BUSINESS

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Horse breeder ships all over the world

BY MELODY BIRKETT Progress Contributor

Silver Spurs Equine owner Mike Miola has earned an international reputation for his horses.

Small wonder that his horse-breeding business at 14445 E. Quail Track Road in Scottsdale ships a small but signi�icant part of his top-of-the-line, high-performance stallions around the world: their semen.

“We freeze the semen in liquid nitrogen. It’s a complicated process,” Miola explained. “And we ship the frozen semen to our distributors in those countries. And they sell the breedings.”

“We ship breedings from our stallions all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Europe, Israel, Australia.”

Miola, who has owned the business with his wife Michelle since 2005, boasted, “We

Mike Miola owns Silver Spurs Equine in Scottsdale and boasts he has “37 of the fi nest breed stallions in the world.”

(Special to the Progress) have 37 of the �inest breed stallions in the world.”

Silver Spurs co-owner Michelle Miola and her husband opened their Scottsdale

business in 2005. (Special to the Progress)

And those horses are part of another aspect of his business – raising 150 babies a year.

“We sell those high-performance babies to various competitive ranches that are the showmarks of the industry in all different western saddle sports like reining, working cow, cutting, bough racing and Quarter Horse racing,” he explained.

The couple hasn’t always been in the horse business.

“I owned a company called NorthStar Financial which was one of the largest money managers in the United States,” said Miola.

“We had mutual funds, hedge funds, a brokerage �irm, a bank, you name it. If it had anything to do with money, we owned it.”

When they sold NorthStar in 2015, they were “managing over $300 billion,” he added.

Miola and his wife moved to Arizona in

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NOAH’s new center to be one-stop shop for care

BY ALISON STANTON Progress Contributor

Dr. Linda Eller, a physician who specializes in family medicine, started working as a medical provider for NOAH in February 2017. Over the course of the last �ive-plus years, Eller has strived to work closely with her patients in shared decision making so that they can achieve their healthcare goals.

“At NOAH I have had the ability to serve a diverse patient population and have earned the trust of many patients,” Eller said, adding that this has been the most rewarding part about being a NOAH provider.

When the NOAH Cholla Health Center opens in November, 2022 near Loop 101 and McDowell Road, Eller will be working at the clinic full time.

The 30,000 square foot comprehensive health center, which was previously a car dealership, will be a “one stop shop” for healthcare, and will be the combined new home to three of NOAH’s health centers: Heuser Pediatric Dental, Heuser Family Medicine Center and Cholla Health Center. All will be operating as Cholla Health Center in the new location.

Eller, who has earned a Board Certi�ication from the American Osteopathic Board of Family Medicine, said she is looking forward to having a new and permanent facility where she can serve her patients and continue to give them the best possible care.

“As a provider at the previous Cholla location, we have been without a permanent home, off and on, for over two years,” she said. Eller said the Cholla Health Center will offer comprehensive and high-quality healthcare in south Scottsdale, a part of the city that will be new to NOAH. “NOAH has operated clinics in north and Old Town Scottsdale, but has not had the capacity to extend services as far south and east as we will with this new location. There is a high demand in this area for an integrated healthcare offering that supports underserved populations,” she said.

It also will offer in-person and virtual visits for approximately 16,000 patients annually.

Eller is pleased that virtual visits will continue to be offered to her patients at the new Cholla Health Center via the NOAH QuickCare team.

“Keeping telehealth as an option has been a great addition for our NOAH patients. At NOAH, our wonderful integrative team helps to offer comprehensive care for our patients,” she said.

When she is not in the clinic, Eller can be found traveling and hiking, exploring the world around her with her amazing family.

“Traveling is a passion for my husband

2002, shortly after losing many friends in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Over time, the couple grew Silver Spurs Equine and now, “we’re the largest breeder of the American Quarter Horse in the world,” Miola said. “I always had diversi�ied portfolios,” explained Miola, adding that portfolio does not include training the horses. “When we got into ranching, we wanted to dedicate ourselves to breeding. I bought all of the great stallions in the industry so I would have a well-diversi�ied portfolio of stallions. Our stallions breeding fee ranges from $500 to $10,000 depending on the stallion.”

In addition to their Scottsdale ranch, the Miola’s also have one in Oklahoma. “We do all of our breeding here,” Miola said. “We put about 50 babies on the ground here and then we ship them to Oklahoma where they’re weaned from their mamas. That’s where the rest of our babies are born.”

On his 60-acre Scottsdale ranch, Miola said he has close to 300 horses at any one time and about the same number in Oklahoma, where he owns about 750 acres.

“For a mare to have a foal, the gestation period is 11 months, 11 days,” Miola explained. “Our mares were all champions in the show pen when they were youngsters and for some mares, we want to have more than one baby out of them.

“They can only carry one year and they never have twins.”

