Announcer: 0:00

The following programming is sponsored by Marc J Bernstein. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of this station, its management or Beasley Media Group. Entrepreneur, founder, author and financial advisor, Marc Bernstein helps high-performing business owners turn their visions into reality. Through his innovative work and the Forward Focus Forums, Marc connects entrepreneurs to resources that fuel their success. Founders Forum is a radio show and podcast where entrepreneurs share their journeys, revealing the lessons they've learned and the stories behind their success. Join Marc and his guests for a mix of inspiration, valuable insights and a little fun. Now let's dive in.

Marc Bernstein: 0:39

Good morning America. How are you? Good morning Canada. Good morning India. Good morning everyone.

Marc Bernstein: 0:46

We happen to have a couple of immigrants in the studio today, so that's why I say good morning Canada and India and our topic of the day. So we have Justin in the studio, we have Shikha Miglani, who you probably heard probably on our previous show, depending on how we play the shows and she's going to sit in with us on the show and our topic for today is the let them theory. So Mel Robbins is a podcaster who I listened to on occasion. I have to tell you, just being honest, she's not really my favorite podcaster, it's not my favorite show, but she she presents some great ideas, she has good guests and, um, she has a book that was based on an idea she had and it's called the let them theory, which I'm listening to on audible and it turns out that Justin's read the book. So, rather than me telling you what it's about, Justin, if you would like to give your impression on that, I did read the let them theory, you know, probably about two months ago now.

Justin Currie: 1:44

Um, I don't listen to Mel's podcast, but I did really kind of resonate with her theory, the let them theory, and essentially that is you know to me what that really was.

Justin Currie: 1:54

Is it related a lot in business and also, for me, a lot of like agitation, right, the world's running so busy now, you know, and there's a lot of people that get agitated. You know whether that's road rage, whether that's, you know, in business there's a lot of different ways that you know, people can just become upset with others. And with the let them theory it's to me it just really resonated in the sense that you know people are going to do what they're going to do, no matter what. You're not going to control the narrative, you're not going to control anything that they're doing. So why not just let them be right, you don't need to control them, you can just let them be. And it also just kind of relieves that sense of you know, control and stress in your life when you're just, you know, helping people understand that you know you don't need to be involved in everything and people can do what they want to do.

Marc Bernstein: 2:46

Yeah Well, Shikha, your thoughts on it, and then I'll give you my thought real quick, yeah.

Shikha Miglani: 2:50

So it's a very powerful concept, especially for me, because it used to be very difficult for me to let go. I was always this over-caring, over-protective person, whether it was my family, my sister or my brothers, my husband or my kid. My business right, so it. I think lately, in the last two years, I've started practicing this very consciously when you let go of things, you you know you let things be the way they are, they are supposed to be right. You can't change people's life, like you said, Justin, but you know, sometimes, sometimes by over parenting, we can ruin the kids. You know, sometimes, by over you know, protecting people, we can actually not let them find their true self. As much as let go is important, I think it's also important to set boundaries so if they fall, you're there to help them, but let them know you're not going to be the same person they expected. You can't be available both ways. So I think that would be my duality part to it you know where you let go, but you also let go other things. That comes along with it.

Marc Bernstein: 3:50

Yeah, one thing that I thought was interesting she actually says say it out loud, let them. She gave an example of early in the book that she saw on social media a bunch of her friends on vacation. It was one friend. And then she started looking at the pictures you know close-ups and realized all her friends went on vacation without her. But she saw them all together and it occurred to her that, you know, first she got angry, then she got you know, feeling dejected, and then she got you know, well, I'm going to do something about this, I'm going to call them. And then she got you know, I'm going to do something about this, I'm going to call them. And then she remembered and she said let them. You know, just let them do it.

Justin Currie: 4:33

She said it out loud, several times and she said, each time she said it it started, it went away.

