Herb Farnsworth has crawled inside lots of ceilings—and it’s never nice.
“Oh, it’s horribly dirty,” said the 62-year-old co-founder of HEPACART, which manufactures dust-containment carts and other infection-control products that crews use when working above the ceiling tiles in hospitals.
Removing a ceiling tile for maintenance work is a dusty job wherever it’s done. But dust is the enemy in a hospital, where it can pose a serious threat of infection to patients whose immune systems may already be compromised. So the more swiftly and safely the task is completed, the better.
“At HEPACART, we protect patients and productivity,” Farnsworth said.
Founded in 2006, HEPACART—HEPA stands for “High Efficiency Particulate Accumulator”—is located in a 12,700-square-foot warehouse in Merriam. There employees assemble several varieties of the company’s namesake product, a hard-bodied aluminum cart on wheels that connects to the ceiling and can hold up to two workers. Dislodged dust, dirt and debris travel through an air-filtration system in each cart that collects up to 99.7 percent of objects larger than .03 microns. How small is that?
“It’s one-third the size of a smoke particle,” Farnsworth said. “It’s pretty tiny stuff, and invisible to the naked eye.”
The next best way to remove ceiling tiles is with a less durable tent, but that would let potentially contaminated material escape into hospital hallways and rooms. And it would take a greater amount of time.
“This cart gets in and out of a ceiling in three minutes,” Farnsworth said. “A tent gets you in and out of a ceiling in 15 to 20 minutes.”
That security and efficiency has gotten HEPACART into more than 1,000 hospitals, including Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Such clientele has helped HEPACART to grow its revenues by more than 50 percent for several years in a row. And with 2,600 hospitals with more than 100 beds in operation in the United States, there are more customers where those came from.
“It’s been an interesting niche business that’s been very, very good,” Farnsworth said.
Top of the Line
HEPACART grew out of Farnsworth’s first business, TED Systems in Shawnee, which in 1999 began designing and installing security, sound and fire alarm systems.
In 2003, TED Systems took on a big project at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City to test 4,000 fire alarm devices, about 450 of which were in the ceiling. Hospital officials also wanted as much as possible to protect patients from ceiling-tile dust, which Farnsworth was more than familiar with after years of entering ceilings to wire security equipment.
“So our lead engineer, Jeff Pirner, and I decided to build our first HEPACART in order to do that project,” Farnsworth said. “We didn’t necessarily invent a new piece of machinery. We invented something that was a whole lot more productive and a lot better. People were building their own to do jobs, but nobody was selling it, nobody was marketing it.”
Farnsworth saw a clear opportunity to mass-produce state-of-the-art dust-containment carts to help maintenance workers remove ceiling tiles in hospitals. He was further encouraged by the growing trend among hospitals to adopt improved standards in preventing the spread of germs carried by airborne dust particles.
Yet something else was spurring Farnsworth’s vision. He wanted to do more than provide a technical service to customers, as he was successfully doing with TED Systems and had previously done in similar capacities as an employee at Simplex and Honeywell. He wanted to actually make something.
“More wealth was created in this country over the years by manufacturing than anything else, until Google and Apple and others came along,” Farnsworth said. “Manufacturing is what turns raw material into value and wealth.”
But even as Farnsworth began to see other companies coming on line with their own dust-containment machines, he bided his time in launching HEPACART as its own company.
“You can’t be too early, and you can’t be too late,” he said. “Too early costs you a lot of money. Too late costs you market position, and that costs you a lot of money. So we decided that 2006 was about the right time.”
Another key decision was to make HEPACART the premium product of its kind on the market, the one with the most value, even if it meant a higher price tag. The company’s average transaction for a cart is $8,000 to $10,000.
“I wanted to be the top of the line,” Farnsworth said. “I didn’t want to be in the middle or the bottom.”
Father and Son
In 2011, Farnsworth’s son Mark joined HEPACART as director of sales and marketing, following a 15-year career in the media industry. The working relationship between father and son developed from casual conversations.
“We had talked one Thanksgiving, and I said, ‘I’m ready to do something different,’” Mark Farnsworth said.
“At one point, I talked to him and said, ‘Hey, I’m doing some marketing and stuff,’” Herb Farnsworth said. “And I told him about some things and he said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea.’ And I’d say something else, and he’d go, ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’”
The two men came to realize that they could form a complementary team by combining a father’s old-school mechanical savvy and a son’s modern marketing know-how.
“It helped that he was 38 years old before he came here,” Herb Farnsworth joked. “Because we had a lot of time to get over the fact that he wrecked the car when he was 16.”
The younger Farnsworth saw untapped potential in the company.
“I knew that HEPACART was a great product,” Mark Farnsworth said. “But I also knew that we had not leveraged the brand like we could. And, quite frankly, I knew that with a little work and a little marketing expertise that we could take it to a new level.”
The time was right, Herb Farnsworth recalled. “We were at a critical point. We were either going to be a market leader and be successful, or we were going to kind of dribble along. And you can’t dribble along very long in a market position. You’ve either got to jump or not.”
One of the first improvements made was to the HEPACART website.
“The prior website looked like it was a hobby,” Mark Farnsworth said. “The website now reflects the legitimate manufacturer and operation we have become. We had all kinds of marketing information, but we got it all coordinated to where it all looks the same and it all feels the same and everything represents the HEPACART brand.”
‘We Have an Obligation’
Today there are more than 50 custom options available on different HEPACART models that have come from customers making suggestions about how they could better use the product.
“Our biggest advantage is that we listen to what customers have told us,” Mark Farnsworth said. “And we’re constantly evolving and adapting the cart to try and make their job easier and keep patients safe. I give our director of marketing, Brad Uecker, and Jeff Pirner a lot of credit for our ability to move quickly.”
HEPACART’s options include taller, shorter, wider or narrower carts to accommodate different-size hospital hallways. Windows can also be installed in the doors of carts, so a worker inside a cart can see outside before opening the door. There is also a multiple-tile adapter that is used to open two or three ceiling tiles at once, which is important if workers have to tackle massive duct work or deal with sprinkler pipes.
HEPACART provides live online video training to cart operators, 70 percent of whom are hospital contractors and 30 percent hospital employees.
“It’s not a complex machine,” said HEPACART builder and video trainer Rick Singers. “It’s the steps of operation that are critical to keeping everything (dirty) inside the cart. So training with people that are going to be on the inside is the important part.”
“The art is really the proper use,” Herb Farnsworth said. “We were on a conference call with a consultant one day, and he was like, ‘Look, there’s an art of doing things right.’ And we embraced it and said, ‘That allows us to be different from everyone else.’”
The toughest part in teaching the art of the HEPACART can be convincing workers to use it in the first place.
“It’s getting them to buy into the necessity of the cart,” Singers said. “The mindset is: ‘Look, buddy, I just want to throw my ladder up in the ceiling and pull cable, you know what I’m talking about?’ And then you say, ‘OK, but if you pull down something that’s infectious, and that’s your wife or your mom in the room right over there, then where do we go with that?’ And they say, ‘Oh, I see what you’re talking about now.’”
Even some hospital personnel have trouble appreciating that an unprotected open ceiling tile is a problem, Mark Farnsworth said.
In a way, the sales process is as much about education as anything.
“We have an obligation, more than anything else, to educate people,” Herb Farnsworth said. “They’re not doing wrong because they really want to. In most cases, they just don’t know any better. But they’re all headed in our direction.”
