Prescott’s was founded in Monument, Colorado in 1980 by an entrepreneurial family from Prescott, Arizona. With its origins as an OEM distributor, Prescott’s saw firsthand the need for a high-quality independent service organization specializing in surgical microscopes within the United States.
Fast forward 44 years and Prescott’s has a knowledge base to service, supply parts for, and refurbish all brands, models, and generations of surgical microscopes. Today, Prescott’s stands alone as the only independent service organization with national coverage, the ability to service all surgical microscopes, and unmatched response time.
If the story ended here, we would describe Prescott’s as an inspiring story of vision, ambition, hard work, and success. But the story doesn’t end here.
“We believe the same principles that led to success in surgical microscopes will lead to success in other modalities our customers care about,” Prescott’s CEO Brian Straeb explains. “Between 2021 and 2023, Prescott’s has acquired four new modalities including infusion pumps (Adepto Medical (Adepto)), patient monitors (Pioneer Biomedical (PioBio)), sterilizers (Preventive Maintenance Medical), and anesthesia machines (Heartland Medical/Vetland).”
Prescott’s Surgical Microscopes and Adepto/PioBio boast the ISO 13485 certification, and there are plans to include additional certifications in the future.
TechNation is eager to share more about this innovative family of companies and how Prescott’s can assist hardworking healthcare technology management leaders throughout the nation.
Q: What are some advantages that your company has over the competition?
Straeb: Prescott’s is a family of brands specializing across six critical modalities. Each modality is the legacy of Prescott’s acquired companies who are known as specialized technical experts with a customer first culture. At its core, technical excellence and a customer-centric culture are the two features we look for when considering business fit for acquisition and expansion. Our top priorities will always be to deliver technical excellence when and where needed, to get it right the first time, and to deliver a best-in-class customer experience so patients receive the care they need.
Importantly, our objective is to retain the things each of our businesses has always done best while leveraging the infrastructure of the larger Prescott’s Group. This allows our customers to enjoy the continuity of working with vendors they have come to depend on while benefiting from being a part of a larger organization.
Our advantages come from:
- Technical Excellence in everything we do.
- Best in Class Responsiveness minimizing patient disruption.
- Market leading value.
We can service, sell, rent, or procure products in all modalities including surgical microscopes, infusion pumps, patient monitors, anesthesia machines, sterilizers, and washers, and complete operating room design and buildouts.
Let’s discuss service for a moment. While some of these devices are small and can be mailed in for service, many of the items are extremely large and expensive. Oftentimes hospitals have a limited number of these devices such as surgical microscopes in their inventory, and they rely on those to function correctly to ensure patients receive the care they need. When one malfunctions or is due for service, time is of the essence. Understanding the severity of these situations, Prescott’s has positioned over 75 expert technicians across the U.S. and the UK. These technicians are in the field both proactively servicing your equipment and ready to respond when something is not properly working.
Prescott’s has serviced microscopes in the field for over 40 years. During that time, they inquired with other companies like theirs that service anesthesia machines, sterilizers, and washers.
Rather than attempting to train their technicians in these areas, they reached out to two of the industry leaders, Heartland Medical and Preventive Maintenance Medical, and the Prescott’s family of brands began to come together. Our organization then saw the struggle our customers were having in keeping their infusion pumps and patient monitors up and running. Bringing Adepto and PioBio into the partnership has provided our customers with the ease of having experts in these modalities along with an easy-to-use RMA/RGA system that removes all the stress when sending a device in.
Adepto and PioBio also bring a large fleet of rental devices to the fingertips of our customers. As experienced during COVID, when high flu season or major health events occur, additional hospital beds are needed. Each bed requires an infusion pump and a patient monitor. Often, hospitals rely on rental devices to accommodate the increased need. Adepto and PioBio have hundreds of devices in many different models ready to be deployed at any given moment. This is especially true during the annual flu season.
With our Vetland brand, we bring the same support to the veterinary community that provides health care to our furry family members.
Q: What are some challenges that your company faced last year?
Bringing the brands together to operate as one while retaining their independent strengths has been a fun journey and one that will continue. Bringing together companies as one can be difficult under any circumstances, this can be exceptionally challenging when all companies involved have strong established cultures, strong employee and customer relationships, and are independently successful organizations. These are things we want to keep intact and continue to grow but with many of the departments becoming what we refer to as “group level” departments, we needed to start the process of unifying certain areas as one. Equally important to our internal groups and messaging is our external messaging to the world and, more importantly, our customers about who this group is and what we represent.
