Posted by: Contributing columnist, CLARION LEDGER FEATURE, BUSINESS, October 9, 2016: The Mississippi Innovator’s Hall of Fame recently inducted four individuals in the class of 2016 and honored five “Innovators to Watch.” I always look for opportunities to talk about great Mississippi companies, but usually in the context of a technology theme. A few weeks ago I highlighted Hawkeye Industries from Tupelo and Fuse.Cloud as two of the recent Innovators to Watch and I’ll cover the other three this week — TelehealthONE, Jeff Good and the Up in Farms Food Hub and Next Gear Solutions.
TelehealthONE
TelehealthONE, a founding tenant at the Mississippi Bio-Medical Business Collaboratory in Canton, is the state’s first private telehealth company. Telehealth really is the medicine delivery mechanism of the future because of the ability to bring doctors to patients no matter the distance and Mississippi is actually a leader in telehealth activity. TelehealthONE concentrates on providing 24-hour access to medical care for patients in rural and remote areas — a much-needed service for a state with more than 50 percent of residents residing in those areas.
TelehealthONE is the first and only private telehealth company in Mississippi and provides access through video-based consultations.
Under the leadership of David Powe, Ph.D., the company’s owner and chief executive officer, TelehealthONE has grown its services to include servicing long-term care institutions (such as nursing homes) to providing walk-in clinics at various pharmacy locations across the state. In a much-heralded recent announcement, the company unveiled a key partnership with Mississippi-based Fred’s Pharmacy. With plans to a private telehealth kiosk in each of the pharmacy chain’s locations, TelehealthONE will eventually bring healthcare within 15 miles of almost every Mississippian.
Up in Farms Food Hub
Good is practically a household name throughout much of Mississippi as an esteemed restaurateur, having founded Bravo! Italian Restaurant and Bar, Broad Street Baking Company, Sal & Mookie’s New York Pizza and Ice Cream Joint and Mangia Bene Catering. Everyone is probably less familiar with his new innovative venture — Up in Farms Food Hub.
The Up in Farms Food Hub is trying to solve a pretty basic, but difficult, problem: Both farmers and restauranteurs want locally produced items to be consumed locally. It’s cost effective, the food is more likely to be fresh, it helps the local economy, it shortens the supply chain, and it takes out the middle man. The problem is the regulatory and liability frameworks for commercial food preparation are normally not very conducive to local sourcing of produce on a large scale.
Through Soul City Hospitality, where Good is a managing partner, he is spearheading the Up in Farms Food Hub program — a farm-to-table initiative that connects Mississippi’s small- to medium-sized farmers and their produce with local restaurants, schools and grocery stores as well as commercial distributors. To facilitate this effort, Soul City Hospitality operates a warehouse in Jackson where the produce is washed, graded, packed, cooled and stored — meeting all food safety standards.
Next Gear Solutions
Next Gear Solutions, headquartered in Oxford, is probably the fastest-growing company with 100 or more employees in Mississippi that no one knows about.
Next Gear provides the back-end software that enables large restoration construction franchisers, insurance agents and property owners to have an efficient and streamlined process for restoring property after a flood or other catastrophic event. Their software, DASH, is the leading platform to help with materials ordering, job management, insurance reporting, and all of the other behind-the-scenes transactions and activity that are completely invisible to everyone when the software works well.
Having grown exponentially and with momentum at an all-time high, Next Gear Solutions’ reach now expands outside of Mississippi and the United States into Australia, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom. Most recently, in fact, the company even acquired its largest competitor, ClientRunner. The company has 110 employees and recently received an $11 million investment from a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital fund. Next Gear Solutions was founded by Garret Gray, who serves as its president and chief executive officer.
I always enjoy telling the great stories about Mississippi technology and innovation-based companies, and I’ll spend the next couple of weeks talking about the 2016 inductees into the Mississippi Innovator’s Hall of Fame. If you want to read ahead about some of the companies, please visit www.MSInnovatorsHallofFame.com.
Tony Jeff is the president and CEO of Innovate Mississippi. He can be reached at tjeff@innovate.ms.