Greg Ranger had positioned himself quite well at St. Vincent Health. His team of nearly 20 people had taken over servicing of the organization’s biomedical devices and saved St. Vincent about $2 million that would have otherwise gone to outside vendors to do the same work.
“Instead of waiting for a call back from a manufacturer and that person showing up within a day or two, they had somebody standing in the department in 15 minutes,” Ranger says.
Word got out about the great work and soon, Ranger was being asked to take on jobs at other surgery centers and physician practices. So he put together a new business plan and with the blessing of St. Vincent, branched out to provide service to others in the Indianapolis region.
“We went out and operated as a DBA for about six months and grew the company almost $4 million in that six-month period,” Ranger says.
Seeing the potential for Ranger’s team, the hospital advised him to look at forming a separate limited liability company. A new plan was developed, and in 1999, TriMedx was born. The next year, ownership changed hands and TriMedx became a part of Ascension Health.
“Initiating the business concept and growing out of the hospital was a fairly large challenge,” says Ranger, the company’s founder, president and CEO.
Equally challenging was trying to develop a common set of beliefs that everyone could get behind in an environment where the business was expanding by leaps and bounds.
“You are hiring someone for about the size of the business you are,” Ranger says. “We were growing in the early years at a 30 to 40 percent or even 50 percent growth rate. Two years after we got the person on board, with a lot of folks it would be more than they could handle again. Becoming more disciplined in that whole arena and developing skills around development and progression planning was very critical.”
Today, TriMedx has 500 employees, and in fiscal 2008, it garnered $150 million in revenue.
Here are some of the things Ranger learned about successfully growing a company along the way.
