
How EO helped me realize my dream of launching a hospice
Contributed to EO by Chris Warburton of EO Detroit, who is the founder of both Balanced Home Care and his passion project, Lily Hospice.
We’re all born, and we all die.
We celebrate the day of our birth each year, even though we don’t remember our birth. However, death is something we all know will happen, and many people are alert and oriented right until the moment life ends. How we leave the world is at least as important as how we come into it—right?
I started my company, Balanced Home Care, in 2009 and grew it to 200 employees pre-pandemic. We provide qualified caregivers to people in independent senior living facilities and private homes.
After running my core business for 11 years, I developed a great deal of admiration and respect for hospice care. Everyone I spoke with about hospice shared positive experiences. One hospice nurse told me about a patient she cared for who loved fishing. She decided that no matter what it took, she was going to help him go fishing one more time—and she did. She now leads the Lily Hospice team.
You see, though not everyone realizes it, hospice care is about body, mind and spirit. The mission is to keep people physically comfortable but also tend to their mental and spiritual needs, sometimes helping to find resolution to things that might otherwise be left unresolved.