Navigating the Complexities of Assisted Living with Petunia: A Family's Guide

EPISODE: #17 In this episode of Healthcare Wayfinders, host Zach Aten speaks with Greg Hearn, founder of Petunia—a modern tool built to help families navigate one of life’s most emotional and complex decisions: finding the right assisted living or memory care facility for a loved one.

Greg shares his personal story that led him to create Petunia, and explains how the platform is transforming the way families collaborate, compare, and confidently choose the best care option—without spreadsheets, confusion, or scattered communication.

💡 What You’ll Learn:
✅ The hidden challenges families face during the senior care search
✅ Why most decisions are made under pressure—and how to reduce the stress
✅ How Petunia helps families make informed decisions, together
✅ Common mistakes to avoid when choosing assisted living or memory care
✅ How Petunia respects privacy, saves time, and keeps everyone aligned
✅ The impact of aging demographics on the future of senior care

Whether you’re just starting the process or already deep in the search, this episode is a must-listen for anyone helping an aging parent or relative find the right care.

📌 Check Out Petunia:
🖥 Website: https://usepetunia.com
📋 Free Checklist: https://usepetunia.com/checklist
🎁 Wayfinders Special Offer: Use code WAYFINDER2025 for one free month

🔔 Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with someone who needs it.

Contact the Healthcare Wayfinders Podcast

• Email us at podcast@grassrootslabs.com

Special Thanks to:

• Seth Aten who produces the podcast.
• Grassroots Labs for sponsoring the show.

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Transcript

   What if one of the most important decisions of your life where your aging parent will live and be cared for, had to be made under pressure with limited information, and across multiple family members in different states? For millions of families, that is the reality. Welcome back everyone to the Healthcare Wayfinders Podcast, where we are routing you to more accessible and cost-effective healthcare.

I am your host, Zach Aten, and in today's episode we're talking with Greg Hearn, founder of Petunia, A tool built to guide families through the emotional and logistical maze of finding the right assisted living or memory care facility for their loved ones.  Greg has been there twice. His personal experience with deep empathy for families in this situation has led him to create a smarter, more collaborative way to handle the process.

If you or someone you love is facing this journey, you'll want to hear what he's been building and how it can change the way that we care for our aging parents.  📍 Let's dive in.

   Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Healthcare Wayfinders podcast.  I've got Greg Hearn here with Petunia.  Greg, how you doing today?

 Hey, I'm doing all right Zach. Glad to be here and thanks me on podcast.

 Yeah. We're super pumped to have you here. So yeah, let's just jump in. Tell the audience a little bit about Petunia and tell us about how you got inspired to, to start it. 

 Yeah. So I'm Greg. I'm the founder of Petunia. We're at and we help families navigate the living care. adding a little more to it. We developed a really specialized project management tool for the really specific project of finding the best assisted living or memory care for that aging loved one, recognizing that it's usually a family decision distributed across a couple of different stakeholders in your family.

And like many teams or groups, your stakeholders are probably distributed across the country. So we bring everybody together on the same platform where they can drive the search and then ultimately make the decision together.  and then we take it from there.

 That is so cool. And I can speak from personal experience or at least my wife's family. My mother-in-law and father-in-law, both of their, both my mother's parents had to go into assisted living memory care in the last couple of years. Exactly. Your story, their siblings live in different states.

And trying to organize all of that between everyone and find somewhere that they felt like it was safe for their loved one to go. Was just, they, I'm sure they spent countless hours, countless dollars, countless driving trips back and forth to, to figure this stuff out. So what you guys are doing is so needed right now, especially as more and more. Folks age in our country and that kind of, that bigger group, baby boomers population is more and more of them are going into these types of living arrangements.

 Yeah. No, that's, that, that's exactly right. If you read any of the popular press and even, some of the more industry specific publications, right? We've hitched that we've hit that peak 65 moment here in the United States, and that means the boomers are hitting 65 or older in the largest cohort.

At any point in history. And we're at a really interesting place with aging and longevity and with all of that, with senior housing very broadly, right? Where we have, a group of people with radically different expectations on how aging looks and how and where they want to age as they continue to grow into their golden years.

And there's just a ton of opportunity in the space, whether you're thinking about housing or anything else within the aging ecosystem. And there's so much room for improvement. We're really excited. We're really focused on, for now assisted living and memory care. And folks that are have already made a decision or are close to making a decision that type of community-based setting makes sense for them.

But this is gonna be an interesting next decade or so as folks continue to get old.

