HEALTH AND WEALTH IS ALWAYS GREEN

An entrepreneur presents a memoir of switching careers.

In this short overview of his professional life, author P. describes how he and his brother, Omar, entered the elderly care business with A Plus Home Care Services in Louisiana, providing outpatient services and helping patients with chronic illnesses. The siblings made sure to concentrate on business basics: “In today’s world, social media and online advertising dominate the marketing landscape,” he writes. “However, word of mouth was the most powerful tool for getting new clients.” Through hard work and a focus on professionalism, the brothers grew their enterprise and found success, adding more employees and opening a second office. Eventually, P. was a millionaire, he says, without ever losing his sense of empathy: “In my case, understanding the needs of clients with chronic diseases was essential,” he writes. “I took time to sit with them and listen to them.” Then the business was unexpectedly raided by the police. “It was a list of false accusations,” P. writes, apparently involving bookkeeping irregularities. Although all charges were soon dropped, the author used the incident as a reason to switch fields, moving to the medical marijuana industry, which in Louisiana was a market with “high demand and low competition,” he says. He went through the difficult task of getting licensed and soon started a new chapter in his business life. P. narrates all of his entrepreneurial adventures in this remembrance with a winning combination of humility and bright optimism. At the same time, he doesn’t paper over any mistakes he made, and he always stresses the deeper lessons he learned from them; the most important one, he says, is that “money is the byproduct of your excellence, and you will not excel if your heart and mind are not into it.” His insistence on the importance of listening to people and building strong teams will especially resonate with other entrepreneurs.

A brief but energetic tale of two startup businesses.