My company, Aardvark Mobile Tours, has been operating fleets of buses, trailers, and mobile showrooms for 14 years. We regularly produce more than 100 mobile tours annually in all 50 states and three other countries with a team of about 215 people. Let's just say things were rolling along smoothly.

And then, wham! The mother of all pileups came in the form of a coronavirus. My pit crew and I can build engaging experiences and provide all kinds of cures to keep our vehicles rolling, but we didn't know how to fix a pandemic. Our operation came to a screeching halt as our clients' plans ran out of road.

A couple weeks into the shutdown, I was reading the news on my phone and wondering how I was going to keep my company operating when I happened across an article about how Israel was converting shipping containers into mobile testing sites and placing them in neighborhoods around the country, essentially taking the tests to the people. The solution was light-years ahead of anything in the United States, where drive-thru sites were overwhelmed with long lines and didn't help people without vehicles. But it was also full of logistical challenges. Shipping containers are a pain to move around, require electricity and HVAC to be rigged up, and are almost impossible to level.

And then it hit me like a runaway truck – not one of ours, of course. By using our patented mobile vehicles, we could actually pull off Israel's idea better than the Israelis. I felt a surge of excitement and drove like Mario Andretti to the office.

I assembled our team of designers and engineers, pointed to one of our trucks, and told them we needed to convert it into a mobile COVID-19 testing facility that had high throughput, was safe for clinicians, and could be set up in less than 15 minutes to ensure it could hit multiple sites per day, which was something shipping containers couldn't do.

In about 20 minutes we whipped up a design that required relatively minor modifications to an existing truck. We then got to work making the reconfigurations, and in a couple days, we were set. One side of the vehicle folded out, and then a platform and steps dropped down. Patients could walk up to a sealed window that had arm holes and attached rubber gloves for administering a COVID test. We had created a self-contained mobile testing facility that could be deployed virtually anywhere. It was the literal definition of a turnkey solution.

We took our first truck to Florida, where the Department of Emergency Management immediately placed an order for an entire fleet. Since then, we've been pedal to the metal producing mobile-health vehicles in three plants across the United States. And now we're prepping them for vaccine administration. When the pandemic first hit, I thought it might be the end of the company. But with a bit of serendipity and a solid team of innovators, we wound up creating a new business segment that will continue rolling even after the pandemic.