MCKINNEY — Ask Matt Prados why he moved his growing tech firm from California to Texas and he ticks off the top reasons commonly cited by relocation experts: Better hiring opportunities, a business-friendly environment and a central location.
“When we were looking for places to move, Texas was top of the list,” said Prados during Wednesday’s opening of Review Wave’s new headquarters in McKinney’s expanding tech hub.
Review Wave — an automated platform designed to help health care providers improve the patient experience — is the latest California business relocating to Dallas-Fort Worth. Last year, 25 California companies made the move to Texas, according to Y Texas’ relocation tracker.
“California’s economy was not what we needed when we needed to hire,” Prados said.
Prados founded Review Wave in 2016 after discovering the importance of reviews for health care providers trying to attract new patients.
“The doctors with the most reviews got the most new patients,” he said. “Patients lacked a nonconfrontational way to communicate back to their doctor if they weren’t happy. We really kind of opened Pandora’s Box on that.”
What began with reviews soon branched out to a variety of patient experience improvements. The company’s automated system now enables health care providers to attract new patients, schedule appointments, collect digital forms, chat online, request patient reviews and text reminders through two apps, one for the health care provider and one for the patient.
Twice rated one of Inc. 5000′s fastest-growing private companies, Review Wave posted a three-year revenue growth of 1,422% to snag the 328th spot in 2021, according to Inc. 5000. The company has doubled its size year over year for five years, including through the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That growth, along with an increasing client base on the East Coast, catalyzed the company’s move to McKinney.
“We really needed to find a state that was open and more business-friendly than California had been,” Prados said. “We also needed to move east because our client base on the East Coast was getting bigger. We needed a more local presence in those time zones.”
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Formerly headquartered in Irvine, Calif., Review Wave now occupies the third floor of the Common Desk co-working space in McKinney where the city has been attracting tech firms. From there, the company will sell its tech system to chiropractors, audiologists, dentists, optometrists and other health care providers across the U.S. and Canada.
The California-to-Texas relocation pattern has been a consistent theme in D-FW’s growth for more than a decade. In the first several months of 2022 alone, five companies have moved from California to Texas and three of those moved to D-FW, according to Y Texas. More than a third (105) of the 265 corporations that have moved to the state in the last decade flocked from California, where state income and corporate taxes tower in comparison to income-taxless Texas.
Review Wave received a grant from the McKinney Economic Development Corporation to grow their business and hire in the area. By the end of the year, the company plans to double its clients and hire 100 new employees in a range of sales, management and C-suite positions.
Recruiting is already proving much easier in Texas than in California.
In California, Review Wave got three applicants a day on a $2,000-per-month Indeed.com advertising budget. That same budget attracted 540 applicants in Plano, McKinney and Addison in less than three days, Prados said.
“We knew it was a rich area for people looking for jobs of our nature,” he added.
Review Wave has already hired 25 employees for the McKinney headquarters and plans to add 50 more by December.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story misstated that Review Wave received a grant from the McKinney Economic Development Corporation Innovation Fund. The grant was received from McKinney Economic Development Corporation, but not from the Innovation Fund specifically.
