June 26, 2025 ⢠43 mins
On this episode of Butternomics, our host, Brandon Butler, talks with Henry Mason about what it means to build a healthcare company rooted in care, not just code. From a tech background to running one of Georgia’s top hospice providers, Henry shares how he’s navigating the business of medicine with honesty, grit, and a clear vision. If you’ve ever felt like the healthcare system isn’t built for you—this conversation confirms it, then gives you the game plan.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You have to learn how the business of health care
works to properly provide the best health care for you
and your family. You have to. You absolutely have to,
because this is the one thing that everyone keeps the secret,
and it's for a reason. If you're able to find someone,
whether it's me or whoever, who can help educate you
on the business of health care, you'll better know how
(00:23):
to give your family members appropriate care.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Everybody, Welcome to another episode of butter Nomics. I'm your host,
Brandan Butler, found the CEO of Butter atl and today
we got somebody special in the building.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Man.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
You know what I'm saying, not just doing the work,
but do it in a very intentional way. And we're
going to talk about something but you know, I like
a lot of people probably don't think about upfront, but
you know, it's something that everybody has to deal with,
and this brother right here is really helping people go
through it the right way. Mister Henry Mason, how you doing, sir?
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I'm good man. I appreciate you guys having me, I
really do.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I appreciate you pulling up now. You are the founder
and CEO of Precious Hospice, right.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
That's correct.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah, for those who don't moment, First of all, what
is what is precious hospital?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
So what is hospice or what is precious hospital?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
What is hospice? Then tell us why it's precious? What it?
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I got you fair enough. So hospice is a program.
It was originally started in like nineteen ninety late nineteen eighties,
and it started as a place and it was a
place that you went to and you just died in. Right,
So if you had like a day or two left,
they sent you to a place to pass away. And
that was what hospice was. And it was paid for
by your insurance. And the reason why I was created
was because they didn't want people dying in the hospital.
(01:34):
Like that's you're not supposed to die in the hospital.
Most people don't know that, so you're not supposed to
and hospitals get deemed for that. So this guy in
Florida who created this company, he was it was a
center at the time he came up and he created
this hospice concept and so it was a place. And
then as time went along, the hospital said, well wait
a minute, I can send him there when they got
two days left. What about a little bit more time.
(01:54):
Can they have this at home? Can we stop them
coming back and forth to the hospital, because hospitals don't
get paid if you come back every thirty days, they
don't get paid for that next visits. So they expanded
the program. Now they expanded it out to six months.
So so what you have now is in no out
of pocket service called hospice where you can get your equipment,
your supplies, your nursing visits, your CNA's, your medication, all
(02:17):
sent to your home for no out of pocket costs.
And that's kind of where we come in as Precious Hospice,
particularly in Atlanta, is okay, who's doing this for minorities? Right?
And then once you understand the hospice model, what's really
going on here? Because why do all of us think
we only got a day or two? And then I
got people like President Carter get in two years and
(02:38):
that's where you start precious Hospice and then you're like,
you know what, I think it's time to tell everybody
the truth. And that's how we got to the social
media thing about everything. How we started talking about it.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Now that's interesting, man. I mean again, like I've had
family members in hospice care I actually have an uncle
right now that as that he's at at home hospice.
So sure, when you hear the word you're not going
to you kind of think the worst, you know what
I mean, You kind of assume like okay, but like this,
even my uncle, you know, like looking at him now,
he's been at home hospitals care for about the last
two and a half months, yep, and you know he
has nurses coming and you know, people were checking him
(03:11):
out and making sure he's good. And on the flip side,
you know, I remember also my grandfather from my grandfather
passed away. I remember going with my mom that that
was her dad, and like going to different hospice facilities
and kind of like checking them out. I didn't know
everything that was going on, but like ally had, I
always had this impression that it was where you were
kind of going when you had a couple of days left.
But to your point, there's actually like a whole lead
up that can actually happen to that, and I don't
(03:32):
think a lot of people fully understand that.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Well that's on purpose, right, and so I'll just give
it to you straight for you guys, And so we
have a one hundred and eighty day average, so at
day one eighty one and someone's on so basically a
little over six months, we got to start paying that
money back. And so what medicare is saying is, you
guys are bringing people on too early before they're actually terminal.
And so we go back and forth. We say we
can't play god here, right, we got to figure this out.
(03:55):
And so then they come back and say, we're going
to give you guys a one hundred and eighty day average,
So you got to average your per and that's here
for one day with a person who's been here for
three hundred and sixty days. So if you're the hospice
company as profit first, right, you're one as many people
as you can who are three hundred and sixty days
who aren't going to cost you a lot of money.
That's not you and me. We need help, right, We
need the beds, we need the supplies, we need the
(04:16):
we need the medications paid for it, we need the
extra nursing visits. So they tell us, well, you can
only go in when you're dying tomorrow. And what they
do is they use us to average out the numbers
to other people. And that's so when you're coming up,
you say, well, what company do I look for? Well,
I need to find a company there that looks like me.
Why because he's transparent and honest. And this is why
you think this. It's not your fault, you just it's
(04:39):
a systemic problem that we have here.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Okay. So that's what he's saying, right Like, if you
don't have the information, they're basically saying, you actually have time.
But the average for the facility average hundred days exactly.
And so the reality is the average.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Again, you have people on both sides of that look
at it, but they're giving us the information day before
we before we pass out, right, that we come in
there and balances out so other folks can stay in
there longer.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yep. And now you're saying, well, I got my uncles
in there for two and a half months, and I'm
saying I've seen people in there for President Carter, for instance,
almost two years. So four people had to come on
and pass away in a day for him to get
those two years.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Man, this is this is wild man, this is And
so you said a second ago too that a lot
of people don't understand that, you know, hospitals get dinged, like,
so what's the purpose, Like, what is the point of
hospitals in all this? So you're saying they don't actually
want people to I mean, obviously we don'tant people to
pass away, but you know that shows up on like
some reporter for them to say, like you know, people
are not getting the care they need, or like, how
are hospitals getting like penalized for people passing away in
(05:35):
the hospital.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Sure, so it's a it's called a mortality rate. So
that's there's a percentage that you have to be under.
You can't have people to pass away in the hospital.
So what they've done is they've created these contracts with
hospice companies that the hospital will come in and give
them comfort beds or hospice bids in the hospital. So
one of my posts when a healthcare Henry, we talk
about stop going to those beds. Right, those beds are
(05:56):
being used for what we just talked about. You're being
put in a bed and then you're giving say you
can't we're going to put you in this bed because
you can't make it home and on our ambulance ride
and if you don't make it home, then you hit
that hospital's mortality rate, they can't get deemed. But so
many times that doesn't look good. So we say, man,
you can go home. You can go home, trust me,
you can go home. They say, well, I didn't know that.
I said, well, you didn't go home, But how long
(06:18):
did it take for your parents to actually pass four days?
You think you couldn't make a fifteen minute ride in
four days? Yeah, that's what we're talking about. And so
now they're like, well, Henry, you're talking too much. I
ain't talking enough. No, realistically, we're not. And I shouldn't
be the only one talking because I'm not the only
one who knows it it. Just find me another hospice
owner who's willing to say it. The other thing is,
I'm thirty seven years old. I'm not even supposed to
(06:40):
be in this industry, right, And then I come here
because my mom, she worked for another hospice company. She
got cancer for the second time. They didn't even have
the decency to come check on her for nine months
while she's going through chemotherapy and radiation. Yeah, so I
know right off the back, y'all don't care about us.
We're working for y'all, but y'all don't really care. Then
if you don't care about your employees, I don't care
about the people you were taken care of. And that's
(07:02):
one of the things my mom said, Well, I wanted
you to do this and make a company that actually
is people over profit. I said, we'll try it, and
it just worked.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, and you're in business with your mom. You know
what I'm saying. You start this company with you Like,
how did this say? How did that actually come about?
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah? So she's sitting through this is twenty fourteen, she's
sitting through her chemotherapy treatments and we're going back and forth.
She said, well, they never came and checked me and said, well,
you don't ever have to go back there. We'll figure
something house for you to do. She's like, well you can,
I could do this hospice. Then I said I don't
want to do this, and that was my initial response.
So I'm love this, and so she had her she
had her dad, which my granddad called me and said, yes, son,
you're going to do this. And so the way my
family works is you do what he tells you to do.
(07:40):
Let's be honest. So I was like, yes, sorry, I
got you. So I hung on the phone, and we
got to work. She wrote out policies and procedures and
she's going through chemotherapy, man. And so I went back
read all the regulations. Took me about six months to
learn everything. And then we went back into the community
and said, we're going to start educating minorities on this hospice.
And that's when I find out why are all of
(08:01):
you all saying I'm not going there, You're not about
to kill my mom? And I'm like, why are these
other people calling me when they're not even appropriate yet.
And that's when we found out, Okay, this is this
is the problem. This is what you've been told, This
is what you believe in. The reality is you were
told this so that they can average other people out
with your day, so you're giving your days away. My
knowledge was, if everyone has six months worth of food,
(08:22):
but one person passes away today that other six months
worth of food that they had, we don't throw that away.
It just goes to somebody else.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah and yeah, man, Like again, I think to your point,
it comes so much, just comes down to education. I
think that's one thing I kind of see on a
lot of folks who come on the podcasts. They talk
about just there's this education gap in which you don't
know and kind of how people A lot of times
it looks like us it get penalized for it, right,
like when you started going through this process, because again
you said like you didn't necessarily come out of school,
like your background's in tech tech financial talking about that
(08:51):
six months when you're actually you know, learning the regulation,
Like what did you have to go through? Was it
difficult figuring out how to get the licensing? Like how
did you kind of go from because people know like
how you started, right, how do you kind of go
from zero to one and even starting that kind of company.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, so I definitely didn't have enough capital, right, That's
the first thing when people even ask me now, like
well how do I start one line? It's more spend
than anything. So I think I had about two hundred
to twenty to start it. That's money I had saved
from doing government contract so I'm normally I was actually
doing government like staffing and recruiting, so headhunting for companies
with the DoD space, and so I built up a
(09:23):
little nest egg. I was about twenty four years old,
so I was like I could definitely have enough to do,
and I didn't have enough. You really need about two
hundred and fifty to five hundred thousand to do it.
And so we win in it. We started it, we
hired all the people that we needed to hire, and
then we found out is that you have to run
this company for like at that time was pretty much
a year before you got paid. So now you're talking
about what I thought was enough money. I burned through
(09:45):
that in four months. So I needed the extra, the
bad kid to make this work. And so instead of
doing that, what I did was I took on the jobs.
