Getting Out of Your Own Way: J. Heinlein on Rebuilding a Business for Success and Freedom | Nursing Home 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 Joseph Heinlein, who goes by J. He has been the president and owner of Synergy Home Care of Westchester, New York since 2012. The parent company was founded in 1999 and is now recognized as one of the fastest growing home care franchisers in the country. Synergy Home Care focuses on creating compassionate, customized home care plans to help individuals stay safe, healthy, and connected at home.

They have been honored as a home care pulse best of home care endorsed national provider for eight consecutive years, reflecting their commitment to delivering exceptional services. Jay holds an MBA in finance and international business from NYU Stern School of Business and he previously served as a director at Bank of America in institutional sales. He has applied his leadership and strategic expertise to grow Synergy Home Care of Westchester and make a positive impact on his community. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdBack 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. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefitsagency.com. All right, back to our guest today, President and owner of Synergy Home Care, Westchester, New York, Jay Heinlein. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

J. Heinlein: You’re welcome. Thank you, Anthony. I appreciate you having me here. Let me clarify one quick thing if you don’t mind. Please. You mentioned in the intro the Home Care Pulse Award for the national provider. That is the franchise or award. So not only at the franchise or level, right, getting it for eight years in a row, but we actually, Synergy Home Care of Westchester, will recognize this year as provider, Home Care Pulse provider of choice.

And you may say to yourself, well, okay, what happened to the other years that you have been running this agency for now 13 years? Well, just as a quick nutshell, we are very involved with our clients, with our families, I call them, and our caregivers. And a lot of communication, a lot of interaction with them, I consider us to be partners more than us serving them.

So we have a lot of feedback from our clients already. So I have not felt the need as an agency owner, I have not felt the need to participate in that Home Care Pulse survey. And that’s what Home Care Pulse is. It’s a third party surveying group and they go out and they talk to your clients and they survey them on satisfaction. They talk to your employees or caregivers about how is it, how are your clients, how is it working for that particular agency?

Since we were so active in doing that, I never felt the need to reach out through a third party as well. A couple years ago, I changed and we’ll get into this, but I changed my business model. I brought a COO involved, a Chief Operating Officer on. And he made me realize that there is something to recognition from industry-respected sources. And so last year, we decided to work towards that Home Care Pulse award recognition. And the first year going

Anthony Codispoti: for it, the first year going for it, you got it. We got it. Yes. And so I just wanted to make that little distinction because one, I’m proud of the franchise or that I’m involved with Synergy Home Care.

They’re fantastic. And also, I wanted to make sure people understood that we didn’t participate prior to last year. So sorry about that.

But the first year that she took a swing at it, you qualified for it. And the way that it works is they’re going out and they’re surveying your actual customers, your clients, your patients, your families to ask, unbiased, hey, how are these guys doing? Is it good stuff? And people came back with thumbs up, you

J. Heinlein: passed the spades and so won the award. There are all sorts of metrics involved and you’ve got to achieve those metrics. And that’s the only way that you get the award.

Anthony Codispoti: You mentioned that. Well, actually, before we talk about how Synergy Home Care, sort of the franchise or you had the very positive things to say about them, give us a little background about how you got to Synergy because you were a director at Bank of America for 11 years. What prompted that change from corporate America?

J. Heinlein: Interesting. I think a very interesting journey. I was a Wall Street guy for 26 years. And we went through the 08 financial crisis that everybody was aware of. And we, the Wall Street firms, banks, right, investment banks, major, major layoffs, as everybody saw in the headlines.

Well, most people don’t realize is that from about 2010 on, there were still quieter layoffs going on, right? Because in the end, from my perspective, in a very basic way, I think the Wall Street model had broken from the 08 crisis. And what I mean by that, and again, I’m simplifying it dramatically. Any real finance majors out there are going to, you know, cut this to pieces. But in a simple way, you look at equity prices, right? And you can influence equity prices by either increasing revenues or decreasing costs. So the 08 crisis brought on a lot of regulation for all the big Wall Street firms, right?

And I work for one of them. So if you’re not influencing the equity price by increasing revenues, and you do that in some ways by leveraging your capital, well, there were capital restrictions, so they weren’t going to have more capital to use, or creating new product derivatives. Well, that was what got us into the mess to begin with. So they weren’t going to be able to create new product. So if you’re not influencing in a dramatic way the revenue side of the equation, then you got to go after the cost side. And typically the biggest cost is human capital, people. And that’s why you saw all those layoffs, right? And that’s why it continued. In my mind, that’s why it continued. So from 2010 on, we were still quietly letting people go.

