We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Aaron Marcum . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Aaron below.

Aaron, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

I started my first two businesses with just me. One was a home care agency, taking care of the elderly, the other a satisfaction research firm specializing in measuring satisfaction for home care agencies. Since these two businesses, I have either invested in or helped get others off the ground, and have learned from those experiences, to hire the right people early.

With my second business, I hired my first satisfaction research call center employee within a few months. Over time, I learned to hire slowly in order to scale the company faster. It became more about finding the right people instead of just filling a seat with someone who could get me by for a while.

After a few years scaling my second company, I adopted a more rigid hiring practice that involved 15 steps when hiring someone for our leadership team. Some of the steps did not require myself, but other members of the team. This process included group interviews (where even the direct reports of the leader we were trying to hire would interview them) that were intense and involved a handful of our team members sitting down with the top 3-5 candidates. Once they narrowed it down to the top two candidates, I would interview them and then invite them to dinner, along with their significant other, with my wife and myself. I found that involving my wife on these big decisions helped a great deal. She always knew what to ask at dinner and provided perspectives I had not considered.

What would I do differently? Since those first two companies, I have become a huge advocate of hiring the right people early on, if not on day one if possible. The compounding effect you get from having the right people on the team, early on in the entrepreneurial journey, cannot be underestimated — even if it is one key person to begin with, who can help you scale.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Over the span of more than 20 years, I founded and scaled award-winning multi-million-dollar companies that have positively impacted the lives of thousands throughout North America.

My entrepreneurial journey began in healthcare. It was in my second start-up, that my visionary leadership changed the trajectory of the home care Industry and positively impacted the lives of thousands of entrepreneurs and the millions of seniors that were under their care. I founded the Best of Home Care® award program and created an innovative benchmarking and performance platform, now the recognized standard in the industry.

I have a Master in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied under renowned psychologists and well-being experts, including Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology. It was through this life-changing program that I discovered my calling, helping my fellow home care entrepreneurs find their own personal and professional path to flourishing.

My Breakaway Accelerator coaching program is exclusively for home care CEOs and their COOs/Executive Directors, to help them think bigger, keep their top talent, accelerate agency growth, transform their personal lives, and create a life filled with abundance.

I am also a #1 Amazon and Barnes and Noble best-selling author with my release of EntreThrive, written for entrepreneurs who want to accelerate their financial freedom while creating what Aristotle referred to as The Good Life.

I am a sought after keynote speaker, where I have been engaging entrepreneurial audiences since 2006.

My passions lie in road cycling and traveling the world with my family. I’ve been married to my lovely wife Heather since 1996, and we are the proud parents of six beautiful children.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Yes, I have experienced this more than once, where it appears as if my ventures have had overnight success but it was only after years of grinding it out.

I experienced that with my second company in particular, where for several years I grinded it out and a lot of times it was just me grinding it out alone. Over time, the tactics that I learned proved to be very beneficial. One of those tactics was actually investing in my own personal growth. We started that company in 2008 and around 2015 started getting momentum and experiencing some growth.

At that time, I was living what I call the “lie of the either or,” where I felt like either I had to thrive personally or I had to thrive professionally, but I couldn’t have both. And so I decided to thrive professionally and invested in my professional life and then felt like my personal life would eventually catch up, damaging my family relationship in the process. But in 2015, I had some mentors, some really important people in my life, including my wife, who helped me realize that I needed to stop and invest in my personal growth. By doing that, in 2016 I saw exponential growth in my business as I started letting go, giving trust to my team and really helping them and mentoring them. That was also the year that I started cycling, an investment in my own physical health. That year, we also implemented the entrepreneurial operating system (EOS) model which helped us measure data on a weekly basis that we hadn’t done before. Getting the right people in the right seats, establishing our core values, all of that came together in 2016.

And again, it’s no coincidence that I saw those results when I started investing in my personal growth. But it wasn’t perfect. There were times where we had to make some very difficult decisions. We had the wrong people and we had to let go of people who had been with our company for years that were no longer the right people that would help lead us into the future.

Scaling up started with my personal growth, getting the right people in the right seats, establishing the right vision, tying employee positions to that vision, made us really good at solving our issues. A lot of this is because of the EOS implementation in 2016, which helped kind of change that narrative.But again, it started with my own personal growth.

There were many meaningful moments along the way. In 2016 my CEO and I were kind of at the verge of burnout before all of these changes. And so we got a valuation of the company and thought maybe we should try and exit and the valuation came in very disappointing.
It was less than $1,000,000, which we thought was worth quite a bit more than that. We had to make some difficult decisions at that point too, and that’s when we decided to double down.
We decided we’re not going to exit, we’re going to grow this thing. And the valuation later on was exponential. And we scaled that company to new heights. And now even after I exited in 2020, it is now doing well into the eight-figure range

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

My second company, the satisfaction research and performance benchmarking firm, for the home care industry, turned out to be a significant risk to take at the time. No one had ever specialized in the home care space relative to these kinds of services and for the most part, home care providers did not see the importance of it. The industry was still young, fragmented, and focused on providing care. Taking time to do surveys and manage their data was not their priority, like it is today. At first it was like pushing a string to convince an entire industry of the importance. The first few years were extremely challenging. Our cash was tight and we were just holding on. However, we persevered and continued to find different ways to message the impact our satisfaction program could have. By 2014-15, we hit a tipping point and the company took off, now helping over 4,000 home care providers improve the quality of care for millions of seniors throughout the country.

Many see this company, HCP, as an overnight success but that is far from the truth. It took years to gain the momentum that led to eventual success. The risk I took personally and professionally is likely only fully understood by myself, my wife, and a couple of leadership team members who joined us early on. However, I value those early years grinding it out and taking on that risk. It has added a great deal to my resilience and staying power. It has helped me understand the importance of finding your “calling” early on in a venture, in order to create a deeper purpose and determination to see things through.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://breakawayaccelerator.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aaron_marcum_02?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aaron.marcum.75
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-marcum/
• Other: https://www.entrethrive.com