Mitch Waks' 39-Year Journey: From Elementary School Entrepreneur to Healthcare Industry Pioneer

Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today's guest is Mitch Wax, CEO and founder of Cooperative Home Care. They are a home health care agency that was founded in 1986 to provide personalized medical and non-medical support for people of all ages. including skilled nursing and therapies for older adults and individuals with developmental disabilities. Their mission is to help clients remain independent and safe at home by delivering compassionate care and tailored solutions. Under Mitch's leadership, the company has successfully expanded into mental health services, staffing, and home monitoring, ensuring families receive holistic support for a wide variety of needs. Mitch is an expert in home health care advocacy, having served on boards like the National Private Duty Association and the National Association of Home Care. He also holds a certified senior advisor certificate and is a licensed auctioneer in Missouri. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today's episode is brought to you by my company, AddBack Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, founder and CEO of Cooperative Home Care, Mitch Wax.

Mitch Waks: you

Anthony Codispoti: Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Mitch Waks: my pleasure. Thank you for having me on your show.

Anthony Codispoti: So Mitch, before we get into how you came up with the idea to start Cooperative Home Care back in 86, I want to go back to your childhood and what your, up until the age of 12, your lifelong ambition had been.

Mitch Waks: Sure, let's talk about the most painful part of my life. My lifelong ambition had been I wanted to be an astronaut during the many kind of, you know. space program early years. was anytime there was anything that had to do with a rocket ship or anything, it was on TV. My parents were watching anything that NASA was televising. And I just thought it was the coolest thing in the world. And then of course I grew up with, you know, space shows, know, Star Trek and other shows like that. Lost in Space. These were cool 60s shows that just captivated my attention and I wanted to do that and then I lost all of that when I did a little research and found out that because I wore eyeglasses I could never be an astronaut and I was never going to go into space. Although now actually come you know What is it, 50 years later, I'm finding, with enough money, I can go into space. I can buy a ticket on maybe Elon Musk's next trip up there. No, it's a little too much money and I don't know that it would be worth it. If the price comes down, maybe. I mean, I think it's still a few hundred thousand to...

Anthony Codispoti: Is that a consideration for you?

Mitch Waks: just take a very, you know, 15 second ride into space. Maybe a minute, I don't know what they're doing, but.

Anthony Codispoti: So how did you recover from that devastation as a 12 year old of realizing that this dream you'd had for years was no longer possible?

Mitch Waks: Well, it wasn't easy. But it was really at a pretty young age when I started really my path toward entrepreneurship. My first attempt at being an entrepreneur nearly got me kicked out of elementary school. I, kids always were looking at each other's lunch boxes and seeing what we could trade because you didn't like what your mom put in and you were hoping somebody else did and you could trade for something good. And usually the good stuff was the dessert. And so I started buying cheap candy at the, at the local drug store. And then I was reselling it at lunchtime. for a sizeable markup, I didn't realize at the time, was probably a 200 % markup I was asking for on the candy. And then somebody got pissed at me because they didn't have enough money to buy one of my candy bars. They told the principal and principal called my dad. The next entrepreneurial story, if I can go on. I was in sixth grade and all the rage were cinnamon toothpicks, cinnamon flavored toothpicks. They were all the rage. And you bought them at the drugstore. They were like, they came in packs of five toothpicks and they were pricey enough that, you know, it caused your parents a little moment of like thinking before they automatically said, sure, go ahead and buy some more.

Anthony Codispoti: Never heard of it. Okay.

Mitch Waks: And so I bought a bottle of cinnamon oil and I soaked my own toothpicks that I guaranteed were three times as strong as anything they could buy. And one day the bottle cap leaked in my pants pocket, the bottle cap kind of opened and pure cinnamon oil, man, once that gets on your skin, it was burning. And I would try to... muddle through the day as best I could and not scream in pain, but eventually I'd go see the nurse. Again, that entrepreneur business was shut down quickly.

Anthony Codispoti: So you were carrying around your manufacturing operation in your pants pocket.

Mitch Waks: Yeah, in my front pocket, yeah, that was dumb. So, I almost got kicked out of school a second time. And then it was, I think when I really hit kind of a bigger market was high school. And I was throwing what we called in the Midwest keg parties. And how it worked was somebody's parents go out of town. and they let you know and then I as the producer of these keg parties would arrange for kegs to be picked up by a local bar or distribution site that didn't card you and they didn't care about the law so I was able to buy you know kegs and the tapper and You put a deposit down, you bring it back, you arrange for a local high school band to play and they played for free beer. That was always the deal. And then people would come and they would pay $5. They would get a cup and they were allowed to drink as much as they wanted to drink, listen to the band, hang out with their friends. And that was the Midwest keg party. And at $5 a head, you know, I could make, you know, several hundred dollars. depending on the size of the party.

Anthony Codispoti: how long before that one got shut down? I'm gonna guess this is a little bit more severe than just going to the principal's office.

Mitch Waks: No, because I had this brilliant idea early on that the first party when things started to get a little rowdy I got nervous because you know you don't want people to trash this guy's house and the parents to come home and said what the heck and who's responsible and I didn't want them pointing at me so what I did was I would buy plenty of beer and make sure it was fair to all the people that paid their five dollars But if it started to get out of hand, if it started to get rowdy and the testosterone was growing, I would sneak off to a back bedroom and I would call the local police station and act as a neighbor that's concerned and hearing too much noise. The police would...

Anthony Codispoti: So you call, you would call the police on yourself.

Mitch Waks: Absolutely right, I did. Yeah. And nobody knew this, because it was always in secrecy. And the police would come and I would say, my god, the cops are here, everybody out the back door. And so the band would shut down immediately and all the kids would just scamper like little mice or cockroaches running when the light hits the room. And they loved it. There were something about running from the cops and almost getting caught. But not. That was just, and they loved my parties. So it was, then they became known as, my God, the party was so good that the neighbors called the cops. yeah, for free. And pretty soon I was producing some larger size and, in the summer there'd be like people that had.

