Founder's Story
The Real Reason Entrepreneurs Burn Out—And How to Fix It | Ep. 206 with Aaron Marcum Founder of Breakaway365
Thu, 24 Apr 2025
Aaron Marcum spent over two decades in the home care industry before founding Breakaway365, a coaching program designed to help agency owners scale their businesses while reclaiming the time, energy, and freedom they’ve lost. In this episode, Aaron shares what inspired him to launch Breakaway365, how positive psychology transformed his approach to leadership, and what he's learned from coaching hundreds of overwhelmed home care entrepreneurs.Drawing on data from his previous venture, Home Care Pulse, Aaron explains how burnout, poor delegation, and always-on leadership are silently eroding the effectiveness of many agency owners. Through Breakaway365, he now empowers leaders to rethink how they build their businesses—with scalable systems, strong culture, and purpose-driven leadership at the core.Key Discussion Points:The Burnout Epidemic in Home Care Leadership:Aaron shares how most agency owners lose sight of their original vision due to constant stress and reactive leadership. Breakaway365 was created to help them "break away" from always being on and return to the freedom they set out to create.Positive Psychology Meets Entrepreneurship:Backed by a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, Aaron explains how mindset shifts—like reframing setbacks as temporary—can radically transform business owners’ resilience and performance.Keeping Culture Framework:A proprietary model developed by Breakaway365 focused on retention and team growth.K.E.E.P. stands for Knowledge, Empowerment, Engagement, and Partnership.Emphasizes autonomy, relationships, and confidence as the “arc of growth” that drives team loyalty and performance.AI-Driven Purpose Matching:Aaron introduces a powerful tool Breakaway members use to help caregivers define their personal purpose, aligning it with the company’s mission—enhancing retention and employee engagement from day one.Three-Day Immersive to Three-Year Commitment:Breakaway365 starts with a transformational three-day event where owners define their Breakaway Blueprint—a roadmap tailored to what they truly want from their business. The program then continues for up to three years, offering tools, coaching, and AI-powered systems to build lasting success.Why This Matters:Home care is a mission-driven industry deeply impacted by leadership burnout and staff turnover.Breakaway365 is not just about growing revenue—it's about restoring joy and purpose to business ownership.Aaron’s approach is adaptable across industries, offering a blueprint for any founder looking to scale with sanity.Our Sponsors:* Check out Avocado Green Mattress: https://www.avocadogreenmattress.com* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Notion: https://notion.com/founders* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Chapter 1: Who is Aaron Marcum and what inspired Breakaway365?
And that's why I'm excited to have you, Aaron, because I've been told sometimes I can be on the negative side and I need more positivity in my life. Yep, everyone does. Thank you. See, everyone does, right? Everyone does. And I'm sure we can dive in all these things, and I'm excited. But I know you're doing these events, immersive events, and you're helping a lot of people and impact.
Five-time bestseller, USA Today bestseller. You've done amazing things. So before we go into all the nitty-gritty of those, what was the spark that made you say, I want to create Breakaway 365?
Yeah, you know, it's a culmination of many years as an entrepreneur. I've been in the home care space for 22 years, 23 years. I started as a home care owner. I started my own home care agency at 28 years old. And through that journey, and that's a highly charged emotional field, a lot of turnover, a lot of challenges in and of itself. And they're doing an amazing work.
Like these home care agencies, home care owners are doing amazing work. What I found, I saw this in myself, is that I had a dream when I started what I wanted out of my business. And then through the day-to-day and the stress and the turnover and the challenges that that brings in that industry, they lose sight of that.
And so really the foundation of our program after 23 years of having been involved, being a founder of one home care agency and owning another. And I started a company back in 2009, data analytics companies that measured satisfaction and we raised the quality of standards for the entire industry. And I was seeing because we were measuring so much data in that company that I started.
Home Care Pulse is the name of the company. It's now Activated Insights. I saw that a lot of the turnover and a lot of the challenges are being caused by burned out leaders. You know, people who are just we call it always on leadership or always on ownership. They thought they had to be involved in the business all the time. So Breakaway 365, as the term states, I'm a cyclist.
