Her Story
About Julie
Julie Davids owns and operates Senior Stride Home Care alongside her husband, a business they started in 2015 after she gained experience in recruitment, training, and HR roles. Her career path included positions as a soft skills trainer at SparkNet, a recruiter for Affinity Health System (Mercy Hospital), and HR professional at Generations Home Care and Hospice, all of which prepared her for leading a home care agency focused on supporting seniors with activities of daily living. She now concentrates on referral marketing, benefits administration, and social media while overseeing a leadership team of six to eight people that has achieved a caregiver retention rate of 75 to 80 percent. Davids attributes much of the company's success to prioritizing high-quality caregivers, a value rooted in her personal experiences, and she emphasizes three core values of integrity, creativity, and teamwork in both her professional and personal life.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Julie
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would attribute it mostly to our leadership team, which consists of between 6 and 8 people. When we first started the business we asked what makes them different and the reason why we chose home care assistance because they started out with caregivers, the importance of caregivers. That really resonated because when I was going through my cancer my mom moved in with us and she was my caregiver and I wanted our caregivers to be like my mom.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Whenever you start a business or a project there's always going to be challenges and roadblocks but the biggest advice I ever received was when someone told me that if your why is big enough you can pretty much overcome anything. So then I just look at why did I get into this business and then it kind of comes all in perspective.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Make sure your why is important. Why are you getting into business? Make sure that the reason why you're getting into it you're filling your bucket not just financially but emotionally and professionally and socially and maybe even spiritually. So just have a really good why so when there are challenges that you can look back to why am I doing this and then you get that energy again to continue forward.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge is finding really good caregivers. That's been the biggest challenge from day one. However our retention rate is the inverse of what the industry is. The industry retention rate is only 20% where ours is between 75% and 80%.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
We go by 3 core values. The first one and it kings everything is integrity. Basically what that means to me is you do what you say you're gonna do even when no one's looking. You just do the right thing whether that is financially morally or ethically. And then the second and third in no particular order would be creativity which is creative thinking when you have challenges or problems and then the third one would be teamwork where everyone is working together for a common goal.
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