How an 11-Person Medical Supply Company Uses NetSuite, SuiteCommerce, and AI to Compete with Industry Giants

In 1996, Howard Sturman bought a pallet of medical supplies for $5,000 and started selling them out of his living room.

Now, nearly thirty years later, the company he founded serves healthcare providers across the country, carries thousands of products, manages complex inventory and compliance requirements, and competes against some of the largest distributors in the medical supply industry.

It also has 11 employees.

That fact came up several times during our conversation with Medical Innovations CEO Evan Sturman, partly because it doesn't add up. Most people assume there's a much larger team behind the scenes (there isn't). Instead, there’s a deliberate investment on systems, automation, and technology that lets a small team do a wildly unreasonable-sounding amount of work.

This approach to business didn't start with AI. It didn't even start with NetSuite.

This approach to business started with data entry.

When Evan joined the company full-time after graduating college in 2013, one of his responsibilities was moving information between systems. At the time, Medical Innovations was operating with multiple QuickBooks environments and a separate Access database for inventory management. Information needed to be entered multiple times, maintained in multiple places, and manually reconciled whenever anything changed.

For a growing business, those kinds of processes have a way of becoming acceptable as part of everyday operations. People learn the workarounds. They build spreadsheets. They create checklists. They hire someone whose entire job is essentially keeping up with the manual work—which feels like a solution right up until you realize you’ve added a person-shaped bandage to a systems-shaped root issue. But Medical Innovations took a different approach.

After about six months of manual data entry and working inside those manual processes, Evan hit a wall. He consolidated everything into a single, heavily customized QuickBooks file—what he cheerfully calls the Frankenfile.” It worked well enough (as things with names starting with “Franken” historically do) for a while.

Fortunately for Evan, after spending months inside those processes, he saw something that sounds obvious in hindsight: if the business was going to keep growing, the systems themselves would eventually become the bottleneck, and no Frankenfile was going to fix that.  

So rather than waiting until growth forced the issue, Medical Innovations invested in their operational foundation early.

The best time to fix infrastructure is before anyone thinks it’s urgent

Here’s the thing about foundational fixes: they’re far from glamorous. Just like homeownership, no homeowner wants to spend the time, money, and energy to fix a structural gap in their home when they could be spending that time, money, and energy on fun house things that look cool and give them immediate gratification (hot tubs, anyone?).  

But in the long term, foundational investments pay dividends. For Medical Innovations, this idea has been their north star and has shaped nearly much of their technology strategy ever since. For them, that foundational investment became NetSuite.

The decision wasn't driven by company size. Plenty of organizations wait much longer before moving to an ERP platform, usually after their workflows have evolved into something between “uncomfortable” and “genuinely bad.” Medical Innovations didn’t wait. Evan understood that implementing systems during or after rapid growth is significantly harder than implementing them before it, as processes become ingrained, change management becomes more difficult, and teams become dependent on workarounds that become familiar and known.

Medical Innovations wanted to avoid that situation.

Today, NetSuite serves as the operational hub of the business. Inventory, financials, customer records, order management, reporting, all in one place. all live within a centralized platform. Around that, they've layered in Salesforce, ShipStation, VersaPay, SuiteCommerce, and a growing set of custom scripts and workflows built to handle the things that don't come standard.

What stood out during our conversation was how pragmatic their approach has been.

There was never a sense of trying to force every process into a single application simply for the sake of consolidation. No “one application to rule them all” energy. Just: find the right tool for each job, keep NetSuite as the single source of truth, and don't make it weird.

Automation isn't about replacing people

(We know you've heard this before. Stick with us.)

One example that illustrated this well was accounts receivable.

Like a lot of organizations, Medical Innovations dealt with the usual challenges like delayed payments, customers who forgot, invoices that fell through the cracks. Nothing catastrophic on its own, but the slow drip of inconsistency has a way of slowly wrecking cash flow and burning a surprising amount of someone's Tuesday with follow-up calls.

To fix it, they integrated VersaPay into NetSuite and worked with Anchor Group to build automated invoice reminder workflows, allowing customers to pay directly from the invoice. Reminders go out on schedule without anyone having to remember to send them, and the process runs exactly the same whether someone's in the office or at their kid's soccer game where they are definitely not checking email.

The most obvious benefit is faster collections. The less obvious benefit? Consistency. Customers get the same experience, every time (and the team gets their Tuesday back).

For Medical Innovations, automation isn't about replacing people but is instead about removing the kind of unnecessary manual work that nobody should be doing in the first place, so their people can instead focus on things that actually require smart human judgment and experience.

