Because I Can

Robert started working at age eleven, not because he needed to, but because he could.  “I heard of this great thing called a newspaper route,” he remembers today.  “I loved the idea of accomplishing something and getting paid for it.  But you had to be twelve, which bothered me at first, but then I decided it didn’t matter.  I badgered the district manager, and he finally agreed to let me do it as long as my parents gave the okay.”

To the eleven-year-old-boy, working that paper route was the coolest thing in the world.  He was doing something no one else his age was doing simply because it was possible.  For five years, he delivered the paper each morning and each afternoon.  “From that time onward, I’ve done everything that way,” he remarks.  “I got part time jobs that were different just because I could.”

True to form, Robert was a DJ on the radio at age 15.  It was a job that required some skill and could be done in any city, so he learned the techniques, the voice, and the diction.  Through college, he DJ’ed on six different radio stations while he also pursued an opportunity as a bank teller and ended up managing his own branch.  At seventeen, he became an interstate truck driver traversing the East Coast, when the minimum age for that position was supposed to be 19.

“I always do things a little earlier, a little differently, and maybe not exactly the way they were intended to be done,” he says.  “I wanted the job that was hard to get that not everybody could do to prove to myself that I could.”  Now the cofounder, President, and owner of BrightStar Care of Fairfax, Robert is still driven by the same force that has led him to success over the years.  He does things because he can, measuring himself and each day by what he accomplishes and focusing on moving forward every step of the way.

While always present, that driving force took a new turn when Robert was in college and came face-to-face with the reality that the opportunity and ability he has always relied on can be fleeting.  Normally a hearty 22-year-old student athlete, he was feeling under the weather and went to the health center.  Luckily, the cardiologist at the clinic that day noticed he had more than the flu and sent him to UVa for emergency surgery.  He had been stricken with endocarditis, a deadly virus that eats the heart valve, and the odds were not good.  “That day, I saw the bleakest prognosis and the lowest moment of my life,” he remembers.  “I was convinced that when I went to sleep that night, I would never wake up.”

Miraculously, Robert did wake up, though not to the same life he had known the day before.  His house on campus had burned down, and his sister had totaled his car.  He had lost his home, his vehicle, and his competitive swimming career, but he was alive.  “When I woke up and began rehabilitation, my ‘do things because I can’ philosophy was taken to a new level because there had been a moment where I really didn’t think I’d be here to do them,” he explains.  “Even more in the wake of that experience, I try to go a little beyond what others think I can do, and what I think I can do.  I don’t fear things anymore—being poor, being sick.  I feel that anything I do is worth doing, and I want to test limits and boundaries.”

Committed to redefining his own abilities, Robert graduated in 1984 and began competing in Iron Man triathlons, even with an artificial heart valve and a pacemaker.  For over two decades, he went full steam ahead in that fashion so that, when he was pushed to the brink again, he was ready.

It happened on his way home from a business trip in India in 2006.  Robert stopped in Edinburgh, Scotland and was in a taxi from the airport to his hotel when he was hit with a sensation he knew all too well.  “You never forget the feeling,” he remarks.  “I knew it was endocarditis.  The odds of catching it twice are infinitesimal, but it was unmistakable.”  He was taken to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, where doctors confirmed that a severe case of the disease was attacking his artificial valve.  After a lengthy 14-hour surgery, during which they told his wife he was dead before the surgeon decided to try one more time, Robert was brought back.

Within two days of surgery, he was walking again, and eight months later, he ran a marathon in Las Vegas because, as always, he just wanted to see if he could.  “I had hit rock bottom before, and I knew a bit about the path back up, so I was able to take it faster that time,” he says.  “And reflecting on those brushes with death, I feel that they were freeing.  I can do or try anything I want, and if I fail, that’s okay.”

It was this liberating confidence that allowed Robert to change the course of his professional path completely, leaving corporate America at the pinnacle of his career, with more responsibility and a higher salary than he’d ever had before, to launch his own business.  Finding the ethics of the company he was working for too incompatible with what he felt was right, he made the decision to walk away from his lucrative position to start something of his own.

