Rocco Coniglio's Inspiring Journey To Business Success

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Hello everybody. We are going to have fun this afternoon talking with Rocco Coniglio. Hello, Rocco.

How you doing, Larry?

Now, many of y' all may know him as Coniglio since you have the American pronunciation, but we've agreed Conlio is the proper Italian G, silent pronunciation. And Rocco was asking me about the podcast and I told why I do the podcast. I was telling him it's because I get a chance to meet fun people like him and talk about winning with new people and kind of broaden my own perspective as well as my friends and the people I know broaden our perspective on winning by pulling it in proven insight from people that have gone out there and attacked life with energy and faced all the things that we all run into and one overcome. And like Rocco was sharing, he's right, now he's dealing with a bad pack. We all. It's always something, isn't it? And I won't tell you what I ran into this week, but it's always something. And it's usually completely unpredictable. The predictable ones somehow we're able to avoid. But in spite of that, you gotta win. Clock is ticking and nobody wants to hear about your problems because they cut all of their own to deal with. And so Rocco, talk about, I'm excited to hear what you would think in looking about your resume and your achievements. What do you think is your biggest achievement that you're most proud of pulling off in business? And that really means a lot to you?

It's a good question. I would say when we started our company, Psych360 back in 2015, just the time of life of when my wife and I started that company, I think it's really, I think it's easier to start a company from scratch when you're younger and you don't have, you don't have as much to lose. And we actually, we started our company more like mid career. So I was, I don't know, I don't know what I was when I was back in 2015, mid-30s. And at that time we had two girls, two young girls. A year after we started the company, we had our third girl. I had a W2 job that I was working, had just moved my dad in 2013 from Pittsburgh to Ohio because he had gotten diagnosed with dementia. And so I was his primary caregiver, so I had to take care of him as well. And so like you're talking about starting a company, maintaining your performance at your full time job so that you could have an income. Because when you start a company, typically you're not going to be able to pay yourself or pay yourself very much for a pretty long time. And for us it was like, I don't think we took a salary for three years. So it was an extremely challenging set of circumstances because I was trying to be a good dad, trying to be a good husband, making sure that we were, you know, I was performing at my day job and then also starting and growing a company which takes a ton of effort, especially in the first few years, checking in on my dad, grocery shopping for him, making sure he was taking his medications. So I would say like the first few years was, was pretty brutal just from the standpoint of like it was non stop, it was full go all the time. And then it got to a point and in 2017, when there were routinely times where I remember would come home on like a Thursday, I would be behind on work for psych360. And so I would work throughout the night to catch up on everything without any sleep and then go back to work Friday without sleeping. And look, I'm not suggesting that's like a badge of honor or anything or I'm not suggesting that's like the right thing to do. I mean sleep deprivation is not good for your health. But I wanted it pretty bad. So it was just a matter of like, that was what was necessary to get to where we wanted to go.

And so from that, what would you say, starting with that beginning, what do you think is out your past, things that you were able to do? What is your mountaintop that you're most proud of so far?

I think that actually accomplishing the vision that Nicole and I had for the company, which was when we started, it was just her and I in scaling a company to the size of 75 employees, scaling it to, we were serving the nursing home industry. So like we had 600 different assisted living and skilled nursing facilities that we serviced in multiple states. We were taking care of thousands of patients. We had 140,000 patient encounters a year. I never would have thought that we would have got it to that scale when we first started. But I think being able to help so many people, being able to employ a lot of people, being able to develop a lot of people, that was extremely rewarding. And I think that it taught us a lot of lessons and created and established a lot of great relationships. And we felt like we did a lot of good throughout the course of that time and getting to professionalizing the organization to this, to the degree that we actually had a buyer come in and say, like, we, we want to buy the company. We think what you guys are doing is great. That, that was, that was awesome.

And so you mentioned relationships. I just heard a snippet, that interview with Peyton manning, Super Bowls MVPs, this, that and the other. Every award you'd win at football. And he said the biggest thing he looks back on is the relationships. The thing that means the most to him is relationships. And I think when we start businesses, we don't really think about that's going to happen. Would you agree?

I think that if I look back at my career, like when I was working for other companies, I worked in the healthcare industry for over 20 years. I worked for some large corporations, I worked for some smaller corporations. The best executive team and culture I worked with was a company called Spectranetics. They're part of Philips Healthcare now. They got bought when I was, I was there by Philips, but had a really great culture. It started from the top. They taught everybody about relationships and they did that through really having a strong focus on the mission of the company and the strong focus on values. And that started from the CEO down. And so I think just being exposed to that, I kind of knew going in that we wanted to create a similar type of a culture and organization. And so I think I came into it eyes wide open, knowing that like we were going to have a lot of relationships that we were going to establish and there were going to be a lot of people along the way that we wanted to see develop and frankly develop them to the point that they would move into better things, whether that was with our company or outside of our company. So I would say that when you see things like that happen, that you take pride in those things because you were a part of it.