The Challenge: Eliminating Manual Work Through Automation (aka the quote problem)

Here's where it gets fun (for us at least).

Customers in the medical supply industry rarely provide manufacturer part numbers when requesting quotes, oftentimes providing vague, ambiguous directives with just enough information to be technically correct, but wildly unhelpful:

“A quote for a syringe, please.”

“I need a quote for a glove.”

“How about a catheter?”

The problem with this is that most medical products aren't interchangeable, where somebody now needs to determine what the customer actually needs, identify potential matches, compare alternatives, gather pricing, and build a quote.

For small requests, the process is manageable, but for large product conversion opportunities involving dozens or even hundreds of line items, it becomes infuriatingly more time consuming.

As Evan explained, one of Medical Innovations' larger competitors handles it by routing requests to a dedicated product conversion team—which, at a billion-dollar company, is a reasonable solution. At an 11-person company...it is not.

Medical Innovations didn't have that option. So they built something better.

The Speedboat Strategy: Accelerating Product Conversions with AI

Working alongside Medical Innovations, Anchor Group developed an AI-powered product conversion tool within NetSuite. Using customer-provided descriptions alongside NetSuite item records and vendor data, the tool identifies likely product matches and dramatically cuts the manual research required to build a quote. The target: 80% of the work done automatically on a 100-line-item conversion, which turns a multi-day research project into something that gets done before lunch.

The impact goes beyond internal efficiency and is creating ripples across the sales process (and competitive impact) as well, where speed matters. Anyone in sales knows: time kills deals. Every day between a customer's request and a delivered quote creates an opportunity for them to keep shopping around, lose momentum, or simply move on. Shrinking that window creates an advantage that has almost nothing to do with company size, which, when you're competing against organizations orders magnitudes larger, is exactly the kind of advantage that’s worth building on.

We all love a good analogy. Evan described Medical Innovations as a speedboat competing against cargo ships, where the larger organizations they compete against have bigger budgets, larger teams, and significantly more resources. He knows Medical Innovations can't compete on scale alone. But can out-maneuver them—evaluating new technology faster, implementing faster improvements, making decisions without navigating layers of red tape and organizational bureaucracy.

And the coolest-to-us part is the tool isn't finished. The next phase: make it customer-facing. Once the new website goes live, the plan is for customers to submit their own product lists and receive a quote directly—no back-and-forth, no wait time or no friction. The contact-to-quote window shrinks again, and the speedboat gets faster.

What good infrastructure actually saves you

Side note: Our first draft of this story was purely about growth and efficiency, but the transcript surfaced something worth including in this final version.

Medical Innovations operates in an industry where the stakes are high. They deal in lot numbers, an overwhelming amount of compliance requirements, product recalls, and (soon) pharmaceutical licensing across dozens of states. And now, the NetSuite infrastructure they implemented that helps them move fast is the also same infrastructure that keeps their customers safe.

Evan told a story that makes the point better than we can:

Without lot tracking, that conversation goes very differently. (And gets wayyyy more expensive, way faster.)

But Evan's framing wasn't about legal protection. It was simpler than that:

This goes way beyond simply infrastructure talk and says more about why Medical Innovations invests the way they do than any ROI calculation.

Technology doesn't create that advantage by itself, but it can amplify it.

What makes the Medical Innovations story interesting isn't that they're using NetSuite or building AI tools. Plenty of companies are doing both right now, with varying results and varying levels of enthusiasm from their finance departments.

What makes it interesting is why they're doing it, and that they started long before it was obvious they needed to.

This isn't a company chasing latest trends or just checking the "we have AI now" box. Every investment in infrastructure has been made with a specific vision in mind.

Evan mentioned that if the company needed to open a new warehouse location tomorrow, the software is already ready for it. Of course, the building would still need to be secured, and people would need to be hired. But those are the easy parts.

Growth has a habit of exposing every shortcut you've ever taken. But Medical Innovations made a different bet: build the infrastructure before it's needed, and when opportunity arrives, you spend your time saying yes instead of figuring out whether you can.  

For Medical Innovations, that preparation has already enabled a small team to compete far above its weight class. And based on the trajectory they're on, it’s proving to be one of the most important investments they've ever made.

Not bad for a company that started with a pallet in a living room.

By now, you may have infrastructure investment FOMO. The good news is that Anchor Group has a talented group of award-winning consultants that produces FOMO-relieving NetSuite work on the daily.

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