Beyond the Case
A podcast where global leaders from the Harvard Business School Owner/President Management (OPM) community join in a personal capacity and share the real decisions, failures, and mental models behind building enduring companies.
This podcast is independent and not affiliated with Harvard Business School.
Beyond the Case
Building a Purpose-Driven $750M Franchise: The BrightStar Care Story with Shelly Sun
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Shelly Sun Berkowitz’s story is about turning a personal frustration into a purpose-driven enterprise and learning that building a successful company requires much more than being a great entrepreneur.
After struggling to coordinate medical and nonmedical care for her grandmother, Shelly left her accounting career and founded BrightStar Care in 2002. She built the company around a clear purpose: helping families access high-quality, compassionate care. By the time she sold a majority stake in 2025, BrightStar had grown to more than $750 million in annual revenue, serving approximately 25,000 families across more than 450 markets in 43 states.
Her growth was not simply the result of hard work. She documented processes, invested in technology, embraced franchising, and learned to hire people with the experience needed for the company's next stage. She also recognized that her drive to solve problems personally was becoming a bottleneck. Her “one-three-one” approach - requiring team members to bring three possible solutions and one recommendation - helped build a culture of independent thinking and accountability.
Perhaps the most revealing part of the conversation was Shelly’s reflection on the personal cost of entrepreneurship. She described working 90–100-hour weeks for a decade, carrying the emotional weight of the pandemic, and recognizing only later that she was burned out. Her decision to sell a majority stake was ultimately about more than money: it allowed her to prioritize her family, trust a new CEO, and redirect her energy toward advising and investing in other entrepreneurs.
Her journey offers a powerful message: the ultimate measure of entrepreneurship is not just what you build, but whether you build it in a way that serves others, develops people, and allows you to live according to your values.
Here are the Top 10 Takeaways from the conversation:
- Let purpose guide your decisions, especially when the path forward is difficult.
- You don't need to know everything if you're willing to surround yourself with people who do.
- Build systems that make success repeatable rather than dependent on you.
- Hire people for the challenges ahead, not just the success you've already achieved.
- Develop problem-solvers instead of becoming the person everyone depends on for answers.
- Use intuition to ask the right questions and data to validate your decisions.
- Establish your values and priorities before difficult decisions force you to choose.
- Don't wait until burnout to recognize that success is coming at too high a personal cost.
- Have the courage to walk away from a deal that compromises your values.
- Build something that can thrive without you so you can make room for your next chapter.
Books:
Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Beyond the Case. This is a podcast where global leaders from Harvard Business School's OPM community join in a personal capacity to share the real decisions, life lessons, mental models which go behind building enduring companies. Today's guest is Shelly Khan. She's the founder of Pride Star Care. And she's joining us more so to discuss purpose-driven entrepreneurship, the evolution of a leadership, and what it takes to build a company that makes a meaningful difference. Shelly, we're so honored that you're joining us today. Welcome.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01Shelly, could you briefly introduce yourself and also uh the initiative you're involved with today so the listeners have an idea?
SPEAKER_00Sure. So Shelly's Berkowitz. Um, I founded Bright Star Care in 2002 and going through a personal experience looking for home care for our bread and butter, who needed non-medical and medical care. Um, and so we were managing two different companies, not knowing when some was commonly and when someone was going. Um, it's something I just couldn't let go. And so I left my corporate career and uh uh became an entrepreneur, not something I thought I would have done because I my background is as a CPA, so somewhat risk-verse. Um I started my entrepreneurial journey in 2002 and began expanding bite-star through franchising in late 2005 and up and through early 2025 when I served the majority to speak about capital. I owned 50% of the company and we were um generating $750 million in annual revenues, taking care of about 25,000 families in over 450 markets across 43 states. And since selling, I'm still executive chair of the board and have you know over a 30% stake in the company. So try to be available and helpful where I can. Um, but it's given me some additional time to help entrepreneurs that are looking to scale, have guidance, and someone needs really whop in their shoes, um, but also be able to write investment checks. I've made nine investments since I sold BrightStar. If I can help a founder get the right team, scale their business, and reach another mark of profitability before they bring in institutional capital, the outcome for them and for their future generations will be far greater than if they take institutional capital too early. And so that's my uh kind of next chapter, so it's on the right side.