“I wanted something that was truly sustainable,” he says.  “I knew that if I went back into consulting, it would be about me building a book of business around my capabilities and skill set, when what I really wanted was to start something with staying power—something that would last long after I’m gone.”  With this scope in mind, he decided to take a macro perspective of America’s unmet needs, and realized that the single biggest driver of demand is healthcare and the aging population.  “In the next hundred years, 78 million baby boomers will redefine what it means to age in this country,” Robert explains.  “There will then be a brief lull before an even larger population of 86 million millennials will have the chance to redefine it again.  I wanted to be part of those redefinitions.”

BrightStar proved to be the perfect avenue to accomplish this goal.  In 2001, an Illinois accountant named Shelly Sun and her husband, JD, opened the home care agency, which expanded to several agencies before she decided to franchise in 2005.  Since then, BrighStar has become the most rapidly growing franchise in home healthcare, with over 250 agencies.  The franchise defines its business model as private duty homecare, meaning clients pay out of pocket or through insurance companies, as opposed to the model reimbursed by Medicare or Medicaid, which is generally restricted to skilled, in-home care under a doctor’s orders for a relatively brief period of time.

“If your family member has dementia and needs to stay at home and can’t drive, but the family is working, Medicare doesn’t cover it,” Robert explains.  “The private duty model is much broader and can provide all the services required.  Our staff focuses on seeing fewer patients in a day and spending more time with each of them.  What we really want to do is care for people.  We want to provide services over the long term to families and help make more possible for them.”

When Robert decided to walk away from corporate America, home care is the last business he thought he’d walk into.  He assumed he’d become the CSO of a high tech company, or start something in that field.  But home care put him in the perfect position to address a coming crisis, bringing together cutting edge technology, intellectual property, innovation, and business strategy.  His wife, Kerry, is BrightStar of Fairfax’s cofounder and Director of Operations.  Together, the Massies navigate the complicated maze of hiring W-2 employee nurses, LPNs, and CNAs to provide care to a set of clientele that sorely needs this assistance.  So far, it seems that BrightStar has successfully developed a reputation of delivering that assistance with unparalleled professionalism and dedication.

Robert and Kerry bought the franchise rights to the Northern Virginia area in July of 2012 while living in Chicago.  They moved back home to Virginia, found a place to house the business and generated their first revenue in late November.  They plan to open between 4 and 6 offices to serve Fairfax, Mclean, Vienna, Manassas, Gainesville, Springfield, Loudon, and Leesburg areas.  Aiming to build continuity with both clients and caregivers so they can provide the best care possible, the Massies offer paid time off and employ over 30 caregivers today.  “It’s a very personal business,” Robert affirms.  “You get to know the families.  It matters that you’re there on a personal level, and that’s very rewarding.”

Breaking ground and blazing new trails is also a pastime rooted deeply in Robert’s ancestry.  His family immigrated to America in 1678 and settled in New Kent County in Virginia before moving into the interior.  When the Revolutionary War was won, the country was so new that it didn’t have money to pay its officers for their service so, instead, they awarded land grants.  “The officers and their families went out and literally staked their claims, and Major General Thomas Massie had two land grants,” Robert describes.  “One was established in Nelson County, Virginia, and is now known as Massie’s Mill, Virginia.  The other was somewhere ‘out there,’ in what’s now Ohio.”  Nathanial Massie, who became a surveyor, staked the land for the familiies’ land grants and received 10 percent of the land he staked as a fee.  He staked out Chillicothe, Ohio and then went back to Washington and petitioned to award the area territory status.  Ohio was mapped, and Nathaniel was named its first provisional governor.  He then laid out the town of Columbus and became its first mayor.

Several centuries later, Robert was born to a farmer from Lynchburg, Virginia, who woke up at 6:00 AM every morning to run the family quarry business.  His mother had been an economics genius who turned down a Harvard professorship to marry Robert Massie III, who was frugal, conservative, and steady after growing up on a farm during the Great Depression and fighting in World War II and Korea.  “Personal responsibility is everything to him,” Robert says.  “I grew up knowing that if I wanted something to get done, I had to do it myself.”

That’s why, when Robert wanted to be a pilot at age 14, he became one of the youngest kids in the state of Virginia to get glider lessons.  It’s also why he was committed to playing football and tried out for the team each year, even though he wasn’t very good.

