No Sale
Been turned down? You can still come to a profitable arrangement with your prospects.
Olivia Cheng, CEO of Aurora Imaging Technologies, is passionate
about fighting breast cancer. But she can't help save lives if
nobody buys her product, a breast-specific MRI machine. So when a
hospital or clinic says "no, thank you" to the $1.5
million price tag, Cheng, 50, comes back with an offer they
can't refuse: Aurora will provide the machine at no cost and
even pay rent for the space to use it. Then, Aurora pockets the
insurance payment for each use of the machine--about $1,000 per
patient--for the following five to seven years.
Although selling one machine means a one-time profit of over
$700,000, the same machine placed in a hospital or clinic can
generate $15,000 a day--enough to pay for the machine and its
management, plus put $2 million a year toward Aurora's bottom
line. "This is the best-kept secret in medicine today,"
says Cheng. She expects Aurora to double 2005 sales, growing to
over $20 million in 2006.