I'm Not Building Wienermobiles My Whole Life

Introduction:

This week, special guest Travis LeFever shares the unusual journey he and his co-founder wife, Amanda, have taken to build Mission Mobile Medical, which makes mobile health clinics in Greensboro, NC. That journey started with Travis partnering in a construction business by taking out 39 credit cards to borrow $250,000. The business did well, and he eventually bought out his partner, but when Travis’ father died unexpectedly, he was moved to sell the construction business and look for something more meaningful to do with his life. That extended search led him, somewhat improbably, to overseeing sales for a company that manufactured specialty vehicles, including the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. It was there that Travis had another life-changing experience when a nurse with a federal grant asked if he could build a mobile clinic to reach patients in underserved communities. That was the spark that led Travis and Amanda to cash in their insurance policies and start Mission Mobile Medial in 2020. The company, whose remanufacturing process allows it to create clinics in less time and for less money than its competitors, expects to hit $60 million in revenue this year.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Travis LeFever is CEO of Mission Mobile Medial, which makes mobile clinics in Greensboro, NC.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Travis, our special guest today. It’s great to have you here. Travis, I learned a long time ago that pretty much every business owner has an interesting story about how they came to start their business, and you’re no exception. Can you tell us about your background? What did you do before you started Mission Mobile Medical?

Travis LeFever:
Yeah, thanks, Loren. I appreciate you having me, and you’re right. It is an interesting story, and I love to share it, because what I’ve learned is that even though I don’t know the folks who are listening personally, it seems like we’re all kind of fellow travelers on the same road, that even though we can’t see each other, or maybe not be connected, that we’re traveling the same path and connected in ways we can’t really see.

Loren Feldman:
Absolutely.

Travis LeFever:
In 2012, my wife and I owned a construction company, believe it or not, and the start of that company is also interesting. I borrowed $252,000 on 39 credit cards to buy into that one at 22. I have to tell you that one sometime.

Loren Feldman:
Wait, wait, wait. You have to tell me a little about that this time. You were 22 when you did that?

Travis LeFever:
Yeah, 22. My boss quit. I was working at another construction company. My vice president, who hired me, came in one afternoon and said, “Hey, I gotta go. I’m gonna start my own company.” And I was like, “All right, see you later,” but turns out he was driving a lot of the revenue, and things started to get pretty shaky, pretty fast there. And it took about 12 months or so, and I was calling him looking for a job. And he said, “Well, I don’t need any employees, but I have been looking for a partner. You come up with $250,000, I’ll sell you half the business.” [Laughter]

And so I called my dad. You know, when you’re 22, you call your dad. And I go, “Hey, I got this opportunity. What do you think? And do you have $250,000?” And he goes, “If I had $250,000, you’d be the last person that I’d give it to. You’re crazy.” [Laughter] But then, in a moment of seriousness, he said, “Look, you know, if you really want something in life, you’ll find a way to get it. So go see if you can get it.” And I got on the internet that night, and I’m sitting on the floor of our spare bedroom there. I was in Fort Myers, Florida. I had a one-year-old. And I don’t know if you remember back in 2000 or ‘99, but the internet was the Wild Wild West. And you would get all these pop-ups for credit-card offers. You remember this, right?

Loren Feldman:
I do remember.

Travis LeFever:
And what I learned was that they didn’t talk to each other. And so, over the next week or so, I applied for as many credit cards as I could apply for, and they started showing up in the mail: $6,000, $2,000, $10,000, $12,000, whatever it was. And I amassed my stack of credit cards, and ended up with $252,000, 39 credit cards. And that’s what I used to buy into that business.

And my claim to fame, Loren, to this day, is that, in all the years that it took me to pay off those credit cards, I never missed a payment. And so I was really, super cognizant of that. And I don’t recommend that as an entrepreneur. That’s not a secret hack of any sort to get into business for yourself, but it worked for me. So, there you go.

Loren Feldman:
So how did you make the first payment? That’s the one I’m curious about.