Yeah, yeah. And in fact, you reminded me my nephew is working with Google in their tech world. The quantum computer. That's right. He's. He maintains a quantum computer, but he was talking about when he. The hiring process. They had five or six steps, but they, pretty early on they started talking about, I forget what he called it, the Google way or something like that. But they were more interested in your attitude about how you went about yourself. You went around about being around other people as much as anything else. And I think that's what you're referring to. Would that be correct?

Yeah, I mean, I think your attitude is really important. Your attitude can either make or break whatever you're focused on. So there's a lot of smart people out there, and intelligence isn't the whole thing that's necessary in order to be successful. You really have to have a strong mentality and I think attitude is a big part of that.

So, okay, now you sold a company, you sold this company. We'll get circle back on some of these things. But I'm curious right now. I know you're in a lot of pain with your back and everything, but it's hard to be a happy guy when back pain is a great leveler. But the thing is, what gets you most excited about living or what aspect of the job? Is it what you're able to do now with your kids after, you know, after getting over this hurdle, you know, you just, you've climbed a massive mountain and you more than fulfilled the vision you and your wife started out with. And now what did that yield for you? What have you learned? What are you excited about? What are you looking forward to?

Really looking forward to doing it again? I'm not at a point in my career where I think it makes sense to think about slowing down. I got a family to support. I have three, three girls that you got to set an example for. And I think that making sure that you're continuing to lead your family is important and leading through example. And when we look at, at least when I look at like the future, I'm looking at things like, okay, so what's next? Is it running another company? Is it in healthcare? Is it in another industry? I mean, all those types of things are things that I evaluate. But just trying to figure out what the next challenge is, at least on the business side, is kind of the process that I've been going through now. And we've been looking at various companies to go through an acquisition process on. And so that's kind of exciting. And those are the things that we're looking at now is identifying companies in the lower middle market, primarily in healthcare, where we can add value. And so there's some exciting opportunities on the horizon that we're engaged in.

Maybe you can offer some insight for people that are in that situation where they've had some success, they got some resources, they've got a network of friends and ex business associates where they could kind of put their band together. You know, it's kind of like being in music. You've got your band, you can put the band together, we can put on A show. And it's just a matter of trying to find the right material like they do out in Hollywood. They'll read scripts for years and they'll finally find the project. And then they go around the clock pulling it off and they pull all of their friends in and put something big together. As you're out there now, you've got resources, you've got skill sets, you've got experience and contacts that you didn't have before. How do you go about evaluating opportunities? What have you learned about that in terms of streamlining that and getting to the bottom line on what could be a fit, what could be worth it, what could be exciting where you could add value? And I'm sure when you add value like you, I think I saw in your, your resume there that after you did your eight figure exit, you stayed on as chief operating officer and president and you grew. The, you know, the company doubled again. And so what are you looking for or what would you advise people to look for in terms of where you can make a difference and what could be exciting to do that would engage you? What kind of potential are you looking for?

Given that I have a healthcare background, given that I've been in sales and business development for a long time in my career, given that I've been able to start a company, scale it to a PE exit, those are all things that would add value for the right circumstances. Right? So I think there are opportunities where one of those things could be valuable to a company, but the opportunities that get me excited are opportunities where I could, I could add value in all of those areas. So when I'm evaluating those types of opportunities, I'm looking for opportunities that I can make a larger impact by adding value in all the different areas that I feel I have strengths in. So a lot of it is just having a lot of conversations. I mean, it's a lot of work, but it's getting on calls, going to meetings, going to conferences, flying around the country and figuring out what's going to be the best fit. Meeting people in person. I mean, zoom is great and doing this type of thing is great, but a lot of times it goes a long way to meet people in person. Go have dinner, go have lunch, grab coffee, whatever. It's really a long process. It's not something that you just make a rash decision or you just like pull the trigger on something quickly. But there's a lot of opportunities out there. You just have to find them and then you have to have multiple conversations and see what feels best and, and what your gut tells you. And. And that's how I've been going about it.

It's prospecting, isn't it?

Yeah, a lot of it is.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah.

And it's kind of like people will say. They'll always come in and say, you know, what was the magic when you. You hit your stride? What was the button you pushed that caused everything to really start to work for you? You said, I always tell them if there were 88 keys on a piano, I was banging all of the keys, trying to find every, you know, going to conferences, call phone calls, zoom. Meeting people there, going to business lunches, calling my friends up, looking on social media, whatever I could think of. You know, that when I was in business, people would come up and say, what do you think about the idea about this getting new recruits or. And I say, yes, that's a great idea. And then the next one you think of, do that too. Because we know you never know where the. It's like digging for gold. They're down in Brazil and they're up in Alaska digging for gold.

