Today we’d like to introduce you to Alaina Macia.
Hi Alaina, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
MTM was started by my parents in 1995. They saw the gap in reliable transportation for medical appointments. Instead of investing in a fleet of vehicles, they contracted with local transportation companies and held them to higher quality standards and then they contracted with health insurance companies to provide transportation to their members. MTM’s core market serves individuals that are elderly, sick or who cannot afford to own and operate a vehicle. MTM transports members to their preventative and life-sustaining medical appointments.
After getting my engineering and Masters in Business degrees from Washington University, I joined the business in 2003. At the time, MTM was mainly operating in Missouri and had revenues of $30 Million. My parents were ready to retire, after working so hard to make MTM a success. I officially became CEO in 2005. Today, we have scaled the business and grown it to cover 40 states with revenues of $1.8 Billion nation-wide.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Scaling a business is never a smooth road. We had many growing pains – capital, technology and people. We learned that establishing our culture and hiring for values was key to our success. At our roots, MTM is a mid-west company with midwestern values. We work hard, never are satisfied with status quo and treat one another respect. Our values are collaboration, innovation, integrity, customer focus and delivering value. We had a home grown technology system that we had to upgrade and move to the cloud. This required us to significantly invest in our technology development team. Today we have state of the art systems and are leading the industry. To continue our growth to fuel technology and innovation, we decided to make acquisitions, which required significant capital. We were fortunate enough to leverage our own balance sheet to raise debt to fund our acquisitions. MTM continues today to be owned 100% by the founders’ family.
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As you know, we’re big fans of MTM. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
I am most proud that MTM is known as the highest quality operator in our space. Because we have increased our reach to be nation-wide, we are now offering a direct-to-consumer transportation solution called Wanda. We know that as our parents and grand parents age, they need reliable and customer friendly transportation resources they can trust. We have launched in the Phoenix and Tucson markets and are launching here in St. Louis market.
How do you define success?
Success is setting a stretch goal and doing the work everyday to achieve it. Sometimes failing is success, you learn what not to do and how to adjust your strategy going forward. To minimize failing, you should meet with others that have been successful and see what advice they have for you, what to do and what not to do. There is no reason we shouldn’t learn from others!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/MTMInc
- Instagram: mtm_inc
