Max-Wellness Gives Customers What They Need

As business models go, the one Max-Wellness follows might be considered a bit unorthodox.

Michael Feuer, founder of the Cleveland, Ohio-based HME company suggests choosing his approach, “Because that’s were the money is.”

Feuer, also co-founder of OfficeMax, the big-box office supplies chain that grew to 1,100 stores before he sold it for $1.5 billion 10 years ago, is following the money—and the public’s need for the products he sells. He plunged into the HME pool three years ago, opening four 5,000-square-foot Max-Wellness stores in Ohio and Florida.

From their inception, they have defied the standard HME model. They do not accept Medicare, Medicaid or insurance, though employees do help customers fill out the paperwork to get reimbursed. There are no hospital beds, CPAP machines or oxygen concentrators. Every product—and there are more than 10,000 available, ranging from vitamins to walkers and wheelchairs—is out on display and accessible. The employees, called “Wellness Advocates,” are upbeat and knowledgeable. And forget the common drab gray and green decor. Max-Wellness stores are ablaze with orange walls.

The stores are thriving, with a customer return rate of 80 percent, Feuer says. But Obamacare is looming and the times are going to change, and Feuer is determined Max-Wellness will get there first. “In 
effect, Max-Wellness will be anywhere 
the money is,” Feuer says.

Developing Changes

Businesspeople who are fixed on how they are going to do something often stay stuck. Feuer finds that you have to just keep changing.

Max-Wellness started off with brick-and-mortar stores that are large and expensive to build, and operate a dozen hours or more every day. At the time, these seemed the best answer to Feuer’s leading question, “How do we provide effective answers to healthy living to give [customers] a way to enhance their lives, treat health issues and prevent health problems?”

Change in the market was leaning toward larger retail developments. Feuer and Max-Wellness were seeking other ways to draw in customers, whether through a website or some other avenue. “You figure out how to bring them under one dome to serve [customers] better,” Feuer says. “To be an effective marketer, you have to give the customer what they want when they want it at a price they want to pay.”

To further establish itself and prepare for future changes, Feuer posed the question: “Who are the folks who need these products and where are they? That’s where we are going.”

The answer seems to have served them well. Within the last two years, Max-Wellness has opened two Mini-Max stores, one in the lobby of Willoughby Lake Health West Medical Center in Willoughby, Ohio, and the most recent in Moorings Park, an upscale retirement community in Naples, Fla. The stores are between 600 and 800 square feet, and both operate shorter hours selling products geared specifically to its clientele. “It’s a very profitable model because you do all your business in a short period of time,” Feuer says.

The model allows Max-Wellness to spread its wings across the nation. “We’re now looking at college campuses, student centers, hospitals,” he says. “We also have Wellness-in-a-Box. It’s an automated retail dispensing device that is unmanned and located in airports.”

Personal care items, vitamins and other health products are available from the box, which looks like an upscale vending machine. Users can even take their blood pressure, check their weight and assess their body fat index for free.

“We are changing into a four-legged stool,” Feuer explains. “We have the traditional model, the hospital model, the retirement community and Wellness-in-a-Box.” It might seem like different companies to some, but it is all under the same umbrella. “All we are doing is 
rearranging the venues to fit the needs of the customer,” he says. “It’s part of the natural evolution. It never all works. You have to adapt—the good [businesses] keep changing, and the bad ones go out of business.”

One Size Does Not Fit All

Feuer is never short of ideas, which is another reason things are always changing at Max-Wellness. Lately, he has been thinking about how products are delivered to the customer.

“We are not locked into the delivery mechanism,” he says. “We have to get to where the customers are, where they want to be, where they want to shop and do it for them. Our job is to figure out how to do it effectively.”

“One of the big things in our future is direct to customer, Max-Wellness@home,” Feuer continues. “Think about where the customer is and think about how to reach them.”

He likes Amazon’s business model. The dot-com giant doesn’t own much inventory and operates on the OPM 
principle—Other People’s Money, Feuer says. It is basically a conduit to the customer, yet it stands behind what it sells.

He’s adopted that model for some of his company’s products. Lift chairs, for example—Max-Wellness doesn’t buy any of them, but it partners with another company to provide the chairs on the floor and deliver them to the customers.

With the changes on the horizon from Obamacare, Feuer believes this model might be key to broadening his company’s scope. “Medicare and Medicaid is such a radical wild card. We have not accepted Medicare, but we are looking at different ways to tap into some of the possible Medicare opportunities,” he says. That could mean partnering with a rehab 
center or a hospital to provide the products its clients need.

To make all this work, Feuer keeps a keen eye on packaging. “You have to package yourself and you need to add drama,” says Feuer. What is packaging? “Everything is packaging in my opinion,” he says. “Packaging is how you present yourself, how you work with customers. It is how to deliver to people what they want before they know they want it and make them want to come back.” First, you thoroughly train your employees. Feuer’s Wellness Advocates receive constant training, starting with the Wellness Academy, which offers online classes. They receive a weekly Max Gram that provides information on new products, company ventures and other topics.

Wellness Advocates have iPads so they can access help when they cannot answer a question. Secondly, make sure your store is a happy place to be—not always easy to do when your customers need things they don’t want to need.

Feuer has a way around that. “What we are selling is hope,” he says. “Take 
mobility. I call [mobility products] freedom machines. The customers do not think of them like that. But a rollator, a cane, they are really freedom devices.”

When customers leave a Max-Wellness store, Feuer wants them to feel better than when they came in—more encouraged, more upbeat about their lives and the possibilities ahead.

Actually, that has always been his 
focus: possibilities. That’s what got him into HME in the first place. Despite all its challenges and all of the doom-and-gloom predictions, he saw a market ripe with possibilities. “We have just scratched the surface,” he says.