You can't leave any stone unturned. I mean, it's a lot. It's a lot to go and find those right opportunities, and you certainly can't sit back and wait for it to come to you. So I would say it's really important to be active in a lot of different ways.

Yeah. Because it's like this. The opportunities are out there, but they don't know how to find you, and you don't know how to find them. The only way to do it is just go look it. And it doesn't matter that you have all this experience and you could be. You could take them and make them a hundred times bigger, this or the other. They don't know where you are. They don't know that you know, you have a tremendous. For you to be able to capitalize on the advantages you have. You got to do some prospecting. It reminds me of. I had my dentist on here, Dr. Ty Ericks, and he was talking about how he found his practice, and he was over in Tampa, and he looked all over the state, all over the Southeast. He came up underneath another dentist, and then it came time for him to go his own way, but he thought, I'm going to take over a practice. I don't want to build one from scratch. And he just. He had to do the same type thing. Do you think the idea of starting one from scratch right now, does that appeal to you, or is it more.

Appealing to buy A business that's already cash flow positive.

Yes. Yeah, that's a lot of thesis in place.

That's a good question. So I think there are pluses and minuses to both. I mean, the way I look at it is if you start a business, especially if you start one for a second or third or whatever time you're able, I think you're in a better spot than the first time you did it because you can start it the right way. There's not a lot of like, oh, I made this mistake, or I, I gotta fix this, or I gotta take take two steps back and, and so having a blank slate. There's something to be said about having a blank slate because you've been through it already. And so you are going to be much more efficient with limited resources than you were the first time you did it. Right? So you could probably get to where you want to go faster and with less money and less pain than you did the first time. So that's the big plus on starting something from scratch. Now if you go and get, you go and look at acquisitions and you say, okay, well, I'm going to go buy a business, or I'm going to go and buy a business that's cash flow positive and it's been around for a while, or whatever your criteria is for buying a business, you can buy a nice business, but now you have a whole set of other challenges, right? You've got people that you don't know in that business. You have to build credibility and trust with those people. You may have to, you may have to upgrade some of those people to get to where you want to go with that business. The business may be unsophisticated. It may have been. I mean, I've seen plenty of businesses that have been around for decades. They don't have, they don't have good systems in place. They've been running on antiquated operations for a long time, primarily.

Are you referring to human resources, accounting?

All of it, really? No, truly, all of it. I mean, there's plenty of businesses out there that are successful, but they're not sophisticated or they haven't, they haven't really sophisticated their operations. There's businesses I've seen that are highly successful and they have no sales. Right. They have no sales team and they don't hunt for new opportunities. And so there's all kinds of opportunities out there with existing businesses. But now your challenge is, is that you have to work through a lot of change management and you have to invest some of those dollars back into the business in order to get it to like that next level. So that's a whole other set of problems that you have to tackle versus when you start a new business from scratch. So both have problems. It's just what problem do you feel more comfortable that dealing with?

Would you agree with this, this tight statement that it has to do with are they set up for future success or not? Are the areas that need to be addressed? They've kind of had success, they've maximized their success and they're where they are and they're probably not looking to sell if they're blowing and going. Not as many of them.

There's businesses at all different stages. There's businesses that different, they have different life cycles. So like for instance, there are low middle market businesses that you can find that have been highly successful for decades. But you know, they're founder owned and maybe the founder's taking home a couple million dollars a year. Right. Like there's no reason if they're, if that's a lifestyle business for them and they, they've got a great life and they've worked really hard to get to that point and they don't really want to put the energy in to taking it to the next level. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Right. But, but they may not be set up to take that next step. So you're. The question you have to ask yourself is can I take it there? Do I have the resources to be able to take it there? And are the problems that I see with the business today based upon where I want to go with it? Are they problems that I can solve versus There are plenty of companies out there that I would call more of a platform.

Yeah.

That it's already set up and ready to grow and get to that next level. And at that point you can run a lot faster with those businesses, but they'll cost you more too.

Yeah. One thing I would think about in a situation like that, Rocco, is if I go in there is if I'm looking for a recruit, someone to bring on board or something, you want to find out enough facts to see if you kind of like them, if you could be in business with them, if it would be fun to be around them, if you could do things to be involved in that business at that location with these people doing what needs to be done. Do I hold? Am I getting inside? Are my inside saying this would be fun? I like the challenge. But at some point that like button has got light bulb, has got to go on, doesn't it?

Yeah, you're right. Certainly if you get into a situation that you're evaluating a business and there's not a match with the people, that's pretty much it.