He also relies on in vitro fertilization “just as they do with human beings.”

“We have the same equipment as any in vitro fertilization clinic in the United States,” Miola added.

He employs 15 people in Arizona, including two full-time veterinarians, and over 20 more in Oklahoma.

He said stallions that are cared for can live 25-30 years. Three of his are 25 years old – well beyond the competition age of 3.

All the babies and most of the stallions are named at Miola’s ranches.

“What you try to do is get the dam and the sire (mom and dad) somehow mixed into the name,” Miola explained.

“They’re such hams, my stallions. They’re photographed all the time for various magazines. They don’t want to photograph me. They want to photograph the horse.

“If you go to an equine magazine, you’ll always see a horse and rider. But when they use one of my horses, Spooks Gotta Gun, on the cover, it’s only Spooks. He’s famous.” Spooks has unique coloring with brown fur on his body and a white face.

He said that in Scottsdale, “I’m with them every day along with my wife and the whole staff. We pamper them. They have their own swimming pool, they have their own spa and air-conditioned stalls. A lot of people, when they see it, ask if they can rent a stall and live here. We get very attached to them.”

Another part of Miola’s business is rescuing horses.

“One thing I’m very proud of is that every year, for those recent mares I mentioned… we rescue them from the killers that are going to ship these beautiful horses to Mexico to make dog food,” said Miola.

“We rescue a little over 200 a year. We bring them to our ranch. They get all the tender, loving care. They are such beautiful horses. How people can think of killing these horses is beyond me. Most of them stay with us but every year we �ind homes for about 200.”

Information: silverspursequine.com.

Business makes seniors feel ‘Right At Home

BY ALEX GALLAGHER Progress Staff Writer

Right At Home recently began providing Scottsdale residents and families looking for at-home care for their loved ones.

Franchise owner Christian Slagle is relishing the opportunity to have the wider reach.

“AARP has a statistic that every day, there are 10,000 65-year-olds added to our population and by 2029, they estimate that there will be 61 million people who are 65 years old or older,” Slagle said. “And there aren’t enough facilities to house all those people.”

Because of this, Slagle is trying to break the stigma surrounding at-home care for seniors.

Before becoming the owner of the Phoenix-Arcadia franchise of Right At Home, Slagle worked in the travel industry as a consultant and said that his departure from that career was another sad example of corporate America.

“It was sad because I made this company millions of dollars and they were going through a restructure and it was obvious they wanted to make a move and they didn’t. They hired somebody half my age,” he said. Slagle got an opportunity from a college friend who owned a Right At Home franchise in Dallas to try something new.

“He wanted a job with more of a purpose, [one that's] more ful�illing,” Slagle said. “So, he introduced me to it and knowing where I was in life, and said ‘I have so many stories about how we have done such great things for families and where our caregivers have brought comfort and how it’s just the whole idea of helping people and we see it all the time.’” Slagle jumped into this new approach to in-home care. He said control and legacy “are two key factors because the clients are saying, ‘hey, I’m losing control because someone’s coming into my house,’ and we’re saying ‘No, we’re going to give you control because we’re giving you control by helping you to stay in your home.” Slagle admits that can oftentimes be the challenging part.

The other challenge is respecting the client’s legacy.

“Now, legacy is important for families because the question is ‘how do you preserve someone’s legacy?’” Slagle said. “So, the idea of preserving their legacy is making sure that we talk about ‘what did you use to do?’ ‘Tell me about your family, etc.’”

Because of this, Slagle feels he cannot only pair the right client with the right caregiver, but he can have caregivers rotate since he currently has a three-to-one caregiver-to-client ratio and approximately a third of his caregivers are also students.

“Because the chemistry between the caregiver and the person is really important,” he explained, the process of marching the backgrounds of clients and providers also is important.

“If we have caregivers from the East Coast and that’s where the (clients) moved from, that usually goes better.”

However, it is most important to Slagle that he understands the clients before getting them the right caregivers.

“When someone is considering home care, we go to their house and we will ask as many questions as we can,” he said. “We will just ask a lot of questions about that legacy part so that we can train and see which one of our caregivers is a match.”

With an expanded presence, Slagle foresees more growth for his franchise.

“We see growth and we want to make sure that we’re doing a really good job of supporting families and the seniors,” he said. “We are seeing an increase and there is a tightening supply of assisted living facilities and they’re expensive.”

Info rmation: rightathome.net.

Chris and Lynnette Slagle have expanded their Right at Home franchise to service Scottsdale. (Special to the Progress)

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Eller said she is glad that she chose to become a family medicine physician and work as a provider for NOAH.

“I have the pleasure of caring for many generations of families here at NOAH. It is amazing to have continuity of care with my patients and their families,” she said.

Eller is accepting new patients for telehealth appointments currently, and later this year for appointments at the new Cholla Health Center.

Information: cholla.noahhelps.org.