Anthony Codispoti: Almost getting caught but not, yeah. built-in marketing.

Mitch Waks: some farmland and I do the same thing on a larger scale.

Anthony Codispoti: So how did you avoid somebody actually getting in trouble from the police or the police reporting this to the parents? Because that's the part of this equation that I'm like,

Mitch Waks: The police never reported it to the parents. They would just come, they'd knock on the door, they'd ask for who lives there, whoever it was went to the door, said, hey, I'm just having a few friends over, is something wrong? Oh yeah, and one of the neighbors complaining the music's too loud. He goes, okay, well, we'll shut the music off. And the police would go and that'd be it back then. That was it. They were just there.

Anthony Codispoti: This is like three stages of brilliance, Mitch. Like you had your own built-in sort of bouncer in the local police station, but you gave everybody enough of a heads up so that, you know, the police don't get there and find this giant party. And then the part that I love the most from that marketing and sales part is that viral built in, the party was so good. The cops got called, right? Everybody wants to talk about

Mitch Waks: Yeah. yeah. Absolutely. They could go. Yeah, and at schools the next day it was all, that's whatever your moon's got.

Anthony Codispoti: that's hysterical. Okay, so let's come to 1986. I mean, we see a pattern here. You know, the way your brain works, you know your audience, your audience has been your classmates, you know, all the way through elementary school up through high school and what it is that they want and how can I provide that to them and charge a markup for it. So how did the idea in 1986 come about to start cooperative home care?

Mitch Waks: Well, started with the Appalachian Trail. And are you familiar with the trail?

Anthony Codispoti: I am, but let's assume that our listeners are not.

Mitch Waks: The Appalachian Trail is a trail that goes, and let me back up and say I was not familiar. I was selling investments for Shearson Lehman at this time in my life, and it was boring. I was making good money, but it was a boring job. And my mother-in-law had been doing tutoring for adults in their home. She was a special ed teacher. And she said, hey, and I had a degree in education in English, by the way. That was my background. That's what I went to college for. I was gonna teach until I lost the passion for that my first semester of teaching. And I ended up at Sheraton Lehman. So, and for your viewers, that was a big banking house before the crash of. big banks, were the first one, Lehman was the first one that was allowed to fail before the others were not allowed to fail and they failed. So they're no longer a bank, but I digress. So my mother-in-law, I'm married just a couple of years at this point, comes to me and says, hey, do you mind taking over some of the tutoring of my students? And like all good sudden laws, you know, what do you say? You say, of course, yeah. course I'm gonna do that. And she says I'm gonna go hike the Appalachian Trail. Now I didn't, I made a classic entrepreneurial mistake. I didn't ask follow-up questions. Entrepreneurs, young people trying to build should listen carefully and ask follow-up questions. I failed to do that right out of the gate. And it wasn't until about, and she gave me like six months notice. I'm like yeah yeah it's fine. And she said, okay, here's, you'll come over right before I leave and I'll hand you the files and I'll just tell you a little bit about each one. And there was maybe 10 or 12 students that she had that she was doing tutoring for. So the week before she leaves, I go over and there's this massive packing production and boxes labeled for all these different towns. And I'm like, what is going on? And that's where I learned the Appalachian Trail. isn't a weekend hike or a one week hike. It starts in Maine or in Georgia and ends in the other city. You can go from Georgia to Maine or Maine to Georgia, but it's like a half a year hike to go all the way across the country. It's a big deal. Yes, they do. And I had no idea. So I had just signed on for, you know, helping.

Anthony Codispoti: It's a big deal. People put months and months of prep work into it.

Mitch Waks: some kids with their tutoring math or English or whatever the heck she was doing for months. And I didn't quite realize it till like right before she went out of town. So I start doing the tutoring and my frustration point, and this is an interesting thing for young entrepreneurs to kind of take note of, the system was broken and that's where opportunity happens. I would show up at these people's homes and what would happen is they weren't ready for me to tutor them, meaning their home care assistant or aid hadn't shown up that day or they did show up but they didn't do anything. And back in the day in the state of Missouri, the state just gave people money to find their own home care aides and often you know, if you have a disability, that doesn't work very well. So the money was getting stolen really from them by family members, from neighbors, from people who promised to take care of them but never did, but always took the check. And so I went to the state and I said, hey, I'm doing this. I'm standing in for my mother-in-law, but hey, these guys. They're never ready when I get there and I got to spend more than half of my, a lot of time just trying to help them get out of bed and into their wheelchair and have a little breakfast and a little coffee before I can actually start tutoring them. And by that time, it's almost time to go. And they said, yeah, that's a problem. And I said, hey, what if I was able to somebody to come in? and help them before I got there. Could you reimburse that person instead of just sending the money directly to the client or the patient? And they said, well, that has to get approved at the very highest level. So I worked doing a little lobbying to get something like that done. And then sure enough, the state offered a brand new contract to a brand new group of providers. And I was the first one to sign off. that offered to pay a company, an intermediary, the money. So they kind of took my idea, but they changed it. And it was instead of paying the money directly to the caregiver, they paid it to an independent fiduciary. That was the birth of Home Care in Missouri.

Anthony Codispoti: So do you think that this was already in process behind the scenes or was this kicked off by your request?

Mitch Waks: Well, I am sure they had gotten complaints before, but I wasn't privy to those, but I was pretty persistent. I was that A-type personality, and I was kind of a business person before they knew what hit them. In other words, these were social worker types, and they had never really, back then, they weren't really being approached by business people. They were being approached by other social worker types, and I really wasn't even interested in... trying to make money off of this. I just thought if I could just get a caregiver, I could do my job, do the tutoring. I go in, they're ready. I teach them what I'm supposed to. And then I go away, back to my day job at Shearson. Because I was doing this for my mother all evenings and weekends. Because she just had that few people to teach. So I think it was probably a little of both. They'd heard complaints before.

