While Asheville-based Aeroflow Health hit the 1,000- employee milestone in March, it wasn’t an overnight success by any means, says CEO Casey Hite. It took years and a personal crisis for the company to start growing.
In 2014, the company founder and Hite’s brother, Don, died at age 44. The tragedy led Aeroflow to discover that doing less, but doing things better, could lead to its ambition of becoming the “Amazon of healthcare devices,” says Casey Hite.
The Hite brothers ended up in Asheville because Don Hite remembered the good times as kids when their parents would take them to the Wolf Laurel ski resort in nearby Mars Hill.
Don Hite thought Asheville would be a good place to raise a family. He founded the business in 2001, providing home oxygen supplies, but things didn’t start well.
“He was about a year into the business and was struggling to drive sales. I was working for a company in St. Louis selling heavy industrial equipment, but I didn’t like my job, so I came in to help drive sales,” says Casey Hite. “Neither of us knew anything about healthcare, and I think that’s one of the keys to our success.”
In the early days, Aeroflow tried to be one-size-fits-all, says Hite. In addition to oxygen supplies, the company provided wheelchairs, walkers and a wide assortment of other devices.
“When everything was thrown together, you couldn’t tell which ones were making money, and which ones weren’t,” he says.
In 2009, the company employed about 50 workers. Five years later, Don Hite suffered a fatal heart attack while on vacation with his family.
“I’m sure you’ve heard that most companies that have really sustained the test of time are ones that have gone through a crisis. And I would say that that period was our crisis,” says Hite.
Until then, Hite thought running a company meant telling people what to do and then micromanaging the details. His brother’s death destroyed him emotionally. He called company leaders together and told them he could no longer manage in the same manner.
“Several months later, I realized the company was running far better. And this whole time, you know, we had been holding the company back because we weren’t empowering our people.”
Aeroflow narrowed its focus. Gone are the wheelchairs, walkers and oxygen tanks. Instead, the business concentrates on items related to moms and new babies, sleep apnea, diabetes and urology. It will soon add nutrition. Growth took off, and Aeroflow has repeatedly appeared on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies over the
past decade.
None of Aeroflow’s leadership team has a healthcare background, says Hite. Not having the baggage of doing it the routine way allowed the company to apply best practices from other industries, from automation to stacking things in an assembly line structure. He also credits technology that lets customers know in seconds whether their insurance covers a product or service.
“Life is complicated enough for our patients,” says Chief Operating Officer Lauren Bennett, “and we want to take the complication out. You need that monitor, you need those test strips, and we’re going to do all that work in the background, and the system we have allows us to do that almost instantaneously.”
The company keeps track of prescriptions from doctors and offers services such as online nutrition or lactation counseling, all covered by insurance. “We have thousands of new moms attending our lactation courses online,” says Hite.
“We’ve narrowed our focus, but we’re trying to go deeper in each one of those segments,” says Ryan Bullock, chief strategy officer.
The company had $600 million in revenue last year and served more than 1 million customers in 2023. Its 1,100 employees work across about 35 states, with about half of the staff based in Buncombe County. It opened a 51,000-square-foot distribution center in nearby Arden in March, where 65 workers will fill an estimated 3 million orders this year.
Rather than Aeroflow reps calling on doctor’s offices, the company drives customer growth by search engine optimization from patients looking at options to treat their conditions. The company’s growth also leads to increasing word-of-mouth referrals. Customers like choosing their brand of device rather than taking whatever is offered through a doctor’s visit, says Hite.
“We have a group of people here who love solving problems,” says Hite. “What we focus on is really pretty simple.” ■