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In the past 25 years, Kate and Tim Beevers have sold a million devices designed to save the lives of premature infants.
What inspired the McMinnville couple to invent and market a new line of neo-natal devices was the preventable death of a toddler.
The active 18-month-old was a patient in the intensive care unit where Kate was working as a nurse when he fell asleep face down. Flaps of skin closed off the hole in his throat through which he was breathing, following a tracheotomy.
Nurses managed to revive the child, and Kate fit a small plastic basket into his throat to keep it open and clear. But the unpatented and unproven gadget couldn't be sent home with the child, and he subsequently died of an obstructed breathing passage as a result.
Kate's work as a respiratory therapist, which she continued until 2009, and Tim's as an engineer, then with Hewlett-Packard, led them to refine, patent, manufacture and market the device as a Trach Guard.
Over the years, they've added four more tools to the line carried by their company, Beevers Manufacturing & Supply. They've given some of them whimsical names, such as Sticky Whiskers and Gators, but the purpose is always deadly serious - to save lives and ease suffering among infants and toddlers around the world.
The company recently moved into a new 5,000-square-foot building at 850 S.W. Booth Bend Road, next door to the Betty Lou's plant. It lies only about 800 yards from a site once hosting a Hewlett-Packard medical instruments facility but now home to an Albertson's shopping center.
Last year at this time, the company was getting by in a building about one-third the size, situated beside the Beevers' home on Baker Creek Road.
The new quarters previously housed the PLAN adoption agency, so the walls were adorned with a cascade of children's photos.
Kate asked that the photos be left up. She said they underscored the company motto, "It's all about the babies."
She told a reporter, "The pictures fit what we do, so we left them there."
In addition to looking to the future in acquiring expanded quarters, the Beevers are also looking to the future in assembling a management team to take over as they ease into less active operational roles. They have embarked on a seven-year transition plan.
They plan to hire an executive officer and a team of sales and development professionals. And they thought that would be difficult as long as they were still operating out of what amounted to their garage.
"I think we'd like to have our executive management team away from our house, and we knew we would have to move to do that," Kate said.
They aren't seeking to retire so much as they are to have the luxury of visiting emerging markets as company founders and ambassadors. The company has already established markets in much of North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, but pockets of great promise remain, including Korea and India.
The couple outsources production to a California company, the nearest capable of meeting exacting medical industry standards, including FDA certification.
It works with 15 distributors in the U.S. and Canada, and 20 more in Europe and Asia. They place Beevers products with hospitals and clinics.
The company's success has been rooted in the Beevers' search for solutions to challenges encountered in neonatal units, where nurses and doctors were often piecing together odds and ends to hold tubes in tiny noses or attach breathing tubes and other apparatus to babies' faces.
The company's Sticky Whiskers and Mini-Whiskers make attachments possible without tearing an infant's tender skin. Its Gator, decorated with bright jungle animals, holds tubes in an organized fashion to eliminate tangles.
Although their website is currently under renovation, readers seeking additional information are invited to pay a visit at www.beevers.net. When completed, it will include pictures of local families modeling Beevers equipment.
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