Miriam Allred (00:01)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host Miriam Allred. Today I am sitting across from Conant Schoenly the president of Charter Oak Home Care in Connecticut. Conant, welcome to the show.
Conant Schoenly (00:15)
Thank you so much for having me, Miriam.
Miriam Allred (00:17)
You and I have been rubbing shoulders for a lot of years, a lot of years, and this is the first time I'm interviewing you formally. So apologies, but also better late than never. And I've been looking forward to this. So thank you.
Conant Schoenly (00:31)
I'm so happy to be here with you after all of these years. Happy to be on the pod.
Miriam Allred (00:37)
Yeah, well, let's get right into your story. You have kind of an interesting journey landing in the family business in Connecticut. So talk a little bit about your personal background first, and then we'll kind of share your parents' story and the business story. But talk a little bit about yourself first.
Conant Schoenly (00:54)
Yeah, so I actually grew up working in Charter Oak Home Care, which was our family business. It was started by my dad back in 1985. So it's the oldest home care agency in the state of Connecticut. And as a high schooler,
I worked as a CNA for the company. So I learned from a very young age about what the company does. I had to take care of many clients over the summers. And then I would also come home and I would hear my dad at the dinner table. He'd be talking about the business. So in some ways I really feel like I was raised in home care. And that was a huge blessing to me.
I then went off to college ⁓ and in college like everyone else I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Wasn't really a hundred percent certain that I wanted to go down any set career path.
I went into finance when I graduated, spent several years there, was in the private equity space, and then went to graduate school and started working for Georgetown University while I was going to business school there.
And then when it came closer to graduation, I was thinking about what do I really want to do when I graduate?
And I remembered back to ⁓ some of the early days for me and having to work 100 hour weeks and just feeling like, this is not fulfilling what I'd love to be doing with my life. And ⁓ there was some health challenges for my father at that time. And I was thinking, man, I would love to
to do something that really has a tangible impact on others and that I can call my own. So I asked my dad if he would be open to me coming back to the business and in 2018 I went back to the business.
Miriam Allred (03:17)
And what was his response? Was he jumping for joy? Was he hesitant? What was his reaction?
Conant Schoenly (03:22)
Great question. ⁓ He asked me, are you sure you really want to do this? He said, it's going to be harder than you think. And man, I was very naive getting into it. ⁓
coming out of a totally different setting and heading into home care full time, ⁓ it was certainly culture shock. But I also think that he was really happy and he was proud that I wanted to continue the legacy that he had started to build ⁓ over 30 some years at that time. So I think that he was really happy.
Miriam Allred (04:06)
Do you have siblings and were they involved ever?
Conant Schoenly (04:11)
I do. I have a younger brother ⁓ and at that point he ⁓ was in process of going to graduate school so he was not at a point where he was in a position to join the business or really had interest in that. ⁓ He does help us out now. ⁓ He does some of our Google ads and our
digital marketing and ⁓ it's really special for me now to be able to work with him every so often on the side.
Miriam Allred (04:44)
I said to you before the conversation, there's a lot of parents that are running these home care companies and they have kids and it sounds like maybe your parents didn't put pressure on you to take over the business. They let you come to it, but I wonder, did you ever early on or as you were kind of like entertaining coming back, did you ever feel a sense of pressure from your parents, good or bad?
Conant Schoenly (05:06)
No, my parents are absolutely wonderful. They never even brought up my coming back to the business. It was never something they mentioned. They were always very supportive of whatever I wanted.
to do in whatever career that I had. And they have always been some of my biggest supporters. I highly respect my dad. He's one of the guys that I respect the most on this earth. And so for me, it was really an opportunity to get to work closely with him. And I consider that a huge privilege. ⁓
And over time, that relationship that he and I have has only grown stronger as we've been able to work together. And he's now older, and so I can go to him and ask him questions because he understands the business and he cares deeply for it. And that's a real gift to me.
Miriam Allred (06:09)
That's amazing. today we're going to talk a lot about you coming in and leveling up the business and scaling it and overhauling processes and people and service quality and all of that good stuff. But I want to talk a little bit more about Charter Oak for a couple of minutes because it's interesting. You've already cited the oldest home care company in Connecticut and Connecticut's a really interesting market. think everyone could say that about their own market, I actually think Connecticut's pretty interesting and that it's a small state.
With a reasonable population, I was looking up kind of stats, three, three and a half million people. ⁓ It's one of the older states. So there's a lot of older adults in Connecticut, but it's an interesting demographic in that a lot of the children move away. It's one of the states where more often than not, children kind of fly the coop and move away. Again, that happens everywhere, but it's more so in Connecticut. ⁓ But explain, you're saying Charter Oak is the oldest home care company.
in Connecticut, 1985, talk about your dad and his experience and why home care and the experiences that he went through with his mom and his grandmother.
Conant Schoenly (07:15)
Yes, I will say that Connecticut definitely has an aging population. And there's a lot of other home care agencies that have popped up in the state. I think we now have close to 1200 home care agencies in a state that is quite small.
geographically. Now, not all of those home care agencies are of any size. They could just be one person, but ⁓ there has been an increasingly crowded market ⁓ in Connecticut. But when my father was young and he was in high school,
He lived in a multi-generational household. So he was with his grandparents and his parents in the Boston area. And my or his grandmother ended up getting cancer. And so he ended up as the primary caregiver for her.
at a very young age. And then as time progressed and he went off to college, he heard that his mom had the very same type of cancer. And so he actually quit college at that point and came back up to the Boston area to take care of her.
Now fast forward several years and he's a pretty entrepreneurial person, has a lot of ideas and he came to Connecticut and my parents got married and he said, know what, it would be so great if this state
had an option other than going to the hospital or going to a SNF or other long-term care facility because both his mom and his grandmother really wanted to remain at home and it put a lot of stress on his brothers and his family.
doing their best to keep them at home. And it almost totally broke his family. So he really understood that there was this need. And then he started Charter Oak Home Care really well before his time, before home care was a thing.
