David Gilberg, Founder, CEO & President of Elder Care Homecare

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Ryan Heckman, the CEO of Rally Day Partners, and this is the Founders' Journey Podcast. We'll explore the heart and soul of great founders and their journey to build the company of their dreams. You will learn about new industries and business models while discovering how to apply the Founders mindset to your everyday work and life. (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to another episode of the Founders' Journey Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Heckman, and I am joined by a VIP, at least for a day here at Rally Day, the CEO and founder of Elder Care, David Gilbert, David, welcome to Denver. - Thanks, thank you for having me. - It's kind of cool because when we started visioning of what the Founders' Journey Podcast would be, it was mostly like, oh my gosh, we have all these Founders in our portfolio, these amazing stories. What if we could tell them to our broader community? We have since added a lot of different topics over the years, but always nice to come back to home in terms of sharing the rich textured stories of the Founders that we get to work with every day. David's business, Elder Care, just became part of the Rally Day portfolio in July of 25. David, just real quick, why don't you describe your business and how you came to be part of the Rally Day family, and then we'll kind of segue in to kind of how you got here today. - Yeah, I love that. Thank you again, and Ryan, thank you for letting me fly in here for a number of reasons, but most of all to be a part of this. This is awesome and exciting. As I mentioned to you, this is my first time ever on a podcast, so this is great. Elder Care Homecare is a concierge home health care business specializing in caregivers and nursing. For when anybody thinks of what we do, it's kind of that old, whole-hearted thought process of what do seniors need, and it's that caregiver in the home. That's exactly what we're offering. But then we go even further and we provide that concierge level of service to even nursing care. So in the pandemic, many people saw that the most vulnerable population was underserved and a lot of the health care facilities. And the best part that we can offer now is not just caregiver services, but even more extensive and have nursing care at home where we can do everything from IV infusions, wound care, as the simple nursing stuff. The more importantly, all the way up to vents, trakes, and peg tubes, and things that nature. So really exciting of stuff of services we offer. But more importantly, I think to your question is how do we end up in the rally day family? And that's a fun story in my mind about in 2024 after the pandemic was kind of subsiding and we went through a lot of challenges helping seniors and figure out how to navigate the challenging health care environment. We realized we needed a partner to help us continue to grow and scale. And the interesting part as an owner, founder, is we always think about growing and scaling in a business perspective. But from a health care perspective, it really comes down to how do we help more people? And with those and the most vulnerable population is there's a lot of people missing out on that health care need. And we were looking out and saying we are struggling, servicing as many people as possible to the best quality care we believed. And that's what kind of brought us to that point where we said we needed a partner. And we went on that our own journey to find that partner. And I think we were lucky enough to meet you guys and you guys embodied everything that we thought of of how to help us grow our team, how to bring better quality and higher services to senior citizens. And what type of people do you want to be spending time with? And you guys had everything. Yeah, I mean, it was a huge compliment that you chose to work with us. And it's a big decision. We're going to be together for like five years, probably, at least. And I can only imagine for you and your wife and family, what a pivotal moment this was for you all and the trust that you've put it out. So I think on our side of it, there was absolutely some divinity at play here. There's four managing partners at Raleigh Day, Mark Nancy, Frank and I. And when we met you, David, I'm not sure we've shared this with you, but all four of us had the need for home care for our parents. And so we knew very intimately and very vulnerably how hard that decision was to even kind of decide that we couldn't do it alone, that we needed help in the first case. And then it's a very, for those of you who have not been through this, you type into your Google search or whatever, like care for my parents. I mean, there's no search engine words for what you're looking for, which is the love and care of someone that is the most probably special thing in your life. And you just don't know how lonely that can feel and how vulnerable you feel as a son or daughter, hiring someone to go into the home of your mom or dad or both and caring for them. So we had all gone through that together. And then when we met you, David, and you shared the story of you and your mom, we all said, and you just said, boy, I wish we wouldn't have known elder care. And I wish they operated in the state of Colorado because it is just such a scary moment in time for everybody. And it really, I guess, helped us to attach ourselves to the work that you do and maybe ask questions that were more informed and felt inspired to support your future just a little bit more because of what we were going through personally. So in that respect, I would just set the table that this is not just an investment for a rally day. This is us making an investment into the broader society and in terms of providing the capital to give the care that we wish we had had when we were going through all this. I think it would be a great time to share your origin story because your mom has been a big part of that. And it's just a great story. - No, I appreciate that. It's funny 'cause I don't, as many children don't. I don't think my mother enough for everything she's done, just raising us in general, but then also for everything she's done for elder care, a quick background to it. My mother launched what we call the elder care consulting, maybe 30 years ago. And she had the vision of what we call today is called the gerage or care manager. When you think about anybody and everything in our lives, we have financial advisors. We have consultants for our business. You have so many people you can hire to help you. But when you get to have become a senior citizen, you don't know what you're doing like you just said. And you have 12 different medications, seven different doctors, all these different elements. And you don't know what you're doing and nobody help you navigate. So she had the vision to be the daughter with knowledge. And so she became a consultant for senior citizens. And now it's an entire industry today, called gerage or care managers. And she was one of what I would always say is the OG of the late '90s was one person, nobody did this industry. She's going to assist the living's hospitals, pitching the service, and just a soul woman starting her own company, entrepreneur, which she or force. And she launched elder care consulting. And did a fantastic job just helping people. Uniquely, she had two special aspects to herself. One is she's a social worker and a nurse. Both of which are very rare to have both, which gave her the clinical side from the nursing. But the social worker side is what, as I would say, is like that quarterback who navigates everything and problem cells. So when she was helping out while I was being raised and growing up, I've seen her build this company of elder care consulting and be a one woman army. But more importantly, I can't tell you many