Miriam Allred (00:01.533)
Welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. Today I'm in the lab with Alex Chamberlain, the owner of Easy Living in Clearwater, Florida. Alex, thanks for being here in the lab with me.
Alex Chamberlain (00:15.458)
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity.
Miriam Allred (00:17.365)
We don't know each other super well, but we've had a couple of good conversations recently brought together by mutual connections. So I'm really looking forward to learning from you and talking a little bit about some of your skills and areas of interest in building up your business. So let's jump in and start with your origin story. You, your mom, the family business, multiple businesses coming together, your background's pretty interesting. So would you go ahead and share that with us?
Alex Chamberlain (00:41.816)
Yeah, of course. So I'd say to really begin the journey, have to start with my mom. She's the founder and entrepreneur of this entire kind of senior world that I've now become gratefully a part of. her story starts to where...
She started a company in 1998 called Aging Wisely, which does geriatric care management. And that's kind of where I got my first foot in the door. I remember when I was 16, she'd make me drive around every year and deliver marketing material or Christmas gifts to referral sources and stuff like that. So that was kind of my first touch into the field.
And then when I went to high school, I went to Palm Harbor University High School and they have a program called the Medical Magnet Program and that's what I was in. And that's actually one of the tracks that I went down was to become a CNA. And if you asked me probably at that time, 16, 17, 18, do you want to be in home care? It was a hard no.
But I went away to college, went to business school, Nova Southeastern, and I had a great summer internship and a great job, kind of my junior and senior year there working at Intrepid Power Boats doing boat sales. And I absolutely loved it. I had a blast working at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show, the Miami Boat Show, and really thought that kind of boat sales was going to be for me. But I graduated in 2008. So as we all kind of remember the market crash, the big recession, the housing recession, you know, all those famous movies like the Big Short and things like that. So nobody was buying boats. So there was no opportunity for me after college to kind of pursue that career.
So I do what every other kid does calls home and says, what now mom? And that's kind of where she's like, Hey, I have this care management business. It's called aging wisely. We refer out a lot of home care and we just haven't really found an organization that we're comfortable partnering with that can provide again, really consistent caregivers at the quality that we want and why don't you come back and help me get this thing off the ground?
And I kind of laughed and said, you know, I do have that CNA experience. So why not? And so moved back to Clearwater here and helped to get Easy Living. That's what we call it. It was two separate companies at the time and helped get Easy Living off the ground. So I was the scheduler. I was the backup caregiver.
And pretty much every position within the company and just continued to grow that organization. So it's been fun.
Miriam Allred (03:11.069)
Amazing. What a great, great story. And you're talking about these two businesses coming together. So both the care management business and the home care business. Talk a little bit about your business model holistically. Like what is kind of the setup, the payers, the revenue streams today?
Alex Chamberlain (03:28.726)
Yeah, so to kind of keep that evolution of the company going forward. We just continued to grow. And with that, we had more shared team members, more shared employees. So when it came time to, you know, shared biller, right? Care management and home care, two different softwares, two different QuickBooks, two different tax returns, two different benefit programs. It just seemed where it made sense to kind of blend the organizations as one. And that's really what we did in 2016 is we kind of merged under one brand. call it Easy Living. You're experts.
And Aging Wisely and then that's kind of where a lot of our growth journey really moved forward. So we opened up our second office in 2017 out in Pasco County and a little bit of that thesis there for our expansion was we were primarily private pay and then in 2015 I got into the Medicaid game and so that's where we started. We got our Medicaid approval number and we started securing those contracts for the county and my thesis was the growth strategy was if I could open up in a new county leverage the Medicaid referrals and I reached to about 750, 800 hours per week pending your reimbursement rates. I was able to afford a sales rep and then grow the private pay side of the business. So that was kind of the growth strategy that we've been implementing from there. And once when you get a sales rep, you're able to grow the private pay, you're able to the care management and we were able to expand. And so that's kind of what we did in 2017. And then in 2019, I got my license to open up in Hillsborough County.
I remember it November 2019, signed my lease January 1, just wanted to get through the holidays. And then of course, you know what happens in February 2020, you know, COVID hit the world lockdown. And so that was a little bit of a rough start. So just signed a lease and all that overhead just to not really open it for the year. And of course, then after that, there was the Medicaid moratorium. So there goes my thesis, because Medicaid is not accepting any new providers. And but nevertheless, we worked through that in 2020 and kind of through really 2022, we really kind of got off the ground there. And then it was 2024, I was presented with an opportunity to acquire, do my first acquisition in Polk County, where another family business reached out to me that was doing care management. And so we were able to acquire them, they were called All About Aging, and we were able to acquire them in Polk County. And so we've expanded out to there. So for us, in our payer sources. have care management. We have home care.
And we're servicing that in Pinellas, Pasco, Hillsborough and Polk, kind of the Tampa Bay regions, what I like to say. And then most recently, as of last year in 2024, I got my license to do skilled nursing and that's just in Pinellas and Pasco right now. So it kind of falls in line with what our kind of mission and vision is. So our vision is just to help as many families as we possibly can, guiding them through their aging journey.
And then with our mission, it's just to provide the care and resources to prevent falls and hospitalization by keeping you aging wisely. And we do that through our service lines, which is care management, home care, and skilled nursing. So we're able to help you wherever you need help on your aging journey.
Miriam Allred (06:50.626)
That was a great summary that almost sounded scripted but I'll let everyone know that was not scripted but clearly you've done that a time or two which was amazing just a few times.
Alex Chamberlain (06:54.883)
Thanks.
A few times, yes.
Miriam Allred (07:03.735)
I love that you've grown up with this business. The really neat thing that I'm just speaking out loud as an observation, I'm interviewing more people that have kind of grown up in home care. And I don't think that was really the case maybe 10, 20, 30 years ago, but there's a lot of people that are kind of starting their careers in home care, which I love to hear. And I think you're good example of that of it just kind of happened that way. But here you are years and years later and you know really the ins and outs of home care. And so
When we first met, asked you, of all your experience, what are some of your areas of expertise or areas of passions? And I thought it was interesting. The two things that you said, one was the intake call. You love just hearing that initial call from families or the clients themselves or that adult daughter. You love just kind of that initial interaction. And then the second thing you said that I thought was interesting is you have this strength and ability to speak caregiver.
So, You and I kind of talked through that and that's what I latched onto. So that's what I want to talk about today is just how you as this owner operator kind of CEO role still have these really deep connections and relationships and ability to speak with the caregivers. And so my first question is just around what does that mean to you? You you said to me, I can speak caregiver, I can kind of speak their language in your own terms. How would you describe that or define it?