We started with the group logo and core values. This process started by forming a group of top management from all brands and working through the process together for several months. We took best practices from all organizations and brought parts of all together to form one unified message and internal belief in what we represent. Keeping the core name of Prescott’s was important to all, but also was keeping identities. For that reason, we incorporated the icons from each of the brands into our messaging and website structure. Allowing our customers to be at ease knowing the level of service and flow of doing business with each of the divisions would not change from what they are accustomed to while providing the platform to grow as one united organization.
Q: Can you explain your company’s core competencies?
The core values came together in early 2024. After considering best practices from each division, we established this group of core values, known to us as the Gears of Success, we then paired each value with an explanation of what that core value means to this team. We are happy to share those here:
Prescott’s Gears of Success:
- Integrity: Act with unwavering integrity in every endeavor.
- Teamwork: Be hard on problems – not people.
- Excellence: Consistently pursue greatness.
- Respect: Cultivate harmonious relationships.
- Innovation: Measure efforts before results.
Q: What product or service that your company offers are you most excited about right now?
The core of the group is the service and repair of the devices, and that service is still what is most exciting about this organization. Each division has decades of experience in their modality, and they continue to expand that knowledge daily. Often health care facilities do not have the budget available to always upgrade their equipment. The devices they have are still great devices and will last years. However, finding the support to service those devices properly is often a challenge. We provide that service and expert knowledge to allow our customers the flexibility to allocate their budget as they see fit while keeping their current fleet functioning properly. We have taken this a step further by perfecting the ease of doing business with each division by either having boots on the ground or streamlining the RMA/RGA systems for our depot service devices to ensure our customers can keep their focus on providing the care their patients need, rather than worrying about how they will keep their fleet of devices running properly.
Q: What is on the horizon for your company?
The future is bright for Prescott’s. By bringing high-quality service offerings across multiple modalities to our customers, we expect to grow rapidly. Our evolution over the next several years will focus on resource allocation, operational expansion, maintaining the highest level of quality and responsiveness, and building on our great culture.
Q: Can you share some company success stories?
Below are a few stories/experiences our customers have shared with us:
“If we have something break, I’ll call my rep at Prescott’s, and I’ll say, ‘This is what’s going on.’ And if it’s a quick fix, he’ll tell me over the phone how to fix it, rather than him driving from … wherever he is at that time. … And that’s why they are my preferred [vendor].”
“I tell my coworkers, ‘Check out this RMA. It’s really easy to use, you’ll get a shipping label sent right to you, and you’ll be able to box it up and send it right away, and quick turnaround time, and it works when it comes back.’”
“There hasn’t been one service complaint as I’ve been here for 12 years, and the savings have been substantial. Dependability is through the roof. I cannot say enough good things about the Prescott’s service delivery.”
“If something happens and the microscope is in need of immediate attention, then they will walk me through what I need to do. So, their service support is outstanding up here as well.”
A customer called at 8:00 am one morning stating that their air dryers failed, and the air lines were filled with water. They had all their 14 anesthesia units down and were quoted a 6-week turnaround from their vendor. We had units in stock and ready to go and by 3:00 am the next morning we had them up and running with 14 units. They resumed business as usual the next morning, and the patients received the procedures they needed on time.
Q: Can you describe your company’s facilities?
Our surgical microscope division is in Monument, Colorado, and along with the 75 field service employees we have, this facility houses over 50 employees from administration, shipping and receiving, in-house technicians and inventory specialties.
Our infusion pump and patient monitor divisions house over 50 employees in Kansas City, Missouri. This is a depot service model meaning all service technicians are on site in Kansas City and our customers mail their devices to them for service or repair.
Our anesthesia experts have a headquarters location in Louisville, Kentucky. The service team and operating room design specialists are in the field.
Our sterilizer and washer technicians are also in the field with headquarters in Mount Vernon, Ohio.
Q: Is there anything else you want TechNation readers to know about your company?
We are extremely proud to be part of the HTM community.
We know how much work all of our partners, competitors, and customers do to keep these hospitals and facilities up and operational. We also know most of the technicians and employees of these companies don’t get the credit and publicity that clinicians get or that they deserve. However, we are very aware that without the equipment and services all of us in the industry provide none of this would be possible.
Thank you to all our customers and to all the HTM professionals for all you do!
Contact us at prescottsmed.com.
