In Search of a Better Business Model

August 12, 2024

I wrote about this in my column, Business Different, in the Santa Fe New Mexican on August 12, 2024.
Santa Fe New Mexican Column

Column (originally published)

I paid my way through school working nights in a factory and started my post-collegiate career as an elementary school teacher full of Dead Poets Society-level idealism.

I taught fifth and sixth grade at Hawthorne Elementary School in my hometown of Elkhart, Ind. That state was trying “looping,” in which teachers remain with the same students for two years. I met my students at the start of their fifth grade year, and we remained together until they left elementary school at the end of sixth grade.

Those kids met my idealism and spent two years teaching me how to lead their learning community. They banished the “timeout” corner (my only discipline tool) and never walked in a straight line, but they taught me how to create an environment where they could learn. My students academically held their state and national rankings, with many improving compared to their larger peer group.

Their parents were more involved than they’d been in previous years, and we were happy. Our class decided what the response to harms would be. If there was a fight, the students (including the combatants) sat together and shared how the fight had impacted the community and what should happen for resolution. I supported their decisions, even when they didn’t meet the standards of the school system. I kept the classroom door closed. I was willing to stand up for my classroom community and our way of doing things if needed, but at 22, I wasn’t in a hurry to challenge the entire system.

Thirty years later — now in business rather than education — I am.

Now I lead a caregiving agency. Like when I was a teacher, there’s a lot of talking, a lot of building relationships, a lot of trust and, mostly, we’re real happy. The core team and I ran a successful Medicare-funded care agency for 18 years. We sold it in 2022 and kept the team together. We believed we could bring something beautiful to senior care. We didn’t think it would be easy, but we really didn’t think it would be this hard.

Home caregiving is a growing market with two challenges: getting and keeping good caregivers. We thought a person-centered approach and protections like paying caregivers as employees and providing benefits and training would solve these issues. It solved half the problem.

We have a waitlist of caregivers who want to work with us. We solved supply, but not turnover. We were losing caregivers. We got curious and realized current caregiver culture doesn’t support connection and long-term relationships with agencies or caregiver peers.

In the 1930s, many American workers benefited from the New Deal. But New Deal legislation deliberately excluded domestic workers from coverage. This perpetuated economic inequality and the racial wealth gap. Over time, some of these exclusions have been removed, but domestic workers still lack key protections. These inequalities created a culture of desperation and distrust.

Hierarchy (corporate and governmental) had only harmed caregivers and their work. Being nice within a hierarchical structure made caregivers twitchy — what could we do? We wanted to create, or support the caregivers to create, self-governing pods. We came up with a model, and a week before launching, we found a Harvard case study of a nursing organization in the Netherlands already succeeding with self-governing pods. And much like Ted Lasso, the main character in the eponymous HBO show, I realized I’d invented what the Dutch had already done.

I hope you’ll join me as we play the great game of business with a bit of a Dutch playbook. Perhaps we will change our part of the world for the better, or perhaps our effort will be cast about by the windmill of life with me starring as Don Quixote. Either way, it’s going to be a good story.

What Stayed With Me

What stayed with me was the continuity.

At the time I wrote this, I thought I was describing a pivot — from teaching to business, from classroom to caregiving. Looking back, I see something steadier. The same questions were already there: Who decides? How is harm addressed? What happens when the people doing the work are trusted to shape it?

I didn’t yet have the language I would find later — agency, autonomy, empathy clarity — but the shape of the work was already visible. The classroom and the caregiving agency were not opposites. They were different expressions of the same impulse: to take labor seriously enough to organize around the people inside it.

Reflection

Have you ever had a moment like this?

The one where something works — not perfectly, but enough to feel alive — and we realize it isn’t an accident. It’s because people are paying attention to one another and taking responsibility together.

If you’ve ever been part of a classroom, a workplace, or a small team that found its own way of doing things — even briefly — you know this feeling.

You don’t need to hold onto it.
You don’t need to defend it.

It’s enough to notice that it’s possible.