Owner's Story

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From Customer To Owner One Woman’s Experience With Elder Care Led Her To Help Others In 2001, Toni Scharr began a life-altering journey. Her story is not unique. Her mother, Mary Pawlek, suffered a stroke and spent time in a nursing home. Toni and her siblings wrestled with the same issues many Americans do when dealing with their elderly parents – “What does mom want? What is best for her? How can we help most when we do not live with her?” “She did not want to be ‘handicapped’ in her own home, as she put it,” Scharr says. “But she was receiving horrible care and not recovering well in the nursing home. We – my dad and the kids – decided to bring her home.” Mary came home to the family’s sprawling farm just across the Rio Grande River from Mexico near McAllen, Texas. Louis Pawlek still farmed large amounts of milo, corn and vegetables. He needed help taking care of his wife. “We were familiar with senior care,” Scharr said. “We found Caring Senior Service and we immediately loved the office staff. I went to the office to meet them, which is rare. The caregivers they brought to meet my mom were outstanding.” It’s been nearly 10 years, and Mary Pawlek is still a Caring Senior Service client. The story is typical, except for one major component: Toni decided to bring the same care her mother received to the elderly where she lived – in Victoria, Texas.

“I never saw myself as a business owner,” she says. “I am a pharmacist, and I have worked in hospital pharmacies for a while. My husband is a business owner, and I did not want to enter that world. “But the more we worked with Caring, the more I thought, ‘what a neat service. Why do we not have this in Victoria?” Toni met with her CPA, and gathered all the information about a franchise from Caring Senior Service founder and CEO Jeff Salter. “We went to San Antonio to meet Jeff, and we began to work on providing this service to our town,” she says. “We thought we researched the area (Victoria) well, then low and behold we found a national competitor here. I worked in three hospitals in town and never saw their information.” Wanting to give the seniors of Victoria the same level of service her mother received in The Valley, Toni took the plunge into business ownership. She came to training in San Antonio and launched her business in 2003. “I searched for an administrator, and had a few people turn me down or be too non-committal,” she says. “Then I found Laurie Koehl, and we haven’t looked back. She came to me with experience caring for a terminally-ill husband and a load of experience working with the elderly. She had such a good reputation.”


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Owner's Story by Caring Senior Service - Issuu