Yeah.

I mean, there's no reason to take additional steps. Yeah, that's hard to overcome.

We had a big recruiting operation and people would frequently, you know, they'd come in and they, they'd have somebody they were trying to recruit and they'd bring them in and introduce them to me. And after they leave, they come back in and say, what'd you think of him? You know, you know, what'd you think of him? And I said, I don't know. What did he think of me? You know, if we don't like each other, it doesn't matter what we thought of each other.

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Notes.

What was going, what was in your suit that caused you to start a business at the stage of life you were in taking on your father, you had to. Basically that was a new job. Having that's disruptive and something had to be driving. You had a burr in your saddle somewhere. And it probably didn't happen overnight.

No, it didn't happen overnight. It was like I would say I had always thought about it for quite a long time and I knew just being in corporate that you really had to have ownership if you wanted to create wealth.

And would you say that again?

You really have to have ownership if you want to create wealth.

Thank you.

Yeah. And you're not going to make that with a, you know, W2 and working for somebody else. So. So that was one thing. I think the other thing was I lost my mom abruptly like when I was 29. And so it just, that hit me pretty hard. And so when that happened, that just created like a sense of urgency for me. Because when you lose your parents, you're. At least for me, when I lost my parents, it just creates more of a. A sense of your own mortality. I think when you're, when you're young and, and they're around and you can lean on them, you kind of don't feel as, as much of that. I only have certain amount of time here, right. So what am I going to do with it? And when that happened, that really accelerated my push to, to really think about, okay, I want to. I would always lay out what my goals are every single year, what I want to do, what I want to accomplish. And the more I started to do that and to visualize that, and the more those things started to happen for me, then it made me more confident that I could take bigger risks and accomplish those things. And it was up to me to put the responsibility on myself to make those things happen. So those were the things that really pushed me. And at that point in my life, I was like, well, if I don't do it now, I'm not going to have the time right ahead of me to be able to get to where I want to go.

Yeah, yeah. You've got to factor in the time element. It's, you know, at some point you got to go and you don't want to do it where, you know, it's hard enough to have. You're going to have sleepless nights if you start a business. You know, I hate to hate to tell. Bust anybody's bubbles. And it, it is better the younger you are. Sleepless nights are better the. You don't want to have sleepless nights. Nobody gives you a plaque for doing sleepless nights. And people say you just work so long. It's like I said, it's just. I'm just no good. If I was good, I wouldn't have to work as much. I'm trying to get good.

But I think the other thing is you answer some questions for yourself if you're able to take some of those risks. Because I look at it this way. I wasn't. I didn't come from wealth. I didn't come from. I didn't have any money. So I wasn't really going to be worse off if I failed. Right. At least I knew, at least I would know that, hey, I took a risk or I took some risks and it didn't work out. But, like, it's not like I would look back and have regrets because I didn't try. So I've always tried to have that type of mentality of, like, what's the downside? Okay, well, I fail. And so what? Like, you can fail. And a lot of people say, like, hey, fail forward, and you learn a lot of stuff when you fail. You probably learn more when you fail than you do when you succeed.

Yeah. Now, looking back and thinking about where you were when you started, what skill set, what experiences, what had you gained from your experience working inside another company that served you the most, launching your own business.

That's a good question. I would say just seeing how large organizations run is really valuable. You can see how professional organizations run. You can also see inefficiencies. Yeah, but understanding. I mean, like, for us, we had, like, operating systems in place from day one, even. It was just me. When it was just me and my wife, Nicole, we used a lot of technology. We used a lot of automation. We started to make relationships with outsourced vendors that could start to. We could start to outsource mundane administrative things to make ourselves more efficient. And a lot of that came from learning on our own. A lot of that came from experiencing things within some of the companies that we both worked in. She had worked at the Cleveland Clinic. She had worked at University Hospitals in Cleveland. So she saw how large health systems worked. I've worked within those organizations. I worked within, like, a lot of large companies like McKesson, Medtronic, Phillips Healthcare. So you could kind of see how they built those organizations and what was really helpful and what wasn't. And so you could use a lot of those teachings when you built your own operation. The other thing I would add is that the culture of. When you experience a good culture, you learn a lot and how the culture is run. And there are subtle. There are a lot of subtle things that go a long way. Like, for instance, when I was at Spectranetics, the executive team there, they never referred to people as supervisor, boss, employee, this, that, and the other thing. It was always like, you're a teammate. Okay, so the CEO is a teammate. To the guy that's on the manufacturing floor putting the devices together, it didn't really matter. So the hierarchy was there. But it also was like, it was emphasized that everybody was working together as a team rather than this hierarchical structure that made everybody feel inferior or superior to others. And that one, I think that went a long way. And coming from a place where I played sports a big part of my life, I really appreciated that because. Because in order to have a successful team, you do have to have that mentality that no one is bigger than the team.