And my concern was it’s not going to change. So I’ve had a really good run. I enjoyed my Wall Street career of 26 years. I enjoyed the people I worked with.

I enjoyed the kind of alpha side of it, the competitive side of it. But I don’t think there was a day that went by where I didn’t feel empty and wondered, is this really who my parents raised me to be? So after 26 years and this revelation of my own about things not being the same as they were, that they were going to have to, we’re going to have to do the same business with less people and probably get paid less, I decided to change. And I was able to orchestrate my departure.

I was able to retire from Wall Street financially whole. And that gave me time. And that’s really important because the first couple months of being home, I was able to do all the things I expected.

I was going to get work out and get back in touch with my family and do all those quality of life things. But after a couple months of it, I thought, well, I’m bored. I really want to do something else because I love working. And so what I did was I then it made it my job to go back and revisit all of the jobs and careers that I fantasized about for probably the last 10 years of my Wall Street career because I knew I was going to keep working. I may not continue on Wall Street, but I enjoy work. So they were things like going back and becoming a doctor and opening my own practice, going back, becoming an attorney, opening my own practice, becoming a school teacher, becoming a psychologist, right?

All these things. So what I did was I then made it my job to go through and each one of those that I had thought about researched to the end degree. It was very therapeutic because what I was able to do is as a 48-year-old with this quality of life, right, and this family, I was able to go back and look at each one of them and say, okay, does being a doctor make sense? You got to go back to medical school.

You’ve got to then go to work before you can as a doctor before you open up a practice. Does it make sense, right? And I was slowly able to cross each one of those off.

Anthony Codispoti: And honestly, since then, and over these past 13 years, I have not thought about one of those professions since. Yet I had spent 10 years before that thinking about them all the time. So that’s why I’m saying it was therapeutic.

You were able to sort of scratch the itch, so to speak. Yes, absolutely. Oh, I could do that. Now I actually could do this. I’m going to check this out. Right. And then you ultimately decided that each of these different things wasn’t for you. Right.

J. Heinlein: It didn’t match where I was in life. And I was able to cross it out. But what was really fascinating is that as I researched all of those, certain themes developed for me. One, I didn’t want to do anything with Wall Street again. I had gotten a bunch of calls to come back to work for other institutions. I didn’t want to do it. I knew that that was done.

That chapter was closed. I wanted to, for some reason, run my own business, even though I had never run a business before. I wanted to run my own business.

And I wanted a job where every day, all I did was went out and tried to find somebody to help in my local community. And so those major themes came along. And then I started to look into that further. And when I talked to friends and family and other people in about that, one person had said to me, you know, Jay, everything you’re describing there is home care.

You should really look into home care. And I said, I’m not a doctor. I don’t have any medical background.

Like, no, no, no, that’s not what this is about. That’s if you want to be a home health provider. If you want to have a medical practice, home care is much simpler than that. It’s going out and finding good people, caregivers, employees, that go into people’s homes that need help. And you help them stay there longer and safer. Usually a demographic is an older population, but it doesn’t have to be. We help, we’ve helped 20 something year olds. We help adults that maybe have some kind of cognitive or physical impairment, and they need a little extra help to be able to stay home and relatively independent, depending on that cognitive or physical impairment. And so that’s how I started looking at home care. And then for me, it was a choice of, do I go out and look at buying a independent business or do I look at a franchise?

And not having been a business owner, for me at least personally, there was a lot of, there were a lot of possible traps in buying my, either starting my own business or buying somebody else’s business. I don’t know about their books. I don’t know what happened.

Is there something going on with their client base that I don’t know about that suddenly is going to change the revenue stream? So I felt uncomfortable about that. And then I started looking into the franchise and the franchise model just made more sense to me.

Anthony Codispoti: You had somebody who was going to be able to kind of show you the ropes from the beginning.

J. Heinlein: And then I took it a little further, probably my Wall Street background, but just due diligence, I then started to look at various franchises. And I understood the franchise model. In my mind, what happens is you’re going to lease a brand name and they’re going to give you a symbolic little box. And that little box is going to tell you everything you need to know about how to run that particular business.

This isn’t just about home care. This is in my mind any franchise, right? That you’re looking at. They’re going to say to you, this is how you run a successful business. Now, the truth is they’re not telling you you will be successful. You’re really starting that business from scratch. So believe, you know, understand that that if anything, you’re starting it from below scratch because you’ve got to pay in to the franchise. So you’ve already put capital up front. So you’re already a little bit financially behind the curve.