SPEAKER_01Incredible. Shelly, you mentioned that you had an accounting background and you weren't in the healthcare industry. So, what gave you the confidence to enter an industry which you didn't know firsthand?
SPEAKER_00I had been in the shoes of who my ultimate customer was going to be. Often it's the adult daughter or daughter-in-law arranging a care for the family, and I had found myself uh in that setting and needing to go through those decision points. But from the very beginning, Bright Stars model had that every single office, including a French IZs now, had to hire a director of nursing. So even though I didn't have a clinical background, I hired someone who had the clinical um capabilities to be able to go in and assess the patient, know what kind of care is needed, and help me know who I need to fill in terms of caregiver with what the needs were for the family. And so I focused on what we look for in our franchisees is business background, good believers, those that can scale, um, those that can read a financial statement, can access capital to be able to grow and have people involved in the business. Usually that franchisee today is running the operations, which is often that I did, and they would hire a salesperson to go out and talk to hospitals and their discharge planners or families that are going to get discharged to have heavy care, as well as a director of nursing to be able to kind of set up and oversee the cases. So it isn't a single employee model. Every single location kind of has three key roles that kind of form the three legs of a stool. Typically a franchisee, or in my case, the original founder business owner was the operations role.
SPEAKER_01And did you start this with the vision for a franchisee model here? Or were you experimenting with different business ideas and then you stumbled upon this business model?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I somewhat stumbled upon. I think that's pretty common in franchising. I would have thought that franchising equaled McDonald's. I didn't realize until I was in it that franchising to every sector uh of the economy. And so I had had company-owned stores in 2002 to 2004, and I had an opportunity, I guess we were very profitable, to invest in a minority stake in a hotel. Um, and so I wasn't gonna run it day to day, but I'd be involved in some of the management of it and with some other capital source for it. But I attended new owner and new manager training for choice hotels, which was a franchise brand. And while I'm in franchise trading, I kind of had the light bulb go off of like, huh. My original business plan had that I would have, you know, 50 or more locations, but I thought I would have to go slow. And as I was profitable, start another one, you know, my first one correlated to a second, correlating to a third. And so here I'm sitting here in 2004 and kind of questioning franchising. I haven't really thought about that, but the franchising can work in hotels. Could franchising work in home care? And so I kind of set off to research what other business models uh franchising would be part of and handing in businesses and maid businesses and other service-based businesses that one up worked in Mortar had a lot of franchising in it, and that was new to me. So it was kind of the path that I used to grow. I knew that to grow and serve as many families as I wanted to serve, which was my ultimate ambition. I was either going to have to take institutional capital too early and the risk culture and quality, or I was gonna have to go really slow and I would have fast followers compete with me if I was relying just on my profitability to be able to open additional locations. But could franchising give me an opportunity to share successful model I had built? I'd already invested in technology in early 2004 that became a great backbone for how do you make sure that processes and data are consistent location to location to location to location. I'd already made those investments. I'd invested in a brand, um, have something that could scale nationally. I started in 2002 with the main healthcare solutions, very generic, but I hired a professional branding firm, actually the same one that helped uh Margaret Kiyosaki come up with Rich Dad Corbad. And so with James Bergen, um we came up with Bright Star's hair. And so I had the branding, I had the website, I had the technology, and so it seemed like I had a lot of uh the fundamentals that would allow me to scale through franchising. And so that's what I you know set out to do in uh in 2005 and ultimately it was very successful.
SPEAKER_01Since you started considering franchising in let's say 2004, I believe you mentioned, did you ever have to go back in time and create you know standard operating procedures, or were you always uh organized enough from day one where you had documented your workflows so as to temperatize it easily?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I've been an accountant by background, right? So I had documented everything or what I thought was everything in my first location. I hired an executive director that couldn't be in two places at one time, to one my second location, and I handed off my operations manual, all of my policies and procedures, and let her use that to see if there were any missing polls. And she used that as some things I had taken for granted. I had to answer some questions, and we had to add maybe another 15% to location two. And then when I opened location three with an executive director, did the same thing again. And there might have been another 5% or so that needed to be added that weren't added from the first and second location that was added from the third location. And that really became the foundation of um, you know, the franchise operations manuals. There was maybe a small amount in terms of like signage and you know, DBA and things like that, that came with being a larger brand and not just my own and licensing my brand versus opening my own locations, but it was a pretty small lift to go from what I'd already documented to a set of operations and as well as to be the backbone of the franchise.