Anthony Codispoti: You weren't the first to complain, but maybe you were the loudest and the most persistent.

Mitch Waks: Right, and so we got a contract and I signed the contract without my mother-in-law being there. And when she came back, I said, hey, I've got an idea I want to share with you. And I told her the story and I said, hey, can we make a deal? I think there's something here. Because before she got back, pretty quickly, we were... getting referrals from the state to do more of the same. I wasn't looking for that. I was just happy to say, okay, you know what? I'll take responsibility. I'll pay the caregivers. I'll make sure that my mother-in-law's handful of people that were tutoring are ready to be tutored and they're taken care of. And that was a good feeling. If I had done nothing else, I had done a good thing for my mother-in-law and for those people. But all of a sudden the state, because I went in and talked to a large group of social workers at the state, they started making calls and saying, hey, I got somebody else for you to take care of. Can you take it? I'm like, you know, the entrepreneur in me said, okay, one more keg's gonna get, many more cups do I get out of that? And so I said, yeah, okay, I can ask my caregivers if they can take on a. another client or two. And before you know it, we started growing, home health care and tutoring became really a very secondary thing. Now, my mother-in-law, you had to know was a, she was a Birkenstock wearing granola making no bra wearing feminist from the minute that she, know, before there was a term and she didn't like male dominated. businesses. She just thought that's, you know, she knew about toxic masculinity before it came a thing in this last 10 years, you know, and didn't like it. But I made her a promise. I said, Fran, her name is was Fran. I said, Fran, how about you just do the tutoring of your patients that that you are very close to and let me do the home health and we'll keep it all in one company. And you never have to worry about anything except you just do the tutoring, just like you have been. Now, the same reason I said, of course, when my mother-in-law asked me if I would help her, was probably the same motivation in reverse when I asked her, would you be willing to do this? It's like, okay, her son-in-law is asking her to do something and she wants her daughter to be happy. So against her best wishes, she said, sure. So I made a deal with the devil. And I kept that promise by the way, she, she never really did anything else except the tutoring. And I kept all the other business stuff away from her until she retired, which wasn't too many years later, but she eventually retired. We do actually there. There's a handful of clients that we still do some in-home tutoring for. And it's kind of a piece of her legacy. And it's something I don't want to go away because it's a piece of her.

Anthony Codispoti: Do you still offer the tutoring services today? really? Okay. there's a little nostalgia there. Yeah. Okay, so how, so this is in the year sort of 1986. This is when this is all kind of birth.

Mitch Waks: of course there is. These are actually the early 90s. She started, so on our website we go by the year she started tutoring. And so let me just clarify. I didn't come on until the summer of 90. Okay, so this is early 90s when this is reborn.

Anthony Codispoti: Okay. Okay. And at what stage are you in a position where you're like, okay, we've got something, it's working, it's profitable. How long did that take?

Mitch Waks: It was before she got back from the trail. It didn't take long to do the math on the back of the napkin and figure out that, okay, here's what I have to do to get to the margin I need. And here are the expenses. And I didn't even know what all the expenses were going to be. Cause there just weren't any other models back then. When I say that we were one of the first five home care companies in the state, we were one of the first five home care companies.

Anthony Codispoti: months. ever. And so where does it stand today? What are sort of the breadth of the services that cooperative home care offers?

Mitch Waks: That's a great question. Well, we've expanded to like five or six offices. We're in multi-states. Our caregivers are in the thousands, no longer 12. And we have expanded services to include skilled nursing and therapy, including what your wife does, the speech therapy. We accept Medicare, Medicaid, all insurances. So it's really grown. We expanded into pediatric care. Again, we are just meeting people where they are trying to help them either age in place or in the case of peds and the kids, we're just trying to help them grow in place so they don't have to be institutionalized or spend too much time at a local children's hospital.

Anthony Codispoti: As you think back sort of those early days in the early 90s and now where you are today in 2025, what was maybe like a key inflection point along the way that really helped to catapult the growth, maybe steer you in a slightly different direction that you look back on now and, you know, really appreciate?

Mitch Waks: Yeah, I'm going to give that's a great question and it's an easy one for me to answer. I joined an organization called YEO at the time, Young Entrepreneurs Organization. Are you familiar with it? They have a sister organization called YPO for young presidents. And the only difference is president, the people in YPO are usually presidents of publicly traded companies. So they're not really entrepreneurial.

Anthony Codispoti: I am.

Mitch Waks: but they're large. So like locally, the owner back in the day of the Bush family for Anheuser-Busch Beer, the president was a member of YPO. And then companies that are entrepreneurial, usually substantially smaller, they joined YEO. So Young Entrepreneurs Organization. And it's a group where there's a large You know, there's about 250 members in St. Louis and in YEO, but you're broken down into a small group that becomes your own board of directors. Now think about this small, young entrepreneurial companies having a real board like the big books, like Anheuser-Busch did, right? So all of a sudden you've got other people from all walks of businesses who are now in a group of 10, usually. and they become a board that you meet with every month and go through kind of a series of questions and problem solving. And we were there for each other and every month we solve problems that we each brought up. Hey, I've got an HR issue going on. And somebody at the table would say, you know what, I dealt with that about a year ago. Let me tell you what I did and how it turned out. And that was the most valuable thing I could have done. and something I encourage any entrepreneur to join that or, and there's several of them now that are kind of peer groups or quasi peer boards, not just YEO, which is my favorite, but there are a few others out there. The alternative board is another one. And there's a third large one that I'll think of.

Anthony Codispoti: And so this was really instrumental in helping you work through sort of big challenges and getting to the proverbial next level.

Mitch Waks: Absolutely. it was huge. It was huge. It turned me into a professional where before that I really wasn't. And I joined that group in, I late 90s.

