From Health Design Plus’ position on the Weatherhead 100 list of fastest-growing companies, M. Ruth Coleman can see where her company has been and where it’s headed.
“We’ve gotten more sophisticated in 17 years,” says Coleman, president and CEO. “The tools that we can use for analyzing data are much better now than they were, and we’ve just learned a lot.”
Founded in 1988, the Hudson-based health care management company has grown to 110 employees and reported $10 million in 2005 revenue.
Smart Business spoke with Coleman about how she adapted her company’s footprint to help expand its capacity.
Why did you change from a national focus to a regional one?
Some of it is due to the cost and ability to manage clients from a distance. A lot of it has to do with when we are concentrating market share in an area, we can have a much better impact on trend and can work more closely with the regional medical staff and hospitals to really know where there might be issues and how we can support everybody in reducing the cost.
In this current environment, it’s a model that’s going to be more effective to reaching our mission.
How do you define and maintain controlled growth?
The actual percentage of growth may vary from year to year, but it really is based on our capacity. It’s also based on the number of new clients; one client may have a lot of (member) lives, and that’s actually easier to bring on in a benefit year than four clients with a smaller number of lives.
We also take a look at our capacity to grow and our ability to hire the staff we need — in the timeframe we have — to bring on a client. Most employers roll over their health benefits in January, so we’re almost like a seasonal business. Our year-end’s crazy because, for the most part, that’s when new clients come on.
A lot depends on when a group makes a decision to move forward. The earlier the decisions are made, the better we can handle the growth.
We’ve walked away from prospective clients who have come to us and said, ‘We’d really like to come to you’ because it was too late in the year, and we decided that we couldn’t handle bringing on new business at that point. We just told them very directly that we didn’t feel that we could service them well.
This is a business where, if you do it well, it’s expected; if you don’t, it takes you 10 years to recoup your reputation.
What techniques do you use to grow your company?
We went through a major systems conversion in 2002 and 2003 that took us from a 100-percent paper environment to an almost paperless environment. We handle millions of claims documents every year, and that gave us a much better ability to manage our business and to manage workflow and huge efficiencies.
We are better able to program the system so medical claims can come in electronically, and a much higher percentage of the claims can just go right through, without ever having to be handled by a processor. That improves capacity phenomenally.
Our processors work from home on secure lines, and it’s given us a much broader ability to recruit. Folks earn the right to (work from) home. We have a lot of single moms; it’s really given them a lot of flexibility. They love it, and they do very well at it. It’s given us the ability to recruit a higher level of talent in terms of skills because we have a broader geography from which to attract.
I don’t care if they process at 2 a.m., as long as their quality and production is there — and we can monitor all of that now with this technology. We were about ready to have to build a new building, and it really freed up some space for us. The key is to have the tools to monitor and manage the work.
How do you get prospective clients into the pipeline?
We’ve gotten much better at using databases and information about prospective clients, and also using consultants who are well-connected and highly influential in areas where we want to grow. They help us to identify good prospects and to do an introduction.
We have to do more marketing and get our name out in the right communities. It’s very helpful to get people to know our name because we’re kind of like ‘the quiet company.’ Public relations-type activities are going to be more effective for us in the geographies where we really want to concentrate. We may go to ad campaigns, but that’ll be down the road a little bit.
HOW TO REACH: Health Design Plus, (330) 656-1072 or www.hdplus.com
