Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
IN 2005, Joe Keeley was 25, six years into the launch of his successful nanny placement business that matched college students with families.
He’d attracted the attention of the late Minnesota businessman Peter Lytle as an adviser and source of financing. And he’d launched the process of nationally franchising then College Nannies & Tutors with the idea of opening 200 locations in five years.
One of the lessons he learned from Lytle right away dealt with the challenges of dealing with cash flow.
Having launched while he was in college at the University of St. Thomas, he was in penny-pinching mode, while Lytle convinced him they had to be willing to spend some money to help the company grow.
“I came from the school of thought to bootstrap everything,” Keeley told Upsize at the time. “And then we’re spending $10,000 on a software program just to find out that we needed to build our own. It blows my mind. It’s a keep-me-awake-at-night type of thing.
“Peter came in and was a really helpful investor early on,” Keeley told Upsize in September. “He helped as I literally graduated from college … It’s amazing how much you don’t know.”
For whatever he didn’t know, Keeley did know that he believed in the concept: the idea of helping build stronger families by using pre-screened nannies and tutors as role models for kids.
And the concept worked. He got to 200 locations, though it took longer than expected. The company now has more than 12,000 “role models” in any given year. The biggest change is that Keeley no longer owns the company.
There were a couple big moments that helped him get there since he last appeared in Upsize.
First, in the early 2000s, he was preparing to travel one night when he and his wife needed a sitter.
At a meeting the next day with someone in the tech industry, he was telling them about how he wanted to get real-time availability from his employees and be able to display that availability to parents so they could always book a sitter.
The counterpart said “Like Uber.” Keeley had not heard of Uber, but he looked it up and “it was just shy of magic,” he says. “I said ‘that’s exactly what I want to build.’” The company soon became College Nannies, Sitters + Tutors (CNST) and that moment led to creating the My-Sitter app.
The second major milestone came in 2006 when the company started providing corporate backup care for a $9 billion, Boston-based public human resources company called Bright Horizons Family Solutions, which provides sitters for corporate clients.
“If you couldn’t get to work because one of your children didn’t have child care or was home from school or mildly ill, you could send the child to one of their backup centers or, what was just starting out, was offering the option of having nanny or sitter come to the home.
CNST, with its national network of employed nannies and babysitters, was a perfect match. Keeley ultimately sold the franchisor to Bright Horizons in 2016 and, as of July 1, has left the company, ending his 18-year-old journey with CNST.
He’s now on a search for his next opportunity.
He’s likely to get involved in another business, He’s looking for opportunities to either start, partner or buy into a company that is looking to use technology to grow, possibly through franchising. “I like being in that position of teaching and growing this sort of entrepreneurship through building a national brand,” he says.
He’s also looking at possibly investing, mentoring and getting actively involved in other early-stage businesses. His introduction to Lytle came when Lytle was a judge at the Minnesota Student Entrepreneurial Awards, which Keeley won.
“I was looking for a place to land post-college and looking for a little bit of seed capital,” he says. “It was very helpful at the time. I’ll probably do a little bit of that myself.”
Keeley advises new small business owners with growth plans to ask lots of questions and seek help. He bounced ideas off not only Lytle but from his professors at St. Thomas. Plenty of willing resources exist.
“Young entrepreneurs or new entrepreneurs they think when they take that CEO title, by virtue of starting something, that they need to have all the answers, and that they need to be able to do it all themselves,” he says. “The opposite of that is true.
There’s a really good Minnesota Nice start-up community here where there are a lot of people and organizations eager to have coffee or take a lunch and help folks that are thinking of doing something.”
Contact: Joe Keeley, founder of College Nannies, Sitters + Tutors:
jo*@************es.com; www.collegenannies.com.
