Utah Center in Residential Addiction Treatment Expansion

Addiction Treatment Industry Newswire

08/07/2013 – Steps Recovery Center, an addiction treatment drug rehab alcohol rehab center in Southwestern Utah, is planning a major residential expansion in a renovation of a large estate in Bloomington, which is considered a suburb of the town of St George located not far from the Arizona border. The estate is zoned for as many as eight beds but owner and founder Mike Jorgensen, whose brother Mark owns the Desert Solace sex addiction specialty shop also located in the area, says he needs a hard fought variance from local officials to bring the estate up to the 24 residential beds upon which the $1.1M expansion plan is based.

65-Bed Operation

If Jorgensen can get past the 150 people who showed up last week at a community meeting to oppose his Bloomington plan, 7-yr-old for-profit Steps Recovery will be an operation with 65 beds and annual revenues potentially in the $8M range. Currently, Steps Recovery is a $4M annual revenues operation that has about 40 beds in nearby Payson, UT that range in licensure all the way from ambulatory detox to residential and transitional living, with Jorgensen also having opened an outpatient program a little less than a year ago. At residential $9.5K a month – 90-day stays are encouraged with discounts – Jorgensen says his focus has been on serving clientele in the local market, eschewing the expensive national marketing done by the myriad private for-profit programs that populate the mountainous and highly scenic northern parts of the state of Utah. In the Payson area, there are a lot of centers and there has been a lot of expansion of capacity of late, so competition is fierce. In the southwestern part of the state where he is expanding, Jorgensen won’t have much competition so his local focused marketing strategy will have a highly advantageous risk/reward profile.

Utah Hub

Over the last 30 years, Utah has developed into a substantial addiction treatment, hub and a major focus of addictions entrepreneurial activity, with hundreds of programs dotted across the state and a heavy concentration of teen therapeutic schools and wilderness programs, some of which have developed highly controversial reputations for their alleged harsh behavior modification techniques.