So everything that wasn't clinical, I did it. Your administrator,
you're a marketer, you're volunteer coordinator. I did all of
those jobs and saved myself about three or four hundred grand. Yeah,
and that's how I learned how this stuff works so much,
(10:07):
especially in the hospitals, because most healthcare companies coming out
the gate have two three million of cushion, so they're
just hiring people to do the job. But if you're
a guy that's got to go do the marketing and
you're trying to figure out why I'm not getting patients,
but this guy's getting patients, and you start slowly backing
that down you say, Okay, you got to follow the
money train, and then it makes sense to you.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So this makes me think, Man, now I'm starting to
worry about hospitals in general in their business model, Like
what's wrong about the hospital business model? Just healthcare business
model in general in the United States.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
I don't really understand what you mean me say, what's
wrong with it?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Like it's again, it just sounds like, I mean, I understand,
they got to make business. They got to make money.
I mean, they're obviously business. They got to pay staff
and stuff like that. But at the end of the day,
it seems like to your point, they're kind of prioritizing
making that money over the best interest of people. And
so I know, like you have some hospitals that you know,
like they come to a nonprofit or you think about
like a hospital like a Grady, right where a lot
of the people that come in there usually lower income,
(11:01):
versus like, I don't know, an Emory or north Side.
It has a little bit of opposite, right, like how
do we get more equity in the healthcare space, especially
for people of color.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
So most hospitals are nonprofits. So your major hospital chains,
particularly in Georgia are going to be nonprofits. When it
comes to hospitals specifically like Grady, they get a lot
of grant funding too, Right, So a lot of those
patients that come in with Medicaid or they don't actually
those medical what people don't understand about a lot of
these Medicaid programs and Medicare advantage programs, they actually don't
(11:29):
cover everything that you need. So the hospital is stuck
with a bill, and that's why patients are getting these
huge hospital bills. But the reality of it is they
are getting these huge they were getting huge grants from
the government to kind of help them keep going because
without a hospital, you really can't have a community. When
it comes to what are they doing to make money,
that's such a huge broad question because you have executives
(11:53):
who make money in the insurance industry, right, and no
one talks about them, right, But you got you got
insurance executives who make twenty thirty million dollars a year.
But yeah, everyone talks about the doctor making four hundred k.
It's like, why are we really the doctor's saving your life, right,
he should be making twenty million dollars, right. So that's
kind of where it's like, for the most part, people
who are clinical want to do the right thing.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I would say that, yeah, Like what's the saying I've
remember hearing. It's like, you know, Medicare silver hair, Medicaid
underpaid and they kind of talk about like how Medicare
and Medicaid or used for different audiences. Is that accurate?
Orm my misutated.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
It's totally accurate because Medicaid is a needs based program, right,
so you can only get it if you have which
is another issue they got to figure out. But you
can't really have that in Georgia specifically, you can't have
any assets life insurance. You's got to have less than
like two grand of your bank account. You can't make
them like more than like thirteen hundred a month or
something like that. Any Flushuay is based on family size,
but it's really for people who need it. It's a
state based program. Medicare is federal base, but it's a
(12:51):
more expensive, comprehensive program. So for someone who needs more care,
if you have a little bit more money, you will
get Medicare. And then but then it's confusing because you
got Medicare Part A, part B, Part D, and it's
like now you got to figure all this stuff out,
and then it's like that's where we try to bridge
the gap for them.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah. Now again, when you think of the name, you know,
Precious Hospice, I mean, it definitely sounds like, you know,
there's more of a caring element to it and all that.
I mean, Like again, even right now, in this conversation, said,
I came into this thinking one thing about hospital care,
and I'm already starting to be like, oh, okay, this
actually isn't just what you think, right Like yeah, and
when again I'm already like, okay, this out, this could
be applied to different situations and stuff like that. I Mean,
(13:28):
I've had friends I kind of feel like we're all
in this age right now. You know, we're in like
this kind of thirty five to fifty year old age.
I was talking to my best friend about it. He
lost two of his parents last year, literally within a
month of each other. And you know, I kind of
think about, you know, a lot of my friends are
going through situations we talk about all the time where
nobody got us ready for this part where our parents
start getting older and like our family members start getting older. Right, Like,
(13:49):
you think about it and you see it. But when
all your friends kind of start dealing with it, it kind
of hits home a little bit differently. Right, I've literally
had another one of my best friend's moms passed away. Right,
And again, these are people that you knew when you
grew up with and so so just tell me, like,
what is the day to day like of running a hospice, Like,
what is that kind of deal.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
With I can give you today. Let's give you today, right,
So this morning I woke up. I woke up about
four thirty, got to the gym about five, got about
five thirty six. Now on the internet, I give everybody
my cell phone number. I don't know if I should
have done that, right, But again, I never expected it
to grow like this. I just figured that cowp people
will hit me up for some help. And it grew
so about six o'clock every morning, Now my phone's gonna
(14:27):
start ringing or text and I'm talking about to the
point now we get about twenty a day. If someone's like, hey,
I'm at the hospital, can you tell me what they're
talking about? And I'm like, sure, I got you, so
and that's kind of become my thing. So from there,
of course, last night, I went and got this puppy
I was telling, which is over in the room next door.
So I got to walk this puppy that I got
yesterday because we picked this puppy up because we have
our Precious Witsch Foundation It's sorry where we give out
(14:49):
these precious wishes to people who are either on hospice
or need hospital something like that. So we've taken people
to a Falcons game, this one in particular, I had
to pick up the dog last night. It's a puppy
because we have a patient who lost her puppy two
weeks ago. So without that dog, I know that patient's
going to pass away quickly. So the first thing we
did was and I partnered with Interim Home Health and
(15:11):
we got a dog. And I was like, so now
we're going to present the dog today at two thirty.
This isn't going to air before two thirty round now
I'm joking. So yeah, just stuff like that. That's what
pressures me to us, right, just going the extra mile,
not just putting every dollar into salespeople, but putting it
into things where we can actually provide value to patients
and their families.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Okay, okay, And so again you're looking for ways to
just get the show up. I mean to kind of
provide care in lots of different ways. You know, how
is this because it also a family run business, right,
Like you have family members involved in that, now, like
how do they start getting involved?
Speaker 1 (15:43):
So originally my mom was won bat all information, right,
so I just have the finance background to figure out
how the numbers work. But my mother, she passed in
twenty twenty two. But you spoke about someone you knew
that passed a couple months away from each a month
away from My dad died January twenty twenty two. My
mom died April twenty twenty two, and my son, who's three,
was born two weeks before my mother passed. So and
(16:05):
literally I talk about this because the day of my
mother's funeral was a Friday. I actually had to go
to work, right, I literally had it because when you're
building a business, and yet, yeah, I have to help
people like people, right, they can't wait for me tomorrow
like they need me now. So I had to literally
on my way to my mom's funeral, stop by the
office help three patients. I'll never forget I had to
(16:26):
help three patients get out of the hospital. Make sure
everything was set up for them, and then I went
to my mom's funeral and nobody ever knew about it.
I just kept going. So in terms of having like
family in the business, that was pretty much what we had,
me and my mom, and we just ran with it.
And it's just been like the baby I just said,
I'm a ticket as far as I can go. I
have other plans, but to taket as far as I
can go.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
How was this journey impacted you personally? You're building this again,
you know, inspired by your mom and getting your family
and stuff involved. Like, how has this just change your
perspective and inspired you?
Speaker 1 (17:07):
You ever spend time with a hospice patient.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I have.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, when you spend time with a hospice patient, it'll change,
like the very fabric of who you are time is
not the same anymore. How you feel empathy is not
the same anymore. What matters to you won't even matter anymore. Yeah, right.
It's like you think, man, I gotta work, I to
go get this stuff. I got to go take care
(17:29):
of my family, And then at the end of their lives,
they all say the same thing. It's like, I just
wish I had more time and I think for me,
it's like you start to embrace that and take that on.
I don't know if it's good or bad, because I
do consider myself to be like an impact, so I
take on a lot of the emotions of the families
(17:50):
that I talk to. I don't know if it's good
for me personally, but it's like purpose for me, right,
So I feel like that's what I'm here to do,
and so that's just what I continue to kind of
keep doing.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm sure it has to be tough,
man Like, you know, there's there's definitely moments because you
know when people are coming into that, whether he and
they're on the front end of the back end of it.
I mean you're all face dealing with somebody's kind of facing,
you know, the end of their life coming up, and
just it makes you feel I get. I have a
friend of mine, not even a friend, I have a
family member who owns a funeral home, and you know,
like even in the you know, he was like kind
(18:22):
of a small country town, but he literally has the
biggest funeral home like in the county, and so he's
all like anytime somebody passes away, and lots of people
with people that he knows, Like he's actually also the
county commissioner, right, so he knows a lot of people
that are coming through there, and so that's something he
has to kind of work with all the time too, right, Like,
these aren't just random people. I mean, nobody's random, but
more even more often than not, anytime it's a family
(18:43):
member or you know, a friend of a family member, like,
he has a connection with them. So it's given him
a different approach to kind of those things.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, that that's an interesting take. One of my mentors
is Levitt from Levitt Funeral Homes, and one of the
things that we've noticed is that it is different dealing
with someone Nay, you watch past. So when we bring
them on hospice, we watched them past. When they get
them at the funeral home, they've already passed, So it
is a little different from that vantage point, But it's
(19:14):
one It's just one of those things where you're constantly
talking about death and you kind of got to figure
out your way around regular life even though that's what
you deal with on a daily basis.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah, I mean again, it's gotta be tough. But same time, man,
I think what's really important is that you're you know,
you're bringing more equity to the space. You know, you're
bringing up more perspective and more consideration because a lot
of times, I mean, we've heard the stats in the
past where even when people of color go to the hospitals,
they don't always recognize that we deal with pain the
same way as other people.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Like.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
That kind of stuff has happening right now in.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Atlanta Adrianna Smith, Right, she just passed, but they just
put the plug on her at Emery Young. You heard
the story, Well, it was the story the young lady,
only the nurse, right, she was a nurse, and she's
telling you what she's experiencing, right, And you all have
the audacity to tell if they're willing to tell this
to a nurse, that's because she's black. What do you
(20:09):
think they're telling the other black people? Right? And so
until we get more representation in our spaces, and we're
talking about hospice, hospice is pain management. So we're talking
about going to a hospice that's gonna most of these
hospitals gonna tell you we're not in that much pain.
And hospice is totally different because we have to actually
pay for your pain medications. So when they tell you you're
not in that much pain, it's because well, I could
(20:31):
give you pain mans, but I got to personally pay
for them, So who are they gonna That goes back
to two days one year, you know what I mean.
So if you start putting all of that together, you
can start making sense of it. But that part of
it is why I wanted to go and build out
my own community and we start a healthcare Henry Academy,
and so we're going to teach people how to start
(20:53):
their own health care businesses because everything in health care
is a business. Everything in health care is a business.
One that's super simple that anybody can start for three
grand maybe five is when you go to a senior
living facility. They all have placement agencies that they use.
So go to any facility, say hey, I want to start.
