In a market they found to be largely their own, the owners of Wilmington-based 101 Mobility have grown their specialty health care equipment sales and service business and are ready to start selling franchises.

“We chose franchising as the preferred method of growth because we see a benefit to having people who have a stake in the business,” said 101 Mobility Chief Strategy Officer Luke Sampson.

He said the company is doing brisk business in a health care equipment market that has too often tried to be all things to all customers. 101 Mobility has been able to take advantage of being more educated about the company’s niche in the industry: mobility and accessibility equipment.

They sell and service chair lifts, auto lifts, modular ramps and other equipment that an aging population will continue to use. They say they are the country’s first such sales and service company with this specialty.

“On a strategic level, we have a distinct advantage over our competition,” said Keith Barnhardt, the company’s chief operating officer.

He said the next step for the company is to sell franchises so that the company can keep its support team lean since it’s easier to support a franchise than it is to support a sales rep.

“We went through the numbers early in the process,” Barnhardt said of the two-year-old company. The company began looking at
franchising in August of 2009.

They felt like the gap in the specialized mobility products market would not stay open long due to the country’s aging demographic.

“We honestly are a little surprised no company has positioned itself to benefit from this growing need,” said CEO Dave Pazgan in a release. “Consumers have no trusted national brands to turn to for selecting, installing and servicing mobility equipment.”

Barnhardt and Sampson started the company after they left a national mortgage company.
They looked at the market and saw health care to be a safe industry in which to start a new business, Sampson said.

When Sampson and Barnhardt realized they had tapped into a lot of potential, they called their boss from their former company, Pazgan. He decided to move to Wilmington and join them.

The company’s revenue was $850,000 in 2008 even though they didn’t make their first sale until June, Sampson said. 101 Mobility’s 2009 revenue was $3.1 million.

Because of the aging baby boomer retirees, the leadership at 101 Mobility sees their product being in high demand.

Sampson said the company’s relationship with Veterans Administration hospitals makes areas with large VA hospitals and clinics the ideal spot for the new franchises to work. “This is a business that works (well) near VA hospitals,” he said. “It’s a scalable business.”

“We’re looking for somebody who is a little bit entrepreneurial,” Sampson said. “We’ll make it easy to transition our sales reps into
franchisees.”

They are a young business and franchising can stunt revenue generation from the reps in the field who decide they want to go out on their own. But Sampson said that they will continue to grow the ad rep sales and technician force as the number of franchises grows.

The company currently has about 14 teams on the East Coast and in the Midwest.

“We’re growing two models, the franchise model and the sales rep model,” Sampson said.