SPEAKER_01As you grew from one location into a national franchise, what do you believe was the hardest lesson you learned about scaling a business?
SPEAKER_00I needed people around me who had muscle memory around scaling at a size and an expertise that I didn't have. And there were people frequently in my organization that weren't keeping up. They might have been great and phenomenal and want to celebrate them and financially reward them if they helped me get to 25 locations, but I would be in a completely different skill set and someone who had experience taking an organization from 25 to 150 if I was going to get to 150. Otherwise, everybody was looking to me to tell them what to do. And I needed people around me that could help the organization know what to do because they already had a recognition of doing it.
SPEAKER_01Was there any point when you recognized that the business was overly dependent on you to scale and grow? And if yes, how did you work around being a bottleneck?
SPEAKER_00My work-life balance was really off 90, 100 hour a week for 10 years of that journey as a single mom, you know, that took its toll. We did try to put things in place, and I did try to keep upskilling the team so there wasn't an uh a huge dependency on me. We implemented Geno Whipman's traction, which was really helpful to make sure that the whole team was aligned on an annual set of goals. We broke that down. So what do we need to do each quarter to achieve the goal? And then everybody owns those quarterly blocks, um, as the book would say. And so that that took things off on me if everybody was doing what they needed to do in their lane, the organization moved forward. Um, I would say there was probably more dependency on me than the first 25 locations, because I didn't yet have the money to have a team that would allow me to get out of the day-to-day decisions. But as we became more profitable, I was willing to invest in a larger organization to help um the organization continue moving forward. And I remember like maybe 2007, 2008, I was on planes a lot, going to visit franchisees and you know, going through the TSA lines. And I said, you know what, is there anything about this that I could take away and have something that's easy to remember to help my people solve their own problems instead of bringing every problem to me? Because that was what was becoming exhausting. If every single one of my direct reports had one or two problems per week they needed me for, do the math, and 15 to 20 problems per week that I'm spending a lot of time solving and not focused on strategy and taking the organization forward. And so I implemented one through one and I rolled out to my team for every problem you have, you need to bring me three possible solutions and you need to put a state in the ground, give me one recommendation. And I use those as guardrails as to how much authority did I want to give. I needed my director force to show me that they could not think just like me, but could solve a problem in a way I could accept. And good enough was good enough because it would give me back my time. And once I've had, you know, my executives to an 80 or 90% of the time, I was comfortable with their recommendation, they didn't have to bring as much to me. Something that was over a certain dollar limit or something they hadn't seen before. They still need to bring it to me in that structure. But frequently I would have an executive walk down to my office and say, Shelly, I've got this problem with XYZ free and chyz, and they're seeing this, and then, okay, what's your one through one? And they curse and walk back down to their office and know that my door was open for them to walk back once they had a one-through one. But it became the language across our organization and that cascaded down where they started looking for their people to be in power, but also to think through possible solutions to a problem rather than just pushing up a problem up to higher up in the organization, which is very inefficient.
SPEAKER_01Shelley, what's your leadership style? Are you more analytics driven or a gut-driven entrepreneur? How do you take decisions?
SPEAKER_00I I base my decisions on data. I think my gut tells me what data I need to go look for. And then I want to validate my gut with data. But I had a strategic coach. I hired an amazing woman who was my strategic coach from probably 2008 through 2015 or so. And Julie would say I could see patterns in data that were from completely different parts of our company, but I would see how they fit together to tell a story. So given that I chose to be an accountant, I'm very comfortable with numbers and data. And so that was really helpful for me to believe that I could weave a narrative through a few different things that were moving for our organization, but then I would want to go double down and get more data and more trend and look at it at the location or regional level to validate before we rolled out system-wide change. I think the change I had to make to be successful as a franchise or was to slow down in some ways and pilot locally first, expand regionally, and then only after the king sort of worked out of that, expand nationally. Because franchisees only have so much bandwidth to be able to implement change. If we were rolling out things that were a C, franchisees would lose confidence in following us if it was better for us to roll out three A's of projects in a year than seven B's and C's in terms of what it would do for the organization because they were more apt to follow us. That slowing down and doing it right and going slow to make sure that we'd work through all the tweaks was heard from me on such a drive there. Um, but it was a lesson I thought the left.