I have a company and we place people into your
(21:15):
beds and say, okay, well how much is it? Say
we'll charge you eighty percent of what you charge for
the first month's rent. Some of these affilities are ten
grand a month. So let's just say you got your
aunt and your aunt wants to go there before you
send your aunt there, call them and get a contract,
get your eight grand back. This is the stuff I'm
talking about. Like, that's how much stuff we have in healthcare.
(21:35):
And that's one small thing that anybody can do. So
imagine that on a grail level, Like what's actually going on,
Like where's the money being made for us medications? Right?
The pharmacy, the pharmacy courier, the person who takes the
medication to the home because they got to go to
the home. The supply, the supply company. We got a
supply delivery person now, so he delivers it when we
(21:56):
need something done right away. Your equipment you leased from
a durable medical equipment company, so we pay that company
to write our EMR system, which is like super expensive.
That's probably gonna be four five grand a month, depending
on who you are, could be twenty a month. Right.
So it's just like if you can get us to
understand like, hey, it's time for us to get in
health care. We've got the money, we've got the resources.
(22:18):
I just tell people, build you a team. Yeah, don't
come in here like I came in here, like me
and my mom came in here guns blazing. Two people
don't do that, Like you're gonna lose your behind doing that. Like,
get you some people together. You got a nurse at
the hospital, you got a person who goes to the
hospital anyway to sell something else. Y'all can start something. Yeah,
put your fifty downs together. You can start something that
might not be a hospice, but you can do something.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
No, that's interesting, man, I mean you know, you're talking
about the whole kind of you know, just value chain,
supply chain of hospitals and healthcare in general. I mean,
funny enough, I've actually, you know, in a former life,
I was in tech myself, and I actually implemented helping
hospital implement EMR system, so electronic medical records, so you
get it, so you get it so like and again
I didn't even think about it back in the day.
I just thought I was helping them out doing some
work and they were you know, getting everything from tablets
(23:00):
and all this stuff. Now, but you know, like, so
tell me more about this healthcare henry. Like that's stoutly
helping people do It's really kind of understand Like there's
lots of places that you can kind of get involved
in this. Yeah, you know, especially from a minority, just
an equity standpoint.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
You want to know the truth.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
What's up?
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Do you want a truth for?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I want to know the truth.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
The truth is I was having a hard time crack hospitals, right,
this black boy comes in here. Hey, I own a
precious hospice. Get out of here, Get out of here,
get out. I got her, Okay, cool. I come up
with this idea. What if I stop talking about hospite.
Whatever reason you don't want me in here, right, whatever
reason you don't want your case marriage talking to me,
you don't want me doing anything, I'm gonna be healthcare henry.
So now I just want to help seniors. I am
(23:37):
the patient advocate for seniors. So are we gonna tell
the boy he can't come in here? That's what I
look at you. You can't come in here and help seniors.
That's not how that works, right, So now come on,
we want you to help seniors. And that's where that
came from. That's where the whole platform came from. I'm
pushing hospice, trying to get people on it, and I'm
just getting hit with this door for years. In seven years,
(23:58):
eight years, I'm like this is crazy. So we finally
switched the model saying, hey, we got the hospice, but
I know more than just hospice. I know home health,
I know placement. I can tell you how to start one.
I can tell you about nursing homes. I can tell
you about whatever you want to know. And that's how
I was able to get in and be a resource.
And then I can tell people you have options, because
when you go to a hospital, a lot of times
(24:19):
they just give you one company, or they'll give you
three companies all owned by one company. No, this is
a real thing. It's like you got to be joking.
So now as we built out the platform the cause
I'm getting, I said, they did what to you? Oh
that's the same company. Well, I'm going with you because
you're transparent and you're honest with me. I said, that's
what I would do. But you have to go in
(24:39):
there and tell them this is where I want to go,
because if you tell them once or twice sometime they'll
still try to steal you up the play. They did
that to one of my family members, so I know
they didn't know as my FAMI member, of course, but
she told them like four times, and this hospital is
still trying to sell them somewhere else, so it's like,
what are we doing here? So now you got to
get out there and become the patient advocate, and that's
what I've been doing.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
No, man, I mean, you know, it's funny you kind
of talk about getting the door slammed your face people
telling you know, Like I was talking to a buddy
of mine recently and we were actually both both of
us were giving some advice to somebody about who's gonna
ready to start a business, and my friends said something
really funny. He was like, look, man, you're gonna go
on this journey and I'm sure you're gonna be successful,
he said, but the one thing you gotta be careful
that you don't do is you don't become the villain
(25:22):
in somebody else's story. Yeah, he was like, because the
way that he started his business was that somebody told
him no, and he was like, that was all the
fuel he needed to go start. Now he's running like
a seven figure company, right, So he's literally telling this
other guy, you're gonna run to the same thing. You're
gonna get running, You're gonna start building stuff and people
gonna come at you, and like, you just want to
be careful because he tell the wrong person. No, you
(25:44):
can become the villain in their story. Yeah, and now
they're gonna want to build something just to kind of
like show you that they could do it right. And
it sounds like, you know a little bit of that.
That's what kind of happened to you a little bit, right. No,
that's exactly what happened to me.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Because No, Literally, when my mom was going through chemo
and I caught her old boss and said, can you
help me, like explain to me how to start a hospice.
He's like, yeah, he laughed at me, like that's a joke,
like you can't do this. And I'm like, you're gonna
tell me or not, Like if you don't want to
tell me, that's fine, because we weren't like, you need
the prompts for Google to work with you, and we
didn't really have the prompts to know how to do that.
So I went to him. He's like, I just just
(26:16):
go look through the stuff and he's like laughing, blah
blah blah, all right. Do So that became my fuel
and two years later he went out of business. Seriously, Yeah,
and we're bigger now than he was then. It's just
like that. The better option would have been, let me
take you under my wing, which is why we started
the academy, and say, if I could bring you under
my wing, I can show you, I can stop you
(26:36):
from having the pitfalls that we had, and you can
have a much easier route because I don't like even
you have kids, right, yeah, you got two kids. Do
you want your kids to be entrepreneurs?
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (26:48):
You do.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Why? Well, the biggest reason why is I when I built,
when I've built the stuff that I've built, I always
bring especially my daughter, always bring her along with me
little show it. But the biggest thing is I don't
want anybody to, you know, tell them they can't have
any opportunity. I want their opportunity to be totally depending
upon other people. Now, I will say I don't have
an issue with people working corporate jobs at all. I
think there are a lot of people that are very
stressed out that are trying to run a company that
(27:10):
will probably be you know, employee number five or fifty
in a bigger organization. But I know for me personally,
and a lot of times I do think it's because
of the color of my skin in some area, you know,
even when I look around, and you know, I'm be honest.
I've said to myself, I get tired of asking people
that don't look like me for opportunities. That's just something
I said to myself over and over and over again.
Like when I even I am just being honest. Man, Like
when I've I've been in tech and when I go
(27:31):
back and I think about every company that I've worked at,
the person who Randy did not look like me, the
did not come from the same space as me, and like,
it's just so interesting, especially in a city like Atlanta.
I was having a conversation with Ryan Wilson from the
Gathering Spot about the same thing. Right. It's like when
you look out, you know, like we don't own anything.
A lot of these people, we don't own a lot
of businesses, a lot of black owned businesses don't employ
you know, actual people.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And so for me, you know, even though I had
built stuff and had a great career, I kind of
got to this place to where I was just tired
of my opportunity these being based upon somebody that didn't
look like me's perspective. And so I'm teaching my daughter, like, look,
you can go get a job you can guess. I'm
nothing wrong with that at all. I want you to
be successful, but understand and controlling your own destiny. It
(28:12):
comes to his own issues as well, but at least
you're in the driver's seat a lot more.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
So my take on it is a little different. So
my son is three, right, and what I have to
endure on a daily basis, I wouldn't want him to
have to deal with that. I would not want him
to have to go And I get like when it
makes sure a better person.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
All that not that much.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
It's not something that's quite the opposite because now you
understand how the real world works. And it's not that
you want to shelter him, but it's like, hey, we
have to do a better job of like you are
building butter Nomics, right, butter atl Now that needs to
get to a point where your kids, now, they got opportunities.
(28:51):
They come up here, you go go walk into this.
They're not starting from I don't when I say an
entrepreneur like, I don't really want him to start from
the bott.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
No yeah, no, no no.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
No, It's like I'm doing this so you all have to, right.
It's like even my son's grandfather, CD moody. He talks
about this has been on here.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Man, that's the homie.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Oh I should have told him I was coming.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
I've been had on lunch with him a couple of
weeks ago.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Man, Yeah, I tell him so now you know so yeah.
So it's like when he built this business and then
it's like you can walk your kids in the front door.
How many people build construction companies where they can actually
walk their kids through the front door. Like that's what
we need to be trying to get to. Like, that's
where I look at people like that. I'm like, Okay,
if we can all start doing that, then you can say, well,
(29:41):
we don't need certain amounts of certain kinds of people.
But until we all understand and do that, we're all
going to be in the same rat race. He's a
great example of that though.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
No, I mean, you know, he's a great guy. He's
actually building the podcast before you and I. We've hung
out up into his office, you know, actually sat down
and talk to him a couple of weeks ago, just
about some things.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
It's cool.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
He's reachable, he's he's very good guy. You know, tells
me he's like, man, just pick up the phone and
you know he's he's down in Rida, not that far
from the Stone Mountain. On my folks, Man, I tell
everybody you know her to find though you know we're
gonna get them out. But no, man, I mean, look,
I think to your point. You know again, I was
talking to another buddy of mine, Terrence runs company out
(30:21):
here called Grady Baby Co. Right, Like, one of the
things we were talking about was nepotism. And it's like, look, man,
there's something wrong with nepotism because to a certain extent,
why wouldn't you want your kids to start on third base?
Why wouldn't you want your kids to be able to
walk into a door because of your name, because of
what you've opened. Look, I'm I'm I'll tell you right now,
even when it comes to school, Like I already told
my daughter she's going to Spellman, you know what I mean. Look,
(30:42):
I got a video of her when she was three
years old. He took a video of her standing from
the Spellman sign saying I go into Spellman because guess
what that's gonna be part of her application. And even
now I've I've got friends that I've connected with over
the years. I mean, we're good friends. She does stuff,
but I've told her, I'm like, look, it's all lined up.
You still got do the work. Yeah, but why do
you think dad works so hard and does these things
(31:03):
to do with these relationships? Right, Like if my relationships
can't help you get into a better space. So yeah, absolutely,
I believe in Yeah. I don't want to just go
start from the bottom and go grind it out because
I had to work hard. If anything, I want them
again start on second or third base and maybe get
a little bit of a head start. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
I'm with you one hundred percent, man. And I look
at because my mother's side of the family, they've all
had businesses too, right, they still run their own businesses,
and I've been able to learn so much from them,
and they've done everything from banks to construction companies, and
you've got lawyers and entertainments. Uncle Aerroy is my mom's brother.
So like just really understanding and like how this stuff works.
(31:41):
They have made it pretty clear like when we sit
down and we talk, this is what you gotta do.
