2026 New Year Check-In: How Helperly Turns Aging Into Joyful Adventures

We share the moments that defined 2025, from hot air balloon Dream Days to tough hiring lessons, and we set our sights on a 2026 that proves aging can be joyful. We talk presence, culture, reach, and a New Year’s wish for seniors to set brave, simple goals.

• Dream Days that create lasting memories with family
• How social media helps reframe aging as joyful
• Hiring lessons and the primacy of culture
• Practicing presence as a founder and parent
• Expanding reach beyond Utah to new states
• Big goal for 2026: one million followers
• A New Year’s wish: seniors set real, energizing goals

Email us your feedback and topic ideas at marketing@helperly.com, helperly.com, and we will make an episode about it

Chapters

• 0:08 Looking Ahead To 2026
• 0:32 Dream Days Take Flight
• 1:34 Families Make Memories Together
• 2:14 Hiring Lessons And Culture
• 3:24 Being Present As A Founder
• 4:47 Expanding Reach And Joyful Aging
• 6:12 Big Goal: One Million Followers
• 7:21 Apply 2025 Lessons In 2026
• 8:13 New Year’s Wish For Seniors
• 9:43 Thanks, Feedback, And What’s Next

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Welcome back to Senior Care Academy. Last week we talked about Christmas, and this week we're going to be talking about 2025 and New Year's and just kind of checking in on 2025 and looking forward into 2026. So we um lined up a few questions just to kind of reflect um personally on my year, helperly as a year, and then um just seniors and and everything in general. So the first thought is the proudest moment with the helperly team this year. I think one of the proudest moments that I have, there's a lot of proud moments throughout the year, but something that I'm super proud of is starting to get into creating bucket lists like Dream Days for Seniors. Um, and we were able to take um an elderly man and his daughter, and then an older lady and her granddaughter on a hot air balloon ride in Park City. And um the team just we worked together really well. We posted about on social media, that's how we got the winners, and then from there um we reached out to their family members to figure out what gifts we should get for them. We worked with the the granddaughter and the daughter to get really sweet notes to their uh older loved ones. Um the hot air balloon ride was really awesome. Bigfoot hot air balloon did a great job. Um and it was just a really cool moment before they were a little bit nervous. I was able to go up on the hot air balloon with them, and that was super cool. Um, just seeing them like they had their arms around each other and they were just like taking it all in. Um so that was a super proud moment being able to make that happen. Um, and I'm looking forward to doing that a whole lot more in 2026, just trying to help seniors continue living and checking off bucket lists and and making memories. It was really cool. It'd be cool to take those two older people by themselves, but it was even more special to have them be accompanied by somebody that they love, one of their loved ones, that um now they can share that memory forever and be like, remember, you know, back in 2025 when on the hot air balloon red. So I loved that. Um, next, what is an unexpected lesson that I learned as CEO this year? I don't know if it's unexpected, but it's a lesson that I learned and then relearned is that my biggest responsibility as CEO is making sure that we have the right people. Um it's a lot less about my personal skills or my personal intelligence or my um strategy or anything like that. Like those are all important. But what it when it boils all the way down, it's do we have the right people with the right culture um to help continue move thing continue to move things forward um and to have everybody aligned. So not necessarily unexpected, but it was a lesson that I learned this year. Um I wish it could be more because of how awesome I was at hiring, but some really bad hires towards the beginning of the year that made me learn that that I need to be spending a lot of time making sure that the people that join us on this mission um have the right intentions and work ethic and everything like that. Number three, how has being the CEO of Help Release shaped you personally this past year? Hmm. Um I think more than the role of CEO itself, just being um uh entrepreneur trying to start something and the amount of space it takes in your mind daily, not just like from nine to five or eight to six or something. It's literally all day, every day. Um and if I'm not like up to my computer working, I'm thinking about working. Um I wish that I don't wish this actually, but probably 99 out of a hundred times when my wife's like, what are you thinking about? I have to say work and the like that's what I'm thinking about all the time. Um and so being the CEO I've had to personally work harder to