The product that sells… but may never get used
The following article was published in Thiis Magazine in February 2010. You can download a PDF of the article (2.4MB).
Imagine producing and selling thousands of products, none of which will ever see the light of day. Many will be in cupboards and on shelves, while others will be in place, ready to solve a huge potential problem but will never be needed.A few will be used for training purposes,but most will stay in their wrappers.That's the scenario at one business that has grown steadily over the past few years and that is now looking to capitalise on some recent legislation while, at the same time, build a stronger range for the future…
Think vacuums and you think Hoover. Think evacuation and many people think Ski Sheets and Ski Pads. You may have never heard of them before, but they are two products that fulfil a real need. What’s more, they can keep people on the right side of the law too! The products are manufactured, in the UK by Northants based Hospital Aids. Recently, the company joined forces with sister Company, Spectrum Healthcare and that name is being seen around the exhibition circuit and marketplace a good deal more, offering a comprehensive range of evacuation products. Steve Clark, Sales and Marketing Director gave me an insight into a business that is looking to expand into new sectors in 2010.
Steve gave a brief background to the company. "Hospital Aids itself has been in existence for something like 30 years and has been supplying Ski Sheets to the NHS since the early 80's.The Ski Sheet was the main focus of the company in the early days and several of the other products that we manufacture under the Hospital Aids banner have evolved from the Ski Sheet. A good example of that would be the Ski Pad which is now one of our best selling items. The basic principal of all of our evacuation product range is to be able to get people out of places like hospitals and care homes quickly and carefully, with minimal physical strength, on the part of the carers."
Steve told me that probably the best example of where the products have been used in the past was at the Royal Marsden Hospital when there was a fire in January 2008. "They evacuated more than 40 patients from the fourth floor of the hospital, on their mattresses, using Ski Sheets."
I suggested to Steve that, in a way, it's a strange business, in that the products that the company supplies may never get used. In fact, everyone would rather hope that they would never have to be used. "It is odd really and maybe more than 99% of all the products we supply will never get used."
According to Steve, the Ski Pad evolved from the Ski Sheet as a solution to the problem, where mattress evacuation is not feasible. "It may be that corridors are not wide enough or stairways are too difficult to negotiate. There can be all sorts of architectural reasons why you cannot move people on a mattress and we believe that the Ski Pad has a lot of potential to be used in places other than hospitals and care homes, which has been our main focus up until now. For example, anyone who has someone working in their offices with a disability may well be a potential customer. If you have someone with a disability working on the fourth floor of the building and there is a fire, then they will not be able to use the lifts and the Ski Pad is a good option to have on hand."
Steve explained that the demand for the products is being driven by a combination of two pieces of legislation. "Regulator y Reform (Fire Safety) Order of 2005 means that the Fire Ser vice is no longer obliged to provide a "complete evacuation ser vice" for your premises and now every business and establishment has to have their own evacuation procedure/s in place. Local fire services also have the right to inspect and if necessar y close premises that are deemed to be in breach of this new legislation.
Couple that with the changes in the Disability Discrimination Act which states that everyone has to have the same right of evacuation and these are regulations which mean that equipment such as the Ski Pad is a sensible option as part of their compliance procedure."
The company has come a fair way since it was started by one person working out of a garage. "The Ski Sheet was just one of those innovative ideas that enabled a company to grow from it" says Steve who added that it is still one of ver y few products on the market designed to solve the problem. "There are a couple of other products around, one of which has been around for some time. However, the main competing product does not have the formal NHS approval that we have and the reason for this is that the NHS specify that there must be a particular type of buckle on the product called an Immi Buckle.They are from the USA and are the same quality and strength buckle that you would find on most cars or aeroplanes. It is the most expensive component on the product and, in the main only we use it."
The retail price for a single Ski Sheet is £41.50. Although it might seem like a low value item, Steve tells me that they are sold in batches of anything up to 1000 at a time. Steve explained how the business had evolved. "The business was sold to the occupier of the building we work out of now and, at that time it was predominantly a janitorial supplies company." It was, in fact, the insurers of the business that took it over in 2002 and, at the time, Steve was working for the insurers. "I had been in financial services for 25 years. My background was as a pension’s advisor and I was getting rather bored of it to be honest and so I had decided that I wanted to do something different. The janitorial business was up for sale but couldn't find a buyer and my boss at the insurance brokerage told me that he was thinking about buying it himself and asked me whether I fancied running it for him for six months.We started in October 2002 and decided quickly that the Hospital Aids part of the business was the one that held the greatest potential for growth. In 2002 the turnover for Hospital Aids was £150,000 and we have built that to around £700,000. All my energies initially were spent developing the Hospital Aids business. Before it was developed simply through word of mouth and so we got out and about and started telling people about the business and the products, mainly via exhibitions, product demon- strations and website development."