Travis LeFever:
Yeah, so minimum payments. I mean, if you know anything about credit cards, it’s $21 on however many thousand. And we were okay there. Like, I took a salary and we made minimum payments for a while, and then I’d rotate them to sort of keep the interest off. You get these new offers, no interest, and I had a whole system.

Man, they were spread out all over my dining room table. I remember seeing them. You know, I can see them in my head. The dining room table’s covered with statements, and I had them lined up by due date. And I pinned the checks to them and figured out the days. So, it took a lot of my time managing my finances.

Loren Feldman:
And you were married at this time?

Travis LeFever:
Oh, yeah.

Loren Feldman:
What did your wife think of this?

Travis LeFever:
Oh, she of course thought that this was the craziest thing in the world, and what had she gotten herself into?

Loren Feldman:
How many years did it take you to pay it off completely?

Travis LeFever:
Um, let’s see… I bought the rest of the business in 2003, so probably four or five years? Yep, four or five years.

Loren Feldman:
Not bad, wow. So it worked out. You said you bought the rest of the business from your partner?

Travis LeFever:
It did, yep, and I didn’t use credit cards—of course, I didn’t have any extra credit cards.

Loren Feldman:
I’m surprised you’ve been able to get a credit card since then.

Travis LeFever:
It’s crazy. I’ve got immaculate credit, my friend. So we had this construction company in 2012, and my dad passed away. It was in April, 2012, and it was unexpected. And, you know, it’s real quiet after a loss like that. I was close with my dad. And with the funeral and the family and kind of the silence, I had to face facts, that I really, in building my own business, hadn’t grown up to be the man my dad raised me to be.

Loren Feldman:
What do you mean by that?

Travis LeFever:
Well, I’ll tell you, at the funeral, I just stood there with my mother and my brother and my kids. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a funeral of a community leader before, but the line was out the room, out the door, out the building, around the block. And I stood in the line, and I listened to hundreds of stories about my dad, and almost all of them followed the same kind of structure. “Your dad used to stop and check on me every Friday on his way home from work, just to make sure I had food for the weekend.” Or, “He noticed that my porch was falling down, so he came back on Saturday with a group of men from the church, and they rebuilt my porch.” Or, “He cut my hair for free.” Or, “He worked on my computer and didn’t charge me anything.” Like, just story after story after story.

And you can’t ignore that. And that example, I think, of servant leadership really personified—and he wasn’t successful by the world’s standards, for sure, but he was significant in the lives of a lot of people. And really, that was the contrast that was painted for me through that experience—that I was successful, but I was far, far from significant. And I’d been working to do well for myself and had sort of forgotten about doing well for others. And so, I just had a change of heart, I guess is the word, and made some decisions. After six months or so, I closed the construction company, sold it to one of my partners, and went on kind of a search for a second mountain. Like, what am I going to do? What am I supposed to do?

Loren Feldman:
You said the construction business was successful?

Travis LeFever:
Yeah, we were probably a $7 million business. We had 75 folks. We worked all over the country. I had business in 29 states. I worked for every branch of the government, the U.S. military, including the architect of the Capitol. We were doing good.

Loren Feldman:
So no small thing to walk away from.

Travis LeFever:
I don’t think so. Like I said, it wasn’t what I was supposed to do, and I knew it. I didn’t think it. I knew it. So it made it a little easier.

Loren Feldman:
Did you know what you wanted to do next?

Travis LeFever:
No, no, no, no, I didn’t. So, Amanda and I went back to school, finished our degrees. I taught. I taught for this association. They sent me to nine countries. Taught all over the world.

Loren Feldman:
What were you teaching?

Travis LeFever:
I was teaching quality control in oil and gas, so sort of an offshoot of our construction work. I went all over: South Korea, Saudi, Alaska, Hawaii, China, Trinidad, Tobago, South America, all over. And I learned a lot about people in that space, taught business in college for a couple years, did some consulting work. And really, I think it was kind of the ramp onto this business.

