About this episode
Chaliss Pulliam and Angela Jerome of Protector Transport Services in Lanham, Maryland took the company from $50,000 in revenue over the back half of 2023 to $275,000 year to date, from a business formed on June 12, 2023. Their wedge was hospital discharges: once a doctor signs the papers the insurer stops paying, so a hospital sitting on a two or three day ambulance backlog will pay a few hundred dollars a trip instead. The fleet went from three vehicles to eight, and bigger Rams replaced Caravans because hospitals reject the small vans.
Key takeaways
- Protector spent three to four months on Route Genie without learning it, texting every driver their next day schedule nightly, and Jerome says some support calls were never returned at all.
- Migrating patient records into Bambi took Jerome under two days around her other duties, and the company was booking every trip in it full time inside two weeks.
- Trip entry and assignment now runs roughly two to five minutes against 30 to 40 minutes before, when building one trip meant three separate tabs and a full delete to reassign it.
- New drivers ride about two weeks with the driver supervisor and top drivers before the team decides fit, and Pulliam says Protector pays above what other local companies pay drivers.
- Protector covers all of Maryland, DC, and parts of Virginia while nearby competitors cap service at a 10 to 25 mile radius or run a single van that cannot absorb hospital volume.
Chapters
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:55 Starting the NEMT business
- 5:40 Filling the demand for NEMT
- 7:41 Growth plans for the next year
- 8:18 Trying a dispatch/routing software
- 12:40 Easy switch to Bambi
- 21:22 Challenges in scaling the business
- 28:24 Bambi's superiority over legacy software
- 38:56 RUN BAMBI RUN!!