 Yeah, definitely. And, lots of decisions that have to be made with care and love and sometimes resources too. Be, before we jump into kind of the product, can you give us a little backstory on you and kinda how you got inspired? What's the story behind how you, why'd you decide to start Petunia?

 Sure. Yeah. Like many folks in the space, it's a learned and earned experience. That's the really short version. This is let's see. This is my third venture. This is my first venture in the age tech ecosystem. But the brief sort of personal story behind all this I had the opportunity the experience of going through the assisted living and then the assisted living and memory care search twice.

In the past five to 10 years once was for both my mom and my dad, and that was for assisted living. And then when my mom passed it was for assisted living, but ultimately memory care for my dad who's living with dementia. The reason why we went through this process twice was when my parents were together they were actually all the way up in the Hartford area of Connecticut where I grew up.

I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and my brother lives in Dallas, Texas. And when my mom passed and my dad was all alone. Up there in Connecticut. We realized that among many other things that were changing, he needed to be closer to family. So we embarked on this search across Georgia or from Atlanta and Dallas narrowing it down to Atlanta.

And then going on this journey with the learnings we had from our first experience with assisted living and memory care and going through process of purchasing as a. consumer Going into this second process with a lot more of the important questions to ask, knowing what to look for and ultimately the sort of system I made to go tour over 30 assisted living communities in the Atlanta Metro ended up being unbe, unbeknownst to me, the sort of 1.0.

And then I promptly out. Experience going, Ooh, that was really not great. Somebody should really fix this process. And then I promptly forgot about it for about nine months. I guess maybe forgot about it. I ignored it, I think for about nine months as I, I was looking at other verticals and ventures that had ped my interest.

Yeah. That was that's the origin story. And eventually, like I said, it kept sitting with me, this experience of going through and deciding and selecting assisted living. And so that's when I finally just to full circle back to H Tech Atlanta decided I was gonna spend a little bit of time and effort and do some discovery on both the senior living vertical itself.

And then ultimately, specifically assisted living in memory care. And that's when I ran into Jeff Gray and H Tech Atlanta. And, it's one of those things where a lot of the right pieces and right opportunities were coming together. The cosmos were with me, and we were able to figure out something that we could build that solves a real problem for families.

Other families that are finding themselves in a situation buying a thing in this case senior living memory care, assisted living. And it's something they've never had to do before. And that gets hard and confusing and overwhelming really fast. So that's really the problem we're looking to solve.

 Can you give us like a little overview of what does that process look like now? The problem what, and then how is that better when people use a tool like Petunia? I know I said we went through it. I didn't go through it. I heard my in-laws talking about it. But again, it's something that you hear a lot of people talk about and.

So can you walk us through what does that, what's that process look like for someone who's trying to help their aging parents or an aging loved one? The difficulties that they're gonna run into. And then again, I'd love to hear about how Petunia can help make those a lot better.

 Yeah. It often starts with, a family being under some form of duress. And it's pretty polarized. It's you go for a family outing, it's the holidays or the 4th of July. And you start to notice. Things aren't quite right. There's stuff around the house that's either broken or doesn't seem right.

Things aren't being kept up the way that you think that they should. Or maybe you're, actually noticing a parent with memory difficulties. And so you start under the duress of, oh gosh, there's something wrong with my parents or my loved one. And there's a longer timeline there where you're able to go and do some research and figure out if, assisted living or memory care might be an option.

That's one polar opposite end. On the other it is the more acute need, which is you have an aging parent, they've maybe taken a fall. They're either coming out of the hospital or or having to go to short-term rehabilitation and as part of their care plan, you are told that it's not safe for them to live at home without full-time care, right?

Or some other sort of accommodation. And so then you're put on this sort of rat race to figure out if assisted living or memory care is the right thing. If so, where. and either one of those places are, significant forms of duress for a family. And that's how you're entering into this buyer's journey, right?

And then you do accept, like I said, most of the time a, an assisted living or memory care decision is made not. Just by a single family member but often by several family members, right? So you have your family team leader but then maybe two or three other stakeholders, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters that all, want to have input on the decision.

And that's. A fairly unique way to purchase something. And then so you finally go and you you figure out that you're gonna go tour a few assisted livings or memory care and you get to the tour and you're ready to take notes and you. Have no clue what questions to ask or what to look for or really what's important.

And so you're starting on the back foot, right? For making this, potentially life-changing decision for someone that you love, right? And often with their resources or funds. And then you take it all back, right? You've gotta figure out, okay, there's place A, B, C, D, and E. You go on a couple of these tours and gosh, they all start to look and feel the same.

