By Thomas A. Parmalee
When Becky Reel talks about home care, she doesn’t begin with market share, payor mix or EBITDA. She begins with her grandfather.
His death following what she describes as neglect in a nursing home altered the trajectory of her life.
Her mother launched a home care agency in Arlington Heights, Illinois, naming it For Papa’s Sake Home Care for Families in his honor. It was a mission-driven response to grief.
At the time, Becky was building a conventional corporate career, grinding it out in media and production, along with doing stints in marketing at companies like Cars.com, Grubhub and Yodle, earning an MBA and doing senior-level analytics work along the way.
But home care “found her,” she said.
What began as a plan to stabilize her mother’s business turned into a decade-long transformation.
From a Personal Mission to Market Leader
Becky has great memories of her grandfather.
“His life was about making people happy and making people laugh,” she said. “And the end of his story did not do him justice.”
She has great admiration for her mom, who started the home care agency, but she was concerned when she saw her struggling to make it profitable.
“She had a great mission … but the agency wasn’t being run like a business,” she said. “So, I joined in 2014 and naively thought I’d quickly turn it around and leave … and 10 years later, I was still there. I just loved it so much – I had found my calling.”
Her stepfather, Rob, also played a major role in helping the agency – and the family unit – find its footing.
“My mom remarried Rob when I was 20, and he became such an important part of not just our family but the agency itself,” Becky said. “He jumped in with both feet and helped build something alongside us. When I talk about For Papa’s Sake being a family business, he’s a big part of that story. I love that man.”
Sometimes, people hear that Becky’s mom was a single parent and assume that is the whole story – but it’s not, she said. “Rob came into our lives and changed everything,” she said. “He was all in on the agency and all in on our family.”
But the agency would have never turned a corner if not for Becky’s work ethic and defining realization: Purpose alone is not a strategy.
At the beginning, processes were inconsistent. Branding lacked cohesion. Financial controls weren’t optimized. Growth was reactive rather than engineered.
She approached the agency the way a product marketer would approach a launch:
- Clarify the value proposition.
- Systematize operations.
- Build a differentiated brand.
- Measure everything.
The result was extraordinary.
Under her leadership, the agency achieved 300% year-over-year growth and was ultimately ranked the #1 home care agency in North America by Activated Insights. In 2023, the company was sold to private equity.
But her story isn’t simply one of growth. It’s a testament to the value of setting up efficient systems.
“Had I not built a successful infrastructure to help run the agency, it would have crumbled,” she said, recalling a period when she was pregnant with her second child while her husband underwent open-heart surgery. (She reports that he’s now in great health and thriving.)
Her hard work also helped her mom – “a fierce and strong woman” who had the mettle to start a business in her 50s – avoid losing everything she had plowed into the business.
While Becky does not envision owning an agency again, she is immensely proud of all she accomplished.
“I worked in corporate for 15 years, but I never felt fulfilled like I do in this industry,” she said. “I was so in love with helping so many different people. I was able to help individuals stay at home, so they could help their loved ones. I also had the opportunity to help caregivers with their livelihoods.”
Founding Reel Home Care Consulting
In January 2023, Becky launched Reel Home Care Consulting. Rather than seeking to build the largest consulting firm in the sector, she’s chosen depth over volume.
“I knew I could make a bigger impact on a wider scale by starting a consulting firm,” she said. “Now, I get to help owners find their purpose and implement best practices.”
She values being able to “dive deep” with each client. “We are like a partner rather than a consultant who just gives them ideas,” she said.
Several of her clients, in fact, are like her mom – they’re embarking on a second career as a business owner.
Her model is partnership-based. She and her business partner, Kristyn Gemzsi, who serves as the firm’s client experience manager, selectively engage agencies at three primary stages:
- Startups – Structuring marketing, technology, pricing, and brand positioning from day one.
- Plateaued agencies ($500K–$1M revenue range) – Rebuilding processes and margin structure to unlock the next growth phase.
- Exit-ready owners – Cleaning up P&Ls, strengthening margins, diversifying payor mix and preparing three years of defensible data for buyers.
For agency owners seeking to navigate a transition, she noted that potential buyers want a minimum of three years of clean financials, margin discipline, diversified payor sources and a leadership team capable of running the agency without the founder, she said.
“If your growth is dependent on you, buyers will see that as risk,” she said.
That’s why “you need to have a team you can delegate to,” she said.
While every agency she works with is different, what connects them is each owner cares deeply about clients and staff, she said. “A lot of them spent years grinding for someone else and finally said. ‘Enough, I want to build something that’s mine, something with purpose,’” she said. “My job is to match that energy and give them the tools and the confidence to get wherever they’re trying to go.”
She has a variety of tools in her toolbelt to choose from as she seeks to advance her mission.
“I built an agency, scaled it, and sold it,” she said. “I’ve lived every stage of this journey. That’s why I love this work so much. I’m not coaching from the sidelines. I’ve been in the trenches, and I know what it takes. And there’s nothing better than watching someone who was tired of building someone else’s dream finally build their own.”
The 5 REEL Principles
Becky doesn’t just talk about improving home care businesses — she has built a philosophy around it.
Over time, she distilled what she learned from operators, caregivers and clients into what she calls the 5 REEL Principles, a framework designed to help agencies grow without losing sight of why they exist in the first place.
