IAM1205- Podcasts Host Runs a Private Home Health-care Company

Ryan is the owner of Minute Women Home Care, a private home health care company located in Lexington, MA 6 miles outside of Boston. Established in 1969, Ryan bought the company from his Aunt in 2011 and has been focused on growing his business. Ryan is also on the board of directors for the National Aging In Place Council, a non-profit that helps connect seniors to proper senior care services. Ryan hosts two podcasts, The Caregiver Toolbox, and Conversation with Tara and Ryan. In his free time, Ryan enjoys golf, snowboarding and spearfishing.

• CEO Hack: Focusing on productivity systems and habits
• CEO Nugget: Set up processes and procedures manual early enough
• CEO Defined: Hiring people that are smarter and more talented than you

Website: https://www.mwhomecare.com/

Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-caregivers-toolbox/id1183027228
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanmceniff/

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Transcription

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00:08 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:35 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gretch from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Ryan McEniff of Minute Women's Home Care. Ryan, it's great to have you on the show.

00:45 – Ryan McEniff

Thanks so much for having me. It's always a blast to be able to do things like this.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. It's great to hear about all the awesome things that you're doing and super excited to have a contributor on our site on the podcast as well. So what I wanted to do is just read a little bit more about Ryan so you can hear about some of those awesome things before we jump in. Ryan is the owner of Men at Women Home Care, a proud private home healthcare company located in Lexington, Massachusetts, 6 miles outside of Boston. Established in 1969, Ryan bought the company from his own in 2011 and has been focused on growing his business. Ryan is on the board of directors for the National Aging in Place Council, a nonprofit that helps connect seniors to proper senior care services. Ryan hosts two podcasts, The Caregiver Toolbox and the conversations with Tara and Mike. Tara and Ryan, I'm sorry. In his free time, Ryan enjoys golf, snowboarding, and spearfishing. Ryan, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:38 – Ryan McEniff

Absolutely.

01:40 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. I know I touched on a little bit. Hear a little bit more about how you got started with a car, and your CEO story.

01:48 – Ryan McEniff

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I fell backward into this opportunity. I. After college, I'm from New England, from Boston. We were talking about that. I moved out to Colorado. I wanted to drink beer and snowboard. I was successful at doing both. My parents moved down to Florida like so many New Englanders do for retirement. My mom got sick. She got cancer. It was bad. And, as an only child, I quit my job and I moved down to be with her in Florida. But while I was out in Colorado, I was racking my brain on what I wanted to do and I didn't want to be an employee. I wanted to be a business owner. As we all know, as we age, weddings and funerals bring people together. My mom's sickness was terminal, and I had the opportunity to talk with my aunt, she had been out of her business for a number of years. It was definitely trending in the wrong direction.

She was like, if you want to have this opportunity, you know, you. You've. You've got a win-win situation. If you don't like it, you can walk away. If you're able to resurrect this thing, then you look like a hero, because this thing's a year away or so from being insolvent. So I tried it out for a year. We started seeing progress. We came up with a way to pay for the business. That was my. My mom's last gift, as I like to say to people. Like, if she and I had, she hadn't gotten sick and I hadn't gone down to Florida, and my aunt and I talking, I would have never had this opportunity. And, you know, I needed 24-hour home care for my mom. I needed hospice for my mom. That's what I do now.

I provide the same type of care to stressed-out families who are going through the worst days of their lives and trying to make it a little bit better and providing dignity to people that have had it all. Everything, all their dignity taken away from them because of the diseases they're going through. So it's a great way to make a living, to help families, and to employ people. It was. Sometimes life's a role. You just have to grip it, rip it, and just go along for the ride. I never thought I'd be back in Boston, but that's the way life takes you, and everybody's got their ups and their downs.

03:51 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. So I know you already touched on, you know, how you work with your clients. I wanted to know if there was anything additional that you do to kind of help serve your clients you can kind of touch on. What you feel kind of is like, what I like to call the secret sauce that could be for yourself or the business or a combination of both. What you feel kind of sets you apart.

04:07 – Ryan McEniff

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. There are a couple of things that I like to be self-critical of my own industry. In Massachusetts, there isn't a whole lot of regulation in private home care. It's the equivalent of opening a house cleaning company in terms of what the government looks at us in other states, it's highly regulated. So the reason I bring that up is that there are literally thousands of private agencies and everybody's the greatest. Nobody's ever said, hey, Gresham, I'm the worst.

