“My brother's disabled, so my mum spent a lot of my youth just worrying if he was okay,” Sage’s Head of Business Development Alessandro Furlotti says. “He's epileptic, so a lot of our headspace as a family is just occupied with figuring out what to do in an emergency situation.”

That formative experience taught Furlotti two things that have stuck with him: the value of caregivers and the importance of cutting seconds off emergency response time. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that he’s ended up at Sage, helping grow a platform that empowers caregivers to give the best care, right when it’s needed. He remembers the moment in his interview with CEO and cofounder Raj Mehra when he was shown a chart demonstrating how Sage reduced caregiver response time to resident alerts by 60 percent. Furlotti was in. “I mean, that's going to directly save lives,” he says.

After graduating with honors from University College London, Furlotti decided to go the consulting path, landing at Boston Consulting Group’s London office. “Everyone joins BCG because they're competitive and don't know what the hell they want to do with their life,” he says, grinning. “But I wanted to do it because I like puzzles and problem-solving and I get bored easily so the variety of work was a draw.”

During nine years at the prestigious consulting firm, he worked on 28 projects, getting a chance to dive into every part of a company and find the areas that could be improved. It was a crash course in management. While at BCG, he also completed his MBA from Wharton. 

Furlotti’s longest project was at a multinational bank, and his shortest — but perhaps most memorable — was a reorg at one of Italy’s most storied football clubs. “Everyone had been there for 30 years. Never left,” he says. “They just had a lot of entrenched, very antiquated ideas of the way things should be done.”

That taught him a lesson he’ll never forget: “The enemy to productivity is: This is the way we do things.”

Mehra reached out to Furlotti at the perfect time in 2022. He was on the way home from Baltimore where he’d been “having a terrible time” on a project. “I literally said, ‘I'm done,’” Furlotti remembers. “And then I got the email.”

He proved a perfect fit for what Mehra was building at Sage. Right away, Furlotti recognized that the Sage sales process should be closer to consulting than traditional sales. “Because senior living has a very fragmented decision-making process and a very fragmented stakeholder group,” he explains.

The C-suite buyer may be drawn to the increased Net Operating Income (NOI) Sage can deliver, but the operator at the specific community is more focused on the month-to-month budgetary impact. While the management on the floor will be enticed by Sage’s ability to deliver data to best deploy staff and identify top performers, caregivers will demand a tool that works seamlessly into the course of their shift. That final piece is essential and too often ignored, in Furlotti’s view. He’s seen so many communities purchase “a shiny new toy” that proves burdensome to the staff. Eventually, caregivers revert back to pen and paper, walkie talkies, and pagers. “It has to be intuitive,” he says. “And that's where Sage has really differentiated ourselves. We’re making something the caregivers actually want to use because it makes their day easier.”

Consulting taught Furlotti to speak to the concerns of every stakeholder from the C-suite to the nursing station. He loves to enter a meeting with a potential buyer buoyed by Sage’s data, demonstrating how many unplanned encounters just aren’t being logged and how that lack of intel creates staffing issues, inaccurate pricing models, and more. Sage provides a completely new vantage point from which operators can recognize overstaffed and understaffed shifts, and empowers them with data when speaking with families about their loved one’s care needs. “If you're going to a family and saying, ‘I need to increase your loved one’s care level and increase your price,’ you now have the evidence to back it up,” he says.

Early in his time at BCG, Furlotti learned that data is king. He stresses as much to the operators and managers he speaks with about Sage’s data-rich operations tool. “Have you ever wanted to know how you can be 25 in a meeting with a CEO and have them listen to you?” he says. “It's all about making the conversation not ‘you versus me,’ but ‘you and me against the number.’”

A conversation goes completely differently when you can tell someone: “It's not my opinion. This is what the data is saying. How do we solve it?” 

As Furlotti speaks, it quickly becomes clear why he excelled at BCG and why he’s been such a valuable part of Sage these last two years. He believes Sage’s data can bring on a new generation in senior living. And he loves that he gets to spread the word to senior-living communities. “That's what we do here,” he says. “That's how we enable our customers.”