The Envoy America Method: How Treating Every Older Adult Like Your Own Parent Built a 30-State Business | Logistics Series

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is K.C. Kanaan, the co-founder and CEO of Envoy America. They provide tech-enabled transportation services that help older adults, patients, and individuals with disabilities get to where they need to go safely and comfortably. Their work improves patient throughput, reduces hospital readmissions, and lowers cost for healthcare partners. They have received awards for Best Aging Focused Startup and Operational Excellence in 2021, 2022, and 2023. K.C. brings over 30 years of experience in operations, sales, and marketing and is known for his people skills, creativity, and strategic thinking.

He holds an MBA in marketing and finance from the University of California Davis and completed executive education in strategic leadership at Harvard Business School. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdBAC Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription meds in a way that puts more money into your staff’s pockets and the companies too. As an example, one recent client with 450 employees boosted their net profits over $412,000 a year. Now results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the CEO of Envoy America, Casey Kanaan. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

K.C. Kanaan : It is my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me to be on your podcast.

Anthony Codispoti : All right, K.C. So you have a pretty interesting background, a lot of it in tech. You’ve worked at places like Intel, Seagate, and Bose. And when I say worked at, I mean, you held pretty key leadership roles. You were chief of staff at Intel, head of business development for Seagate, and head of sales for Bose in 32 countries. So before we talk about Envoy America, I want to hear a little bit about how some of those earlier roles helped to shape the skill sets that would later become important when you started your own business.

K.C. Kanaan : That’s a great question. Working for big companies, you learn how to focus on the key things that make a company run from you. Not only how you take care of the employees, who you hire, how you keep them happy, because if the employees are happy, they’re going to take care of the clients. They’re going to make them happy.

If the clients are happy, the clients are going to continue to come back again and again and tell their friends about their experience interacting with your company. So it’s the hiring, the managing of team members. The other example is something that I’ve learned at Intel. Intel calls it in Bose or management by objective where you set up your goals for the year. You break it down by quarters, by months, by weeks, and you execute to the goals. So you stay focused, you stay disciplined, we hold or we hold each other accountable. And those are some of just examples that I’ve learned working for big companies that I brought over to running our company and make sure that we do some of these things that can help us grow.

Anthony Codispoti : So that last program that you mentioned at Intel, sounds a lot like EOS traction that I hear a lot of small businesses talk about. Are there a lot of similarities there?

K.C. Kanaan : Absolutely. It’s very, very, very similar. I’ve read the book, the EOS and we’ve practiced some of it, happened to the gentleman next door to us in Phoenix, his office was the EOS consultant that ran the Phoenix office. So he gifted me the book and I’ve read it and we’ve worked with them to bring some of those teachings into our company.

Anthony Codispoti : You mentioned one of the other things that you learned working for some of these large corporations is the importance of hiring good people, keeping them happy when you’ve got them there. Can you maybe give some specific examples of things that you have tried and found success with when it comes to both the recruiting side of things as well as the retention retaining side of things?

K.C. Kanaan : Besides learning this at the big companies that I worked for, it’s also some of the things that great companies like Southwest Airlines or Starbucks have done, which is you take care of your employees, you make sure that they’re happy and it starts with explaining the why behind what you do. So in our case, serving older adults and patients that need more than just a ride. When we recruit drivers or staff, we work with them on the why you need to take your time when you’re serving an older adult. The clients that we serve, sometimes they’re hard of hearing, sometimes they’re dealing with a medical condition that requires them to walk slow, they’ve lost their independence, they’ve lost a spouse and they need more than just somebody that’s going to take them from here to there. They need somebody that’s going to be like a family member, a son or daughter to help them every step of the way. So explaining the why again and again and reiterating it when we, before we hire somebody during the orientation, during regular updates on here are the things that you do from and when you’re helping somebody with their seat belt, an older adult, the last thing an older adult or anybody wants is somebody touching them when you’re helping with a seat belt.

So is there a better way to do it? And we teach our driver companions on how to do it or why it’s critical to call the night before to confirm that you’re still, you’re the one who is picking them up because that puts them at ease. So it’s explaining the why and everything that we do to make sure that our team members understand it and by doing this you’re putting the clients at ease, you’re helping them, you’re respecting their space, their dignity and that makes them happy and that allows us to deliver better service to them.

Anthony Codispoti : So it sounds like you’re not just hiring anybody that’s got a driver’s license, you’re looking for a particular type of personality, somebody who’s patient, somebody who’s calm and caring, and you’re also enabling those folks with the best set of tools possible by giving those very specific instructions. Hey, make sure you call the night before when you’re putting the seat belt on. This isn’t like putting the seat belt on your kid or your grandpa, they don’t know you so don’t touch them. Here’s the correct way to do it. Just lots of attention to details and these little things that make a big difference.

