This Kansas City area CEO’s career takes her on journey from burn nurse to phone medic
Editor’s note: During the month of March, in honor of Women’s History Month, The Star will feature glimpses of daily life of women who make up part of the thread of Kansas City.
It hadn’t dawned on Christine Ricci years ago, as a burn nurse at HCA Healthcare, that she would need an appointment to speak to the CEO. She didn’t know.
“I thought you could just walk up the stairs and go in the office,” Ricci said. “I didn’t even knock.”
She laughs now at that naive nurse who just waltzed right in. But it highlighted one of her biggest fears: blind spots to what she doesn’t know.
It took someone pulling her aside, telling her she was like a bull in a china shop, breaking glass everywhere. It took four words to help change her career:
“Let me help you.”
From there on Ricci learned to ask what she needed to know; what she didn’t see.
“I learned to ask more, listen more and really align myself with great mentors that had already been down the path, already had the bumps, the bruises, all of the learnings that I could just rely on them for their knowledge and their experience and their constant guidance,” she said.
Because she unknowingly walked into the CEO’s office at HCA, she gained a mentor who taught her she could have a bigger impact than working one on one with patients if she was at the table where decisions are made.
So when her HCA CEO paid her to go back to school, she earned a master’s degree, and through it worked 16-hour shifts as a nurse Fridays through Sundays. She worked an internship on the off days.
No longer that naive nurse, Ricci is now a CEO herself as one of the owners of Phone Medic, a growing company which operates 17 uBreakiFix stores across four states. And along the way she’s worked at large and small companies, including Cerner, Sprint and B.E. Smith.
“I can’t imagine being in this role without that mentorship and people to really help guide me and see what I don’t see, especially as fast as things move,” she said.
“Now I know to just ask and listen. Ask and listen. Ask and listen.”
