Estramonte needed to order equipment for his new lab and asked his staff what was needed for coronavirus testing, in case it came to the U.S. At the time, awareness of the coronavirus was starting to increase, though it was mostly isolated to China and, later, Italy. North Carolina approved the lab in January 2020. “I was like, ‘If somebody is going to get paid for it, we might as well do it.’” “It was a lot of STD testing,” he said, with a chuckle. In October 2019, he decided to open a lab sophisticated enough to run toxicology tests, instead of shipping them off to big testing companies like Labcorp or Quest Diagnostics. P.” - and it was financially close to breaking even.Ī gamble on testing: Still, it became clear to Estramonte that the company would need to look somewhere else to make money.
StarMed stuck with it, and by 2019, the medical clinic had a new director - Dr. “I remember saying to my a few times, ‘Maybe we should just get out of this and open up a bunch of Supercuts and manage those.’” “I lost a lot of money in getting this up and going,” he said. It was expensive, and his projections were off. In 2018, he took some of the profits from the chiropractic office, spent $3M on upfitting an old Chinese restaurant and hired two doctors and three physician assistants to open a clinic offering primary and urgent care. The chiropractic business was successful, and Estramonte saw a need to expand into medicine in underserved areas. Keith became Estramonte’s mentor, and Estramonte took over the Keith Clinics on Tuckaseegee and Central Avenue after Keith died in 2010, in addition to the one he owned in Sugar Creek. He moved to Charlotte in 2000 to join the Keith Clinic of Fletcher Keith, a well-known chiropractor who started in Charlotte in 1960. “I had no idea at the time that it would wind up being what it became.”Ī new venture’s rocky start: Estramonte, 46, went to college in Upstate New York, at SUNY-Oswego. “I remember saying, ‘If this comes over here, we need to find a way to be relevant to the community,” he said. In an interview Tuesday morning in his office off Tuckaseegee Road in west Charlotte, Estramonte marveled at the run his company has had, recalling a meeting with staff two years ago, as COVID was spreading in China. And lately, he’s been feeling the pains of a growing business, with some customers complaining about long waits for test results. As recently as a year ago, he had to take out a $1.5M loan to make payroll. His first medical clinic, in a converted Chinese restaurant off Freedom Drive in west Charlotte, was barely breaking even when COVID hit. There have been rough patches along the way. StarMed’s voyage from obscurity to Charlotte COVID testing colossus comes from a combination of fortunate timing, acting on hunches and embracing a risk-taking startup mentality - much of it emanating from its fast-moving CEO, Michael Estramonte, a chiropractor who moved here from New York a little more than 20 years ago.
It’s doing 40,000 COVID tests a week and employs nearly 2,000 people, up from just 100 two years ago. In fact, it’s a relative newcomer, an unlikely overnight sensation that has successfully waded into the heavily regulated healthcare industry and become a household name, with more than a dozen testing centers in Mecklenburg County. To see the lines of cars weaving through parking lots of StarMed testing centers all over Charlotte, it might be tempting to think that the company running the show is drawing on a deep reservoir of healthcare experience. Lessons from Abroad: How Europeans have tackled opioid addiction and what the U.S.Storm stories – NC Health News works with teens from SE North Carolina to tell their hurricane experiences.
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