times in high school I'd be driving the car with her. And she'd say, I've been five minutes off to make check in on a patient. The next day, I know three and a half hours later, I'm still in the car. So that was how I was being raised. And I went in pursuit of career and finance. I began advising a couple of various different businesses. I'd be in my career G, health care, and then moved to Morgan Stanley. And I advised a deal in the Medicaid space at the time. And I looked at this and said, oh my God, what an amazing industry and business of helping people. And very quickly, I looked internally and I felt myself, you know, a career in finance. I wasn't really making a difference. I wasn't helping anybody. And the one person who I always knew who did so much for others and serviced others was my mother. And that she then launched during this time frame she launched a company called ElderCare Homecare, which was she had so many struggles as that consultant for families as she realized, hey, they need caregivers. Let me oversee them and realize the services that exist today were pretty much non-existent. As you Nancy, Mark, and everybody has really struggled with this caregiver side, she noticed that as well and said, why don't I provide the aids and do the consulting at the same time? Very quickly after she started providing caregivers, she goes, what did I do? I went for me consultant, which I am the hardest worker. I'm a nurse, I'm a social worker. To now managing people, I don't even know compliance, management, all these other things. And because she was such a fantastic entrepreneur, she figured it out. But it was really on a small scale. So if she had 20 clients that were consultant, she'd help one or two with a caregiver. And it was what I'd like to call almost like a side hustle. And when I was advising a couple of companies in the Medicaid space, I looked at this and said, oh my God, there's such a need. I would love to take over elder care home care and relaunch it as a standalone company and use this amazing competitive advantage is my mother. She has all the knowledge in the world. And so I left Morgan Stanley and launched elder care home care as a standalone company. And she thought I was crazy. She thought, it's a very challenging industry, very challenging business. And I'd worked so hard working my way up in finance. But I believed in this. And I believed we could really make a difference together. And that's how we started in 2017. And what's gotten us here today. - Yeah, so for those of you who are investment bankers out there, pretty high standard in terms of pivoting your life away from investment banking into maybe forming a partnership with your mom, which is pretty crazy. Take us back to the day. I think I asked you this early, early on when we met, but I'm just intrigued by you at your office. I'm assuming Donna Manhattan somewhere at some Morgan Stanley building, doing M&A, and when you walked out of the building, and maybe you had a box, our bag, or I don't know. But I mean, take us to that moment. Because I think a lot of us who grow up in the finance industry have a romanticized version of the story that we dream about in terms of setting our sites on a different goal. And perhaps one that is maybe more altruistic or more impact oriented. But none of us really have the guts to do it. And so it becomes just this dream, this notion, maybe something pulling on us that never gets fulfilled. You actually did it. So how did you get the courage? And then what were some of the insecurities or like second thoughts that were hanging over you when you walked out of the building? And maybe there wasn't a moment. But maybe take us to that like day zero. - Yeah, it's funny that you're bringing me back. It's firstly, just as I think back to my investment banking days right now, I think such warm-hearted feelings that only happens after a decade of being out of investment banking. Right? In the moment things is I'm like, oh wow, what great times I had done. It wasn't great times, most of the time. But you know, it's interesting with most investment bankers to get to investment banking. Most people, especially interviews are saying, this is my dear passion. And all I ever wanted was to be an investment banker. And I'll do whatever it takes. Then you get the job and you work tirelessly to any time throughout the middle of the night. And you enjoy the work content and you have to otherwise. You can't survive in that industry. But I think most people once they make it a few years in investing banking. In the back of their mind, they start thinking they want to get out and do something more. They've just advised all these companies, they've done all this work. And they're back in the mind. Everyone has dreams and most of the time you just dream and then you don't do anything about it. And you always say, I should have done this and I shouldn't have done that. And nobody does anything. I was really fortunate or unfortunate during my time that once I had advice on this deal and Medicaid, I pretty much convinced myself that this was an amazing business opportunity and that I can make a real difference. So I believe probably for two, three months, I was building business cases, building models on the sidewalls at work and asking pretty much anybody who would listen to me to review it with me. My office made another VP in the group, somebody else. And I think because of that of overcommunication with other people in the group, I think they could tell I was starting to check out a little bit and I had other priorities. So by the time I was leaving, I think to them and to myself, this was almost a absolute that this was gonna happen. Having said that, I think even more so is, I don't know if it's my personality trait, almost every person I spoke to told me this was the worst idea on what am I thinking? And it almost gave me, I'm one of those that kind of rebels. I must have been in my childhood that people tell you know so that you do the opposite. It must have been something along those lines that every person I spoke to you just said, you just paid all this money to go to business school. You spent all your career in finance, I lived in Milwaukee, Chicago, Brazil, Morgan Stanley, like I've just been grinding away to try and get to this point. And I'm finally there. And then all of a sudden, I'm just gonna leave and stop it all and then start afresh. And so-- - And with your mom. - And with my mom and everyone's like, what is that? - This headline is horrible. And I can tell you, you know, there were times I'm thinking, what are people saying about me? I mean, he just couldn't cut it and had to go work with his mother like in this obscure industry that like nobody wants to do. And the only person who actually believes in me at the time or believed in the thesis and everything was my father. And he had started his business many, many years ago. And my entire family, if they thought I wanted to be quote unquote entrepreneurial, my family had an insurance business. And they said, okay, if you really want to leave and go sell insurance and go build a financial business that way. And he was going to say, no, no, I think you're passionate about this, you believe in this. And I actually think you will kill it with this. Your mother, my wife is the best nurse I know, but she has no idea what she's doing from the business side. And this is all you've done. I think you take your shot. And I think because of that, I had one person in my corner who I trusted and believed in, that helped. And on the other side, I felt like I just had this unnatural need to prove everybody else wrong. And those two things combined, I think, just gave me the drive to do it to finally pull the bandit off. And this is purely for my selfish interest. But was there a day that you walked out of the office of Morgan Stanley? There was the day that I was fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough, that at the end of the year during the bonus season, they had known that I'd been doing this. And they asked me point blank if I was planning to leave. And at the time, I hadn't decided to leave. I wasn't planning to leave. In my head, I was always going to try and launch this as a side hustle. And like we all know, it wouldn't have gone well. And I would have said to myself, thank God I didn't leave and ruin my life and go launch it. But once they'd found out it was almost kind of like a push out in a way, I had the option. I think once we-- you and I might have talked about this once. I don't remember. But I think they asked me point blank. And in my head, I hadn't decided. But I didn't want to lie. And I knew if I left two or three months later to pursue this. And I'd lied in this moment. I'd burn every relationship I ever had. And so in that moment, I said, yes, I'm looking to pursue other actions. And right when I said it, I was almost for breathless. Like, I can't believe I'm doing this right now. Like, is this really the moment? I'm not ready for this. I'm not ready to do this. I needed three months. I need the money. This was part of my financing. But that was the moment. And it was end stop there. They couldn't have been more appreciative. That's the day, exactly. That the box was carried out. And the nice part was I held my head high. And I was excited for the next journey. But I also was like, I don't know why I just did that. Like, what was I thinking? Yeah, it's like they pushed the issue. And then they pushed you out of the nest. And maybe you'll look back and say that was like the best thing that ever happened in terms of forcing that on you. But boy, I mean, I talked to so many people in our industry, which is pretty crummy, as we all know, in terms of just fulfillment, broadly speaking. And we all talk about it, but very few people do anything with it. So maybe one of the things that comes out of this podcast is an investment banker out there. Regardless their age, says, you know what? I'm pushing myself out the nest thing. And if David can do it, I can do it. And maybe other people will create really cool companies from your inspiration. Let's talk a little bit about the time sense. I don't know if you want to put it into chapters, David, but it might be helpful to talk about, again, another visual in my mind is your mom at the kitchen table the day after walking out of Morgan's family saying, OK, now what do we do? And so I'm curious about that. And then maybe in like three or four chapters talk about how you got to where you are. For those of you who don't know, I'm in a scale of this company, Eldercare, I even dare say company. Let's call it an organization. But the scale of this is huge. I mean, how many people are we caring for today, Eldercare? I'd say the number is probably around 600 patients today we're caring for today. And then we have maybe 2,000 employees total at this point. And then you think about the sons and daughters or husbands or wives of those that are provided care. I mean, you know, and you think about a typical hospital. And if they had 600 beds, that is a massive hospital. And so every day, Eldercare is a very large hospital system dispersed through the tri-state area of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. And it's in the world of home health care. Eldercare is becoming a blue chip leader of the industry. But it all started somewhere. And we know in a lot of cases in your mom's heart and then in her hands and then yours. Maybe just founders journey this and just do the three or four chapters. What would be the title of chapter one? And what were you focused on and then do chapters two through three or four or whatever? I love that. And then to go back to your point is, you know, we're really proud of this today. I think we have crossed the barrier. But I think we're going to provide over 1.5 million hours this year of service. So really exciting. But to your point of the founders journey-- and it's hard to-- I almost want to break it up to 20 sections, right? But can't do that. So I think the first stage is starting out. And I don't want to use that word. It is like you said, what's the title? It's not the most articulate words. But I think it's almost applicable, even better usage of starting out as the chapter summary. Because at that point, you don't know what the hell you're doing. Everything is hard. Everything is a nightmare. And you second guess yourself at every stage. And anybody who's been a founder started a company. Everything is just so difficult. And I give such respect to anybody who tries to be an entrepreneur, even if it doesn't work out. Because then you understand the journey to some extent. And that's the idea of making email addresses. And websites and things like that all sound so easy. Everything sounds easy. You see Facebook, I should have started that. I had an idea. Everything's so hard. And it's so crazy to think the challenges I had, even just with our email addresses a decade ago, that all of a sudden somebody else had the URL, and then you did this. And then you got to save it on GoDaddy. And it's just a nightmare. So I'd say the first year to two years, when you start out, is you have the challenges of starting a business. And that's number one really hard. Two, you're trying to figure out your way of what the strategy's going to be. And although you have all these ideas in the business model, and you have a business case, and you've maybe had mentors and people, all of a sudden, then you have to start and do it. And it's never how you drew it up. Nothing is the same. So again, the first year, the first three months, I didn't think I got my first client until three months in. And the way I can still remember the time I got my first client and the story is so vivid that I walked into a pitch, cold calling a nursing home. Saddened a way of two hours. And finally, a social worker came out and walked past me and said, oh, have you been waiting for me? I was like, yes, but it's no problem. She goes, all right, I just come in and we'll talk for five minutes. And while we sat for five minutes, we spoke. She was about to kick me out. And three of her employees walked in, complaining about some patient. And so an extremely challenging situation. And she just looks at me and goes, this seems like a nightmare here. Give him a shot. That was how I got my first client. That's not how I drew it up. I thought I'd have, in Morgan Stanley, this amazing business model with people knocking down my door, pitching these board rooms and these businesses and families. And I'd have these massive clients. And I never thought it's been two hours sitting in the waiting room from a social worker to people just complaining about a patient and then being like, good luck to you. Go for it. And so I'd say the first year or two is very much like that as two steps forward, one step back. And it's, be honest, it's probably like two steps forward, ten steps back in the first two years. But you get the Justin in that regard. And then once we made it past the two years, I think we had proven concept. It wasn't a one man or me and my mother. I mean, I was a scheduler, the billing person, the finance person, the marketer, the sales person, the scheduler, nurse David, if I had to be whatever it was. Two after year two, I would say, you start building a little infrastructure. We had an office manager, a scheduler, an HR person. We brought on a finance person two days a week. So you start doing a little delegation. And I think it's probably the size of this conference where the size of our office, which in this stage, I would say, is toddler stage in some regard. And chapter two is, you can walk, you can kind of run, but it's definitely not good. It's not pretty, it's cute, it's very cute, right? When I look at my toddler running, it's cute. I