Going the Extra Mile

It's tough to find a good-news story in the home medical equipment sector these days. Burdened by the threat of competitive bidding and legislative cuts, surety bond and accreditation mandates, the 36-month oxygen cap and nosediving reimbursement, most providers are simply trying to stay alive.

But in Norcross, Ga., a five-year-old, single-location HME called Extrakare is thriving with a growth rate of 50 percent each year and revenue that jumped from $493,371 in 2005 to $4.6 million in 2008. That growth — 834.6 percent, to be exact — earned Extrakare a place on the elite Inc. 500 list, where the company ranks as the 271st fastest-growing private business in America, the 25th fastest-growing private health care business in America and the eighth fastest-growing private business in Atlanta.

What's Extrakare's secret?

“We don't do anything that is particularly unique,” says company President Scott Lloyd, who partnered with Kevin Godwin to open the business in 2004.

Don't you believe it.

Lloyd and Godwin, who were colleagues at a top audio-visual integration firm and who both have business degrees — Lloyd an MBA from Emory University's Goizueta Business School and Godwin a BBA in management from Georgia State University — intentionally set out to build an HME company on a firm foundation of professionalism and productivity.

The Right Plan

You might say that Extrakare came about because Lloyd and Godwin were tired. The two traveled a lot on business, which became both wearing and wearying.

“We were looking for something to do where we could sleep in our own beds at night,” Lloyd says.

A mutual friend had an oxygen business in Florida and, over the years, he had often remarked how much he enjoyed the business. “You guys should really be in this,” he'd tell Lloyd and Godwin. Finally, early in 2004, the pair traveled to Florida to visit their friend and take a look at his oxygen business. That's all it took for them to start researching the industry, which evolved into a business plan and a mission “to deliver superior patient care in a home setting.

“We really set out to create an oxygen company solely designed around non-delivery technology,” Lloyd says. “We built it around Invacare's HomeFill, which was the only mainstream product [of its kind] at the time …