I got into cycling in 2016. But helping people break away from all of that and get back to why they started their home care business in the first place.
Oh, no, I was going to say it reminds me of when I was a corporate regional manager and I used to message people at two, three, four, five in the morning. And they would become very stressed out thinking they had to respond. It actually brought a lot of the morale down. And then, you know, I learned from that point, bringing that into my life.
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Chapter 2: What data reveals about burnout among home care agency owners?
And entrepreneurship is I need to be cautious in how I do things. So I'm curious around these data points, what you were seeing. Can you dive more into what were you seeing about these owners? And then we'd love to go to the next step.
Yeah. Yeah. So in the data points, one of the key questions we would ask, these are surveys we send out. Think of like what J.D. Powers does for the auto industry. We were doing for the home care industry. And so one of the key questions, we call it the net promoter question, but it's a simple question. It's how likely are you to recommend services or on the employee side?
How likely are you to recommend employment to family and friends?
And the other question that correlated the most to the impact, like whether or not someone is going to score that high on that highly recommend question, is when they would score their relationship with their supervisor really low or their owner, then that was the number one question that would bring down the highly recommend question. That's just one example is that
Their relationship with the owner or their supervisor and the connection they had with them was correlated to whether or not they would recommend someone to come work for them. I mean, it seems obvious, but we would find little nuances like that in the data that said, OK, this is we're causing some of our own turnover.
Yes, there's industry outside industry impact like Medicare changes and Medicaid changes and reimbursement rates and all these things impact. Certainly. But the greater impact, what I believe and what we found was often the leadership. Right. And and that they they didn't know how to delegate. They didn't know how to really let go of things and allow other people to come up and learn new skills.
And they wanted to own the whole process. And. A lot of these home care leaders maybe didn't have a business background when they started their home care business, right? And so with our program, we're trying to teach them not only how to level up themselves, but also level up their leadership team. And so I went back.
I was beginning to say I went back and got my master's degree in, when you say positivity, in applied positive psychology, which is really the science of well-being and why some people thrive and why some people don't. I studied under Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, very well-known psychologist, and really learned the science of well-being.
And that's what we've incorporated into the program to help people solve that always-on leadership. They don't always have to be on. They need time for themselves. I write in my book, I talk about this concept of the lie of the either-or. And the lie of the either or is that people feel like either I can thrive personally or I can thrive professionally, but I can't have both.
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Chapter 3: How does positive psychology help entrepreneurs overcome burnout?
But it's so it applies to every business, every workplace. that the more you can instill, help your team members with more confidence. In positive psychology, there's a theory called self-determination theory. People are more likely to stay when they have these three elements. And this is part of our keeping culture. We help our members incorporate these three elements in the workplace.
If people have more autonomy in the workplace, more better relationships, and greater confidence, I actually, I use the term, so self-determination theory is the theory that supports this, but I use a term that we've created called the arc of growth, which is part of the keeping culture model. And that's just the acronym, autonomy, relationship, confidence.
That when their relationships and their autonomy is strong, their confidence grows.
Yeah. So when you when you look at these home health care owners, I know a few people that own them. For example, I have a friend. It was started by his parents. And then he's now in his 40s. So now he started getting into it. And then I'm guessing eventually he's going to take over their business because they'll eventually retire.
But I'm curious on how, for example, his parents who are in their 60s, how they see this compared to him who's in his forties. And then I'm sure like you, you were in your twenties. So are you seeing different generations, different people from, from different decades being able to leverage this, but also like their openness to wanting to implement.
Yeah. Do you mean on the on the receiving the care on the actual workers on the on the culture side?
Yes. Like the owners of these businesses or management on the culture side, like keeping culture and these other things that you're doing. What is their openness to this?
Yeah. So going back to that arc of growth, the autonomy is that when you think about the younger generation coming up, they're very open. Like you're getting younger ones. Like I was a little bit of anomaly back then. Back when I started, the average agency owner was about 52 years old, which is how old I am today. 20, 23 years later, right? And so that was back then.
