Growing my business

I have had the somewhat unusual experience of starting the same business twice in a ten year period. The first time during late summer to early fall of 2005, the latter in January of this year (2011).

I left the company for whom I worked in 2005 and 2006 for personal reasons. Specifically, I had started working there after Tulane University was flooded by Hurricane Katrina cancelling the Fall 2005 semester, and left the company in the early summer of 2006 so that I could return to school and finish up my degree. This is worthy of note because my first experience selling medical equipment online was by all accounts an unprecedented success. Heck, it was so easy it would have been hard for me not to have experienced success in 2005 and 2006 when I cut my teeth with online medical equipment sales.

I was given permission in September of 2005 to start selling excess inventory from the firm's four retail medical equipment and supply stores on Ebay. I set up an Ebay Store, and by December of that year I had not only gotten rid of all of the excess, I was actually outselling all four of the company's retail DME stores. By mid-January, our Ebay Store had achieved the #1 overall position in search results across all three of the major engines for the term "medical equipment" (with or without quotation marks). In addition, we were appearing on page 1 for at least 50-60 product-specific search terms and phrases. It was so easy I became bored and decided to go back to school.

Well, the experience was positive enough that I began to educate myself about internet technology. I taught myself HTML, CSS and a host of other languages, figuring out for myself how to build websites and market them online. In January of this year (2011), after trying out a few different jobs and finding none of them appealing, I asked my father, who is the owner and CEO Louisiana's premier Home Health Care, Rehabilitation, Infusion Pharmacy & DME (Durable Medical Equipment) firms if I could attempt to develop a retail divisision for his own organization. He granted me permission to do so, and within a week the two of us had a contract in place.

Well, I quickly learned that success selling medical equipment and medical supplies online would not be as easy this time around as it had been a few years back. The reason is actually fairly simple, and the step up in terms of the difficulty level was widely anticipated by myself and others within the newly-formed organization. Luckily, I had the benefit of a brick-and-mortar storefront to supplement the sales from the website until it (the site) had taken off.

The fact is that each year, tens of thousands of companies from every industry and sector imaginable attempt to develop an online presence. Thousands of these are companies that do business strictly online. Combine with that the fact that competitors who were online in 2005 (and possibly even earlier) have gotten much better at all phases of the business process, and the result is a global online marketplace which becomes increasingly difficult to compete within with each and every day that passes.

The fact is that tomorrow's internet will feature more companies trying their best to succeed than does today's internet, and some of those present in today's internet will be stronger competitors tomorrow than they were today.

To be clear, I am in no way suggesting that anyone shy away from joining the plethora of companies competing for world domination via the web. Rather, I am merely asserting the undeniable truth that there are certain online destinations that attract a widely disproportionate share of non-porn internet traffic, and that there are only so many companies that can dominate that sphere in a given time period. The numbers simply aren't favorable to every existing and new business in the world having success at generating leads and/or new sales online.

This is particularly true of medical equipment products, compression stockings and orthopedic braces, supports and splints. Medical equipment and other healthcare products are typically ordered by a physician and billed to either Medicare or private insurance. When your business model is retail-only, many if not most of your potential customers are ruled out right from the start. The medical attire and orthopedic items such as wrist braces, knee stabilizers, elbow supports, compression therapy and anti-embolism stockings must be measured and fitted in order to provide any meaningful benefit to the patient or customer. While measurements can be easily provided online, there is no way of knowing the exact or even approximate number of patients who simply don't bother to find a roll of measuring tape and follow the sizing instructions required to know what size to order. My guess is that the number is substantial.

In any case, it is much more difficult to get products in front of consumers online today than it was the last time I made an attempt at running an online business. As stated previously, this is due to the fact that I must now compete against several times the number of other medical supply stores than were online in 2005-2006, as well as the fact that many of the healthcare and medical equipment firms that were in existence back then have made tremendous strides in terms of their competitiveness in the online world of HME sales.

The shining light at the end of the tunnel is the fact that after eight months of working 60-80 hour weeks, Egan Medical Equipment and Supply of Covington appears to be carving out a sustainable niche for itself on the web and in search. While we're still a long way from the top of our market segmet, we are generating enough business to keep the doors open and the lights on... at least for today.

Advice for others

Keep working hard and never give up!