SPEAKER_01Do you ever reflect on and think back about your journey in terms of you having bootstrapped the business uh and how it would have been had you taken outside funding or institutional capital sooner? Do you feel that would have helped you scale further? Or given your leadership personality, do you think that would have come in the way of your entrepreneurial instincts?
SPEAKER_00I think franchising is a low capital way to grow. And so what I would have been gaining was money. I didn't need any more money than what I had. I had great lenders. I ran a formal process in 2015 and had 27 pitches to do my lending, right? It's large, large debt to be able to make sure I have the money to be able to grow and scale. So I didn't hold back from 2015 and thereafter from scaling. That would have been the point in time where I either did debt for equity. But in 2015, I don't feel like our culture was fully baked and we didn't have enough penetration across the country to where I wouldn't have sacrificed quality and culture to take institutional capital that early. So that was a decision point. That said, I wish I would have realized in 2021, 2022 how burned out I was from leaving through COVID and trying to do so while being a single mother and carrying the weight. So I really care about our business. I care about every family we take care of. I wore the weight of every family and their safety and our caregivers' safety on my shoulders. And that was draining. And so I wish I had considered in 2022 that I was birthed out. And if I've recognized, I would have done an intentional search for a CEO in 2022 versus when I did ultimately in 2025. And if I had done that, I would have all at the minority partner that had an opportunity to buy me out on a step basis where eventually I would be out of the cap table 100%. But I can't go back and rewrite history. What I would say is once I was ready to exit, I would have twin boys, one of them is autistic. I put my boys second, which is hard for a mom to say during COVID. And I was really faced with that decision point as my boys try to go to college, and to get in my autistic stuff try to go to college. And I needed to start working the business for close to six months to live where he lived to help him be able to achieve independence. And if I had to live with the independent today, and he is, and so it's a right choice. Um but once I got him in a good place and I stepped back to the business, it didn't feel right to take the reigns back on the leadership team that stepped out and all the reigns won while I lived with you and I live the deal. But I also didn't want to have 100% of my band as well tied to a business. I only 100% of that I was never. So it it was a natural evolution to sell a majority, not just a minority, but sell a majority of white stuff with someone at the CEO level that could bridge a gap for a year, but knowing that we needed to go find a CEO with British experience. And we put a new CEO in place and Josh Wall was phenomenal, and I couldn't be on a place. I finally have peace of mind now that I know that I have the right CEO in that seat. My first 16 months post-exit, I didn't have peace of mind. I had a lot of money. I was getting to spend more time with my family and things like that. But I didn't have peace of mind yet that I had the leaders and had all the skills to take a business forward and do everything that I want to do for all the families we serve and all of our franchisees and their livelihoods. And we have that now. And so that's been very liberating, the mind share that I have free now to start working on kind of what's next because I trust Josh so much.
SPEAKER_01Walk us through the sale process. What is that journey like?
