Why We Started
On Time NEMT

There’s a moment most of us have had — where life reminds you, without warning, that the ground beneath you isn’t as solid as you thought. For Bob Doerr, that moment arrived in the form of a single email.

After more than fifteen years of dedicated service in corporate America — long hours, relentless commitment, the kind of loyalty you can’t fake — Bob opened his inbox one morning to find a mass termination notice. No phone call. No conversation. No “thank you.” Just an email, sent to him and roughly a thousand others in identical positions, informing them their time was up. One keystroke. That was all it took to end fifteen years.

Bob and his longtime friend Mike Cynar sat down and had an honest conversation. Not just about what to do next, but about something deeper — the difference between riding someone else’s rat wheel and actually driving. Mike, who had built a successful eight-figure marketing agency, had long believed in the power of business ownership. Not just for the financial upside, but because owning a business means you get to decide what kind of company you run. You get to decide how you treat people.

Mike encouraged Bob to buy an existing business — something already generating revenue — rather than starting from scratch. The logic was simple: it’s far easier to scale something that’s already working than to build from nothing. So they started digging.

After a lot of searching, one opportunity stood out: a non-emergency medical transport company. NEMT is the business of getting people to and from medical appointments — dialysis patients, seniors, people with disabilities — those who depend on reliable transportation just to access basic healthcare. It was meaningful work, and the numbers made sense.

Mike and Bob did their due diligence. They ran the numbers, asked the hard questions, and eventually decided to move forward with the purchase. Then, at the last minute, the seller backed out.

A lesser pair might have walked away. Instead, they looked at each other and said: let’s build it ourselves.

Starting from scratch in a capital-intensive industry wasn’t going to be cheap, and they knew it. That’s when Mike and Bob brought in a third partner — David Dilday, the former owner of Supreme Foods, a highly successful food distribution business he had built, scaled, and eventually sold. David had seen what it takes to grow something from zero to something significant. He became an equal partner, and On Time NEMT had its founding team.

Here’s where most companies would have moved fast — leased vehicles, hired drivers, opened the doors, figured it out along the way. That’s not what these three did.

For three full months before officially launching, Mike, Bob, and David did something unusual: they went out and talked to the people they hoped to serve. Face-to-face. They sat across from facility coordinators, healthcare administrators, and patients’ families, and they asked a simple question: What’s broken?

The answers they got were almost hard to believe.

All three founders had the same reaction: Who runs a business this way? But the more they dug, the more they realized — this wasn’t the exception in the NEMT world. It was the norm. Two serial entrepreneurs and a customer service veteran recognized the same thing at the same time: this wasn’t a hard problem. It was a neglected one. And they knew exactly how to fix it.

When it came time to choose a name, David didn’t have to think long. The whole story — the problem they’d discovered, the promise they were making, the reason the business existed — came down to two words.

On Time.

They loved it immediately. They were also certain the domain was taken. It wasn’t. And so OntimeNEMT.com became home, and On Time NEMT officially launched in February 2026.

Not that it was smooth sailing from day one. Launching in this industry comes with surprises — DMV requirements, state regulations, compliance layers that nobody warns you about in advance. Perhaps the biggest shock for most people to hear: commercial insurance for a single transport vehicle runs approximately $1,300 a month. Per vehicle. The costs are real. But none of that changed the commitment.

The second part of the On Time NEMT story is still being written — and it may be the most exciting part.

Most providers in this space operate exactly like a ride-share app: pick up, drop off, move on. Mike, Bob, and David looked at that model and asked: What if we did something genuinely different every single time?

These aren’t marketing stunts. They’re expressions of something the three founders understand personally: the people riding in these vehicles are someone’s mother, someone’s father, someone’s family. They deserve to be treated that way.

Each of the three partners knows what it means to watch a loved one age, to navigate the healthcare system on their behalf, to hope they’re being treated with dignity. That experience isn’t what drove them to start this business — but it’s very much woven into how they intend to run it.

This is just the beginning. As they grow, the team plans to keep finding new ways to raise the bar — for their clients, their partners, and an industry long overdue for a change. The only rule: no more just picking you up and dropping you off. Not here. Not at On Time NEMT.