Still Something to Lean On

When I first came home from Kessler Rehab 14 years ago, I had significant care needs. I could barely sit up in bed on my own, and I had to manage infusions, wounds, and a host of other ailments.

While my very good private health insurance provided nurses and caregivers for a couple of months to ease the transition, that support surprisingly ended even though my chronic care needs were just beginning. That’s when we faced the same problem millions of Americans face each year: Who do you trust to walk into your home and care for someone you love?

The frustrations Betsy and I ran into finding help convinced us there had to be a better way.

Team photo from a few years ago

Two years later, we opened LeanOnWe. We built it around an idea that seemed obvious because we’d needed it ourselves – families shouldn’t have to choose between affordability and peace of mind. Over the next 12 years, more than 2,000 families trusted us during some of the hardest times of their lives.

Earlier this month, Betsy and I decided it was time to step aside and sell LeanOnWe.

I’m not going to pretend it was easy. Twelve years of someone else’s worst situation becoming your life’s work does something to you. It wasn’t regret when we signed the sale papers, and it isn’t now. Maybe it’s wistfulness, like handing over something we’d stopped thinking of as a company and started seeing as a house where you raised your kids. LeanOnWe wasn’t really a job for us. It was a room we lived in for 12 years: worn spots on the floor from pacing, from calls at night and on weekends, and from helping families who called us in crisis and hung up relieved. We’re not living in that house anymore, yet we still know where those worn spots are.

We received interest from a few buyers, but when Mike Lasday and Denise Kuhbier raised their hands, Betsy and I knew it was the right path. They’ve both been with LeanOnWe since the outset. Mike co-founded LeanOnWe with us and has been at the center of our operations, while Denise joined shortly after we started. She has helped families navigate impossible decisions with patience and compassion.

Mike and Denise know what LeanOnWe stands for because they helped make it what it is.

Mike, Denise, Betsy and me

Here’s what still gets me, even now. It isn’t 2,000 families in the past tense. Someone’s daughter is about to call LeanOnWe, scared about her father’s fall risk, trying to figure out how to trust a stranger with the most important person in her life. That’s not “we” anymore, but part of me will always feel it is. I know Mike and Denise will do right by her, as they’ve done for every family before her and for every family who is just a phone call away from reaching out to LeanOnWe.

This isn’t the first time life has asked me to begin anew.

When Lehman Brothers collapsed, years of accumulated restricted stock became worthless. In the difficult months that followed, I restarted at Barclays. Over the next few years, I built a larger business than the one I’d left behind. Then a driver fell asleep at the wheel and barreled into my bicycle, and suddenly there would be no rebuilding a career. I had to rebuild a life.

LeanOnWe grew out of that rebuilding. Somehow, the endings that feel permanent never turned out to be.

Selling LeanOnWe doesn’t feel like walking away from something. It feels like making room for something that’s been growing alongside it. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself writing and speaking more, and spending more time thinking about resilience and reinvention – not just my own, but the questions we all face when life stops following the script.

I’ve written a chapter for an anthology on thoughtful leadership, coming out in September, and my own book manuscript is finally done. I’m speaking mostly to business and financial audiences these days, though those conversations have taken me into healthcare, schools, and senior communities as well. Different rooms, same conversation.

As for Betsy, she’s still deep in the transition at LeanOnWe. Ask her what comes next, and she’ll smile and say she has a few ideas beyond the tasks she had easily put off when she could use work as an excuse – cleaning out closets, digitizing boxes and boxes of old photos, reorganizing the garage. She’ll figure it out.

Fourteen years ago, I came home needing help I didn’t know how to find, and that search became LeanOnWe. This week, that problem is still being solved – just not by us.

I don’t yet know what comes next, but I’ve started from less than this before.