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Article Excerpt
In this article ...
Meet Angie Hicks, founder of Angie's List that rates plumbers, painters and, yes, doctors.
Quick! What do plumbers, painters, movers and doctors have in common?
Give up?
They're all service providers, of course.
That's why they all rub shoulders in the Angie's List underwriting announcement on National Public Radio, which explains that Angie's List provides "first-hand consumer reviews on local service like plumbers, painters, movers and now doctors. Details at Angieslist.com."
Are plumbers, painters and movers happy about this? Maybe. Are doctors thrilled? Probably not so much. But Angie's List is all about helping consumers find high quality contractors and service companies, and as of April 2008, that includes health care providers.
Founder and chief marketing officer Angie Hicks has no problem adding doctors to plumbers, painters, movers and more than 300 other categories of service providers.
"The medical industry is no different from other industries in that consumers need independent information from other consumers that they can make decisions on," says Hicks.
This "ask your neighbor" business model caught on in a big way with the 650,000 consumers in 124 cities across the country who now subscribe to Angie's List. "Putting reliable, unbiased information on local companies at the fingertips of consumers in major cities across the country" is how the company describes its mission.
Fast growth
In 1995, Hicks started the business by going door to door in Columbus, Ohio, collecting ratings on local services from friends and neighbors. Today, Inc. magazine ranks Angie's List among the fastest growing privately held companies in the U.S., with $24 million in 2007 revenues and a respectable 100 percent annual growth rate.
The company has been written up in numerous local and national publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Kiplinger's Personal Finance and The Wall Street Journal. A recent $35 million infusion of venture capital "allows us to grow our member base faster and to invest more dollars in our medical offering," Hicks says. It was members, Hicks adds, who kept asking Angie's List to add health care providers.
Angie's List now includes dozens of health care provider categories, from "cardiology general" to "urology." Consumer members describe the work done, the approximate cost and whether they would "Hire Again." They rate price, quality, responsiveness, punctuality and professionalism on an A through F scale. An "Overall" letter grade is calculated exactly like a grade point average.
Members have unlimited space to describe their experience in their own words under "Member Comments" and may also choose to complete a more exhaustive battery of "Additional Questions Answered when completing this report."
Headquarters is in downtown Indianapolis, a little closer to home for the 35-year old Hicks, who graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, with a BS in economics before getting...
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