So a lot of these hospital discharger planners will, will hear that same spiel over and over again and they'll just kind of roll their eyes like, yeah, great. The fact of the matter is that we're a business that's run on crisis. For whatever reason, people, whether it's taboo, whether it's just tough to have this conversation with your family members, don't wait to make a plan until it's already too late to make the plan.

Mom goes into the hospital on a Wednesday, is going to be discharged on a Friday at 03:00 and what the heck do we do when mom gets home over the weekend? That's where the discharge planner goes, call Minute Women or another private agency. So we're going to be getting our biggest two days or Thursday, Friday, and Saturday morning when people are discharging home or they've gotten home and they realize they're over their head and they can't do this.

So when it comes to a secret sauce, what I tell the people, listen, there are great home care companies out there, but it doesn't matter if you're the perfect home care company in the world, if you don't have caregivers, you are not going to get the business and it doesn't matter. We're going to make sure that we always have those caregivers. It sounds silly, but a lot of home care companies don't focus on recruitment and hiring of caregivers. That's a secondary job for the office staff. That to me is the equivalent of a car dealership saying, hey, we'll get around to buying new inventory when we can.

Well, if you don't have inventory to sell, nobody's going to show up to you. Now granted, caregivers are not inanimate objects that sit on a floor just like human beings. But the point is you need to have those caregivers and your roster and your bench staff to be able to jump in and provide care at very short notice.

When it comes to the secret sauce and something that is a little bit more applicable to all CEOs and businesses, I found that communication is the crux of every single issue that we've generally had, whether it's interoffice or between customers and the office, or between the office and caregivers communication is always key, and 90% of issues can be handled or small fires can be put out relatively easy with the communication.

So we strive to make sure that we are constantly talking with our customers, whether that's by phone, whether that's by text, whether that's by email. So that way, even if we do a bad job, or even if a caregiver does something that makes you want to lose your hair, in which I've lost it all already, you won't say that, hey, we couldn't have done better with communication, or we couldn't have done better with that.

One important aspect, similar to a secret sauce that we discussed earlier, is the need to invest in your company before customers start investing in it. It's just one of the things that it takes money to make money. You might sit there and say, hey, listen, I'm making 100 grand a year as a business owner, and this is great. If I hire somebody, that means I'm going to only be making 40 grand a year, or whatever it is, or 60 grand a year. But that person is going to allow you to free up your time to be able to do more high-value dollar tasks.

So you need to look at it in terms of being able to invest that money before you need to do it, rather than afterward. I've learned that the harder way, and everybody learns it at their own pace, and that's something that I've learned over the years.

07:59 – Gresham Harkless

And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

08:10 – Ryan McEniff

You know, what has made me more efficient, I would say, is really focusing on kind of that GTD model, that book, and learning about that, whether it's looking at Reddit's productivity models or having that tax task list, having that inbox that allows you to quickly store something, and then it's out of sight, out of mind. I am definitely a big fan of Cal Newport. His books and his podcast on productivity are really good.

He has really opened my eyes in some ways, making me realize that sitting in front of a computer and completing mundane tasks, such as constantly checking email and text messages, doesn't leave me feeling accomplished at the end of the day. How did my quick response to emails move the needle? Well, it didn't, unless it was a big customer or one of those rare important emails.

But you need to sit down and write out the tasks that will truly drive your business forward, then focus on them. Then going back to with I know you it, but going back to the little hack or secret sauce, is that all the stuff that you didn't have that doesn't move the needle? You got to find somebody else to do that for you or you have to outsource that or eliminate that. That kind of mentality of thinking about, hey, my time is worth dollar 500 an hour, let's say, even if it's not, and I hope one day my time is worth dollar 500 an hour. If it was that, would you ever do some of the tasks that you're doing right now?

Maybe you have to do some of them now because you don't have that money, but if you do, then you need to look at what are those things vital. I felt like when your productivity system, is very simple, a task manager, an inbox, like an email or an Evernote, and then you start getting into a habit like that every day.

It allows you to focus on the important stuff and then delegate or eliminate the rest. Not every email has to be responded to, right? So I feel like those are some of those things that while it's no magic bullet and I don't think anybody's ever going to give you a magic bulletin, being able to utilize your time the best that you can is really important. I've always been fascinated by how somebody like Elon Musk or Bezos or Cuban or whoever, they've all got 24 hours in the day, just like you and me, they have more money, but they don't have any more time.