K.C. Kanaan : You’re absolutely right, Anthony. It’s small things that make the big things happen. When we hire people or we interview, we lead with one question, what prompted you to apply? There are a lot of good people in the world, but we’re looking for a specific type of individual that wants to contribute and help. So by the way they answer the question, what prompted you to apply, if they talk about I get what you do, I get my parents lost their ability to drive and they’ve struggled and that’s something that I understand or my neighbor is an older gentleman and he needed help. So the way they answer that question, if it’s service oriented versus I saw that you’re paying $22, $25 per hour and that’s why I applied is probably not probably it’s not the right person for us. So we take the time to understand why they want to work for us and if what they want to do and achieve is aligned with how we serve our clients.

Anthony Codispoti : So on the surface, initially it feels like a pretty strong pivot to go from your technology background into the transportation business. Now before we actually get into talking about how tech is actually a major lever in Envoy America, can you explain how the idea to start the company came about?

K.C. Kanaan : Absolutely. So in my family there are four kids including me, so I have three siblings and myself. Parents lived in Northern California, out of the four of us, my sister lived close to them, full time she had a full-time job and teenage daughters and it was at a time when our parents were dealing with medical conditions and stopped driving and they needed to get to medical appointments, the grocery store, hair salon, you name it, just a normal life. So we’ve tried and helped them try everything that you can think of from taxis, Uber, when Uber was still new, left volunteers, but nothing worked, nothing. They, for an older person in their 80s, trying to deal with technology, it wasn’t as easy.

How do you upgrade the software and how do you do this and do location and things like this? So we’ve seen over a number of years how much they’ve struggled to the point where they were giving up on, I don’t want to go to the doctor, I just don’t want to do anything. And they’re individuals or in my case, our parents, they’ve been driving for 60 plus years doing the things that they wanted to do on their own and now they can’t do it and they have to rely on others and unfortunately the services, the transportation services, they’re not designed with older people in mind. They’re designed to take you from here to there and not to help you every step of the way, not to walk up to your door or go inside the grocery store with you. So we’ve seen them struggle for a few years until we had this aha moment that this problem is bigger than my family and I.

Anthony Codispoti : I weren’t the only ones in the world having this issue.

K.C. Kanaan : No, there’s millions and millions of people like my own parents and we decided to take the plunge and do something about it, solve this problem. And here we are 10 years later.

Anthony Codispoti : And so how did you first get started considering that your background really wasn’t in transportation?

K.C. Kanaan : It wasn’t. How did we start? My co-founder and I met at Intel and we were friends and he was dealing with the same exact challenge. Andy lived in the Phoenix area.

He has one sister that lived in New York, another sister that lived in Israel and his parents lived in Baltimore and he was dealing with the same challenges and we’ve always talked to each other after we left Intel. So we both had this aha moment at the same time. Like we’ve tried everything. If we’re people with our background and can’t find a solution, there has to be a way to solve this problem.

So that’s how we got into it. We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know the difference between a senior living community or a facility.

I remember the first time went to meet with a lady. Her name is Karen Barna, the president of the Arizona Senior Living Association and I said, how many facilities do you have? And she looked at me and said, we don’t call them facilities. Facilities is like a jail or we call them communities because it’s a community.

This is where older people, older adults live. And then she added, you don’t come from this industry. It’s like, no, I don’t. She said, you better learn more about it. So I started learning and talking to anybody who’s willing to talk to me, read books and just learn and continue to learn to figure out how we solve this problem.

Anthony Codispoti : And so how did you get your very first client?

K.C. Kanaan : How did I get our first client? We wrote a press release. There was no chat, GPT, 10 years ago or things like this. Just wrote a press release and send it to every newspaper, small and large TV stations in the Phoenix area. Before that, we went and knocked on doors, as you probably know, and your listeners know, Phoenix, same with Florida. There’s a lot of older adults that live here. So every morning, I would have a list of 50 addresses in Sun City, Arizona or Peoria and just go knock on doors and try to give flyers that we created, go to senior citizens centers to try to talk to older adults, go to Denny’s and put flyers on windows because we thought, okay, older adults go to Denny’s at four o’clock.

Nothing worked until one of the newspapers, we were lucky to the story on us. They called it Uber for seniors. Until our surprise, we started getting calls from senior living communities and healthcare organizations saying, can you help us like help you do what? I mean, all of our focus has been

Anthony Codispoti : on you were going, you were trying to go direct to the end user business to consumer.

K.C. Kanaan : Because that’s the problem we were trying to solve for our own family. So and that’s when we realized that instead of going to try to get consumers who are trained not to talk to strangers or open the door. I mean, Anthony, I had dogs chasing me here in June, July in Phoenix on dress like this going and knocking on doors.

And people slamming doors in my face is like, I’m not I’m going to keep doing it. And it didn’t work. What worked is the newspaper Arizona Republic doing a story on us. And we started getting calls to our surprise from senior living communities, healthcare organizations, based organizations saying, can you help us? I’m like, sure, we can help you not knowing if we can or not. But we did.

Anthony Codispoti : And so clearly, I mean, looking back now, it makes a lot of sense, right, especially when you can sign up like a senior care facility that can provide you with a lot more business than you know, one person in a house, you know, in the street in Phoenix could do. But clearly, they had there there are other services that the hospital was working with to provide transportation. What was the problem that they were really trying to resolve when they called you? They saw this story in the paper, they’re like, Oh, maybe this guy can fix what?

