What does it really mean to balance purpose and profit as an entrepreneur? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, host Marcia Dawood sits down with Coco Sellman to uncover how founders can address real community needs while building profitable, lasting companies. Marcia Dawood introduces Coco Sellman, a serial founder and the author of “A Force for Good.” Coco’s journey began with deeply personal motivations—seeking specialized care for her stepdaughter—which inspired her to launch and later successfully exit a healthcare business. Now, she’s focused on empowering women entrepreneurs to scale with intention and impact. This episode offers valuable insights for anyone navigating the world of startups and scale-ups. Coco Sellman shares hard-earned lessons on timing exits, acquiring businesses, and the essence of her practical growth framework. With honest stories and actionable advice, the conversation makes this episode an essential listen for founders seeking both purpose and profitable growth.
What does it really mean to balance purpose and profit as an entrepreneur? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, host Marcia Dawood sits down with Coco Sellman to uncover how founders can address real community needs while building profitable, lasting companies.
Marcia Dawood introduces Coco Sellman, a serial founder and the author of “A Force for Good.” Coco’s journey began with deeply personal motivations—seeking specialized care for her stepdaughter—which inspired her to launch and later successfully exit a healthcare business. Now, she’s focused on empowering women entrepreneurs to scale with intention and impact.
This episode offers valuable insights for anyone navigating the world of startups and scale-ups. Coco Sellman shares hard-earned lessons on timing exits, acquiring businesses, and the essence of her practical growth framework. With honest stories and actionable advice, the conversation makes this episode an essential listen for founders seeking both purpose and profitable growth.
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Marcia Dawood [00:00:00 - 00:00:04]:
Here, Coco. Welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast.
Coco Sellman [00:00:05 - 00:00:18]:
Oh, I'm so happy to be here. It's just watching your show and such a big follower and love your book. I can't wait till Unapologetic wealth comes out. And so I'm really excited to be here with you, Marcia.
Marcia Dawood [00:00:18 - 00:00:30]:
I'm excited to be here too. And I of course have your book right here with me. A Force for Good. We're going to talk a lot about that, but start off, tell our listeners a little bit about your background and how you created a Force for good.
Coco Sellman [00:00:31 - 00:01:15]:
Sure. So I am a kind of a lifelong founder. I've been a founder for 25 years. Five companies first. I always like to say the first few were not as successful as the last. My first company was a Etsy like company that was in the late 90s and that I ran out of money after five years. The next few were more consulting based and training ship based and I made money, enough money but not enough to sell it. And, and so I finally got to a place where I wanted to buy to, to own a company that was not where I really was, not at the center of it and where I could develop something way beyond myself, but really have a sense of legacy and stewardship.
Coco Sellman [00:01:16 - 00:01:58]:
And so that led me to my healthcare company. And so my healthcare company was called Alume, started it in 2016. It was a still is a company that provides around the clock nursing for medically fragile kids and adults. And that business grew fast. We merged with another company and then we sold it last year or 24, 2024. That created a very big run and then a like moment of total pause. And so out of that was birthed a force for good. And a force for good is a platform for women founders and it helps them scale, impact and profit more quickly.
Coco Sellman [00:01:58 - 00:02:12]:
We help them accelerate the speed at which they move from existence to surv to scaling to impact. And that's been a total joy and lots of fun. And that's more or less what I'm doing right now.
Marcia Dawood [00:02:12 - 00:02:33]:
I love that. Okay. I love how in a lot of cases, entrepreneurs, they develop something out of need. So I know that you and I share stepmotherhood and your stepdaughter, who is absolutely the sweetest, she did need some additional care and I think that's how your company got started. Am I right?
Coco Sellman [00:02:34 - 00:03:02]:
You are right, yes. So I met Amelia, who is now 24 but was 5 when I first met her. And she's medically fragile. She's a little girl that was born at 26 weeks rather than the regular 40. Very premature. She spent 100 days in the hospital before she was able to go home. She had surgeries on her heart, she had a stroke. She had a lot of challenges when she was a baby and those challenges stayed with her through her development.