Anthony Codispoti: You know. This is something that I'll echo for our listeners. I've had the opportunity in my business career to be a part of different masterminds, peer groups at different points. once you find the right one, the value is, it's hard to put a price tag on because the ability to talk through problems with people who have gone through or going through the same thing, have them be a sounding board, have them... you know, share stories, have them make introductions to people that have been helpful to them and working through those things. And, you know, they always say, what's the saying? you're, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. And so when you find the right group, you're in a room of, you know, a lot of other really bright people who are helping you not only solve those problems, but just to think bigger.

Mitch Waks: You're absolutely right. And I thought of the third group. So I don't want to just be accused of pushing the group that I love. But the third one that I'd recommend is Vistage. So there's Vistage, the alternative board, and there's my favorite, YEO. But it's now the Y has been dropped to just EO, Entrepreneurs Organization. They are worldwide, great opportunities to go not just around the country, but around the globe. and meet other people in the organization with also unique challenges in learning how they fixed them.

Anthony Codispoti: So Mitch, as you guys were growing years ago into these different services, mental health services, the staffing, the monitoring, which of those areas posed the greatest challenge for you and how did you overcome it?

Mitch Waks: I think the challenges come with every one of our lines of business at different points. Each one of them has unique challenges. They all have something in common, whether it's regulatory challenges, whether it's labor challenges. And I think it wasn't that there was one line that posed the greatest challenge. I think there are challenges that come with each of our growing phases. One of my greatest challenges was growing and using all the money and not having a great cushion so that when we had almost a little perfect storm happening, the state of Missouri, who was at that moment paying a large part of our revenue, they had a computer glitch and announced that, we're gonna miss a few payments to our vendors. And when you spend years getting used to being paid every couple of weeks and you're in a growth phase, any excess money is going into fueling and funding the growth. Well, I found myself in a situation. I know, I think around the early aughts, the early 2000s, where we were gonna run out of cash. And we had about a half a million dollar a week payroll at that time. And so the number was gonna be big. And I figured out a way to get us, through us a couple of weeks. But I was still gonna be about a million dollars shy before I got my next payment from the state and the revenue started flowing again. And at that time, I really didn't know about the benefit of a banking relationship and how important it is to have one before you need money. Because I never really needed money. We were just depositors. And then we would take the money out and use it for growth, you know, maybe open up a new city or something. And I was naive. And so I would go to a couple of banks where we had deposits and say, hey, we got a problem and I need to borrow some money. And they just looked at a young guy like me with, like, what do you have for collateral? Do you have any property like, well, I got my house. goes, we're not going to take your house away. Do you have any other property? No. You have anything of value that we can have? No. Do you have assets in the business? I said, no, it's a service business. It's all people. There's, don't make any widgets. And so they'd say, you know, come back when things change and you have something that, you know, that, that we can put on the books as a collateral. And so I had nothing. And I am, I'm not sleeping, right? I knew there's a, as soon as you don't make a single payroll, man, all of your caregivers, I don't care how loving and supportive and generous they are, they need their paycheck. You can't skip payroll or they're gonna skip out on your company and go work for somebody else. They'll go, yeah, you ain't getting them back because you've already burned them once. So.

Anthony Codispoti: And good luck getting them back.

Mitch Waks: I had to really think outside of the box. I called a friend, his name is Vern Harnish. And Vern is widely known in the entrepreneurial world. He wrote The Rockefeller Habits, which became a seminal book for entrepreneurs back in the day. He's written a dozen more books, a brilliant young entrepreneur. and well, he's older than me, so I guess neither of us are. And he just said, Mitch, you gotta get up early, you gotta take a mega dose of vitamin C, I don't know where that came from. And he said, you gotta talk to everybody you know. And you have to not be afraid of bearing your soul.

Anthony Codispoti: At one point he was young, always brilliant.

Mitch Waks: And don't be embarrassed. Just tell everybody you know the problem and see if anybody has any ideas. It's like it was the early it was it was it was crowdsourcing before there was crowdsourcing. Right. And so I started, you know, telephone calling because there was no crowdsourcing back then. And one of the calls I made was to one of the bankers I had. He was a very low-level banker, he decided to go on his own. He goes, it's interesting you call me, Mitch. I've just started a Nuvo bank and we're looking for people to be on the board and I think you'd be good. I said, okay, I'd be happy to be on your board. I got on the board. But in order to get on the board, he still needed more capital to help fund the loans that a bank, that's how they make money, right? So I asked him, what is the lowest amount I can invest and become one of the owners? And he goes, well, the lowest amount you can invest is $50,000. That's the smallest amount. Now, it doesn't sound like much today, but back in the day when you're wondering, can you make payroll, the 50,000 is everything. I mean, come on. And so I took a leap of faith and I said, hey, I want to join the bank. believe in you. His name is Kirk. And I'm going to give you the money and I'm going to join the board. But I'd also like to be one of your first customers. And he goes, great, we need loans. You know, I'm like, well, wonderful.

Anthony Codispoti: I need a loan.

Mitch Waks: I traded $50,000 to be able to get a $1.1 million loan on no collateral. I was now just part owner of this bank. I was one of

Anthony Codispoti: Wow. Was it like an implied quid pro quo or was it like?

Mitch Waks: No, it was completely up and up. He needed capital, but he also wanted to give out loans. That's exactly how they, anything starts. They line up a bunch of loans before they open their doors and they...

Anthony Codispoti: and he was able to turn this loan around in time for you to make payroll? I that's fast.

Mitch Waks: Yes, yeah, I turned that loan around and it was very fast. And he understood after I joined and after he got my money that he didn't like. they had practically, there was very little business yet, you know? They didn't even have a building yet at the time. They were off, they were leasing their own space. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: You were helping each other out. Yeah.

