We recently connected with Josh Crisp and have shared our conversation below.
Josh, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
The Solinity global mission is to create housing, programs, and services for the aging population. The Solinity family of companies, we call our ecosystem, is intended to shape the way we view aging while creating solutions that influence positive change. At the turn of the past century, caring for each other started with the family and extended to the local community as well as caring organizations and institutions. At the core of care and coordination was the family. Overtime, with many positive changes, we unfortunately also delegated the family and community role in providing care more and more to a “health system” that continues to be more and more controlled by the government. Simultaneously, as the “American Dream” has been defined with the center of it being wealth generation and a goal of “retirement” has become fundamental in our planning, society has forgotten why we were created and that we all have a unique purpose we were created for that is not defined by our work or health. Solinity wants to inform, educate, and influence aging adults to understand their purpose and live it. We strive to create housing, programs, and services that help everyone realize they have a unique purpose given to them by God, and that as long as they have breath and life each of us has a purpose to live. In spite of our frailty, we have a purpose and we want to assist all of those we can influence in living that purpose.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
The pathway to the senior living industry at first seemed very happenstance for me. In hindsight I can now understand that my entire life of experiences, both good and bad, uniquely prepared me to do exactly what I’m doing today. I don’t think this is an accident I think it is providential guidance by a higher power. While I wish I could take credit and say that I had a strategic plan defined at an early age that I ran towards, that is completely false. Being raised in a minister’s home, moving around the country all of my life, and having to constantly get comfortable being uncomfortable prepared me to face so many of the challenges of starting businesses and responding to changes that we have limited to no control over. I was fortunate to have great parents and they surrounded me with great people and leaders that provided positive influences on me. I was also blessed to be shown a Biblical view of how we were designed to care for each other. Very specifically I can recall my parents “adopting” a widow to live with us and they provided and coordinated care for the widow until she died. At the time, I didn’t realize these life experiences were equipping me for the future.
As I finished high school, I struggled with a vision for my future. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I had an underlying desire to help people and I loved feeling like I had some influence in helping people accomplish something. I didn’t really like school and I had very little desire to go to college but I did mainly because everyone said I should. It took me a long time to finish college because I worked part time to full time to pay for my college. I recall vividly being very frustrated working in the “real world” and then attending class to be forced to learn outdated and seemingly irrelevant information. I was very excited to complete school and did finish with a sense of accomplishment, but still had no real direction on what I wanted to do in life. One of my last jobs as I was working through school was as a real estate agent. This was fun and interesting but still didn’t seem to be meaningful.
Just after graduating college, which seemed like a career in and of itself to me, I was introduced to the senior living industry by an entrepreneur who was creating a housing and care model for older adults. The mission centered around a biblical approach to care for older adults. While the industry or job didn’t seem super sexy or even financially lucrative to me at the time, I felt drawn to it, maybe even “called” to it. It seemed to me like the opportunity to help others in various ways was plentiful. So I jumped in with two feet not really fully understanding what I was getting myself into. The next nine years of helping build a company and a culture that ultimately became a publicly traded and vertically integrated health system was rewarding financially and a learning experience to say the least. The 9 years of work paved the way for me to launch out on my own and start my first company.
I would like to say that me launching out onto my own and starting my own company in the industry I had spent 9 years was intentional and strategic, but it really wasn’t. It was very much a response to being somewhat forced out of my comfort nests without a back up plan so to speak. I have often had people refer to me as a serial entrepreneur. My response is often that I’m not a serial entrepreneur, but rather a reluctant entrepreneur. You see I would much rather latch onto something successful, but often I find systematic problems that I see no one addressing the root causes. When this happens, I have sort of made it a practice to start taking steps towards trying to create solutions to problems I see. Therefore, my approach to creating companies hasn’t been designed to necessarily make money, but rather to solve problems and/or to influence change.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
There are a long list of times in my life and career I have had to pivot. One such time was in 2020. In 2018 I launched the Solinity brand and what has now become the Solinity family of companies. Life was good and exciting. In the senior living industry we were experiencing substantial growth and real estate development business was good. I had used all of my life savings and put it all on the line to invest in the teams and developments we would own and manage. Going into 2020 I felt extremely confident, probably even to an arrogant level, of the success we were experiencing and the confidence we had in our investments paying off in the coming years. By the middle of 2020, my world was turned upside down all due to factors beyond my control. The one thing I hadn’t planned for, a global pandemic!!! I found myself within the same year going from thinking I’m going to be a multi-millionaire and our companies will never look back to facing a potential total bankruptcy. While I wasn’t alone and the entire planet was facing challenges we had never faced before, it felt like the most helpless and lonely place in the world. Everyone was facing their own challenges and isolated and it felt like no one cared and/or could do anything about it. No level or creativity or hard work was going to fix this.