K.C. Kanaan : So the first call from a healthcare organization came from the American Cancer Society. They have a program it’s called Road to Recovery. Any cancer patient can call them. And they would provide transportation to and from cancer treatment medical appointments. They rely on volunteers to do this. And about 25 30% of the patients that they can’t find volunteers because maybe it’s six o’clock in the morning or the travel, you know, you’re talking 20 30 miles, volunteers are not going to do things like this. So they read about us and said, Can you help us?

And like, Sure, we can help you. And that’s how we started serving them. It was a pilot for one month. And after three days, they call and said, We’re gonna, we’re gonna go from being a pilot into know we want to do this after three days, after three days, because their patients were so happy. And the part of the reason why they were happy, things I described earlier, call the night before to put them at ease that we’re going to pick them up.

When we went to their house, we were on time, and we walked to the door versus them standing at the curb waiting for us like what other companies do. When we got to the hospital, we would walk them inside the hospital. And depending on the medical appointment, if this was radiation 15 20 minutes, we would stay with them.

So the minute they’re done, the minute we can take them home, or if they need to go from this appointment to go to the lab or do another thing, pharmacy, we would take them. And if you compare this to how the industry works, now they, they don’t do any of this. They don’t call the night before.

They don’t walk you inside the building. They don’t help you when you’re done, especially if you’re doing cancer treatment, and you’re tired, and, and so you have to call them when you’re done and wait. Sometimes it might be an hour. Sometimes it could be two hours before they come back, and you’re sitting after a radiation. So that’s how it started going from being a pilot with the American Cancer Society into into into a

Anthony Codispoti : guys were just providing a much higher level of service than anybody that was out there.

K.C. Kanaan : We continue to do that. The two other things happened related to healthcare. One of the nurses at Mayo and Phoenix was talking to the patient and said that’s so nice that your daughter can bring you every day and stay with you and radiation normally is five days a week, six weeks. She said it’s not my daughter.

This is my envoy is like who what’s envoy. So they started doing research on us. We didn’t have any website or anything. They called and said, can you talk to us? So I showed up and said, we think you can help us to help you with what readmission rate is like what is readmission rate? And just that didn’t pretend I know what readmission rate is. They explained that when a patient is readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, that has a negative impact on not just the patient, but the hospital. And because of our model walking the patient and treating them just just providing higher level of care, Mayo thought that would help Mayo deliver better care to the patients. So they started using us and this was nine years ago and they continued to use us.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s probably more consistency too, right? If they’re having trouble getting transportation, maybe they miss an appointment here or there and that’s not good. That probably lends to that readmission. When you guys are there every day on time, helping them get to and from, that probably plays a big part too.

K.C. Kanaan : And some examples with patients that were going through treatment, if the driver is wearing perfume after shave, that can have an impact on the patients because of their immunity.

Anthony Codispoti : So having the ability to call us and communicate these things to us and us answering the phone and accommodating the request, that went a long, long way to help deliver care to that patient. So we did a great job for the American Cancer Society. They said, you’ve done a good job here in Phoenix. Can you go to Tucson? I was like, sure, we’ll go to Tucson. We were just in Phoenix. So we went to Tucson. We did a great job for them or our team did a great job for them and said, you’ve done a good job consistent in Phoenix, do you go to Seattle? I went to Seattle and then I said, can you go to Georgia?

Can you go to Houston? And that’s how we started expanding. It was just doing a good job serving the clients. That probably cut down quite a bit on the sales and marketing that you had to do.

K.C. Kanaan : So you’ll be surprised to hear that we do not have and haven’t had any sales people working for the company. It’s been primarily word of mouth. I mentioned we’ve done press releases. That’s marketing. So we’ve done a lot of this. It worked for us in Phoenix and we thought if it worked in Phoenix, it’s going to work somewhere else. So whenever we have a good story, we talk about it and do a press release that we would write and do a white paper and basically say, don’t take my word for it that we do a good job. Here’s what the folks at the American Cancer Society said or here’s the folks at this senior learning community, let them share their experiences with us.

Anthony Codispoti : So how many locations are you in? Call it geographic market, city, states, however you want to define it.

K.C. Kanaan : We’ve been blessed to grow to 30 states, roughly 300 cities, large and small, rural and metro areas. And it’s all been word of mouth, the partners that we work with. And most of our business is through corporate relationships like the American Cancer Society or different senior learning communities that say similar to American Cancer Society, you’ve done a good job here. Can you go there? And that’s so we’re roughly 300 cities.

Anthony Codispoti : So is there any of your business that looks like what you thought it would be originally, where it’s relationships directly with a senior citizen who needs that transportation or is it all the relationships with a hospital, skilled nursing facility, senior care community?