So you were in a football program that went 68 and 1.

Yeah, yeah. We. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It causes you to fall in love with the sport when you can do win.

Yeah, I played football from the time I was in fourth grade to the time I was 22 years old. I was fortunate to play college football. And I played at University of Mount Union, which is kind of like the Alabama Division 3. I think they've got like 14 national championships now. I was part of four of those from 97 to 01, and played for a great coaching staff. Coach Karras was the head coach of that football team. And just an amazing group of coaches, an amazing group of leaders and an amazing culture as well that they put together there.

Well, to not belabor the point, but I think parents that have their kids in sports programs need to be aware the influence on attitude and everything of the program and the coaches and how they react. You don't have to win all the time, but they have to react to losing, getting beat the right way and keeping their head up and keep moving forward and taking the positives out of it. But a positive sports program being a part of that really does instill things in your bones that you carry with you right on up, don't you think?

Oh, yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think that being part of stuff like that is. I think there's some people that don't relate that to other parts of their life. And. And that's unfortunate because I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned when you play sports. So I think it's really important to play sports. I think that it teaches you how to work with other people, especially in a team environment. There's a ton of work that goes into preparation and being successful and competing. And then there's an individual aspect to those team sports, too. So being able to kind of get inside your own head and figure out, like, okay, well, how am I going to compete? Compete? How am I going to get on the field? How am I going to win a job and what can I do to make myself better? How am I going to push myself? Like, all those things are really important. You have your own the team and individually, you have your own challenges that you're all you're going to face. Whether that's trying to get better or fighting through injuries or just mentally just making yourself tougher mentally to be able to fight through adversity. I mean, all those things are really valuable in sports.

Well, we found that recruiting tens of thousands of people, we found that invariably, not always, but invariably, there was a high likelihood that if you had a high achiever, they played high school sports in One way or another or they were in the band or there was some kind of competitive environment where they had to push themselves and learn what it is to push themselves and challenge themselves and go on exhibit, put on performances and things like that. Because the things you learn from that, you're not going to learn any other way.

Yeah, I agree. I also think it's interesting you mentioned that because the high achievement thing, like if you listen to some of Nick Saban's speeches, he has one where he says high achievers can't stand to be around mediocre people and mediocre people can't stand to be around high achievers.

Yeah.

So like when you think about cultures, it's really important to make that match. Right. You want to surround yourself with high achievers in order to be ultra successful. If there's tension within a team, it's probably because you haven't found that right mix of people. And you have, you have a group that's okay with mediocrity and you have a group that's not okay with mediocrity and they're high achievers. And so that, that isn't a good mix. That's not a good culture.

Yeah, yeah. And you find the top leaders are incredibly attitude sensitive. Like if they come in to an area or a team or they're in an event, the first thing they're going to pick up on is the energy level and the attitude of everybody there more than anything else, because that's where they're looking for. And it's like a smell, you know, winners, winners can smell success, but they could also smell losing. They could smell a bad attitude or whatever like that, that doesn't fit. And that's one of the things for a, the most important thing for a leader to do is to make sure that the right ingredients for success are there. And that attitude that, that approach kind of permeates the organization. When you came in, what appealed to you about this particular opportunity? What was the, the business that you started? What was the service and why did that appeal to you? Why, why do you say we can get in here, we can make a difference? And then it did, it turned into a huge success. So congratulations on taking that bet.

Well, I would say my wife identified the opportunity. Like Nicole, she was working in the long term care industry. She said, I'm getting a lot of, a lot of patients that have psych mental health issues in this particular space. There's not a lot of providers that work in that particular vertical within healthcare that they can provide those type of services. And I think there's a huge need here that's unmet. So we talked about it. This is back in 2013. We talked about it for a while. She wanted to start something, and I did, too. And I said, yeah, let's do it. Let's. But we did some homework on it before we made the leap. I mean, the first thing that I did was I said, let's go see if there's a model out there right now that has been formed. Because at least if there's one that we can point to that's large and has scaled, we can say, okay, this is a proof of concept.

Right?

And some would say, you know, some might argue, well, if someone else is doing it, why would you do it? Well, that actually gives me more confidence that there's a market for it if someone else is doing it. If someone else isn't doing it, then you're almost on the level of, like, you're saying, like, I'm an inventor or I'm like an Elon Musk, like, type, type of guy, where I'm just going to go do something no one's ever done before, which is extremely challenging. So when we looked at the market, there were tons of signals that said, like, this is going to. There's a market here. There's an unmet need. And so at that point, we just said, all right, let's just take a leap of faith and work really hard and make it happen. And we did.

