It was insane.
They pay nurses $20-$30 an hour, and sometimes they would have to send a nurse on the road to take something to another hospital. At that time, the area had no medical couriers. Even regular couriers were few and far between. They had nothing. My mom said, ‘I’m gonna fix that’.
She’d always helped my dad with his business, Larkin Painters. She’d never had something of her own—and she wanted to do something that was just hers.
She started the business out of her house, with herself and 3 other women. It just blew up with busy-ness. Soon she bought our current location, at 300 Ames in Downtown Saginaw.
The company grew bigger and bigger, and before long she had 40 employees and 20 company vehicles.
She was getting dry ice from a place called Polar Ice, in the early 2000’s. Sometimes they were out of ice, which meant she couldn’t pick up lab items that needed to be frozen. She would have to go all over the place to find dry ice, and it was getting to be a big problem. She was making enough revenue that she was like, ‘This is ridiculous. You know what, I’m going to get my own dry ice machine’.
When she got the dry ice machine, that part of the business took off big time. I had no idea how big of a deal dry is. People use it for shrinking metal, growing vegetables and marijuana. Cancer patients get cold caps that freeze the hair follicle and helps their hair not fall out during chemo treatments, and dry ice is used for that."
- Tara Crawford, CEO of EZ Pro Delivery Inc. & Larkins Dry Ice