K.C. Kanaan : So I would say more than 95% is business to business. However, when we work for a senior living community and we’re serving the community and the residents that live there, they get to know us and they would start calling us to maybe take them to visit their family for their grandkids graduation or wedding or Thanksgiving dinner.

So there is the business to consumer relationship, but it’s a small percentage and it always comes through a relationship that we have with either hospital or senior living community or faith based organization.

Anthony Codispoti : This is really cool. I want to get to the even cooler part in my mind as a tech guy. Talk about how you guys really use technology as a lever for efficiency and improved service.

K.C. Kanaan : The way I’ll answer this by giving you an example, the way the industry works is especially for working with a hospital, they’re social workers, they that their staff would call and say, Mrs. Smith needs to come for her appointment. Here’s where she lives, her home address, here’s the hospital’s address appointment is at 10 o’clock and when she’s done, she’ll call you so you can you can you can take her home. What we’ve done at the beginning, we were just trying to figure out okay, what time do we need to pick her up, do we keep the driver, we don’t keep the driver with her, till we like you can you can use technology to solve this, you can you can put the addresses here and with with Google Maps or any map pop software, you can you can say if she needs to be there at 10 o’clock on Tuesday, what time do I need to pick her up from from her home? So we automated this process. We automated, how long do we is the appointment? So we we leverage AI to figure out based on the addresses, what type of appointment is this, it searches, is this a radiation clinic or is this a kidney dialysis center where normally it’s four and a half to five hours, it searches our database, we have millions of data points now to say okay, did we serve this lady before and if we did, how long did it take? It looks at the the history, does she use a mobility device like a walker or a transfer wheelchair and if it does, it adds more time to when do we pick her up, it looks at where do we park, one example that I like to use is in Chicago, Sixth Michigan Avenue, we had a client, there’s no parking on Sixth Michigan Avenue, so what do you do and how do you figure out where do you park and where do you park?

Anthony Codispoti : So your software is feeding this information it’s already sort of doing that research and it’s like oh there’s a parking deck, you know, half a block down the street kind of a thing, that’s where you should go.

K.C. Kanaan : Right and and then when you get to the hospital, where do you park? So you give yourself enough time to get the patient if this is a medical appointment to their destination on time. You said it a few minutes ago, people miss appointments, people are late to their appointments, if they’re late it’s not like the doctor is just going to wait for them till they show up. Everything needs to be organized and it needs to be done on time but when you take them home too, the last thing an older adult or a patient wants to do is call somebody and wait and wait and wait. These are older people that are dealing with some of them medical, serious medical conditions and and you got to take care of them. And everything, it has a lot of impact not just on the patients and the older adults but the businesses. So picture this is a five o’clock appointment or the appointment it’s supposed to end at five o’clock. If you don’t show up on time, what is that patient going to do?

Wait outside when it’s 100 degrees in Phoenix or minus 20 in Chicago or somewhere in the Midwest in Minnesota. So it’s all these small things that we’ve solved through technology to be able to deliver great service to not just the patients but the businesses that serve these patients. You know a hospital is like any other business. They care about getting patients in and continuing to get patients. They get reimbursed some of the the the costs based on the patient satisfaction rating. We impact this.

The cost to them if they have to pay overtime to their staff to wait for the patient for somebody to come in and take care of them. So there’s there’s a lot of small things and what I’ve described technology is just a small element in it. We integrate with our clients so when they’re ready to make reservations and they all use technology, the hospitals, we integrate with them so that they don’t need to call or email and some people still fax. We don’t have a fax machine but I mean it’s

Anthony Codispoti : it’s it’s we’re talking about a couple different things here which is really interesting. We’re talking about you know I know that one of your core values is this idea of compassionate transportation right. So yeah we don’t want to leave the the person waiting out you know in 100 degree heat in Phoenix. We don’t want somebody sitting around in you know minus 20 in Chicago but there’s also you know sort of the the business, the cost savings aspect for your core client you know the hospital, the senior living communities. There’s there’s a lot of things that you guys are doing it sounds like to help them to reduce costs to I mean is there an element here where like you know you’re helping to move people along more quickly so that frees up more space in hospital bed is that a thing?

K.C. Kanaan : Absolutely and you bring up a great point. If I take a step back not coming from the transportation industry was a benefit to me and and our team because it’s like why are you doing things this way like there has to be a different way of doing things. So if you look at any hospital they normally discharge patients around 10 o’clock or so when the doctor comes in and they do their rounds and they determine yep this patient is ready to be discharged and if this patient needs to go to a rehab center because they’ve had knee replacement or hip replacement or the recovering from from a heart attack they need a specialty vehicle to take them a wheelchair accessible vehicles to take them wherever they need to.

to go. Now, no one has these wheelchair accessible vehicles just sitting around. I mean, we’re talking about 70, 60 to $80,000 vehicle. Any business that owns and operates these vehicles, they want them moving.

Otherwise, you’re not making money. So when the hospital makes the decision to discharge a patient and they know where that patient is going, they start making phone calls to different transportation companies to say, can you send a vehicle to take so-and-so to the skilled nursing facility or the transitional care unit? And most companies that are in this space, they’re small operators. They have a few vehicles, a handful of vehicles. So normally, it’s a family member that’s answering the phone and at the same time is driving. So the response is, yep, we can do this.

