Building A Family-Owned Home Care Team In Northern Kentucky

Burnout doesn’t start with a crisis. It starts with the quiet build: laundry stacking up, missed meals, a sink that never empties, and the constant feeling that you’re failing someone you love. Marcus O’Malley, owner of Caring Excellence Northern Kentucky, joins us to talk about what families actually need from home care when life gets heavy and confusing, and why the real goal isn’t just getting tasks done, it’s getting time back.

Marcus shares how his journey into in-home senior care began by helping his mother-in-law launch a nurse-led home care agency, then became deeply personal after losing his own mom. That lived experience shapes how they support families across Northern Kentucky, just across the bridge from Cincinnati, especially when people are new to non-medical home care and don’t know what questions to ask yet. We also talk about what being family-owned (not a franchise) changes, from local knowledge to pricing flexibility and the ability to invest more into the people doing the work.

A big focus is caregiver retention and why “caregiver-first” isn’t a slogan. Marcus breaks down what they do differently: flexible schedules, health benefits, high pay, ongoing training, and appreciation that’s specific and timely. We also get practical about hiring, including the standard they won’t compromise on: character. Skills can be trained, but compassion can’t. If you’re choosing a home care agency, hiring caregivers, or supporting aging parents, you’ll leave with a clearer lens on what quality care at home really looks like.

Subscribe for more conversations on home care, caregiving, and aging well, and if this helped you, share it with someone who’s carrying a lot right now and leave us a review. What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing with care at home?

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Transcript

Meet Marcus And The Mission

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey Valerie, how are you? This is Marcus O'Malley. I'm the owner of Caring Excellence Northern Kentucky. We serve the Northern Kentucky area just across the bridge from Cincinnati. We serve all nine counties of Northern Kentucky.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

So, what got you started in the business of home care?

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Yeah, Valerie, it's funny. I actually helped my mother-in-law, who launched Caring Excellence 14 years ago. She was an RN and launched Caring Excellence. She was a nurse, but didn't have the business background. I designed their logo, helped them with their website, helped them launch their business, and really watching her journey of building caring excellence, as well as my wife working for her. We have been watching the journey and seeing the impact that she had in the local community and caring for Louisville. And then when my mom passed away four years ago, I really started that journey individually, seeing my family, caring for my mom and walking that road as a family and trying to understand all these words and all this life planning that had to go on at the end of life. And now, since then, helping some friends walk that journey as their moms and dads have become sick or been struggling. And I was actually laid off from the tech industry. And I talked to my wife and said, I think I'm done with corporate. And I want to do something a little bit more meaningful, a little bit more impactful. And we talked pretty much within a couple of weeks about what about caring excellence? This could be a journey, this could be something that we could do. And we saw an area of need in northern Kentucky, the Cincinnati area. And so we launched the last year and have continued to grow since then.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

That's great. And just as a reminder for everybody, where what are the other areas of Kentucky

From Tech Layoff To Purpose

SPEAKER_00 1:34

that you guys serve?

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Yeah. So my mother-in-law launched in Louisville, and my brother-in-law has now launched in Lexington, Kentucky, and my sister-in-law in southern Indiana. So we are a family-owned, we are not a franchise. So my mother-in-law started this, and now the next generation is spreading our wings across Kentucky and into Indiana.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Wow, that is great. So I love I love it that it's a family-owned and operated business, and you guys work so closely together and cover a huge territory. So that's amazing. And you've been in this by association, you've been in this business for a very long time. You've known about your mother-in-law running this business. You've you know what her experiences were throughout. And so I'm so glad you guys are continuing down this path. We we need more. We need more folks out there, need just a little help around the house to a ton of help around the house.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

You got it. And having the firepower of an RN as your nurse, having somebody in our team in our corner that really deeply has deep knowledge of the medical space. Elizabeth, my sister-in-law, who's got southern Indiana, is a master's level social worker. My wife Sarah did the scheduling and helped with managing the team for a number of years, helping my mother-in-law. I come with just a business background and having experienced it from the client side, knowing what it's like walking that journey in the naivety of not knowing all of this information, but being able to walk with them and understand and empathize at the position that they're in a unique way. It really brings a holistic view. And I love the different skills that our team brings together to help and support each other with our different locations.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

That's great. Yeah. Social workers, nurses, you've got all the whole gamut of folks that are knowledgeable and helpful. And that really does come in handy quite a bit, especially navigating the healthcare system. You're right.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