Mitch Waks: they were leasing space and they hadn't built their own building yet. That was gonna come in year two. So I was able to get money transferred into my account with literally hours to spare before we had to transfer it to the payroll. And then the state fixed their computer glitch and all the back money started coming in and... I got a three year loan, I paid it back in eight months and developed amazing credit and now history, not only of loan repayment, which is so important for young entrepreneurs, borrow money even if you don't need it, is gonna be my short advice. If it was a longer podcast, I'd tell them why and develop relationships with bankers at a very early age when you don't need money. get to know them and let them get to know you. And I turned 50,000 into 1.1 million. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: That's tremendous. I mean, you kind of touched on it a little bit. Like, hey, I wasn't sleeping. Like, I was really stressed about this. For people listening, we've never been responsible for somebody else's paycheck. Excuse me. Like, imagine you maybe being out of work and not sure where your next paycheck is going to come from and the stress that that involves. How am I going to pay my rent? How am going to pay? my utilities and groceries, how am gonna take care of my family?

Mitch Waks: don't have to imagine that. Do you know how many times I went without paying myself as an entrepreneur? That's just normal. And you gotta hope you've got, if you're married, you gotta hope you've got a that understands that and that you have some other resources or savings to fall back on.

Anthony Codispoti: Right. Well, and then here's the thing from your perspective, you're not just worried about being able to pay yourself. Now you're taking that same stress of wondering, can I pay everybody else and how are they going to be able to make their bills and support their families? And it just becomes this crushing pressure of like, I don't know what I'm going to do, you know? And in some cases it paralyzes people. They're paralyzed by the fear. You got some really great advice from a close friend and you followed that advice. I don't know if you took the vitamin C, that seems irrelevant, but you certainly got on the phone and you just started calling everybody to, hey, I don't know what the solution looks like, but let me talk to everybody I can think of and see what we can flesh out.

Mitch Waks: Yeah, and it was purely by accident that I went down my contact list and came across a guy who was starting his own bank. I mean, I never would have called this guy out of the blue because I already knew the answer. The bank that he worked for had already turned me down for a loan. And you're absolutely right. It was really about all the people, because I knew what it's like not to get a paycheck, but I also knew that these people didn't have a fallback and many of them, know, many nurses, you know, they're living month to month, paycheck to paycheck. Even though nursing pays well and we paid well, it's still, it's a lot of Americans don't have a lot of cushion and you can't mess with their money. So.

Anthony Codispoti: Mitch, was it some of these lessons that you're working into this new book that's in process?

Mitch Waks: Yeah, lessons like this and every other lesson that I can think of that I learned over the course of a fledgling entrepreneurship into a successful entrepreneurship venture. And it is, don't want to steal, I'm not going to steal the idea of entrepreneurship for dummies because that's a very well-known franchise that is very well copyrighted. But basically it's for brand new and even not brand new entrepreneurs that maybe have not joined a peer group and are struggling. Or people in today's day and age, what I come across a lot are kind of that middle-aged guy who kind of either got displaced at his company after years and took his 401k and decided I'm going to start a business. Right? But they don't know anything about starting a business. I mean, they were a corporate man or a corporate woman for their whole life. And they just see, oh, okay, you know what? I'm not gonna work for anybody else anymore, damn it. To hell with a boss, I'm gonna be my own boss. That way I can never get fired. Well, of course you can get fired. You get fired when your business shuts down and your environment, your... the group of people that you're selling into, they can fire you every day of the week. They don't like your product, they stop buying it, you're fired. They don't like your service, they stop using it, you're fired. I mean, the beautiful thing about a capital market is that it's clean in that it works. The supply and demand of your product or service has to be in that equilibrium. And when you screw up, and you're not providing a product or service that your community wants or needs, you're fired. So that's a mistake they make. They think they won't get fired if they start their own business, but they can and they do. As we talked before, we started the podcast, how many young businesses start and then close in the first year? The number's crazy, crazy.

Anthony Codispoti: Right. Which is even more impressive to talk about how long you've been around 39 years and counting.

Mitch Waks: Yeah, 39 years. We're going to have to throw a good party at 40. Because I don't know that I'll be around for 50.

Anthony Codispoti: I certainly hope so. mean, are you going to pull your own kegs for this party?

Mitch Waks: You know, I've gotten to the point where I probably don't need to charge $5 for a solo cup for all my employees. We'll just supply the libations without learning.

Anthony Codispoti: I love it. So when can we expect this book to be available and where can folks find it?

Mitch Waks: Well, they can't find it yet. So I wish I was hawking something, but there's really nothing to hawk yet. But I'd be happy to come back for a follow-up visit and I'd be happy to let your viewers know there's not even a name. I don't have a title yet. The book is written. It's completely written. I wrote it in, I stole an idea from Stephen King. I went away to a small cabin in the woods for 30 days and I wrote a book. This was in the middle of COVID. actually got in a car. I drove to Vail, Colorado at an Airbnb that I rented for 30 days. And I got into a very regimented routine. I would get up early in the morning, do a little yoga, have a little breakfast and coffee, and then start writing. I'd write until dinner time. I'd go take a break and go to the villages in Vail and have dinner there. I'd come back. and then do another bit of writing till around midnight. I'd go to sleep, wake up early and do it all over again. And it was close, but on day 29, that night, before I was ready to check out, and I actually asked the owner, hey, can I extend this another week? She said, no, it's already booked. So I'm like, okay. So I just, I focused and I just cranked it out. The evening of the 29th day, I had sent to Kinko's and with copies of, you know, please put, you know, five of these together for me. I'm going to pick them up tomorrow. The next day, she said, congratulations. I'm going to take you to my favorite pizza parlor. spent the day with my landlord driving around Colorado mountains. And then that afternoon, I went and picked up my books. at Kinko's and put them in the trunk of my car and drove home.

Anthony Codispoti: Fascinating. Well, we'll definitely have you back in X number of months when the book is ready. I want to come back.

Mitch Waks: Be happy to. there other things that your listeners might be interested in?

Anthony Codispoti: for sure. I know that they will be.