would not say he's running a marathon anytime soon. And that's where I think the stage two is. You have four or five employees. You're a business, but you're really not a business. You're communicating every snail thing somebody did in the office. I could hear them. So I'm still kind of pulling every string in some regard. Somebody says something on a phone. I don't agree with, I can hop right in. I can jump into any problem in problem-solve. So although I'm delegating, it's really not a full on business. And I think this is where a lot of founders really struggle to get past that point. At that stage, I would say we were up to six employees operationally and maybe 50 to 100 employees externally. And not even seems big to me. Yeah, seems big. I'm zero to 50 or whatever. Exactly. And that's where I always use it because it's their W2 employees, but it's still variable. So they're out in the field. There are caregivers out in the field and are nurses. But I think at that point, I was at the precipice of, hey, do I run a small business? Or what do I need to do to scale? And I was really fortunate at the time. One of my closest friends had to start up that they sold. And I was discussing the same problem over drinks as most of us are just venting over. What was the name of the friend? Josh Milstein. And you thought of the Josh? Exactly, an awesome guy. And he had just sold. He had a new mom's company. It was a technology platform. I would give a shout out to him. But unfortunately, I don't think it's around much anymore. But eight years ago, it was to connect new moms who were trying to find things to do in random cities. And at that moment, he goes, actually, my business partner is trying to figure out his next thing. I really think she's talked to him. And his business partner, who's now our chief business officer, Eric Mayer, had just moved down to Texas. And I was like, he lives in Texas now. He's in Austin. He's living the dream. You guys just sold. And you guys were in the new mom space. We're on the other spectrum. We're in elder care. I don't know of that. That combines. And he was like, no, he's just a great partner. And I think you get out a lot of value. As you guys are going on this next stage of the journey, I'm not trying to push you in any way, but have a conversation. And so I didn't think anything of it. I think I waited a month or two and then reached out to Eric and was just like, hey, let's just catch up. Next time your New York, let's have a beer. And that was probably the toddler stage of getting us to the next stage. Bring out a partner who I could trust, who could help us scale into another location, who can help me industrialize some of the business. And that's when we launched in Manhattan. It finally agreed to come on board. It's my crazy idea of my passionate project that how do we offer senior care to more people and how I think this entire industry really should be. And the challenge we were getting to at that point was our quality of care at that stage was the best thing in the industry. And I give it all to credit to my mother. She's a nurse and a social worker, our business model really catered to that model of she can do or nurses have to do both services and would provide the highest level and consulting capacity for free to every family who hired us for caregiver services. And when I brought them on board and we started launching new locations, we quickly were realizing that's not an easily scalable option that David's mom can be replicated at every location. So thank God I had a trusted partner to do this. And I know many times in founders journeys when you bring on partners that can go one of two ways. So I was in the lucky camp. And so in that chapter three with Eric and I, I'd say, now I would say we're a true business. Chapter three is becoming a real, you know, not a child, but a real-size business that we can say, hey, what do we do next? And so that would be chapter three, I think, was us trying to figure out how to scale our business and what's the business model we'll be proud of and what we want to do. And the biggest aspect that we not only noticed was how do we keep my mother. But also in the healthcare industry as a whole, is really just a challenge in it of itself. Healthcare has a mentality, unfortunately, of a burn in turn for their healthcare workers. Get what you need, grind it out, help people. And if it's at the behest of the healthcare workers, mental health or their aquatic care, you just need to get the job done. That's healthcare, right? The hospital, like they are just, they're so good, but they're really iron-clad-focused. And I almost looked at us like, we're a startup. How do we build, kind of what rallying's done to private equity. How do we offer this in the home healthcare business that people want to come here? They're excited. And the quality of care that they want to do, they could be passionate about the change. So that was in chapter three, I think we started creating this entire business model around that thought process. And we were successful, it went well. And then I'd say chapter four is, what's next? How do you take to the next stage? And I think Eric and I started struggling scaling, to be honest. Operationally, wherever we touched was gold, and the things we weren't touching was starting to struggle. And I joined an organization. Again, I think the one thing I've done really successfully is recognizing when I'm not enough. Self-awareness into what, how do you fix these things? How do you get better? And I joined an organization, which I highly suggest people to do, is YPO. And during one of our sessions, my entire crowd, the group of people I was meeting with, mentioned to me that I need a COO, you need it. And as a founder and this in my business, I don't want to spend the money at first. I was like, I don't know if I need it. I'll do this better than them. And can they jump in? Eric's been fantastic. But I don't know if we can get lighting doesn't strike twice. And fortunately, one of the gentlemen in my IPO actually let go of their chief of staff. They did it lay off and just wasn't right. It wasn't because of performance. He was like, we had to do it lay off. And this guys are rockstar. Me with him, I'm telling you. He can be helpful. So we actually were talking to this gentleman named Todd Averson. And he was speaking to us to become a consultant for us. And at that point, that's what we're going to hire him for. We're going to say, we need some help. But we don't need too much help. So why don't we hire a consultant who can help us take it to the next level. And during those discussions, we quickly realize there's so much work that we need to do, that he's going to have recommend. And I don't have time to do it. Eric has not time to do it. And our leadership doesn't have time to do it. We need to bring him on full time. And that was the next stage when we got lucky with the third member of our C-suite, Todd Averson. And he came in and the most exciting part for him was he goes, I've never been to a company that has less meeting than you guys. And he goes, it's amazing. That's why you guys run so fast, so hard. You guys are so successful. That's what's helping you guys scale at 50 to 100% per year. But you guys never-- you guys never meet. You don't have a Monday morning. You don't have anything. So that was the first thing that we realized like, hey, we got to become a real company. And that was the third stage. And I think once we got to chapter 4, we're writing chapter 5. Now with you guys was, we got it to a level where I think 2,000 employees were across four different states. We have five or six different offices. We did two acquisitions, but we did them well. But there's a lot of footballs. How do we offer and scale this quality to as many people in more states and more regions than we could? And keep the culture of what elder care was from