After finishing graduate school at Roosevelt University, Dominic Fosco decided to take a crack at the family business and became purchasing director for he dad Richard's company, HealthWare Inc. in Oak Brook, Ill.

During his four-plus years with the company, Fosco was responsible for recruitment of medical equipment in all modalities and watched and learned from his father.

"In the early days, there was a lot of watching, a lot of leg work and I learned the business from the bottom up," he says. "I learned everything I could from my dad and then branched off on my own when I thought the time was right."

In August of 2008, Fosco started Redfish Medical Inc., in Lombard, Ill. and has led the company to be a leader in the purchase and sales of used, refurbished, demo and new medical equipment.

The company is a reseller of used, refurbished and new medical equipment and deals in a lot of dry cameras, CRs, ultrasound; and recently delved into supplies with dried film and other accessories.

As an experienced and driven professional with 10 years of purchasing and sales experience in the health care field, Fosco is currently growing Redfish in the way he helped other companies grow while working in the family business.

"I can tell you that we have grown cumulatively since I started the company," he says. "Most of it is due to developing really good relationships with new sources and new buyers. We have a pretty nice database of people we work with and their growth helps the growth of our own company."

With a company philosophy that puts the customer first, Fosco and his crew have established a great reputation in the industry, and were named a DOTmed 100 company for 2010.

"We pride ourselves on following up with people. Even if it's a business-to-business type deal, we believe in good customer service, a prompt return of phone calls and honesty. It goes a long way and makes people want to do business with you."

Reflecting on past successes, Fosco believes that expanding early on to work with international customers has been one of the company's best moves.

"We deal with a lot of hospitals and healthcare systems here in the Chicago area, as well as [smaller] customers, but we have had a big influx of international customers which has helped us as well," he says. "The international business ... has become a big part of us."

Redfish is housed in an office in the Western suburb of Chicago and they have a couple of storage facilities and a handful of dedicated employees. For now, Fosco isn't so sure he wants that aspect of the business to change.

"When it comes to expansion, we obviously plan to expand and have been growing in income, but we like that our overhead is fairly low," he says. "Right now it's working fine. Sometimes you can expand without changing the number of employees you have and we plan on expanding by more customer orders, not by expanding to a bigger office. We are planning to go full steam ahead and keep doing what we are doing."

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