be where my feet are. So if I'm at home um with my boys being very intentional in that regard, or if I'm sitting up to my desk working on my computer, I'm at my desk working at my computer. Um, and so being way more intentional um has really helped is what I've been working on a lot this year to be intentional with every single one of the different roles that I play in my life, CEO being one of them. This is gonna be a quicker episode, but talking about what is my biggest hope for Helperly in 2026. I think my biggest hope for Helperly in 2026 is that we can start to really expand our reach. So we this year started doing Dream Days, we started um doing local experiences, started posting more about it on social media, and so the biggest hope I think is being able to show the world that aging can be joyful. Um, we had some ads running on like Facebook, and there was a number of older people that were like, Aging sucks. Like, you don't know what you're talking about, you're only 27. Um, and I was like, Yes, that's the point. Like, we are trying to change that. Um, so my biggest hope is to be able to really show the world that aging can be a good thing. Like, obviously, it's not fun to have your body slow down or to have your kids all live out of state, or like all of those things aren't fun. That's not the point of what we're trying to say. But we want to say that it can be better. Um, so doing that by just getting more seniors out, doing more dream days, um, that's my biggest hope for Helperly. And then along the way, of course, is growing our reach and our impact um outside of Utah and to other states, and um, I think 2026 would be a lot of fun. If Helperly could achieve one major thing in 2026, what would it be? I think if we could achieve just one major thing in 2026, I think it would be crossing like a million followers or something. Just enough being able to get enough reach so that way every single time we show something awesome happening for an older adult that people see it is the biggest thing that I want to um have happen. Because we are regularly helping out like the one, right? The one senior, the one group of seniors, the the individual. And I love doing that and being able to get the reach on social media to kind of just fill social media with uh positive things about older adults instead of all of the other like there's other good things on social media, but like eight billion pieces of content are posted every single day. And if we could have a lot of people seeing um somebody that's older breaking a stereotype about getting old, laughing, smiling, doing something that they've wanted to do or that they used to do, um, that would be awesome. Um what is your new year's message to the helperly team as we start 2026? I think the helperly team as we start 2026 is 2025 was full of lessons learned, and now 2026 we should go apply all of them. So if we learned all these things in 2025, the good, bad, and the ugly, um, and then we don't change anything, then we didn't actually learn. And so I'm excited to apply all these lessons into 2026 to um not relearn the same thing, like let's continue to grow, continue to progress, and continue to be better. And the last question: what's your new year's wish for seniors and the families that we serve? My New Year's wish for the seniors and families that we serve is that I wish for them to especially the seniors. I'll just focus on the seniors. The seniors that we serve, I wish for them to set New Year's resolutions, to set goals, to set ambitions, whether it's relearning the trumpet or um dabbling in Spanish or going out and playing pickleball once a week. Setting goals, I think um that as we anecdotally and then just objectively as we get older and life starts to appear less um expansive, right? At 20, oh, I could do anything with my entire life. At 30, I could do lots of things with my entire life. At 50, I could do some things with my life. Um at 80, I'm alive, you know? Um, and so my hope would be that they make a few goals and continue to try to progress and better themselves and and um learn new things because they should have just as much vigor for life, and I think they can. I've seen this with the elderly people in my life, that they can have just as much vigor and excitement for life at 91 as I have at 27. And so if more seniors could do that and their families supported them in whatever their goals and ambitions are, that would be an incredible 2026. And so thanks for following along, Senior Care Academy. We're excited to bring a lot of um really exceptional guests and thought-provoking conversations. Um, and we're open to whatever feedback and topics that you want us to talk about. So if you do have any thoughts, then you can just email it to marketing at helperly.com, helperly.com, and we will make an episode about it. So thanks again for twenty twenty-five, and here's the twenty twenty six. Cheers.