the beginning when it was just me and my mom, or there's six people sitting in a room in the size. And I don't know how to do that. And I'd rather not have the pain points for three years figuring it out. I know we can learn. But I don't want to spend three years learning. How do we expedite that process and take to the next level? And that's where chapter 5 is being written with you guys. That's really well said and well articulated. My observation about the industry is having just gone through it as a consumer is that the industry is kind of devolved into a lead generation industry where if you type in, I need home care for my parent. And there's a list of phone numbers on the first page of Google. I would say 90% of those phone numbers are lead aggregators who then sell me and my needs for my family to some agency who pays top dollar. My experience was feeling in the form very naively and getting about a dozen calls within an hour. And it was kind of varying degrees of quality. But let's just say, at best, it felt like an overseas call center, boiler room type person on the other end who said, do you need a caregiver for your mom or dad? And it just made me feel the opposite of what I wanted to feel. I don't know how to explain it exactly. But I felt that my noble desire for a higher quality care for my father in this case was being attacked by capitalism for lack of better word and kind of a very transactional approach. What I never heard in that journey was, hi, I'm David Gilbert. I work with my mom, Lauren. And we do two things really well. We all provide the best medical care to your loved one. And we have the EQ and social working mindset of caring for the whole family. Because the little known truth in home health care is that for everyone patient, there's a family around them that is really struggling with balancing life and kind of the not shame, but like this feeling of defeat that I couldn't care for my dad. And I've got to hire someone to do that into his home, at least in my case, and others to varying degrees. And that has been missing from this industry for some time. Despite the fact that this industry is growing like crazy, and our country needs somebody in this country to emerge as a white knight of sorts. And we believe that reality that elder care can be that white knight, that guardian angel, that we don't have words yet to describe what it is we want to hear. But I will tell you, David, I heard nothing close to the story you just told. How are you working with our firm? And I know you guys have spent some work on purpose and with our dear friend and colleague, Haley Rushing, on this. But talk to us about your first steps with Rally Day as we try to hone that sense of purpose for you. So you can scale your mom's sense of purpose to a greater degree, to walk us through that. 'Cause I think it tells a lot about what you've been up to in the first couple of few months since we became partners in July. I'm just point it up now, but even before I jump into the purpose, I just want to highlight on one thing you just said, Ryan. One of the largest companies across America that has 80% market share in exactly what you're saying is called the place for mom. And many companies who go that route who, unfortunately, that's how you probably found your caregiver who's got 55 calls. It's really sad because if you don't provide a good job or do something wrong and most of your leads come from online digital ads like a place for mom, you can provide good, bad, any type of care and your lead generation ever changes. Our model at ElderCare, which is exactly that was sitting in a waiting room and educating social workers. And if I didn't do a good job, that social worker's gonna hear about it. And therefore, our model is always exactly to your point is educating people of what the amazing services we can do. Rather than, hey, there's this whole other market that's super successful, many businesses do really well. Like you said, the Capitalistic Senior Care Society of lead generation is just a whole different model and why many companies struggle scaling because they can do bad quality, not care, not be, you know, want to be there for your family. - There's just no feedback loop that's meaningful. - Exactly. And again, no fault of their own. That's the business model, many have gone. But with ours, that's exactly right at how we had that feedback loop that you had to succeed if our only, this is something when we met with you guys from our digital advertising, we didn't do any. ours is completely lead generation for us is a sales model of in hospitals with doctors and with their patients. And if we don't do well, that's the end of that relationship with that hospital. So that's a lot of, it shows how well we've done that. But that's why our model's slightly different. But it brought us to exactly that point of this amazing work I think we've done with you guys is our business model is unique. And our services are really there for the family themselves and for the patient or we don't even call them, we say they are client, how do we service them? And I think how to articulate it well, we struggled on how to make that a mission or a purpose statement. And you guys have been fantastic command and hailey was amazing and we brought in our entire team. You guys had for those who aren't aware, they have an entire purpose session part of the RAP program and it was really special to me. Going into it, I was, I can say honestly, I didn't know what to expect. I looked at it as just an awesome opportunity to spend time with the rally day and my team, we don't do it enough. And I was like, this is great. We'll have lunch and we'll do this working side of it. - Good bye. - Yeah, good bye. And my great, like this is cool. I was at GE, we did a lot of drink the Kool-Aid stuff. Sure, let's go drink the Kool-Aid. But actually the session was awesome. I think hailey does a fantastic job of articulating a number of views within the company and taking, and I always respect people, can take complex issues or opinions and distill it into a concrete idea. And that's what we did and the session was amazing. I think the teams that was there, I think we had almost 10 people, walk out of the session like, oh my God, I'm so bought in. And the, I'll read it now because it really means a lot, the purpose statement that we came up with was, and I'll go through the, where we're hailey and the team really came up with how we decided this was together. We elevate care to meet the moment and deliver peace of mind. And when I read that first statement, I don't think senior care ended up itself. And I wonder, you know, if I were somebody on the outskirts of the streets, I'd be like, what are you talking about? And then when everything you said, Ryan, during this entire discussion so far, it like fits perfectly into the statement. And the way we thought about it was first, the first word is together. And people might say like, what does that mean? And I think anybody who ever talks about care for their family is it takes a village. It's not just the children, it's not just the doctor, it's not just this person. So together, we all have to work together. And that, that first word meant a lot to us. And then the second part was to elevate care. Obviously we want to bring care to the next level for everybody to provide the highest quality. The third aspect was to meet the moment. And many people might say like, what does that mean? What moment are you? You're not a rock band. Like, you're not gonna stand on stage and start playing out. And to us was every single moment that care is needed where everybody's life is just as important. And when I think of meeting the moment and our team thinks of meeting the moment is, to us or to a doctor or to somebody else in the field, they might think, you're not having a heart attack. It's not a big deal, I'll get you later. But in home