Call the Nurse

REVIEW SUMMARY
Company. National Education Video
Industry. Nursing education
Key. Success comes from seizing opportunities.

Businesses are often born out of necessity, but their subsequent success frequently depends on the founding entrepreneurs seizing opportunities for growth.

Consider Ted Wolfendale, who moved from Pittsburgh to Naples in 1972 with his parents when he was 16 years old to help care for his father who was dying of bone cancer.

Wolfendale and his mother, Lynette Wolfendale, built a nurse-on-call business out of necessity because none was available then. But they seized the opportunity to provide educational materials to nurses when the federal government mandated continuing education for the nursing profession. Today, their materials are widely used in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.

In the 1970s in Naples, Ted and his mother were the sole caregivers because there weren't any home-health nurses available in those days. So Lynette and the young Ted started Dial-a-Nurse in 1978, the first home-health agency in Naples.

Neither had formal nursing experience; Lynette was a stay-at-home mom and Ted earned a law degree from Stetson University. Today, Dial-a-Nurse has 110 nurse employees in Naples and 30 independent contractor nurses in Fort Myers. They charge $21 to $47 an hour depending on the level of care, and most customers pay cash.

But in 1989, the federal government mandated nurses complete continuing-education courses. So the mother-and-son team produced videos narrated by leading nursing experts and sold them to hospitals and large health-care organizations.

Since then, their company, Naples-based National Education Video (better known by initials Nevco), has produced 872 video programs. About 30% of their business comes from overseas, and they've expanded their offerings to lay people with DVDs currently being test-marketed in Walmarts. They also recently started offering digital download versions of some programs so home-health aides can earn continuing-education credits using their computers at home.

Ted Wolfendale, 48, is particularly excited about a charitable endeavor that could bring Nevco's videos to poor areas of the globe such as rural India, where nurse training is nonexistent. He's exploring starting a nonprofit organization that could provide the videos for steep discounts or low-cost licensing agreements.

Wolfendale says both the Dial-a-Nurse and Nevco businesses are profitable, but declines to cite sales data or other financial information. He acknowledges that Nevco sells “tens of thousands” of videos a year and its flagship program costs $325. While the nursing business has slowed, the video-training business has been unaffected by the economic downturn in the U.S., though Wolfendale acknowledges that international diversification has helped, too. “It's a growing business because even in a recession you need education,” he says.

Videos for nurses
By 1989, the Wolfendales were operating their successful nurse agency in Naples and Fort Myers. That year, the federal government mandated that nurses should continuously seek education to maintain their licenses.

Hospitals have always been busy places, and hiring instructors and gathering nurses at a designated time would be an expensive and logistical challenge. So the Wolfendales approached Naples Community Hospital with an idea: They could produce a video and provide a test of the material so a facilitator could arrange the education session any time of day or night.

Nevco, the company they established to create videos, filmed nursing professors from the University of Minnesota to whom they paid a fee. They hired a television anchor from one of the local TV stations to narrate parts of the video, used some graphics and added generic footage of patients. They created a written test to make sure nurses understood the material and got it approved by a government-sanctioned nurse-accreditation board. “We were very frugal about the way we did it,” says Wolfendale, whose mother is now retired but still involved in the business.

Currently, Nevco's customers are facilities with large nursing staffs, such as hospitals, nursing homes and home-health agencies. Videos and materials cost $325 and topics range from Alzheimer's disease to fall prevention and infection control. Usually, a facilitator designated by the hospital or nursing home administers the test, which is graded by Nevco. In all, the company has produced 872 videos. Wolfendale says the company has “thousands” of customers, declining to be more specific.

Wolfendale says Nevco stays ahead of the competition and video pirates by constantly updating its programs and creating new ones. “The better way to protect copyright is constant change,” he says.

What's more, competitive barriers are steeper today than they were when the Wolfendales got into the education-video business. In 1996, the federal government repealed the national continuing-education requirements and relegated that duty to the individual states. So today, continuing-education videos have to be approved by each state nursing-accreditation board (a handful of states, like Tennessee, have no continuing-education requirements).

While DVDs continue to be the leading format for Nevco's products, Wolfendale recently started providing streaming online videos for Florida home-health aides who prefer to obtain their continuing-education credits using their home computers. About a dozen such courses are offered online at specific times and the program costs $19.95 per person. “We're talking about making an app,” Wolfendale adds.

Nevco also has developed a series of videos for lay people on topics ranging from surviving a heart attack to coping with osteoporosis and yoga for muscular dystrophy. “We're being beta-tested in Walmarts,” Wolfendale says. Nevco charges about half of what it does for the nurse-accredited videos. “The margins are thinner, but the volumes are much higher,” he says. “There's a demand there.”

International diversification
Wolfendale has made a big push overseas to other anglophone countries, and 30% of Nevco's sales now come from about 20 countries. “That helps in rougher times,” he says.

Wolfendale says his key to successful overseas expansion was to take advantage of the U.S. Department of Commerce's “gold key” program. The U.S. government will conduct background checks on prospective customers and provide low-cost insurance in case the customer fails to pay, paving the way through all kinds of potential export landmines. “You can wave that surfboard straight through the bureaucracy,” Wolfendale says.

The U.S. government can also arrange face-to-face or video-conferencing meetings with prospective and existing customers at embassies around the world. This “gold key” program is valuable because it establishes trust between the exporter and the importer. The U.S. Department of Commerce will even provide a letter of recommendation on its letterhead, a seal of approval that immediately provides credibility.

In addition, Wolfendale says his success using the U.S. Department of Commerce program has helped him establish Nevco as a leading expert in the field of nursing education. For example, Nevco recently was selected by the government to be a U.S. representative to a recent European health care summit.

As part of Nevco's broader mission to improve quality of life, Wolfendale says he's exploring setting up a nonprofit that would license or buy Nevco videos at a discount and provide them to poor areas of the globe. No outside funding would be needed initially. “We could start it with $10,000,” he says.