We’ll get to you whenever we can. And now the patient is still sitting in the bed. The nursing staff are still dealing with the patient. They’re not making money because insurance pays based on the number, based on whatever code that procedure is. And if you’ve met the number of days to get reimbursed and you’re not leaving, you’re not making money and you can’t admit somebody new into the hospital. So it’s costing you money. It’s causing friction into your entire system because now your nursing staff and discharge nurses and social workers are chasing after transportation companies to figure out when is somebody coming in to take that patient to their next place. And that system is so broken. They refer to it as the patient throughput. It’s discharged so you can admit a new patient and that system is so broken. Now for us, just looking at it, it’s like, why are you doing it this way?

Anthony Codispoti : There has to be a completely fresh perspective to bring. Yeah.

K.C. Kanaan : So we came up with a solution, which is easy to implement, but it’s also hard to implement, which is allocate a vehicle to the hospital and vehicle and a driver, obviously. In the minute they make the decision to discharge a patient, the hospital staff can either communicate with us electronically or the driver is sitting on site. The driver will go get the patient and take him wherever they need to go. So instead of waiting hours, it’s done in minutes. And it’s, you know, just the return on investment is beyond.

Anthony Codispoti : I bet these hospitals love you guys.

K.C. Kanaan : The ones that give us the time of the day to listen to how we solve this problem, their response is, where have you been? And why can we do this? Because we’re fortunate now to be large enough to have a client care team, a dispatch team with invested in technology to be able to respond to our partners real quick. We have the resources to put vehicles at hospitals versus, versus I’ll respond to it whenever I can.

The incentives for a transportation company, there’s no disadvantage for a transportation company to, if they show up on time, or they show up three, four hours, there’s no penalties. They’re still making money. And they’re making a ton of money versus, versus if you look at it from the hospital standpoint, it’s costing them money. And they’re not making money for us. They subscribe to our service. We allocate a vehicle. And it’s, it’s smooth.

Anthony Codispoti : So depending on the size of the hospital that you’re working with, there’s minimum of one vehicle dedicated to them. Perhaps there’s more depending on, you know, if they’ve got more patients that they’re moving. So it’s not like a, they just call you like when they need you kind of a thing so that you can really help with that patient throughput and, you know, be there to deliver the best service to their clientele, to their patients, you have to have somebody and their vehicle dedicated on site.

K.C. Kanaan : Absolutely. Absolutely. We’re, we, we are in a position and have been doing this for a long time, allocate a vehicle and a driver in this vehicle can serve somebody that’s in a wheelchair, somebody that is in a stretcher or somebody who’s ambulatory.

And the model is very, very simple. Sometimes what I describe it, I say, we’re like Southwest before Southwest changed how they do things. We don’t charge more if somebody is in a using an oxygen tank or somebody has their suitcases and they’re, they, you know, they need help, they, or somebody’s bariatric. We, we don’t charge more. Where other companies they start adding up before you know it, you’re paying two to three as a hospital or, or a patient just or insurance company for this. We, it’s transparent, one price and will serve you and will serve you faster than anybody else and better than anybody else.

Anthony Codispoti : What’s it look like for envoy when you go into a new geographical location? So I have to imagine that you need some sort of minimum capacity in order for it to make economic sense for you.

K.C. Kanaan : So every expansion that we’ve had, we, we went in with an existing client or a client that says, I would, we’re going to do business together. So we have the time to hire and train and, and, and launch the geography. We know how many vehicles we need, how many drivers, the type of vehicles that we need. If it’s ambulatory versus wheelchair accessible vehicle, and we plan it, then we, we, we launch when we launch into new geography, we always bring experienced drivers to, from different areas to go into that geography. Cause we want to head it out of the park on day one. The last thing we want to do is fail somebody because if we fail somebody recovering from that,

Anthony Codispoti : then you got to put your best foot forward. So you’re bringing in experienced drivers from a different area. So they can show the, show the client, Hey, this is how we do things. And I’m guessing they’re probably helping to train some of those first drivers that are local to that area.

K.C. Kanaan : They, they absolutely, they type two roles. One is interviewing and training the new team members. And the other one obviously is to deliver the service. It’s the technology inside the vehicle from a simple as the type of wheelchair that we use. It’s called Broda chair. That Broda chair, the investment we make in every chair is about seven to $8,000. But that chair can be managed by one person versus two. It can be used as a wheelchair. It can lay flat. It can incline, decline.

It’s easy to maneuver. We have inside the vehicle, we have a winch. So when just picture a boat on a trailer and you’re pulling the boat, you don’t want to be pushing the boat. You, you want, you want it done using a winch.

And we have winches inside the vehicle. So when somebody is, is, is bariatric, you don’t want the driver to be pushing 300, 350 pound chair and, and patient. So this way we medicate the risk injuries, workers, calm, and your, this is your business. So we control our costs and we can pass on the savings to our clients by doing things differently. The vehicles are equipped with dash cams, telematics. It’s all technology that ties you mean by telematics.

