Melissa Fors Shackelford is the principal of Shackelford Strategies, a healthcare growth and commercial strategy practice advising CEOs, boards, and investors across behavioral health, health tech, managed care, and senior living. She works with founders on the questions that decide whether a healthcare company scales: who the buyer actually is, how to price into a payer or provider system, and what turns early traction into a repeatable commercial model.
Her perspective comes from more than 25 years building commercial functions inside the organizations startups are trying to sell to and partner with. She has held senior leadership roles at Optum, Cigna’s Evernorth/Express Scripts, the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, and LetsGetChecked, spanning payer, provider, and digital health. That range lets her translate a founder’s pitch into language a health plan, employer, or health system will actually fund.
Today she advises and serves on the advisory boards of early-stage healthcare companies, guiding go-to-market, positioning, payer strategy, and fundraising narrative from seed-stage pitch decks through commercial scale-up. Her deepest work is in behavioral health and substance use, where founders come to her for a direct read on what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus next.
She holds an MBA and the NACD Directorship Certification, and chairs the Governance and Nominations Committee at Asbury Communities. Named AMA’s Nonprofit Marketer of the Year, she is the author of Harnessing Purpose: A Marketer’s Guide to Inspiring Connection and a TEDx speaker on purpose-driven growth. She is based in Minneapolis.
