Meet One of the Owners - Kevin Zabel

As I approach the latter stages of my thirty-eight-year career in radiology I’ve been asked to share a highlight and two came to my mind immediately. First would be the transition from the analog film days to the digital equipment in use today. I started my career with Picker International in 1985 as a film processor service technician. Early on in my career we heard rumors of this new technology that would put us out of work someday. One evening I was having dinner with several of my fellow technicians after a day of training on film processor quality control when the subject came up. Most of us were quite young and concerned about our futures. The older, grey haired instructor sitting at the table assured us that we would all be able to retire working on film processors. Well for me he missed it by 10 or 12 years.

2007 seemed to be the year that we saw it here in Iowa. Every hospital that was still on film decided to buy a CR system that year. I’m convinced that if digital mammography would have been viable then, Z&Z Medical would not have survived the rapid change. As it turned out every one of our customers that was performing mammography had to keep one film processor on site and as you may remember mammography film processors were very high maintenance units. This bought us just enough time to make some major changes to our business and allow Z&Z Medical to remain a viable entity in the radiology world. So many aspects of our business were tied to film beyond just the service of equipment. Film and chemical sales became just a fraction of what we used to do. Silver recovery service, gone, the sale of reclaimed silver, gone, illuminator, film bin and safelight sales, gone, filing and mailing supply sales, gone and scrap film sales would be gone in few short years. What were we to do now?

That brings me to my second highlight. When Craig and I started Z&Z Medical in 2000 we did not deny the fact that if we didn’t address the coming digital revolution, we’d soon be riding a dying horse. I’ve seen a lot of our competitors that didn’t heed the warning and are now nowhere to be found in our industry. We asked ourselves who in our industry would be the last customers using analog equipment and how could we make them customers of Z&Z Medical? We concluded that it would be chiropractors and veterinarians, but the amount of film and chemical they would use in a year an average hospital would use in a couple of days. It would really change the scale of our operation and we couldn’t justify the cost of sending a salesman out to knock on their doors. Our answer was an ecommerce site on the internet that would push our boundaries well outside of the state of Iowa where we’d worked in the past.

We had dabbled over the years selling x-ray accessories to our customers so we had all the connections we needed make that part of this site as well. We also made a pretty bold move at the time and put our prices right on the site so anyone with a credit card could make a purchase. It took us about a year to get the site ready and I’ll never forget our first order was from a customer in Missouri that purchased two film bins from us. I think those may be the only film bins we’ve ever sold on the site.

That was in 2005 and at that time there wasn’t a hospital in America that would think of buying radiology accessories on an ecommerce site. We managed to plug along selling analog supplies to the chiropractors and vets and some medical clinics. Many of our local hospitals in Iowa would use our site as a catalog and then send us a purchase order. Sales from the site continued to grow year after year and eventually the hospitals did come around. We always felt that it was as the old purchasing agents at the hospitals retired off and the new staff coming in embraced the change. We often joke about the new purchasing staff asking the older staff “What do you mean I have to use a catalog or wait for a sales man to show up? I’ve got everything I need right here in this computer.” Today about 80% of our annual revenue comes either from our ecommerce site, or from customers outside of Iowa that found us through our site.

That’s a lot of change in thirty-eight years, going from those old mechanical monsters that reeked of developer and fixer to a DR panel with lightning quick results. There were also the hours spent printing purchase orders to fax to our vendors, to now having an ecommerce site that can work 24/7 for us. When I started with Picker in 1985 I thought I’d do this for ten years and then look to change to something else. I guess thirty-eight years later I never made that change, but the job actually made a huge change around me.