Is there a secret ingredient to growing your NEMT business? Maybe. But there are plenty of not-so-secret ingredients: reliable people, good software, conscientious vehicle maintenance, and carefully managed expansion are a few. In today’s blog, David Cason, CEO of Shuttle Ruidoso in New Mexico, discusses one that’s just as important, though not often discussed: networking—the face-to-face, on-the-phone, knocking-on-doors kind of networking that builds critical relationships… and grows transportation companies, like Shuttle Ruidoso. (He also shares a few other tips.)

Relationships are important because the path to growth is almost never a straight line. Just ask David. When his mother founded Shuttle Ruidoso in 1999, things were . . . different. For one thing, their NEMT wasn’t an NEMT.

“They were in business for seven or eight years before they started doing NEMT. It kind of just fell into their lap because the one company that was here doing it went out of business.” They did “everything from passenger to tours to taking people up and down the mountains for skiing and what have you.” Once they got into NEMT, “we kind of dropped everything else.”

And from there, “it was just trial and error and putting ourselves out there,” he says. “When we started, you had to drum up your own business, basically.” But then the state went to the broker model “so that the state didn’t have to manage transportation any longer,” David says. “Then, it was very important to me from the get-go, because I’m a relationship guy, to make those annual pilgrimages to their home offices, meet people face to face that we speak to daily on the phones, establish those personal relationships.”



It’s all about relationships
“I’ve built my business really by being very relationship oriented, David says. “Of course, it helps being from a small town. I do everything with a handshake and everybody knows me by name. Same goes with a lot of our contracts, even with our brokers and our independent contracts with local area hospitals that are in our service area.”

Including other NEMT providers in your area
“One of the things that I’ve found very beneficial over the course of this past year and a half, since COVID,” David says, “is professional networking within our industry. Here in New Mexico, we recently created a coalition of all the NEMT providers in the state that provide services. This has become very beneficial because we are all independently owned and operate in our own little individual markets, so our voices aren’t heard as a whole. We created a louder, more unified voice on issues that we have in the network, and petitions that we want to make to the state and to our governmental agencies.”

The relationships built from the coalition have other benefits. “The providers in our state now have a forum to share information, so we’ve been able to share with each other different contracts that we have,” he says. “One of our providers in Deming just told me about a worker’s comp contract that we’re pursuing now, that she's been working with for several years. So, had we not been able to network and speak to each other, we wouldn't necessarily have had the opportunity to share some of those contracts.”

Work your relationships with your broker and your PRM
“Our relationship with Modivcare is fantastic,” David says. “One of the great things about the broker model is we don’t spend money on marketing. They give us our assignments. They’re giving us our business for free; before the broker model, we were pounding the pavement and sending postcards.”

Before the state created the broker model, “it was really just creating that relationship with our routers because at the time, we were only operating 10, 15 vehicles,” David recalls. “I was in expansion mode, so I was hitting the concrete, sort of, over the phone, staying on the phone with other brokers, letting them know I’ve got open resources, until they got used to the resources that I had in the new areas.”

He notes that, now, “Modivcare, especially, has more robust systems in place that we can put parameters in their system. But we still rely on the human touch and the human relationship with our routers.

Still holds true: provide good service, become the vendor of choice
“When we expanded up into northern New Mexico, there was another facility up there that we started off just given transportation,” he says, “but they liked our service. And so we were able to go meet them face to face, build that relationship and then pretty much earned their sole business. So when they were scheduling rides, either through Modivcare or other brokers, they would specifically request us.”

Word of mouth: it’s the “other” networking. “Oh, absolutely. Several hospitals in three different cities that we service have really kind of come on board just through word of mouth,” he says. “We also got a contract not too long ago with the court system here in New Mexico. It’s outside of what we do through Modivcare, but it’s making sure that people who don’t have transportation get to their court-mandated appointments. And then once we did that, each of the different counties and district attorneys—because we were already in the state system—started recommending us across the entire state.”

Diversify outside of NEMT
Based on where you are and the needs of your community, it may make sense to include additional lines of business to help with volume and increase revenue. “We’re 99.5% NEMT,” David says. “But we also do airport service to our three closest airports, and private charters for groups because we’re in a tourist town,” and he’s considered a number of other businesses. “We’ve just stayed focused on medical. New Mexico’s so dispersed, a large state, our average trip is about a hundred miles one way.”

He says, “Outside of our little regional hospital, there’s only one EMT paramedic in our whole county. And so I’ve been in talks to provide ambulette service: basically a level of service between NEMT and an ambulance. With our little regional hospital, if it’s anything more severe than a broken bone, they’re going to transfer you to Albuquerque anyway, which is a couple hundred miles away.”

Last thoughts
How would David summarize the key to his company’s steady growth? “If I could figure out what a cornerstone of my success was,” David says, “I would say it has a lot to do with being so relationship oriented, seeing someone face to face, shaking their hand, and building that relationship.”