A paper clip is an unlikely object to put beside a chief executive’s name. It has no valuation, requires no demonstration, and has resisted several generations of technological excitement by continuing to be a bent piece of wire. Jeff Blankinship once offered it as a solution to an office problem: people removing staples before scanning documents. Use paper clips, he suggested. The little obstruction could simply disappear.
The detail suits a career spent around the less glamorous parts of running an organization. Blankinship co-founded Surgical Notes with his wife, Courtney, and served as its CEO and president. His subject was often the work between the work: getting information from one place to another, reducing repetitive handling, making a process less awkward for the person who had to do it again tomorrow.
A paper clip, taken seriously
In 2011, his advice included returning to workflows every few months and asking employees to identify what was slowing them down. He also recommended bringing technology vendors back for refresher training. Software could have useful features that employees had never learned, or that had vanished from institutional memory as colleagues trained their replacements. Buying the tool was only part of the job.
“Staff may be working hard but they’re not always working smart.”
Jeff Blankinship, 2011
There is a modest kind of ambition in that argument. The inconvenience is worth investigating even when nobody has put it on a conference agenda. A process can become familiar enough to escape attention. Familiarity, unfortunately, does not make it a good process.
At Surgical Notes, that attention became product work. A 2008 alliance with SourceMedical connected the companies’ systems so scheduling information could flow into document creation. Forms could be generated, stored digitally, and managed without relying on a stock of preprinted pages. It was an integration designed around the unlovely business of entering information and then entering it again.
The practical promise was easier to grasp than a grand theory of transformation: fewer repeated steps. For an employee facing another pile of forms, that is a respectable product demonstration. The glamour would have to look after itself.
Two founders, one working business
Blankinship grew up in Plano, Texas, and graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1986. His early career took him to Los Angeles before he returned to Texas in 1994. By the late 1990s, he and Courtney were building Surgical Notes. She brought experience as a Dallas transcriptionist. The business combined a service people already used with software that could change how the surrounding office work was done.
The partnership deserves its full place in the story. Courtney was a co-founder, and the company’s beginnings involved knowledge of an existing occupation. There is a particular advantage in starting close enough to a task to recognize its daily frustrations. A business opportunity can arrive wearing the thoroughly unromantic clothes of a job someone already understands.
The products grew more specific. In early 2011, Surgical Notes added a module to its SN Chart web portal that brought related administrative tasks together on one screen. It could generate spreadsheets and send electronic notifications when an underlying report changed. More than 40 customer facilities were using the application at the time.
A notification sounds like a small feature until somebody needs to know that a document has changed. Then it becomes the difference between working from the current version and discovering, later, that the current version was somewhere else. Blankinship’s product explanations repeatedly returned to these ordinary points of failure.
A December 2012 profile described Surgical Notes serving more than 450 centers across 42 states. A historical snapshot of the business during Blankinship’s tenure.
Scale did not arrive only through individual customers. National Surgical Care selected the company’s VMR Express software for all its centers. Such agreements placed Surgical Notes inside the operations of organizations with multiple locations. A product had to fit into work already happening, alongside other systems and the people responsible for keeping everything moving.
By December 2012, Surgical Notes had a footprint across much of the country. Blankinship also held a director’s position with the Texas Ambulatory Surgery Center Society. The founder’s work extended beyond his own office into relationships with customers, management companies, and a professional association.
The day the title changed
In 2019, the company reached a different sort of milestone. Surgical Notes completed a majority recapitalization with the Houston private equity firm CapStreet. Randy Bishop, its president and chief operating officer, became CEO. Blankinship stepped away from operations and retained a minority ownership interest at the time.
The distinction matters in a founder’s biography. A company can remain part of someone’s financial life after it stops organizing the working day. The handoff put an existing executive in charge and gave Blankinship room to concentrate on another venture, Healthcare Paycard, subsequently known as SmartHealth PayCard.
There was no publicly disclosed transaction price to turn into a trophy number. The useful fact is the change in responsibility. The company he had helped build was continuing under another leader. A familiar title had become a past title.
Blankinship’s ventures had already widened. In 2015, he joined Bishop and Larry Anders to found Surgical Captive, an insurance business. It added another set of professional relationships to an increasingly varied business life. The collaborators matter here: the career contains teams and partnerships, rather than a procession of businesses conjured into existence by one person.
SmartHealth PayCard brought another collaborator, Paul Clampitt. A national launch announcement in February 2020 identified the two Texans as co-founders. The next year, the company announced a partnership with HealthWare Systems. Blankinship had moved into a different product category while continuing to build through relationships with other businesses.
He also returned to the Texas association’s board in 2021. He had been its first vendor board member roughly a decade earlier before stepping down. Returning with another company made the relationship a thread across different phases of his career.
The ranch with no stones
Another enterprise had trees, cabins, and a considerably better chance of containing a fishing rod. In June 2019, outdoors writer Luke Clayton described visiting Broken Stone Ranch near Grand Saline, east of Dallas. Jeff and Courtney welcomed him at the lodge. Builder Jimi Callender had been working on the property’s cabins and gathering spaces.
Clayton toured the grounds by ATV, looking at lakes, outdoor facilities, and the accommodation. He described Blankinship as an experienced traveler to hunting and fishing lodges. The couple sought his feedback on the experience they were preparing for guests. The account gives the business biography a welcome change of setting, and a practical glimpse of the couple working together again.
The ranch’s name has its own small joke. Its website says the property has no natural rocks. Broken Stone came from a church sermon on Luke 20:18. A name that sounds like a description of the terrain turns out to have a different origin altogether.
The property offers fishing, walking, and room for groups to gather. This business has a physical address and an experience that unfolds over a visit. Software can put information in the right place; a ranch has to give people a reason to enjoy being in one.
That makes it a useful companion to the office story. Blankinship’s public career includes the administration behind organizations. The ranch introduces hosting, outdoor interests, and the shared project of making somewhere people want to spend their time.
The next business had walls
In 2022, Blankinship partnered with designer Ric Pearson and entrepreneur Mark Hall to launch MobileOp4. Pearson had designed a portable unit in 2019. The company’s account traces the idea to problems exposed by Hurricane Katrina, including the difficulty of transporting and deploying usable space.
The new venture changed the material under discussion. A screen could be reorganized with software. A portable room had to travel, open, and function on arrival. The company describes a design that could be deployed on a level surface in 15 minutes. Its usefulness depended on what happened after the transport stopped.
Published rental specifications. Diagram is conceptual; dimensions describe the product, not a performance comparison.
Event Modules, which identifies Blankinship as its founder, distributes the units. Its offerings include ticket booths, operations offices, command spaces, and hospitality uses. The business deals with an old event-organizing question: where does everyone go, and what do they need when they get there?
In May 2025, Event Modules announced a partnership for the Iroquois Steeplechase at Nashville’s Percy Warner Park. “We’re honored to support an event with such rich history and tradition,” Blankinship said. By 2026, the company was highlighting a deployment in Arlington for the World Cup.
A public event has a front stage and a working area behind it. Blankinship’s later ventures place him around the latter: the space that must be delivered and ready while other people concentrate on the occasion. It is a fitting continuation of a career that has paid attention to what gets in the way. The paper clip now has rather more floor space.