So you have to still follow those those guidelines. And if you do this, we think that you have a great chance of being successful. Right? So what I did is I understood that part of it. But what I wanted to know was, all right, you as a franchise owner, how are you running your business? So I’m confident you’re one going to be around in five years, 10 years, 15 years when I still need the support that you’re supposed to be providing me.

Right? How are you running your business and where are you making your money? What’s the what’s the what’s the culture of your business model? So I actually went and flew to a couple different franchisors and I met with their management to understand.

Anthony Codispoti: Synergy wasn’t the only one that you looked at. You talked to multiple companies to make sure that you were going to be bedfellows with the right group.

J. Heinlein: Their culture, their business model matched my mindset. Right? And part of it as well is with a franchise model, the way I look at it is they’re making money in a couple of ways. There are a lot of ways that they’re making money, but they’re making money in a couple of ways. There is that upfront franchise fee that you pay to get involved.

Right? For some franchises, it’s a couple thousand dollars. For some franchises, it could be a million dollars.

Right? Some of the storefronts that you see out there, it costs a lot to buy into that territory and lease that name and get all of that support because they feel like this is already a no-brainer. You’re going to be successful if you do what we tell you, but you’re going to pay for that. The other way that they make money, and this is the more tip, right? This is the big way, is weekly royalties and then there’s some marketing fees. So every week I pay franchise people, typically we pay 5% royalty fees on the gross revenues and you pay a marketing fee.

So for me, that was key. I wanted to find a franchise system that focused on that royalty fee because in my mind, I don’t mind paying that percentage. I don’t mind paying them a lot of money as a percentage because if that’s the case, that means that I’m making a lot of money.

Anthony Codispoti: Everybody’s goals are aligned at that point. Absolutely. They make money when you make money.

J. Heinlein: Right? So to me, they’re going, I wanted a system that was going to do everything that they could to support me and try to help me grow my business. And synergy is amazing at that.

Anthony Codispoti: So what did you find with them that you didn’t find in some of the other home care companies that you looked at?

J. Heinlein: It was pretty much that. And early on, remember at the very beginning, I was new to all this. I didn’t know anything about franchising. I didn’t know anything about running your own business. So my thought process and my questions were probably very simplistic at that time, but their culture matched what I believed was the right business model. When I was out there, they were focused on me. They were focused on the business. They were focused on how do we help you set up?

We’re going to be with you. So you go out, you do a week intensive training, and they take you through the whole nuts and bolts of setting up a business from you need two staplers and this type of computer and this office layout to the support and software and all of the other stuff. And this is how your software works.

And this is how you schedule. What I also found as you asked that question, it’s interesting because what just also came into my mind, what I found really impactful was the other synergy owners. And I think that’s probably what also helped put me over the edge in that I knew that this was the franchise I wanted to be part of because it is, you know, you hear this, it’s Couché, but the Synergy Franchise Partner Network is a very, very solid and cooperative network.

We have chat rooms, we have Facebook pages. Tomorrow I’m going to be on a strategic call with, I think it’s 10 to 15 other franchise partners around the country that are in a similar position to me. And we get together once a month and it’s led by somebody at the franchise support and we get together once a month and we just talk and brainstorm about any issues, what’s working, what’s not working and it’s open up and I can’t tell you how helpful and valuable that has been.

So when I was out there, I got to meet a few franchise partners that have been in the system and they were not even focused on the franchise or the selling me on buying into the system. They were focused on me, where I had been, my history, why I was getting involved, what I expected out of it, where I felt my strengths and weaknesses were. So they were asking me all the right questions about how does this individual coming into a system become successful?

Anthony Codispoti: They’re interviewing you just as much as you’re interviewing them. They want to make sure it’s a good fit on both sides.

J. Heinlein: Yes, but in a, not in a, we are going to, we have the ability to stop you from getting on board, but more of a, all right, we want to understand you, we want to understand where you’re coming from, your mindset, so that we can try to help you. We can help you with your, really bring out your strengths, but we can also help you if there are weaknesses where you can navigate and build around those weaknesses. How do you overcome those weaknesses? And that to me was more impressive.

Anthony Codispoti: I think it’s really great what you were just describing there, this call that you’ve got with other franchise owners. I’m assuming there are another parts of the country. All over the country.

All over the country. Similar maybe size to what you are so that you guys can support each other. You can talk about what’s going on. As you think back to maybe the most recent meeting, what was one gold nugget that you pulled out of one of those sessions? Because I think this idea of having this, this peer support people who are in same or similar positions to you is just so invaluable in running a small business.