Justin Currie: 4:35

Yeah, and I can jump in there for a second as well. Marc is just as far as you know, with with the let them theory and just kind of to to build off of what you were saying there I think it's it's really important to note that over time, you actually train. You train yourself to think a certain way. So when you're, when you're saying let them out loud and you're continuing to say that over and over again, you're going to eventually train yourself to subconsciously not worry about that over time. So I think that's important to note, that it's not just in that situation. You're actually training your mind, for you know the future of that Right.

Marc Bernstein: 5:06

It becomes a habit after a while. I think you're right.

Shikha Miglani: 5:09

Breaking the patterns Yep.

Marc Bernstein: 5:11

So I got my voice a little bit back. So let me introduce Justin Currie, who's the sole owner of Thema Home Care, which is recognized in the Inc 5000 list for its rapid growth, and he's also founder of Masters of Home Care, a consulting firm dedicated to helping home care agency owners helping other owners scale to $5 million in revenue. He's originally from Saskatchewan, Canada. Now resides in Downingtown, PA, with his fiance and three dogs and a child on the way Right.

Justin Currie: 5:42

Not on the way. Actually, she's here now.

Marc Bernstein: 5:43

She's here, that's right, I'm sorry, I'm behind.

Justin Currie: 5:46

And how old is she? Now she's only about five and a half weeks, so brand new, brand new.

Marc Bernstein: 5:50

So congratulations, thank you and welcome. So, Justin, tell us your story. So, like Shikha, who came from another country, so did you. So you started in Canada and made your way here. Tell us really. What we're trying to find out is your entrepreneurial story, how you came into business, but I know part of that includes your journey to America from Canada, so let's hear about that.

Justin Currie: 6:13

Absolutely yeah. And so I grew up in a town, turtleford, saskatchewan. There's only about 500 people there. It was up in Northern Canada and entrepreneurship was not, you know, super visible there. Right, there wasn't a lot of people that owned companies. You worked in the oil field or you farmed with your family. My family was all farmers, so I always had this entrepreneurial spirit, even when I was working. I used to pull pipe wrenches in northern Saskatchewan. That's how I kind of started working In the oil business, in the oil business, yeah.

Justin Currie: 6:44

And so I did that for about 10 years no-transcript, a million people in Calgary. So there was a lot more opportunity there and I started working just as a contractor. I was doing inspections in the oil and gas and that was my first foray, you know, into actual you know entrepreneurship even though I was just consulting on my own to actual entrepreneurship, even though I was just consulting on my own. And from there I actually had a partner approach me and he owned a very large inspection agency, but what I did was very specialized. So he wanted to do an offshoot of that. So we started a company together and we partnered on that and that was called Petromec Inspection Services and so with that.

Justin Currie: 7:43

He was a really, really great mentor of mine. He's a, you know, he's a. He's a bit older than me. He had a lot more business experience, so he's who I learned a lot from. And also, I mean, in in Canada doing inspections, it wasn't uncommon to drive to a site that was 14 hours away in a day, so I got a lot of time to listen to podcasts and listen to books and, you know, just kind of just just learn on the go, and so I learned a lot about that. Around that same time I met my fiance, who's from from this area here in Pennsylvania, and that was ultimately when we made the decision that I was going to move down here and start my own company, and home care was where we wanted to be. That was how many years ago, was that? That was just shy of eight years ago now. And why home?

Marc Bernstein: 8:26

care.

Justin Currie: 8:27

So we're a very close-knit family in our community. I have a very large family, and so when my grandma became ill, we all worked together to try and find solutions for her, and that's where the family really stepped in. But what I really noticed is that not everybody has that big extended family right Like we were very lucky to have that, and so just knowing that there's seniors out there that just don't have access to that and they also don't have, you know, the funds and things like that to pay for that long-term care is it was just really an opportunity to be able to help those seniors out, all while combining my love of business.

Justin Currie: 9:03

So it was almost a personal passion of yours, given your family's situation and, combined with you saw a business opportunity, a way to make money, absolutely, absolutely, and I think it's important to know Thema as well is a mixture of my grandma's first name, so Thelma and Jermaine. What is it? Thelma, thelma and Jermaine?

