From Teacher to CEO
Lindsay Rice recalls how her plans to become a teacher led to her becoming the CEO of Alabama Colon & Gastro in Huntsville
Words by Erin Shockey | Images by Al Blanton
Lindsay Rice has lived up to the title “strategic planner” her entire life. After growing up in Walker County, she planned to graduate from the University of Alabama, marry, teach, and start a family—in that order. Nowhere in her strategic plan was the title, “CEO of a Successful Medical Practice” ever included, yet that is exactly the position Lindsay finds herself in today.
After five successful years as CEO of Alabama Colon & Gastro in Huntsville, Alabama, Lindsay, for once in her life, is thankful that not everything went according to plan.
Growing up in Sumiton, Lindsay often competed in pageants. She won the Walker County Junior Miss title in 1995 and the Miss Walker County title in 1996. While attending college at the University of Alabama, Lindsay’s interests were in history, museum studies, and teaching. In her anthropology class on human osteology, she was paired with an aspiring medical student named Brad Rice as a lab partner. The two became close friends through class and eventually started dating.
Upon Brad’s acceptance to medical school, the couple became engaged and later married. After obtaining a master’s in history and a teaching certificate from the University of South Alabama, Lindsay began her career as a teacher at UMS Wright Prep School in Mobile, gaining skills that she would later use in her career.
The couple then moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where they lived for six years. Brad completed his fellowship and it was time to start planning their next move to settle down and raise their two-year-old son, Sam.
“When it came time to figure out where we were going to settle, my husband received job offers from across the country,” Lindsay smiles. “One day a postcard came in the mail from Huntsville and that changed everything.”
The move to Huntsville was the beginning of something extraordinary for the Rices. After Sam began school, Lindsay served on various boards and quickly became involved in local philanthropic organizations, such as the Junior League of Huntsville. Through these service opportunities, she acquired communications and marketing skills that would benefit future career endeavors that were waiting just around the corner.
In 2015, Brad was ready to take a leap of faith and open his own medical practice in Huntsville, specializing in digestive diseases, endoscopy and hepatology. However, he would only do so under one condition: Lindsay had to be the CEO.
“My first thought was, ‘I don't know anything about running a medical practice,’” Lindsay laughs. “But I finally agreed and said from the beginning, ‘If we fail, at least we tried. We did it ourselves and it’s on us.’”
With their family’s livelihood on the line, Lindsay did everything she could to research and learn how to run a successful practice. The Rice’s collective faith and dedication to hard work helped them build a strong foundation for a successful practice.
“I am a firm believer that if it's meant to be, it will be,” Lindsay says. “For our practice, everything fell into place at the right time, like it was meant to be.”
Alabama Colon & Gastro opened its doors in December 2015 and began seeing its first patients in January the following year. The practice began with four employees; it has since grown to 18. Over the past five years, Alabama Colon & Gastro has built faithful relationships with patients and referring physicians across North Alabama and beyond.
Lindsay believes the success of their practice is due to the staff’s dedication to quality customer service, the determination to constantly improve, and also due to clever T-shirt marketing efforts (last year’s Christmas shirts read “Twas the Night Before Your Colonoscopy”).
She has implemented successful collaboration techniques from the classroom to the medical practice such as regular staff meetings and quarterly committee meetings. She believes her experience teaching was the best training she could have ever had to prepare her for her role as CEO.
“We love taking care of our patients and advocating for them,” Lindsay says. “Because we are a hub for North Alabama, we have patients from Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee. We even have patients that drive up here from Florida, which I still can’t believe!”
The practice will continue to benefit patients in north Alabama and beyond. As for Lindsay, even though becoming CEO of Alabama Colon & Gastro was never part of her plan, she wouldn’t have it any other way. 78