Vision Quest: This Can-Do Indianapolis Company Is Growing its Business—and a Healthier, More Diverse Supply Chain

11.15.2024 - LISC Stories

Sudhansu (Sam) Yadav spent his early years in a rural village in northeast India. His father, a bright and diligent student, had earned a series of scholarships that ultimately carried him out of that home village all the way to the University of Missouri. After completing his PhD there and finding work, he brought his wife and small son to join him in St. Louis. Five-year-old Sam Yadav didn’t speak a word of English when he arrived in America. With playmates and TV as his teachers, he learned quickly. 

Today, Yadav and his wife Vanita are deeply rooted in Indianapolis, Indiana, where they raised two daughters and in 1997 founded Quest Safety Products, a minority-owned manufacturer and wholesale distributor of personal protective equipment that supplies major pharmaceutical and life sciences corporations across the country.  

Quest sets itself apart by meeting its “customer promise”—the right product, the right quantity, at the right time—with more than 99 percent accuracy. What’s more, as Quest’s CEO, Yadav is a committed job creator and investor in the ethnically diverse, low-income community just east of Indianapolis’s airport where his growing business recently built a new 58,000-square-foot headquarters and warehouse. “With our company,” he says, “it’s not just about growing the business, it’s about growing the future for us and our community. We want to make decisions that will outlast our lifetime.”  

These capabilities and values made Quest an ideal candidate for support from the Abbott-LISC Initiative to Support Diverse Businesses in Health. Launched in 2022, the $37.5 million initiative aims to develop a broader, more resilient supply chain in the healthcare industry, and at the same time promote the health and well-being of local communities. It does this by helping to scale small and diverse suppliers like Quest, including those that are owned by people in historically marginalized groups—people of color, women, and immigrants, for example. To date the initiative has supplied interest-free growth capital, affordable loans, and technical assistance to over 100 small businesses nationwide.  

Suppliers of products to the healthcare industry face daunting barriers to entry, with exacting requirements for regulatory compliance and robust logistics, notes LISC senior program officer Akilah Hicks. Gearing up to meet these demands is capital-intensive, and that disadvantages minority business owners, who typically start out with less personal wealth than white entrepreneurs, pay higher interest on loans, and receive a tiny percentage of all venture capital investments annually. “In the Abbott-LISC initiative,” says Hicks, “we’ve positioned ourselves as that flexible ‘friends and family’ capital source, offering a kind of support that hasn’t been available to many small and diverse-owned businesses.”

Yadav was well-prepared to launch Quest nearly 30 years ago—he had a background in Fortune 500 medical device sales and Vanita brought expertise as an accountant and MBA. But without a lot of wealth to fall back on, capitalizing the business was a heavy lift. He borrowed from two sources outside the couple’s own savings—a mezzanine fund that charged him nearly 20% interest, and a local bank that charged 4% above prime. “When you’re a small business and don’t have a lot of capital, banks look at you and say, ‘There's maybe, if we're lucky, a one-in-five chance that he's going to be successful,’” Yadav observes. “They’re trying to cover what could be a potential loss for them. And in our category of minority, immigrant, first-time business owners, it's seen as a high risk.” 

Despite these early challenges, Quest has been successful, steadily growing—and in fact doubling – revenue in just the last four years. Yadav believes he can double the business again in the next 36 months.  

The Abbott-LISC initiative is fueling this expansion with $250,000 in growth capital. It’s helping to pay for three software programs that together will dramatically boost efficiency and empower employees to work smarter (not harder). One digitizes warehouse operations, replacing paper purchase orders with wireless handheld devices workers can use to scan product and minimize searching and walking through the warehouse. Another is customer-relationship-management software that allows salespeople to centralize and learn from notes, contacts, and opportunities from the field. The third is pricing software that automates pricing updates in a highly dynamic market, and makes it easier to maintain margins and segment price points to gain business. 

Yadav wants to spread the wealth, sharing the benefits of Quest’s growth with its employees and community. In the next few years, he expects to increase Quest’s workforce from about 50 employees to 100. And with the company’s move in 2021 to its new facility in an area certified by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a historically underutilized business zone (HUBZone), Quest committed to hiring at least 35% of workers from economically distressed areas. The jobs come with good pay and benefits, to allow the workers to enjoy better health care and use the products developed by Quest’s life sciences customers. 

Yadav is even looking to invest in rehabbing or building housing that a warehouse worker could afford to rent or buy, a type of dwelling that’s in desperately short supply all around the country. “We're talking about the basic home,” he explains, “two to three bedrooms, two to three bathrooms, and a common area. A nice kitchen and a nice yard. I think we can create a nice living environment.” A church near Quest’s headquarters runs a residence for women in addiction rehab and their children; Quest has helped sponsor the residence, and is now exploring ways to help the church build a day care center so mothers can begin working and rebuilding their lives.  

Affordable housing and child care are key areas of expertise at LISC. Brandon Taylor, deputy director of LISC Indianapolis, says the Abbott-LISC initiative has fostered a valuable connection with Yadav that LISC Indy hopes to build on. “We have tools, both loans and grants, that we can bring to the table to support these projects,” says Taylor. 

In building Quest, Yadav has confronted stereotypes and obstacles. But he’s apt to emphasize the ways the community of Indianapolis—“an overgrown small town,” as he fondly puts it—has lifted him up along the way. When he was a young man laboring to get Quest into the healthcare market, for example, Yadav picked up the phone at 6 o’clock one evening, called Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant headquartered in Indianapolis, and asked to speak to the president. Impressed by his energy, the president’s secretary put him through to a vice president, inaugurating a mentorship that has steered Quest toward ever-greater opportunities. It was to fulfill a pressing need of Eli Lilly that Quest, in 2002, began the contract manufacturing of Quest-branded products that brings a higher profit margin than distribution. At the end of its current contract with Lilly, Quest will mark 27 years of continuous partnership.

These days, the Quest team uses as its virtual-meeting backdrop a picture of the new headquarters against a bright-blue Indiana sky dotted with fluffy clouds. It’s part of Yadav’s communications strategy. “When you introduce yourself as a minority business enterprise or HUBZone company,” he says, “the first thing they think of is ‘underfunded, doesn’t have the wherewithal to grow quickly with us, and may not have the processes in place that would support the demand of a large public health company.’ We want to show them this building is a representative of the building our customer is working in today: it’s modern, it’s clean, it’s highly efficient.” Yadav talks to customers not only about Quest’s ability to take on eight-figure agreements and track record of success but also about his own background and philosophy of caring for employees and community.  

That’s a story with enormous human appeal. “The support I've gotten from my customers has been amazing,” Yadav reports. “And I think part of it is I'm willing to open myself up and say, ‘Here's who I am and what I would like to create. Would you like to go on this journey with us?’ The number of people who have said yes is astounding.”