SPEAKER_00That was how in a lot of hard work. I've I built and scaled a company I'm really proud of, but I got one shot to sell that didn't have higher experience while I was a business owner. And so I hired an investment banker, I wired Jacob Morgan. The reason I selected them is they caught Heidi Blee as a female. I had a really great that's mana, a really great successful track record. Three months into my sales process, Heidi left uh JP Morgan to go back to build with sex. Uh, and I was already quite committed and in the process. Uh, if I hadn't been further along, I would have terminated the agreement. She was a key person in my contract. So I could have terminated the agreement and gone over and followed her to Goldman. In hindsight, if I wasn't so pleased with my private equity firm, I should have done that because she's great. But so I hired an investment banker, went through the minimal process, you know, had a lot of suitors, you know, very successful business. But I really found that I was the only woman in the room and I was often discredited or talked over. And it was shocking to me because if I didn't like the terms and didn't like the deal, I was the only one that was gonna be the one deciding because I am the 100% of the company. Um, and so what one thing that I didn't really realize, and then naive on my part, is that investment bankers generally are steering business owners towards buyers and that they do business with, even if they're not good people. And I got steered to a shutter. I and I was pressured to enter into exclusivity. Um, entered into exclusivity in September of 24, and by November of 24, we'd finished all of our third-party work, which is fun, of work, plus answering all the due diligence questions, but our quality of earnings came back clean. All of our third party, like technology and clinical, all came back clean. And they tried to retreat, but they thought that I was a far-to-buyer, a foreseller, and that they were gonna be able to get me to lower my price because I was two weeks away from funding and I would take anything. And so they tried to pay me less, but yet they wanted more of my company. I was just well over 40%. They wanted me to only go over 20%. And they were that creepy. They were trying to pay me less because they wanted one. No, and so I was like, I I can't do it. This is how these people are gonna be before I sell. They're gonna be horrible after they're gonna be horrible in franchisees, they're gonna cut costs, they're gonna cut the team, they're gonna cut services to our franchisees. I just can't do it. Um, and I have a very supportive husband. Um, and I said, honey, I think I would have less peace of mind selling than than I than I would hold it because they don't sell. And so I got back on the phone with them and I said, you know, I heard what they have to say, you try to change a key economic chart. That gives me an out and art specifically within the hour. My attorneys will be sending you a uh termination letter of its specificity and then setting two hours for no agreement. I have the right to call their backup letters and then they'll be now and they were shocked. They try to eventually come back. I wanted nothing to do with them. And I took you know four or five weeks off of my favorite holidays. And I just tried to regroup and see if I could still still have a couple, three more months of going through a sales process because by that point within a year, I was exhausted, my team was exhausted. My team was irritating with me to say all of them gotta see the possibility of the payout and got already started spending it. Even if we would have sold it someone horrible, they probably would have gonna take another job if they didn't have this huge payday. So our it just just a came during this align. I was misaligned with my investment banker, I was misaligned with my The employees felt really lonely, which is why I started found a good fatal. I don't found their founders feel lonely like I did. I wanted to have a conciliary to be able to talk through and understand everybody's competing interests. But I did reach out to my my backup editors in early January at 25. Um, and all three of them had gone all the way through due diligence, offers I would have accepted. All three were very interested. But Spencer Muller from Peacot Hapital said, Shelly, if I get on a plane to learn and fly to Chicago, can we spend the entire day and iron out what we need and what you need to see if we can afford the value? And I said, yes, but it's after tomorrow, you're not 100% certain that we can close a deal in under 60 days. I don't want to waste your time tomorrow. Because in 60 days, my pencil goes down. And I've hopefully show everybody in this process, I'm not a poor seller. I've got a very profitable, very high cash flowing business. I could learn to love it again. My size now is stable. I might even make some changes in the leadership team. He says, fair enough. We will know by the time we get through. And Spencer and I got to exclusivity on January 5th, and we closed our transaction on February 28th, 2025. So way less than 60 days. And we were moving forward together. 18 months post-transaction as a founder who loves her business dearly. And I still very much respect and am well online and a lot of market and the managed team that I interact with as part of my EFRA. A few founders that I talked to have that experience. But I've been a lot of diligence checking after I got prone by the shark the first time. And I wanted to talk with every single one of the founders of the portfolio. And those still in portfolio are the ones that have sold since it were quite more free to share. And I heard really good names.
SPEAKER_01And obviously, less of this is gone, but I didn't have every founder uh, you know, or business leader do from now on is always chat as well and says, Shelley, what have you learned about yourself since you transitioned away from the CEO role? And I'm sure, you know, giving up a huge stake of equity in a business that you built from the ground up has not been might not have been easy. You've had to trust someone else to carry forward with something that you built and nourished from day one.
