DISTRIBUTION
Find Your Focus How Supreme Medical is committed to servicing customers in the home care market. Colton Mason’s official job title with Supreme Medical is senior vice president. But he prefers to use another term
when describing his day-to-day responsibilities – sales leader. “‘Don’t worry about the horse, load the wagon.’ That’s a quote I grew up hearing constantly from my hero – my father, Tony Mason,” he said. “My job is to keep loading the wagon every day. Working with our customers, our manufacturer reps, and our industry associations to keep Supreme Medical in front of everyone in the market for our products and services.”
As an independent distributor and IMCO member, Supreme Medical approaches the market in several unique ways. First, over 90% of their business is shipped to a front porch. Supreme’s business model is homed in on home care. “The home is going to be the care setting of the future,” Mason said. “We decided a long time ago that we’d rather carve out a key focus and do one thing extremely well. We’re laser-focused on serving the home care market.” In an in-depth interview with Repertoire Magazine, Mason shares how independent distributors can stand out in the marketplace, why home care will be front and center in the healthcare continuum of care, and why participating in advocacy efforts at the state and national level is so important. Repertoire: Can you talk a little bit about your home care centric business model?
Mason: We do things much differently than a physician, nursing home or hospital distributor. Case in point – a huge percentage of our business is low unit of measure fulfillment where we’re shipping medical supplies to a patient’s home on behalf of a provider that’s billing their insurance. 8
Colton Mason
For example, let’s take one of our top product categories, urologicals. Our best-selling catheter brand comes packaged from the manufacturer in cases of 300. The problem our customers face is that every patient requires a different quantity
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of catheters and ancillary items depending on their medical needs and insurance coverage. As you can imagine, the normal distribution model of shipping boxes or cases just doesn’t work when you get down to the individual patient level. That’s