It really does. It really does. And then my background of managing teams. So I've managed teams across the country and actually internationally. And so bringing that into caregivers and helping build up that team and creating a great culture. I think I brought some of that skill set and gifting into our team, especially with the disparate team. As you know, you got caregivers going into

Building A Caregiver-First Culture

SPEAKER_01 3:41

the home everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Everywhere. And so be able to create that connection to us and really build that network and that training for them ongoing, really keeping them connected.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

That's great. And let's talk about caregivers for a minute because without them, there is no home care business. Absolutely. So it sounds to me like you take great care of your caregivers, which for anybody listening, any family that watches this, that is so important, not just to take care of the clients, but those caregivers need to be felt feel appreciated, and they need to feel like they're working for an organization that really cares about them. So I it sounds to me like you guys do a lot of taking care of.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

I think we do a good job with it. We really do say that we're a caregiver first and we try to back that up. So we're very flexible with our schedules to meet our caregivers' desired schedules. We're the highest paying in the state of Kentucky. We provide health benefits. If we commit to the schedule for the week, we will pay them regardless of if the client doesn't or things don't work out or they're hospitalized. We really want our caregivers to feel cared about by us. And then we do ongoing training, go well above and beyond what's required for the state, as well as appreciation videos. We really try to make them feel connected and cared for, annual events, getting them together in person. We really do try to make them know that we care about them and remind them how thankful we are for the work that they do. And I think it shows in our retention rate. We've got about 20% higher retention rate than most companies in the area. And we never lose a caregiver to a competitor. We just don't. We just take really good care of our people. They may move, there may be other reasons that they leave, but they really do love, I think, working, working with our team.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

That is so nice to hear. And yeah, and focusing on that retention rate and what makes the caregiver feel so appreciated and feel like there's no other place they'd want to work. Because think about it, these folks are alone with their with a client, but they're not around a bunch of people they can hoo-ha and joke with and laugh with and say hello to all day. They are by themselves and they're spread out all over the place. So bringing them together and sending them appreciation messages and videos and honoring them if they're, I don't know, you have caregivers of the month or whatever they do, spotlights, those things are so important. So I'm glad to hear that you do all of that because it's a lot of work. The caregiver side is a lot of work. It really is.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

It is, it is, but it's critical, isn't it? It's absolutely worth it. That retention is so key. It's a great experience for our clients when they get to see those same familiar faces week after week. And we've gotten some great training from ASN, you know, and some guidance on taking good care of our caregivers. And we try to take advantage of some of that and recognizing them. Whenever we get thank you notes or reviews, I try to read those by name, find the videos, and make sure and send text messages and photos of it to those individual caregivers or those teams of caregivers, make sure that they really get the credit and praise that we get from our clients.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Yeah, that's awesome. I love hearing

Hiring For Character And Compassion

SPEAKER_00 6:37

that. So when you guys are hiring caregivers, what do you look for? What is the thing that tells you all as a team, this person definitely makes the grade?

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Yeah, absolutely. We say character is the first thing and really the main thing that we're looking for. You you can just throw out the window that you've worked at the job for 10 or 15 years. That's great. I'm glad that you have experience. But I really want to know that you care about people. I want to hear it come out in your interview. I want to hear why do you enjoy what do you enjoy about caregiving? Not the flexibility, not this is what I've always done. I want to hear, I care for this missus. When I just got so close to them, and I just love spending time with people. And what we often say is we can train you how to care for people. We can't train you to care about people and really want to hear in those interviews that they care about people. And that's the passion that we want to see in our folks that went during the interview process.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

That's so funny that you said that because I will tell people you can teach anyone a skill. As a nurse, you can teach me any nursing skill that I need to function, but you can't teach a person how to be compassionate and how to really care about other humans. So that's exactly what you just said. That's so great. I'm so glad we're on the same page with all of that. Yeah, you can definitely teach skill, but compassion is something that and I feel like most of the folks that probably come to you or work for you, they have a calling to be a caregiver. Somewhere in their lives, they've felt either they've done it for a family member or they've felt like this is really a role they can they can succeed at and they really enjoy it.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Absolutely. I think you have to, right? It's it's a hard job. I constantly remind people that I constantly remind my team, hey, this is a hard job. We get it. We understand you're going into the hardest season of people's lives. I remind our clients and their family. Grief amplifies whatever's going on. So that can be bring people really close together and it can cause issues too, and cause a lot of pain and hurt, and sometimes bring out the worst in people. And so these caregivers are right in the middle of that area. And so really try to, you have to have a calling to do this. You have to genuinely care about the people and care for them. And I think we can find that, right? There's a lot of people out there that that have a desire to care for people. Some of them are discovering it through taking care of grandma and grandpa or mom or dad themselves, aunt and uncle. But it does come out, and we find a lot of those folks that it's late in life or in a season of life, they discover they have this gift and they get excited about caregiving.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Yeah. Some folks go in as their second career. So you have a second career here, but some people go into caregiving as a 50-year-old or that's something, or maybe they've retired and they can do some light companion care or whatever. I know people do caregiving at all stages of their life. And