I can go to them with real questions and real things.
But people that don't have that, that's where you and
I have We do have to come in and help
our community. That's one of the things that I will
say about us. We're not as open as we should be. Yeah,
like you've got some information, I've got some information. Well,
(32:02):
I can't give him this information because he's going to
be better than I am. That's a huge problem we have,
Like we've got to even with me trying to start
the hospice, right, He's like, and that guy was a minority.
Believe it or not, he wasn't a you know, he
was a minority. And I'm like, it's serious. He's like,
and so now instead of working together, you're out of
business calling me trying to buy mine. It's like, that's
(32:22):
not how that works anymore. But I think, like what
you're doing is like super impactful. I watched a couple
of episodes. I'm not a media TV person. I like
shooting and do something else. No seriously, but it's like
I watched a couple of episodes, like even while with Jordan.
So I was just at a wedding with Jordan Adam
married and I was like, oh, this is actually pretty cool.
Like I actually thoroughly enjoy somebody creating a space where
(32:46):
people can educate others on what they can do, because
that's what we're missing. Like we don't know, right we
literally where I'm from Chicago, you don't know. I don't
know you can start a podcast and if I do,
if you don't tell me that, hey, you get started
with finding somebody to find you a space and get
in there and pay some money, you don't know. You
just think what I got to give me a camera?
Like you don't know. So these platforms are super important, man, No.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
I appreciate it, MA. I mean, one thing I've always
tried to do is I try to be very tactical,
and that's one of the reasons why I even started
this platform. I think we've got wait enough motivation. I
think we got enough people telling us to go start
and work hard. And sometimes you need to know, like
what do I do first?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
First thing?
Speaker 2 (33:22):
But how do I go from zero to one with
this thing? Any motivation to kind of you know, get going.
I got the motivation, now I need the direction, and
that's where we kind of built this platform in to
kind of bring people in, man, And so I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
One thing I love to ask you too, is like,
especially with your tech background and just you know, I
always think too that for us, like you said, you're
thirty seven, so you look at things a little bit differently.
You know, how are you bringing kind of innovation into
this space?
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Right?
Speaker 2 (33:58):
You would ask that, Yeah, how does that part come in?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Yeah, you're good. So I can't say exactly what it is,
but I will tell you that we have built in
EMR system that is going to change the way we
do EMR. We're going to change the way you do
medical records. And I think for us it's funny. So
the guy I don't know, if you know, Jeff Nelson
from Blavity and Affro Tech. We went to high school together,
(34:21):
so we talk often, right, and I was telling him like, man,
you know he's super it, like a guy of the future, right,
that's how he thinks everything's AI. So I went to him,
I was like, bro, I got decided. He was like, oh, yeah,
we gotta do that. So it's just like I being
in not my industry healthcare and being young, because I mean,
this is my decade now, so I've been twenty seven.
(34:42):
You see a lot of holes, right, If there were
if there were people out there that say, hey, I
want to start a healthcare tech fund or whatever, you
would need somebody like me to tell you. No, these
are the holes that you can feel with products that
already exist need rebranding, like literally, like without getting into detail,
(35:04):
like you could literally take what we do on paper.
There's stuff that exists to change that. Just rebrand the
whole thing and now you got this and once one
of us buys this. Because healthcare is not like a podcast, right,
Your people can come from all over the country. My
healthcare people can only come from people I can service,
which is with then my fifty mile radius. So if
(35:26):
I got it in company is two blocks down the street,
we're fighting for the same market share. You got to
have it. So health care tech is going to be
like for me once I'm able to talk about it.
But no, it's gonna be one of those things where
I fla, we can actually change the dynamics of how
things are done. And you're talking about the hospital systems
and how they work. It's like they need to be
(35:48):
doing more business with minorities. The whole DEI thing right,
Like that never existed for us. You see, no healthcare
companies like complaining about it. We never had no opportunities,
you know what I mean? They say, we have a
dr program. No you don't, right, It's just never really
existed for us, so it never really bought. But I
think in the future, as we build out where we're going,
(36:09):
we can tell them like, hey, you we go to
you all in Atlanta, we go to you for all
of this care you're building, medicare, private insurance, millions of
dollars a year for all this care. You mean to
tell me you can't set a budget to the side
for African American companies, But you're getting all like, we
can't get anything. But yet you expect me to go
(36:31):
out and I feed fifteen hundred seniors. The mayor comes out,
so somebody cares. Right. Then you can't tell a company
that you work with that they have to do any
of that. Yeah, Like, I just don't understand that. So
that's where we got to We got to grow together
and build our platforms together so that we can have
a voice. Because if we got a voice, we can
make some things change.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Absolutely absolutely. Now, what lessons would you give? What's like
two or three just lessons you kind of learned that
you would give, you know, black entrepreneurs and founders in
the healthcare space that want to get.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
To find a mentor asap. Find a mentor asap because
the stuff that you need to know is not in
the book. There's the regulation book, the policies books, and
to say what people say, just read the book. Like
the pitfalls you're going to have are not always in
the book. For instance, when you're in hospice and you
do your hospice billing, you got to really know how
(37:21):
to build. The reason is for us, we didn't get
paid for two years, two and a half years, so
I said I needed more money. That's why I needed
more money. I had to actually get in the car
and drive to Columbia, South Carolina to have a conversation
to figure out why am I not getting paid? You
promised me this money, I'm not getting paid And they say, well,
you built this in a way. I said, no, that
(37:42):
we didn't, and so we ended up having to go
through all this stuff. But the reality of it was
you have to hire the best people around you that
you can't get to without a mentor because they're not
going to just work with you. So then that's what
we do. So you have to give set you up
with the best people around you so that you can
build adequately and get your stuff paid for. The Other
one I would just say is I hate to say this,
(38:04):
if you're a minority going into a health care business,
you need to be ready for a lot of those
I'm just gonna be honest with you. It's not one
of those things where I've started my company with two
guys who are not minorities, and what they had access
to I still don't have access to. Right. If it
wasn't for social media and me telling people when you
(38:24):
go to the hospital, call me, I'm gonna help you.
Before that got rolling rolling rolling, we weren't really getting
much from the hospitals at all for whatever reason. Right.
It could be because I'm a minority, could be because we
don't like health care hearing, like we don't know, right,
but until now it's like now we're getting it. But
I would just tell them it's gonna be. It's a grind.
It's not something you get in. You can be a
(38:46):
millionaire tomorrow, you could figuratively, right, but it's a grind
to it. And I think they really have to understand
that it's a long haul to this, but if you
stick with it, there's so much space for everybody it's
just so much space, man, there's so much space for everybody.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
No, I love it. I love that. So you know,
looking ahead, man, what's the long term vision for precious healthcare?
Like I know you're talking about potentially some tech innovations,
some other things, like where do you see this thing go?
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Tech innovation is the number one thing for me. So
where we are with hospice, where we've learned so much
in ten years, we've learned so much at ten years,
and so we've been able to compile all this information,
all of this data and put together projects and products
that people can use say, hey, this is your issue, right,
you can use this for four bucks a month, and
so we've put together different products for that. So but
(39:35):
all of that will be coming available under Healthcare Henry
dot com as we kind of like roll out our
own like sample EMR system that should be hearing about
two to three months. And then we have our we
Trust Henry dot com, which is like our version of
our directory. So like we've got companies that might be
referred to you by the hospital, but how do they
treat people? How they treat our people? What's their customer
(39:56):
service like? And so when you come to we trust
Henry dot com get you the real Well this Google
says this is a four, Well it might be a
four on Google, but for us, it's a two and
a half. And this is why it's a two and
a half. And so we're giving people the real background
of how to function and how to do that. But
my advice to people though, more than anything, you have
(40:17):
to learn how the business of health care works to
properly provide the best health care for you and your family.
You have to. You absolutely have to, because when you're
going this is the one thing that everyone keeps the secret,
and it's for a reason. I gave you one of
the reasons with hospite, right, but all of it has
a reason, and without going to d do, y'all have
a reason. But if you're able to find someone, whether
(40:42):
it's me or whoever, who can help educate you on
the business of health care, you'll better know how to
give your family members appropriate care. I spoke last week
about a home health company who also owns a hospice.
My suggestion, I'm not sure I would go to one
because Margins are in hospice. So if I'm a home
(41:02):
health and in Georgia, to have certificate a need, So
you can't open a home health here. So what's easier
to do? Once you get a home health it's easy
to get a contract, and after about thirty or sixty
days they try to move you to hospice. That's not
true rehab. So I would look at stuff like but
if you don't know that the business of that, how
that works. You just said I was to go anywhere,
But now that you know, you can really revaluate, well,
(41:24):
why does this really work? Why am I going here?
Who's sending me here? Who's pressuring me to go here?
Why am I being diverted from this company to that company?
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, that would be my advice. No, man, look, this
is good information. Man, before we before we get out
of here. Man, please, you know, if people want to
get in contact with you, they want to get in
contact with precious hospice, they want to learn about healthcare, Henry,
like give them all the things up. I lit you know.
I love that we trust Henry, because I'm just saying
I do think to your point, like there's something important
about having kind of almost like a directory of being Like, no,
(41:54):
these are vetted, trusted services. You're already a trusted individual
in that space and now you're helping them like highlight
the other things. So please man again, like give them
all the things. Man, How can they find you, all
work with you, all support you? How can they learn?
How can they all this stuff?
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Absolutely so precious Hospitals is the company, and we always
say call us when you're in the hospital. You can
call us whenever, and you can always transfer. If you
make a bad decision up front, you can always come
to this later. But in terms of learning the business
of health care, that's healthcare Henry. So that's YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.
I don't know all stuff, but all this stuff right, Facebook,
all that stuff, and we're just giving them just like
(42:27):
solid gems that they can run with every day. And
then when it comes to understanding how to run your
own business, they can go to Healthcare Henry Academy. And
if you want, like you said, you're our directory is
stuff for us. And I say us, people think you're
just so black. I'm not. I don't just mean black.
I mean us as a people because it's institution versus people.
(42:49):
And I think too many times people try to say,
if you're pro people, you're pro black. Now I'm pro
everybody because if you got medicaid and they pull your
medicaid and you're a white male with us too, now
whether you want to, whether you want to realize it
or not, you're with us too, and I'm for you
even if you don't like me. So that's what I
would tell them.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Okay, hey man, Well look man, thank you so much
for coming out of this billing is really a really
insightful episode. I learned a lot. I'm sure everybody else
learned a lot man, And again, thank you for the
work you're doing in this space. Brother, It's really important.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Thank you man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate you
for sure. Man.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
With that said out, y'all, that's the pot. You've been
listening to button Nomics and I'm your hosts Brandon Butler.
Got comments, feedback? Want to be on the show, send
us an email today at hello at butternomics dot com.