Marc Bernstein: 9:22

and it's Thema Home Care. Oh, that's great Interesting. So you started the company. What kind of challenges did you have? I know it kind of started with your immigration to the US.

Justin Currie: 9:32

Yeah, so immigration was actually. I always like to say it was actually more of a challenge than starting the actual company, because I had some big challenges with with just the legalities of it. I actually, you know, got turned around at the border twice and got flagged because of just bad legal advice, so I had to end up parting ways with that legal firm and that didn't go very well, but I ended up eventually getting here getting my visa. I was still flagged for a few years afterwards so they would pull me into secondary and so it was a long process. But I had to do that while starting the company and already investing money into the company. So, needless to say, I mean, there was a lot of moving parts. It was not just get out there and market the company, it was, hey, let's try and get this visa thing figured out too Well.

Marc Bernstein: 10:18

Thankfully, you did it eight years ago and not today, right? I think it might be a little tougher today.

Justin Currie: 10:22

It might be a little tougher.

Marc Bernstein: 10:23

It might've been a bit of a challenge today, yeah, interesting. So what kind of challenges business-wise did you have in starting the business?

Justin Currie: 10:29

You name it. I mean that was the first business that I started, you know, on my own. I always had a partner before who kind of paved the way and you know you don't get. You get a lot of experience just kind of through, just just watching him do his thing, but you're not actively doing it yourself Right. So I had to learn a lot of things the hard way early on. I mean, when you start dealing with the financials of it cashflow, I learned pretty quickly that, you know, some of the programs just were not viable to work with some of the insurance payers and I just really spent the first couple of years learning. You know we were really good at sales, we could sell and bring people in, but as far as the overall health of the business, you know, from a financial standpoint, from a strategic standpoint, we really needed to kind of narrow that down and optimize that over time.

Marc Bernstein: 11:16

And tell me about the growth of the business and what's happened over the last eight years.

Justin Currie: 11:22

Yeah, so we've grown every year since we started, except for it wasn't actually COVID. We grew during COVID, it was actually the year after. Unfortunately, I don't want to get too deep into it, but they really paid everybody unemployment insurance to stay at home, and that was our exact caregiver demographic, oh boy. So they were essentially paying them more to stay at home than they were to come out and serve our seniors. So that was the only year that we actually had a loss in revenue. So you had trouble getting people. It was, yeah, pretty much impossible to get people. We had our good core group that we still had on staff, but everyone else they actually, you know a lot of them actually left just to collect unemployment so they could be at home with their family. And you know, I don't blame them for that. It was unfortunately just not a. It wasn't good for our industry as a whole.

Marc Bernstein: 12:10

Has that resolved itself? You're back to having people again now.

Justin Currie: 12:13

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, we, we don't have any staffing issues. We kind of have a model where we we we charge a little bit higher rates, but we're also offering a lot more value. But it allows us to pay our staff. You know a lot better than our competitors as well, so that's been a really good strategy.

Marc Bernstein: 12:29

And obviously the company's profitable because you're now consulting with other home care agencies to show them how to be profitable. So tell me how that occurred.

Justin Currie: 12:38

How that happened. Yeah, that was kind of funny. That was more of just kind of a passion project. Obviously, I'm here, right, I love talking about business and growth and scaling and, you know, I wanted to help other owners kind of avoid the pitfalls that I did off the start. And there's, there's a lot of agencies out there that are in. You know that even just zero to 500,000 range, right, they just can't get things moving because they don't have that background and that experience.

Justin Currie: 13:01

So I essentially just started, uh, posting some short videos on TikTok and Instagram and things like that, and I started to develop quite a following. And with that, you know, people started reaching out to me, right, they wanted to know if I was doing any consulting, if I had any programs, and so what I did with that was I just built a, basically a course and mentorship program and now we have, yeah, a bunch of students inside of that and I go in and do a group coaching, weekly group coaching. We have a bunch of different kind of packages in there and we're just helping other owners, you know, become successful. You do this remotely, I imagine, or we do. Yeah, that was. That was a big thing for me. I mean, that's why I got into business, was for freedom and mobility, and you know I don't want to be tied down to anything.

