Born into a turbulent household in Atlanta, he endured instability throughout his youth, even spending time in foster care. These early hardships instilled in Jackson a drive for stability and purpose.
He found refuge and structure in places like the church and a children’s home, where a small gesture left a profound impact on him. One Christmas, an anonymous stranger left him a gift, with no fanfare or thank-yous required. That formative act of kindness fueled Jackson’s resolve to work hard and give back, setting the stage for his mission-driven approach to business and philanthropy.
In the Beginning
In his late teens, Jackson entered the working world without a college degree but with abundant ambition. He landed a job at a small Atlanta staffing firm called Perimeter Placement by persuading the owner to hire him on straight commission with no base salary. It was an unconventional gamble, but it paid off. In his first month, the 21-year-old newcomer made more money than he ever had, quickly proving his knack for recruiting and sales.
After a few successful years placing candidates, Jackson approached Perimeter’s owner with an audacious idea: he wanted to buy the struggling business outright. The owner agreed, and Jackson took over the firm, growing it to four employees under his leadership.
This early entrepreneurial foray taught Jackson how to build and run a recruiting business. After a year, he sold Perimeter Placement at a profit and returned to executive search work by partnering with a former mentor on a new venture: Jackson & Coker Associates. Jackson soon bought out that partner as well and formally renamed the firm Jackson & Coker.
Over the next three years, he transformed Jackson & Coker into the nation’s largest retained physician search firm. By the mid-’80s, Jackson was a rising star and a dynamic recruiter who understood both the healthcare industry’s needs and the value of building relationships with medical professionals.
Jackson & Coker: Rise and Unexpected Exit
Jackson & Coker’s rapid ascent in the 1980s cemented Jackson’s reputation as a pioneer in physician recruiting. Hospitals and clinics across the country turned to J&C to find qualified doctors in an era when physician shortages were growing.
Jackson’s success came from a relentless work ethic and a personable approach to matching physicians with employers. By focusing on doctors’ needs as well as hospitals’ requirements, Jackson & Coker set a new standard in the industry. Under Jackson’s leadership, the company became a powerhouse in healthcare staffing, proving that a young entrepreneur without formal business training could disrupt the traditional executive search industry.
But just as Jackson & Coker hit its stride, Jackson’s tenure there came to an abrupt end. In 1989, outside investors were brought into the business. The infusion of capital came with strings attached, and before long, Jackson found himself forced out of the very company he had built.
Losing control of his namesake firm was a bitter setback. “In 1989, an investor was brought in… and a short time later, Rick was forced out of his own company,” one account recalls. It was a turning point in Jackson’s career, unexpectedly ending his first chapter as a physician staffing leader.
For many entrepreneurs, such a blow might have meant the end of the story. Jackson, however, was undeterred. He later reflected that setbacks are simply part of the journey. “Failing is how you grow. Success is getting up one more time than you fall down,” Jackson has said. With that resilient mindset, he wasted no time moving on from J&C.
Ventures and Challenges in the 1990s
Freed (albeit unwillingly) from Jackson & Coker, Jackson spent the 1990s expanding his entrepreneurial footprint across healthcare. He became a “venture builder” by using his industry knowledge and investor backing to start and grow a slate of healthcare service companies from the ground up.
Over the course of a few years, Jackson helped conceptualize or develop more than 10 businesses, ranging from surgery centers to practice management firms. By harnessing $5 million investments in each new venture, he quickly created enterprises that became leaders in their niches, including one of the nation’s largest surgery center chains, a top pain-management clinic network, and a multi-site allergy practice. Jackson’s slew of ventures seemed unstoppable, and by the early ‘90s, he had emerged as a prominent healthcare entrepreneur beyond the staffing world.
One company that emerged during this period was Allegiant Healthcare Services, a healthcare management and services firm. Jackson took on the role of chairman and president of Allegiant after one of his startups went public, giving him a broader platform to influence the industry. However, the breakneck expansion was not without turbulence. Changes in healthcare regulations and reimbursement under the Clinton Administration in the mid-’90s created headwinds for Jackson’s businesses.
By 1996, Allegiant Healthcare Services was struggling under poor management, during a period when Jackson had stepped away from day-to-day control, and was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was an unfamiliar challenge for the man who had built success after success.
True to form, Jackson turned the setback into a learning experience. He re-engaged as chairman to steer Allegiant through restructuring and settle debts honorably. After four years, the company climbed out of bankruptcy, repaying every creditor (in fact, paying $1.10 on the dollar) and returning some money to equity holders—a nearly unheard-of outcome in bankruptcy cases.
Jackson emerged from the ‘90s wiser about the risks of rapid growth and clearer on where his own strengths lay. He realized he thrived most when betting on himself in business ventures. By the decade’s end, he was ready to return to his first passion, physician staffing. But this time with a more diversified perspective and a hunger to build something even bigger.