Mitch Waks: No, I'm just asking right now, is there anything that you think they'd be interested in knowing about?

Anthony Codispoti: I was, well, hard for me to speak for all of them. But, you know, I think anytime that you can share specific stories, specific examples, kind of like you did about, you know, the issue with making payroll. If you had just said, you need to develop a relationship with banks, you know, early on before you need the money, it's like, okay, like I'll file that away, whatever. But when you can give like this very specific. story with the emotion and all the trials and tribulations that you went through attached to it, that's something that people hold on to more. They're more likely to remember that at their core. So I guess that's sort of a little bit broad, but anytime you can add those little case studies, if you will. I think that's helpful.

Mitch Waks: Yeah, I will tell you the other nerve-wracking piece. So there were so many nerve-wracking, my god, are we going to make it another few hours stories. But in that one, it wasn't just am I going to make payroll or lose the whole company. When I went to this office of this brand new bank, and signed my name underneath a document that said $1.1 million, my hand was shaking. I swear to God, it was shaking. And if you, I kept that document or my copy of it, because you can see my penmanship was like, it was all squiggly because I was freaking out that I was signing off on, you know, it's one thing to think, okay, I'm going to close my doors. But it's another thing to think, okay, if I close my doors now after signing this, I gotta find a way to pay these people back 1.1 million. And if I can't, I'm gonna lose my house, my cars, my marriage. I mean, everything was on the line. Man, that's so.

Anthony Codispoti: And so it wasn't like when that loan came through and you signed that document that, I can totally breathe now. was like, could breathe.

Mitch Waks: I had a short window of breath, but I knew I had to pay it back. And now I've got a new worry. Can I pay it back? Right?

Anthony Codispoti: And so when they fixed their glitch at the state and they finally issued their payment to you, that wasn't enough.

Mitch Waks: That wasn't enough because we had made an internal mistakes in terms of our billing department for one of our divisions, our skilled nursing division. And the person in charge of, I don't want to bore you with details, but we had an internal problem that cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars that we were not gonna get back. And we were counting on that money also to help make payroll. That's why I called it kind of a perfect storm of bad things happening all at the same time. It wasn't just, was also, we had a bad hire in the billing division. They were making mistakes and they were covering up the mistakes. And all of a sudden we're looking at, why aren't we getting revenue in on that division lately? It's down so much. And it took some digging before we figured it out.

Anthony Codispoti: It wasn't just the state's glitch. You guys had an internal error too that compounded the problem.

Mitch Waks: And so I had to crawl back out of that hole that we caused, not just the state. So it was a double whammy. That, and then there was a third piece where right at that time, me and another partner had taken out kind of a chunk of money that we were using to invest in other things, and we couldn't get that capital back. So now, Yeah, it was a perfect storm all happening at the same time. So I had to sign that document wondering, and I'm gonna tell you the truth that I didn't tell my spouse at the time. I wasn't upfront about the fact that I put everything we owned into that document to say, if I can't pay it back, they own everything I own. I didn't tell her that part, that the house would be theirs, our cars would be theirs. everything we have would be theirs. I couldn't bring myself to tell her because I was afraid of her answer and I think her answer would have been, no way, do not sign that document, let the company go. And she was a very conservative woman, still a very conservative woman and she never would have agreed to that. So I didn't tell her the whole truth. And that's not something I'm proud of. And that's not something I would recommend to anybody. have to have, if you have a partner in life, you're going to find times when you need to rely on them for emotional support. Because when you're at the top, it's a lonely place to be sometimes. When you're president or an entrepreneur of a company, it can be lonely and you need that spouse. And don't do what I did. So don't make, and my whole book is about don't do the same mistakes I made.

Anthony Codispoti: Do as I say, don't do as I do. When did you eventually tell her, Mitch? Or did you? Okay.

Mitch Waks: When I paid the loan off, I came clean and said, hey, by the way, I'm really relieved because why are you relieved? Well, there were some codicils in that document that made me nervous that, you know, we had to put up our own. She, it was better than it should have been. It was, wow, okay, so we dodged a bullet. And I said, yeah. And she goes, okay, don't do that again. Let me know. I'm in this with you. And she was in this with me, you know?

Anthony Codispoti: What was her reaction? Sounds like a good woman. how was it that you were able to then, I think you said eight months, turn around and pay this off? How did you pull that off?

Mitch Waks: strategic planning and cost cutting. We cut costs to the bone and we looked at some outsourcing. We tightened our belts. I lowered my salary drastically, almost to nothing because I had some savings and my wife had a job so we could get by. She's the smarter one of the two of us. She's an attorney for the federal government, eight circuit court of appeals. So smart, smart woman. And so she had a job, I could rely on that. And so, you know, through all of these things, we were able to pay the loan back. And then, know, all of a sudden there's a lot of money freed up when we don't have that loan payment anymore. But we got great terms on that, so was good.

Anthony Codispoti: As you look back at that time, what kind of changes did you make internally that are still paying off for you today?

Mitch Waks: Yeah, so here's what I learned from there. I mean, there's so many lessons out of that one story, but one of them is cash is king and you hear that all the time you cannot run out of cash and that means you need to be diligent when you when things are going well, I see a lot of entrepreneurs who overspend personally in other words, they're taking money out of the company and they're using it as a new down payment on a house or they want a new car, they want better clothes, and they start spending the money thinking it's always gonna come. And my experience shared to them is it's not always gonna come. And so you better have great cash reserves. You need to pay attention to the balance sheet, which is, I believe, more important than the income statement. because it really shows the overall big picture health of your company, whereas the income statement shows the immediate health of your company. And sometimes when you're running and gunning as a young entrepreneur, you don't see that. You don't see the long-term health. You just see, okay, what were my numbers last month? How do we do? Okay, we made a profit. Yeah, let's keep going. The balance sheet tells a truer story of what your company looks like. And I think too many young entrepreneurs ignore that. that part of it, of the financial statements until it's too late. So keep an eye on retained earnings, keep an eye on the value of your company, keep cash close and spend as little as you can to provide the kind of quality of goods or services that you want to provide, especially early on. But that advice really doesn't change. mean, be lean, you know, always. Spend less in your company, always. Make it look healthier. One of the lessons I learned was when thinking about an exit strategy, and young entrepreneurs should be thinking about it before they open up their first shop, their first whatever it is they do, their first sandwich shop, their first whatever it is, know your exit strategy. And when you realize that your company may trade

Anthony Codispoti: keg party, whatever it is.