Coco Sellman [00:03:03 - 00:03:46]:
And so, so she's a quadriplegic, she's in a wheelchair, she's non verbal, she eats through a feeding tube. So there's physical challenges. And she is also a bright, happy, joyful and super heart connected human. And she's been a joy in my life. And when she was 8 years old, there came a moment where her care got to a point where our health insurance approved 16 hours a day of, of nursing covered by our insurance. And so I went out to try to find a nursing agency, a home health agency that would cover her care. And nobody would. And I couldn't understand why.
Coco Sellman [00:03:46 - 00:04:27]:
16 hours a day, this seems like a Cadillac customer. And they explained to me that this particular area of home health, this continuous complex care, this sort of ICU in a home, is only done by a very small percentage of home health agencies. And after I went through the process and the journey, I realized that both there was a tremendous need. So we did find an agency and. But there was a waiting list, a long waiting list. I had to find our own nurses. It was not an easy thing. And it just presented to me both how hard it was for me and how like I had the resources and the time and the to to figure these things out.
Coco Sellman [00:04:27 - 00:05:21]:
And I discovered there were other families with multiple children and one parent in the home, not two, and many that were not English speaking as their first language. And I just broke my heart. Right is like how, why should this be so hard? There needs to be bigger access to this kind of care for these very disabled children and their, for their families. And I also looked at what was happening in the market because I am an entrepreneur and I like to do business that's sensible. I like purpose that leads to profit. And I learned that the home health world at this time, at that time in 2016 was consolidating, just starting to consolidate. So there were lots and lots of little players, mom and pops, and there was starting to see acquisitions. So I knew that there was a need that I would care about very deeply.
Coco Sellman [00:05:21 - 00:05:27]:
And I also knew that there would be an opportunity at some point to exit if I wanted to.
Marcia Dawood [00:05:27 - 00:05:29]:
Very smart, nice.
Coco Sellman [00:05:29 - 00:06:05]:
So it was a very personal need. And it, it definitely, it was, it played out in everything we did. It played out to the very End it played out to how we chose our exit partners. Did we want to go with a. A private equity firm? Did we want to go with a hospital where we're going to keep all of our patients and our nurses? Where we're. Where what was going to change, what wasn't going to change? So it really did affect our full decision making throughout. But we also, I was also a business person with. I had two investors, two angel investors, and I needed to make sure we all.
Coco Sellman [00:06:05 - 00:06:07]:
I made sensible decisions for them as well.
Marcia Dawood [00:06:08 - 00:06:12]:
Nice. And so who did you end up exiting to?
Coco Sellman [00:06:12 - 00:07:04]:
What kind of Connecticut Children's Hospital? So Connecticut Children's Hospital, it became their pediatric home health platform. And so they're now expanding it beyond the state of Connecticut. And it's part of an innovative care model that they have been working on and have taking full. Being able to get more access. That's the reason that they wanted to buy us, was because they wanted to have better access to sending children home from the hospital because they were getting stuck in the hospital because there was no home health provider to take them home. So there was a massive lockjam in the system, especially during COVID And then what ends up happening is these babies end up going into institutional care. That is terrible for the families. It's terrible for the babies.
Coco Sellman [00:07:04 - 00:07:32]:
The development isn't as strong. So they were. They want. There. There was that need. And then there was also home health also does a lot of behavioral health. And so the other reason that they weren't able to let kids go home from the hospital was because of that. So this gave them a strategic opportunity to better optimize the flow, control the flow, own the flow of being able to take care of people throughout the continuum, not just in.
Coco Sellman [00:07:32 - 00:07:33]:
In the hospital.
Marcia Dawood [00:07:34 - 00:07:49]:
What a great story of seeing a need, building something, and then being so strategic and thoughtful about the exit partner and then how it would. How your legacy and its legacy would live on. Right.
Coco Sellman [00:07:50 - 00:08:24]:
It was honestly, it's what I dreamed of, but told myself would never happen. It was hard, Marcia. And there were certainly moments along the way that were not easy or pretty. A lot of moments that were not easy or pretty. But I, I am very happy with the way that it ultimately turned out. And the other thing, okay, now I'm being very. Now I'm being the investor in me. Thank God we sold when we did because we were Medicaid driven, Heavily Medicaid driven.
