Dispenser Of The Year
Each year, the association honors one of its members with the coveted THAA Dispenser of the Year Award. The award is given to the licensed dispenser who practices the highest standard of ethics when serving the hearing impaired of Texas. THAA is proud to announce its 2011 Dispenser of the Year is Mark Brumback, BC-HIS, ACA.
Mark was born in Lansing Michigan, and after spending 12 years of his childhood in Parma, Ohio, his family found its way to Houston, where he graduated from high school and took a job with Shell Oil Company to pay for his college tuition. If he worked the weekend shift - three 12-hour days - the company would pay for his education. And, as he later said, "I was determined to get the most expensive education they would pay for." And he did.
Mark graduated Rice University where he completed degrees in both Psychology and Sociology with an honors thesis in demographics. He continues to serve his alma mater today as an interviewer for the Rice admissions board.
By the late 1980's, he decided hearing aid dispensing was the career of the future. He received his license to dispense hearing aids from our State Licensing Committee in June of 1989. Two years later, he purchased his current company, Hearing Aid Express, and made a commitment to excel beyond the normal requirements for being a hearing aid dispenser. In 1991, he obtained our profession’s most coveted BC-HIS designation. Two years after that, he completed the Audioprosthology Education Program and the Hearing Conservation curriculums.
Three times during the 90's, his company was awarded "the 100 fastest growing companies in Houston" while maintaining the Better Business Bureau's platinum status for each individual office. By the end of the decade, his would be one of the largest hearing aid dispensing companies in the state, and would become one of only two dispensing practices in Texas to be registered with the FDA and the Texas Department of Health as a hearing aid manufacturer.
His service to the hearing aid profession is not limited just to dispensing. He is also an inventor. Three of his patented products are widely used within the industry, one of which is currently utilized by the Veterans Administration to help the brave men and women in our military, and one is used in the laboratory of every hearing aid manufacturer in the country.
In addition to his business accomplishments, Mark has volunteered countless hours to improving his profession and the lives of the less fortunate in other countries. To help his profession, he served on the THAA Board of Directors for five and a half years - two as the association's Treasurer. He also served on the THAA Sunset Committee for three years and helped develop the association's sunset goals that were ultimately adopted by the Legislature. But, it is his volunteer service to the hearing impaired of Latin American that defines his true commitment to his profession.
In 2002, he co-founded Hearing Aids for Latin America, a non-profit organization that has taken the gift of hearing to underprivileged children and young adults in such South American countries as Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. Since 2002, Mark has personally made over one thousand earmolds and dispensed thousands of hearing aids to young people all across South America. And in the last 10 years, the organization has given away over 5500 hearing aids and 60 thousand batteries to needy individuals in these countries.
"I didn't get into dispensing to push around paper," he says. "This work gets me back to what we all should be doing - just helping people to hear better."
Our congratulations to the THAA 2011 Dispenser of the Year - Mark Brumback.