Butter Nomics is produced in Atlanta, Georgia at iHeartMedia by
Ksey Pegram, with marketing support Fromqueen and Nikki. Music provided
by mister Hanky. If you haven't already, hit that subscribe
(43:40):
button and never missed an episode, and be sure to
Follow us on all our social platforms at butter dot ATL.
Listen to Button Nomics on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
You have to learn how the business of health care
works to properly provide the best health care for you
and your family. You have to. You absolutely have to,
because this is the one thing that everyone keeps the secret,
and it's for a reason. If you're able to find someone,
whether it's me or whoever, who can help educate you
on the business of health care, you'll better know how
(00:23):
to give your family members appropriate care.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Everybody, Welcome to another episode of butter Nomics. I'm your host,
Brandan Butler, found the CEO of Butter atl and today
we got somebody special in the building.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Man.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
You know what I'm saying, not just doing the work,
but do it in a very intentional way. And we're
going to talk about something but you know, I like
a lot of people probably don't think about upfront, but
you know, it's something that everybody has to deal with,
and this brother right here is really helping people go
through it the right way. Mister Henry Mason, how you doing, sir?
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I'm good man. I appreciate you guys having me, I
really do.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I appreciate you pulling up now. You are the founder
and CEO of Precious Hospice, right.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
That's correct.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah, for those who don't moment, First of all, what
is what is precious hospital?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
So what is hospice or what is precious hospital?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
What is hospice? Then tell us why it's precious? What it?
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I got you fair enough. So hospice is a program.
It was originally started in like nineteen ninety late nineteen eighties,
and it started as a place and it was a
place that you went to and you just died in. Right,
So if you had like a day or two left,
they sent you to a place to pass away. And
that was what hospice was. And it was paid for
by your insurance. And the reason why I was created
was because they didn't want people dying in the hospital.
(01:34):
Like that's you're not supposed to die in the hospital.
Most people don't know that, so you're not supposed to
and hospitals get deemed for that. So this guy in
Florida who created this company, he was it was a
center at the time he came up and he created
this hospice concept and so it was a place. And
then as time went along, the hospital said, well wait
a minute, I can send him there when they got
two days left. What about a little bit more time.
(01:54):
Can they have this at home? Can we stop them
coming back and forth to the hospital, because hospitals don't
get paid if you come back every thirty days, they
don't get paid for that next visits. So they expanded
the program. Now they expanded it out to six months.
So so what you have now is in no out
of pocket service called hospice where you can get your equipment,
your supplies, your nursing visits, your CNA's, your medication, all
(02:17):
sent to your home for no out of pocket costs.
And that's kind of where we come in as Precious Hospice,
particularly in Atlanta, is okay, who's doing this for minorities? Right?
And then once you understand the hospice model, what's really
going on here? Because why do all of us think
we only got a day or two? And then I
got people like President Carter get in two years and
(02:38):
that's where you start precious Hospice and then you're like,
you know what, I think it's time to tell everybody
the truth. And that's how we got to the social
media thing about everything. How we started talking about it.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Now that's interesting, man. I mean again, like I've had
family members in hospice care I actually have an uncle
right now that as that he's at at home hospice.
So sure, when you hear the word you're not going
to you kind of think the worst, you know what
I mean, You kind of assume like okay, but like this,
even my uncle, you know, like looking at him now,
he's been at home hospitals care for about the last
two and a half months, yep, and you know he
has nurses coming and you know, people were checking him
(03:11):
out and making sure he's good. And on the flip side,
you know, I remember also my grandfather from my grandfather
passed away. I remember going with my mom that that
was her dad, and like going to different hospice facilities
and kind of like checking them out. I didn't know
everything that was going on, but like ally had, I
always had this impression that it was where you were
kind of going when you had a couple of days left.
But to your point, there's actually like a whole lead
up that can actually happen to that, and I don't
(03:32):
think a lot of people fully understand that.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Well that's on purpose, right, and so I'll just give
it to you straight for you guys, And so we
have a one hundred and eighty day average, so at
day one eighty one and someone's on so basically a
little over six months, we got to start paying that
money back. And so what medicare is saying is, you
guys are bringing people on too early before they're actually terminal.
And so we go back and forth. We say we
can't play god here, right, we got to figure this out.
(03:55):
And so then they come back and say, we're going
to give you guys a one hundred and eighty day average,
So you got to average your per and that's here
for one day with a person who's been here for
three hundred and sixty days. So if you're the hospice
company as profit first, right, you're one as many people
as you can who are three hundred and sixty days
who aren't going to cost you a lot of money.
That's not you and me. We need help, right, We
need the beds, we need the supplies, we need the
(04:16):
we need the medications paid for it, we need the
extra nursing visits. So they tell us, well, you can
only go in when you're dying tomorrow. And what they
do is they use us to average out the numbers
to other people. And that's so when you're coming up,
you say, well, what company do I look for? Well,
I need to find a company there that looks like me.
Why because he's transparent and honest. And this is why
you think this. It's not your fault, you just it's
(04:39):
a systemic problem that we have here.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Okay. So that's what he's saying, right Like, if you
don't have the information, they're basically saying, you actually have time.
But the average for the facility average hundred days exactly.
And so the reality is the average.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Again, you have people on both sides of that look
at it, but they're giving us the information day before
we before we pass out, right, that we come in
there and balances out so other folks can stay in
there longer.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yep. And now you're saying, well, I got my uncles
in there for two and a half months, and I'm
saying I've seen people in there for President Carter, for instance,
almost two years. So four people had to come on
and pass away in a day for him to get
those two years.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Man, this is this is wild man, this is And
so you said a second ago too that a lot
of people don't understand that, you know, hospitals get dinged, like,
so what's the purpose, Like, what is the point of
hospitals in all this? So you're saying they don't actually
want people to I mean, obviously we don'tant people to
pass away, but you know that shows up on like
some reporter for them to say, like you know, people
are not getting the care they need, or like, how
are hospitals getting like penalized for people passing away in
(05:35):
the hospital.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Sure, so it's a it's called a mortality rate. So
that's there's a percentage that you have to be under.
You can't have people to pass away in the hospital.
So what they've done is they've created these contracts with
hospice companies that the hospital will come in and give
them comfort beds or hospice bids in the hospital. So
one of my posts when a healthcare Henry, we talk
about stop going to those beds. Right, those beds are
(05:56):
being used for what we just talked about. You're being
put in a bed and then you're giving say you
can't we're going to put you in this bed because
you can't make it home and on our ambulance ride
and if you don't make it home, then you hit
that hospital's mortality rate, they can't get deemed. But so
many times that doesn't look good. So we say, man,
you can go home. You can go home, trust me,
you can go home. They say, well, I didn't know that.
I said, well, you didn't go home, But how long
(06:18):
did it take for your parents to actually pass four days?
You think you couldn't make a fifteen minute ride in
four days? Yeah, that's what we're talking about. And so
now they're like, well, Henry, you're talking too much. I
ain't talking enough. No, realistically, we're not. And I shouldn't
be the only one talking because I'm not the only
one who knows it it. Just find me another hospice
owner who's willing to say it. The other thing is,
I'm thirty seven years old. I'm not even supposed to
(06:40):
be in this industry, right, And then I come here
because my mom, she worked for another hospice company. She
got cancer for the second time. They didn't even have
the decency to come check on her for nine months
while she's going through chemotherapy and radiation. Yeah, so I
know right off the back, y'all don't care about us.
We're working for y'all, but y'all don't really care. Then
if you don't care about your employees, I don't care
about the people you were taken care of. And that's
(07:02):
one of the things my mom said, Well, I wanted
you to do this and make a company that actually
is people over profit. I said, we'll try it, and
it just worked.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, and you're in business with your mom. You know
what I'm saying. You start this company with you Like,
how did this say? How did that actually come about?
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah? So she's sitting through this is twenty fourteen, she's
sitting through her chemotherapy treatments and we're going back and forth.
She said, well, they never came and checked me and said, well,
you don't ever have to go back there. We'll figure
something house for you to do. She's like, well you can,
I could do this hospice. Then I said I don't
want to do this, and that was my initial response.
So I'm love this, and so she had her she
had her dad, which my granddad called me and said, yes, son,
you're going to do this. And so the way my
family works is you do what he tells you to do.
(07:40):
Let's be honest. So I was like, yes, sorry, I
got you. So I hung on the phone, and we
got to work. She wrote out policies and procedures and
she's going through chemotherapy, man. And so I went back
read all the regulations. Took me about six months to
learn everything. And then we went back into the community
and said, we're going to start educating minorities on this hospice.
And that's when I find out why are all of
(08:01):
you all saying I'm not going there, You're not about
to kill my mom? And I'm like, why are these
other people calling me when they're not even appropriate yet.
And that's when we found out, Okay, this is this
is the problem. This is what you've been told, This
is what you believe in. The reality is you were
told this so that they can average other people out
with your day, so you're giving your days away. My
knowledge was, if everyone has six months worth of food,
(08:22):
but one person passes away today that other six months
worth of food that they had, we don't throw that away.
It just goes to somebody else.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah and yeah, man, Like again, I think to your point,
it comes so much, just comes down to education. I
think that's one thing I kind of see on a
lot of folks who come on the podcasts. They talk
about just there's this education gap in which you don't
know and kind of how people A lot of times
it looks like us it get penalized for it, right,
like when you started going through this process, because again
you said like you didn't necessarily come out of school,
like your background's in tech tech financial talking about that
(08:51):
six months when you're actually you know, learning the regulation,
Like what did you have to go through? Was it
difficult figuring out how to get the licensing? Like how
did you kind of go from because people know like
how you started, right, how do you kind of go
from zero to one and even starting that kind of company.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, so I definitely didn't have enough capital, right, That's
the first thing when people even ask me now, like
well how do I start one line? It's more spend
than anything. So I think I had about two hundred
to twenty to start it. That's money I had saved
from doing government contract so I'm normally I was actually
doing government like staffing and recruiting, so headhunting for companies
with the DoD space, and so I built up a
(09:23):
little nest egg. I was about twenty four years old,
so I was like I could definitely have enough to do,
and I didn't have enough. You really need about two
hundred and fifty to five hundred thousand to do it.
And so we win in it. We started it, we
hired all the people that we needed to hire, and
then we found out is that you have to run
this company for like at that time was pretty much
a year before you got paid. So now you're talking
about what I thought was enough money. I burned through
(09:45):
that in four months. So I needed the extra, the
bad kid to make this work. And so instead of
doing that, what I did was I took on the jobs.
So everything that wasn't clinical, I did it. Your administrator,
you're a marketer, you're volunteer coordinator. I did all of
those jobs and saved myself about three or four hundred grand. Yeah,
and that's how I learned how this stuff works so much,
(10:07):
especially in the hospitals, because most healthcare companies coming out
the gate have two three million of cushion, so they're
just hiring people to do the job. But if you're
a guy that's got to go do the marketing and
you're trying to figure out why I'm not getting patients,
but this guy's getting patients, and you start slowly backing
that down you say, Okay, you got to follow the
money train, and then it makes sense to you.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So this makes me think, Man, now I'm starting to
worry about hospitals in general in their business model, Like
what's wrong about the hospital business model? Just healthcare business
model in general in the United States.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
I don't really understand what you mean me say, what's
wrong with it?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Like it's again, it just sounds like, I mean, I understand,
they got to make business. They got to make money.
