Going all out for health care: Paul Chopra, president and CEO of COHR Inc., admits to having a gung-ho attitude toward everything he does - whether its sports or business.

Whether it's playing table tennis or running a multimillion-dollar medical equipment service company, COHR Inc. CEO and President Paul Chopra will jump through just about any type of hoop to prove he's capable.

The table tennis test surfaced when Chopra was growing up in Calcutta. A teacher said he couldn't play the game because of symptoms he had from a mild case of polio.

"Table tennis became such a part of me that I had to be the best at it," Chopra recalls. It didn't take long before he could beat the teacher playing with either his left or right hand. The only person Chopra could not best at the game was his older brother.

"You could say because of the polio that I'm a very motivated individual," Chopra adds.

That experience also prompted him to tackle other competitive ventures.

"I entered every sport that I could. I played cricket and I played soccer. I entered annual (tournaments)," he says. "The motivation was, I didn't care that I was last, but I wanted to prove that I entered, that nothing was going to hold me back."

He has applied the same gung-ho attitude toward running COHR, a former affiliate of the Healthcare Association of Southern California, a hospital trade group. COHR is a group purchaser of medical supplies and equipment for hospitals and a refurbisher and repairer of medical equipment.

It was in difficult times when Chopra answered a blind newspaper ad in the L.A. Times and hired on as controller in 1983. By the time he had worked his way up to CFO in late 1987, the company was on the verge of insolvency: it was losing close to $2 million a year on revenues of less than $7 million. Chopra helped instigate a plan that quickly slashed about 20 percent of the staff and allowed it to refocus.

"We had too many consultants running around," he says. "They were costing us too much time, money and lawsuits."

After he became CEO in 1993, Chopra began making acquisitions of mom-and-pop suppliers - including 14 in the past two and a half years - and expanded the equipment-servicing business, which had the virtues of low cost and high margins. Nowadays, COHR's 25,000-square-foot equipment-servicing center is "bursting at the seams," according to Chopra.

In 1991, COHR was back in the black, having earned $798,000 on revenues of $14 million. In fiscal 1995 ended March 31 of last year, COHR netted $1.4 million on revenues of $43.7 million. For the first nine months of this fiscal year, net income was $1.4 million on revenues of $47.5 million.

"He's consistently had a high performance in terms of making the company grow, and almost every year he's beat revenue projections. With a guy like that on the helm, there's a great future ahead," says Frederick Meyer, a longtime COHR director and president of the Southern California Healthcare System, a Pasadena-based operator of several hospitals.

"He's substantially expanded the business, but did it in a very orderly, logical fashion," says Robert W. Kummer Jr., chairman and CEO of 1st Business Bank, which is COHR's bank. "We think he's done a marvelous job."

Wall Street apparently agrees with those assessments. When COHR split off from HASC last February and went public, its IPO price was $9 a share. But it came out at $11.75 when it began trading, primarily because demand for the issue outstripped availability about 10-to-1. It has since run up to $25 a share, yet is trading at a fairly reasonable 25 times earnings.

Chopra's initial stake is a moderate 57,000 shares, or 1.4 percent, but the quick runup made him a paper millionaire within just a few weeks. To make things sweeter, he holds options on another 230,000 shares that increased their tangible value from nothing at the start of trading to $4 million if exercised at the current price.

If Chopra has let such success go to his head, he has done a good job of hiding it. He only recently gave his first media interview and was nervous about how he would perform. Until the subject of conversation moved to COHR itself, Chopra spoke in a voice so soft that it was constantly at risk of being drowned out by his office air conditioning.

Even though his colleagues agree that Chopra has tremendous ambition, crack managerial instincts and worldliness (Chopra emigrated from India to Canada as an adolescent and then to the U.S. in his mid-20s), they also say that his M.O. is astonishingly low-key. Although Chopra's normal workday can extend to as long as 14 hours, his employees indicate his management style follows in the low-key vein: results-driven, but hands-off.

"I'd say he's best described as having an aura of quiet confidence," Meyer says. "He's always had a can-do type of approach, and I think he is very trusted by his colleagues."

"I would give Paul a trophy if I could," says Armando Lopez, executive director of the southwest network of hospitals and clinics for the Los Angeles County department of Health Services. Lopez has sat on HASC's board of directors for about eight years. "He has always been a highly professional person, highly respected for his expertise in finance, integrity and leadership."

Indeed, finance has been Chopra's metier; he began working at various accounting positions back in the mid-1960s as he put himself through McGill University at night. He racked up finance positions at the Canadian divisions of Gillette, Dominion Textiles, Rolls-Royce and Litton Industries even before he graduated.

"I wanted experience in various segments and within the accounting profession," Chopra says. "I wanted to get experience with cost accounting, financial planning, the treasurer functions and the controller functions."

Also, an entreprenurial strain runs in Chopra's family. After World War II his grandfather participated in the government's plan for mechanized farming. His farm suffered from what an M.B.A. might call an uneven performance: "He got all the equipment, but no spares for breakdowns." Chopra recalls. "Technicians were flying in from London all the time to fix the tractors."

After Chopra's grandfather died in the early 1950s, his father abandoned the farm and moved the family to Calcutta, where he ran a ball-bearing distributorship. In 1963, he moved the family to Montreal, where there were better business opportunities.

Chopra was manager of financial planning for Pepsi Cola in Montreal during the mid-1970s, when the rise of the populist, French-only movement in Quebec made him uncomfortable enough to emigrate to the U.S. He's served here in various positions, including international controller for Centronic Data Computer Corp. in New Hampshire, and did consulting for a number of years before he joined COHR.

RELATED ARTICLE: Snapshot

Paul Chopra, CEO, president, COHR Inc.

Age: 48

Native of: New Delhi, India

Resident of: La Mirada

Education: Management/Accounting Certificate, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Spouse: Seema