How do you keep all that straight? And then, between that and the pricing and the floor plans and the care levels, how do you make sense of it all? How do you make more of an apples to apples comparison? When everything's just a little bit different to tie that all back, you're doing this under some form of duress, right?

Either, acute or

 state.

 Yeah. And you're probably in another state, right? So it's it's really tough. And certainly you can do this. And this is like I said, how I did a version 1.0 of Petunia, right? I had Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs and text chains and sending videos and photos back and forth between my brother and I.

And that was, just in that sort of discovery phase, right? And then, how do we put all that together?  And that's, yeah, that, and that's the basis for the customer research and discovery I did starting in the spring of 2024. And that led to the development and then the launch of Petunia in December of just last year.

And taking all of those pain points and being really specific about. What pain and what parts of the problem we could solve that was achievable. Because we're not gonna out Google. They're really good at what they do, but we can help pick up a family from the point of assisted living near me when they go now what?

And then we can drive them through to the decision to say, Hey, this is the best place for great Gam. Everybody agree? Cool. Let's go sign the contract.

 Wow, that's awesome. you mentioned it a little bit before and I just, I'm ignorant of this. Who normally pays for this type of care? I.

 Sure who pays for the care is typically the loved one. Whether it is, and this is very specific for assisted living and memory care in particular it's typically done out of their own funds or some combination of their funds, long care insurance and potentially some other sort of insurance benefit.

And of course it runs the gamut for every family, and affordability is a, is another piece of this puzzle, which we don't touch currently but is also significant. Average rent for an assisted living starts around $5,000, I believe is the national average. And then of course, as your care needs, yeah, it's it's not for folks that are light in the wallet.

And as your care needs increase the care levels increase. And typically that per monthly payment does go up over time. But you know what you get for that in terms of peace of mind, safety, community, right? That's often what helps to offset the real financial aspect to assisted living.

 and then for who pays for Petya? Because we're often dealing with the very old average age for assisted living or memory cares in the mid eighties it's often the younger family members, the children Gen X and millennials are increasingly the decision makers, right? And therefore the ones most needing of a product. This.

 So it's it's something where, like family members can all create accounts. You can do your search. What does that look like? Let's just say me and my sister and my brother we're looking for assisted living for my mom. How would, what would our like journey be through the app to get her into a space that we feel good about, that she feels good about and feel like we've done everything we can to like, make this the best possible situation for her.

 Sure. So like I said, Petunia we ideally  we pick up where Google leaves off. So that means that between you and your sister, for instance you've already determined that assisted living or memory care is something that you're at least interested in exploring more.

Or it is definitely the route that you're gonna go for your parent, right? And high level goes like this. All right, we're gonna go look at some assisted livings for mom. Cool. How about you? Google assisted living near me where you are. I'll Google assisted living where I am.

We get a list of Google does what? Google does. You get a list, almost add in. Places are within your. Then typically what we found talking to customers is you'll do your first round of yay or nay based off of things like the Google rating or whether you have any particular thoughts or feelings about a care organization, right?

You'll have your own sort of first cut criteria. From there once you have five, 10 places that you wanna look at, that's when Petunia can really come in and add some value. One of the family members signs up creates an account they can then invite the rest of their family team, right?

And they're given essentially a family dashboard from which to manage this search and decision making process. It allows you to set a, set a goal like find an amazing assisted living for mom by April 15th. And then also some key stats about different activities that will help you in your discovery and decision making process.

We've got a an integrated family chat for quick information sharing. And from there, like I said, we try to provide a little bit of structure and a little bit of guidance on kind of what are the key activities for you to get to that tour. The types of questions and things you wanna look at while you're on that tour.

And while you're doing that. We are encouraging you to take photos and videos, right? You probably heard me say earlier that a lot of assisted living and memory care communities, they tend to look pretty similar, especially if you're going to visit, a couple in a day. And so it's really tough to figure out, oh, was it this place that had the salt water pool?

Or was it this one that had the really cool craft room or, so by using your phone, which we all have already in our hands, right? And taking photos of the different parts of the community that are most interested to you potentially even some of the brochures and floor plans, you can then upload information from that tour back into Petunia, right?

So that your brothers and sisters can see what you saw, right? Ultimately bringing all that information for a community into one place. From there you can, have some more discussion and figure out whether it makes sense to continue engaging with a community or not. And ultimately you'll get to a point where you say, okay, this is our top one or two.

Everybody can see what I see after I've gone on these tours. What do we say? Cool, let's go. And then along the way, I should mention, we've also built in some other tools that are consumer friendly. Most notably we have our shielded private email. And that's a feature that allows you to make the initial outreach and contact to a community sales person without using your personal email.