I mean, they're obviously business. They got to pay staff
and stuff like that. But at the end of the day,
it seems like to your point, they're kind of prioritizing
making that money over the best interest of people. And
so I know, like you have some hospitals that you know,
like they come to a nonprofit or you think about
like a hospital like a Grady, right where a lot
of the people that come in there usually lower income,
(11:01):
versus like, I don't know, an Emory or north Side.
It has a little bit of opposite, right, like how
do we get more equity in the healthcare space, especially
for people of color.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
So most hospitals are nonprofits. So your major hospital chains,
particularly in Georgia are going to be nonprofits. When it
comes to hospitals specifically like Grady, they get a lot
of grant funding too, Right, So a lot of those
patients that come in with Medicaid or they don't actually
those medical what people don't understand about a lot of
these Medicaid programs and Medicare advantage programs, they actually don't
(11:29):
cover everything that you need. So the hospital is stuck
with a bill, and that's why patients are getting these
huge hospital bills. But the reality of it is they
are getting these huge they were getting huge grants from
the government to kind of help them keep going because
without a hospital, you really can't have a community. When
it comes to what are they doing to make money,
that's such a huge broad question because you have executives
(11:53):
who make money in the insurance industry, right, and no
one talks about them, right, But you got you got
insurance executives who make twenty thirty million dollars a year.
But yeah, everyone talks about the doctor making four hundred k.
It's like, why are we really the doctor's saving your life, right,
he should be making twenty million dollars, right. So that's
kind of where it's like, for the most part, people
who are clinical want to do the right thing.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I would say that, yeah, Like what's the saying I've
remember hearing. It's like, you know, Medicare silver hair, Medicaid
underpaid and they kind of talk about like how Medicare
and Medicaid or used for different audiences. Is that accurate?
Orm my misutated.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
It's totally accurate because Medicaid is a needs based program, right,
so you can only get it if you have which
is another issue they got to figure out. But you
can't really have that in Georgia specifically, you can't have
any assets life insurance. You's got to have less than
like two grand of your bank account. You can't make
them like more than like thirteen hundred a month or
something like that. Any Flushuay is based on family size,
but it's really for people who need it. It's a
state based program. Medicare is federal base, but it's a
(12:51):
more expensive, comprehensive program. So for someone who needs more care,
if you have a little bit more money, you will
get Medicare. And then but then it's confusing because you
got Medicare Part A, part B, Part D, and it's
like now you got to figure all this stuff out,
and then it's like that's where we try to bridge
the gap for them.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah. Now again, when you think of the name, you know,
Precious Hospice, I mean, it definitely sounds like, you know,
there's more of a caring element to it and all that.
I mean, Like again, even right now, in this conversation, said,
I came into this thinking one thing about hospital care,
and I'm already starting to be like, oh, okay, this
actually isn't just what you think, right Like yeah, and
when again I'm already like, okay, this out, this could
be applied to different situations and stuff like that. I Mean,
(13:28):
I've had friends I kind of feel like we're all
in this age right now. You know, we're in like
this kind of thirty five to fifty year old age.
I was talking to my best friend about it. He
lost two of his parents last year, literally within a
month of each other. And you know, I kind of
think about, you know, a lot of my friends are
going through situations we talk about all the time where
nobody got us ready for this part where our parents
start getting older and like our family members start getting older. Right, Like,
(13:49):
you think about it and you see it. But when
all your friends kind of start dealing with it, it kind
of hits home a little bit differently. Right, I've literally
had another one of my best friend's moms passed away. Right,
And again, these are people that you knew when you
grew up with and so so just tell me, like,
what is the day to day like of running a hospice, Like,
what is that kind of deal.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
With I can give you today. Let's give you today, right,
So this morning I woke up. I woke up about
four thirty, got to the gym about five, got about
five thirty six. Now on the internet, I give everybody
my cell phone number. I don't know if I should
have done that, right, But again, I never expected it
to grow like this. I just figured that cowp people
will hit me up for some help. And it grew
so about six o'clock every morning, Now my phone's gonna
(14:27):
start ringing or text and I'm talking about to the
point now we get about twenty a day. If someone's like, hey,
I'm at the hospital, can you tell me what they're
talking about? And I'm like, sure, I got you, so
and that's kind of become my thing. So from there,
of course, last night, I went and got this puppy
I was telling, which is over in the room next door.
So I got to walk this puppy that I got
yesterday because we picked this puppy up because we have
our Precious Witsch Foundation It's sorry where we give out
(14:49):
these precious wishes to people who are either on hospice
or need hospital something like that. So we've taken people
to a Falcons game, this one in particular, I had
to pick up the dog last night. It's a puppy
because we have a patient who lost her puppy two
weeks ago. So without that dog, I know that patient's
going to pass away quickly. So the first thing we
did was and I partnered with Interim Home Health and
(15:11):
we got a dog. And I was like, so now
we're going to present the dog today at two thirty.
This isn't going to air before two thirty round now
I'm joking. So yeah, just stuff like that. That's what
pressures me to us, right, just going the extra mile,
not just putting every dollar into salespeople, but putting it
into things where we can actually provide value to patients
and their families.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Okay, okay, And so again you're looking for ways to
just get the show up. I mean to kind of
provide care in lots of different ways. You know, how
is this because it also a family run business, right,
Like you have family members involved in that, now, like
how do they start getting involved?
Speaker 1 (15:43):
So originally my mom was won bat all information, right,
so I just have the finance background to figure out
how the numbers work. But my mother, she passed in
twenty twenty two. But you spoke about someone you knew
that passed a couple months away from each a month
away from My dad died January twenty twenty two. My
mom died April twenty twenty two, and my son, who's three,
was born two weeks before my mother passed. So and
(16:05):
literally I talk about this because the day of my
mother's funeral was a Friday. I actually had to go
to work, right, I literally had it because when you're
building a business, and yet, yeah, I have to help
people like people, right, they can't wait for me tomorrow
like they need me now. So I had to literally
on my way to my mom's funeral, stop by the
office help three patients. I'll never forget I had to
(16:26):
help three patients get out of the hospital. Make sure
everything was set up for them, and then I went
to my mom's funeral and nobody ever knew about it.
I just kept going. So in terms of having like
family in the business, that was pretty much what we had,
me and my mom, and we just ran with it.
And it's just been like the baby I just said,
I'm a ticket as far as I can go. I
have other plans, but to taket as far as I
can go.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
How was this journey impacted you personally? You're building this again,
you know, inspired by your mom and getting your family
and stuff involved. Like, how has this just change your
perspective and inspired you?
Speaker 1 (17:07):
You ever spend time with a hospice patient.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I have.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, when you spend time with a hospice patient, it'll change,
like the very fabric of who you are time is
not the same anymore. How you feel empathy is not
the same anymore. What matters to you won't even matter anymore. Yeah, right.
It's like you think, man, I gotta work, I to
go get this stuff. I got to go take care
(17:29):
of my family, And then at the end of their lives,
they all say the same thing. It's like, I just
wish I had more time and I think for me,
it's like you start to embrace that and take that on.
I don't know if it's good or bad, because I
do consider myself to be like an impact, so I
take on a lot of the emotions of the families
(17:50):
that I talk to. I don't know if it's good
for me personally, but it's like purpose for me, right,
So I feel like that's what I'm here to do,
and so that's just what I continue to kind of
keep doing.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm sure it has to be tough,
man Like, you know, there's there's definitely moments because you
know when people are coming into that, whether he and
they're on the front end of the back end of it.
I mean you're all face dealing with somebody's kind of facing,
you know, the end of their life coming up, and
just it makes you feel I get. I have a
friend of mine, not even a friend, I have a
family member who owns a funeral home, and you know,
like even in the you know, he was like kind
(18:22):
of a small country town, but he literally has the
biggest funeral home like in the county, and so he's
all like anytime somebody passes away, and lots of people
with people that he knows, Like he's actually also the
county commissioner, right, so he knows a lot of people
that are coming through there, and so that's something he
has to kind of work with all the time too, right, Like,
these aren't just random people. I mean, nobody's random, but
more even more often than not, anytime it's a family
(18:43):
member or you know, a friend of a family member, like,
he has a connection with them. So it's given him
a different approach to kind of those things.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, that that's an interesting take. One of my mentors
is Levitt from Levitt Funeral Homes, and one of the
things that we've noticed is that it is different dealing
with someone Nay, you watch past. So when we bring
them on hospice, we watched them past. When they get
them at the funeral home, they've already passed, So it
is a little different from that vantage point, But it's
(19:14):
one It's just one of those things where you're constantly
talking about death and you kind of got to figure
out your way around regular life even though that's what
you deal with on a daily basis.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah, I mean again, it's gotta be tough. But same time, man,
I think what's really important is that you're you know,
you're bringing more equity to the space. You know, you're
bringing up more perspective and more consideration because a lot
of times, I mean, we've heard the stats in the
past where even when people of color go to the hospitals,
they don't always recognize that we deal with pain the
same way as other people.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Like.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
That kind of stuff has happening right now in.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Atlanta Adrianna Smith, Right, she just passed, but they just
put the plug on her at Emery Young. You heard
the story, Well, it was the story the young lady,
only the nurse, right, she was a nurse, and she's
telling you what she's experiencing, right, And you all have
the audacity to tell if they're willing to tell this
to a nurse, that's because she's black. What do you
(20:09):
think they're telling the other black people? Right? And so
until we get more representation in our spaces, and we're
talking about hospice, hospice is pain management. So we're talking
about going to a hospice that's gonna most of these
hospitals gonna tell you we're not in that much pain.
And hospice is totally different because we have to actually
pay for your pain medications. So when they tell you you're
not in that much pain, it's because well, I could
(20:31):
give you pain mans, but I got to personally pay
for them, So who are they gonna That goes back
to two days one year, you know what I mean.
So if you start putting all of that together, you
can start making sense of it. But that part of
it is why I wanted to go and build out
my own community and we start a healthcare Henry Academy,
and so we're going to teach people how to start
(20:53):
their own health care businesses because everything in health care
is a business. Everything in health care is a business.
One that's super simple that anybody can start for three
grand maybe five is when you go to a senior
living facility. They all have placement agencies that they use.
So go to any facility, say hey, I want to start.
I have a company and we place people into your
(21:15):
beds and say, okay, well how much is it? Say
we'll charge you eighty percent of what you charge for
the first month's rent. Some of these affilities are ten
grand a month. So let's just say you got your
aunt and your aunt wants to go there before you
send your aunt there, call them and get a contract,
get your eight grand back. This is the stuff I'm
talking about. Like, that's how much stuff we have in healthcare.
