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From Yellow Pages to Data-Driven Growth: How Aclaimant Built Their Risk Management Platform

Ten years ago, David Wald sat in an office flipping through the Yellow Pages, cold-calling Chicago healthcare staffing companies. Today, Aclaimant serves over 10,000 organizations across North America, including industry giants like Caesars Entertainment and Carvana. This transformation didn’t happen by accident – it emerged from a deliberate evolution in go-to-market strategy and a deep understanding of how to serve the middle market.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, David shared how Aclaimant’s approach to market evolved from basic outbound calling to a sophisticated, multi-channel strategy. “Early on, we focused very narrowly,” David explains. “Our thought was we’re going to just find staffing firms and insurance agencies that like our product… I still remember in our office we kind of pulled out one of the yellow pages, right. And just let’s get all the healthcare companies that do staffing in Chicago and let’s go ahead and call them all and see if someone will use it.”

This scrappy beginning taught the team a crucial lesson about early-stage companies: “Early companies are all go to market. Product is helpful, and the product can help there. But in my opinion, you got to find a way to actually move the product, especially in this environment. If you don’t have sales, you’re dead unless you’re an AI company and you managed to convince people otherwise.”

What’s particularly interesting about Aclaimant’s journey is how they identified and adapted to market signals. Operating in the risk management information systems (RMIS) space, they recognized that risk management wasn’t just for enterprise companies anymore. As David notes, “The past five years alone. Pick your poison. COVID, supply chain, severe weather, political instability, you name it, rising amounts of people working, remote wages going up. All these things make it a lot more difficult and potentially risky to run businesses.”

This market evolution led to a crucial insight: the democratization of risk management software. “This is now affecting not just people like your Walmarts, Coca Colas and Amazons, the world, but also your 100 person almond farmer or your 75 person construction firm,” David explains.

The company’s marketing philosophy evolved alongside this market understanding. Rather than pushing products, they focused on empowerment and education. As David puts it, “You can’t beat people into being safer. You really have to have them understand that they have a choice and they can choose to better.”

This philosophy manifests in their thought leadership approach, which David defines not as chest-beating, but as helping customers solve real problems: “It’s really about helping people to think about. All right, what are my biggest burning questions of this company and risk management? It can be simple things like understanding how laws are changing and how that’s going to affect my ability to do my job, understanding what other companies are doing.”

Their current go-to-market strategy combines sophisticated data analysis with multiple channels. “Right now we run a very data driven inbound referral and channel strategy on our go to market that’s very driven using targeting and tech tools,” David shares. They look for specific signals that indicate when companies are ready to invest in safety and risk management, either reactively or proactively.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson from Aclaimant’s journey is the importance of domain expertise in the insurance and risk management space. “We live in a world that is highly regulated, that is full of expert practitioners who know their stuff,” David explains. “You’d use the word claims or work comp and you get a sideways lesson… these are people who are managing risk, and the first thing they see with you is, oh, my God, this is risky. This guy doesn’t even know the words that I’m saying.”

Looking ahead, Aclaimant aims to catalyze the next wave of RMIS adoption. “We really want to kind of catalyze the next 100,000 companies that want to get into RMIS,” David shares, emphasizing their goal of making enterprise-grade risk management accessible to the middle market.

The evolution from Yellow Pages to data-driven growth wasn’t just about adopting new tools – it was about understanding how to make complex, enterprise-grade software accessible to a broader market while maintaining the trust and credibility necessary in a regulated industry.