At the heart of the model is empowered ownership, encouraging leaders to set healthy boundaries, delegate with intention and build teams strong enough to lead alongside them. Equally important is compassionate caregiver management, a people-first approach rooted in respect — because, in Becky’s view, organizations that truly value caregivers are far more likely to keep them.
She also emphasizes seamless processes and systems, helping agencies replace daily chaos with clarity and consistency. Growth, she believes, should never come at the expense of personal fulfillment, which is why purpose-driven growth focuses on scaling — or even exiting — in ways that align with an owner’s values and long-term goals.
But it is the final principle that Becky returns to again and again – the one that focuses on delivering an exceptional client experience.
For Becky, survival in today’s home care environment depends on adopting a hospitality mindset — one that treats both clients and caregivers as people deserving of thoughtful, intentional service.
“We dive into systems and processes,” she said. “We focus on driving growth … and ultimately, one of the biggest things we focus on is providing an exceptional client experience, which also goes for caregivers. They need to have an exceptional experience, too.”
Part of what makes her consulting work resonate so strongly with agency owners is the role she chooses to play in their journey. Becky doesn’t position herself as a distant adviser offering occasional guidance. Instead, she becomes an active partner in their progress — someone who helps translate plans into action and keeps momentum moving forward.
“I push to make sure you are successful,” she said, describing the accountability she brings to every engagement.
Home Care Is Not Staffing – It’s Hospitality.
Becky argues that too many agencies think like staffing companies. In her view, home care must reposition itself as a hospitality-driven service.
Caregivers must also feel valued, and many times they do not, which helps explain staffing shortages throughout the industry.
Caregivers do not typically leave for a dollar or two more per hour, she stressed. They leave when they feel like a number, communication is inconsistent, schedules are chaotic and leadership is absent.
Agency owners thrive when they offer structured referral programs driven by current caregivers and hire people who are truly interested in serving others.
They also must be paid well, which is why Becky focused on serving clients who paid from their own funds – also called “private pay” – which gave her the ability to charge appropriate rates for the value she was providing.
While buyers usually want to see a mix of payor sources, she explained that government reimbursement constraints often put a ceiling on the wages you can offer caregivers.
This can harm the business, as low pay attracts lower-quality candidates, which hurts families in the end.
“Your caregivers should be as much a priority as your clients – and they should know that,” she said.
The Emotional Cost of Selling
When Becky sold her agency in 2023 — on her mother’s birthday — it was far more difficult than she anticipated.
For a period after the transaction, she struggled with her sense of identity. The agency had become synonymous with who she was. With two young children at home and a noncompete restricting her from serving Illinois clients immediately, she had to find herself again.
It took six months to see she could enjoy a life beyond owning her agency, she said.
That emotional arc became central to her book.
“Borrowed Time”: Memoir Meets Business Manual
On April 16, Becky will have a launch party for her book, “Borrowed Time: What Home Care Taught Me About Living,” which will be available through major retailers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The book blends memoir and operational insight, covering topics such as the challenges she faced in childhood, navigating personal loss, and delivering insights on building business infrastructure.
In many ways, it is a love letter to her mother, who started her home care business in a bid to find meaning amid a profound sense of grief.
But it is also a blueprint for agency owners who feel overwhelmed, isolated or unsure of what they are building beyond revenue.
“I talk about a lot of different pieces of my childhood that helped me to build resilience – and how I used that in the business,” Becky said.
Some of the topics were uncomfortable to delve into, she admits. “But I wanted people to know we all have ‘stuff’ we’ve dealt with … you either use it to victimize yourself or you use it as fuel to make the world better.”
The focus on hospitality is a critical theme, she said, noting that she wants to change the mindset of what it means to own an agency. “We should completely delight clients and caregivers – roll out the red carpet whenever you can,” she said. “The focus should be more on hospitality than home care.”
She also hopes one audience in particular finds value in her book: any entrepreneur who has ever felt broken, alone, or as if they cared too much. “I wanted them to know that they are not alone,” she said.
The Loneliness of Ownership — and the Dinner Table Solution
Despite outward success, Becky said owning an agency can – at times – be isolating.
She was responsible for clients in crisis, caregivers under strain and families navigating loss. But who was supporting her?
After establishing her consulting firm, remembering how much she struggled emotionally led her to create her dinner series for agency owners.
The intimate gatherings are held around the country. Home care leaders speak candidly about margins, burnout, staffing, exit strategy and the emotional weight of providing care to so many.
“The dinner series is really an authentic way to come together with agency owners and talk about a variety of issues,” Becky said.
While a Feb. 22 session of the Dinner Series in Austin, Texas is sold out, there are a limited number of seats available for a May 20 session in Orlando, Florida.
What Becky Hopes Owners Ultimately Build
When agency owners look back, Becky hopes they don’t simply measure revenue growth or valuation multiples.
She hopes they can say:
- They built something sustainable.
- They empowered caregivers.
- They created systems that protected their families.
- They made clients feel genuinely cared for.
In her words, home care is not going away. Demand will persist — even in recessionary cycles. But not every agency will survive. Those that do will operate with clarity, margin discipline and a hospitality-driven culture.
Becky’s journey — from grieving granddaughter to award-winning operator to industry partner — underscores a simple but powerful truth: In home care, a heart for service and systems and processes are essential for success.
For owners feeling plateaued, burned out or uncertain about their next step, Becky offers a free discovery call. Her pitch is straightforward: If you are going to invest years of your life in this industry, build it intentionally — and build it so it can thrive without consuming you.