(21:35):
And that's one small thing that anybody can do. So
imagine that on a grail level, Like what's actually going on,
Like where's the money being made for us medications? Right?
The pharmacy, the pharmacy courier, the person who takes the
medication to the home because they got to go to
the home. The supply, the supply company. We got a
supply delivery person now, so he delivers it when we
(21:56):
need something done right away. Your equipment you leased from
a durable medical equipment company, so we pay that company
to write our EMR system, which is like super expensive.
That's probably gonna be four five grand a month, depending
on who you are, could be twenty a month. Right.
So it's just like if you can get us to
understand like, hey, it's time for us to get in
health care. We've got the money, we've got the resources.
(22:18):
I just tell people, build you a team. Yeah, don't
come in here like I came in here, like me
and my mom came in here guns blazing. Two people
don't do that, Like you're gonna lose your behind doing that. Like,
get you some people together. You got a nurse at
the hospital, you got a person who goes to the
hospital anyway to sell something else. Y'all can start something. Yeah,
put your fifty downs together. You can start something that
might not be a hospice, but you can do something.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
No, that's interesting, man, I mean you know, you're talking
about the whole kind of you know, just value chain,
supply chain of hospitals and healthcare in general. I mean,
funny enough, I've actually, you know, in a former life,
I was in tech myself, and I actually implemented helping
hospital implement EMR system, so electronic medical records, so you
get it, so you get it so like and again
I didn't even think about it back in the day.
I just thought I was helping them out doing some
work and they were you know, getting everything from tablets
(23:00):
and all this stuff. Now, but you know, like, so
tell me more about this healthcare henry. Like that's stoutly
helping people do It's really kind of understand Like there's
lots of places that you can kind of get involved
in this. Yeah, you know, especially from a minority, just
an equity standpoint.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
You want to know the truth.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
What's up?
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Do you want a truth for?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I want to know the truth.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
The truth is I was having a hard time crack hospitals, right,
this black boy comes in here. Hey, I own a
precious hospice. Get out of here, Get out of here,
get out. I got her, Okay, cool. I come up
with this idea. What if I stop talking about hospite.
Whatever reason you don't want me in here, right, whatever
reason you don't want your case marriage talking to me,
you don't want me doing anything, I'm gonna be healthcare henry.
So now I just want to help seniors. I am
(23:37):
the patient advocate for seniors. So are we gonna tell
the boy he can't come in here? That's what I
look at you. You can't come in here and help seniors.
That's not how that works, right, So now come on,
we want you to help seniors. And that's where that
came from. That's where the whole platform came from. I'm
pushing hospice, trying to get people on it, and I'm
just getting hit with this door for years. In seven years,
(23:58):
eight years, I'm like this is crazy. So we finally
switched the model saying, hey, we got the hospice, but
I know more than just hospice. I know home health,
I know placement. I can tell you how to start one.
I can tell you about nursing homes. I can tell
you about whatever you want to know. And that's how
I was able to get in and be a resource.
And then I can tell people you have options, because
when you go to a hospital, a lot of times
(24:19):
they just give you one company, or they'll give you
three companies all owned by one company. No, this is
a real thing. It's like you got to be joking.
So now as we built out the platform the cause
I'm getting, I said, they did what to you? Oh
that's the same company. Well, I'm going with you because
you're transparent and you're honest with me. I said, that's
what I would do. But you have to go in
(24:39):
there and tell them this is where I want to go,
because if you tell them once or twice sometime they'll
still try to steal you up the play. They did
that to one of my family members, so I know
they didn't know as my FAMI member, of course, but
she told them like four times, and this hospital is
still trying to sell them somewhere else, so it's like,
what are we doing here? So now you got to
get out there and become the patient advocate, and that's
what I've been doing.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
No, man, I mean, you know, it's funny you kind
of talk about getting the door slammed your face people
telling you know, Like I was talking to a buddy
of mine recently and we were actually both both of
us were giving some advice to somebody about who's gonna
ready to start a business, and my friends said something
really funny. He was like, look, man, you're gonna go
on this journey and I'm sure you're gonna be successful,
he said, but the one thing you gotta be careful
that you don't do is you don't become the villain
(25:22):
in somebody else's story. Yeah, he was like, because the
way that he started his business was that somebody told
him no, and he was like, that was all the
fuel he needed to go start. Now he's running like
a seven figure company, right, So he's literally telling this
other guy, you're gonna run to the same thing. You're
gonna get running, You're gonna start building stuff and people
gonna come at you, and like, you just want to
be careful because he tell the wrong person. No, you
(25:44):
can become the villain in their story. Yeah, and now
they're gonna want to build something just to kind of
like show you that they could do it right. And
it sounds like, you know a little bit of that.
That's what kind of happened to you a little bit, right. No,
that's exactly what happened to me.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Because No, Literally, when my mom was going through chemo
and I caught her old boss and said, can you
help me, like explain to me how to start a hospice.
He's like, yeah, he laughed at me, like that's a joke,
like you can't do this. And I'm like, you're gonna
tell me or not, Like if you don't want to
tell me, that's fine, because we weren't like, you need
the prompts for Google to work with you, and we
didn't really have the prompts to know how to do that.
So I went to him. He's like, I just just
(26:16):
go look through the stuff and he's like laughing, blah
blah blah, all right. Do So that became my fuel
and two years later he went out of business. Seriously, Yeah,
and we're bigger now than he was then. It's just
like that. The better option would have been, let me
take you under my wing, which is why we started
the academy, and say, if I could bring you under
my wing, I can show you, I can stop you
(26:36):
from having the pitfalls that we had, and you can
have a much easier route because I don't like even
you have kids, right, yeah, you got two kids. Do
you want your kids to be entrepreneurs?
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (26:48):
You do.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Why? Well, the biggest reason why is I when I built,
when I've built the stuff that I've built, I always
bring especially my daughter, always bring her along with me
little show it. But the biggest thing is I don't
want anybody to, you know, tell them they can't have
any opportunity. I want their opportunity to be totally depending
upon other people. Now, I will say I don't have
an issue with people working corporate jobs at all. I
think there are a lot of people that are very
stressed out that are trying to run a company that
(27:10):
will probably be you know, employee number five or fifty
in a bigger organization. But I know for me personally,
and a lot of times I do think it's because
of the color of my skin in some area, you know,
even when I look around, and you know, I'm be honest.
I've said to myself, I get tired of asking people
that don't look like me for opportunities. That's just something
I said to myself over and over and over again.
Like when I even I am just being honest. Man, Like
when I've I've been in tech and when I go
(27:31):
back and I think about every company that I've worked at,
the person who Randy did not look like me, the
did not come from the same space as me, and like,
it's just so interesting, especially in a city like Atlanta.
I was having a conversation with Ryan Wilson from the
Gathering Spot about the same thing. Right. It's like when
you look out, you know, like we don't own anything.
A lot of these people, we don't own a lot
of businesses, a lot of black owned businesses don't employ
you know, actual people.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And so for me, you know, even though I had
built stuff and had a great career, I kind of
got to this place to where I was just tired
of my opportunity these being based upon somebody that didn't
look like me's perspective. And so I'm teaching my daughter, like, look,
you can go get a job you can guess. I'm
nothing wrong with that at all. I want you to
be successful, but understand and controlling your own destiny. It
(28:12):
comes to his own issues as well, but at least
you're in the driver's seat a lot more.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
So my take on it is a little different. So
my son is three, right, and what I have to
endure on a daily basis, I wouldn't want him to
have to deal with that. I would not want him
to have to go And I get like when it
makes sure a better person.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
All that not that much.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
It's not something that's quite the opposite because now you
understand how the real world works. And it's not that
you want to shelter him, but it's like, hey, we
have to do a better job of like you are
building butter Nomics, right, butter atl Now that needs to
get to a point where your kids, now, they got opportunities.
(28:51):
They come up here, you go go walk into this.
They're not starting from I don't when I say an
entrepreneur like, I don't really want him to start from
the bott.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
No yeah, no, no no.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
No, It's like I'm doing this so you all have to, right.
It's like even my son's grandfather, CD moody. He talks
about this has been on here.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Man, that's the homie.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Oh I should have told him I was coming.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
I've been had on lunch with him a couple of
weeks ago.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Man, Yeah, I tell him so now you know so yeah.
So it's like when he built this business and then
it's like you can walk your kids in the front door.
How many people build construction companies where they can actually
walk their kids through the front door. Like that's what
we need to be trying to get to. Like, that's
where I look at people like that. I'm like, Okay,
if we can all start doing that, then you can say, well,
(29:41):
we don't need certain amounts of certain kinds of people.
But until we all understand and do that, we're all
going to be in the same rat race. He's a
great example of that though.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
No, I mean, you know, he's a great guy. He's
actually building the podcast before you and I. We've hung
out up into his office, you know, actually sat down
and talk to him a couple of weeks ago, just
about some things.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
It's cool.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
He's reachable, he's he's very good guy. You know, tells
me he's like, man, just pick up the phone and
you know he's he's down in Rida, not that far
from the Stone Mountain. On my folks, Man, I tell
everybody you know her to find though you know we're
gonna get them out. But no, man, I mean, look,
I think to your point. You know again, I was
talking to another buddy of mine, Terrence runs company out
(30:21):
here called Grady Baby Co. Right, Like, one of the
things we were talking about was nepotism. And it's like, look, man,
there's something wrong with nepotism because to a certain extent,
why wouldn't you want your kids to start on third base?
Why wouldn't you want your kids to be able to
walk into a door because of your name, because of
what you've opened. Look, I'm I'm I'll tell you right now,
even when it comes to school, Like I already told
my daughter she's going to Spellman, you know what I mean. Look,
(30:42):
I got a video of her when she was three
years old. He took a video of her standing from
the Spellman sign saying I go into Spellman because guess
what that's gonna be part of her application. And even
now I've I've got friends that I've connected with over
the years. I mean, we're good friends. She does stuff,
but I've told her, I'm like, look, it's all lined up.
You still got do the work. Yeah, but why do
you think dad works so hard and does these things
(31:03):
to do with these relationships? Right, Like if my relationships
can't help you get into a better space. So yeah, absolutely,
I believe in Yeah. I don't want to just go
start from the bottom and go grind it out because
I had to work hard. If anything, I want them
again start on second or third base and maybe get
a little bit of a head start. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
I'm with you one hundred percent, man. And I look
at because my mother's side of the family, they've all
had businesses too, right, they still run their own businesses,
and I've been able to learn so much from them,
and they've done everything from banks to construction companies, and
you've got lawyers and entertainments. Uncle Aerroy is my mom's brother.
So like just really understanding and like how this stuff works.
(31:41):
They have made it pretty clear like when we sit
down and we talk, this is what you gotta do.
I can go to them with real questions and real things.