Anthony Codispoti : Casey, you use an example. Yeah, we similar to like Uber and Lyft. When you order an Uber, you know where the car is, when the car is moving, how far the car is, but also one step further is somebody on the phone using their phone and driving.

We get notifications when that happens. Are they taking hard turns, heartbreaking acceleration, all these things are, are monitored, telematics we, we, we, between what we’ve developed and using companies like Azuga on the dash cams, we monitor what our drivers are doing. And this way we medicate the risk for, for, for our clients.

If somebody is driving safely and we get a safety score on every driver after every trip, we praise them, we recognize them, we thank them for, for doing a great job. And the ones that need coaching, we coach them up and coach them up.

Anthony Codispoti : I was going to say, this sounds like, there’s probably some people who push back a little bit, oh big brother, you know, but, but I mean, you guys, when you get right down to the root level of it, you’re really just interested in improving the level of customer care. And so if you find an opportunity to coach somebody up, say, hey, you did this, this, here’s a better way to do it, it just benefits everybody.

K.C. Kanaan : Absolutely. One of the services we offer for our clients, and this is more on the senior living is we, we offer full management. So some senior, a lot of senior living communities, they have their own fleet, and they have their own drivers, employees of the company. But they don’t have the experience, the expertise to manage an in house fleet.

So one of the services that we offer as we bring the technology, the know how to, to help you manage your fleet, everything from compliance to maintenance to the things that I’ve described, are they speeding, are they, you know, doing a good job? Just last Friday, one of our drivers that the client that we, the senior living community that we’re serving, we got notified that he was going 45 miles per hour in a 25 mile zone. There’s a resident sitting in the front, and the driver was not wearing a seat belt. Now, this happens every now and then, but God forbid there’s an accident, who’s going to get in trouble?

One, you’re going to injure the person, the old, there’s a chance you’re going to injure the older adult, the resident. And then people these days are happy suing each other. So if the driver caused the accident, somebody’s going to get sued. And we mitigate this, we reduce the chances of doing things that can cause harm to everybody, including our business partner.

Anthony Codispoti : Casey, I’d like to shift gears and talk about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome in your life, whether it’s something personal or professional. How did you get through it? And what did you learn?

K.C. Kanaan : Yeah, we’re so weird. How much time do we have? There’s a lot of things that, you know, mistakes that I’ve made and learned from these mistakes. One of them is, you know, we grew with one of our corporate clients, and we’ve been serving them since 2017 and continue to grow with them and grow and expand to many states. And everybody from the board members and people that my mentors, like you have most of your eggs in one basket, you need to find new clients.

It was like, we’re growing and look at all the growth. Unfortunately, that corporate client was acquired. The company that acquired them did not see the same value in what we brought to them as the company that we were doing business with. And it got to a point where they were putting pressure on us to reduce prices and change how we do things. And there was a race to the bottom and we’ve decided to walk away from that business.

And this happened in January this year. It was not an easy decision to walk away from one of our largest clients and having to reduce, basically eliminate tens of jobs, if not hundreds of jobs, and having to to impact people’s livelihood. But this was a big mistake, a challenge that I had to deal with. It was my mistake for not listening and not taking the advice that our board was giving me. And it was a lesson. That’s brutal.

Anthony Codispoti : And if I’m sort of connecting the dots here, you’re saying, you know, it’s a long time client that you’ve been growing with, they got acquired. So the people coming in didn’t have visibility into what it looked like before you guys had come in with this solution. They probably just looked and saw you as a line item.

And they were like, oh, here’s a place where we can reduce costs, not understanding the full value of what it is that you’re providing. Do you think maybe this is a question you don’t even want to entertain? But do you think that after a period of time, after you’re gone, that they’re going to realize sort of what they’re missing and come back? Or you just kind of like, we have moved on to other things now?

K.C. Kanaan : I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ll ever do business together, if they will ever come back to us. But this was a blessing in disguise for us. Let’s hear it. It was a blessing in disguise because it made us, it was a wake up call that when we started this company, we were focused on bringing tremendous value. And we continued to provide tremendous value to our clients and the people that are part of our corporate clients. But with all the growth, we forgot about some of these things.

We’ve always done a good job for our clients. But it was more, now let’s grow, grow, grow. It was growth versus why are we growing and how can we continue to do the things that we wanted to do? It was a blessing in disguise. It made us realize we need to go back to the hospitals. We need to be a little bit more proactive in reaching out to them.

We need to just go back to our roots and focus on what made us great in the past and continue to keep that in the back of our mind as we rebuild the company.

Anthony Codispoti : And so that was earlier this year, recording this in June of 25. You migrated away from this client in January of this year? January 8th to be exact. Yeah, of course, you’re going to remember that day for a long time. The first days of my life.

How were things going since then? Obviously, there’s incredible pain. You’ve got to pull off a lot of really difficult band-aids right away in terms of letting people go, kind of right-sizing the ship, changing directions. Now you’re sort of six months into this. You’ve got to paint a picture for us today.

