The Parable of the Mom & Pop

If ever the home medical equipment industry needed a modern-day fable of how to succeed in the face of competition and corporate takeovers, now is the time, and the story of Rapid City, S.D.'s Breathe EZ Oxygen and Respiratory Supply is that tale.

In the 1980s, Ella Mae Bell and Vern Shafer each launched promising careers in HME, Ella as a customer service representative and respiratory therapist at Shell Medical in Rome, Ga., and Vern as an employee of his sister and brother-in-law's Pulmonary Services Inc. (PSI) in Sioux Falls and Rapid City, S.D.

As they worked, both were promoted to location manager. Ella managed a staff of six for eight years, while Vern's family business grew large enough to warrant a 6,000-square-foot location.

“Like many other [HMEs] at that time, we had become caught up in the ‘everything-to-everybody’ mindset,” Vern says. “We set up large showrooms in our facilities, filling them with all kinds of things from nursing uniforms to diapers and everything in between. We had a rehab department where we built customized wheelchairs, and we had a full maintenance department for overhauling concentrators and fixing whatever needed fixing. We supplied liquid oxygen and had a transfill system capable of filling 80 small compressed gas cylinders per batch. We did it all. We were everything to everybody.”

Indeed, Ella, Vern, and their respective companies were so successful that they caught the attention of the same large, national HME provider. Ella eventually became the national company's director of marketing for Georgia. Vern remained location manager at his original business, although the company now flew the national provider's flag. Business was good.

For Vern, however, the transition was hard, with changes happening quickly and a new corporation calling the shots. “I wasn't used to having someone else tell me what was best for my location. I had always run my location with the idea that the patient comes first — always. If you take the best possible care of your patients, your patients will be happy. If your patients are happy, your physicians are happy. If your physicians are happy, your business will grow. This philosophy had always seemed to work in the past, and I didn't see any reason to change.

“However, I was being asked to change, actually, told to change,” he continues. “‘Time is money, Vern, and you need to spend more time making more money!’”