I suggested to Steve that the 2005 Fire Order legislation that has already been mentioned must have provided the company with a huge boost. "Indeed" he replied. "I don't think we really appreciated at the time just how much of an impact it would have on the business and I believe that we may only have scratched the surface, as far as total demand is concerned."
In the early days though, it was all about getting out and about and telling people about the products and, as par t of that process, the connection with Spectrum Healthcare came about. "The early contacts that I started to make when we were starting to market our products included the owner Spectrum Healthcare and we started to supply the business with Ski Sheets and Ski Pads. At the time, Spectrum were selling mainly beds and mattresses but were being asked for Ski Sheets and Ski Pads and so it made sense these distribution commitments. They are slightly different products and they sell side by side with the Ski Sheet and Ski Pad, giving Hospital Aids & Spectrum access to a comprehensive product range."
The association with Spectrum has definitely given the two Companies a strong base to work from as Steve points out. "It has enabled us to create our own niche. We supply the majority of products that are sold in competition to evacuation chairs and so we have set ourselves up as a one stop evacuation shop really.We now sell chairs too and so we offer the full range available."
It’s probable that many people reading this ar ticle are not really selling into this specialist market at all, but Steve is keen to develop other routes to market. "We do have some very good distrib- utors in the UK, some of which sell products like fire extinguishers and safety signs and we have sold through the large wholesalers before, but we tend to get lost in the pages of the large catalogues. We would like to find more people to work with in the UK, but another area that we have our eyes on is mainland Europe where we have established a number of contacts through the main shows. It hasn’t really taken off yet, but we are convinced that there will be a marketplace there for us. I have been around RehaCare (Düsseldorf) for the last two years and there is nothing like our product on the marketplace over there. The legislative requirement to use products like ours in Europe hasn’t really kicked in yet, but we believe that it will and that will create the marketplace for us, in time."
As Steve re-iterates, supplying a product that is required by law can be far easier than other items. "When it’s backed up with legislation it isn’t a difficult sell.We also do very well in Southern Ireland where they are very focused on using these types of products which is again backed up with recent equivalent legislation."
Of course, as we have seen with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), having legislation in place isn’t always necessarily the guarantee that people and companies are going to spend money to make sure that they comply.
Steve agrees. "Although UK legislation was announced in 2005 (Regulator y Reform (Fire Safety) Order), it has taken a few years before people have really started to take it seriously.The difference is that now, the Fire Officers are going into premises and serving enforcement orders. They have perhaps been into cer tain premises some months ago and explained what is needed but, if nothing has been done to comply, they are starting to go further and, in some cases, close the premises.This has led to a lot of calls from care homes and hotels, in par ticular. Hotels have a real problem using the evacuation chairs in terms of the maintenance and training required to be able to use them, safely."
Steve explained further. "The first priority of the Fire Services appears to be to put the fire out and then secondly to ensure that the structure of the building is safe. Under the old regime, where the first priority might have been to get people out of the building, places like care homes, in particular felt that they didn’t need to have anything in place in terms of a plan of how to get people out. Now, they most definitely do and this includes having appropriate equipment (and relevant training to use it!) if needs must."
There are around 15 people working for the two Companies and of those 10 are employed in the manufacturing side of the business. As Steve admitted, there is plenty of scope for growth. "We cer tainly have the oppor tunity to grow, however, we have just about reached full capacity in our existing premises and we may have to look at doing something about that in the near future."
The reason that both Spectrum Healthcare and Hospital Aids are being used, as separate marketing names, rather than combining the two together under a new name is purely down to targeting the diverse marketplaces that the company is working in.
"We were going to places like the National Back Exchange exhibition under the name Hospital Aids and people were seeing the name but not understanding that we might have products to offer that were relevant to them." Steve explained. "We needed a more neutral name for events like that, but we also needed to have a hospital focused name for the other sectors of the marketplace, in which we are active. They are separate companies with some common directors and Hospital Aids is a brand with some 30 years of history and you don’t drop that lightly."
Steve believes that for anyone interested in the products on offer, now is the time to make the decision to take the next step. "We think that we have another two to three years of people purchasing the products in bulk to make sure that they are complying with legislation. We think that the impact of the 2005 Fire Order is only just being felt now and that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in that regard. We are adding other products to the range at the same time and are also building a falls protection product range along with plans to increase our moving and handling products too.
We are developing two or three brand new, innovative products that we hope will come to market by the middle of 2010, one of which will be a kneeling product after we were asked to produce something for people who spend a lot of their working life in a kneeling position."
Steve is also very much aware that new products have to be added to the range. "We are aware that the evacuation products will not be at the same high level of demand forever and that once people have them in place, then there will be a lower, although constant, demand. That is why we are building up the range of products on offer from both companies to be in a position to offer greater choice in the medium to long-term."
It all points to future expansion in an interesting sector of the marketplace.
For more information on the products, call 01604 586 501. The websites are at www.hospitalaids.co.uk and www.spectrumhealthcare.co.uk.