Marc Bernstein: 13:41

Do you see that? Do you see the future of your business being more on the consulting side or or continuing to grow your agency or both?

Justin Currie: 13:48

You know what it's going to actually be continuing to grow my agency. I've found, you know, after starting the consulting side, as much as I like talking to everybody, not everybody has the same work ethic, not everybody has the same mindset and we work to help people, you know, improve upon that. But really I mean there's a lot of busy work with that. So with um, with with Thema, home care, with the agency, we have a really uh, you know, a really strong exit plan that we want to do in a few years. So I mean that's going to kind of take a lot of my focus, so we're going to be working on that.

Marc Bernstein: 14:19

Um Shikha has a question I believe Sure.

Shikha Miglani: 14:21

Uh hey, Justin, you mentioned that you immigrated from Canada and I'm an immigrant too. I came from India, far, far away from East. So I was just curious to know your story, what has been your experiences and if you can share it with the audience.

Justin Currie: 14:35

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess just from the what to expect side, like when you come to the US, it was a lot more business friendly. I mean, when I came down to the US, I obviously ran a business up in Canada and then started one in the U? S and I can tell you firsthand that it's just there's a lot more opportunity here and the government seems to work more with you instead of against you. Um, you know it's almost a negative thing to grow your, grow your business in Canada. So it was, it was really challenging to grow there. So with that I mean, yeah, it brought a lot of opportunity and I mean that's part of the reason for our success as well, I think is because we're used to all this red tape and roadblocks and then moving here, there's still those things, but not on the same level.

Marc Bernstein: 15:20

With that, we're going to take a quick commercial break and we'll be right back on Founders Forum.

Announcer: 15:46

Are you a home care agency? Ready to scale your business to commercial break and we'll be right back on Founders Forum revenue. Whether you're an independent agency or private equity firm expanding your locations, we've got you covered. We focus on helping you attract VIP private pay clients so you can avoid the complexity and government of insurance services while building a recession-proof business Serving seniors over 65,. We know how to help you thrive in the private pay market. Visit MasterOfHomeCarescom or sign up for a newsletter homecarebacom for exclusive insights and strategies. Scale smarter with Masters of Home Care.

Marc Bernstein: 16:23

We're back on Founders Forum with our guest today, Justin Carey, and we have Shikha Maglani in the studio with us, and we're just talking about immigration, which is an interesting topic for both of you. You've had different experiences with that. I do want to ask you and make sure we have enough time for this. We always like to talk about future vision, so if we're three years from now, we're looking back, Justin, so it's we're down in May of 2025. So May of 2028, and you and I are talking and we're catching up. What would have had to have had, what would have had to have happened, for you to say this was a successful year for my businesses and my family life, my personal life? What would that look like?

Justin Currie: 17:08

Yeah. So in three years time, I would say, you know, for Thema Home Care, the real goal is where we're starting to pave the runway right now for an exit. That's usually, you know, kind of a three to four year plan. So in three years, you know, we want to start to be in a position where we can start, you know, realistically looking, looking for buyers, um, who can come in, and as far as family, um, you know, I'm kind of there right now. I mean, I have a five week old and I've spent uh two days in the office, I think, since I've had her and we've actually grown. So I think that's uh. So I think things are going well. We have some really good systems and everything built and we're really for that next three year path. I think we're really uh, without me working, you know, 18 hours a day. We are going to continue to grow and hopefully be be ready to sell at that point.

Marc Bernstein: 17:55

I love it. Less is more, which often is Absolutely.

Announcer: 17:59

It's great.

Marc Bernstein: 18:00

Now what do you do post sale If you sell the company? What, what, what does your life look like?

Justin Currie: 18:04

after that. Good question. I've considered a lot of different things at that point and one of the things that I'm really passionate about is actually shelter animals. So we foster a lot of dogs we have three dogs and those places they don't have a lot of funding right, so they don't run super efficiently. So one of my passions would probably be to go and work there and help them become more, more efficient operationally and just do it, you know, for volunteer work or whatever, and just hopefully use my business experience to help them.

