J OSH DAPKUS  Josh Dapkusmanages the local Bayada Home Health Care marketing group. I confess that I wasn’t really aware of this company, but the more I find out the more impressed I am. Bayada has a range of services to help those wanting caring, supportive health care in the home.

But this isn’t really about the company.  It’s about Josh’s journey to get to this destination.

Josh was strongly motivated by his grandmother’s experience with dementia. As you might imagine, this was stressful for him and the whole family. And it convinced him that he would love to spend his life helping others with these challenges.

With a degree in business development and marketing, Josh wasn’t especially motivated with his job doing insurance claims. So he leveraged this into doing insurance processing for hospice.

People noticed his considerable knack for making deeply human and caring connections, as I have as I’ve gotten to know him.

But hospice wasn’t exactly the right thing for him either. I have deep respect for the work they do based on the experience we had when my father was dying, but hospice tends to connect with people at the very final stages of life. It’s much more about caring and reducing suffering than taking any kind of preventative action.

This was a struggle for Josh, in his search for making a deep difference in peoples’ lives.

He was overjoyed to connect up with Bayada, a group which feeds his soul, gives him leadership opportunities, and makes a difference in the world. It’s a great example of the extraordinary results which can stem from:

  • A company which has a firm foundation in its values
  • Hiring someone who already has a deep alignment with those values
  • Giving employees the opportunity to bring their best into the workplace and to customers

Josh has a faith-filled philosophy and approach, while Bayada as an organization doesn’t tend to approach faith so explicitly. It’s not dissimilar to the relationship between my own faith and the philosophy of Small Fish.

What’s important, though, is that Bayada gives Josh the support and freedom to use what’s best for their patients. If a patient has a faith foundation, he’s able to help them using the most meaningful language and images. How great it is to use all the assets of this company’s employees!

Josh has been reaching out to other health care providers in the area in an effort to create a “badgeless” group who are all in service of those in the community. It’s an ambitious goal, but may well change the face of health care across this country. And those who want to focus more on competing than cooperating? Well, they might just get left behind. We’ll see.

Josh shared with me the challenges of having such a heavily emotional workload working with patients and his employees. To maintain his mental and spiritual balance, he turns off his work phone between Friday evening and Monday morning. He trusts his group to do the right thing.

This is a great example to all of us who feel we’re indispensable and end up with a 24×7 workweek!