J. Heinlein: We were, it wasn’t necessarily the most valuable for me, but with, because we don’t, right now, we’re not involved with veterans. We’d like to become, we’d like to be able to help veterans and be part of the VA program. We’re not, that haven’t been accepted yet into that yet.

It’s a process to get into it. But there was discussion from other parts of the country about VA and how to help the veterans. And there was an exchange between one of the franchise partners in Florida and one of the franchise partners in Arizona. Or another great examples, we’ve been, we’ve been much more involved with helping families in facilities, right? Our home care. So people traditionally think, oh, you help people in their home.

Well, yes, majority of it. But the fact is where we help people is in their home environment. And that can be different for many, many people home, home, you know, whether it’s an apartment, a house, right?

That’s your typical home environment. But a lot of people when they’re older, have other types of living situations. They could live in a community. Maybe it’s an assisted living community. Maybe it’s an independent living community. Or maybe there’s more of a medical need and a skilled nursing care need. They may live in a nursing home or a rehabilitation center.

Anthony Codispoti: And those are the facilities that you’ll go in and still provide support to.

J. Heinlein: So we change, we cater to where they are. We have somebody that we’re just about to start helping with. We helped this person, right? And it won’t give very specific stuff for HIPAA reasons. But we helped this person a long time ago. And wonderful woman. She got stronger and she didn’t need our help anymore. But she was at a facility. So it was great. She was able to, she was able to act relatively independently within the facility. So awesome.

She didn’t need synergy anymore. I love those scenarios. When people actually outgrow our care because they’re getting back to a independent baseline. That’s wonderful for me. I know that doesn’t sound, make sense because it means we’re losing revenue, but that’s okay with me. I don’t mind that.

Anthony Codispoti: We’re doing this. You’ve done your job really well. You sort of graduated somebody from your program.

J. Heinlein: That’s the way I view it. I love it. So unfortunately, there are a lot of people that need help. So it’s not as though there won’t be somebody we can’t help. But when people, you know, get stronger and mentally or physically and they don’t need it anymore, that’s wonderful. Right. So this woman didn’t need our help. And that was a few years ago.

So it was great. And she’s been, I get a call a couple of days ago. She went into the hospital. She had a setback. She’s weaker. She’s going to be back in the facility.

But the family feels like she really could use some extra support one-on-one support at the facility. And they called us up a media. They were like, I don’t know if you remember us, but you helped my mom and I’m like, of course I remember you. And how is your mom? And they told me the story and that’s great.

And they said, we don’t think it’s going to be long. It may just be several weeks, but we really would love it if you and your people would go in and be there with my mom to just help her out until she gets stronger because she’s having some difficulty, especially some incontinence issues and whatnot. And having somebody there that can get her to and from a bathroom can mean all the difference in the world.

Anthony Codispoti: So the fact that you remembered this person, Jay, it suggests to me that there’s maybe a bit of a personal connection. Like you’re trying to get to know each of the families that you’re working with. Absolutely.

J. Heinlein: And it goes back to when I set up this business, when I started the franchise, we had a choice. I had a choice. I could be a what’s called a contract agency. We’re what’s called a LICSA, a licensed home care service agency, which is a licensed agency by the New York Department of Health. So we’re heavily regulated and supervised by the New York Department of Health. Not all agencies are, but we are a licensed home care agency versus a what’s called a CHA, a certified home health agency.

And typically a CHA is an agency that takes Medicare and Medicaid. I decided at the very beginning that I wanted a different business model. I didn’t want to have what I call a quantity based model. If I took Medicare and Medicaid, I’d have every client I could possibly want, but it would change my business model. I would have to then, my team would then have to hire every single caregiver we could find. And that’s just not my business model. We’re more about being involved with our families, partnership.

Anthony Codispoti: What a more of a boutique experience. Well, both your caregivers as well as the people that you’re delivering the care to.

J. Heinlein: Yeah. I mean, the nice part is that you can still be very successful. And there is a large demand so you can help a lot of people, but you don’t have to help thousands, which means me, the president and owner of the agency, I love going out and seeing our families and seeing our caregivers going tomorrow morning to see a new family that is going to want 24 seven care. And I’m going because I, and there’s a dementia component to it.

Women lives with a private agency now and the family is just not happy with that agency because they don’t feel like this agency really understands dementia from an administrative standpoint, but also from a care team standpoint. And they had heard about us. So I went and I met the woman, I met the family, lovely, but my nurse is going over there tomorrow. So I’m going to go tomorrow morning and introduce the nurse to the woman and the family.

I’ll be there 10 minutes, but that warm introduction is important. And that goes back to the partnership part of the way I view this. We’re partnering with a family. They have a care need.