That was a smart move. I don't know if you realize how smart that instinct was to look for a model right from the beginning. Because the bottom line on success, you can make yourself a success at pretty much everything. If you work hard, you're going to beat half of the people just by working hard. And then you beat another 40% by having a good track to run on. And the way you get those. You find those good tracks to run on is look at the people who are already successful doing what it is you want to success and start. Start modeling their behavior and picking up things that fit. Fit your style and keep working hard in a certain path. And so for you to have that instinct right from the beginning, rather than, I think a lot of people, they kill themselves because they don't have a model.

Right. I agree. Yeah, models are. I think it's really important. We were just talking to a business partner of mine about this yesterday, and we were just talking about the amount of work that we're putting in to what we're doing now. And I just said it's important to do that now because the faster I can learn this, like the faster I can learn something, then the more I'm able to narrow in on the most efficient way to do it. And then the more efficient I get at it, like the less time I'm actually spending doing it because I've created a model, I've created a model in my head of like how it looks and then I just get faster and more efficient as time goes on.

Right. And that allows you to develop those kind of systems, put things in place that allow you to stay on track. Is there anything that we should add to your insight that when you worked inside big companies, you saw how big companies work and you were implying that successful big companies work. Is there anything to that that we should add to pass on to people that you learned that they could incorporate, bring, make sure they have in their business as they put it together?

I think, yeah, I do. I think that when you're in those big companies, don't take it for granted. Try to learn as much as you can when you're there. It's there for you. You're an insider at that point. So one, if you take an interest and you, and you learn some of these things, the whys behind it, why have they chosen to do certain things? Why have they deployed certain systems and not others? How they evaluate things. Number one, like that's going to set you apart from like 95% of the rest of the people that just kind of go along and don't really understand the why behind what the company is doing things for.

Right.

So as far as like career path, like that'll definitely set you apart. And then on the other hand, if you decide to ever do something on your own or as an entrepreneur, you've actually learned more deeply why decisions have been made. And then you can evaluate for yourself on whether they made good decisions or bad decisions. If the criteria they used to make those decisions were good, was a good set of criteria or not.

Let's talk about the timeline and launching something. How long did you, you talked about like for three years you were going, going morning, noon and night. And the good thing about that was time pretty much goes by pretty fast. But the bad thing is you're running to the ground. How did you, who was your first hire?

My sister in law.

Okay.

Yeah, she was a nurse and we actually hired a lot of family. So we had, we had family working in our organization. Some of our family still works there to this day. When you make those hires you want to hire people that you trust and that you have confidence in, and that'll do a good job. And so what she did was she. She helped Nicole, who was seeing patients at that time, be more efficient with her time. So that was our first hire.

Yeah. And so how did you staff up? How long did it take to get your first 10 people, five or 10 people in place? And how do you describe that process?

So we started July of 2015. We had our first contract in August of 2015. And then we started to just put. We started to put goals in place, like, what did we want to accomplish in 2015, what did we want to accomplish in 2016 and 2017 and so forth. So, like, every year we would revisit those goals. We made our first hire in 2016, end of 2015, and then we made more hires in 2016 where they were full time employees. Part of that was putting, what did you want to do? Like, did you want to pay yourself more or did you want to reinvest in the company? And the answer for us was we always reinvested into the company. Rather than paying ourselves or increasing the amount of money that we made, that accelerated the growth of the company faster. That allowed us to not wear as many hats. So. And there's also a balance, right? Like between Nicole and I, we did every single job you could possibly do in the company. And so I think that's important too, because you learn a lot of things by doing all those jobs. As much as you don't want to do a lot of those jobs, you just do it. And that way, you know, it gives you more insight into who you want to hire, what skill set they need to have, and you learn all the intricacies of how a company works by doing those types of things. We went and utilized the sba. We utilized some SBA lines of credit. We raised a little bit of money in 2018, brought on like a minority partner in 2018 in order to. Absolutely.

Now what's that? What's bringing on a little money?

The first money that we tapped into was Small Business Association. We went through the SBA and we went through traditional lending and we got like, process.

Like, I'm asking you to shed some light on people who said, I think I might do that. Well, maybe. Maybe not so much. Maybe know what you're getting into before you do it.

Yeah. So it's like a financial colonoscopy. I mean, it's like, that's what I suck. It's like you have to have all your Documents in order. And it's painful and it's. Takes a while. Like we, we were able to get through it, I think like in 90 days. But it can take six months, it can take nine months. It depends on how much you're, how much you're taking. And you're also personally guaranteeing that. Right. So it's not like you're not on the hook for it. So you're personally guaranteeing a lot. When you start, when you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a business, you have to be comfortable with that level of risk and your confidence level has to be high enough and your outcome that you're able to, you know, you want to make it happen. And, and then as far as raising money goes, we had some people that were interested in what we were doing and we raised money from, I would characterize them as angel investors.

