Female Founders
BY EDDY GOLDBERG
AMERICAN DREAM
M
Growing the brand, one client at a time
ila Feldman came to the U.S.
from Ukraine in 1980, when
she was 12, a refugee from religious persecution. She settled in Brooklyn
with her family, which arrived in the U.S.
with only one suitcase. They had no furni-
ture and slept on the floor until a neighbor
looked in on them. “Soon everybody was
bringing us things,” she says, from clothes
to furniture. Her parents took odd jobs to
put food on the table.
At 15, she met Lenny Verkhoglaz, her
husband-to-be and future co-founder of
their franchise business, in a store where
he was working to put himself through
college. They began to date and five and
a half years later, married and moved to
New Jersey, where their company, Executive Care, had its serendipitous beginning.
It was Valentine’s Day and the couple
was preparing to go out when her rabbi
called and asked her to look in on an elderly neighbor, Helen, whose daughter
was away and had left her mother to fend
for herself. “I couldn’t understand how
her daughter went on vacation for two
weeks. It was heartbreaking to see,” says
Feldman, who spent the next week caring
for her bedridden neighbor. (See below
for more details.)
Neither of them had ever done this
before, but after that week, she says, “I
went home and told Lenny that this is
what I wanted to be doing with my time,
helping the elderly in need of care and
their families.”
She soon left her job to provide oneon-one home care, adding one client at
NAME: Mila Feldman
TITLE: Co-founder
COMPANY: Executive Care
SYSTEM-WIDE REVENUE: $10 million
NO. OF UNITS: 27 (13 corporate)
INTERNATIONAL UNITS: 0
GROWTH PLANS: 1 year, 10; 3 years, 15;
5 years, 20
PUBLIC OR PRIVATE? Private
YEAR COMPANY FOUNDED: 2004
YEAR STARTED FRANCHISING: 2013
YOUR YEARS IN FRANCHISING: 3
32
Franchiseupdate ISS U E I, 2 0 1 6
fu1_executivecare(32-34).indd 32
2/7/16 3:04 PM