Homecare Supply of Beaumont, Texas, has become the top private home medical equipment provider in the country, acquiring 33 businesses and experiencing consistent double-digit growth on the road to No. 1.

But this kind of success requires much more than a good acquisition strategy, says Todd Christopher, the company's chairman and chief executive officer. Homecare Supply built its success on four important foundations: a clear mission statement, careful monitoring, employee incentives and continuous training. Christopher calls these foundations “the four pillars.”

A Company That CARES

Christopher sums up Home Care Supply's mission statement with the acronym CARES: Customers are our focus, Attitude is everything, Respect fellow employees and have fun, Earn profits and increase holder value, and Simple.

“This business is complex enough without creating complexity,” Christopher notes.

To ensure that every division of the company is working to further this mission, Home Care Supply managers visit each of the company's 52 branches annually. “We drop in unannounced and do a 50-point check,” Christopher says. “Every employee at the highest-scoring branch wins $1,000.”

Incentives like these are essential to Christopher's management style. “I like a team effort,” he says. Bonus programs based on annual sales forecasts also encourage all employees to take personal responsibility for the company's success. “Every employee can earn bonus dollars,” he says. “We put our money where our mouth is.”

The final foundation for Christopher's “four pillars” is education. To provide its employees with compliance information as well as the skills to reach yearly goals, Home Care Supply has created its own in-house “university.”

Christopher believes in setting high compliance standards both internally for current employees and externally for potential acquisitions.

“We have higher compliance standards than the [durable medical equipment regional carriers],” he says. “Only 40 percent of the companies we look at buying make the cut. It's incumbent on us to go out and be a moral company that does things the right way all the time — even when people aren't looking.”

After satisfying Home Care Supply's strict compliance standards, any potential acquisition must also possess an effective collections system and must be as profitable as possible, Christopher says.

High Expectations

To date, Home Care Supply's management team has focused on respiratory products, but Christopher says he wants to position the company as a diversified home care provider. “We've bought companies that do 100 percent respiratory and companies that do no more than 25 percent to 30 percent respiratory.”

Looking ahead, Christopher predicts that Home Care Supply will go public by 2004. “We need a $200 million to $250 million revenue to go public,” he says. “I think we can get there during the next couple of years.”

Indeed, despite the sluggish U.S. economy, Christopher is optimistic about the HME market's future. “It's a good time to be a consolidator in this business,” he says. “It's good that health care is becoming popular again on the public market.”

TODD CHRISTOPHER, chairman and chief executive officer of Home Care Supply says his enthusiasm for the home health care business was ignited more than 28 years ago, when, as a new Atlanta Falcons football recruit, he learned a valuable lesson.

“On the first day of practice,” he recalls,” a teammate hit me so hard that I had an epiphany: I'd rather sell medical supplies than have them used on me.”