I got a consulting gig to do a turnaround project. A friend of mine was working with a specialty vehicles company, and they built things like the Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles or Planters’ Nutmobiles. They were super cool, special vehicles, mainly for marketing, and they were having some trouble in sales. And, of course, you know, turn it around, come in, big sales and marketing effort. I was VP of sales. And we started landing clients, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, the Navy, Facebook, Procter & Gamble, you name it. And we turned it around. The second year I was there, I think, was their best year in 46 years. So we were doing good.

And then in summer 2019, we had a nurse from our local hospital come in, and she asked if we could build a mobile clinic. And we’d never built a mobile clinic. We’d done a few healthcare-adjacent things. But our tagline was, “If you can dream it, we can build it.” And so it was very much like, “Sure!” And so we sat down, and we put together this proposal: a pitch for this really complex, custom, 40-foot-long coach, biggest generator you could buy, all the bells and whistles. And I took it to her, and I said, “Hey, look at this. Sit with me. Look at this.” And she laughed at me. She said, “You really don’t understand what we’re trying to do, do you?”

And she began to educate me—for lack of a better term—on the number of underserved people in our community and how scarce funding was to care for them. And she said she had a grant for $250,000. She had till Christmas to spend it, and really, what could we do for that? And so I went back to that organization and met a little bit of resistance. They really didn’t want to do a low-margin job, really didn’t want to do anything outside of building custom vehicles. But I finally got them to say that if she would take a remanufactured RV—which is, you know, an RV that you take all the consumer stuff out of and rebuild it with commercial stuff—they thought they could do it for $250k. So I went and asked, and she said what was, in hindsight, really the magic words, which is: “It doesn’t matter. It needs to be out of the sun, out of the rain, and run every day. And I think it’ll help these people.”

And that took us to the day that changed my life forever, which is when I invited her over to sign the contract. Now, you can imagine my experience signing contracts with folks like Lockheed Martin and the Navy. You know, it’s a very businesslike affair. There’s a lot of terms and conditions and box-checking, and then when it’s over, there’s a lot of really firm handshakes and claps on the back. But she was different. She came around the table, and I stuck out my hand to get the handshake, and she pushes it away. She gives me this really big hug. And I remember in the moment thinking: I’ve never gotten a hug at work before. [Laughter] Like, this is weird. We don’t hug, where I come from: construction.

But then here’s kind of the moment. And I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but maybe your spouse or your mom or your grandma or somebody talked to you while they were hugging you—like, it’s a very intimate thing. You don’t really have any place to go. You kind of have to pay attention to them. And she starts telling me that I’ll never know what it’s going to mean to the people she’s going to go see, that she’s going to take it up into the mountains—Appalachian Mountains—here in North Carolina, and see people who don’t trust the doctors or won’t drive the hour it takes to get into town. And my stomach just went in knots, because she was so wrong. Like, I did know what it was going to mean to those people, because those were my people.

I grew up an hour north of town in the Appalachian Mountains. My mom: big farm family, one of 13 kids, dirt-floor poor. They slept four to a bed. My six uncles are chicken farmers. I had cow pastures on three sides of my house. We drove 10 miles on a dirt road to get to church. And so all I can think about is how I’d heard growing up that you can’t trust the doctor. “Don’t go to the doctor—they’ll find something wrong with you. You can’t afford to be sick. The hospital’s where you go to die.” And because of those attitudes, beliefs—core beliefs—both of my parents struggled with their health their whole lives: obesity, heart disease, diabetes.

And then, like I said, when my dad was 66, getting ready to retire, at work in a storage room by himself, he has a massive heart attack, dies—cold, dirty, linoleum floor, and scared to death, I’m sure, the whole time. And that’s not fair. He raised me and my brother right. He took care of what he was supposed to take care of. He worked hard. He saved. He did all the right things. He was a veteran.