Meaning you can have those sort of initial inter interactions. Yeah. You can get that tour scheduled. There we go. And if it doesn't work out with a community or you just don't wanna hear from that sales person again, once the process is done and over you've never given up your personal email. So that constant email marketing drip. Of information doesn't hit your email box inbox, two years later.

And I like to point out that I'd still, I'd say we're two years after moving my dad. I still get postcards at least twice a month from some of the communities that I visited. Now that's physical mail, but same goes with email as well. Yeah.

 Is is Petunia primarily a tool for, the folks who are researching these communities, or is it like a marketplace where you've got the com, the communities on the other side of it? Or is that something that you're looking at going to Eventually I.

 No that's actually a defining factor that makes petunia, I believe, unique. We are not a referral market or a listing marketplace in any way. We are not building the Zillow for assisted living.  We are definitely family focused. I wouldn't say we're exclusively family first, and that's because in order for Petunia to really work well we want to be additive to a senior living operators an assisted living operators lead gen customer marketing activities that they have already today.  So one of the great things about having a guided sort of more structured process on the family side of this equation is that what you end up with are more confident and more informed consumers, which we believe, like I was saying, is complimentary. To the existing activities that senior living, assisted living operators are engaging in already, so that, by the time a a lead a customer gets to a community salesperson, they, like I said, they should be a little more confident in the.

Areas they need to probe, the questions they need to ask. If they've gone on a few tours already, maybe at least at face value, how one operator and or community might stack up against another. And that benefits, like I said on the operator side because, in speaking with operators they encounter two major problems.

One is awareness which is senior living. Or rather assisted living in memory care is an option, right? It's not that well known. People think senior living, they immediately say nursing home, right? Which is. Not what assisted living and memory cares is. And then after awareness is education, right?

What is assisted living, right? And by having folks that are more confident and more informed already they, it can cut down on some of that. And then our other kind of interesting thesis there is again, talking to operators. For the last dozen or so years, they've been very reliant on third party referral sources.

Third party lead gen, right? There's a couple of big websites out there that help find a place for your mother that are really good about getting, but what you'll find, if you look a little under the cover is it's a really poor experience for the consumer and a really expensive lead for the operator.

And communities and operators are really interested on in reducing the amount of third party lead gen referral traffic that they get and really focusing on, organic lead gen. And so we're really trying to figure out, and we haven't figured it out yet, but we want to figure out how Petya can be additive to their existing flow.

And and by doing so we help out both sides of the equation, right? We have more confident, more informed families that are able to make this decision in a in a better way. And then when they're, looking at the communities, they're just, they're more educated.

And it's an easier sort of plug and play 

 yeah. No, that's great.  So I know UNI is a subscription product. Is it something that somebody uses just during this search for their loved one and then they're done? Is it something that provides, that you use long term? How's that work? How does somebody utilize it?

 Yeah. I guess the answer is yes and so really. We're focused, like I said, on what you do after Google, and then to the point of the decision. And as I mentioned also there's lots of other sticky problems to solve in places where we think we can step in and help both during the discovery and selection process and then afterwards, right as we start thinking about move in and family engagement we're not there yet.

But that's definitely on the roadmap for the future, already thinking about that stuff. And then in terms of it, it being a subscription that's right, we offer weekly or monthly pricing. And actually we do have an offer for folks that are listening to Wayfinder today. If you use Wayfinder 2025 at checkout, you get a free month of Petya.

 Oh, that's awesome.

 Yeah, we're excited to help families, right? So it makes sense for us to offer that. And if you're not quite if you haven't quite figured out whether assisted living is the right thing for a loved one you can also check out, use petia.com/checklist and you can download our assisted living family decision checklist.

It's six concrete steps to help step you through that part of the decision. And it also highlights where Petya can help as you consider assisted living or memory care for a loved one.

 Oh, thank you so much, Greg. I. Appreciate you giving that offering to our listeners and I just appreciate you and what you guys are doing. I know there's so many people out there that. You know, are really struggling and oftentimes silently about how to take care of their loved ones, like you said, oftentimes, in duress and having to make a very expensive decision oftentimes to try to take care of their loved one.

I just think it's amazing how you guys are, helping to lower that pain threshold and help increase people's happiness with, that they were able to. Go through this process and get their loved ones somewhere that they feel good about and they're happy about for the long term.

 So thanks for what you're doing. Keep up the good work and I really appreciate you coming on the show.

  Thanks, Zach. Appreciate it.