Delivering a $10 million first-aid contract

When Dave Hammond was dodging bullets and tending to wounded marines in Vietnam from 1970 to 1974, the Navy hospital corpsman's attention

That happened last month when DLH, the Tinton Falls company Hammond runs with his wife, Linda, outbid all comers to provide its patented Intelligent First Aid Kit to up to 44,100 U.S. Postal Service facilities and 250,000 letter-carrier vehicles across the country. In all, the kits will help protect some 800,000 postal employees.

The kits combine supplies and how-to cards in color-coded packs for each type of injury. "Our kits don't replace doctors," says Hammond, 55. "But they temporarily help to stem an emergency until Emergency Medical Services or other help arrives."

Developed with the National Safety Council, a health and safety advocate based in Illinois, the kits are marketed through the DLH Website, www.futureoffirstaid.com, and the safety council. They come in consumer and industrial versions and address breathing impairment, bleeding, shock and other conditions. Supplemental packs treat ailments ranging from head and spine injuries to insect stings.

Hammond, who has a master's degree in education from George Washington University in Washington, D.C, handles product development and dealmaking. Linda Hammond, who has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, oversees product design and marketing. Dave Hammond says the two-person company, which reportedly had $400,000 in sales two years ago, has been growing at a rate of 25% a year. That includes a jump in business after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

First aid has been a Hammond cause since Vietnam. The former medic served as civilian director of training for the Navy Medical Department from 1974 to 1978 and offered first-aid training on a contract basis to offshore oil -drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico from 1982 through 1990. He calls his evolution from first-aid training to designing and providing kits a natural progression.

"My military experience and my offshore work both involved people who were exposed to hostile environments that led to accidents," Hammond says. "The first-aid kits that were on the market had a lot of drawbacks. Some were simply a box of bandages, which wouldn't be useful for serious injuries. Even a comprehensive kit isn't much use if the person who administers aid forgets how to use the items. And people who don't provide medical services on a regular basis do tend to forget the proper steps.

"If someone is choking or bleeding heavily and you've only got a few minutes to save their life, you don't have time to start thumbing through a thick book looking for the proper procedure and then trying to identify the right item using a tiny diagram," Hammond adds. "My wife and I researched the market and couldn't find any product that tied everything together."

The Hammonds introduced their initial kits in 1997 after more than five years of development. They quickly picked up business with the U.S. Postal Service and Hertz after showing the kits at trade shows. They moved into the consumer market in 2000.

"Industrial was a logical starting point," Hammond says. "The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires businesses to offer first-aid training and to maintain supplies onsite. We offer the kits, and through a partnership with the National Safety Council, we can also provide the required first-aid training courses."

Hammond credits the postal contract he won last month to the unique design of his kits. "Our color instruction system is patented, so no one else can offer anything quite like this," he says. "Someone's bleeding out? You reach for a red card marked 'Blood' and the information is there, with the appropriate supplies that are also color-keyed."

Dan Dede, a detective with the Pasco County Sheriff's office in Tampa Bay, Florida, counts himself a devoted DLH customer. Dede is responsible for providing medical training for a 1,000-person force and calls the kits ideal for detectives, deputy sheriffs, special weapons and tactics teams and other law-enforcement personnel.

"Many of our officers are the first people to arrive at the scene of an accident," Dede says. "It's critical to have the correct supplies and easy-to-read instructions on hand when life-or-death action must be taken."

Meanwhile, there's no shortage of demand for life-saving products. According to the National Safety Council's most recent statistics, there were 8 million disabling and more than 33,000 fatal injuries in the U.S. in 2001. That amounts to a disabling injury every 4 seconds and a fatal one every 16 minutes. Workplaces saw 3.9 million disabling and 5,300 fatal injuries.

Hammond keeps labor, equipment and overhead costs down by contracting out all manufacturing to an organization called Workshop in Sedalia, Missouri, which employs disabled persons. He is negotiating with a similar organization, The ARC of Monmouth in Monmouth County, to handle work generated by last month's postal contract. And thanks to that contract, the Hammonds are looking to move their company's headquarters from their home-where they operate out of a spare room wired for fax, multiple phones and credit-card processing-to an office in the nearby Eatontown area.

The couple also plans to step up their marketing efforts. "We'd like to expand into specialty retail outlets like Lowes and Home Depot," says Hammond. "It would be the right move when we're ready."