And so when she’s standing there, she’s telling me this, all I can think about is: What if someone with her heart had headed up into our little town and treated my dad like a patient instead of a profit margin, like a human? And would he have maybe listened to the doctors, adhered to the medication, whatever it was, took the heart meds? Would we have gotten 10 or 15 or 20 more Christmases with him? Would he have met his granddaughters? Would he maybe finish raising me?

And so in that moment, I got on fire, really, for this work. And I thought, “Well, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to help people like her help take care of people like my dad.” And so I go to work. Like, I’m VP of sales. I’m going to do marketing. I’m going to figure out this market. And so I go, and I look, and it turns out, it’s a real market. It’s a big thing. There’s lots of people out there. There’s academic research centers. There’s hospitals. There’s health systems. There’s health centers that serve the underserved.

I was like: This could be a big deal. And really, it didn’t resonate with the owners there. I didn’t resonate with what I was saying. And January 10, I think it was, Friday afternoon, 2020, the owner comes in my office, and he says, “Hey, we don’t need you here anymore.” And I got a box, packed up my stuff, said goodbye to my team, and went home.

Loren Feldman:
Were you fired for some kind of cause? Was the idea that you had been devoting too much energy to this side project that they weren’t interested in and not doing what you were supposed to be doing? Or, how was that explained?

Travis LeFever:
No, well, it wasn’t explained, to be transparent. But I mark it down to vision, right? A small, family-owned business has a vision of what it is, wants to be, has been for nearly 50 years. And I have a vision for what I want to do with my life and what impact I can make in this world. And if they’re not the same, like, I’m not building Wienermobiles my whole life. That’s not it for me.

And the very definition of division is two visions. And I think that the further apart they are, the more tension there is in a relationship. And to be honest, it’s okay. Absolutely, they need to go be who they are, and I need to go be who I am. That’s what makes the world such a beautiful place. We’re all different, and we’re going to do different things. But then we came here, and so we incorporated the first week of March 2020. It took us about three months. We cashed in our life insurance. I designed my first website. It was awesome. And we turned the marketing machine on.

Loren Feldman:
When you say we—

Travis LeFever:
My wife and I, yeah. So Amanda, my co-founder, our current president and CFO, she’s the brains behind the operation, for sure.

Loren Feldman:
What had she been doing before this?

Travis LeFever:
Oh, we were still consulting and doing whatever we could to kind of make a living. We still did a little bit of work for one of our construction clients. We had four people working in a chicken plant in Georgia trying to make ends meet. So, she’s keeping all the books there, and keeping our kids afloat, and all the things that I wasn’t able to do.

Loren Feldman:
Travis, before you tell us about how you guys built the business, you’ve already said that you sold the construction business because you realized that wasn’t how you wanted to spend your time. You wanted to do something more meaningful that would have more of an impact. Did you feel that you were on that path during those years when you were teaching and then consulting leading up to the wienermobile company?

Travis LeFever:
That’s a great question. The teaching felt like it. I love to teach. I think I’m a teacher at heart. Whenever I was in high school, I would coach other teams. And I coached when I was in college. I coached high school wrestling and football. I was almost a math teacher—until they started talking about invisible numbers and imaginary numbers. I was like, “Oh, I’m not going to be a math teacher. I’m lost here.” And so I thought teaching was it.

But then I got into a college teacher, because I don’t have a teaching degree, so I can’t go and teach elementary or high school or anything like that, but I can be an adjunct professor. And so I did that for a while, and it just wasn’t it. And so it was like, on to the next thing, on to the next opportunity. And this? Honestly, we didn’t know if this was it. We thought it was, felt it was, felt put in place to do this work. I knew I was really good at this type of work, but I don’t think I realized how desperate our country was for this help, and what role we could play in it.

Loren Feldman:
Before you tell us about that, where did your business knowledge or business instincts come from? Because you’ve described the circumstances under which you grew up. There’s nothing in there that suggests you are going to necessarily be an entrepreneur and build a business. You did that with the construction business. Did you learn from your partner? Did you figure it out yourself? Why was that business successful?

