Married and Working Together (eBook)

How we sold our company and how you can do the same

Michael Gerard Lamia, Patty Gallo Lamia (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
152 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9798350988536 (ISBN)

Infos

Married couples can get ahead in business together. 'Married and Working Together' is a playbook that describes how, in detail, Mike and Patty were successful in marriage and in business.

Patty and Mike have been married now for close to fifty years and, thankfully, remain 'Married and Working Together.'

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There are hundreds of ways to get ahead financially. Married and Working Together provides a step-by-step detailed storyline of Mike and Patty's journey that started in early 2000 and ended in 2020 with a multi-million-dollar payday. Together they decided to stop working for their employers and put their hearts and souls into starting a company with just $10,000.00. After growing their company to more than 500 employees, working in close to 50 states, they accepted an opportunity to divest themselves of half the company, elevate their daughter and son into leadership positions, and initiate plans to do it all over again. Readers will experience the difficulties of their journey, share in the happiness and sorrows of their twenty-year mission, and most important, learn how expedite their timeline on the way towards building and selling your own company. We have some key secrets we believe have allowed our personal relationship of close to 50 years to withstand the ups and downs. Now, we're sharing those secrets with you!

Textauszug

KEY HIRE

Faith gave us faith! Patty and I found ourselves in our small, 1,000-square-foot office deciding where to start. Our IT staffing company did not require much in the way of forms. We needed a time sheet so our employees could fax in their hours every Friday. We could then pay them based on the hours and bill the client from the same form.

Our medical staffing business was very different. Our employees needed background checks, drug tests, competency exams, references, and much more. We needed someone who could help us generate forms, so we hired Faith. She had previously worked for a large local medical staffing company. She was looking for a startup opportunity and we were able to give her exactly what she wanted. Years later we estimated that Faith created more than 100 forms. Today, although many of the forms have been updated because of new regulations and changing requirements, we continue to utilize her early work.

KEY HIRE

I knew how to sell. I was successful at my first position in 1996. And my success continued well into the early 2000s. Patty was an expert at back-office creation and execution. She had already raised two children and Stephanie was off to college in the summer of 2000. But we needed additional sales help.

Our second hire, Mikey, came to us from a local staffing company where he had a reputation as a renegade in his approach. He was a young, single guy, a resident of Michigan who wanted to make a statement as a healthcare staffing recruiter. Mikey drove a motorcycle and a Firebird Trans-Am. He sold Kirby vacuums door-to-door in Michigan before he moved to Florida, a skill set we never would have thought helped, but persistence is always an important attribute when someone is selling, especially exclusively by telephone.

He reminded me of myself when I was in my early twenties. Patty and I interviewed Mikey and after a short period of time decided he would become our very first recruiter. It was an exciting time. Mikey was full of energy and enthusiasm and had a promising idea. He proposed that rather than jump into the nurse recruitment area with a bunch of other competitors, we pioneer staffing travel physical therapists. It was 2003, and no other staffing company had made a commitment at that time to try this specialty. Before long, Mikey was on the phone, using the internet and searching for medical facilities that would use our services to help fill their open positions.

Mikey was that first production employee, as we refer to an employee who generates revenue versus an accountant, for example, that does not produce revenue but is responsible for control of the expense side. We provided Mikey a base pay of $40,000 a year and agreed to pay him a dollar per hour as a commission for every hour one of his clinicians billed. In this example, when Mike had ten employees on this payroll, he was earning (1 x 40 x 10), equaling $400 per week. It was a win-win for Mikey, Mike, and Patty. It was late in 2003.

And then came Mikey’s recommendation. Mikey had a friend working at his former employer who was also looking to join a startup. Mikey referred Jimmy, and he quickly became our third hire.

KEY HIRE

Although Mikey referred to his friend and coworker Jimmy, he did say with a loud voice that Jimmy was different. Wow, that was an understatement.