As a boy, Robert was relatively small and the brunt of all the jokes in school.  “I was the kid with the glasses and the bangs who wanted to be on the football team but didn’t have the skills yet,” he remarks.  “I was teased a lot and didn’t take it well.   I was always near the top of the class in grades, which only made it worse.  I cried a lot and was a bit of a mess.”  Despite the constant ridicule, he continued to lead with his chin, trying out for the football team each year until, finally, one day in ninth grade, amidst an episode of teasing by a group of boys before school, he finally snapped.  The young man who had always been scared to death of physical confrontation as a kid suddenly threw a punch for the first time in his life, and then another, and then another.  “I was suspended from school, but something had changed,” Robert remembers.  “Over the next couple of days, I hunted down a couple of my ‘tormenters’ and picked a fight with each one of them.  It was the wrong thing to do, but it was wildly freeing, and I suddenly wasn’t afraid anymore.  For me, that was a defining moment.”

After that turning point, Robert flourished.  By the time he enrolled in Washington & Lee for college, he was social and athletic.  Good grades began to matter to him, and he soon got them.  After college, he moved to D.C. and took a position in the finance division of a department store, going through training and becoming the new accounts manager for the credit card division of May Company.  “They gave me a lot of responsibility early on, and I had a blast,” Robert recalls.  “I was managing people and discovering the transformative power of technology, doing things that hadn’t been done before.”  Robert and his team found that, if they applied mathematical models to people’s credit history, they could predict whether they were a good credit risk, essentially inventing the retail credit score in 1984.  People from stores across the chain could call Robert’s credit department, which had created an interface into the CBI Credit Bureau reports.  With that information and the application, the model could make a decision, assign a limit, and create an account within three minutes.  “We called it ‘instant credit.’  Technology and modeling and business coming together really excited me, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” Robert remarks.

After five years of bringing increasing capability to the division, Robert transitioned over to the merchandising side of the business, where new technologies like the UPC barcodes were being applied.  Now, customers could be checked out at the register electronically, where the exact size, style, and color of the purchased items was instantly recorded.  Stock could be replenished automatically and much more efficiently, and dynamic ordering systems were developed.  The work was invigorating, but after four years, Robert decided he had gone as far as he wanted to go in the department store world.  With that, he returned to the University of Maryland to earn his MBA while also working full-time and fathering his first child.

Upon graduating in 1992, Robert was hired by Deloitte Consulting, LLC as a senior consultant and promptly immersed in the consulting world.  “Not only could I still do all the things I loved about business innovation and technology, but now I could do them with an array of companies and project teams of the smartest people I had ever met,” Robert remarks.  “I realized that, through the power of coordination, we could organize a team of people to do much more together than any of us could do individually, and I learned how to lead a team constructively.  My leadership style evolved into that of the player coach, believing in the model of leading by example and that you have to adapt your leadership style to the people that you lead.  Different people need different things from a leader to be happy, excel, and help achieve the goals of the group.”

Robert was there for eight years, moving up through the ranks until he was offered a chance at partnership in 1999.  He thought long and hard about the offer, but the more he looked into what a partner career really entailed, the more he noticed that many senior partners seemed to lose their passion.  “Being a partner seemed limiting to me- in that it defined you from that point forward,” he observes.  “I would likely be that partner in that industry and in that practice until I retired.  The money was good, but ultimately I decided that I couldn’t do it.”

At that time, mid-sized companies were looking for smart consultants who knew technology to come serve on their leadership teams, and Robert accepted a position with a small company called Oblix, based in San Mateo, California.  As part of their leadership team, he learned the world of venture capital and how to build a $25 million company.  Commuting back and forth across the country took its toll, however, so Robert accepted a position on the leadership team of a Midwest financial software company with rapid growth and big name clients, moving the Massie family to Chicago.

Within four months, however, it became painfully apparent to Robert that his new position was not a good or sustainable fit.  Broken leadership led the company to close its doors, and Robert suddenly found himself out of a job.  Fortunately, a friend who had been a partner at Deloitte and left for another California company had just joined IBM when it bought the company.  IBM was poised to open a new frontier in software, and though Robert thought the 300,000-employee company was rather big, he decided to give it a try.  They had a bold strategic plan with excellent margins, so he joined IBM in 2002 as a software executive on the sales side and rose through the ranks to Vice President over the next ten years.  “It was a phenomenal ride, and we were able to act like a small business inside a big company, which engendered a sincere camaraderie in the team,” Robert recalls.  “We took Sam Palmisano’s vision to make software the driving force of the company and essentially helped remake IBM from a hardware company into a software company.”