SPEAKER_00It wasn't as easy for the first 16 months or 14 months. Now that I have Josh and C, I would say I have a complete piece. But it was the right time for me at the end of the way to South. It was the right time for me to think about Bright Star and be available Bright Star 50 hours a quarter, not 50 hours a week. And that's time that I found to be a more pleasant wife and law and to work on investments and advising that brings me the same joy and impact that I felt and what was my why of Brightstar all along was what we can do for families. And that will continue under Joshua Stateship with BrightStar. But now I'm getting to have impact on other founders. Um and maybe a charitable foundation, I will have a lot of input on families and children with autism and on those that are entering the workforce with autism and they're neurodiverse because they have so much to give to employers that understand how much they have to give, but both sides need to be prepared for that union.
SPEAKER_01You've started founder to founder now and you advise other entrepreneurs. What is a mistake you see founders repeatedly making that you wish someone had warned you about earlier?
SPEAKER_00Celebrate those that got to you to a certain point. You're in a position to be financially generous, be financially generous, and help them lay them on their seat, but get the people around you that have the experience about where you want to go, not where you are and where you've been.
SPEAKER_01Is there a book that you feel you've read which has influenced the way you think about life, leadership?
SPEAKER_00There's so many EOS traction and what the heck is EOS hygiene within has had a pretty big impact on me. You know, Dr. Hardy and the power of scaling, and it's easier to get a 10x than 2x. You know, some of those have been from a leadership perspective, good degree, even though a lot of those companies still aren't around anymore, still have a lot of words of wisdom in there that still hold true and and good lessons. And then I just I think it's so great, even beyond books that you read and you're going through it with with the OakMe program. I just think the opportunity to executive education where you're learning through case study of companies and leaders who have actually done it. But for me, when I did his small groups, and I'm sure you're you know in one as well, I came prepared and I'd read my case, I had my answers to the little questions at the back. And then you have people with completely different backgrounds and different size companies and different industries. And what we wound up with coming into class was so much richer than what I had only on my own. And I don't think you get that in a book. And so while I'm well read and I enjoy reading business books and did a lot as a leader, I think a lot of my professional development came more through 10 years attending Harvard for a week in January as part of the YPOHPS program than it did reading any individual of series calls.
SPEAKER_01My last question in closing to you is you spent more than 20 years building bright star care. Along the way, you've had to navigate crisis, learn how to trust your team, learn how to lead better, and ultimately transition a majority ownership in your business. So if you could sit down with this Shelly who operated and opened the first location in 2002, what would you tell her about, you know, what building a successful company would demand of her and what you would tell her not to sacrifice along the way?
SPEAKER_00I wish I had this North Star compass from the very beginning. I think I had it unintentionally, but with intentionality during COVID, the only way I could lead is really thinking about the rank order of who my stakeholders were and in what order I had to protect them. Because there were so many decisions that I had to make that it helped one group, but it might have hurt another group, right? Every decision I make in the business around quality, didn't have to cost my franchise a little bit more to make sure that there's great clinical oversight and we're preventing falls and things like that. That's the most important thing. And then the only way I give great care are my caregivers. And so we need to be competitive, we need to give career tracks, we need to help our workforce be able to progress their own personal lives and pay them a fair wage. And then my franchisees, my corporate team, and myself. But I feel like for myself as the owner of a business, if I was doing my best with the four above, I would be rewarded as well. But I don't think I would have realized until I was in it and really tested under COVID. If I hadn't realized from day one, whenever I was struggling with a decision, to think through the customer first. And that's not true in every industry, but in all as a vulnerable mom or dad or grandpa or grandpa, quality of care matters more than anything else. And so being really clear on that would have gotten me to faster decisions and would have allowed me to sell the why to my franchisees, not just telling them what they're going to do, but taking the time to tell them why. Because there's no one who hopefully can argue that our country's parents and grandparents deserve to receive the highest quality and compassionate care possible. And that has always been my rule of star. I wish I would have been able to tell the Shelly at the age I was in 2002 when I was starting. Whenever I reached conflict among stakeholder groups, that the win had to go to uh after the seniors that we were cared for and had a made of that provide care to them, that would have made some things along the way easier.
SPEAKER_01Phenomenal. What a great way to end this episode. Thank you very much, Shali. We appreciate your time and all the wisdom you've shared with us.