Mitch Waks: on a multiple of four to five times your EBITDA, then you realize that every dollar you save is actually worth $5 when it's exit time. That's huge. Where else can you get that kind of leverage? The answer is nowhere. So I cut $1,000 of costs somewhere that is just excess. At exit time, that's worth $5,000 to me. Are you kidding me? I mean, think about that every time you spend anything and make sure you're going lean, lean, lean.

Anthony Codispoti: really powerful advice. I'm glad you gave voice to that. Because I do think, especially for folks who think that's too far off in the future, or they're not really set up for that sort of exit strategy, it's something that once they get closer to that finish line, they're wishing that they had really been thinking about, I probably wouldn't have expensed this to the company. I probably would have not taken that trip in that way. How about some advice on growth levers that have been particularly helpful to you?

Mitch Waks: Yeah, okay. So growth lovers, I think one of the best ways, and you've already alluded to it, is make sure you are not the smartest person in your network, right? Your network has to always be changing. And I think part of being a great entrepreneur that's looking for growth is being a great networking person and always looking to help others network. That always helps you when you're helping connect other people. Learn how to be a really great connector for others, and you'll be surprised how that comes back to help you. And keep growing your network with more and more successful people. And through them, you're going to learn about growth in ways that you just weren't thinking about. Or join a good peer group and ask them, you know, What do you guys see from the outside that I'm not seeing? So I want to say networking is key to growth. I want to say your peer group is key to growth if you've got your own board that you've put together. The next, another key to growth is looking for chaos. A good entrepreneur doesn't panic when the market goes crazy. They get a smile on their face without saying anything. And they say, OK, I got to find the opportunity in this chaos. Other people are going to scream the sky is falling. That's an opportunity. And that's what good entrepreneurs know. Don't.

Anthony Codispoti: Give us a specific example there, Mitch, because I think you're on to something here.

Mitch Waks: Yeah, okay. I'll give you an example personally. There was a moment in time when the unions were really threatening and starting to make some inroads into our population. Specifically the SIEU Service Employees International Union. That was the union that was coming into healthcare. They had unionized a lot of hospitals, but they needed more growth and they were now going after mom and pop operations. And once you got unionized, man, you lose a lot of control over your small business. And I'm not bashing unions by any stretch. It just changes all the dynamics of your company. Well, a lot of people were panicking. And so there was chaos in our community. And the powers that were causing the chaos were large. mean, you know, the pocketbook of the Service Employee International Union is huge. I mean, you know, it's like the teamsters of healthcare. And these are big, powerful people with big money and they don't play fair. None of them play fair. They played a kill and win. and they do and they know how to do it. And we're a bunch of small entrepreneurs just struggling to kind of do our own thing. And in this case, it was, you know, health care. And I smiled, I smirked maybe, and I got an attorney that specialized in unions and I let them do what they needed to protect the company. In the meantime, I crafted a and the letter was, dear fellow owner, times are tough right now. And it looks like with new increased regulations from the government, because there were new regulations coming down, with the shortage of caregivers and now the last straw being the incoming of unions to really tear us apart. Are you thinking about getting out? Is the stress too much? I understand. I'm trying to put together a group of people who are like-minded, who want to look for solutions. And or if you're just tired and it's time for you to exit, I want to talk to you about exiting. That letter produced so many phone calls and I started buying small companies. for pennies on the dollar. And the value was not just in the clientele they had, but it was in their salespeople, it was in their caregivers, because there was a shortage, I was able to come, and the biggest probably value they had was caregivers. And that began kind of an annual letter writing campaign that kind of hit on the worst chaos that was happening at the time. And I would send out letters to every home care company in my state and wait for the phone to ring. And whenever there was chaos, I'd send out another letter and I'd pick up another handful of small companies to purchase. So it's about.

Anthony Codispoti: That's fascinating. So the chaos for you was the changes that were taking place, specifically the one that you mentioned with the unions trying to come in and everybody being afraid about that. You use that as an opportunity to reach out to people that maybe knew your name. A lot of them probably didn't and say, hey, what do you think about this? Are you tired? Are you looking to maybe step aside? And you were able to get these folks that, you know.

Mitch Waks: They just said, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: You probably didn't have to even plant the seed. The seed was already there, but now you were their way out.

Mitch Waks: Right, and there was two major groups that would call me back. Entrepreneurs who were a lot older and just tired and ready to walk out. And the other group were people who had no idea what they were doing and they were scared and they just wanted to go back to work for somebody else. so, yeah. I was able to reach out, I formed coalitions. And many of the people I had conversations with never turned into a purchase opportunity. They turned though into a sounding board, a person that I was out there to help and say, hey, we're in this together, what should we do? And what can we do? And sometimes years later, I got a phone call, Mitch, remember me? We had lunch, you know, back in whatever 2005 and. I'm like, yeah, yeah, of course. How are you? Well, I'm getting ready to retire and I thought of you first. So I want to give you an opportunity if you're interested in purchasing my company or they'd call and just say, look, I'm just ready to transfer the company to you. You were so kind to me. You did so much. And that's yet another lesson that comes out of this is help all your competitors. Be there for them. Don't they're not your enemy. They're your friends. They're your future source of business potential.

Anthony Codispoti: Interesting.

