On September 8 2023, Pallas Care was invited to be an exhibitor in the expo at the USC Aging Is Now/Aging Is The Future Symposium, jointly hosted by USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and Marshall School of Business. USC Marshall News interviewed Rich, Pallas Care’s co-founder, about his experience of the event.
USC Marshall News: Could you tell me a little about your experience with Pallas Care? How did the company begin and grow in your time before, during, and after Marshall? And how do you see it growing in the future?
Rich at Pallas Care: Pallas Care is a startup home care agency founded in 2022 by two USC Marshall MS Social Entrepreneurship alumni, Jennifer Dawson and me. We finally acquired our CA Home Care Organization license in May 2023 and are starting operations. I was inspired to enter the aging care industry by my parents’ experience of aging and caregiving. Jennifer has several years of experience in working with nonprofits in the LGBTQ+ community in LA and was inspired to start a home care agency tailored to the needs of LGBTQ+ seniors. We met in class at Marshall in Spring 2022 and decided to start Pallas Care together. My background is in IT and design strategy for large enterprises. I am committed to dedicating the rest of my career to use my skills and education to improve the lives of older adults and their caregivers. We have a roadmap for Pallas Care that includes growing beyond non-medical/personal home care, into home healthcare, behavioral healthcare, residential facilities, and active retirement communities. We see our home care agency as our entry point into the aging care industry.
USC Marshall News: What has been your greatest struggle growing Pallas Care? How have you worked to overcome this?
Rich at Pallas Care: We incorporated Pallas Care in June 2022. It took a further 6 months for us to prepare our CA Home Care Organization license application and meet all the state requirements. Then it took the CA Home Care Services Bureau a further 5 months to approve our license, in May 2023! We were somewhat frustrated by this long timeline, but we used the time to research the industry, build our networks, and establish partnerships with relevant nonprofits and vendors. Now that we are operational, our greatest struggle is with the chicken-and-egg problem of starting a home care business: you cannot get clients unless you have hired the caregivers who can immediately provide care for them, but you cannot hire experienced caregivers unless you have clients that will provide work for them! We have decided to take a risk in hiring some caregivers and, in parallel, acquire some client leads and build referral partnerships with local facilities. Hiring caregivers is a challenge in itself. There is a growing shortage of caregivers. Part of Pallas Care’s mission is workforce development, to hire, train and develop new caregivers for the home care industry.
USC Marshall News: You are a former student of Abby Fifer Mandell. Could you tell me a little about that experience? How did it inform your work at Pallas Care and your business ventures into the 50+/65+ market?
Rich at Pallas Care: Abby Fifer Mandell is one of the professors in the MS Social Entrepreneurship program at Marshall. She inspired both Jennifer and me with her Social Innovation Design class and her passion for using human-centered design to develop approaches to the challenges faced by older adults. Abby taught us about the importance of user research, of deeply understanding how our products/services fit into the lives of our users, and the fact that feedback (from clients, caregivers, and other users) is a gift! We have incorporated human-centered design into the DNA of Pallas Care. We intend to use this approach with our client and caregiver communities, and other stakeholders, to continuously innovate and improve our services, starting with home care.
USC Marshall News: We heard from a lot of experts at the symposium. Was there an idea, a moment, or a piece of wisdom that stuck with you? Inspired you?
Rich at Pallas Care: I really liked Abby’s statement that ageism is a bias against our future selves! This is a great way to express the negative attitude to aging, planning for old age, and providing aging care in our culture. The phrase “joy span” also hit home for me; the desire for people to have a joyful aging experience, not just an increased lifespan through advances in medicine. I have also heard this expressed as “adding life to years, not just adding years to life”. As a lifelong tech guy, I was inspired by the focus on AgeTech innovations – not just as stand-alone products or devices, but embedded within tech-enabled services. This resonates with Abby’s teaching that you need to ensure that your product fits into the life of the user, and conveniently solves a genuine need within that broader context. At Pallas Care, we intend to use our home care business as a test bed for AgeTech products that can enhance our care services, improving the experience of our clients, their loved ones, and our caregivers.
USC Marshall News: How do you see the intersection between business and aging growing in the future? Do you see panels/discussions like the ones we saw today being commonplace?
Rich at Pallas Care: I am encouraged that AgeTech has been given a name, and that technology innovators and investors are finally paying attention to a huge market that is ripe for new solutions. Together we can design better joy spans for our future selves! I hope that USC will continue to foster collaborations between the Davis School of Gerontology, a world leader, and its other schools, as well as local businesses and nonprofits. This represents a resource-rich ecosystem that could lead to breakthrough innovations in AgeTech and tech-enabled services. I have participated in several conferences recently that have focused on AgeTech, and I am hopeful that the collaboration between gerontology experts, technology innovators, industry and aging nonprofits will continue to develop. We need to learn to speak each others’ languages and to realize that we will need to work together to achieve the greatest impact on the experience of aging. Our future selves will thank us for doing this!
Read the USC Marshall News article about the Aging Is Now Symposium here: https://www.marshall.usc.edu/posts/marshall-and-davis-partner-for-symposium-on-future-of-aging
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