health care, when it's our client and it's concierge care, someone calls with any complaint, you have to meet that moment and take a moment to take care of that situation. To you or to anybody, it might not be a serious crisis, but to that person it is, seniors have many of these throughout the day and a lot of challenges and they're lonely and it's difficult. And as a senior care provider, you're not just taking care of the clinical side. You're on the emotional side too and this goes back to the model of elder care that we talked about my mother's and nurse, but also the social work. And we never want to lose sight of just, we're not just a clinical provider, we're a psychosocial provider too. That caregiver might be part of the family. There's family dynamics. There's patient dynamics. They could have a good day, a bad day. So that was the third part. And then the final is to deliver peace of mind. And to me, this is the most important aspect then, and Ryan, you've kind of talked about it before, is this is a family situation. It's a loved one, either a child taking care of the parent, a grandchild taking care of a grandparent, a wife taking care of a husband, and it's such a scary moment. And when the tables have turned for a child to take care of their parent or their wife or a significant other has to take care of a loved one, you want to know they're in the best possible hands and that you guys are in it together and they will be here whenever you need it. And that peace of mind means so much to people. We all have busy lives. If the million things going on, and if you're worried at every second of the day, it's just, it's very challenging. And that's delivering that is what I'm most proud of for families. - Yeah, I have to say, when you all got done with that work, I was here in Denver and my partners and teammates in sequence called me that night and so on. We had like, I don't know, overstated, but it was sort of like, we had a magical day and a half with David and his team. And all of them talked about this meeting the moment thing. And for me, I know there's the four parts and I think peace of mind is ultimately what you all provide families and loved ones. But like meeting the moment to me means so many things depending upon who you are in this phase of life. For the, say, son or daughter or husband or wife who has a moment where they kind of say, I can't do this anymore. That is a very hard moment in life where you have to submit yourself to someone else and it feels kind of rotten, you know? And so there's that moment. And then I'm thinking about, let's just say at two in the morning, let's say one of your team members is on-site with a patient, you know, that patient or client, they may be asleep for six hours while that caregiver is on staff for eight. And that middle of the night shift for any human being is isolating and lonely. And that caregiver could fall asleep. They could start focusing on themselves and getting their head and lose focus when the delivery of care over an eight-hour period might be one simple moment of helping them get out of bed and to the bathroom and back, not just safely, but with that touch of someone who really cares for them. In which case, they go back to sleep with that peace of mind for them that is created in this very small moment of time. And you think about that for 30, 60, 90, 120 days, that one moment of touch through the hand on someone's shoulder saying, you've got this. And I've got you can mean the difference between someone living for a long time and feeling cared for versus, you know, feeling maybe like an inmate of their own life. And if we could wish anything for our loved ones, it would be like that dignity of care at that standard of meeting the moment, whatever that is. And I think your opportunity to like activate this purpose statement externally, great. But I think for all of our employees, feeling a sense of calling for that moment, which is like three minutes of eight hours, there's some legs to that. There's something that we can change the industry. I feel it. I agree. And you articulate that so well. I thank God you weren't there that day because you would have done so much better than we were. But just to set the stage and I, right, and you know this for everybody listening, the rap program and that eight hour session of doing this purpose work is about an eight hour session and it culminates within the last 20 minutes. And we, I think Samantha and Hailey set the room where they kind of distill, as I said, these concepts into three topics. And they give it to our team to then say, okay, everyone in the team go to which one you resonate the most with. And I look back at Frank, one of the management partners at Rally Day, and he came up to me afterwards. We were evenly dispersed through all three. And then everyone's commentary was pretty aggressive that they were gung-ho that theirs was the smartest and best. And Frank afterwards came up to me and even I said the same. I was like, I was pretty nervous. This was going to go really badly. Like, this is, this is why I didn't think this mushy stuff is good. We're going to walk away from this. This is going to be terrible. We're all going to come away being like, I thought I was right and you were wrong. And to watch how, and that's where I think, the Rally Day team came out of it saying it was magical. Watching us all come together to this moment, to get this purpose statement that I think hits on everything that we really wanted to, was awesome to see now looking back. In the moment you don't see it happening until, as you get there, like, oh my god, this journey was the best part. But I doubted it in first. Frank even said he was like, I was nervous. I was like, he was like, this is my first time doing this. And I was like, this is going to be the last thing. I totally agree. Like, strategy, it's like fine. We're going to go from X to Y. And we're kind of programmed that there's going to be a little sausage making in that. But it's within some guardrails of reason. You throw a purpose on the table with 10 people. And it's like, what is the purpose of our organization? It takes a very powerfully gifted facilitator to take hours of work, get to that last 20 minutes, and almost unveil it for everyone at the same time with their contributions and the contributions of other stakeholders. Yeah, it's somehow it works. I have no idea how it works. I still don't know how we got here. It's like magic. It's like the genie and he, you know, bends down and like, you've popped out and it was awesome to see. And that's what like you said, like, we have nurses, social workers. COO is like operations people. We had HR people, like, everyone's such different perspectives. So how he like pulls it all out of us and puts it together, it's awesome. Well, and I don't say there's not as an advertisement, but when David references rap, what that stands for is a rally day accelerator program. And it was our attempt to create some programming around the first six months that we were with a new partner and investment to give a sense of halftime to the founder and his or her team, where you could kind of look in the first, you know, in your case, eight years and say, you know, what did we learn? And if it's a football team, it's like, what adjustments do we need to make for the second half? And just taking stock of all that in a, you know, meaningful way that would somehow inform an even better second half and work together, the A accelerator is not necessarily to accelerate growth. It's to accelerate trust. And we find that going through this, you know, a difficult day together, David and all of his people, it just creates this alignment and sense of trust that you can't create otherwise. And the way that we program us out as we start with purpose and then David is here in Denver for a couple of days than working on a strategy that will