But people that don't have that, that's where you and
I have We do have to come in and help
our community. That's one of the things that I will
say about us. We're not as open as we should be. Yeah,
like you've got some information, I've got some information. Well,
(32:02):
I can't give him this information because he's going to
be better than I am. That's a huge problem we have,
Like we've got to even with me trying to start
the hospice, right, He's like, and that guy was a minority.
Believe it or not, he wasn't a you know, he
was a minority. And I'm like, it's serious. He's like,
and so now instead of working together, you're out of
business calling me trying to buy mine. It's like, that's
(32:22):
not how that works anymore. But I think, like what
you're doing is like super impactful. I watched a couple
of episodes. I'm not a media TV person. I like
shooting and do something else. No seriously, but it's like
I watched a couple of episodes, like even while with Jordan.
So I was just at a wedding with Jordan Adam
married and I was like, oh, this is actually pretty cool.
Like I actually thoroughly enjoy somebody creating a space where
(32:46):
people can educate others on what they can do, because
that's what we're missing. Like we don't know, right we
literally where I'm from Chicago, you don't know. I don't
know you can start a podcast and if I do,
if you don't tell me that, hey, you get started
with finding somebody to find you a space and get
in there and pay some money, you don't know. You
just think what I got to give me a camera?
Like you don't know. So these platforms are super important, man, No.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
I appreciate it, MA. I mean, one thing I've always
tried to do is I try to be very tactical,
and that's one of the reasons why I even started
this platform. I think we've got wait enough motivation. I
think we got enough people telling us to go start
and work hard. And sometimes you need to know, like
what do I do first?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
First thing?
Speaker 2 (33:22):
But how do I go from zero to one with
this thing? Any motivation to kind of you know, get going.
I got the motivation, now I need the direction, and
that's where we kind of built this platform in to
kind of bring people in, man, And so I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
One thing I love to ask you too, is like,
especially with your tech background and just you know, I
always think too that for us, like you said, you're
thirty seven, so you look at things a little bit differently.
You know, how are you bringing kind of innovation into
this space?
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Right?
Speaker 2 (33:58):
You would ask that, Yeah, how does that part come in?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Yeah, you're good. So I can't say exactly what it is,
but I will tell you that we have built in
EMR system that is going to change the way we
do EMR. We're going to change the way you do
medical records. And I think for us it's funny. So
the guy I don't know, if you know, Jeff Nelson
from Blavity and Affro Tech. We went to high school together,
(34:21):
so we talk often, right, and I was telling him like, man,
you know he's super it, like a guy of the future, right,
that's how he thinks everything's AI. So I went to him,
I was like, bro, I got decided. He was like, oh, yeah,
we gotta do that. So it's just like I being
in not my industry healthcare and being young, because I mean,
this is my decade now, so I've been twenty seven.
(34:42):
You see a lot of holes, right, If there were
if there were people out there that say, hey, I
want to start a healthcare tech fund or whatever, you
would need somebody like me to tell you. No, these
are the holes that you can feel with products that
already exist need rebranding, like literally, like without getting into detail,
(35:04):
like you could literally take what we do on paper.
There's stuff that exists to change that. Just rebrand the
whole thing and now you got this and once one
of us buys this. Because healthcare is not like a podcast, right,
Your people can come from all over the country. My
healthcare people can only come from people I can service,
which is with then my fifty mile radius. So if
(35:26):
I got it in company is two blocks down the street,
we're fighting for the same market share. You got to
have it. So health care tech is going to be
like for me once I'm able to talk about it.
But no, it's gonna be one of those things where
I fla, we can actually change the dynamics of how
things are done. And you're talking about the hospital systems
and how they work. It's like they need to be
(35:48):
doing more business with minorities. The whole DEI thing right,
Like that never existed for us. You see, no healthcare
companies like complaining about it. We never had no opportunities,
you know what I mean? They say, we have a
dr program. No you don't, right, It's just never really
existed for us, so it never really bought. But I
think in the future, as we build out where we're going,
(36:09):
we can tell them like, hey, you we go to
you all in Atlanta, we go to you for all
of this care you're building, medicare, private insurance, millions of
dollars a year for all this care. You mean to
tell me you can't set a budget to the side
for African American companies, But you're getting all like, we
can't get anything. But yet you expect me to go
(36:31):
out and I feed fifteen hundred seniors. The mayor comes out,
so somebody cares. Right. Then you can't tell a company
that you work with that they have to do any
of that. Yeah, Like, I just don't understand that. So
that's where we got to We got to grow together
and build our platforms together so that we can have
a voice. Because if we got a voice, we can
make some things change.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Absolutely absolutely. Now, what lessons would you give? What's like
two or three just lessons you kind of learned that
you would give, you know, black entrepreneurs and founders in
the healthcare space that want to get.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
To find a mentor asap. Find a mentor asap because
the stuff that you need to know is not in
the book. There's the regulation book, the policies books, and
to say what people say, just read the book. Like
the pitfalls you're going to have are not always in
the book. For instance, when you're in hospice and you
do your hospice billing, you got to really know how
(37:21):
to build. The reason is for us, we didn't get
paid for two years, two and a half years, so
I said I needed more money. That's why I needed
more money. I had to actually get in the car
and drive to Columbia, South Carolina to have a conversation
to figure out why am I not getting paid? You
promised me this money, I'm not getting paid And they say, well,
you built this in a way. I said, no, that
(37:42):
we didn't, and so we ended up having to go
through all this stuff. But the reality of it was
you have to hire the best people around you that
you can't get to without a mentor because they're not
going to just work with you. So then that's what
we do. So you have to give set you up
with the best people around you so that you can
build adequately and get your stuff paid for. The Other
one I would just say is I hate to say this,
(38:04):
if you're a minority going into a health care business,
you need to be ready for a lot of those
I'm just gonna be honest with you. It's not one
of those things where I've started my company with two
guys who are not minorities, and what they had access
to I still don't have access to. Right. If it
wasn't for social media and me telling people when you
(38:24):
go to the hospital, call me, I'm gonna help you.
Before that got rolling rolling rolling, we weren't really getting
much from the hospitals at all for whatever reason. Right.
It could be because I'm a minority, could be because we
don't like health care hearing, like we don't know, right,
but until now it's like now we're getting it. But
I would just tell them it's gonna be. It's a grind.
It's not something you get in. You can be a
(38:46):
millionaire tomorrow, you could figuratively, right, but it's a grind
to it. And I think they really have to understand
that it's a long haul to this, but if you
stick with it, there's so much space for everybody it's
just so much space, man, there's so much space for everybody.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
No, I love it. I love that. So you know,
looking ahead, man, what's the long term vision for precious healthcare?
Like I know you're talking about potentially some tech innovations,
some other things, like where do you see this thing go?
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Tech innovation is the number one thing for me. So
where we are with hospice, where we've learned so much
in ten years, we've learned so much at ten years,
and so we've been able to compile all this information,
all of this data and put together projects and products
that people can use say, hey, this is your issue, right,
you can use this for four bucks a month, and
so we've put together different products for that. So but
(39:35):
all of that will be coming available under Healthcare Henry
dot com as we kind of like roll out our
own like sample EMR system that should be hearing about
two to three months. And then we have our we
Trust Henry dot com, which is like our version of
our directory. So like we've got companies that might be
referred to you by the hospital, but how do they
treat people? How they treat our people? What's their customer
(39:56):
service like? And so when you come to we trust
Henry dot com get you the real Well this Google
says this is a four, Well it might be a
four on Google, but for us, it's a two and
a half. And this is why it's a two and
a half. And so we're giving people the real background
of how to function and how to do that. But
my advice to people though, more than anything, you have
(40:17):
to learn how the business of health care works to
properly provide the best health care for you and your family.
You have to. You absolutely have to, because when you're
going this is the one thing that everyone keeps the secret,
and it's for a reason. I gave you one of
the reasons with hospite, right, but all of it has
a reason, and without going to d do, y'all have
a reason. But if you're able to find someone, whether
(40:42):
it's me or whoever, who can help educate you on
the business of health care, you'll better know how to
give your family members appropriate care. I spoke last week
about a home health company who also owns a hospice.
My suggestion, I'm not sure I would go to one
because Margins are in hospice. So if I'm a home
(41:02):
health and in Georgia, to have certificate a need, So
you can't open a home health here. So what's easier
to do? Once you get a home health it's easy
to get a contract, and after about thirty or sixty
days they try to move you to hospice. That's not
true rehab. So I would look at stuff like but
if you don't know that the business of that, how
that works. You just said I was to go anywhere,
But now that you know, you can really revaluate, well,
(41:24):
why does this really work? Why am I going here?
Who's sending me here? Who's pressuring me to go here?
Why am I being diverted from this company to that company?
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, that would be my advice. No, man, look, this
is good information. Man, before we before we get out
of here. Man, please, you know, if people want to
get in contact with you, they want to get in
contact with precious hospice, they want to learn about healthcare, Henry,
like give them all the things up. I lit you know.
I love that we trust Henry, because I'm just saying
I do think to your point, like there's something important
about having kind of almost like a directory of being Like, no,
(41:54):
these are vetted, trusted services. You're already a trusted individual
in that space and now you're helping them like highlight
the other things. So please man again, like give them
all the things. Man, How can they find you, all
work with you, all support you? How can they learn?
How can they all this stuff?
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Absolutely so precious Hospitals is the company, and we always
say call us when you're in the hospital. You can
call us whenever, and you can always transfer. If you
make a bad decision up front, you can always come
to this later. But in terms of learning the business
of health care, that's healthcare Henry. So that's YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.
I don't know all stuff, but all this stuff right, Facebook,
all that stuff, and we're just giving them just like
(42:27):
solid gems that they can run with every day. And
then when it comes to understanding how to run your
own business, they can go to Healthcare Henry Academy. And
if you want, like you said, you're our directory is
stuff for us. And I say us, people think you're
just so black. I'm not. I don't just mean black.
I mean us as a people because it's institution versus people.
(42:49):
And I think too many times people try to say,
if you're pro people, you're pro black. Now I'm pro
everybody because if you got medicaid and they pull your
medicaid and you're a white male with us too, now
whether you want to, whether you want to realize it
or not, you're with us too, and I'm for you
even if you don't like me. So that's what I
would tell them.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Okay, hey man, Well look man, thank you so much
for coming out of this billing is really a really
insightful episode. I learned a lot. I'm sure everybody else
learned a lot man, And again, thank you for the
work you're doing in this space. Brother, It's really important.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Thank you man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate you
for sure. Man.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
With that said out, y'all, that's the pot. You've been
listening to button Nomics and I'm your hosts Brandon Butler.
Got comments, feedback? Want to be on the show, send
us an email today at hello at butternomics dot com.
Butter Nomics is produced in Atlanta, Georgia at iHeartMedia by
Ksey Pegram, with marketing support Fromqueen and Nikki. Music provided
by mister Hanky. If you haven't already, hit that subscribe
(43:40):
button and never missed an episode, and be sure to
Follow us on all our social platforms at butter dot ATL.
Listen to Button Nomics on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Brandon Butler
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