BEAR CREEK COUPLE FIND GLOBAL SUCCESS ONLINE

By Chris Cook - Forks Forum editor

Terry and Marnie Lemon are testing and training radiology technicians across the globe, in turn providing a comfortable living for their family and diversifying the West End economy.
Glacier Valley Medical Education is the name of their online company. It is housed in the couple’s home office in Bear Creek.

The core of their business is located on their Web site, www.glaciermedicaled.com.
Radiology techs from across the United States, Canada, overseas military medical personnel and nations as remote as India and England are tapping into the Bear Creek-based Web site.

The Lemons “overnight” success on the Web began in 1996 in Salt Lake City, and began paying off in a substantial way in 2006.

The Lemons arrived in the West End in 2002, relocating from the Whitefish, Montana area.
“The town was super expensive,” Terry explains about relocating to Forks, “the cost of housing, grocery, fuel were all aimed at tourists. It was too expensive for a business start-up.”

The couple decided to start searching the Pacific Northwest for a new home and base of operations.
“We were looking for somewhere that had wilderness, forest, hiking, but not likely to have a growth spike,” he said. “We started vacationing out this way?took a drive around 101, and really liked what we saw?it really had an appeal to us.”

In addition, there were concerns about being close to top-notch medical care. Marnie has had two liver transplants and one kidney transplant, a result of contracting hepatitis as a teenager while on a family vacation in Southern California.
“The best guys in the country are in Seattle, at the University of Washington,” Terry said of his wife’s need for orthopedic surgery, a side effect of her battle against hepatitis. “Access to Seattle was a critical part of our decision.”
The couple applied for and were hired at the Forks Community Hospital’s Bogachiel Clinic, with Marnie working as a nurse and Terry taking x-rays and CAT scans.

Terry said he became the manager of the radiology department and worked there until their online business took off in 2006.
“I decided I needed to be home running the business, and retired from my day job,” he said.

Terry said they saw the need for reasonably-priced testing for radiology technicians who must take a required number of credit hours of training each year. The studies are monitored and certified by the American Society of Radiologic Technologists.

He said taking the courses required travel to hotels in faraway cities, forcing radiology technicians to take time off work, pay for transportation and lodging and meals just to take what usually amounted to a generic study course not always applicable to their daily work.

At first they held seminars in person, but as use of the Internet expanded in the mid-1990s they saw an opportunity in placing the courses online.

After trying traditional mail marketing they turned to Internet search engines to find success. Word of mouth among fellow radiology technicians and easy online access grew the business, too.
Working extra hours at the hospital in Whitefish and in Forks helped to underwrite tens of thousands of dollars in start-up costs.

Learning how to write HTML and Java Script code cut out expensive outside programmer costs, he said.
The online system proved successful, with the couple constantly refining their online business model.
Students began contacting them from places they never expected to draw business from such as military radiology techs stationed in Guam, Japan and other foreign countries.

“The military was a big, unexpected audience” he said.

Inquiries seeking online training from Singapore, Russia, Hong Kong, Kenya, Nigeria, even the king’s hospital in Saudi Arabia are now arriving in their e-mail in box.

The vast majority of payments come through online credit card transactions, which automatically turn Canadian dollars, Saudi Arabian shekels and other currencies into U.S. dollars, and into the bank account of the Bear Creek-based business.
The radiology field offers room for considerable growth of their business, he said. There are 280,000 x-ray technicians in the United States, 150,000 in Canada, and 325,000 in the United Kingdom.
Other new, and unexpected, fields are opening up for the Lemons, such as new rules that require chiropractors in California who perform x-rays to be certified.

The couple are scheduled to fly to London this summer in pursuit of a deal to provide certified testing and training for Great Britain.

Bilingual training is also being looked at, with Web pages being translated in Spanish.

Terry offered some tips to those interested in taking a business online. “Don’t get discouraged, be prepared, it took four years to break even (for us). We had to make some hard (financing) decisions. And it takes a while for people to find out about you.”

He also said when an online business begins to make it that you need to stay focused and continue to develop the Web site and seek new markets.

The couple now have two young sons, one and two years old.

”Being able to stay home with the kids, watching them grow up,” is one of the benefits of working in a home office,” he said.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity, worth pursuing.”

Terry sees Forks as highly dependent on the tourist trade in summer, and sees Internet marketing as the way to boost this sector of the economy.

“Whatever they have, whatever they are selling” using a Web site is today key to making sales, he said.

Posted February 6, 2008