Right.

And we knew that we were going to need, if we really wanted to grow. And we were growing like we were. Our company was doubling year over year. And that's a little easier to do when you're small. But we knew like to sustain a 40 or 50% growth rate year over year, you've got to have, you can't just reinvest free cash flow back into the business. You're going to need additional capital to do that too.

What was requiring the additional capital? Well, facilities, things like that.

It's actually, it was the rate of growth in the fact that you've got to hire people ahead of that growth. And so we're hiring professionals that have high salaries. You're talking about nurse practitioners, physicians, those type of people. So, and you're also, you also have a lag in your collections because you're billing third party insurance companies. And so you're going to see their productivity. So when you bring someone on, you might hire someone today and they, they may start to see patients and their productivity ramps up over the course of, let's say 90 days. But it's depending on the insurance company and how quickly they pay. You might get paid in a month, you might get paid in 90 days. It really depends. And then when you start to get that going, it's, it gets going faster and you have some inertia behind it. But you do have to float quite a bit of cost within the first three to six months, depending on how quickly you get them ramped up. Because it's up to you to, to get them busy, right? I mean, you got to give them a salary, you got to give them some incentive pay and that was really important. And then as you get, as you scale and get larger, you have to invest more money into systems to operate the business. Like everything can't stay the same as it was when you're like a five person group than a 10 or 15 or 20 person group. And then you're 50 and then you're 60. So. And you've got to be able to compete with larger companies. So you got to figure out, how am I going to offer, you know, benefits to people, how am I going to offer the same level, if not better benefits than like a bigger company may offer? There's all kinds of things that get more costly as you get larger. And so that was really important for us to be able to do those things to, to get to where we wanted to go.

How did you realize when you needed, how did you figure out how to make those steps forward? I mean, do you have, let me ask you this, do you have a facility? How much did facilities play in this?

It didn't play much into it. I mean, we had office space, but it was more for administrative. A big part of our workforce was in the field. We had to provide them technology and equipment, you know, so you had to buy laptops and phones and stuff like that. But I mean, as far as capital expenditures, not a whole ton of capital expenditures. We had a lot of software that we had to invest in.

Yeah, that can get expensive. And so now how long did you were you up to the 75 people on board before you wound up selling the business?

We got pretty big in 2021 and then Mark. Yeah, yeah, I mean it was. Yeah, it was like six years. And then year seven. It was really. Year seven is when we transacted. But we went through growing the company, scaling the company, and then we were servicing the long term care industry. A big part of our business was nursing homes, assisted livings, and throughout the course of the COVID The COVID thing from 2020 to 2022, it was an extremely challenging environment to operate in. There was definitely a lot of challenges that we had to overcome over the course of that time. And for us it was like, it was good timing. It was a long, hard road to get to where we were. And it was just time at that point.

What was the biggest challenge for you where you, you're running a pretty sizable organization and you're new to the game and what did you have to go through to sort things out in your own mind to where you could stay on top of things? Did you ever feel like it was Getting away from you, the people, the dealing with the people issues, and much less the outside things, the internal thing.

Actually, the internal things were worse than the outside things.

So why is that so often the case?

It's just. Yeah, it is. I mean, it was. It's like, you know what your own dirty laundry looks like, and a lot of other people don't. I would say that, like, I always felt it wasn't. Probably wasn't reality, but I always felt like I was just piecing everything together and holding it together with, like, duct tape. And it just always felt that way. It always felt like if this one thing broke loose, then everything else is going to unravel. But, like, it. That never was true.

Right.

And it only felt that way because I think partly is because I'm very analytical, so I would analyze everything. I was acutely aware of, like, how. How fragile certain things are, and you can obsess about some of those things. But what's interesting about building a business is that the larger it gets and the longer it's in business, there is just some natural, what I would call, like, inertia, where the more you get going and the more it just keeps going and keeps going, the harder it is for it to fail.

Right. When did that realization come to you?

Probably after I sold it. Yeah. Well.

Well, the thing is, it's hard to keep perspective when you're in the middle of the 100. The fire you're trying to put out, the. You got 40 fires going at once, and you're.

Yeah.

It's hard to be the philosopher about things.

I will say. Maybe that's not fair to say that. Like, I guess we. We were able to. I remember in 2021. It was June of 2021, we. We bought an RV like half the country did during that time.

Yeah.

And so we were able to take the family on a really long trip out west for a month in the summer.

Okay.

