Friday, September 11, 2026, marks six years in business for Ovation Home Care in Gainesville, FL.
That’s six years of caring for people who deserve our honor, respect, and dignity.
Six years of consultations, assessments, bedside visits, reassessments, and investment in our client’s lives.
And six years of managing all the demands, expectations, and requirements of running a Florida home health agency.
Looking back makes me think about the people with whom we’ve connected.
The Caregivers
You might think I would place our clients at the top of the list, that it might send the wrong message if they were anything less than number one.
But the fact is, Terri (my wife and cofounder) and I are only two people. We couldn’t possibly have had the impact we’ve had since 2020, if it was just the two of us working with clients (although we both have put in many hours doing just that).
Our home health aides and CNAs are the hands and feet of Ovation Home Care. They help clients shower safely, change their incontinence products with dignity, eat well, and keep them company while their family members are elsewhere—whether across town or across the country.
Terri would even say they’re our eyes and ears. Who else sees the clients once they’ve stopped trying to make a good impression on clinical professionals? (This phenomenon is what Terri calls the White Coat Syndrome.)
When their guard has dropped and they reveal just how much trouble they have with a simple everyday task, when they keep repeating the same thing throughout a six-hour shifty that they didn’t repeat during a 60-minute assessment, it’s our caregivers who observe and document and reach out to our office stay so that we can take action.
Our Clients
We’ve had some memorable client cases. Some cases have lasted years. Others, just days. But that’s the nature of what we do. We help people age in place. When a client is able to do that right up until the very end, that’s a success. I never realized that until we launched Ovation Home Care.
I have my own memory of working with clients. It mostly happened during the first couple of years when we were challenged to find caregivers who met our standards. Fortunately, I’m not just an owner; I’m a home health aide. So I’d often fill in when needed.
I remember one client in particular. Let’s call her Mrs. Z. She weighed all of 70 pounds, sopping wet. And she was on hospice due to decades and decades of smoking and the resulting lung disease. We didn’t have anyone to work the Saturday shift with her so it was covered by yours truly for several weekends.
Mrs. Z could be mean. It seemed that I could never do anything right. But I persevered. I’d do my tasks and when I had a break, I’d sit down and watch TV with her.
One morning toward the end, out of nowhere, she said to me in her thick European accent, “Brent, I want you to know I really enjoy our time together. And I know that I can be mean sometimes, but it’s just because I’m in so much pain.”
She passed away about six weeks later.
In this business, you need to have a thick skin and know that you’re going to be tested because people are suffering. The suffering might be physical, as with Mrs. Z, or it might be the emotional angst of losing your grip on independence.
At the end of the day, every one of us has to care. Like, legitimately care. Give a darn. Feel their pain, their worry, their fear. That’s when real connection begins.
Their Adult Children
To call adult children of aging parents the Sandwich Generation is wrong; they’re members of the Tug o’ War generation. In fact, they’re the rope, being pulled this way and that.
Let me tell you, that rope is tired and worn thin. And it can be a little bristly. Sometimes, adult children have a knee-jerk reaction to an aging parent’s poor decisions. They’re incredulous and exasperated at what they see from mom or dad.
What I’ve discovered is that these individuals are grieving. Mom or dad have changed. They’re not the same person anymore. They’re not the rock you’ve leaned on since you were a child. And that loss brings about grief and all its phases: denial, anger, guilt, etc.
I’ve had countless conversations over the years with adult children trying to balance keeping their parents safe with respecting their dignity. It ain’t easy.
But when it works right, Ovation Home Care becomes an extended family of sorts, We come alongside the client’s children in caring for mom or dad. We are there for their loved ones when they can’t be.
What We Are Celebrating This Year
A few years ago, we put our original mission statement to be with all its verbose corporate-speak. We adopted a new statement, one that could be our north star:
Ovation Home Care exists to revolutionize private duty care by providing a client experience so thoughtful that every client and family member feels like a VIP.
I make no claims that we achieve this outcome 100% of the time, but it gives us something to aspire to, a standard around which we can unite.
So this year, we’re celebrating steps in the direction of our mission statement.
Like when one of our caregivers heard his client mention late on a Friday afternoon how it was the client’s wife’s birthday on Sunday and he hadn’t gotten her anything. That Sunday, the caregiver picked up a simple bouquet of flowers at the grocery store and surreptitiously delivered them to his client to give to his spouse.
Or how Terri and I went to visit a longtime client who was facing her final days one Sunday after church. We picked her up a chocolate milkshake (because we knew how much she liked chocolate) and dropped by the client’s home. As we stood around her bed, I commented on the beautiful, soft throw blanket warming up the client. I figured one of her grandchildren had brought it. No. It was our caregiver who thought to bring her client an extra blanket.
Or the funeral for a client who eventually succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. The client’s main caregiver had to rent a car to get to the funeral. She was upset because she was going to be late. But when she entered the church, a family member cried, “There she is. That’s her, the one we were telling you about.” That caregiver got a standing ovation because of the connection she had fostered with the client and family.
This is what we’re celebrating. It’s not about numbers or milestones or anything else. It’s about the impact we’ve made on clients and their families. And you know what
We’re not done.
