A.J. Filippis assists his father, Tony Filippis, Sr. Without Tony’s accident, the company may never have been founded.

Many HME companies begin with a dream, and Wright & Filippis of Rochester Hills, Mich, is no exception. However, the dream that started this company was more of a nightmare than a wish for success.

During the night of April 29, 1929, the mother of company founder Tony Filippis, Sr, dreamt something terrible would befall her family. So strong was her premonition that the next day she ordered her eight children to remain in the family’s Detroit yard after school.

Twelve-year-old Tony ignored her and, with several neighborhood friends, hopped a freight train headed toward the local swimming hole. During the trip, Tony fell from the moving train car and his mother’s premonition came true. “I climbed back up and someone yelled, ‘Look, your feet!’ They were mangled beyond recognition and later amputated below both knees,” he recalls.

Life as an amputee in the 1930s—before legislators passed laws to protect many of the rights of the disabled—was hard. Unable to find work because of his disability, Tony vented his frustration to Carl Wright, a friend who worked at Martin-Halstead Co, which made Tony’s artificial legs. “I told him, ‘I’m branded as a cripple—I can’t get a job,’” Tony Filippis says. “‘They hire me and when they find out about my legs, they fire me.’”

Wright offered his friend an apprenticeship at Martin-Halstead and 10 years later, in 1944, they opened their own business, Wright & Filippis, which specialized in prosthetics and, later, orthotics.

After Carl Wright died in 1959, the Filippis family bought the Wright family out of the company, and today, it is the sole owner and operator of the business—now headed by Tony’s son, A.J. Five of Tony’s grandchildren, his daughter, and two of his grandchildren’s spouses also work for the company

Tony Filippis, however, is never far away. At age 87, he still comes into the office daily and keeps the organization focused on its core mission—distinguishing itself as a company with a strong commitment to serve its customers and its community.

The company operates 28 locations in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, and employs 600. Most of the locations include retail space—a necessity because it has retained its signature prosthetics and orthotics business.

“The majority of what we do is provide the service along with the product,” says A.J. Filippis, president and CEO of Wright & Filippis, and a certified prosthetist. “The physicians out there know that when they have a problem we are going to take care of it, no matter what it is.”

The company serves about 4,000 prosthetics and orthotics customers per month. Patients come from a variety of sources including a wide range of physician groups, discharge planners, and physical therapists.

Though A.J. Filippis has no plans to abandon the company’s core business, over the years Wright & Filippis has diversified its offerings by adding a wide variety of product and service lines including respiratory, HME, home infusion, assistive equipment—such as ramps—and third-party administration. This diversification has helped the company ride the ups and downs in individual product lines while remaining profitable.

“When one area may be down a little bit, another area picks up,” Filippis says. For example, profits from the prosthetic and orthotics side can shrink during the winter months because patients are coming in less. However, because HME is primarily delivered to the patient’s home, it is not as subject to seasonal variations.

The company works with several large insurance carriers, Medicare, and Medicaid, and has plans to increase its number of Michigan locations. However, no matter what form future growth may take, it will not lose sight of what makes it a success—customer service—Filippis says.

People Persons
The emphasis on customer service was a natural outgrowth of the prosthetic business. “Without [the customers] we do not have a business to begin with,” Filippis says. “When you work closely with a patient, as you do when fitting a prosthesis, you develop a personal relationship with them. It is not just the patient that is coming in, it is Mr Smith or Mrs Jones. I have gotten to know about their families, and they know about mine, because you are spending a lot of time with them. You are not just walking in, handing them orthoses, and walking out. You are spending 2 or 3 hours fitting them—and that goes on throughout their lives. You start to build friendships as much as business relationships.”

It was this additional level of service that, 25 years ago, attracted John Wright—no relation to the founding Wright family—to the job of vice president of business development for the company. Wright, a former seminarian, found the company’s mission to serve its patients and not just hand out equipment a compelling reason to join and help to usher in the respiratory side of the business.

“It is a clinically driven company with a heart,” he says. “What was easy about [adding respiratory services] was that the company had a fantastic reputation from a clinical perspective. Prosthetics and orthotics are clinically driven, and if you can make that transition from a clinically driven company and the professionalism that goes along with that to the HME respiratory field, you are going a long way.”

From the beginning, finding individualized solutions for amputees was a priority for Wright & Filippis.

The high degree of customer service means that everything, even for Medicare patients, is individualized. “We tried to get away from...that one size fits all [mentality], because that is not necessarily the case,” Wright says. “They did custom rehab wheelchairs even before I started on board, and we tried to bring that into the Medicare rental area—one size doesn’t always fit all, so we can adapt things for specific people. It is just taking that individualizing of prosthetics and orthotics and individualizing for HME.”

Though the company has a 43,000-square-foot distribution center and operates a mail-order business, it still has retail space at most of its locations, primarily to accommodate its prosthetics and orthotics customers. Each site, though driven by the company mission, has a high degree of autonomy, allowing the staff—which usually are drawn from the local community—to tailor services to the character and expectations of their area.

The prosthetics and orthotics retail services also help promote the company’s HME sales, Wright says. “There are a lot of [HME] companies out there that have only warehouses and call centers, and we have that situation to a certain extent,” he says. “The retail sites are primarily there for the prosthetics and orthotics business, but it helps us as we promote the HME side. For example, in getting some of the contracts we have received over the years, one of the things that made them happen is our retail facilities.”

Community Focus
The interest in helping people does not stop at the company’s doors. Wright & Filippis is highly visible in every community it is in. The company sponsors or cosponsors events and activities from wheelchair picnics to golf outings to marathons.

“Since [Tony Filippis] was discriminated against so much because he was disabled, he has instilled in us that it is not a fair playing field,” A.J. Filippis says. “Giving back to the community has given us the recognition that we are not in it just for the buck, and we really are not. At the end of the day, you feel a lot better when you have given something to someone who did not have the opportunity that you did or others do.”

These events also help educate the public about those with disabilities. This is one of the motivations for the Wright & Filippis-sponsored Athletes with Disabilities Hall of Fame.

“We use it to educate the community that these athletic events disabled individuals get involved with also make them healthier and their lifestyle better, so it is a way of promoting good health even in the disabled population,” A.J. Filippis says.

However, it is not enough that an athlete is disabled. To end up in the Hall of Fame, the athlete must, like Tony Filippis, have given back in some way to the community as well.

Overcoming the challenges life throws at you by helping yourself and others is the dream of Wright & Filippis come true. Luckily, some bad dreams really do turn out well.

C.A. Wolski is associate editor of Dealer/Provider.