Marc Bernstein: 18:36

So obviously you're looking for a successful exit because you'll be volunteering at that point and quasi retired. I guess at that point. That's the plan, that's the goal. Yeah, very nice, very nice. What are the challenges? What do you have to do over the next three years in order for three or three to five years, let's call it for that to happen?

Justin Currie: 18:53

So right now we actually just started a new location in Wayne, pa, so that's our second location. So there's two kind of two phases. So right now we're developing a new client acquisition channel that's going to help us scale a lot faster. We've also dove into, we've made a pivot into, specifically memory care. So traditionally I mean, memory care has always been in a community or in a facility right, and what we've done is we've built a program. We have experts in on the team now that are going to allow us to offer that memory care at home. So that's part of the plan. And then also over the next couple of years we won't be doing it this year, but likely next year we're going to be looking at doing a couple acquisitions as well.

Marc Bernstein: 19:35

Interesting, so multifaceted. Is this all under your jurisdiction or do you have still a partner? You don't have a partner in the business, so do you have leaders in the business that will help you with, let's say, acquisitions or new client acquisition, or is that all on you?

Justin Currie: 19:52

So that's going to be my part. So I brought in an executive director about six months ago now and she is phenomenal. She runs the show in my agency. We were really lucky to have her on board, and so that's really allowed me to free up my time to work on strategy and growth, and so I'm going to be working a lot with those acquisitions.

Marc Bernstein: 20:12

And I'm guessing that what you're doing. There's a concept called unique ability. You find people to do the things that you're good at, but maybe other people could do just as well or better, and you focus on the things that you're really great at and that sounds like strategy, and growth and vision for the future is your thing.

Justin Currie: 20:29

Absolutely, and that's my passion too and that's yeah, I mean that's what I study a lot of, and I think it's kind of funny to say I mean I don't have a secondary schooling or anything like that but what I've always done is I just learn ahead of the curve. So right now we're in a position to scale right. So over the last year I've been learning a ton about scaling and talking to consultants about scaling and just kind of trying to learn ahead of time.

Marc Bernstein: 20:53

Have you worked with any? There's a company called Scaling Up. There's EOS, which is the entrepreneurial operating system that is about scaling. There's a program that I participated in, the Strategic Coach. It's out of Canada, actually out of Toronto. Have you looked at any of those types of programs or outside help for that?

Justin Currie: 21:12

Yeah, we have. Yeah, I've read all the scaling up with Vern Harnish and traction by Gina Wickman and everything for EOS and we actually utilize some of the EOS tools. We haven't had an implementer come in because on my staff we don't have a huge executive team, it's more just like myself, the executive director and the rest are employee staff members. So it's not super beneficial to us, but still the structure of it it really helps out.

Marc Bernstein: 21:38

That's my company as well. We're not set up really for EOS as such, but we're using some of the principles which sounds like very similar. We're talking about vision. So, Shikha, I imagine you must have a question or thought about that.

Shikha Miglani: 21:51

Yeah, thought here, Mark, that's what I love about my job I bump into people that I should be bumping into because I just my company, Mighty, which is an AI collaboration company, just started a joint venture with another healthier company and in the home care. So we are integrating AI into the operational aspects so we can bring down the cost of the service or more efficiency or something, just a little advertisement.

Shikha Miglani: 22:12

It sounds like you guys need to talk after this, but I'm curious what's your thought on AI, how it can be integrated to provide better care, maybe cheaper care, because there are a lot of people, people who cannot afford it and I think we need to think about them and maybe training them better right To leave a better customer experience. So just a thought on that. Have you thought about it?

Justin Currie: 22:31

Yeah, it's going to be kind of probably a controversial thought on. It Is. As far as AI in our industry, it's high trust, it's relationship based. You can do AI for a lot of things, like we use AI with a lot of backend operations and stuff. As far as client facing, referral source facing, I don't use AI tools in that aspect just because I know a lot of other companies are going down that road and we want to remain that high level of personalization. We have a kind of a higher value, higher price service and so we really want to keep that level of personalization high and the tools are starting to become more and more advanced so you can actually they're starting to get to the point where you can almost get that personalization. But that's a little bit of a differentiator for us is just remaining like hey, we're the people you're talking to on the phone, but not to say that we don't have a ton of AI integrated in other areas of the business.

