Kindly give our readers an introduction to your business. Please include what your business is all about, in which city you are located, and if you have offices in multiple locations/ cities.
Superior Hospice, Inc. is one of Minnesota’s newest hospices offering compassionate, high quality, innovative care to individuals who are facing their end-of-life journey. As a patient centered, care-giver supportive agency, we will meet our patients and their loved ones any place they call home. This can be a residential home or senior living community like Independent Living, Assisted Living, or Memory Care. Superior Hospice focuses on person-centered care, developing an individualized care plan based on the client’s needs and goals. Our staff are available for support 24 hours a day, seven days a week in order to meet our patients’ needs as their condition changes. Each patient and their caregiver receive support from a team of professionals who care for the whole person. That team includes doctors, nurse case managers, CNAs, social workers, spiritual care coordinators, therapists, and volunteers. We want to ensure maximum patient and caregiver autonomy so that the patient can be in control of their own hospice journey. Our treatment plans are thorough and include equipment and medications that relate to the patient’s terminal diagnosis. We know individuals and families may need service quickly, and we can respond quickly beginning a patient’s hospice journey as soon as they are ready. Our service area is the Greater Twin Cities area including 21 counties from St. Cloud, MN down south to the Iowa / Minnesota border.
Kindly give us a brief description of yourself (it should include your brief educational or entrepreneurial background and list some of your major achievements).
I have been in ministry for 25 years in the Twin Cities serving in small to large churches. I got my Masters of Divinity at Bethel Theological Seminary in St. Paul, MN. I have worked mostly with adult formation. In every church I have been involved in pastoral care. I also am a Spiritual Director trained at Christos Center for Spiritual Formation. These experiences have prepared me well for my work with Superior Hospice as a Spiritual Care Coordinator. I have learned to approach each person with deep curiosity and respect. I have learned to assess what the spiritual work and needs are for the person or people I am called to work with. I love meeting families and patients where they are at and helping them chart a spiritual and emotional course ahead for them. The goal is that they come through this difficult final journey in life finding peace and sacred memories to treasure. The work might have to do with: prayer, forgiveness, reconciliation, coming to terms with difficult choices, celebrating achievements, remembering, and making sense of the story of their lives. I get to serve as a sounding board, counselor, and sometimes guide as people do the deeply spiritual work of dying and caring for the dying.
What inspired you to (start a new business venture) or (make significant changes in an existing business)? How did the idea for your business come about?
Superior Hospice was in its infancy with our director Andrea Kussmaul working on all the clinical work of forming a new hospice. She did an amazing job of starting from scratch our little venture. I worked from scratch on the volunteer side of the hospice while an experienced Chaplain worked on developing the chaplain role as well as the bereavement role. He left for another opportunity, and I took over the reins of the spiritual care side and bereavement. It has been a pleasure to build on what he designed. In order for our hospice to offer the kind of holistic support that our patients and families need, we had to make sure the Spiritual Care and Bereavement are both fully functioning and fully responsive to the hearts and souls we were privileged to serve. We now have 3 chaplains on board working with close to 70 living patients. We are also caring for over 100 bereaved families who are processing the loss of their loved one.
My favorite innovation is our Butterfly Release Memorial event. We invite all patient’s families and our staff to come to a local park as we release a butterfly in the name of each of the people we have lost this year. It is a chance for our families to grieve in a beautiful and hopeful way and to see some of the staff they have come to love and rely on. It’s a powerful event of celebration, grief, and healing.
What three pieces of advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?
It’s never too late to start something new. I began this new career in my mid-50s, and am enjoying building something that will last long after I’m gone.
Sometimes you choose to be an entrepreneur, and sometimes you are chosen to be an entrepreneur. I did not set out to build a new business but found myself connecting well with our founder and I dove in and did research and found myself being at the beginning of something exciting and helpful to the world.
Feeling overwhelmed is all part of the process. Somedays I go home and feel like I am just barely keeping my head above water. It’s normal that at the beginning of new things there is some chaos and a big learning curve. Breathe through the feelings and notice that, somehow, you have enough.
What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur?
humility, hunger to learn, team building skills
How many hours do you work a day on average?
Pretty consistently I work between 9-12 hours. Depends on what is emerging. I definitely take my days off. Rest is just as important as hard work.
To what do you most attribute your success?