The Birth of LocumTenens.com
Amid the flurry of Clinton-era ventures, Jackson planted a seed that would become one of his flagship successes: LocumTenens.com. In 1995, recognizing the growing need for temporary physicians and the emerging power of the internet, Jackson co-founded LocumTenens.com as a new kind of staffing agency. It started modestly as just five associates with a vision. Rather than a traditional phone-and-fax recruitment shop, LocumTenens.com was conceived as a tech-enabled platform from the outset.
By 2000, the company had launched the healthcare industry’s largest online job board for temporary physician and advanced practice positions, connecting hospitals in need with clinicians seeking short-term assignments. This early embrace of online recruiting set LocumTenens.com apart as a pioneer during the dot-com era of staffing.
In its first incarnation, LT.com focused on just a few medical specialties, including psychiatrists, anesthesiologists, and surgeons, with high demand and critical shortages. The strategy paid off. As the locum tenens concept gained acceptance and the company’s reputation grew, LocumTenens.com steadily expanded into more disciplines.
In the ensuing decades, it broadened its services to over 60 medical specialties, building a vast network that now includes roughly 700,000 physicians and advanced practice providers. This translates to facilitating approximately 1 million clinician workdays per year in hospitals and clinics, resulting in a significant impact on healthcare delivery nationwide.
Jackson’s role in LT.com’s growth was foundational. The firm was in many ways a return to his recruiting roots, but with a forward-looking twist of leveraging technology. As co-founder, Jackson provided the vision and resources to get the company off the ground in 1995, working alongside partners like Lisa Kaeck to establish the business. He nurtured LocumTenens.com through its early growth, even while juggling other enterprises, because he recognized the locum tenens model was poised to explode.
By the late 1990s, physician staffing shortages were becoming a national concern, and temporary assignments were an increasingly vital solution. T.com positioned itself at the nexus of that supply and demand.
“LocumTenens.com was the first business to become part of the Jackson Healthcare family of companies, and I’m exceptionally proud of the countless people it has touched and the difference it continues to make in the lives of patients, families, and communities across the nation,” Jackson reflected on the company’s 30th anniversary. Indeed, from its humble start, the firm grew into an industry leader.
Today, it places more than 7,000 clinicians annually and serves 90% of the nation’s top hospitals. By some measures, it’s the largest locum tenens agency in the country. It remains at the core of Jackson’s business empire, exemplifying his knack for spotting underserved niches primed to scale.
In February 2025, the company celebrated its 30th year of operations, highlighting milestones such as its early job-board innovation and its mission “to empower uninterrupted, exceptional patient care” through temporary staffing. What started as an upstart idea in the mid-’90s is now a pillar of America’s healthcare workforce infrastructure.
Founding Jackson Healthcare and a New Era
During the early 2000s, Jackson officially launched Jackson Healthcare, creating a parent company to house LocumTenens.com and other healthcare staffing and software businesses. Jackson Healthcare was a way for him to “bet on himself” again and double down on the healthcare staffing and services sector he knew so well.
The timing was perfect: healthcare organizations were grappling with staffing shortages, and the locum tenens industry was poised for rapid growth. Jackson’s goal was to build an integrated family of companies that could tackle these workforce needs from multiple angles.
Jackson’s prior ventures and connections proved valuable as he began expanding the new company after its founding in 2000. One of his strategies was to achieve growth through both acquisition and organic expansion. For example, in the early 2000s, Jackson welcomed Premier Anesthesia, an anesthesia practice management group, and launched what is now Jackson Physician Search, initially named Jackson & Harris, to handle permanent physician placements.
In a symbolic full-circle move, he even re-launched the Jackson & Coker brand in 2006; this time as Jackson & Coker Locum Tenens, a company under his new umbrella focused exclusively on temporary physician staffing. Each addition bolstered Jackson Healthcare’s ability to serve hospitals’ every staffing need, from travel nurses to allied health professionals and executives, making the firm a one-stop shop in healthcare talent solutions.
Critically, LocumTenens.com became the cornerstone of Jackson Healthcare’s portfolio. Described as the first business to join the family, it provided a template for the kind of cutting-edge, technology-driven services Jackson wanted his conglomerate to offer.
Over the next several years, Jackson Healthcare launched or acquired more than a dozen companies, including Jackson Nurse Professionals (travel nursing), Jackson Therapy Partners (rehabilitation therapists), Jackson PharmacyPros, and many others. Jackson’s philosophy was to identify niches in the healthcare staffing and services market that were underserved or fragmented, and then fill those gaps with specialized teams.
“Each [company] is highly focused and specialized,” he noted of his subsidiaries, which by the mid-2010s numbered around 15 businesses, including several healthcare software companies. By knitting these together under a common corporate culture and vision, Jackson Healthcare could leverage shared technology and relationships while allowing each unit to excel in its domain.
The Empire State
Over the past two decades, Jackson’s enterprise has grown into one of the giants of the healthcare staffing industry. Jackson Healthcare today encompasses more than 20 distinct companies and has scaled at an extraordinary pace.