K.C. Kanaan : Again, I go back to, we’ve been blessed. We’ve signed new clients in the healthcare system, the hospital system, skilled nursing facilities, senior living communities that the, if we look at some of the key performance indicators, the average revenue per trip is 3x what it was prior to January 8th. Whoa.

Gross margin is about 15 points higher. It took about six to eight weeks to figure out, okay, what do we do? What do we need to do? And how do we leverage the relationships that we’ve had and go deeper with the existing clients that know us and trust us to expand, go a little bit wider with them and deeper. So we’ve signed up a lot of new clients. There’s going to be, or we’ve made some announcements last week and about two new relationships that we have.

We’ll make more this week. These are large organizations that have problems that we can solve, the patient throughput problem, if it’s a hospital. We didn’t talk about senior living communities, but with the hospital, we’ve had a major problem for them, which is reduce their capital and operating expenses, eliminate the capital expenditure, which every community they have.

Anthony Codispoti : Meaning that they don’t need to have their own transportation vehicle anymore.

K.C. Kanaan : Right. So when they, every vehicle they buy a bus, it costs between 100,000 to 140,000. They don’t need to do this with, if they work with us, they don’t need to spend money to operate the vehicles from gas, insurance, maintenance, registration. They don’t need to worry about hiring staff and train them and background screening because we do all of this. They don’t need to worry about the insurance, the risk if their drivers are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

So with senior living communities, we bring a lot of benefits from the help them deliver better care to the residents that live there, help them differentiate themselves, help them reduce their cost, help mitigate their risk, and allow them to focus on the things that they’re good at, their core competency, which is serving residents inside the community versus now you need to learn how to manage a fleet.

Anthony Codispoti : So I want to ask you what is meant by mirror and window because I think this is probably highly relevant to this very difficult period that you just went through. Yeah.

K.C. Kanaan : So this is a concept that I’ve learned, uh, over 25 years ago from, um, just let me take a step back.

Anthony Codispoti : I do a lot of reading. And I like to read the classic books from the seven habits of highly effective people, Dr. Kavey to, to, uh, belt last and, and, uh, good to grade Jim Collins and just a lot of other books from, um, um, blood scaling to the hard things about hard things. And the, this concept, the mirror and the window is from the, uh, I want to say the seven habits of highly effective people where it talks about when things go right, um, the, it’s always good to look at the window and give praise to the team that is playing a key role in, in making things go right. So when, when we sign up a new client or go from a pilot to, to, uh, a full scale contract, it’s not me. It’s not, um, it’s, it’s the team, the drivers that are driving and delivering great service. It’s the client care team. It’s the recruiting team. It’s the operation team that’s keeping an eye on everything and making sure everything is going right.

K.C. Kanaan : So we make sure that we look to the window and give praise where praises do. When things go wrong, I am, a lot of times things go wrong for, and I gave you one example on, on us putting all of our eggs in, in, or most of our eggs in one basket. That’s on me. I’m the one who made that decision and didn’t listen. So you look at the mirror and, and hold yourself accountable for the mistake and, um, but take a step back, learn from that mistake and figure out what do we need to do to recover and recover.

Anthony Codispoti : I think it’s a, it’s, it’s an attribute that I see in a lot of good leaders, good coaches, right? When something goes wrong, Hey, this was me, that buck stops here, you know, ultimate responsibility is mine. When something goes well, you’re looking through the window and, you know, this metaphorical window where you see your team members, it was you, it was you, it was you, you know, you guys are the ones that delivered this great service.

You’re the ones that made this happen. Hard to do sometimes, right? Because you’re never sort of taking credit for the good stuff, but man, you’re, you’re letting all the bad stuff kind of fall right on your face.

K.C. Kanaan : I don’t know if it’s hard. It’s, it, when I look at my job, it’s not about getting the credit. It’s about building something and growing something and, and, and take care of the, the clients that we take care of, but also offer employment opportunities for the team that’s working for us, offer them things that they can’t get somewhere else from, you know, we promote from within.

We, we, we, we try to get people to learn new skills. So, you know, if you start in dispatch and you want to go into client care, absolutely. If you start as, as a part-time employee, when you’re in high school, junior and high school and you want to learn how to do client care and then move into accounting, we’ll work with you, we’ll teach you, we’ll invest in you. So it’s, yeah, that’s the way I look at my job. It’s, it’s, it’s to help develop the team.

It’s to help drive the performance of the standards. And, and if I do a good job, then the company’s going to grow and everybody’s going to benefit. Yeah, it’s, it’s not about, hey, I did this and you did that. It’s, it’s, we’re all, we’re all together.

Anthony Codispoti : So you’ve got this incredible attention to detail and focus on customer satisfaction. How can you help the patient? Patient, you are leveraging technology in all kinds of powerful and creative ways.

