What It Takes to Build a Successful Home Care Company in a Rural Market (JM & Michele Simmonds)

JM & Michele Simmonds share how they built a successful home care business in rural Texas through trust, community ties, and a strong team culture. From recruiting and marketing to handling challenges and keeping a stellar reputation, they break down what worked and what didn't. We also dive into their expansion across Texas and what it took to sell the business. Now, they’re gearing up for a fresh start in rural Colorado—with lessons learned, new ideas, and big goals.

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min

Jul 1, 2025

What It Takes to Build a Successful Home Care Company in a Rural Market (JM & Michele Simmonds)

Miriam Allred (00:01.5)
Welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. Today I'm joined by a home care duo, a husband and wife, powerhouse in the Texas market. I've got JM and Michele Simmonds founders of ClearPath Home Care in Texas who recently sold and are now investors, and they are also now partners of Riverside Home Care in Colorado. Hi, you two. Welcome to the show.

JM & Michele (00:27.4)
Hi, I'm Miriam. Thank you for having us. This is exciting.

Miriam Allred (00:31.1)
Likewise, we have recently gotten acquainted, but I feel like I know you because I see you all over LinkedIn and all over the internet, and I've always thought I need to reach out to them. I need to have them on the show. And now here I am in your backyard in Texas, so we're not too far away, but we're still recording digitally and online, which is great. But I have really been looking forward to meeting both of you and having this conversation. So thank you for making the time.

JM & Michele (00:57.8)
We've heard you speak multiple times, I think probably at the HCAOA events. It's kind of hard to believe that we haven't met, but I don't think we ever had formally, but it did.

Miriam Allred (01:08.8)
Yes, well better late than never, better late than never. So here we are. Let's go ahead and start with your background. You both have been in home care for a hot minute now and have learned a thing or two. And we're going to talk about your journey in a rural market and how you have built a really successful thriving home care business in more rural Texas. But before we jump into that, would one of you like to jump in and

Talk a little bit about your personal background and what you were doing before home care and why you started Clear Path

JM & Michele (01:41.0)
You go first or me? You go ahead. Okay. I graduated from the University of Houston. I got a master's in an MBA in international business from University of Texas of San Antonio. And then it kind of got my entrepreneurial juices flowing. Everybody in my master's degree program was talking about doing their own thing. And I thought, well, why not me? So I started a restaurant in Austin, Texas. And I can say I learned a lot about owning a restaurant, I wouldn't say it was overly successful, but I did. I really learned a lot. And actually right at the end of that is, and I already knew Michele, but she was previously married, but.

JM & Michele (02:27.0)
At that time she had become single and I was then rolling into starting a new business. I wanted to try again and home care was what I chose and that actually formed Clear Path Home Care in Austin, Texas. And then we started a relationship. Well, I asked what he was doing and I have a nursing background, nursing and psychology from Charleton

And, you know, of course it was very appealing to me to hear what he was doing and why and in what regard, you know, he wanted to grow ClearPath. And so I asked him if he wanted an investor.

He forced him to that down. Who's going to pay no money when you're just starting a business? Yeah, so then it made sense with a nursing background to kind of marry business and

care experience. that's how we became partners in Clearpath. And then later we started dating and became partners in life. she was living in Breckenridge, Texas, which is a very rural city and a very rural county, which is about an hour and a half due west of Fort Worth, if you're looking at the Texas map. And she had two kids that were still in school and

you know, as we kind of started progressing in our relationship personally, you know, we had a little problem to try to solve there. I live in Austin, she lives in Breckenridge, business is in Austin, and then you made an appeal to me. did. I was on one of the trips coming back from Austin.

JM & Michele (04:19.9)
It's very desolate, the whole road, the whole way in 281. And it went right through my hometown of Hamilton.

And I just, which is smaller than Breckenridge. Breckenridge is about five, 6,000 people. But I did start to wonder, like, what do they do out here? It's obvious, you you have these services available in the metro areas. That's easy, but what do they do out here? And I went back to Breckenridge and I started talking to some colleagues and friends in the healthcare continuum of care there in Breckenridge and...

said, know, what does this look like out here? they, you know, every one of them said, well, it's non-existent. And the closest big city was probably Abilene, and they would not come that far out to Breckenridge. It's about a 45, 50 minute drive, but they would not come out. So I started thinking, you know, the need is,

obviously big out here because people are relying on the little ladies from the church or their neighbors to look out for them and take care of them and stand in the gaps and you know there's just that's just not adequate you know and it's not reliable and people get burned out and it's just not sustainable.