We go in. Our job is to figure out what those needs are. How do we keep that person there safer and longer and make sure that we’re listening to them. And that’s knowing the caregivers, that’s knowing the families that we help. I, I base the culture of my agency on two very, very simple things, communication and respect.

That is it. And that goes between the three parts to the partnership that I call it. And the three parts of that partnership are the direct care client, the family, our caregivers, right?

The care team, and then the office. And what has to happen in my mind is there has to be a free flow of communication and respect amongst those three parts of the partnership. And if there isn’t, there’s a problem and we need to figure it out and correct it. But if there’s that free flow and people are talking, And because this is an ever-changing situation, home care is always changing. It’s a work in progress, always. So there has to be a lot of communication.

Anthony Codispoti: As I think about your business model, it occurs to me that you probably have two sort of client bases that you’re recruiting or looking for at the same time. You’re looking for the patients to serve. But when you get a patient to serve, you have to make sure that you have the caregiver that’s able to provide the service. So maybe let’s talk about each of those one at a time as you think about what you do to sort of grow the patient side of things. What are the strategies that you use to sort of get out there, to find new patients, have them find you? OK.

J. Heinlein: So first off, I have to comment that. That’s awesome. Very, very perceptive of you. When I got into the business 13 years ago, I thought I was going to be helping the end user, the client. And I quickly came to realize that really what we do is we impact, can impact not only the family that we’re helping, but our employees, the caregivers.

These are great people. They typically, not all the time, which is why I go back to why I said I don’t want a quantity based model versus quality based model. Because unfortunately, like in all industries, there are employees that aren’t fantastic. Well, when you’re in home care, I don’t want the not fantastic employees.

So I realized that we get to not only impact the families that we’re helping, but also our employees. Because a lot of them don’t come from a situation where they have the best role models or they’ve had advantage in life. So if we can provide, and they don’t, they don’t always get respected for what they do. And that’s a huge issue for me.

Because if they’re good at it, what they do is incredible. So as part of our start of care documentation, one of them talks about what a family can expect from us. It’s called the client bill of rights.

And it talks about all the things that you would think. We’re going to treat you with dignity and respect and confidentiality and information. And there’ll be communication. But then we flip it over. And then we go through with every family what we expect from them. And that is you will treat our employees, our caregivers, with that same level of dignity and respect. Because what they do is not easy.

And they’re doing it the good ones from the heart. And so we, I think, focused on that early. And I think that’s why we to kind of flip it on you.

I know you wanted to talk client first. But just for the caregiver, I think, and this will go for both of them, actually. I think if you ever, if anyone ever wanted to kind of take a look at what I’m talking about and really get an underlying feel for what I mean, go and take a look at our Google reviews. Synergy, home care of Westchester, our Google reviews. Because we not only get reviews from our families, which you would expect, right? Love the agency.

We also get reviews from our employees. And that’s not typical. And it’s they care about me. They respect what I do. And so when I’m out with a family, it’s important for all families to understand that and acknowledge that to me as we’re talking.

Because they know that the caregivers, and I say it to them, the caregivers are just as important as they are in this relationship. And so we set that tone early.

Anthony Codispoti: Sorry, Jay. I apologize for interrupting you. But I did just what you suggested while we were talking. And I went and I checked out your Google reviews. And this is noteworthy for folks. They’ve got 77 reviews, which is for folks who aren’t familiar. That’s a lot of reviews for a small business. People taking the time to leave a comment, to give a rating. And traditionally, again, if people aren’t familiar, when leaving a review, it’s much more common to get people taking that time to leave a review who are upset for some reason. OK, so a lot of times reviews tend to skew negative.

So having said all of that, their average review rating is 4.9 stars, which from what little I know about the health care field is almost unheard of. Health care, you’re taking care of somebody who’s sick. They’re hurt. They’re not in the best mental space.

They’ve got other things going on. The likelihood of you getting somebody to leave a really good review seems like it would be lower in this field. So anyways, I just wanted to give you a little pat on the back because 4.9 stars, 77 reviews for a small business in health care is pretty phenomenal.

J. Heinlein: And we only started going after Google reviews a couple of years ago. So but with that, so I think that on that, well, I don’t want to keep going on that subject.

Anthony Codispoti: But that’s OK. Yeah, I’d be curious to hear sort of the methodology, the strategies that you use both in recruiting and retaining your employees, but also how you go about finding clients and patients.

