President & COO at Uniti Med | Leadership Development | Healthcare Consultant | Public Speaker | Podcast Host | Customer Service Representative
In January 2022, Chris Sund left a stable leadership role at a company he loved to help run one with roughly 20 employees, no systems, and no playbook. He bought shares with his own money. A year later, when the business needed capital again, he bought in a second time, pulled from retirement, and put his name on the office lease.
Then, with his own money and name attached to the outcome, he made his first leadership hire a Director of Culture.
Why Chris Sund Doesn’t Believe Waiting Is a Workforce Strategy
Chris Sund is President and COO of Uniti Med and GQR Healthcare, and COO of Nebula, three companies approaching healthcare workforce challenges from different angles. He lives in Fremont, Nebraska, where his wife Courtney works as a respiratory therapist at the local hospital, which means the national staffing crisis he speaks about from stages is also the one his family watches up close. What defines him is a refusal to treat unfilled clinical roles as a failure of effort.
He Sold Beer and Cars Before He Sold Anyone on Healthcare
The résumé starts nowhere near a hospital. Sund spent his early career in beverage distribution, then ran sales and marketing for Lucky Bucket Brewing Company in Omaha, then sold vehicles at Sid Dillon. What those years taught him was how to sit across from someone and understand what they actually needed, a skill that became central to his career in healthcare staffing.
He joined Fusion Medical Staffing as a recruiter in September 2016 and moved up quickly, from client manager to division manager to Director of Sales and Business Development. He founded the company’s long-term care division and grew it from a concept to more than 1,000 travelers on assignment in under five years. He also built Fusion Workforce Solutions, an MSP, and led a small business development team into more than 2,000 new facilities.
Then he traded all of that for the startup. The early Uniti Med days meant HR one morning and compliance the next, marketing in the afternoon, processes written from scratch because none existed.
There were days when I felt like I was learning an entirely new job every week.
He questioned whether he was ready. That doubt, he says now, was not a warning sign.
Looking back, that uncertainty wasn’t a sign I was failing. It was what it felt like to grow into responsibilities I hadn’t handled before.
The correction that stuck came in a sales meeting. Sund, a career salesperson, heard his team propose an approach he had already outgrown, so he redirected them to his. Afterward, Chad Crawford pulled him aside and told him the better strategy might cost more than it gained. Sund resisted. Then he sat with it.
There’s a real difference between leadership and control, and the two can look the same from the outside.
He had asked everyone at the company to say the hard thing. Crawford said it to him.
What $6 Million to $58 Million Actually Bought
Uniti Med grew from $6 million in revenue in 2021 to $58 million in 2023. Inc. ranked the company No. 3 in its 2025 Midwest Regionals list, measuring 12x growth across 2021 to 2023, a window that opens the year before Sund arrived. GQR acquired the business in March 2024, bringing over close to one hundred internal colleagues and roughly five hundred contractors. The awards stacked up alongside the revenue: Great Place to Work certification three years running, ClearlyRated Best of Staffing for talent satisfaction, Fortune Best Workplaces in Healthcare, BluePipes Best Travel Nurse Company four years in a row.
That culture hire, Micaela Zimmer, had a mandate Sund still describes the same way.
- She was there to protect the right of great people to work with great people.
Rapid growth makes it easy to tolerate what you otherwise would not. He was trying to get ahead of that before it arrived.
The operating conviction underneath all of it is that hospitals are not failing to recruit. The population is aging, fewer people are entering the workforce, and in rural markets the right specialist may not exist within a hundred miles.
- You can’t wait for that person to apply. You have to go find them.
Headhunting takes hours, and the team already covering the vacancy does not have them. So the role sits open and the pressure lands on whoever stayed. His answer is time. At Nebula, where he serves as COO, an AI platform with access to more than 180 million professional profiles handles repetitive sourcing and first-touch outreach.
- It doesn’t replace the recruiter. It gives them back the time.
His book, You Are Capable of More, came out of a 2026 survey of more than 200 working adults. He expected busyness to top the list of what holds people back. Self-doubt came first at 40 percent, with fear of failure at 37 and time at 36. Among leaders, 80 percent still second-guess themselves.
The Fiftieth Baseball Game
The biggest risk Sund talks about now isn’t the money he put into the business.
He went to Caleb’s school plays and sat through what felt like the fiftieth game of the summer, not always wanting to be there. Then came the last baseball game. The last basketball game. The final cross-country meet. Courtney kept telling him which moments the boys would actually remember, and she was right every time.
He has stopped saying yes automatically, because every yes comes from somewhere else. He still calls the balance unfinished.
Everything he risked in 2022 could have been earned back. The fiftieth baseball game could not.
Chris Sund is President and COO of Uniti Med and GQR Healthcare and COO of Nebula, based in Fremont, Nebraska. He helps hospitals and health systems build reliable clinical workforces through travel staffing, locums, MSP programs, and AI-assisted sourcing, with a particular focus on rural and underserved communities. To connect with Chris or learn more, visit his linkedIn profile or https://chrissund.com/