So I started talking to him about rural home care and he looked at me like I was crazy. Well, she wants me to move from Austin, which is fun, to Breckenridge, which I'm not downing Breckenridge. I love all my Breckenridge people, but it's not quite as fun as Austin. I just said there's such a need out here and not only for potential clients, but we could really be providing jobs for women in this town where it's an oil and gas and ranching town. And so if you didn't work at the bank or the school, there's just not a lot of opportunity there or for supplemental income, you know. So I looked at him, I said, I think this can really work out here, but it's probably not going to be just the most glamorous experience. he just wasn't convinced. I said, do you want to make a

Do you want to make money or do you want to make a difference? And he said both, of course. And I said, well, I think we're going to have to make a difference before we make money. And that was the mindset that we had going in.

Not to at all on the bottom dollar necessarily, but just making it work and setting the bar for rural home care. And I feel like we've really done that in Texas. And now you see a lot more companies even starting up in the rural areas. So that's really cool to see.

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Miriam Allred (07:24.3)
my goodness, such a great lead in to what we're going to talk about. And I did not know you were business partners before you were life partners. And I want to talk more about that because there are a lot of couples in home care and your journey is probably even more unique than a lot of other people, but just the dynamic of working together and how that all works. So we'll get to that in a little bit. and you were already kind of prefacing my next question was just kind of like the lay of the land of home care in this area in Texas 10 or 15 years ago, it sounds like there were home care companies, was penetration in the big cities, of course, but rural home care was pretty obsolete just 10 or 15 years ago. So you were early on the scene. How established was the business in Austin? How big, how established before you were ready to jump into rural home care?

JM & Michele (08:17.8)
Well, luckily it wasn't. mean, I think we had only had one client in total before, you know, Michele presented this option and it was a dual option for me. was not only am I moving my business, but I mean, we're concreting our relationship with this move because I'm moving there. And, you know, with the expectation, we both had it that, you know, we're going to get married. And so that was, you know, the whole reason for the move was, was both of those. But no,

It was really just the beginnings of it.

There also wasn't a lot of information out there. We had to wing it for a hot minute because there wasn't a lot of, there's so much mentorship and industry leaders now that are in the spotlight and are available and so much more knowledge. Back then there was nothing, even the state of Texas couldn't be real clear on what we were needing to do. So we had to just limp along and figure it out and I'm glad we did.

created a unique business model for us and we just we made it work. A funny story was when we we needed policies and procedures and I didn't know how to write policies and procedures. You didn't know how to do that. I didn't know anybody else who did. There weren't any consulting companies I was aware of. I literally googled home care policies and procedures off the internet and they were Canadian. That's what we used for about the first three years.

They need policies and procedures. mean, it was a needle in a haystack looking for information out there. And, you know, we're so thankful and glad that it's come a long, long way in the last 11, 12 years. I remember Googling just anything, just asking questions of Google on things I didn't know in home care. And the only person I could find on the internet, even close to writing about home care was Stephen Tweed. Back then he was already doing it. And I remember the first day I met him I was I almost fell to my knees like I had met God because I was like I've been listening I've been reading your stuff for so many years I just I can't believe I'm actually getting to meet you and of course now he's a great friend and and great mentor to both of us and but yeah that's just kind of how it worked back then there wasn't a lot of information

Miriam Allred (10:43.9)
And the funny thing is we're talking 11 or 12 years ago. You're talking like this was 50 years ago, but look how far home care has come in 12 years. It's like it was...

JM & Michele (10:55.02)
It really is amazing. And just through organizations like the Home Care Association of America, we've made huge strides, huge strides. And we were able to charter the Texas chapter for them. And it's so needed because we're such a vast state and the landscape looks so different than most other states here.

Miriam Allred (11:22.6)
And it gives me chills thinking about the next 10 years. It's like, look at the innovation and the progression of 10 years and what a difference that has made and what are we about to accomplish the next 10 years? Like it just gets me excited and fired up. Michele, you had talked about wanting to make a difference. Like that was a big part of your desire to move to rural Texas to get ClearPath going. You mentioned it was an oil and gas town. And so there weren't a lot of job opportunities. And it sounds like you saw a need for possibly a lot of maybe middle-aged women that could find work. Talk a little bit more about that, that landscape and how you captured and found these women and offered them work.

JM & Michele (12:03.5)
It grew pretty organically. course, I knew everybody, it's a small town, you know everybody. being in healthcare, those are the people in my circle. literally Facebook, we recruited off Facebook and when it caught on, it caught on big. And we were able to be full-time, part-time, supplemental incomes for families. We were very family-centric. We worked around your kids, we wanted you off for sporting events. I know as a mother, you're not going to give those things up. And so we really were caregiver focused. And that's what gave us just the best quality of care because we took care of them first. And by default, they just took excellent care of our clients.

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