be in maximum service to the purpose. And then he's gonna take a step back and say, okay, culturally, you know, we've kind of gotten to where we are with your hard, David and the heart of your mom and some of what Todd and Eric have brought to the table. But if the purpose and the strategy is, you know, let's just say, impact wise, 5X where you are today, then it says the, all of us, like, well, then the culture needs to get five times as good to keep up and that's hard to do. I mean, we all say, like, companies get bigger, their cultures get, you know, worse. And so fighting that physics is how David will more or less complete the route process. But it's kind of funny, David is coming here today and he sent me a text last night and he goes, "Hey, we should hang out." And I said, "That's a great idea." And then what happened? The classic case of a private equity partner, right? I was coming in, this is my second or third time in Denver, which has all been awesome. And fortunately, they've been gracious hosts. But I thought I hadn't seen, I actually hadn't seen Ryan since we closed. So I texted him, saying, "Hey, let's grab coffee or catch up." And he's like, "That sounds great." Let's do the podcast. And I was like, "Oh, okay, great." Like, my first time ever on a podcast in our coffee chats out the window, but let's go for it. Yeah, that's the authenticity of the podcast, right? I mean, you and I could be doing that. But then you also threw me in. I said, the last person on this podcast was at Norden. So you double hit me hard as no preparation. And after that, just throwing to the wolves. And I was like, they always do this to the New Yorkers. The New Yorker comes in, throw us to the fire. Well, that's actually a perfect segue. 'Cause I'd like to sort of end the podcast a little bit about you, David. And obviously, when you're the private equity firm and you're trying to figure out, where do we invest our capital? Where do we invest our time? Who, where do we wanna spend the next five or seven years creating value for everybody? And part of that's the industry. And obviously, elder care serves an industry that is underserved. And second one is like a business model, a way of doing things that is somehow different. I mean, elder care checks that box with a bold Sharpie. And the third one is what we call the monster. The leader who's on a mission to do something extraordinary. And it's hard to tell, like when we met David first time, it was like investment banking and sponsored meeting at a big table and everybody had suits on and a lot of stuff. And it's hard to tell. I remember after we first met in New York, I was on spring break with my family. And I said to my family, I need to go make an important phone call. And they're like, oh God, that's the bus kill. And I said, no, this is important. And I called you on yourself. 911-4, here he goes. And I shared with you, I said, you know, we wanna be your partner. And I think you were like, yeah, man, I know, I get it. And I said, no, I really wanna be your partner. We really wanna be your partner. And you're like, no, I get it, man. And I said, well, would you come to Denver? Would you make the step of leaving New York? Come to Denver, meet the whole Rally Day team, 'cause I want you to feel, David, as much you buying Rally Day as Rally Day, buying into your vision. And you said, yes, like you didn't even, I think our phone call was like six minutes. And you were like, yeah, I'm in, let's do it. And then I said, would you bring your wife? And you're like, well, you know, I could tell you're a little hegey. And then I find out your wife is pregnant and there's a whole side story there. But I only bring that up because our hunch was that you're a really special leader. And before this podcast, I asked the team, describe David as a leader now that we've been, you know, together for a few months here. And I just wanna read this to you. It says, one quote was, David is one of the most grounded competitors I've ever met. He's deeply driven to win, but he does it with grace and humility. Another one said, David listens to everyone in the room. He gets his hands dirty in the soil and genuinely sees people. What some presses is that he leaves this way and delivers results. He proves that you can be both ambitious and deeply human at the same time. Another one said, you're relentless. You have a lack of ego. You have extraordinary self-awareness. You're committed to winning and lifting others along the way. You're a talent magnet. You're able to attract the best and retain the best, be the best, develop the best and become the best. And you're a visionary. And then one said, all I need to say is, who else in the world would leave investment banking to join his mom to start a senior healthcare business? So I mean, this is what, this is what your new partners are saying about you. And you can't see, David, he's turning a little red now. The question I wanna ask is, where do all those qualities come from? I mean, did you have role models? Obviously you had your mom and your dad. But I mean, when I read those lists of qualities in you, I mean, it makes me even turn red. Like, the strength inside of you at a relatively young age, I mean, what do you attribute a lot to today? I appreciate that question and I'm grateful, humbled, embarrassed by how nice those statements are on the reality team's awesome, like hearing that from them means a lot. But most of all, I think the question is really valid and it's a challenging one to answer and answer I've given to many people when they ask about the business and the other things, there's no silver bullet, right? There's not one moment you could ever point to. And the one fortunate thing I can say in my life that I've been driven to do and lucky to do from an early stage was gain a variety of experiences in exposing myself to every situation that's possible. And this began at an early stage when I was growing up. I was competitive golfer and from a good or bad way, golfer is a very individualized sport. You either win or lose on your own. You have coaches and other things. When you're on the golf course, you're solo and I think it's similar in skiing too, right? You're very reliant in yourself. So you have to have an internal drive to win by yourself, not to appease your teammates or to get up in the morning and say, I am at least going to see my friends and party with them afterwards. Like, there's no part of you. You go back to your hotel room after it's by yourself with your dad or your mom. So I think doing that, but also at an early stage, my family and my father in particular, was very big on shipping me off to like a camp or whatever I was generally the youngest playing golf with a lot of older competitive athletes in the sport. And I think at one point in every summer, there was a guy from Australia who would come and it was a two-week camp where we would go in his van and for three weeks, just travel to every golf course with two other guys who are five years older than me and just experience that type of nature where you had to evolve and get through that. And that's just the first stage. I think more importantly, I was just so open after those experiences that when I left undergrad, most of my friends almost every single one moved back to New York for their job. I saw a vision for the future that I wanted to try various experiences and G health care. I believed at the time would provide it. So I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I lived in Wawa Tosa and then Waukesha. And then I believed that would give me the stepping stones to then work anywhere in the world for GE. And I think the experience is a GE of training me and the management training, that team atmosphere of fierce loyalty to the people you work with, the leaders I worked under was exceptional. Still to this day, I've been catching up with my old mentor, Ian Graham, who