Patrick Mish’s Entrepreneurial Pivot

The Mish residence is well stocked with books. One reason for this is because Patrick and his wife Devon are big readers. Another reason is that Devon is also a romance writer. The first reason yielded their first entrepreneurial endeavor in 2006.

Patrick was spending nights and weekends thinking about what kind of company he could start. There was something happening in the book world that caught his eye: e-readers. “The e-reader market was just a nascent market at best at that point.” But the product reminded Patrick of iPods and their many accoutrements.

“I was like, ‘Oh, I wonder if these e-readers will catch on. And maybe there’s this opportunity for great accessories for e-readers as well.’” Patrick’s instinct was right. Together with a manufacturer in China to whom Patrick had been introduced and who had become a friend, he created prototypes for e-reader accessories. “I literally sketched the first prototype out on a piece of paper and faxed it to him, and didn’t hear anything back. And then two weeks later a prototype shows up on my doorstep of this cover for a Sony reader…”

The timing was great; Amazon was about to release the Kindle. However, another thing that was not great but put Patrick’s product in higher demand was that Kindle radio-frequency emissions were high enough for the FCC to recommend an outer shell of some kind be used with the device. “This all happened very last minute for Amazon, as they were about to launch the device, so they scrambled to put together and design a case for the Kindle, and the case that they ended up designing was not great, and Kindles were falling out…”

The third thing was the biggest. Oprah Winfrey had Jeff Bezos on her show. The audience gift that episode was a Kindle. “So, our sales went from like $15,000 a year to $75,000 a year to $1.2 million to $12 million to $24 million.”

But eventually, business slowed down, Patrick attempted to transition into iPad accessories, “and we totally botched the process.” The transition was bumpy and as Patrick described it, more of a “soft landing” through the sale of the company to an accessories manufacturer.

NEXT, WE LEAD WITH VALUE

In 2015, Patrick’s father was diagnosed with brain cancer. He had experienced facial cancer decades earlier, and the disease had gradually spread into his cranial cavity. “Very quickly, he went from someone who was retired, living his best life, building boats, to having hallucinations, and then in the span of like two months [he had become] a late-stage dementia patient…”

The disease caused Patrick and his family pain and distress; caring for their loved one added another layer into the mix: “How are we supposed to know what to do…?”

The utter lack of support caretakers can count on when their loved ones’ conditions deviate from the everyday staggered Patrick. After his father’s passing, he felt he needed to find a way to improve the experience for others. Before his father’s death, Patrick had been itching for another company, following the sale of his last one.

“I knew I wanted to pursue work that felt more meaningful and mission-driven. The world of consumer products and phone accessories just didn’t resonate with me—it felt overly commoditized and lacked a deeper purpose.”

He and his eventual cofounder, Vijay Varma, considered a firm that catered to the needs of older adults whose medical profiles prevented them from living at home. They felt that many assisted-living facilities had a very mass-produced vibe. “Let’s make this a much better experience for families—one. And then let’s broaden this from just placement into assisted living to helping patients and their families who are in the hospital, who have to figure out how to get out of the hospital to somewhere, make that transition…”

Today, SilverStay has contracts with University of Maryland, Hopkins, Adventist, and other healthcare systems throughout Maryland. Oftentimes, the company will send its team of social-work case managers or other representatives to hospitals to help clarify the medical state of things and daunting next steps that can sometimes keep patients in the hospital longer than they can be accommodated.  

SilverStay representatives will also accompany caretakers as they seek out care facilities for their loved ones. They may accompany clients to their homes to assist in gathering documents necessary for Medicaid enrollment. “This is when people are most stressed out, the hospital’s breathing down their neck, like, ‘You’ve got to leave the hospital.’ They need that acute bed. They’ve got forty people in their emergency room that need beds. And you don’t have an acute need anymore. You need to get moved out of there.” SilverStay acts as that liaison, matching individuals with long-term care facilities.

SALES IN PARA-HEALTHCARE

Patrick believes the healthcare industry could learn a thing or two from the business world. “It’s very patriarchal around a physician, and the doctor says, ‘Do these things.’ But you know, if you went and used that same model in, say, Airbnb—for example, the Airbnb operator tells you where you need to go, where you need to stay, and talks to you for two and a half minutes and then leaves—no, that is never going to work”

For Patrick, running SilverStay also means asking his staff, which includes the social workers, to engage in sales. He finds that many people automatically recoil at the thought of sales, picturing a cutthroat and dishonest scene. Patrick tries to communicate a different picture: “sales is not about manipulating someone into buying something they don’t need or want, right? It’s about understanding what they need. And can you give them what they want?”

Patrick believes the services his company offers will become more necessary in coming years. Large swaths of the Baby Boomer generation are composed of individuals suffering the aftereffects of decades of physical labor. “So their bodies are worn down, and they haven’t made a ton of money, and so they may have some social security income that’s coming to them. But it might be twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a month, and that doesn’t get you very far if you have any substantial healthcare needs at all.”

This is the type of business Patrick wants to be doing. It feels important, impactful. It feels like it has potential to be something big and widespread and successful. “We’re on a journey to build this into a nationwide company that helps vulnerable patients inside of hospitals get to the right setting where they need to be.”

You can learn more about Patrick here. Be sure to congratulate him while you’re there!