An Indiana native, a former union leader, a singer in a rock and roll band, and a very good salesman in the healthcare staffing sector, Jimmy immediately impressed us. Not because, as we learned later, he really could sing in front of a large audience and lead a rock band with meticulous precision, but because he could exert his knowledge and energy and get people to do exactly what he wanted them to do. Jimmy and Mikey in very little time agreed that to grow the business rapidly they would have to tackle the opportunity separately. Mikey would focus on recruiting caregivers to fill the rapidly growing number of jobs Jimmy was bringing into the company. And how did Jimmy bring in as many jobs as he did in as little time as he spent? He sang! He would offer a prospective hiring manager at a skilled nursing company, an SNF, to sing them a song if they would give him orders. He would then follow up with the same hiring manager once Mikey found and submitted a qualified candidate, to sing another song if the manager signed the thirteen-week contract and completed the hire. Jimmy did not complete college. Mike did not complete college. It did not matter. This dynamic duo had something special to offer and we were excited to be part of the experience. And Jimmy’s magnetic personality did not stop there. I just watched, and Jimmy led the initiative to build the team, one salesperson at a time.

2004

Then came 2004 and the magic happened—our first temporary placement in April 2004. We negotiated a thirteen-week contract with a hospital in Maryland, which was typical for a duration and still is in many areas. The need was specified as a radiologist and the bill rate was an unbelievable eighty dollars an hour. We had to pinch ourselves. Over the course of the thirteen weeks this one placement would earn our new company $41,600. And that did not include overtime or on-call pay. Next, we sourced a radiologist for the position. That challenge came easy because the recruiter we hired knew someone who wanted the job. We negotiated her pay package and she went to work at forty dollars an hour. The profit that we could use to pay for our overheads was twenty dollars an hour or $20,000 over the course of the thirteen-week contract. And, although we could not count on additional revenue from overtime and on-call pay, she worked both. This was too good to be true, but it was.

We finished out the year with gross sales of $500,000. Six of us were on the payroll, including Mike and Patty, the founders, as we would be referred to in time. At that time, we had two employees helping Patty with credentialing, collecting time sheets, and preparing the weekly billings. Mikey with his two new salespeople made new placements and collected our open receivables.

We did not spend much time contemplating our next moves. The market for temporary medical staff was healthy in 2004. Healthcare facilities, including hospitals and skilled nursing facilities, were willing to pay top dollar for qualified temporary staff. And as the demand for temporary staff increased, the pool of talent increased. Medical professionals we referred to as caregivers were walking away from permanent positions because of the lure of higher pay and the ability to travel to different states. Travelers, as we referred to one group of our caregivers, were in a separate class. In exchange for travel pay and W-2 wages they were and still are willing to accept a thirteen-week assignment in Alaska in the summer months and in Florida in the winter months. Some took an assignment in North Dakota so they could be nearby when a family member had a baby! There were many reasons our travelers wanted to work in any of the fifty states. It was the job of account managers to find those open positions, negotiate the contracts with the facilities, and complete the transactions. I recall one married couple we hired that year who traveled to the same facilities every year completing thirteen-week contracts. Larry and his wife stayed with us for close to five years, completing twenty consecutive contracts over that period. This was not work; this was fun!

When you work for someone else, in other words, you are an employee and you earn W-2 wages—that is considered WORK. However, when you work for yourself as an entrepreneur it is no longer considered work because you love what you are doing, having fun!

KEY HIRE

Jimmy referred us to Ginger. Ginger, like Mikey and Jimmy, did not complete college, and unlike Mikey and Jimmy, Ginger did not have any prior sales experience. All we knew about Ginger was that she participated in massage therapy.

It was not long before Ginger became the third member of the dynamic duo. I guess we could have referred to them as the dynamic trio. Jimmy and Mikey both felt Ginger would do well on the client side of the business, now referred to as B to B. Jimmy asked her to make 100 phone calls a day. He wanted her to dig and find clients that would want to use our services to fill open jobs for therapists. It was at this point in our company’s history that we started collecting and filling out jobs for PT, OT, SLP, and their assistants. And Ginger did not stop at calling SNFs only; she started calling in-home healthcare companies as well, digging for their openings. Ginger’s reputation as one who could find things buried under a rock stuck with her for many years during her career at Ardor.

KEY HIRE

Our hiring practices were far from perfect, although we were and remain a company that recruits talent for other companies as a specialty. When Patty and I made a bad hire we would beat ourselves up. How could we make mistakes if this was our specialty? Well, as it turns out, we learned quickly that choosing the right person for the job is far from a science. And we were only a few years into building our big company when the light went on. With that in mind, we would continue to make less-than-perfect decisions. Now when we hire a class—more on that later—we hope at least half the hires will make it ninety days. And that is especially noteworthy when a company is hiring sales...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.1.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft ► Bewerbung / Karriere
• ISBN-13: 9798350988536 / 9798350988536