057: Ruth Ullmann | My Elder Care Journey

Ruth Ullmann, founder of My Elder Care Journey, is a business consultant and coach who believes that no one should have to choose between the business they've created and the loved ones they care for.

Successful consultant

For more than 20 years, Ruth has helped companies, groups and individuals achieve their business objectives. After earning a B.S. in business and her MBA, Ruth lived on the West Coast where she worked as an internal consultant to large corporations, doing both domestic and international problem solving.

When her parents began to need help, Ruth moved back home to the Midwest, where she spent the next 14 years as a caregiver. She gave up her consulting business but her subsequent experience led her to create a new business that she grew for over ten years; helping small businesses, entrepreneurs and consultants realign their businesses to thrive while caring for aging parents.

Ruth naively believed that her education and experienced had prepared her for managing just about any difficult or complicated situation.

Challenged care giver

Ultimately, Ruth helped her parents successfully achieve their greatest wish: to grow old in the home they built and loved. What she never considered was what it would cost her to achieve this goal. Or that there would even be a cost.

During the last seven years of her parents' lives, their health declined more rapidly and their need for assistance increased. Even with the help of a home care company, Ruth was not able to focus and to deliver high quality dependable results to her clients. Her parents' health was too unpredictable. Her clients couldn't put their businesses on hold and Ruth couldn't ask them to do that. She lost so many clients that her consulting business dried up.

Fallout

On top of this development, the stress, the lack of sleep and the duration of her circumstances seriously impacted Ruth's health. Her income and savings were significantly reduced. Among the many other challenges were making sound decisions with limited time to research options and process information; processing multiple changes in rapid succession; an overwhelming volume of information with little time to filter and vet its accuracy or relevance; juggling care giving, managing a business and managing two households; and understanding and navigating the many companies and government entities that support elder care.

Later, Ruth learned that the negative impact on a family caregiver's health, finances and savings she experienced is all-too-common. She believed there had to be an easier way for the more than 10 million adult children of aging parents to navigate elder care without recreating the wheel and juggling or damaging businesses, careers, and families.

Ruth's Solution

She began doing research. She started by interviewing all the companies that support elder care to understand how that industry operates. She was overwhelmed by the generosity, candor and advice that she received. She made a leap of faith, narrowed the mountains of information that were available and, from that work, a process emerged that helped Ruth change the way families navigate elder care.

Today, Ruth is dedicated to helping make her clients' elder care journeys easier, less overwhelming, and better informed. She provides people with unbiased, straightforward information to help them make better decisions. She feels honored to help individuals, small businesses, entrepreneurs and consultants adjust their businesses to thrive without them for a period of time while they care for aging loved ones.

Ruth has been featured on Fox, CBS, NBC & ABC News.