And we’ve just scratched the surface with, with our conversation here today. And the, the scale at which you’re operating, I mean, all these things together suggest to me that it’s going to be difficult for competitors to kind of catch up to you and what you’re doing. As you look forward several years, where do you see are the biggest opportunities and maybe the biggest risks for Envoy America?

K.C. Kanaan : That’s a great question. What we do is serving clients, listening to, to them and serve them. Transportation happens to be the way we provide the service. Can somebody do this? Probably. It’s not like this is brain surgery where you have to, you know, learn how to operate on somebody’s brain, but it takes investment. If, if, if we’ve had this discussion nine years ago or 10 years ago or even five years ago, we, we, we didn’t have what we have today.

So it takes continuous investment, learning, pivoting as needed. Can somebody do this? If, if they take the time and do this?

Yeah, they can. But it, it takes effort. It takes investments and just how much we’ve invested. We’ve invested millions to develop our own software. You know, can somebody go develop it tomorrow?

Maybe. But it, like, you don’t buy this off the shelf and say, okay, plug it in and let’s go. You got to continue to invest. Where do I see ourselves? You know, five years from now, two years from now, 10 years from now, just continue to do the things that we’re doing, continue to provide service to clients, both corporate and the individuals that, that need the service and help them meet their business needs and continue to grow with them. Are we going to go public?

I don’t know. Are we going to get acquired? We’re not building it to get acquired. But if it happens, you know, as long as they, we continue to deliver service to the company, we’ll entertain it. We’re, we’re building it to serve people and we haven’t even scratched the surface.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, I think there’s a common thread throughout your story here. It’s, and you just sort of touched on it briefly here for a second, is that you, you followed what the customers have asked, right?

Like, your initial idea was to serve like one to one. And then somebody saw you in the paper and they said, Hey, you know, we’re a hospital. Can you come help us? I don’t know. Can’t, you know, and like each step along the way, Hey, can you go to this city? Can you provide this service?

Can you guys help us with this? You’ve just constantly been responding to, to your customers’ requests to their needs. And so I think anytime you’re doing that, that’s a pretty solid way to build a business.

K.C. Kanaan : We’ve taken risk. Okay. You know, anybody who starts a company has to be a risk taker. So for us, we take risk. And sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. Like for us, we know what we’re good at, which is who we hire, how we train them, how we retain them as, as employees and drivers, and delivering service to older adults, patients, people that have disabilities and do it better than anybody else. But do it to make money. You know, not, not, not steal money from people as in charge and more, but make enough money to be able to grow the business

Anthony Codispoti : and continue to provide the great services that you are.

K.C. Kanaan : Absolutely. That’s what we do. I mean, you hit, you hit the nail on that. We’ve listened. Most of the growth came from clients saying, can you do this for us? One of our great partners is a company in Minnesota called Lifespark. Lifespark acquired 30 senior living communities.

This was in 2021. And they, they, they said, hey, we have no idea how to run transportation. Can you guys take over? Like, can we take over?

We don’t, if you think we can, we can. And we started working with them. And, and now we manage all our transportation. And from there, it expanded to so many other types of clients from, and it’s across the country. They, and transportation is a headache for senior living communities. And I mentioned how we help them reduce their costs, deliver better service, help them increase their senses. And it all started with Lifespark.

Matt Kinney is, is, is, is my friend at Lifespark. Like, can you do this? We don’t want to do it. Can you do it? And like, um, if you think we can, we can.

Anthony Codispoti : We will figure it out. And we just, so Casey, before I ask my last question, I want to first let people know the best way to get in touch with you directly or, or company or follow your story. How would that be?

K.C. Kanaan : Our website, EnvoyAmerica.com. I’m on LinkedIn. My email address is my first initial last name at EnvoyAmerica.com. Um, I’m not going to give my phone, my cell phone.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s up to you. I think it’s best to start with the email and the website. I think people will be able to get what they need there and we’ll include links to all of that in the show notes for folks. But last question I have for you, Casey, uh, we have a great conversation here today. I hope you and I stay in touch. Let’s say a year from now, we’re sitting down together because you’re celebrating something. What’s that thing you’re celebrating a year from now?

K.C. Kanaan : That’s a great question. What we’ll be celebrating in a year from now. We lost a lot of people in January. It was not their fault that we had to reduce our headcount. We’ll be celebrating that we recovered the business that we walked away from and we brought the team members back and added more team members. Celebrate that we continue to deliver great service to the type of clients that we serve from healthcare to senior living communities, faith-based organizations. Just continue to do more of what we’re doing today and continue to bring real benefits, value to people that need it. Yeah, we started this company because we could not find anything for our own family members and it still doesn’t exist. Transportation for older adults and patients, it’s broken.

There are no, there are few, there’s some companies that do it at a local level, but doing it at scale and being able to serve thousands and tens of thousands across the country, this doesn’t exist. We play a key part in this. Celebrate that more and more people know about it and we continue to serve them.

Anthony Codispoti : KC Kanan from Envoy America. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

K.C. Kanaan : My pleasure. Thank you again, Anthony. I look forward to staying in touch.

Anthony Codispoti : Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.