Mitch Waks: I can't tell you how many people I have openly and warmly offered to help them when they were struggling. And I did it in earnest and I asked for nothing in return. But I built a community and I built a reputation. And years later, people would call and in a couple of instances, they just handed me the keys to their company and said, you know what, it's really not worth much, but take it. I want you to have it. You helped me. I'm ready to. step down, my kids want nothing to do with it, but I care about my employees. Will you take good care of them? And I'm like, of course we'll take good care of them. They said, I knew you would.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, there have been some fun threads throughout this interview, but I think one of the biggest ones that I've really enjoyed is sort of the emphasis on your peer group and the value of networking. And not just networking in the way of like, what can I get from this person? It's like, how can I add value? Right?

Mitch Waks: you have to go in with that attitude. You have to try to help others before they're ever going to trust you. And you have to give away that help wherever you can. In other words, this is not, I'm going to go into consulting. It's a new business line for me. I'm going to help people who don't know what they're doing. No, just go and help them if they're in your industry. Don't worry about, am I going to give away trade secrets and they're going to... you know, take away my business. No, if you're a good entrepreneur, you're a good business owner, if you have good culture and your employees are sticking with you, help others. Teach them what you've learned and it's gonna come back. It always comes back to help me. I've never charged a dime for helping others and it always comes back.

Anthony Codispoti: Mitch, I've just got one more question for you here today, but before I ask it, want to do two things. First, for all the listeners today, pause for just a moment, go to your podcast app that you're using right now, hit the follow button. I want you to continue to get more great interviews like we've had today with Mitch Wachs from Cooperative Home Care. And Mitch, I also want to let people know the best way either to get in touch with you directly or to follow your story or that of Cooperative Home Care. What is that?

Mitch Waks: Well, I'll tell you, they can reach out to me and I would offer to help young entrepreneurs or seasoned entrepreneurs with a particular problem. If they want to reach out, I don't charge anything. I'm putting myself out there as a consultant, but I'm happy to reach out to a fellow entrepreneur and offer some experience sharing. And I use that term because we don't talk about advice in... in EO and YEO. We talk about experience sharing. As a matter of fact, advice is forbidden. You learn that in your training. If you have no experience to share, you don't give your opinion. You just say, I'll pass when it's your turn at the round table in problem solving. So I will offer my experience sharing to anybody that wants to reach out to me. My email is Mitch at

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah.

Mitch Waks: and then my really long, ugly company name. Sorry about that, folks. I wish I had bought, you know, nurses.com or something back in the day, but it's cooperative home care, all one word squished together, .com. Mitch at cooperativehomecare.com.

Anthony Codispoti: And we'll include a link to that in the show notes for folks. It's very generous of you to offer your time like that. So last question for you.

Mitch Waks: And when the video is finished, I'll send them a free copy if they reach out to me.

Anthony Codispoti: there you go. Even more reason to connect with Mitch about that. Last question here for you, Mitch. You and I reconnect a year from now and you're really excited. You're celebrating something big. What's that big thing that you hope to be celebrating a year from now?

Mitch Waks: It used to be my next financial milestone of the company. I remember the first time I got to $1 million in sales. When I saw the papers, I got in the car, I rolled the window down, it was a beautiful day, I cranked the music on. I remember specifically I was listening to More Than a Feeling by Boston. It's a it's an old old song that most of your listeners are too young to know But it was that oh my god, I'm just jamming and I'm so happy now I reached a bunch of other milestones, you know greater than that along the way and now Where where I see? What are we what's gonna be exciting about year 40 when we hit that milestone? Lately my my staff has been doing

Anthony Codispoti: Great tune. Great tune.

Mitch Waks: these great giving back projects. It started with, I want to say our 30th anniversary. We were brainstorming, how do we celebrate? At first was, we're going to throw a party, we'll invite all our clients, we'll invite all our referring physicians, we'll invite. It was all about, let's just throw a party. Eventually, we kept going around. and somebody said, what if we did like a really great service project to go with that party? And that idea, the group, the people in the room at the time, as Lin Manuel says, you got to be in the room where it happens. And the people in the room at that moment were like, yeah, you know what, a service project. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, what if we did for 30 years, we did three big service projects. Okay, that's and then someone said well. we expand that? Could we make it 10, we have a whole year. What if we did 10 great service projects to help the community where all of our employees and caregivers and nurses did something for some other not-for-profit organization? And well, before you know it, a few meetings later, the party was scrapped altogether. I mean, that's just a waste and that's an ego thing. And we put egos aside. And we ended up that year, closing out that year doing 31, 32 service projects. So we quickly realized we could get to 30 if we tried. And we asked our field workers, our nurses, our caregivers, our bathers, our nutritionists, everybody, is there something that's important in your neighborhood and your community that we could help with? We pull our resources and come together. And before you know it, people started saying, hey, yeah, you know what? Our church, you know, needs new pews or whatever because they're I don't know what. And so we ended up, you know, hitting a 30 for 30 milestone. The end result is we had no party. didn't pat ourselves on the back, but we were giving back. And my goodness, I can't tell you how good that feels. So next year, a year from now, what I'd like to be maybe talking about is, you know, maybe we do 50 or 50 for 40. I don't know, but something. We find a way to give back again. And we continue from that 30th year to have a culture of doing service projects throughout the year.

Anthony Codispoti: 40 for 40?

Mitch Waks: but it was that specific campaign that was so memorable. We actually won a few awards that we didn't even apply for, but we're just got out what we were doing. And all of a sudden we're getting all this attention that we didn't even ask for. We didn't hire a publicist. We didn't hire, you know, anybody out there to, to sell us. We threw out the idea of a party and said, let's not, you know, toot our own horn. Let's give back.

Anthony Codispoti: from kick parties to 30 giving back projects in a year. Mitch Wax from Cooperative Home Care, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Mitch Waks: Yeah. It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you for letting me talk.

Anthony Codispoti: Folks, that's a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.