Shikha Miglani: 23:27

I agree. I mean, ai augmentation is the thought right now and if we can do that successfully, we can do a lot of things. But I think it's a technology where we don't fear it, we embrace it and we think about growing the company still right, even with AI coming in. So I don't know, just putting those two thoughts together. That way people are not weary of AI coming in and taking over jobs, absolutely.

Justin Currie: 23:47

And yeah, there's absolutely a place for it and it's taking over everything. It's just we work in a unique industry where it can't do everything for us, but it can absolutely supplement what we're doing Supplement what you're doing.

Marc Bernstein: 23:58

I'm glad you brought that up. We should probably be talking about AI on almost every show now because it's affecting us all daily on such an incredible basis. We were just talking earlier about you, talked about your Shikha, talked about her doing her psychoanalysis on chat GBT, which you can do. I mean, it's pretty crazy things you can do with it right now that you couldn't even dream of a year ago probably.

Justin Currie: 24:23

Yeah, I mean, I just had it summarize all of my, all of my financial statements for me, just to cut through the noise a little bit.

Marc Bernstein: 24:30

Yeah, that's great. So you fed them in and just said give me an analysis, how did? How did it?

Justin Currie: 24:34

do. Yeah, you ask them exactly what you're looking for. You know, like we, we had a little bit of a drain in a that information. Hey, we're having this problem. Upload the documentation and then just let them know what you let it know what you want to analyze.

Shikha Miglani: 24:50

It can imitate humans in so many ways. It can imitate like really well and it cannot imitate that well. I mean it's right, it goes in all of all the directions.

Justin Currie: 24:59

Yeah, it depends on the application, I think.

Shikha Miglani: 25:01

Yeah, what you're trying to do with it.

Marc Bernstein: 25:03

Which one do you use for AI, or do you use multiple?

Justin Currie: 25:06

So we use mostly for like our SOPs. We'll use whaleio is what it's called. So it actually builds a lot of our SOPs out. You just same thing. You put in all your bullet points, all your information. It'll build a nice SOP for you and you can just go in and customize that. It'll build you checklists. So I would say our biggest application would be the SOPs.

Marc Bernstein: 25:26

That sounds great. I've got a couple last questions for you. I think we're almost running out of time, but we talked before about Mel Robbins and I know that's not your favorite book, but I know you got something out of it. What are your favorite books? What do you like to read?

Justin Currie: 25:43

Yeah, I love to read, but I would say some of the most influential books would have been influenced by Robert Cialdini Um, there's a lot of psychology that goes in that you can apply to, uh, selling and building even just building a package and pricing and things like that. Um, that was a really influential book for me. A hundred million dollar offers by Alex Hermosi Um, really really powerful book, just highly, highly tactical. And a lot of that stuff is not being used in my space, so we've really applied a lot of it to the space and we've seen a lot of success with it. And then, on the personal side, I would say Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl oh yeah, Very powerful book on mindset, and I mean he was in a concentration camp and he kept a positive attitude, so if he can do that, then we all can.

Marc Bernstein: 26:32

Very inspirational book, one of my favorites too. Lastly, what advice would you give yourself to your younger self if you could?

Justin Currie: 26:41

Yeah, I would say not to confuse motion with progress, in the sense that, especially when we start out as entrepreneurs, you know you're there is a time where you have a child come. I want to work four hours a day, and so just don't confuse because you're working 18 hours a day doesn't mean you're moving forward. Be very intentional about prioritizing, and that's what I would tell myself.

Marc Bernstein: 27:17

That's wonderful advice for your younger self and for all our listeners, I think, Justin. Believe it or not, time flies on this show and we're out of time, but thanks so much for being here, Shikha, thanks for joining us again, and thank you all for listening, and we'll talk to you again next week on Founders Forum.

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