For therapy biz, the first step in expansion: Research

COURTESY OF THE RECOVERY PROJECT

Polly Swingle helped Charles Parkhill come back from a spinal cord injury. Today, they're in business together as The Recovery Project and facing the challenge of how to expand into new markets.

The Recovery Project LLC was born out of adversity. Its founders met when one of them, Charles Parkhill, injured his spinal cord when a wave hit him just the wrong way off a beach in Mexico in 1998, leaving him unable to move from the neck down.

He made progress working with a Detroit Medical Center physical therapist, Polly Swingle, and in 2003 the two formed the business to help others with traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries.

In 2005, Parkhill took his first unassisted steps since the accident -- he now uses a wheelchair and can walk short distances. By 2012, the company had reached $2.3 million in revenue.

Problem: After some years in business, The Recovery Project faced more adversity, albeit of a more routine variety and one that all second-stage businesses face: the need to enter new markets to keep the enterprise growing. Parkhill and Swingle saw their business missing out on a big market in the elderly population.

"One obvious thing we recognized is the elderly population in the nation is growing," Swingle said. "What programs can we offer? What kind of revenue can we get from this?"

But their business, targeted at neurological problems as it was, couldn't just waltz into a new demographic and begin treatment on a new set of ailments. It lacked the connections or resources. The biggest hurdles would be developing and then marketing a new program.

Solution: Parkhill and Swingle did market research and identified treatment areas of need among the elderly -- such as Parkinson's disease and fall prevention -- and began building physical therapy programs around them.

For marketing, they targeted the areas surrounding the company's two locations -- Livonia and Macomb Township -- because their research suggested that elderly patients don't or can't drive far for physical therapy.

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For therapy biz, the first step in expansion: Research