Travis LeFever:
Oh, man, it’s been a litany of mentors, I’ll tell you. My mom is from a big farm family, but my dad was a city boy, and he was a barber first. And so he owned his own business. And my grandfather was a barber, so he owned his own business. And then my dad, he got carpal tunnel syndrome, and he opened a little computer store in the mall. And so he’s always looking for something to do.

Loren Feldman:
So you did have that entrepreneurial spirit built in.

Travis LeFever:
Yeah, definitely from my dad, definitely from my dad. We’d always talk about how our risk tolerance has turned way up, and our caution tolerance has turned way down. Like our knobs are turned full. Yeah, I get that from him, I think.

Loren Feldman:
So what accounted for the success of the construction business?

Travis LeFever:
Great question again. I haven’t thought about the answers to a lot of these questions, Loren, so you’re getting fresh thoughts here.

Loren Feldman:
I like it.

Travis LeFever:
I can’t say that it was me by much, because I had mentors all the way. So like I said, the guy that I bought half the business from was an incredible mentor, a teacher. We had values alignment. He took me under his wing, to be honest, and he was brilliant. And so a lot of the technical parts of running the business, I think he taught me the creativity that you had to have in pricing and operations. To not gloss over it, though, there were a lot of long nights that I’ve spent learning QuickBooks. And I’m a reader, so I’m constantly reading, and one of the authors that I found who really spoke to me and my style, I guess, was John Maxwell.

So you know, I’m learning about leadership, and as you know, leadership is a lever to helping others reach their full potential, and so I brought people around me. I was lucky in a lot of ways to have people around me who were high potential and somehow saw a path through our business to do better for themselves and their family. And so I put people in the right position, helped them grow, and if I have been successful at all, it’s only because of those people.

Loren Feldman:
All right, so now I want to hear how you started and built Mission Mobile. Obviously, your willingness to take a risk comes into play here. Tell me about cashing in your insurance policies. Did you see that as being a risk of a similar nature to taking out all those credit cards?

Travis LeFever:
So, I always thought—ever since the credit cards—that worst case, I could always get a job. I wasn’t going to starve, right? And bankruptcy? It only stays on your record for seven years, and you’re gonna be okay. And so for right or wrong, maybe that’s not the prudent thing to think, especially when you’ve got some kids. But, I mean, it was always kind of how I looked at it. Like, what’s the worst that could happen? But what I learned over time, and I think probably you know a little bit of this foundational stuff from Zig Ziglar, too, is: Imagine the worst that could happen. If you can live with that, you should do it.

And what I learned over time was: The worst thing I could imagine happening never happened. You know, I didn’t lose all the money. The clients didn’t fire me. I always managed to get another contract. I could negotiate, at some level, even when things weren’t going my direction. People wanted to support me. I had champions that I didn’t even know that I had come out and support me. I had an insurance agent that wrote our first surety bond when, probably, I had no business with a surety bond. I had a banker who gave me a lot of credit when I had no business with a lot of credit. I had tons of folks who wanted to help.

And I think that’s an overlooked asset in a lot of situations. I think a person may be listening to this, who goes, “I just don’t think I can,” well, you’re right, but you’re not alone. There’s people around you, even though you can’t see them yet. You haven’t made those contacts yet. You haven’t developed those relationships yet doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Loren Feldman:
Give me an example, if you would, Travis. Who did you reach out to? How did you find somebody who provided needed help?

Travis LeFever:
Oh my gosh. That’s almost a daily occurrence, at this point. So we read a book called The Great Game of Business by the legendary Jack Stack. I bought the rest of the books, as there’s three or four of them, and I liked that one so much. And then I found out there’s an organization that would help us with our operating system to run the Great Game of Business inside of our organization. We went to the webinar. We called up there, and they said, “Hey, we’ll give you a coach. His name is Rich Armstrong, and he used to be president of the Great Game of Business.” I was like, “Fantastic. We’ll do it.”

Loren Feldman:
They didn’t give you that coach, right? [Laughter]

Travis LeFever:
Well, we had to tell them, “We’d like the best you got,” and they gave us Rich Armstrong. So it was awesome.