was the CFO of GE Healthcare's CT business at the time. And I looked back and that was an amazing experience from the management. Then moving to Chicago, they sent me to Brazil, I lived there for some time and the experience of international work with them as the sole American in the business that they sent down there. So again, just thrown to the wolves. And it was the best, it was the best experience. And then it goes back to you, then going back to business school and enjoying Morgan Stanley. And every one of those experiences, I think, taught me something new and made me open to doing new things. And I think fear is probably the, is a great asset sometimes, but it's also super paralyzing. And because I didn't have the fear to try new things, I think GE taught me, my first career path was, they switched jobs in switch positions every six months and their goal was for you to be comfortable, being uncomfortable. And I think as an entrepreneur, that's like the perfect iteration of life accepted, it's not every six months, it's probably every day, you're uncomfortable. And every day you have a success, you probably have something that goes wrong. And I think all the nice things that were said about me, every step added value. The things that went wrong and that I look back in the moment I had days that I might have been crying during my founders journey in the first year, I can't tell you how difficult that was. I think anybody who's a founder and it's all roses and daisies is lying. Like it was really hard. Weeds and dirt, is it? Weeds and dirt. And it's emotional, it's a grind and nobody understands that unless you've done it. GE days when I was living by myself and every friend's off doing something, it's the same thing. And I think looking back at those emotional times, I wouldn't treat any of it for the world. Someone asked me, what would you have changed with the journey? I think even, you might have asked me at one of the dinners and I was like, I don't know what I would change because otherwise I wouldn't be here today. And I think each one of those has its value, whether it's the finance, experience, investment banking, whether it's my, someone say at your MBA, do you learn so much about business? And I'm like, I learn relationships, networking, business. I don't know which one is coming into play, but they all do it. On a different day of the week, it becomes in. So I think I attribute all the success that we've had to every person along the way. And that's where you guys have been invaluable. It's been 60 days now. I don't know, it's 65 days, like it's crazy. I feel like it's been three years. Like the reality team is awesome to the fact that like, I feel like I've known you guys forever. And I think that's how important you guys are to this part of the journey. So all of it's been great. Yeah, that leading into discomfort. It seems like there's a common trait in most really successful people is that they've lived fiercely on the edge of discomfort like their entire life. And it is sort of compounds. And there's this quote I read that said something like interesting things happen to people who do interesting things. And it's just like way the universe pays us back for that discomfort. But at the time, it just feels like weeds and dirt. And only later on inspection, can you say, oh, yeah. Like going to Milwaukee, like that was a thing. Like not going into investment banking and doing the, you know, luchip health care program and GE. Like that was, that wasn't very glamorous and sexy. But like was very formative in terms of who I became. And I also love how you basically say like all those compliments that the teams shared about you are actually compliments to the people who leaned in the your development. I mean, that's basically what you just said. And that's a great way to think about life. One of the things we look for is leaders who are aggressively humble. And we all know plenty of aggressive people who aren't humble. We also know people like my mom, it's very humble. It's not very aggressive at all. And it's rare to see someone with both these qualities. And when I boil down your, you know, kind of gifts that I see looking from the outside in it's that David Gilbert is on a mission to transform an entire industry. And he will not quit until that is complete. The second thing is that I've never met someone who is at once as humble as they are aggressive. And I just can't tell you how honored I am personally in a half of our firm that we get to be part of your life. And I hope that, you know, in five years or whatever you look back on this chapter of your life. And it's like the most meaningful chapter, like chapter five in the book that you were articulating earlier. We take that really seriously. And yeah, we're 65 days in, but minus well, we three years in. I think what can we accomplish in three years if you look at what we've already accomplished in 65 days? Like it's there. I guess I would just leave with just a massive amount of gratitude, David. I want to thank your wife, the family that you're building. I hope we can contribute to your goals with your family. And I'm just super grateful. So I guess we can, I guess leave it at that. I appreciate that. I'll say one thing that since I want to thank you guys for making that only this experience as great as it's been thus far. But a funny story is when you met Maggie during that dinner and I think at the point, and I was explaining to her how important this decision was. And for anybody who's going to go through this process, when you meet with all these private equity firms, they all blend together very quickly. You spend five hours of presenting to each and they're all great in their own regard. But it's hard. Just ask them. Yeah. And so it's one of those things that when I explained to us, like it's such an important decision. But something you said earlier was it's a marriage. So I said to her, it's like a marriage almost more important because I spend 10, 12 hours a day working. And this is who you're working with. And she did not appreciate the comment that it was almost as important as marriage. I was like, no, it's in a different way. I swear. But since joining a partner with you guys, I can say it is not only met my expectations of what I was hoping, how different it would be. But it succeeded in regards. And that's where I think to your point, I'm generally very relentless in my vision and my goals and seeing you guys support those goals has been exceptional. And at no point have I felt it's been a hindrance or in a way that I spent at Morgan Stanley dealing with private equity. Has it felt like that, which has been the craziest part? Because I knew what to expect. I've done it before. Very few founders have been on the other side and dealt with private equity. So I kind of, even if it was not the way I was right now, I would have said, I knew what I was getting myself into. I've done this. It has not been that way. So thank you to you, Ryan, for our first meeting and being so exceptional and reality being exceptional. Thank you. And I think the purpose statement applies to us too, like we want to meet the moment. And as we conclude here today, if you had a beer and I had a beer, we'd say, let's give a toast to cherishing every moment together. I think this is going to be a really formative time for this industry that we serve. And the work that we're doing is way more important than an investment, including a relationship that we get to enjoy with you and your family. And kind of adding to the lives of your employees and every step of the way. So thank you for giving us this moment with you. And maybe we'll redo this in a year and talk about the progress that we've made. It could be kind of fun. But thank you again, David. Thank you for being in Denver. Thanks for having this moment with me. And I'll look forward to more in the future. [MUSIC PLAYING]