“Crap, time to scramble."
This was the entirety of my email to Mike at 3:25p on Sunday July 18, 2010. I had just received word from our vendor partner of three years that they were deciding to pull out of our long-standing services agreement that was to commence in less than 45 days. Collectively we had been providing health screening and vaccination services to one of NJ’s largest employers, at the time Pro-Activity’s longest standing client. It was our busy season…fondly known to us as “CVD” (cardiovascular disease prevention) season…. It was a Sunday and we had just gotten one of the legs cut-off from underneath us. But you know what they say about small business owners and entrepreneurs…. They only work on days that end in the letter “y”.... And looking back, this became one of those defining moments of the 2010’s for us, but first a little background…
In 2007 it had been about 4 years since we started working with this client at scale, across approximately 70 locations in the NJ/NY/Philly metro area and often in the field with various members of their 10,000 person team. We had invested a great deal into their well-being and gained their trust. We were their people, and they were ours. So when the opportunity presented itself to expand our traditional musculoskeletal-focused prevention services into health-screenings, promotion and wellbeing, we were confident that we could deliver an unmatched experience yielding a more positive impact on a greater number of lives and continue our efforts to shift the population towards more health and less injury and disease. To do so, we’d need a partner organization to serve as our licensed lab and provide appropriate nursing and health technicians. We knew we ran a fast pace, and would be asked to go even harder, hitting 70 locations in approximately 60 total days… starting each on-site around 6a and often finishing after 3p… so the chosen vendor partner would have to be able to keep up.
After receiving proposals from numerous groups and interviewing a handful, we chose a small entrepreneurial group who shared some similar dynamics to our team and agreed to what we believed were win-win terms. We’d handle the project management, health promotion, all things musculoskeletal and health-coaching related, and they’d handle the technical aspects of blood lipid profile testing (cholesterol, glucose, triglyceride) and flu vaccine administration. Like any new vendor-relationship there was a learning curve and a few bumps to work out, but once we did, the first three years went pretty smoothly. We served thousands of people, had countless health-interactions, undoubtedly opened many eyes and minds to underlying health concerns, and arguably prevented a handful of catastrophic health events each year for some whose metrics were creeping into the danger zone. It was hard work…good and purposeful work… the CVD season left us incredibly tired, but no less rewarded.
Back to Sunday July 18th, 2010, and we had our work cut out for us! This year’s season was set to start on September 1st and we were now without a vendor partner to serve as our licensed mobile lab. By Monday morning we had the skeleton of a plan…I’d begin searching for and interviewing other local vendor partners and Mike would begin looking into what it would take to “in-source”... that is obtain our own NJ lab license, hire and train our own internal team and deliver as promised to our valued clients. In a short time, my search was proving “meh” at best, but Mike’s work began to look promising. We had a handful of the requirements already in place, and the equipment manufacturers were willing and eager to support us with any training we’d need. There would of course be a great deal of paperwork, operations manuals and dotting of i’s and crossing of T’s, but the more we learned the more we believed we could do it and meet the deadline. There was just one problem… and it was sorta big. We weren’t doctors and to comply with the state’s licensure requirements, we needed one. And not just any doctor, but one who held the distinction of a “Bioanalytical Lab Director”, and as you might imagine, these types of people aren’t just walking around town. At least we didn’t think so.
Mike stumbled onto a directory of sorts and it turned out in our entire area there were exactly two physicians who held this specialized distinction. A text came through:
Mike: “Hey, don’t you train Mrs. L?”
Eric: “Yes, I have been for years… she’s one of the most committed women we’ve ever had”
Mike: “Any chance she’s related to a Dr L.?”
Eric: “Yes, that’s her husband… I don’t know him but I know he’s a doctor”
Within 48 hours Mike and Dr. L grabbed a cup of coffee. Turned out he not only had the distinction, but had been the lab director for some of the country’s most notable blood banks and clinics. To say he was qualified was an understatement! The man was an expert, and with his help, many more hours of grit and grind in a short period of time, our team secured our lab license, hired and trained a skilled team, and hit the ground running on September 1st. We’d complete upwards of 5,000 screenings in sixty days that year and would impact a number of lives in the process…ours included. We’d learn a bit more about our capacity…our ability to endure challenge and overcome. In looking back, it was one of those milestone moments in Pro-Activity history…. And like so many good stories that have come before and those after…. It came down to trust-filled relationships. In this case we didn’t exactly “know a guy”...but more importantly… had built a mutual respect with and knew a woman….who knew a guy.
-Eric E.
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