Loren Feldman:
But you had to pay him.

Travis LeFever:
We did have to pay him, but like John Maxwell always says, “Who’s going to invest in you if you don’t invest first?” And so, to me, that’s a foregone conclusion. You have to invest in yourself. You’ve got to take a chance on yourself. Nobody else is going to believe in you until you believe in yourself.

So, you know, Rich introduced us to tons of other folks. And John’s introduced us to tons of other folks. Just because you don’t know people in your bubble, current social circle, that will help you, doesn’t mean that there’s no one out there that will help you. Rich, introduced me to you, Loren, right? Like, I didn’t know you. Rich has helped me. He didn’t have to help me. He’s not doing it for the money. He wants to help people.

Loren Feldman:
Rich is a good guy. Did you have some savings in addition to the insurance money and that you invested in this business? And what were the first steps?

Travis LeFever:
We did have a little, but not a lot. I mean, we quite literally put it kind of all on the line for this. We incorporated, like I said, the first week of March and got the ability to do work—technical ability—the bank accounts, all those things. And then, fortunately or unfortunately, the second week of March of 2020 was this little national event called the pandemic shutdown.

And again, this is the second time that I’ve done something that I wouldn’t recommend doing to others. It’s not a great time to start a business in the middle of a pandemic, but it worked out for us. I mean, we had a big pause there for four to six weeks. The world’s turned upside down. Really, nobody knows what’s going on. But it came back up right. The U.S. economy is a mammoth thing, and when it did right itself, our marketing machine was running. And we began to get calls asking if we could deliver mobile clinics and help people start the programs, because now they needed to get outside the four walls of their health center or their hospital and deliver care to the people.

And we started seeing demand. I mean, we’ve averaged between 75 and 100 inbound leads a week for the past four and a half years. And we’ve caught a lot of balls and ran with them, delivering equipment and services all over the country, even into Canada. That first year, we stood up a 50,000-square-foot manufacturing plant. We hired 55 people, delivered about 35 pieces of equipment.

Loren Feldman:
The one you did initially was a repurposed RV. Were you building these from scratch now?

Travis LeFever:
No, actually, so interesting story. We felt that this remanufacturing thing was a competitive advantage. We didn’t really have—being brand new—a supply chain. We had knowledge. We knew how to build from scratch—brand new fiberglass shells—but the supply chain’s a mess. And so we began to just look around for: Where can we find components and chassis? And it became kind of obvious, kind of fast, that, hey, that remanufacturing thing was very useful in a pandemic.

And so that was why we were able to deliver—and one of the reasons we were able to deliver—so fast. The majority of our market was in a year or 18 months before they could do anything delivery-wise. Their factories were full, and we were remanufacturing, and so we were able to deliver in 90 to 120 days, whereas other folks were taking two years. And it was wild to be kind of counter-positioned like that and experience so much success so early.

Loren Feldman:
What were you remanufacturing? What was the input?

Travis LeFever:
So we would take an RV chassis with 10,000 or 15,000 miles on it, and we would remove all the consumer materials quality materials from that chassis and fiberglass shell. And then we would just rebuild a new health clinic inside of that fiberglass. And the key to the whole thing is that what a lot of people didn’t understand is that steel and fiberglass, they don’t know or care how old they are. It’s really about functionality, and that’s really what we were trying to deliver to the world, was functionality. It didn’t need to be fancy to work. And that goes all the way back to kind of the original story, “Out of the sun, out of the rain, it’s got to run every day.”

And then the second year, we realized how important reliability was, and how we were providing a product that was uber-reliable. Rather than being customized where no one could work on it, anywhere in the country, except for that specialty vehicle manufacturer, we were producing a product that had 400 aftermarket suppliers and that any RV technician or RV dealer scattered all over the country and in Canada could work on. And so all of a sudden, we had a product that was twice, three times more reliable and easily repaired than anyone else in the industry. And so, that story began to take hold. We also developed a national service network through those folks, some strategic partnerships, and now we had a service footprint on a national basis.

