The 92 Percent Problem Chris Sund Found Inside His Own Companies

Chris Sund is an American author, keynote speaker, podcast host and healthcare staffing executive. He is president and chief operating officer of three companies, Uniti Med, GQR Healthcare and Nebula, an AI powered talent sourcing platform. He has spent the past decade inside the hiring cycle that every growing company knows by heart. Open the requisition. Widen the funnel. Pay the premium. Fill the seat.

Then he ran a survey that complicated the whole thing.

Sund asked more than 200 working adults a simple question about capacity, and the answers did not line up with how most companies think about it. Ninety two percent said they believed they were capable of more than they were currently doing. Seventy eight percent said they put off things they already knew they should do. Eighty five percent said they second guessed themselves because of the voice in their head. Only seven percent said falling short of their potential was rare.

Those numbers changed how he thought about the shortage. Companies spend enormous time and money searching for people outside their walls. Another source of capacity may already be inside the building, in employees who are contributing and still not using everything they have.

Self doubt beat every reasonable excuse

When the survey asked what stood in the way, four answers kept surfacing. Self doubt, fear of failure, comfort and lack of time.

Self doubt ranked first, ahead of every practical reason people gave.

The finding Sund keeps returning to is the one about leadership. Executives were not exempt. They were among those reporting the widest gap between what they were doing and what they believed they could do. That complicates a comfortable assumption, which is that unrealised potential lives further down the organisation chart and gets solved by coaching from above. The people doing the coaching may be carrying the same doubt.

His working definition of confidence comes from the research and from his own experience. Confident people still hear the voice. They have simply stopped letting it make their decisions.

That idea became You Are Capable of More: A No-Excuses Guide to Becoming Your Best Self, published by Game Changer Publishing on August 13, 2026, with a foreword by performance coach Ben Newman. It is part memoir and part practical guide, organised around ten principles, and supported by free resources including a diagnostic quiz, worksheets and a thirty day challenge. Sund was deliberate about that last part. He did not want readers finishing the final page feeling inspired and unsure what to do next.

The staffing gap looks different when it is your own town

Sund came into healthcare staffing through an unconventional path. He worked in restaurants and the beverage industry before becoming a recruiter in 2016, then a client manager, division manager and director of sales and business development. He joined Uniti Med in January 2022 and became president and chief operating officer in May 2023.

He learned early that rural staffing problems are not only about money. Plenty of rural facilities are good places to work. Employees know one another, and their patients are often their neighbours. But geography and a thin supply of specialised clinicians can leave essential roles unfilled for months, which pushes organisations toward agencies and premiums nobody enjoys paying.

Sund lives in Fremont, Nebraska, the small town he grew up in, so he has watched that play out in his own community. When his wife's grandmother entered hospice, the family gathered at a nearby facility to say goodbye. While they waited, he noticed that some of the clinicians caring for patients were travellers. In that moment the work stopped being about filling an opening. It was about whether families could get good care close to home during the hardest week of their lives.

There is nothing better, he has said, than going home after work knowing you helped someone.

Growth, and the culture underneath it

Revenue across Uniti Med's travel nursing and allied health divisions grew tenfold during his first two years with the company. Uniti Med ranked No. 3 on the 2025 Inc. Regionals: Midwest list of the region's fastest growing private companies, and was named to the 2023 Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces in Health Care list.

Ask Sund about the growth and he is just as likely to talk about the culture recognition.

His view on retention is plain. People rarely leave because of one isolated moment. The decision builds through a series of experiences. A manager who stops listening. A hard week nobody notices. A conversation that goes badly and is never repaired. By the time someone sits down for an exit interview, the decision may have been forming for months.

That thinking became SPARK, the framework he teaches for keeping people rather than replacing them. Its argument is that pay attracts workers and culture keeps them. The National Association for Health Care Recruitment set the framework out in full in a 2026 article on lessons for healthcare recruiters, and he has presented it on the retention track of the Greater Omaha Chamber's POWER Conference. He teaches a second method called LAARC for working through objections, five steps that run listen, acknowledge, ask, respond and confirm.

Culture, in his telling, is not the soft thing a company invests in once growth arrives. It decides whether growth is sustainable.

He tested the message on himself first

Ask Sund what he is proudest of personally and the Inc. ranking does not come up. He points instead to his decision to stop drinking on January 1, 2024, and credits it with changing how he leads, how he parents and how he shows up at home.

That is part of why the message about untapped potential lands differently coming from him. He is not only interpreting survey data or describing a process he read about.

Home is Fremont. His wife, Courtney, is a respiratory therapist. They have three boys, which means much of the family calendar belongs to ballgames and practices, and whatever time is left tends to go to bike rides, walks and time on the water. Those parts of his life shape how he defines becoming more. It is not only professional. It is becoming someone you are proud of at work and at home.

Still in the seat

Plenty of executives write a book after leaving the work behind. Sund did not.

He is still running the companies, still dealing with the hiring challenges, retention pressure and growth decisions that the people booking him to speak are dealing with that same week. He is reporting from the current quarter rather than a case study from years ago. He also founded the Amplify Speakers bureau, hosts the Amplify Speakers Podcast, writes for Forbes and Inc., and serves as vice president of the board of the National Association of Travel Healthcare Organizations.

That is what gives the 92 percent figure its weight. It is not simply a statistic about wasted potential. It raises a harder question.

If most people already believe they are capable of more, what will actually help them act on it?

Sund intends to spend the next chapter of his career helping people answer that.