Business Spotlight: Bringing Health Home

Twenty years ago this September, husband-and-wife Jim Goff and Susan Haralson started a home health care business from their living room. They got the company off the ground with seven employees and five patients.

Today, Premier Home Health Care Inc. employs 750 across 12 offices statewide and serves 2,500 clients. The company’s Joplin office was destroyed in the May 2011 tornado, and Haralson said the company has yet to select a new location for that market.

And though Goff and Haralson divorced 12 years ago, they remain business partners in this venture, offering a range of services such as nursing, housekeeping and laundry, meal preparation and dietary assistance, live-in companions, and personal care such as bathing and dressing.

“He’s the financial guru, and I’m the marketer,” Haralson says, noting she manages day-to-day operations and Goff handles the bookkeeping from his home in Utah, where he is now semiretired. “We do completely different things within the company, which makes it much easier.”

Prior to starting Premier Home, Haralson says Goff was a midlevel manager with Zenith, and she was an on-air reporter for KSPR-33, working as Susan Mulcahy. She also spent a stint as a radio disc jockey for KWTO station Rock 99.

With Zenith moving its Springfield production operations to Mexico, and Haralson looking for a new job following a change in KSPR’s ownership, the duo began exploring business opportunities.

Haralson and Goff responded to a newspaper ad posting for sale a small live-in companion company named Senior Care in Urbana. After meeting with the owner, Haralson says the couple took a leap of faith, kick-starting Premier Home in Springfield.

“She told us, ‘This was a blue-sky opportunity.’ She said we could take this back to Springfield, and it would explode. And it did,” Haralson says, adding she and Goff grew the company to 30 clients by the end of its first year. “She sold us the business, and within a year, we had it paid off and our first office open on East Kearney.”

Its 2011 revenues exceeded $5 million, which Haralson says was roughly flat compared to recent years. This year, she expects revenues to climb by 5 percent. She says the Springfield office recorded a jump in summer business after Mercy Home Health-Springfield discontinued an old Medicaid waiver program that stemmed from the system’s 1995 purchase of a local division of the Visiting Nurse Association.

Haralson says the company accepts Medicaid and private insurance payments, but it has not served Medicare clients since system reforms were enacted about seven years ago. “I’m so proud of the fact that we take care of people who are very poor and people who have a lot of money,” she says.

While costs for services vary depending on patient needs, Haralson says the company charges roughly $18 per hour for in-home assisted nursing care and between $200 and $250 per day for a live-in attendant.

Lisa Griffin, a scheduling coordinator for Premier Home, says she joined the company five years ago after caring for her parents at home – her mother fought a long battle with Parkinson’s disease and her father struggled with cancer – for about four years. Griffin, a former phlebotomist, says she still wanted to serve others after her parents died, and found that opportunity at Premier Home.

“It is very personal for me,” says Griffin, who serves as a point of contact for clients seeking services. “I know firsthand what they are going through.”

After building up the business to now cover 100 Missouri counties – with offices concentrated in the southwest and northeast parts of the state – Haralson says she’s recently sought opportunities to engage in the community.

“I had to travel a lot during the first 15 years,” Haralson says. “The last five, I’ve had a chance to really get involved in the community, which has been nice.”

Haralson has been active in the Ozark Chamber of Commerce, Sunrise Rotary Club and Finley River Community Foundation.

Karen Miller, president of the Finley River Community Foundation and a track coach at Ozark Junior High, has known and worked with Haralson for years – beginning with Haralson’s high school days when Miller was her coach.

Haralson is a four-year member of the Finley River board, which is an affiliate of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks, and she’s volunteered to coach high jumpers on Miller’s Ozark Junior High track team for three seasons.

Miller says Haralson has a passion for people, and her work through Premier Home is in-line with the person Miller has always known.

“I think care for other people may be what drives her,” Miller says. “The focus is not on Susan.”[[In-content Ad]]