Lessons in Wheelchair Profiteering: The Subscription Based Business Model - Erik Kondo

When you build a wheelchair, there are two opposite approaches you can take.

1. Make the wheelchair as easy to repair and replace parts as possible.

2. Make the wheelchair as difficult to repair and replace parts as possible.

When you make the wheelchair easy to repair, you lose control of your customer. They can outsource their repairs without you by using parts made by others. Thus, you potentially only make a one time sale. 

But when you make the wheelchair difficult to repair, you create customer dependency. The purchaser (wheelchair user) must come back to you for your proprietary parts to make the inevitable repairs. By making single wheelchair sale, you have essentially created a long term subscriber to your product line.

It is a well established business principal that long term subscribers to a business are much more valuable (profitable) than one off purchasers.

The Legacy Wheelchair Industry, which is owned by Private Equity, is the business of profiting from the sale of wheelchairs. Profit Equity knows how to create profitable business strategies. This is what they do. Hence, they maximize profits by designing and manufacturing wheelchairs that require proprietary parts and servicing rather than being able to use universal (aftermarket) parts and servicing. 

They purposely make their (wheelchair using) customers dependent upon them. They leverage this dependency over the long term by selling their customer base a new wheelchair model whenever their insurance approves the purchase (typically every five years in the US). As part of their profit maximizing strategy, new wheelchair models use components that are not compatible with earlier models whenever possible (casters are a prime example). The overall result is a worldwide collection of wheelchairs that don’t share common components. Which means that wheelchair users all over the world face problems getting their wheelchair repaired. 

This is the opposite situation to what exists for bicycles. Despite the huge variety of manufacturers and models of bicycles, they are typically relatively easy to get repaired by using commonly available components. Bicycle manufacturers do not have the monopoly power to implement the subscriber based profit model used by the Legacy Wheelchair Industry.

In summary, when purchasing a wheelchair, it is important to consider its ease of repairability as a critical part of the wheelchair provision process. And never forget that the Legacy Wheelchair Industry cares more about their profits than your welfare.