Luke Hejl and the art of being corrected

Luke Hejl had a phrase for the way he ran his company. He reinvented his leadership style every year. It sounded energetic, suitably restless, the kind of thing a founder might say to reassure a growing team that its boss intended to keep up. Then a colleague asked him to think about what he had actually said.¹

Reinvention, she suggested, could sound like discarding the experience that had brought everyone this far. Hejl reconsidered. Gardening was closer to the work he meant: tending what already existed while making room for growth. The exchange is a useful place to meet TimelyCare’s co-founder and CEO. Someone disagreed with his account of himself, and he kept the disagreement in the story.

There is a pleasing occupational hazard here. Hejl began his career in advertising, a business in which a word can receive more attention than a piece of office furniture. Years later, at the head of a Fort Worth company, he was still discovering how much depended on the way a sentence landed.²

01Inventory, with ears

His first ventures required less polishing. As a child, Hejl sold rocks beside the road and ran a rabbit-breeding operation. His father and grandfather were entrepreneurs, giving enterprise a family precedent before it acquired a professional vocabulary. Rocks offer the advantage of patient inventory. Rabbits take a more active interest in expansion.³

Born in Austin, he went on to study advertising at Abilene Christian University. The degree put him on a route through agencies and account management, where he enjoyed the relationship side of the work. Before he had a company of his own, he was learning the business of understanding somebody else’s priorities.⁴

His experience included leading teams at Austin agencies T3 and Springbox. At Doctors in Training, an online education business, he became director of marketing. He later moved to Social Factor, a digital marketing agency, and became its CEO. The work crossed client and agency roles, giving him different views of the same negotiation: what someone wanted, what a team could deliver, and how to make the two meet.⁵

That sequence helps make sense of the founder who followed. Account management puts a person between an outside promise and an inside operation. Growing a company makes the distance between those two things larger. A persuasive introduction may open a door; people on both sides still have to work together after it closes.

02The friends before the firm

The relationships behind TimelyCare were already old when the company was new. Hejl and Alan Dennington grew up together in Austin. They got to know Chris Clark during their first year at ACU. By the time the three began turning a dinner-table idea into a business, they had a shared history that reached well beyond a founding document.⁶

Hejl describes a year of research behind the venture they founded in 2017. That detail deserves its place beside the dinner table. An idea over a meal makes a good beginning; a year of investigating it makes a less convenient anecdote. There is considerably less glamour in asking another question when everyone would prefer to announce an answer.

The first partner campus was ACU, with services launching in 2018. When Hejl later recalled favorite company memories, that first launch stood out. The university had supplied more than a qualification and a set of friendships. It had become a place where those friendships acquired a working test.²

“First, surround yourself with great people.”

Luke Hejl, on advice for aspiring entrepreneurs

His advice to other entrepreneurs begins with the people around them. He also seeks informal mentors who have done his job at a larger scale. Even the person responsible for setting the direction, in this account, needs someone further along the road. A founder can know a company intimately and still have plenty left to learn about running it.

03The name catches up

In 2023, TimelyMD became TimelyCare. Hejl later wrote about the rebrand as a process requiring a story, agreement among stakeholders, and a team empowered to carry the work through. His advice favored an identity that could connect a company’s past with its future. The advertising background had found another use.⁸

A name change offers a conspicuous moment in a company’s life. People outside see a different word. Inside, somebody has to secure agreement, organize the details, and explain the choice often enough that it begins to feel familiar. The public result can be brief while the work behind it is anything but.

Hejl’s account treats that work as a matter of continuity. A company has accumulated relationships under its old name; a new one has to carry those relationships forward. The founder who once worked in account management was again concerned with what people understood about a business. This time, he had to help his own company introduce itself all over again.

04Trust at a distance

A founding friendship creates one kind of trust. Hiring a growing workforce requires another. In his writing about recruitment, Hejl treats choosing people as a responsibility that should receive a leader’s attention. A company bringing in new colleagues quickly has to consider how its habits and standards will travel with them.⁹

In a separate account of workplace flexibility, he argues for doing the careful work before hiring, then trusting the people who join. The distance between desks should have less influence than the clarity of the expectations. That approach asks something of the manager, too: once a colleague has been given responsibility, constant hovering becomes an expensive way of withholding it.¹⁰

TimelyCare’s distributed workforce developed along the way. The company initially hired mainly around Dallas-Fort Worth; it later chose to continue with a remote-first arrangement after finding it could recruit and operate across locations. By January 2024, Hejl reported that about 75 percent of the team lived outside the DFW area.¹¹

A company that began among friends could no longer depend on everyone knowing everyone else. The practical question was how to create familiarity deliberately. A shared screen can carry a discussion across the country. It does less well at supplying the accidental conversation that used to happen on the way out of a room.

05The meeting worth keeping

Hejl has a surprisingly affectionate answer to that problem: the weekly all-hands meeting. His description begins with colleagues catching up and introducing new hires. Departments choose what to present and who should present it. Company progress gets discussed. The meeting ends with a peer-selected award called the Bomb. For an ordinary Monday, the name shows considerable ambition.¹²

The details explain the affection. New people get to introduce themselves in their own voices. A colleague can bring an initiative or a request for help to the wider team. Recognition comes from peers, making the audience part of the occasion. These are small arrangements, but each decides who becomes visible inside a growing organization.

There is also a connection to his earlier work. The account manager needed to understand people across a relationship. The CEO now needs people across departments to understand one another. A meeting can waste everyone’s time with equal efficiency. His version tries to give the gathering a reason to exist beyond the calendar invitation.

06A little disagreement at the beach

Then there are the dolphins. Watching them is one of Hejl’s favorite beach-vacation activities, and he has used that interest to introduce his thinking about disagreement at work. Some people return from the coast with shells. A leadership columnist may return with an argument about how colleagues should challenge one another.¹³

His argument gives employees room to question assumptions and established processes respectfully. The point is shared work: people should be able to test an idea, including a colleague’s, while remaining responsible to the team. He recognizes that some people need an explicit invitation to do this. A boss’s confidence can fill a room rather quickly.

The earlier correction to his leadership metaphor gives the argument a concrete example. Hejl had a formulation he liked. A colleague identified an implication he had missed. The result was a different explanation. Readers can recognize the scale of that exchange without pretending it settles every question about a workplace. It shows a useful move: leave enough room in your own story for somebody else to improve it.

07Back to the place he started

ACU kept reappearing. Hejl graduated in 2001, stayed involved through entrepreneurship and advisory work, and was announced as a new university trustee in March 2025. He had also served on the advisory board for its student-run Morris+Mitchell agency. The advertising graduate was continuing a relationship with the institution across business, education, and governance.¹⁴

The company’s scale provides a different measure of elapsed time. In August 2026, TimelyCare reported partnerships with more than 500 colleges and universities. It also announced a fifth consecutive appearance on the Inc. 5000, ranking No. 2,964 with 104 percent revenue growth over the measured three-year period. These are company figures, useful for understanding the size of the job around its founder.¹⁵

The numbers leave a quieter part of the story intact. Hejl’s career keeps bringing him back to the quality of a working relationship: with an agency client, with old friends, with a new employee, with someone willing to question his choice of words. Each relationship asks for a slightly different kind of attention.

Gardening gives him a modestly useful image for that attention. You keep learning the conditions. You change your approach when something needs it. And, occasionally, a colleague points out that the label you have been using is wrong. The company can grow. The founder can revise a sentence. There is work enough in both.