The third year, we started hearing how staffing was a problem to deliver care to underserved folks in satellite clinics, and so we stood up a staffing model. And then we heard about planning—like no one really understood the framework of how to get one of these programs started in their community—and we began to develop program-planning capacity. And this year, we’re on the cusp, I think, of being awarded some supporting government contracts that are just going to revolutionize the whole space with EVs and some really cool diagnostic equipment that’s made for rural America, and it’s just going to change the game.

So, we’ve come a long way in five years. And one of the key points that I try to mention is traction. Not only are we working for health systems and hospitals and academic medical centers scattered all over the country, and even internationally—we’ve delivered to Alaska and Hawaii—but $100 million in revenue. And we’re turning out tremendous margins. Just yesterday, we delivered the largest gain share to our team, playing the Great Game of Business. We’re open-book management. We delivered the largest gain share in the company’s history, and we’re looking to beat that again in the fourth quarter.

And I don’t say that to impress you with how cool our operating systems are, how slick our people are, how strong their capacity or their heart, but to impress upon you the depth of desperation for healthcare in America. There is a gap, and there is a tremendous number of people trying to fill the gap, but they’re trying to fill it with digital products and new software and AI. And none of that increases convenience for the American patient, much less someone who has a physical disability, is an hourly worker, or a single mom, elderly, lives in a frontier community. And this method of delivering healthcare does all those things, and we’re excited to see where it takes us.

Loren Feldman:
And you hit $100 million in revenue in your fourth year?

Travis LeFever:
So that’s the total over four years. We went from six to 12 to 20 to 29. I think we’ll be 60 this year.

Loren Feldman:
Wow. And you say you did it with healthy margins. Margins as good as that company that fired you?

Travis LeFever:
Way better, way better, my friend. Way better. Yep. And not just that. The margins aren’t the point, right? We’re profit with purpose, and our mission, really—and some people might look sideways at it—is to build the world’s greatest place to work. We have a vision of serving 100 million Americans with mobile healthcare, delivering healthcare to every corner of our country. We have a vision for that and we’re going to do it. But our mission’s to build a place that’s sustainable, stable, safe, where people can grow and really reach their full personal and professional potential. Whatever’s in them, we want them to let it out here and to blossom.

Loren Feldman:
I think I’m hearing you say that you grew as quickly as you did, in part because there was such a demand for what you had to offer. It sounds like you did have competitors. There was an established market. Did you have to do a lot of marketing to get the word out?

Travis LeFever:
Well, let me be clear about two things. There’s market demand, and then there’s solution demand that I think maybe—and I mean, I’m probably going to get some purists arguing with me—but I don’t know if there’s demand for this thing we do or how we do it. Because the thing we do has been around for 100 years, like a doctor on horseback. There’s nothing new about what we do, but there is absolutely something new about who we are and why we’re doing it. And that, to me, is what people are starved for.

Products are table stakes. You have to produce a world-class product. You have to add value to either help businesses make money or save money to stay in business this long. You have to have competitive advantages that create durable and sustainable differential margin. You have to have a path to power in a significant market, but also, you do it with heart. And that’s where the second piece is.

We’re for-profit, but we operate like a nonprofit. We’re in the middle of our B Corp certification. And what that really means is that we leave money in the business for stakeholders. It’s not just shareholders. And stakeholders are our customers. And so we build reserves. We built reserves. We use it to provide below-market financing for folks who need it. We donate a lot of money, and we’re just here for a different reason than most folks are here for.

Loren Feldman:
So why are your margins so good. If that’s your philosophy, you’re more concerned about people and profits.

Travis LeFever:
Well, we add a tremendous amount of value, and we operate very efficiently and effectively, and we’re able to make those decisions to help the people who need help.

Loren Feldman:
What does one of your vehicles cost?