And we went to a bunch of national parks, and we kept up with work when we had WI FI access, and we stayed in communication and everything. But there was never a time where I felt like, oh, my God, we got to get back. And that was probably the first time that we were ever able to do that over the. Like, over a period of five years. And we came back from vacation, and we kind of. Nicole and I kind of reflected on that, and we were like, wow, like, we actually have some good people in place. Like, really. We have some good leaders in place. They were able to manage the business without us there. Every Day, that particular time felt pretty good.

What was your biggest challenge? Gut wrenching challenge of from start up to the sale of the business. That where you felt the most challenged, like they never stopped coming. But there's certain times that. And usually it relates to money, but our delivery of services or something.

There's probably a handful. There was a number of them, but I guess the biggest one was probably March of 2020. Like I said, we were in the nursing home industry. We were on the front lines when Covid hit and we were going. I mean, our business model was to go in Pershing, right? We were not a telehealth business. And so at that point, no one knew what the hell essential meant. No, no one knew anything about what was going on. And so we sat there at the kitchen table. I remember just try, like, looking at each other like, well, are we going to lose our business? All this money and time and energy that we put into it, like, how is this all going to play out? So that was for a period of time that was pretty unsettling. We were fortunate enough that at that point we had a strong enough team that everybody kind of pulled together and we were able to make it through and figure things out.

And when you go through, it's important for people to kind of take the mystery out of how you survive a big unknown nightmare like that. And you basically have to just do what you said, pull yourself together, let the emotion get out of it and get the facts and take the next step.

Yeah, yeah, I would agree. Like, the things that I think the things that we did during that course of time, we had gotten a lot of advice. So we reached out to a lot of people. We reached out to our board, which we were on, right. And we had discussions with them and we had disagreements with them. And we, Nicole and I just said, like, look, we're gonna take as much action as we possibly can because at least again, just kind of going back to the principle of taking action versus not taking action, right? That at least we can know that we tried and tried to do everything in our power rather than, like, let everything happen to us. And that was to the degree of like, I was on calls with the president of the Ohio Healthcare association, trying to figure out, like, okay, well, how are you guys reacting to this? What are you hearing? I remember I found. I found the cell phone number for the physician that was on Governor DeWine's cabinet. And I called him and he answered the phone and he took my phone call. Super nice guy. And. And it was like, Seven or eight o' clock at night. One night. I'm sure he had more, more important people than me to talk to, but he was, he was very kind and was communicated with me on those type of things. So gather much information as we could so that we could make important decisions around our company, around patient care. All of those things, I think contributed to the success and the outcome that we had.

You got to shift the focus in times like that from the punches that are coming at you where you're the punching bag and go back and get, get clear your head and kind of get some facts and then look for a way where you can throw a punch back yourself. Like you said, be proactive. It's like, okay, this is great. I'm getting killed here. I got to do something. I got to throw a punch, I got to fight back. I'm just not going to be stumped into the ground here. I am going to fight back and if they wipe me out, great. But at least I put up a fight, right?

No, that's right. That's exactly it. That's the best thing that you can do.

Yeah. Because the tendency is to let it. Your emotion gets you and you just bail. It's never the good answer. Just let, let them keep stomping you. You got to fight back. And the thing is, you made it that far. You're not the only one in the world who's had to face whatever these problems are. It's like Ecclesiastes said, there's nothing new under the sun. So somebody's been through it and reach out, and that's what you did. You got good instincts, by the way. Rocco.

Thank you.

You might continue to do well in life. I hope so, based off your instincts. Yeah. Congratulations on how well you've done so far. How different would this interview be if I had your wife on, had her answering these same questions?

You know, I don't know that you might want to have her on and see.

Yeah, that might be a point counterpoint thing, I think.

Yeah, you, you might want to do that. That would be interesting. I'd have probably talked a lot less.

It's always great to hear it from the other side of the story, you know, the other perspective. But congratulations on your business, your marriage, your kids, your accomplishments, and appreciate your insights. And I always like to give my guests a last word to pass on to people who've stayed with us this far.

No, I appreciate that, Larry. I thank you for having me on. It was great talking to you. And the last word would just be. I think that really hard work and perseverance goes a long way. Don't give up on yourself. And I think a lot of, a lot of people have it in them to do what they want to do. And you just have to trust in yourself and, and follow the path. And it might not happen on your timeline, but I think if you stick with it long enough, it'll eventually happen for you.

Fantastic. If you come out, continue to come out skiing, I can tell you that Buttermilk is one of the four mountains out in Aspen. It is the best learning mountain in the world, you know, so I'll make.

A mental note of that. Thank you.

So anyway, congratulations. Look forward to the next time. Rocco, thank you.

Thank you, Larry. Appreciate it.

Bye.

Bye. Bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode.

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