Robert ran several large worldwide organizations as he rose through the ranks, gaining invaluable experience and thoroughly enjoying the work.  Yet he reached a plateau as he grew into an executive role and began to feel that the job he had set out to do was largely done.  He was offered a position in hardware, but there was no mission or vision to attract him to that cause, so he began to look for the next big thing.

That’s when another company called looking for someone to run their worldwide sales team.  Robert accepted the position, but within a year, in the aftermath of turmoil caused by a large acquisition and exacerbated by a difficult culture, Robert concluded that it was time to step out on his own.  “The way they ran the business and the way they thought about life was different from how I wanted to approach things,” he says.  “And after traveling the world, I was ready to come home to Virginia, where our family lands are and where my father’s corporation still operates.  At that point, I wanted to find something meaningful—something that would challenge me.”

Robert has found all that in BrightStar, where he aims to bring on skilled and experienced people, help them understand the vision of the company, and give them what they need to enact that vision.  And through it all, his wife Kerry has served as a constant sounding board and unwavering source of support.  “She’s always trusted that, if we sit down to talk something through and decide it’s a risk worth taking, we should do it,” he reflects.  “She’s probably one of the most rational people I’ve ever met, always cool, calm, collected, and able to cut through the emotion and clutter to identify the things that make a decision meaningful.  Her opinion really matters to me.”

In advising young entrepreneurs entering the working world today, Robert echoes the advice his father gave to him.  “Find something you like to do and do that; then the rest will take care of itself,” he says.  “If you find something you enjoy doing, it will work for you because we tend to like what we’re reasonably good at.  What plays to our strengths and feeds us, we enjoy and work hard for.  So if you do what you enjoy, you are going to be successful—both because you are good at it, and because you will work hard at it.  You’ll find a way to make it your own, and that is absolutely everything.  There really is nothing worse than making a million dollars a year at a job that you hate.”

In stretching his own abilities and making BrightStar the best it can be, Robert is now licensed as a Certified Senior Advisor, equipped to help seniors get the support they need across all dimensions of their life.  What’s more, BrightStar of Fairfax is earning its Joint Commission accreditation, the “Good Housekeeping” of health care accreditations that very few agencies pursue due to its rigorous standards.  Robert also works with the American Heart Association and is involved in a number of charitable events.  “To some degree, I’m alive today because of the work they’ve done, so I work to show people the great strides that are taking place in heart health and how they’re happening,” he says.  “Heart disease is the number one killer in the U.S., but it can be prevented and treated effectively, and supporting the American Heart Association is a good complement to my BrightStar efforts.  Working toward these goals is more than my just my work, it’s my life and my responsibility.”

Echoing this sense of responsibility is a framed certificate that hangs in Robert’s home and bears the original signatures of George Washington and Henry Knox.  The date on the parchment is 1778, and it signifies the induction of Major General Thomas Massie, Robert’s great great great great grandfather, into the Society of the Cincinnati.  Washington brought his generals together after the Revolutionary War to create a society that would work for the betterment of the country, and centuries later, Robert continues that mission, seeing the document as a reminder that the work of his family should continue to cross the generations.  “We’ve got so many things to accomplish and responsibilities to uphold,” he affirms.  “I grew up in a family where I knew one day, I’d be a member of the society, and that it represents both an honor and a responsibility.  The certificate represents, to me, the work I have yet to do.  I’ve raised a family and had a business career, but I still feel I haven’t done all that I can do.  At the end, what will I say I’ve accomplished and done?  Will it matter?  I’ve got work to do yet.”

People often say, make no small plans.  That’s why Robert lives his life thinking about what he’d like to see happen in 100 years that he can start today.  With a keen cognizance of the historical arc that connects past, present, and future, he does all that he can because he can.  “Echoing Jimmy Buffett’s tour slogan from a few years ago,” he says, “this is the Year of Still Here.  And not just of still being here, but of thriving and having fun and doing some good—of beating the odds and doing all that I can.”

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