The founder of the hospice, Andrea Kussmaul, who has built the organization has always believed in me. She affirmed my gifts and trusted me to build and lead. She is frequent in her praise, and has an open door to talk over issues and work on things together. I could not have done this without her.
How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?
We have treated every patient as though they are our only patient. That dedication and service has created a wonderful network of referrals. We also try hard to partner well with facilities coming alongside their care. They will reward that partnership by mentioning us to families when the time is right.
Another is our team of community liaisons. Our community liaisons work with community staff, help explain services to clients and their families, assist with paperwork and documentation, and share additional resources that allow them to get the services they need for their end of life journey.
Where did your organization’s funding/capital come from and how did you go about getting it? How did you obtain investors for your venture?
We were started by our larger parent company Home Health Inc. They wanted a way to take care of their patients through all the phases of their lives rather than hand off patients to a hospice they don’t know. Their faithful investment as we formed and got on our feet is beginning to pay back dividends monetarily, but also
What is the best way to achieve long-term success?
Remember the things that got you there. For us, serving our patients and families well and having them be able to have a positive experience in the midst of an often sad and tiring time is core to us. Not losing sight of that is the business gets more and more complicated.
We also believe in hiring top notch employees. We just won’t settle for warm bodies on our team. We will suffer a little in order to wait for the right people and build teams that can trust each other because of the high caliber of the people we are working with. Our recruiting company is excellent.
Where do you see yourself and your business in 5 – 10 years?
I think that Superior Hospice will grow to have area specific hospice teams that work together and do IDG together. Those teams will function in real strength as they will share conversation and care regularly for patients. The teams may not know each other as well, but will have collegial relationships through our all-company meetings and ad hoc consulting with other teams for problem solving. I think that Superior Hospice will have a care facility where we can care for patients on hospice whose home and care team are just not up to the rigorous work of end-of-life care at home. I will serve as the lead chaplain doing care of other chaplains as well as care for other Bereavement Coordinators who are supporting our families after death.
Excluding yours, what company or business do you admire the most?
I have heard a lot about Grace Hospice which seems to have the same passion for individualized patient care as we do. Their model is to keep patient loads right around 50 and to open a new hospice when numbers go over that. They do an excellent job with patients and while growing new offices they keep it small enough that connection and care between staff and for patients continues at a high level. They seem to have avoided that “undisciplined reach for more” that the book Good to Great warns about.
How important have good employees been to your success?
As I mentioned above, hiring good employees is critical to longevity. Good employees who feel valued and cared-for by our hospice are going to give patients great care. Superior Hospice is the nurses, social workers, aides, therapists, and chaplains that it sends out to people’s homes. If those employees are not doing well, then the hospice is not doing well.
How long do you stick with an idea before giving up?
When it comes to ideas, I think of front burners and back burners. There are ideas to pursue immediately, and that is put them on the front burner. If an idea begins to flounder in implementation, I often move it to the back burner to simmer. I think more about it. Research more about it. Whatever caused the idea to suddenly become impossible, I want to see what happens. Sometimes it’s just about timing. Some ideas on the back burners eventually get taken off the stove as new ideas may take more prominence or solve the issues that other ideas were poking at. Ideas that were not meant to be feel like they kind of naturally go away.
What motivates you?
I am highly motivated by intangibles. I love that feeling of accomplishment when you set your sights on doing something and it happens. I also love to see the spontaneous things that I could not have planned happen just because I showed up and offered what I or the company had. Those moments of accomplishment and sheer grace make this demanding work, deeply satisfying.
What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve made in business?
Sometimes I misjudge the importance of learning a skill or solving a problem. Because so much happens in a day, I tend to judge quickly what are priorities and go with those initial assessments. It would be good if I were able to reflect at the end of the day or week about some of those rapid decisions and make course corrections where I seem to have missed something.
What makes you happy?
Being a part of a team that is doing something really good in the world. I love the community of hard work and fun, and the wonder of making a difference for other people. Sometimes it feels like there is nothing but bad news, and it helps so much to be part of good news for others. I am driven by meaningful connection to people. Friendship and camaraderie is one of the greatest joys in my life. Whatever I am doing, it is always better if I can do it with friends.
Business Name
Superior Hospice, Inc.
Contact Name
Jonna Fantz
Business Phone
763-334-7993
Website
https://superiorhospice.net/