Now you have younger coming in, but what they're looking for and what they're missing often because they get into the grind of their business and they may not know how to create a positive culture in the workplace is they're lacking the autonomy that they're really looking for. This generation, this younger generation, they want even more autonomy than I wanted.
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Chapter 4: What are practical ways to maintain positivity in leadership?
I mean, I keep hearing it. It's it's a well, first off, I'm in California and it's very hard to even get from what I hear licensed or even get approved to do this. And there's like a waiting list of people that would be willing to do it because it can be, from what I hear, a lucrative business, but also a very challenging business from regulations to, like you said, people.
It's a very people-centric business that is also relating to people as they age, which is a sensitive subject in itself. If I was to attend your event and I have this kind of business, what do you think I can walk away with in the end?
Yeah, there's so much, you know, because it's so customized, even in that three day event is that we want to figure out what do you want out of your home care business? Like, what is it that you want? Don't be concerned about what your neighbor here wants or what other people want. What do you want? Because everyone seems to want something different.
And based upon that, then you create this blueprint. So by the end of the third day, they have more clarity on, again, what it is they want out of their business and how to get there. And we call it the breakaway blueprint. We help them start the process. It doesn't happen overnight, but we help them start their kind of first draft on this breakaway blueprint.
We have other tools that accelerate that blueprint, but the blueprint has their vision, their goals, and not just goals. We hear that a lot. There's other programs that do that, but we do it in such a unique way to help them figure out
Okay, if I want this, if I want to achieve, I want to double my revenue, for example, you know, in my business, because these are for-profit businesses that, you know, when they're growing, they're making a greater impact on the people that they care for and the people they employ. So we want them to grow.
And so if they're grow, if they had this goal to grow to this certain level, and it's a big goal, they've got to be willing to drop a lot of things that maybe they hadn't even thought of before. So what we help them identify is what's the 80% that's getting in your way that you have to drop to get there? What do you have to decrease and stop doing?
Like maybe you're doing things too manually, right? All entrepreneurs are guilty most, at least most, I shouldn't say all. Most entrepreneurs are guilty of creating complexity in their business. And so what we try to do is help get rid of some of that complexity because that complexity creates chaos.
Visionaries like myself, we constantly, if we don't have the right systems in place, we're constantly flying down from up above the trees, creating all kinds of chaos in our business, you know, trying to fix things. And then we fly back up and we've just created a whole mess. Right. And so we're really trying to help these members. And then that three days help them get clarity on, um,
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Chapter 5: What is the KEEP Culture Framework and how does it retain top talent?
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Chapter 6: How do different generations of home care owners view culture and autonomy?
I'm always hearing complaints from them about systems and processes like they don't have the foundational things set. which they can never really grow in scale. It becomes so hard for them to do so. And they're working 24 seven. So I can, although I've never had this type of business, I know many people who do, I can relate to listening to, to their pain points and seeing what you are solving.
But at the same time, many people today are going to be able to learn how to be positive, which is amazing because entrepreneurs, you know, we can, it's easy to get negative. And at the same time, we can take a lot of the things away no matter what industry you're in. So Aaron, this has been great. If people want to learn more about the events, learn more about you, how can they do so?
Let's go to our website, Breakaway365.com. They can also go to AaronMarkham.com. There's two sites there that you can learn more about me. My book is on AaronMarkham.com. I'm more front and center there if they want to learn more about the book. Yeah, those two websites would be the best way to get a hold of us. Appreciate it.
Well, Aaron Markham, thank you for joining us today. I feel like I need to just open this business just so I can attend your event.
You should. I'll help you with that, Daniel.
I'll document my journey, but it sounds amazing. Maybe I can live vicariously through somebody else that I know who will be a type.
Maybe we could have a reporter attend it, you know, just report on the event. There we go. There you go.
But Aaron, this has been really great. And thank you for joining us today.
Hey, thank you. Appreciate the time.
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