How are they utilizing their time so well and effectively that they can grow these giant companies while you and I and others here are trying to grow our company? How can we emulate that and take some of that insane amount of productivity that they have and utilize it for our businesses as well?

10:58 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely appreciate that. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget, a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. You might have already touched on this, but it's something you might tell your younger business self if you were to hop into a time machine.

11:10 – Ryan McEniff

Oh, that's an easy one. I would tell my earlier self to set up a processes and procedures manual really early. That's one thing that I think, and I guess every answer I'm going to give you is going to weave itself back into the previous answers. But when you're a CEO and you're a solopreneur, or there's only one or two of you in the office, it's acceptable to have everything up here in your brain, right? Then people come to you and say, hey, Gresham, what do I do in this situation? Hey, Gresham, what do I do in that situation?

Well, when you then get 15 full-time employees, like I have right now, and people are calling you up and being like, well, what do I do? You're sitting there going like, I told you this, like ten times, but, you know, I remember telling you this, but you've got a lot of the employees got a lot of things in there. You have to put all that stuff down on a piece of paper and a processes and procedures manual.

None of it's going to be perfect. It's going to be, this is the general rules of how I want my business to run. When things deviate from that, come see me. So I have found over the last two years that putting that down onto pieces of paper in a, you know, whether it's online through some Internet thing, whether it's a physical manual that people can look at, at least they can reference that first, and then if they have questions, then they come to talk to you.

But that is going to allow you to not only have your business down on a piece of paper, so it allows you free time to go do what you need to do to move the needle, it's also going to show you where there are gaps in your processes and procedures manual because people are going to say, hey, listen, this says to do this, but like, this is how it's done now.

So my rule of thumb has been every time your business grows 20%, need to look back at that processes and procedures manual and reevaluate it from soup to nuts and go it over with each one of your team, members of your management, whoever's in charge of whatever department, is this applicable still? What needs to change, what needs to be tweaked? So the more that you can do that, the more that it's going to allow you to free up your time to do things that help you grow your business, rather than explaining to people mundane tasks over and over again because that processes and procedures manuals up in your head rather than down on pictures.

13:22 – Gresham Harkless

And so I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on the show. So, Ryan, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:30 – Ryan McEniff

To me, being a CEO, the main aspect of my job is hiring people that are better at it. Then me, at what I lack. So your job as a CEO is to surround yourself with people who are smarter, and wiser than you are, and then to take their advice and to at least listen to their advice when they're giving that to you. If you're the type of CEO who thinks you know everything, I think you're the Titanic cruising towards the iceberg.

So for me, being a CEO is surrounding yourself with really smart people who are either more talented than you or smarter than you in areas in which you're deficient and building off of that.

14:10 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that. What I wanted to do now is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best they can get a hold of you. Subscribe to your podcast. Here are all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

14:22 – Ryan McEniff

Yeah, sure. Two things I'll mention. I do a podcast called the Caregivers Toolbox. It's not making me any money. It's a labor of love. It's there to try to give education and information to families that are starting their journey into the senior care world. So if you want to listen to a bunch of different senior care experts, by all means, go over and do that. A plug for something that's totally not related to me, but it is related to senior care, is that if you want to start the process of getting your affairs in order, I really recommend going to Five Wishes. Just type that into Google.

They ask for a $5 donation and they give you a few pages of information and questions that you can talk to your family members about. It helps you start that process of who's going to be your healthcare proxy, who's going to be in charge of things when things go badly, and what is the plan. It gives a step-by-step process. It's an easy way for families to kind of breach that conversation when the adult child is becoming a bit more of the parenthood than the parent is now. You need to have that conversation. So go check out Five Wishes. I have no affiliation, just a good resource. For people out there. If you want to listen to my podcast, it's the caregiver's toolbox.

15:34 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. We will definitely have the links and information in the show notes. I appreciate that that last, you know, hack as well too because I think so many times we don't realize, like I kind of talked about before of, you know, what to do when those situations happen. So to be able to have that exercise in place before that happens is so huge. I imagine the people that are in have less maybe heartburn and frustration during those times are those people who have gone through those exercises. So thank you so much and reminding us of that and for providing so much great insight and impact and definitely looking forward to having you back on and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:05 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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