Miriam Allred (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Mulred. It's great to be back in the lab with you. Today I am joined by Domenic Colovito, the co-founder and COO of Our Care Health based in Tampa, Florida. Domenic, thanks for joining me in the lab.
Domenic Colavito (00:16)
Thank you for having me.
Miriam Allred (00:18)
We were just reminiscing on when we met and how we met and all of the connections and industry peers that we have. but super excited to have this conversation and for you to join me in the the formal podcast setting. How are you feeling?
Domenic Colavito (00:28)
Yeah, thank you. I'm happy to be here. I'm good. I'm good. I'm excited to be here. I've been a a follower, since, you know, you got this started. It's been incredible to see how far you've come with it. So I'm happy to be happy to be on. It's also my first ever podcast, so a little nervous.
Miriam Allred (00:42)
Yeah, don't don't be nervous. You're a natural speaker and we've got great chemistry. So this is gonna be lot of fun. for those that don't know you, talk a little bit about yourself, your background in home care, and then also a little bit of background on OurCare
Domenic Colavito (00:52)
Sure, sure. So I I am a co founder and COO of OurCare Health we operate in New York, Florida, and Connecticut. we have been around for we just hit the ten year mark a few weeks ago actually. before that we were working together
the group of us were working together, working to acquire a small company in Westchester, New York and get going. But, you know, the last ten years has been quite the ride. just bootstrapping, growing a business and home care specifically. I don't have to to go into those details. Your audience knows how crazy it can be through COVID and everything else. so we've seen, you know, really great success with the home care. We've kinda gotten over the hump. and and now we're really focusing on, you know, scaling, getting into new states.
and to new to new areas. in and part of the success that we had with OurCare was developing our own kind of private financing product which evolved over years into what is now Greeley Capital So what started as a little bit of a just necessity we created for ourselves kind of took the path of a business of its own. and we're excited to be, growing that business now alongside of OurCare, helping other agency owners grow and and get some stable cash flow.
Miriam Allred (02:06)
Yeah, that's a good teaser into what we're gonna talk about around like financing options and the path that you've taken because I would say it's slightly less common, but we wanna kinda like educate people on different financing options and the route that you took and why. two other contextual questions. what's kind of like the size of OurCare today footprint wise, like hours or revenue or census?
Domenic Colavito (02:26)
Sure, I'm comfortable sharing. OurCare is a little over fifteen million in annual revenue spread across three states. we work with I mean, we're Elixa in New York, so we work with, you know, Medicaid, some of the waivers, MCOs, MLTCs the VA, private pay, really good mix of business in New York. Connecticut we're fairly new. so we've been around for just about a year. We're about to start doing Medicaid. You need to be operating for one calendar year according to our license in order to start working with Medicaid. But we're excited to have that on the horizon. As well as the GUIDE program we're doing a lot of in Connecticut, which I'm sure a lot of people
are have just been jumping into that program. I think it's a great program. and it's specially for a newer agency or for us a new state to get some business in the door. and Florida is we are a registry in Florida. we've considered making the change to a license agency. There's pros and cons to it. but we work with Medicaid, private pay, a a good mix of payers in Florida as well.
Miriam Allred (03:27)
And started in Florida, why the jump up to New York and Connecticut? I think people would ask, like, wow, that's like a pretty big jump. So what what was the reasoning there?
Domenic Colavito (03:32)
Yeah. Well, interestingly enough, we actually started in New York. and we we acquired a small agency out of New York and decided at that time we were gonna form a new company in order to do the acquisition and it made the most sense for the company to be headquartered in Florida. We also had plans to expand into Florida when we were going through that acquisition, so we were like, let's just make the move now. I very reluctantly agreed to let one of my business partners, Andrew, move down to Florida to kinda stick a flag in the ground. And 'cause I was just afraid of change. I was young. I was, you know, just
started this venture with these guys and it ended up being the best thing we could have ever done. it was just one of those moments where we had to kinda put our foot on the gas. but it just made sense for Florida. and we're happy to have Tampa as our as our headquarters now moving forward.
Miriam Allred (04:25)
Got it. And a second ago you said you like you feel like you've made it over the hump. When was that hump? You know, for everybody it's a little bit different. For you personally and in the business, when do you feel like was that like hump and that turning point?
Domenic Colavito (04:38)
Yeah. it's a good question. I think that w over the hump I think is profitability. You know, so it's just a couple years ago that we've really started to see some profitability. We were conscious in
investing in growth the whole time. so we knew we were hiring ahead of the curve. We knew that we were spending money to help scale. I mean you have to scale in this business. There's I don't believe that there's much room for the mom and pop home healthcare agencies anymore. Unfortunately, it's just a really hard business. and with thin margins you need to scale in order to in order to survive. So I think, you know, just a couple of years ago I'll say getting to the point of profitability and getting to the point of just really shaking all the kind of
debt and you know things that we had to do in the past like loans and those little sorts of things to piece things together. Just clean books, profitability, sleeping at night, know that knowing that, everything's paid. you know, not a massive profit, but just not a loss either. That's where I've that's what I would call the hump.