J. Heinlein: OK. And so what I was going to say, it was, listen, that the 4.9, thank you for acknowledging that and seeing that I appreciate that. And that’s I want people to see the content the court because that tells I think that tells the story of what we focus on. Now, what I wanted to say is that doesn’t mean that. Everything’s always perfect. But what it reflects, I hope, is that we’re in that partnership. And so there are always issues, like I said, it’s a work in progress. So but that’s where the communication is so important. When there are issues, we’re there. We’re working on it with the family, with the caregiver. We do what has to be done to. See the situation, acknowledge it, correct it. And so I think that’s where I want to emphasize the importance of it, is that that’s not say that every situation is perfect.

It’s not. But we work so hard at being there for a family and going above and beyond for them that even when there are problems, they know that we’re there to communicate and we respect them. And it’s coming from a good place.

So I think that’s what drives those kinds of reviews. How do we get our clients? Well, honestly, in the beginning, this goes back to the business model being set up incorrectly. Right. And we can talk about that later if you want to dive into that.

But so getting clients was I was the I was the community. The A’s on. I went out. I did the networking. I my view was I want to be out in the community. And I want to through word of mouth.

I want to spread the name of Synergy Home Gear. When I before I started the franchise, we’re in Northern. We’re in New York outside of New York City in the counties of Westchester and Bronx. That’s where we help families. Very, very licensed and regulated agencies, as I mentioned.

So it took us a couple of years to even get the. License from the Department of Health. So we were only able to do a very limited amount of care in the beginning.

I call it 20 percent of what we were able to do once licensed companion care. I knew that was going to be a challenge for the first few years. But my goal was I want to go out into the community. I want to get our name out there.

I want to start providing care and I want people to see that there is a there is a higher level of agency and care that can be provided so that when we finally do get licensed by the Department of Health, then our name or credibility has already been built. We have a reputation and then it will just. That it’ll grow from there because of the work we did. And so I did a lot of grassroots marketing.

I did a lot of community networking, you know, anything that your your local. I was a B and I’m a B and I guy. I don’t know if you know anything about B and I, but I’m a B and I guy, which is a very big local resource chapter. It’s a networking group of professional networking group. And there are about 30 of us in my chapter, all of different professions.

And we meet every week and our our task and being in this group is to keep the others in mind. So we act as a resource. So I’ve got a very strong resource book at my disposal. So not only am I out there trying to find people that need help with home care. But as I talk to people, if there’s something else that they need help with, I can be a great resource for them. So I did a lot of what I call grassroots networking. And that was building the reputation and building our name through religious groups. The big way that a lot of people will build a home care clientele is through your professional referral sources, your facilities, your hospitals, your subcute rehabilitation.

Anthony Codispoti: There’s a lot of sense. That’s the point where folks realize that they need that service.

J. Heinlein: Yes. So for me, the problem was the the licensed part was the personal care. That’s the touch part, the hands on part. I wasn’t I didn’t get that for three years. So I wasn’t able to do that. So in the beginning, I didn’t focus on that part because I didn’t want to go into a hospital where somebody had just introduced me and have the discharge planner say, OK, Jay, here is a person that you can start to help. And we have to say, sorry, we can’t help them now.

Right. So I was strategic about it. I did grassroots community networking. About a year and a half ago, I started to expand and our facility efforts. We’ve been involved with facilities for a number of years now, but more on that grassroots families introducing us. Year and a half ago, I brought on a community liaison and she’s great. Her job is to go to the facilities, build relationships with the facilities in our area and build our referrals through those facilities. So now we have this dual marketing approach, the grassroots, which is your community referral based from various community groups and the facility groups, the facilities that refer on a more regular basis. And that’s one of the changes that we made over the last couple of years to really help us move to a higher level and help more people.

Anthony Codispoti: You’ve mentioned once or twice in our conversation, sort of a shift in business model in the last couple of years. Is this are you kind of touching on that now? You want to give more voice to that?

J. Heinlein: Sure. So. You know, I was a Wall Street guy, so I lived my life, my professional life on bonuses, right? That’s where a lot of compensation was made. I was fortunate in that sense. So when I started the agency and I started my own business, my philosophy was very similar to the Wall Street model philosophy. I am going to have a small group of employees, a few people. We’re going to wear multiple hats, a lot of responsibilities, but they’re going to be able to participate financially. I don’t mind paying people for the effort. So if we’re able to do this and we’re successful and we’re growing the business, I want them to financially participate in that growth.

And for most of the people in this type of industry, they’re not used to what happens on Wall Street and that kind of getting paid more significantly than your peers. So I wanted that to be the case and I wanted to afford that to my employees. So that’s the way we started. And for the first number of years, I was very hands on.

