LIKE MANY OTHER home medical equipment providers, you might feel financially pinched, unsure how to earn a fair profit. Competition is tight-and Medicare reimbursement even tighter.

Things aren't too rough for the big national chains, but what about the small independent HME providers? How can they compete? It's simple, says Dilip Patel, owner of PRN Uniforms and Medical Supply, Houston-wean yourself from Medicare.

"HME is a complicated business, but one thing I always tell fellow providers is, 'Don't wait for Medicare business. There are other ways to survive,'" Patel says. "Medicare is great for the larger providers that get large contracts to provide services. People like me have to depend on-and specialize in-something. You have to have some kind of niche."

For Patel, that niche is compression stockings.

Last year, Patel says, hosiery accounted for almost 30 percent of PRN's total sales and roughly 40 percent of cash sales, even though he didn't start investing in this niche until about five years ago.

"We only stocked about four stockings on the shelves, and they weren't selling," Patel says. "We obviously weren't doing the right thing."

Figuring that education might be the answer to better sales, he attended manufacturer seminars and began putting more than just four stockings on the shelves. He slowly built his compression stocking customer base, but Patel still thought the stocking market hadn't reached its potential in his business.

So in February of last year, Patel decided to jump-start the niche by holding a "Leg Day." He sent fliers about the educational program to all his referral sources, as well as his modest compression stocking customer base of 50. The seminar included lunch and featured a presentation by his manufacturer sales rep.

"We had a good response," Patel recalls. "We sold about $2,000 worth of stockings that day." But Patel says he still couldn't help but think there was even more potential.

Not content to let the matter rest, Patel began to capture contact information on every stocking customer who came into his store, and by the time Patel held his second seminar in July, his customer database had swelled to 250. He did $4,200 in sales that day. Still unsatisfied, Patel held a two-day seminar in October. By that time his database was about 550 strong, and during the two-day event he did $8,100 in sales.

Patel credits this growing sales success to the educational component of the seminars. "The seminars help because it's not just me or my staff telling the customer why they need compression stockings and how they will help them," Patel says. That customers can learn from the manufacturer rep-who is an RN-about how different compression stockings work and about the pros and cons associated with them has been instrumental in the sales success.

And that success is beginning to show. Patel plans to expand his retail showroom from 6,900 square feet (with 4,200 dedicated to HME) to 10,000-with 5,000 for HME and 5,000 for the uniform side of his business.

One might think such success would make Patel satisfied with PRN's recent accomplishments. Well, it hasn't. "My target for this year is to do $10,000 worth of stocking sales in one day," Patel says.