Imagine running one of the biggest companies in your industry, say with sales of about $1.7 billion. Your company gets bought out and you retire comfortably. End of story happy end of story but end of story nonetheless? Wrong. If you’re Steven B. Nielsen, former president of General Medical Corporation (now McKesson) you might take six or seven years off, only to come back and set out to reinvent the industry whose pinnacle you had retired from just a few years before. “I felt there was an opportunity to start a company that was more nimble and focused,” says Nielsen, founder and CEO of one-year-old Activus Healthcare Solutions in Westlake Village. Activus may be a new company, but they expect to make $5 million to $10 million this year. The industry Nielsen is redefining is that of medical supplies distribution. What makes his company different is not what they do, but how they do it. “We sell only to physicians, clinics and surgical centers,” explains Nielsen. “Most of our customers are under severe financial pressure, and time is their most valuable commodity. We offer services to help them improve their efficiency by addressing inventory management. He help them do their inventory control.” That, he says, is helpful to his customers both economically and qualitatively. “These are professionals who are primarily caregivers,” says Nielsen. “They are inventory controllers only secondarily. By making more time available for them to spend with patients, we help them save money while improving the quality of care they can provide to their patients.” A unique proprietary software and support product is a key element in the way Activus delivers on its promise to make inventory control a simple, time-saving process. Called “Activus Interactive Solutions,” or “AIS,” the software has been a major contributor to the purported popularity of Activus among physicians and surgeons in small and medium to medium-large practices. Activus expects to be earning $100 million in the next two to three years. That’s as the company takes its fairly unique sales model from its current confines of a region of California reaching from San Diego to the Central (San Joaquin) Valley, to the rest of the country. “Next, we expect to go to Texas, Arizona, and Las Vegas,” Nielsen projects. “Then the southeast, and mid-Atlantic states. We plan to grow organically, not by acquisition and to cover the whole country.” The sales model that differentiates Activus from the competition is one in which customers decide which team member they would like to deal with at any given time, on any given issue. “When we’re approaching the marketplace, instead of dropping a single rep into a region we have teams and team members dedicated at all levels,” says Nielsen. “Teams include a senior rep, field solutions reps, an inside sales rep, and supporting each team is a customer service rep.” He says customer decides whom they want to deal with whether they want to be called on in person, or by phone. They can decide, at their own discretion, what level of rep their particular issue would be best served by. Nielsen secured a significant financial backer in January. “It’s a four-hundred-million dollar private equity group from Greenwich, Connecticut called Ferrer-Freeman and Company,” says Nielsen. “I think they were attracted to us because of our sales model and our core values.” According to Nielsen, that backing will help ensure the company’s intended fast pace of growth, and expansion into all regions of the U.S.