At the point of feeling I was completely out of options for my companies to remain solvent the phone started ringing, e-mails starting coming in, and opportunities starting arising out of what I thought was the most unlikely areas. You see, early on when I started Solinity, I had a vision to do marketing in house for our brands and communities. I decided early on to invest more in myself and my companies and build an internal marketing team. After years of hiring some of the largest marketing agencies in the world to tell our businesses stories and having to teach and train them on our target market and how to create content for this niche business I decided to invest that money in our company growth in 2018. The small marketing team we had created had already created more influence than I had realized. When many of our industry’s weaknesses in marketing and sales were exposed during the pandemic my team’s ability to be ahead of the times and have solutions for other teams was also exposed. We began getting calls by what would be considered competitors asking for our help. Suddenly, this little glimmer of light gave us a little hope and we started working to help others with their challenges in marketing and sales in this new era of relying on digital solutions rather than just in person traditional marketing and sales methods. Our efforts were quickly being rewarded by more and more growth by referrals. We didn’t have a sales team or business development team, we were simply working as hard as we could to help other’s struggling in our industry to keep their businesses alive and little did I realize until the end of 2020 that we were actually already growing again, just not in the areas that I thought we would be.
I learned so much through this difficult time. Some of the most glaring takeaways for me was that as much as I can plan and strategize their is always going to be things beyond my control that can impact for the good or for the bad. I also learned to never become arrogant or too confident because we can be humbled quickly. I solidified my belief in a higher power and that my ways aren’t always God’s way and that His will gets done with or without me. Lastly, I learned to always be investing in myself and my team and stay as diversified but also integrated as I can. Never be one dimensional. Be open and adaptable to change as it’s the only constant we seem to have. Don’t avoid uncomfortable situations, but rather get comfortable being in a state of change and be flexible enough to embrace opportunities as they come your way.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I was raised without cell phone or internet, yes I am that old! I vividly remember my first business interaction with social media. I was exploring this relatively new use of social media called FaceBook in the early 2000’s. Our industry, senior living, was very behind the times. I went to an event in another industry where this guy was talking about how to leverage a FaceBook to market your business. I left the seminar feeling that I had this golden nugget of information and was excited to take it back to my boss and mentor who was the owner of our fast growing company. I wasn’t prepared for the complete shut down my boss would give me. I remember him not really even want to hear my enthusiasm and strategy idea for us, but rather him saying, “Josh, that social media and Facebook stuff will fade, it will never become anything and you are wasting your time and our resources on that stuff.” You can probably imagine how frustrated I was at this experience.
In spite of my bosses opinion, I was determined to explore the possibilities of this new tool called social media. I can recall spending a lot of time outside of work exploring how facebook could be used for business and then also learning about LinkedIn and how that could be used to grow and leverage my network. I remember setting up a business page for one of my communities privately without using company dollars, resources, or time and working to grow that page. Before long I realized that I was proving my boss wrong and we were able to leverage social media and internet marketing in various ways before it was mainstream. This experience again taught me so much about myself and how to stay open to using every tool at your disposal to leverage your personal and business growth. Creating my personal network gave me leverage to not only add value to my team but prepared me for the future in my launch of my own companies.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.Solinity.com
- Instagram: @joshcrispofficial
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/joshcrispsocial
- Twitter: @joshcrisptweets