I was very involved in all aspects of the business. I had a very small little group. They were only a couple of us. But what I found several years into the business was that what I had really done was created one big key person risk scenario. Any time anybody left and people do as much as they loved working for me, life changes, move away. Something happens in a family, right?

And they have or they need to what they want to get another job because that is more of their interest. All great, right? But I realized that every single time that happens, it’s very disruptive for the people that remain because they have to pick up all the slack. And for me as the owner, I was involved and very actively involved in all aspects of the business. All right, I could be from the Wall Street days being on a trading desk. I can hear five different things going on.

So I could be in my office and if it was quiet, I could hear what’s happening outside in the office space and I’d always throw in my two sets. So with that key person risk also in that small team scenario, also, I was actively involved and controlling what was happening. And I was in a sense not allowing my team to grow and own responsibility.

Anthony Codispoti: So much of it had to flow through you.

J. Heinlein: You were just because I was actively involved. I didn’t try to set it up that way. I was always a person that believed in delegation. But in the end, I really wasn’t doing a good job of allowing my team to own their responsibilities, both in a positive and in a negative way. And so that’s where as we were growing, we had grown under that model for the first, call it five years. Then we were plateauing and we plateaued and COVID hit.

But in a summary, but I was realizing, why aren’t we able to grow further? And I had changed number of employees in the office staff. So it wasn’t, sometimes there were more people, sometimes there were fewer people.

So it wasn’t a numbers thing. And then I realized I was starting, I was so heavily involved. I was in the office all the time. COVID hit. I was, we lost a couple of people. I was even more involved and I started to burn out. And then I realized, is this what you meant to do? When you built this business, when you opened up this business, did you mean to, you wanted to work in it, but did you want it to consume you?

Right? Because I retired from Wall Street. And so I always view this as every project, that next job, next business. I want to learn from it. And so what I quickly realized was, as much as I had been the growth and the strength of the business, I was in fact now the weakness and the hurdle. I was the impediment to the significant growth that I thought we had been successful, but there was so much more given our geographic, geographical location.

Anthony Codispoti: You identified that there was a problem. Basically you’re burned out, you’re plateaued, the growth isn’t happening that you think could happen. You’ve tried more employees, less employees in the office. That’s not fixing the problem. How did you come about to try something different? How did you find the solution? Who recommended that?

J. Heinlein: I realized at the end of COVID, I had had a right-hand person and she was fantastic. And she ended up having to move her husband. They wanted to relocate to be closer to family in another state. Fantastic right move, still in touch. But I then realized she was somebody that I could rely on on certain aspects of the business. So I started to realize I don’t have to do it all. And I read an interesting book.

Well, after the fact I had read this book, so it confirmed everything that I had done. But what I realized was I needed to bring somebody on to run the day-to-day operations and allow me to step out of the day-to-day operations, out of the being in the office all the time from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. So I could get back to what I enjoyed doing and that was being out in the community. I was meeting families, meeting other referral partners, helping to grow the business from that side, working on the financial side of the business as well behind the scenes.

But I needed to be able to get out and do that and focus on quality of life. Because ultimately this is where this book comes in. Somebody had suggested I read this book about two years ago and it just reinforced this part of my journey.

It was incredible. What’s the book? Can I say a book on?

Yeah, please. It’s called Making Money is Killing Your Business by Chuck Blakeman. It’s an amazing book for any entrepreneur because in a shell what it talks about is we all view success. Typically we think of success as financial, the monetary side of it.

How much money are you making? But the truth is the way you really should be viewing success is making more money but having more time. Making more money in less time so that you have time to enjoy whatever you have done.

You can make all the money in the world but if you don’t have any time to enjoy it, what’s the point? It really focuses you on, all right, how do I build a business and then how do I construct it so that it keeps running and it is growing but it doesn’t take me to do it. Right, and it goes back to a concept of, you know, I mentioned key person risk but in terms of a business and selling a business, key person. Right, somebody had approached me a couple years ago to buy my agency but they were undervaluing it dramatically.

Anthony Codispoti: This was a five- Because everything ran through you.

J. Heinlein: Absolutely, and they said, Jay, the minute you walk out the door, the business is gone. So that’s when I realized, okay, I have built this wrong. What I need to do is I need to go back, I need to rebuild it. I need to build depth of team and I need to give people ownership.

If I’m going to give them a responsibility, if I’m going to delegate responsibility, I need to allow them to own that. And there in itself was another interesting journey because what I did was I ended up bringing on a COO who I had known, he was a president of another synergy and was a consultant in the industry and I brought him on because he understood the business. He was a great fit for it. All the things that just were not my strength, even though I was able to do them, I didn’t enjoy them and he also had a technology bend to him. He was very much into how do we more efficiently run a business?

