The COVID-19 pandemic could have been a disaster for a family-owned CPR training company, centered on face-to-face sessions amongst rooms full of strangers.
Richard and Allison Shok, who had moved to Roanoke in December 2020, had an idea for a workaround, though — an uncrewed room, monitored remotely. One person at a time could learn there, while practicing on a mannequin with sensors attached to a computer. The machine would measure every move and give corresponding instructions.
Their plan, based on technology that was used only in hospitals at the time, allowed for both safety and efficiency, they determined. With permission to use it in their business, Code One Training Solutions, they began to grow. The Shoks had 13 locations in 2020, and 55 by the time they joined RAMP, the Roanoke-based tech and life sciences accelerator, in spring 2022.
By mid-2026, Code One had opened its 112th location in the Eastern U.S. The company employs 43.
About 25,000 people per year are coming through their locations these days, and they’re finishing with life-saving skills.
“I really enjoy that the effort and work that we put into growing this business also results in more lives potentially being saved by rescuers,” Richard Shok said. That’s just like an incredible feeling, because it’s like being successful on more than one front.”
Lisa Garcia, who was RAMP’s director when the Shoks came through the accelerator with Code One, said that the company’s continued success, like that of international video conferencing app Zoom, indicates a post-pandemic paradigm shift. It has become acceptable, even commonplace, to work, train and meet remotely.
“There are some companies that have that when they see an obstacle, they see an opportunity,” said Garcia, who’s now a consultant for tech companies and municipalities. “And Code One is just one of those.
“They saw an obstacle. They saw an opportunity and they found a way forward that has really been a remarkable journey. I’ve just been so impressed, and … Richard and Allison, they’re just incredibly energetic, hardworking people.”
Growing and moving
The Shoks, both nurses, met while at the University of Connecticut. They started the company in 2007 after learning that there were no CPR class options in the area.
“So I was like, I’m an EMT, let me start to do classes on campus, so I started to do that for my nursing colleagues, fellow students, and it really kind of took off,” Richard Shok said.
He opened a location to teach there, and started to grow beyond Connecticut. The Shoks moved to Charleston, South Carolina, in 2013 and opened facilities there and in Savannah, Georgia, to go along with locations in the Northeast.
Then COVID hit.
“We were at home in Charleston, figuring out what do we want to do and how can we have our business survive, because as nurses we were not comfortable with the format of a traditional class of a bunch of people in a room together,” Allison Shok said. “We didn’t feel comfortable offering that as a solution.”
The couple had learned about a computer-driven system that grades the performance of students taking CPR courses. CPR Verification Stations was developed by RQI Partners, a joint venture between the American Heart Association and Laerdal, Richard Shok said.
Every compression and every breath is measured, which gives immediate feedback. Hospitals were using it for skills updating, and the Shoks thought it could work outside that setting. They asked RQI if they could use it for remote-learning clients.
“It took a lot of work and figuring out … We were the first company to be given permission to do so, but we also realized for it financially to make sense, we would have to scale it very quickly,” Allison Shok said.
Meanwhile, they were considering a move. Roanoke, where a friend had gotten married, entered the conversation.
“At the time we had two little ones, and we were like, you know, we want to be able to go outdoors, go on hikes, do cool things,” she said. “So we just visited a lot of areas, had no connections whatsoever, and ended up just taking a visit. … And we’re like, wow, this has everything that we want for our family, and just I think after two visits picked up and got an apartment, and then eventually bought a house.”
They had solved the shutdown problem and found a place they loved to live. They still needed to figure out how to grow beyond what Allison Shok called a “mom-and-pop shop.”
“I could see the opportunity that was available, but I was like, I don’t know what we need to do to level up,” she said. “Like I can see the need for it, I can see the market opportunity, but our only education is nursing. We never went to business school.”
They reached out to new friends who were entrepreneurs. One of them helped the Shoks get in touch with Kevin Bloomfield, who in 2014 had sold his company, NetVentures, a cloud-based accounting software platform for nonprofits. The same year, he founded Bloomfield Partners LLC, which invests in software and innovation companies.
He also was a RAMP founding board member.
“I became pretty passionate about both that project and the bigger tech ecosystem, and so I have this personal policy that if somebody calls me asking for advice, I’ll take young people out for coffee or a beer and listen to them and try to give whatever advice I can,” Bloomfield said.
Over coffee with the Shoks, Bloomfield found himself impressed with the couple, who had organically built momentum and revenue despite having no formal business education.
“I could tell that they had big eyes, wide open, and big ears to listen, and I thought they’d be perfect” for RAMP, which was developed with companies like theirs in mind, he said. At the same time, the Shoks were perfect for the Roanoke-Blacksburg region, he said.
Bloomfield remembered Lawnstarter, “almost like an Uber for lawn care,” which started in Blacksburg, then left Virginia to seek more funding.
“And it was kind of like the final straw saying, hey, we can’t just keep raising up these interesting little companies and having them leave the region, because when they leave the region for acceleration, they also raise capital out of the region,” he said. “They tend to create wealth if they’re successful out of the region. That money usually doesn’t come back.”
The RAMP spring cohort deadline was only a couple of days away, and the Shoks quickly filled out an application while Bloomfield put in a call to Garcia to tout them.
“I really think it was mutually beneficial,” Bloomfield said. “It was a great use case for why we put this resource in our region. They benefited from it. They helped the cohort, and it was just a win-win all the way around.”
At RAMP, they found support from Garcia and Mike Abbott, and a mentor in Mark Lucas, whose Mill Mountain Tech develops healthcare-centric products.
“It really kickstarted a lot for us,” Allison Shok said. “I think our circle before then was nurses and EMTs … but we were all of a sudden introduced to serial entrepreneurs and folks with real strategies and opinions and willing to kind of give mentorship.
“The Roanoke ecosystem has just been incredibly supportive,” with people “willing to sit down with you for an hour, two hours, three hours, longer and just talk with you and hash out ideas. They enjoy doing it. They want to see you succeed, so it’s been really, really great.”
The couple continues scouting new locations and wants 80% of the U.S. population to have access to their equipment within a 20-minute drive. The company has a mix of individual clients and businesses, including hospitals, home health and nursing providers, fire and EMS services, small doctors’ offices and dental practices, they said.
Basic Life Support classes, which is CPR for healthcare professionals, are the most popular and cost $125, Richard Shok said. Code One also trains non-professionals who want to learn how to administer CPR, use an automated external defibrillator or mitigate life-threatening bleeding.
Other companies have picked up on the idea, they said, but with millions of CPR training certificates issued every year, there is room for competition.
Meanwhile, the Shoks have found a home in Southwest Virginia and have grown their business to include automated external defibrillators, or AEDs.
“We’re really happy to be part of this community,” she said. “We didn’t move here because of what we thought was going to be the tech or business opportunity, but we are just so lucky that we landed in a community that really was supportive and continues to be so.”
Though they left RAMP, they stay in contact with the organization, attend events and meet new cohort members.
“It’s been great, awesome to be here,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
