About five years into his first business venture, Mickey Moore took Employee Screening Services down a slightly different path.
The decades-old drug and alcohol screening service already was substantial: some 1,200 clients and over $1 million revenues prior to Moore’s 2007 acquisition.
But a few new contracts took the company beyond its multistate footprint with the potential for more on the horizon.
Employee Screening Services of Missouri LLC began working with Kansas City Power & Light Co. in 2008 – when it conducted nearly 7,000 screenings for a large construction project – and a couple years later connected with international engineering firm Black & Veatch.
“We hadn’t focused on companies of that size,” Moore says. “We have the ability to.”
By 2012, the rapid growth caused Moore to reassess the business model.
“We were growing ourselves into ‘busy-ness’ and not necessarily profitability,” he says, declining to disclose financial data.
Additional revenues were reinvested to keep pace with expansion, but Moore was searching for a way to get ahead and stay there. He called on People Centric Consulting Group and, for the next year, the teams re-evaluated ESS’ operations.
“As we started to see much faster growth, we needed to adjust internally, with our culture,” Moore recalls.
The consultations with People Centric co-founders Don Harkey and Randy Mayes led to tangible changes inspired by the book, “Traction: Get a Grip on your Business.”
In the Amazon best-seller, author Gino Wickman points out businesses often pull in systems and measurements that don’t mesh – “like running a computer on Microsoft and Apple at the same time,” Moore says. “It just won’t work.”
Moore heeded Wickman’s advice and implemented an entrepreneurial operating system he says prepared the company for work worldwide.
International scope ESS’ client count is up to 2,000. In a significant move along the growth curve, Moore shrunk ESS’ offices from a peak of nine down to four.
Testing services are primarily handled on-site with clients and typically to meet compliance standards of the U.S. Department of Transportation or the Drug-Free Workplace Act.
“As part of the review with People Centric, they challenged us to look at a different way of pursuing the business. That was to centralize all support functions in the Springfield corporate office,” Moore says.
The remaining satellite offices, in Lebanon, Rolla and Sedalia, maintain enough demand for walk-in testing. Now, random testing, program administration, scheduling and compliance are managed from the headquarters, 2055 S. Stewart Ave. “It’s a scalable business model. It allows us to grow with demand or scale back when there isn’t,” he says.
A segment under research is international drug testing, which was prompted by ESS’ largest client, Black & Veatch.
“International drug screening is in its infancy right now,” says Katie Caton, a designated employer representative at Black & Veatch. “We do some, but it’s mandated by client requirements.”
Though the United States passed drug-free workplace legislation in 1988, Caton says international governments largely have abstained from similar laws.
As a company, though, Black & Veatch in recent years has expanded its own drug and alcohol testing. Caton says all professionals in domestic offices are subject to random screening.
“It could be engineers, our finance people, every position in Black & Veatch,” she says. “We did a work study of our peers, of the construction industry. Employee Screening Services sat in with us to help guide and make decisions.”
ESS now handles about 150 monthly screenings throughout all disciplines in nearly 80 U.S. offices for the $3 billion Overland Park, Kan.-based infrastructure firm.
The Springfield company also has researched Black & Veatch’s next step on the international side, beginning with a 2013 study to determine the availability of technicians and labs, associated costs and the cultural implications.
“It’s probably time to relook at that,” Caton says. “We’re hiring many professionals in India, Mexico, so we’ll probably have to revisit international screening pretty soon.”
Cleaned up Local clients include City Utilities of Springfield, Meek’s, White River Valley Electric Cooperative and Conco Cos.
Moore anticipates conducting 100,000 drug or alcohol tests this year or next, following increases in each of the last three years.
In 2014, ESS handled 96,500 tests, up from 63,600 two years’ prior.
ESS employs 21 full-time staff and 26 part-timers, mostly technicians who perform collections on-site working out of their homes around the state.
The company sends samples primarily to four or five testing laboratories, including Alere Toxicology and MedTox, but has access to 10,000 clinics nationwide through a network of strategic partnerships.
A new agreement with CoxHealth positions ESS on-site in an occupational medicine clinic in Branson, and Moore says the company continues to add school districts to its roster. It now performs random student drug tests for over 100 schools in Missouri.
“Had you asked me 10 years ago would I want to own my own company, I’d say sure. Had you told me it was collecting urine, I might have said, ‘Well, that’s interesting,’” Moore says. “But the difference we get to make – if 2-3 percent of the tests we conduct are positive, out of 100,000 tests per year, that’s 2,000-3,000 cases where we’ve made a significance difference, whether that’s keeping a student from starting drugs in the first place to keeping a bus driver out of a bus that shouldn’t be driving kids around or helping keep construction sites safe. There are so many ways.”[[In-content Ad]]