Right? So I brought him on a couple of years ago and allowed him to start running the day-to-day operational side of it and it enabled me to step away. Now, just as a quick one, what happened was it was interesting and going back to this control and having to change a mindset of the business, the staff, the people in the office, even though he was the COO and I had given them the responsibility, they still looked at me for answers.

So what I did was I had to, this was another part of the difficult challenging for me. I stepped away from the business for two months, took a sabbatical, I was still involved behind the scenes, but I was not involved with the office staff, I was not involved with the clients, the caregivers, I was involved with the COO. And I was involved with the financial side of the business, but I delegated 95% of my responsibilities to them and him. Everyone in the office knew I was taking a sabbatical and that it gave him the two months to build the relationship with the office team. And then when I came back after the two months, it was understood I was not going to be coming into the office every day. I was going to be working from home and out in the community. And by doing that, I was able to basically change the mindset of the office team.

Anthony Codispoti: So you’re refreshed now, what did you see happen to growth?

J. Heinlein: We were up 35% last year. I expect we’re targeting another 30% this year.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s amazing. And it’s incredible. I hear this from a lot of business owners who sometimes they just need to get out of their own way. You need to figure out where their strengths are. And you’ve got a lot of them, right? I mean, NBA, Wall Street guy, you understand the business side of things really well. But when you were able to sort of remove yourself from the day-to-day operations, get out and do more what it sounds like, business development, getting out more in the community and have somebody whose real strength is on the operations side, empower the people in the office, you remove sort of that key person risk and you just allow things to really open up and for that growth to happen more naturally.

J. Heinlein: The control, right? And that’s for people that are getting into any kind of business, you have to early on try to understand what kind of person are you. Are you going to, like I did, try to control every aspect of the business and you’re just going to bully growth and success and make it happen?

Or are you going to build a team early on and oversee their responsibilities and what they’re doing, their efforts to grow? And the way I did it, I had to own that. I was now in the way of even more significant growth and then figure out how I was going to get myself mentally out of the way. And that was probably my biggest challenge and most difficult thing that I did as a business owner. And in hindsight, it was probably the most powerful and best thing I could have done.

Anthony Codispoti: Sounds like it. Jay, I’ve just got one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. Everyone listening today, I know that you love this interview. Jay has been an amazing guest. Go ahead and hit the follow or share or like button on your favorite podcast app. So you can share this with other folks who would be interested in it so you can continue getting more great content. Jay, I also want to let people know the best way to follow your story or to get in touch with you. What would that be? Jay. Jay.

J. Heinlein: People wanted to reach out or they wanted to find out more about home care services. They could go onto our website, synergyhomecare.com. And then you would, you know, that goes to the national site, but then you can go right into our synergy home care of Westchester site. Or if they, for some reason, wanted to contact me directly, I’m always open for conversation and peating my email, jhenline, at synergyhomecare.com.

Anthony Codispoti: Jay. Perfect. Last question for you, Jay. As you’re looking towards the future, what is the thing that the biggest change that’s coming to your industry that you’re excited to see unfold?

J. Heinlein: Well, I mean, not to get into the politics of things, but there’s a lot that could be changing in the political landscape, which I’m not sure is positive. It’s from a selfish revenue standpoint. It probably is positive because if some of these care programs get cut, there are going to be a lot of people that need care and they’re going to need, they’re still going to need care, which means they’re going to need to be able to figure out how to pay for care themselves. That’s not a great thing, but we’ll be there for anyone that needs the help we can try to brainstorm and help.

I think there’s a lot of technology that’s starting to come into the home care space that can make it give people options and tools that may be cheaper before having to go the route of purely bringing in caregivers because it can be expensive. I know that. But there is some technology that you can use to supplement. There’s nothing like having somebody in your home with a loved one. But there is some technology that can be used to supplement it.

Anthony Codispoti: To let somebody observe from afar or jump in on you?

J. Heinlein: Yeah, it could be. Yes, that kind of technology. I think probably the biggest change that’s going to continue to go on is the baby boomers. 65,000, right? I know I think it’s 10,000 people a day are turning 65. And that’s going to go on for a long, long time. So there’s a huge demand and it’s going to continue. So there’s still a lot of people that need help.

Anthony Codispoti: Great. Well, Jay, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

J. Heinlein: You’re welcome. I really enjoyed this, Anthony. Thank you so much for having me.

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