Travis LeFever:
That’s a great question. So price points depend on size and, obviously, what’s inside: anywhere from $200,000 to, top end, $500,000. That’s like with a ton of dental equipment. That’s very expensive. But you can imagine a small van that’s more for outreach and education on the lower end, but a large coach that’s going to be driving thousands of miles through the Pacific Northwest or out West, it’s going to be a little more expensive.

Loren Feldman:
How many employees do you have?

Travis LeFever:
We’re 75 full-time this week, and another 25 or 30 between contract and advisory consulting.

Loren Feldman:
And I’m guessing you’re attracting people who are very much caught up in your mission?

Travis LeFever:
Oh my gosh, you wouldn’t believe it. That’s the part I’m most proud of.

Loren Feldman:
How do you find them?

Travis LeFever:
They find me. Yeah, that’s the wildest thing. They hit LinkedIn. They email me. Like all my information is public. They text me. They go, “Hey, I see what you’re doing. Do you think that there’s any place for me?” Or, “If you ever need someone with this talent set or my talent set, please call me first.” And that, Loren, is the part I’m most proud of. It’s like, I can’t believe that the work that I chose to do and the industry we chose to serve—well, it’s really America, right? Like, it’s not me and I chose. These people want to help our most vulnerable neighbors, all of us. They want to fix some of the things that they see wrong in our country. They want to reweave some of the fabric that they see as threadbare in our communities. And they see this as a path, really, to fulfilling that type of life’s work. And they work hard at it, and we have a great time.

Loren Feldman:
Have you had an impact on the market? Are there others trying to do something similar to what you’re doing?

Travis LeFever:
Of course, of course. We’ve seen our competitors across the entire spectrum. So, we’re vertically integrated, and all that means is that we will provide a health system with any product or service through the whole value chain, up to and including turnkey providing community health care through satellite clinics. We’ll just come do that. If a county, city, or a reservation said, “Hey, we’ve got a neighborhood here that needs healthcare. We don’t know what to do with it,” We’ll come do it.

Loren Feldman:
You supply the doctors?

Travis LeFever:
Top to bottom, I’ll do it. And so, anywhere in there, of course, there’s other people who do pieces and parts of that. There’s providers, there’s staffing companies, there’s equipment maintenance companies, there’s equipment manufacturers. And we see, up and down that value chain, other people in those spaces coming right behind us. They’re fast followers. God bless them. They don’t want to be first, but they’re fast followers, and that’s a perfectly fine strategy. But we’re moving fast. They better get up early and pack a lunch, because we are innovating so fast with new products, new services, new bundles, new finance models, new payment methods, new flexibilities, new geographies, new partnerships.

Loren Feldman:
So where do you go from here? What’s your vision going forward?

Travis LeFever:
Every corner of the country.

Loren Feldman:
What would it take to get there? Do you need to raise more money? Would you need to build more factories? What does “every corner of the country” mean for you?

Travis LeFever:
That’s a great question. There’s 307 counties in America. Some of them have no people. Some of them have a tremendous amount of people. A national network of satellite clinics that are sharing infrastructure and data is not unreasonable. We’ve done things far more complex than that in our country, and so some of it is just a matter of time, I believe, and continued effort, continued discipline. We have to be ready when the opportunity comes, but it’s just a foregone conclusion that we’re going to see extraordinary results. We are going to change the face of healthcare in this country, and we’re going to do it knee-to-knee, belly-to-belly, treating people like people instead of profits. And it’s going to be completely different in 10 years. Mark my words.

Loren Feldman:
So when you think back now on the way you felt after your father passed away, and you decided that you weren’t spending your life the way you wanted to and that you weren’t having the impact that you wanted to—how do you think about that now?

Travis LeFever:
Wow, I hadn’t thought about that one. I think I’m on my way. This is the closest path that I’ve found, but the work’s not done. I want to be able to look back when I retire and put my grandkids on my knee and go to a company alumni sort of event and look back and say we did it. And I can’t say that yet, so still work to do.

Loren Feldman:
Well, Travis, thank you so much for taking the time today.