Giving Families Time Back

SPEAKER_00 9:19

it's just it's so rewarding. It is hard, also a very rewarding place to be.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

You got it. Yeah, no, I agree. I didn't mention it, but yeah, the rewarding piece is absolutely incredible, right? You get to walk with those families, you get to walk with those kids. And something I always remind our families about, especially the children, is that we want to give stories and memories back. We want when you come and see mom and dad that you get to spend time with them and take them to lunch and have tea with them and watch the game together. Let us do the dirty work in the background, let us do the laundry and the dishes. We want to create memories and give you time back with mom and dad. And uh, but I think those caregivers also I try to remind them hey, you're giving time back to that family. You're not just full laundry. That's something the daughter, the son, the granddaughter, the niece doesn't have to do. And so that's a blessing. Think about that, and even hopefully get to walk out of work knowing that you maybe have given a memory back to somebody that they were able to come over and not be frustrated by the text message from dad needing some laundry done or mom needing to ride to an appointment. They just got to be the daughter or son again.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Yep. That's the whole goal of it is to give also give family members that that relief or respite that allows them to just sit and hang out and not worry that there's a sink full of dishes or that there's five things that need to be done that someone else could be taking

Minimum Hours And Local Flex

SPEAKER_00 10:35

care of. So talk about uh shifts like minimum hours. Tell us, you know, what kind of minimum hours do you guys have?

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Yeah, so what we typically take what we typically tell people is four hours and up is what we typically do. Below that, let's have a conversation. We know mom and dad need some help. If we can get a couple of caregivers to come, and depending on the location and the client's ability to be flexible, we do try to service them because we know in those early days, you don't know what you don't know yet. You just need a little bit of help around the house. And we tend to be very flexible. We want to walk that entire journey with those kids of care from mom and dad, grandma and grandpa. And so we're flexible that way as far as time goes. And we were talking earlier about us not being a franchise. And what's really great about that is that we don't have to pay that franchise fee. A lot of the bigger franchises, most of them in the area, paying a large percentage of that fee for that logo, and we don't have to pay that. And instead of keeping that ourselves, we're actually putting that into the pockets of our caregivers for the highest pay in the state of Kentucky, but that doesn't come at a massive surcharge on the client side either. And so we're able to, you know, keep it affordable for clients, and so we allow that flexibility of time as well as that flexibility on the bank, which I think brings some real value to our clients.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Yeah, that's awesome. I and yeah, there's so many, you could talk about it either way, but not being a franchise has a lot of benefits. And being family-owned and operated and being local to the place you live and you work in those communities where these folks live, you know the areas, your caregivers know the areas, all of that is really important. You are super local family business across a large region, but with offices here and there, that's wonderful. You're living and working in those communities and you're a family, and that I think that really makes a big difference.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

I think so too. And it feels like that with our client. A lot of them are local, they love supporting local, you know, restaurants and coffee shops. There's some really great coffee shops in our areas and things like that. And so just being able to work alongside a family-owned business where I can call my mother-in-law and get that nursing advice. You can't do that with every company, but with us, you can have that entire well-built team, social worker that knows that world, speaks their language, and is able to walk alongside us with that.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

That's

How To Reach Caring Excellence

SPEAKER_00 12:55

great.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Valerie, I really appreciate you having me on. I would love to help anyone in the northern Kentucky area. If you have questions, if you just want to talk through it, we would love to have a conversation. You can reach us at our website, give us a call. If you reach out, we'll give you our cell phone numbers. You can text us, whatever is comfortable for you. We just want to walk alongside families in northern Kentucky. We're glad to be a resource just to give advice to sending some of our team in to help out. So feel free to reach out. We'd love to help.