Gaining the Confidence to Pursue ‘Big Dreams’

Tony Danko, MBA ’15, has always known he wanted to start his own company. He knew an MBA from the Robert H. Smith School of Business would help him with his dream.

“I would say a major turning point of my professional career is when I came to Smith as a student,” Danko says.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army after high school and became a biomedical technician. While still serving, he enrolled in the full-time MBA program at Smith. After plans to enroll in another school were derailed just weeks before orientation, the University of Maryland Global Campus alumnus decided to return to Maryland for his business degree. “I walked in and told them my story. They interviewed me and within 24 hours I was accepted. So that is how I would say Smith chose me, or the universe brought me and Smith together.”

Despite the Smith School quickly working to get Danko into the MBA program, he questioned whether he was “worthy to be in business school” since he felt his path was different from those in his cohort. “As we started, the course, the group work, the projects, I had this realization that I do fit in, that I do belong.” He credits his many years of experience in the military managing budgets, making decisions and presenting to senior leaders with helping him realize that he had much to offer the program and his classmates. “To come here and socialize with everybody else, and have that level of confidence that I belong, I fit in. So that was the biggest thing that I took away from Smith was just the confidence to be able to do the big dreams, do the things you dream about doing.”

After serving in the military for 20 years and retiring, Danko sought work in the commercial sector with Kaiser Permanente. “That was deliberate because I had two decades of military service and that’s what I do. I knew if I wanted to start a company, which I did, that I needed to be exposed to the commercial sector.” He says the connections he made there he still carries with him today, and this has helped to open many doors.

Today, Danko describes himself as the “chief decision maker.” He is the CEO and co-founder of Capital i, a healthcare technology management and solutions firm. “Everything within the lifecycle for a medical device, we manage or maintain or provide support,” Danko says about 80% of their work is in the federal sector. They support Veterans Affairs (VA), the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and have expanded into the healthcare supply chain with consultants for the central office in the VA. “We also have another IT firm, it’s a wholly-owned subsidiary. They help other small businesses build their IT program and cybersecurity.” Danko says this IT firm works within the healthcare industry and beyond.

Capital i was formed in 2018, and though Danko had hoped it would be a $10 million company someday, he had no idea success would be reached so quickly. “Last year, we were ranked the third-fastest growing company in the Midwest [of Inc. magazine regionals]. This year, on the Inc. 5000 list, we are the 40th fastest-growing private company in the U.S.”

While many businesses struggled during the pandemic, Capital i was able to grow and build during a time when others could not. “A lot of biomed shops were cut in half and then you had a lot of talent to choose from. In 2020, a lot of bigger companies that do this type of work, they stopped traveling, they stopped their sales, they stopped business development. Well, we didn't. We were able to build contracts and deals and then we had the talent pool to bring along. That was kind of like a shot in the arm for the company,” Danko says.

Seeing how the industry is growing and the need for talent is great, Danko’s goals include helping to build programs to develop the next generation of experts in healthcare technology. “Healthcare gets more and more complex, devices get more and more complex. I'm fearful that the industry [could] start to cut corners because the talent is not there, the workforce is not there.” He is working with a local community college near his home base in Missouri to build a degree program for students to earn an associate's in “biomed and grow that education pipeline to help the industry maintain a high level of knowledge and skilled workers that can support medical devices.”

Danko says he is a “proud” Smith alumnus. Currently, there are at least four other Smith School alumni on his team and the CEO says if candidates from Smith and the University of Maryland come his way, he has a “high degree of confidence that they are a hard worker and a go-getter. That they are very talented.” He encourages students interested in entrepreneurship to “take big risks up front.” If for some reason it doesn’t work out, having a degree from Smith will get you “hired somewhere else. So if you really think about it, your plan B is most people's plan A.”