Miriam Allred (00:01)
Welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with all of you again today. I hope everyone's having an awesome week. Today in the lab, I am joined by Melissa Morante, the Chief Marketing Officer at ComForCare Palm Beach. Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melissa Morante (00:17)
Thanks so much for having me.
Miriam Allred (00:19)
I'm really excited to meet you and to get better acquainted and learn about some of the innovative programs that you all have in your office. was telling you before we got on that I think it was a lawyer in the space that pointed me to your father who has now pointed me to you. And I have a lot to learn from you today. So I am super excited.
Melissa Morante (00:37)
Same here, excited to share.
Miriam Allred (00:38)
So, let's start with your introduction. Tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background coming into home care, and then you getting involved in the family business.
Melissa Morante (00:48)
Sure. So my background is actually not home care or health care. I have a public relations background. I worked in the consumer marketing and PR space for almost 20 years in New York City for a big agency.
I did work on consumer healthcare products, ⁓ but ⁓ my background is really PR and marketing. I joined the family business in 2016, relocating from New York to Florida, which was a big move and something I swore I would never do. ⁓ But here I am. ⁓ We're ⁓ a family owned and operated. ⁓
care agency. So it's myself, my brother-in-law, my sister, and my parents. The Palm Beach office opened in 2010. My father purchased 50 % of an existing franchise. And then in 2012, my sister and brother-in-law joined. And then in 2016, I came along.
Miriam Allred (01:53)
Amazing. And your title today is Chief Marketing Officer. Tell us a little bit about like day in the life or what you do for the business.
Melissa Morante (02:00)
Yeah, so day in the life, ⁓ I am responsible for ⁓ developing relationships with our referral sources. ⁓ We are good old fashioned marketers. We knock on doors and we set up meetings and we go to networking events ⁓ and we build relationships, right? Homecare is a referral driven business. ⁓ And so you get referrals when you have relationships with people.
And so that is, that's my primary role. One of the other things that I'm responsible for is I am our Parkinson's care expert. And so three of our owners, my sister, my brother-in-law and my dad are all nationally certified Alzheimer's educators. And when I joined in 2016, we identified a real gap in understanding of Parkinson's and we have unique expertise and chronic illness and so I sort of dove right in. My grandfather had Parkinson's and what we think was Lewy body dementia, although we didn't know half of what we know now back then. ⁓ Had we, his life would have been very different. My grandmother's life would have been very different.
⁓ And so I sort of immersed myself in the disease and ⁓ like my brother-in-law says, I became a student of Parkinson's ⁓ and really became an expert. There is no certification like there is for Alzheimer's and so ⁓ Parkinson's care expert is how we describe the role.
And so along with that comes training all of our caregivers on Parkinson's disease. And then I do a lot of volunteer work and education on the disease out in the community.
Miriam Allred (03:49)
Fantastic. We're going to talk a lot more about that today, your expertise and how you've translated that. One question though, you coming from New York, big PR kind of marketing firm, but joining this company in 2016 and you said you're very much like boots on the ground type marketing. Was that a hard switch for you? Did you come in? I just, I just imagine you come in from like a digital heavy, like online presence marketing background, but to come and shift gears to boots on the ground type marketing. Did you come in kind of guns blazing like we should do more online and have like a really strong online presence or did you understand from day one like this is a very referral based business and we need to go all in on that strategy. Like what did that look like?
Melissa Morante (04:29)
Yeah, so admittedly I am not a fan of the technology. Like I'm old and I like good old fashioned meeting people, talking on the phone.
Miriam Allred (04:34)
Okay.
Melissa Morante (04:42)
You know, one of the things, we had talked about this earlier, right? One of the things that came out of COVID is everybody started jumping on Zoom and it became an excuse, right? To not leave your office. And all of these meetings started happening on Zoom. And I was like, we are social beings. Like we need to be out there and talking to people. And so, ⁓ no, for me, it was...
It was more about sort of learning how to, we call it marketing, but it's sales essentially, right? And I...
in my previous life had this sort of vision of what a salesperson was, right? My father has been in sales his whole life. And so that was the uncomfortable part for me and learning how to knock on doors and try and cold call, right? And set up appointments and all of those things. That's a little bit different. Sometimes you can make the analogy to pitching media, but...
It's not really the same. And so that for me was the biggest transition, was sort of learning how to sell.
