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Who's Who: Skye Lininger

A series of life decisions unintentionally led Healthnotes' chief executive officer Skye Lininger down the road to kiosks. And the Portland, Ore., resident does not have any regrets.

July 25, 2002

Over the past 25 years, Skye Lininger has learned that the next great decision you make in life could have unintended consequences.

He and his wife, Jane, were headed for the Peace Corps. Instead, they became chiropractors. In the mid 1980s, when laser printers were new and prohibitively expensive, Lininger wanted one. To justify the purchase, he started a healthy living newsletter that mushroomed into healthcare information provider Healthnotes Inc.

And in the mid 1990s, Lininger sat on the beach in Hawaii, working out how to collate and transmit the company's information electronically when it hit him: HTML. The Internet coding language formed the backbone of Healthnotes' electronic initiative, and formed the basis for the company's introduction into the electronic kiosk business.

Today, Healthnotes is a leading kiosk distributor. More than 6,500 locations -- mostly health-food stores, groceries, and pharmacies -- host Healthnotes' kiosks, which provide medical information, healthy living suggestions, and information on medications.

"He has a strong computer background, he understands retail, he understands medicine, and he understands information systems," said Stan Amy, an investor in Healthnotes who has known Lininger for more than a quarter century. "In a world of specialists, he's a bit of a renaissance man."

A change in plans

All of this happened because Lininger bypassed the chance to go to Korea or Guatemala with the Peace Corps. Fresh from obtaining a master's degree in English from Cal State-Fresno in 1974, he had decided to join the Peace Corps in the late 1970s. His wife was going to join him when some prescient advice from a Peace Corps recruiter changed their life plans.

"We thought we could go forward with our personal mission to help people in a natural setting by going to chiropractor's college," Lininger said of one of the most important decisions he and his wife made.

Healthnotes chief executive officer Skye Lininger has spent more than 15 years distributing health and wellness information.

"The recruiter told us it could be a couple months before we found out if we'd be picked and what was our alternative plan," Lininger said. "We told him we didn't have one and the recruiter said we should; he said, `It's likely you'll get accepted, but you may not.'

"We looked into chiropractor's colleges because we were interested in health, and we both got accepted at a chiropractor's college in Portland when the letter came that said we'd been accepted into the Peace Corps. We said, `Sorry, you told us to look for Plan B and we found it.' "

A 1980 graduate of Western States Chiropractor College, Lininger was in practice in the mid 1980s when the next major life-changing event happened.

"In about `86 or so, some really cool laser printers came out," he said. "But they were really expensive and I couldn't justify getting one. I thought if I could make a product that came out of a laser printer and make enough of them I could justify the purchase."

Lininger printed up a health and wellness information newsletter, took it around to some Portland-area health food stores, and Healthnotes was born. Lininger estimates that roughly 200,000 people are exposed to the monthly newsletter.

"Health, that's the thing most people have an interest in, but it depends upon the age group," he said. "I can ask you how you're doing and you'll say, `I'm fine,' but if I ask some of my dad's friends how they're doing I'll get a half-hour on their hip surgery. A high percentage of those people want to know what to do for themselves."

Health of a company

Lininger has been committed to health and health solutions for more than 20 years. But the launch of Healthnotes with some partners, including current vice president of sales, marketing, and regulatory affairs Michael Peet, catapulted Lininger from a local to international scale. He said Healthnotes is available throughout the English-speaking world. While his wife continues in her chiropractic practice, Lininger has focused on Healthnotes since its founding in 1986.

He moved into the interactive world in 1995 during a Fourth of July vacation with his family and Peet's in Hawaii. With so much information available in Healthnotes' database, Lininger was looking for a way to make that data more readily accessible.

"I was sitting there idly thinking about what it would take to create and information database," he said. "It occurred to me that HTML was easy to write in and was interchangeable."

The idea of the Healthnotes electronic database was born. He and Peet threw in $10,000 apiece to get the idea rolling, then found an interested customer in Peet's sister, who worked for General Nutrition Centers in the UK.

"She thought it would fit her needs in retail," Lininger said. Suddenly, Healthnotes was in the kiosk business. The company's clientele includes a number of health-food stores, but it also counts major grocery chains Kroger Co. and Albertson's Inc. on its roster. Plans for 2003 include a program to deploy up to five kiosks in one location, with each kiosk serving a different function depending on its locations within the store.

Privately owned with an infusion of venture capital funding, Healthnotes has brought in revenue of between $5 million and $6 million over the past three years, Lininger said.

"We're very pleased with the progress we've made," he said. "Each of the last three quarters we've had break-even or profitable months."