From its humble start in 2000, the organization surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue by 2018. As of the mid-2020s, Jackson Healthcare generates over $2 billion in revenue each year, placing it among the largest healthcare staffing firms in America. In fact, by revenue, it ranks as the seventh-largest healthcare staffing company in the US and the second-largest locum tenens agency. These remarkable achievements have even led to regular features on Forbes’ list of America’s largest private companies.
What has driven this sustained success? Much credit goes to Jackson’s model of combining strategic acquisitions with organic growth. Jackson Healthcare has continually “added names to the Jackson family” of companies through buyouts and startups.
For example, the firm recently acquired LRS Healthcare to expand in travel nursing and allied staffing. Jackson has also been quick to invest in technology: subsidiaries like Kimedics, a workforce management software, and Inlightened, a clinician engagement platform, have been folded into the LocumTenens.com operation to keep it on the cutting edge of staffing solutions.
By 2023, Jackson Healthcare even branched into manufacturing with the acquisition of USAntibiotics, demonstrating the company’s reach in supporting healthcare beyond staffing.
Just as visible as the revenue growth is the expansion of Jackson Healthcare’s workforce and footprint. The company now employs thousands of associates and deploys tens of thousands of clinicians across all 50 states.
To accommodate its growing team, Jackson built a sprawling headquarters campus in Alpharetta, Georgia, that has become something of a local landmark. Opened in phases between 2008 and 2019, the campus features Italian-inspired architecture, including an eight-story office tower and a piazza with a Roman Colosseum-style facade, which reflects the Jackson family’s fondness for Italian design.
As pictured below, during a company gathering, the Alpharetta campus is both an operational hub and a symbol of how far Jackson’s vision has come: from a small office with a handful of recruiters to an entire “village” buzzing with activity and housing multiple healthcare businesses side by side.
[Jackson Healthcare’s Alpharetta, GA campus (pictured during a company event) reflects the company’s remarkable growth. The Italian piazza-inspired headquarters, expanded in 2019, now houses more than 20 healthcare service companies and thousands of associates.]
Despite its size, Jackson Healthcare prides itself on a mission-driven culture. The organization has been recognized as a “Best Place to Work” and emphasizes collaboration and service. In its own words, “Healthcare staffing is the ultimate team sport,” underscoring a focus on orchestration and client satisfaction in every placement. Jackson’s companies together help healthcare facilities serve over 20 million patients a year through the clinicians they place.
It’s a real-world impact that the founder does not take lightly. From local community hospitals to major medical centers, chances are a Jackson Healthcare company is involved whenever a facility needs a doctor or nurse on short notice.
The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated this impact vividly; locum tenens providers from Jackson’s agencies were deployed to some of the hardest-hit areas, filling critical gaps on the frontlines. This earned them the Top Honor for Pandemic Response in Inc.’s 2021 Best in Business Awards
Philanthropy and Personal Legacy
While Rick Jackson’s business accomplishments are well documented, his personal journey and charitable endeavors are equally integral to his story. Jackson never forgot his challenging upbringing and the helping hands that guided him along the way. As his fortunes rose, he felt compelled to leverage his success for a greater good.
“Like most first-generation money, I just didn’t know how to responsibly manage wealth and giving,” Jackson said of his mindset after years of business success. A conversation with a mentor helped him realize that his ability to generate wealth was a gift that could serve others. This epiphany led Jackson to pioneer a concept he calls “venture philanthropy,” applying business principles to charitable work.
One of Jackson’s first major philanthropic initiatives addressed an issue close to his heart: foster care. He co-founded FaithBridge Foster Care, a nonprofit organization that partners with churches to place foster children in loving homes, and he started the Fostering Success program in Georgia to support youths aging out of foster care. These efforts were deeply informed by his own experience as a teenager in the foster system.
In addition, Jackson launched the goBeyondProfit business leader coalition to encourage corporate philanthropy. Under the umbrella of Jackson Healthcare’s charitable program, branded as LoveLifts, the company’s associates are encouraged to volunteer and contribute to community causes, from funding medical mission trips to supporting local nonprofits on the Alpharetta campus.
Jackson’s philanthropic philosophy often mirrors his business approach. He looks for original, self-sustaining models to “solve significant social problems” with the same vigor he applied to solving staffing problems. By integrating his values into every aspect of his work, Jackson has tried to ensure that “it’s not about me; it’s about [using business] to put people into action to serve.”
After more than four decades in business, Rick Jackson stands as both an industry icon and a community-minded leader. Colleagues often describe him as a visionary who sees opportunities where others see obstacles, whether it was recognizing the potential of locum tenens staffing early on or rebuilding a company after failure.
His legacy in the healthcare staffing field is evident not just in the companies that trace their roots to his influence, but also through the lives improved by his charitable ventures and the example he sets for compassionate leadership.
It’s a journey that exemplifies resilience and innovation: the foster kid from Atlanta who became a physician recruiter, then a locum tenens pioneer, and ultimately the architect of one of America’s largest healthcare staffing organizations. Rick Jackson’s story, marked by bold business moves, hard-earned second chances, and a steadfast commitment to giving back, continues to inspire a new generation of healthcare entrepreneurs and leaders.