Coco Sellman [00:08:24 - 00:09:10]:
And there was a talk about timing and trends because post Covid, there was actually an influx in our business acquisitions because there Were state by state, a lot of increases for the same reason all over the country, kids were not able to go home from the hospital because of this issue. And so the rates increased for a lot of states for this. In this area of care, including Connecticut. I. It was one of my like most favorite experiences was learning how to advocate at the state and national level. And we got in the state of Connecticut right after we did a merger, we did a. We had a 31.7% increase. So imagine overnight your top line goes up by 31.7%.
Coco Sellman [00:09:11 - 00:09:45]:
Oh. And so the value of the company went, grew, which was great. And we were also able to do more of the things we wanted to do for our nurses and for our patients. But it created a huge boost in our value. And then it became more popular. Our particular type of home health became more popular to acquire for a period of time. And then we got out and then the most recent administration came in and now Medicaid's a total show. And I don't know, I'm certain I would not get the value I did in 24.
Marcia Dawood [00:09:45 - 00:09:48]:
Wow. Timing is everything.
Coco Sellman [00:09:48 - 00:09:49]:
It totally is.
Marcia Dawood [00:09:50 - 00:09:51]:
Yeah, totally.
Coco Sellman [00:09:51 - 00:09:59]:
As I was talking to a founder this morning, great business. And I'm like, good luck finding an angel right now. It's a tough time.
Marcia Dawood [00:09:59 - 00:10:21]:
It is so tough. I probably get asked almost daily if I either will invest myself or if I know people who are investing or could I connect so and so to so and it's just, it's a tough market right now. We need to see more liquidity, more exits. They are slowly starting to happen, but it is taking some time.
Coco Sellman [00:10:22 - 00:10:23]:
Taking some time.
Marcia Dawood [00:10:23 - 00:10:58]:
So before we started recording, you told me that you were interested in potentially acquiring a business this year in 2026. So tell me why, what, how all the things that's so interesting to me because. And I'll give a plug in for Shama Bunton's summit that we were at in 2025. Right. We heard from somebody that's all they do is they buy companies and then they sell, they grow the company and then they sell the company like it is a. An actual way to invest. So I am. And by the way, Shama is having another summit, 2026.
Marcia Dawood [00:10:58 - 00:11:00]:
We'll make sure that our listeners know all about it.
Coco Sellman [00:11:00 - 00:11:00]:
Right.
Marcia Dawood [00:11:01 - 00:11:03]:
So tell us all the things.
Coco Sellman [00:11:04 - 00:11:43]:
Yeah, so I know KK Hart. I've met her through trauma, of course, and that this is one of the people that turned me onto this. But I. In 2025, it was my year of post exit. Let's See what the heck I want to do with my life. And do I want to really focus 100% on a force for good? Do I want to do something else? Do I want to angel invest? Do I want to go work in for a private equity firm and be an operator? Do I? What do I want to do? And I was talking to a friend who has been for years thinking about buying a company, and she came to me last year and said, I'm gonna do it. I've signed up for this accelerator program. I'm gonna.
Coco Sellman [00:11:43 - 00:12:15]:
I'm gonna do it. And my whole heart leapt out of my chest and I was like, that's what I wanna do. And it was like I hadn't had anything that really turned me on. And then it made. It just made so much sense to me because, okay, again, I love building businesses, but my sweet spot is once I have a team and things are going, I can make it grow. That's really like the 0 to 1 is it's not easy for anybody. It's not my favorite place. If I had to do it, I didn't have a choice, I would do it that way.
Coco Sellman [00:12:15 - 00:13:23]:
But given that I have the choice and if I choose myself to invest a bunch of money in, say a force for good, or go and buy a company that is cash flowing, I'd rather buy the company, it's cash flowing, and figure out way to grow it. So that's what I'm looking for. And I'm looking for a business that has between 501.52 of EBITDA and I'm looking at a variety of sectors. People think I'm crazy when I say that, but I'm looking for the right role for me. I'm looking for a company that has, first of all, some kind of a mission of some kind that I can really sink my teeth into. Number two, it's gotta have some people on the team, that existing team that will stay, that have real institutional knowledge, cultural knowledge, whatever the special sauce is. So that I'd like to buy that when I write my sweet spot list of what I want, I want to buy into a team that's smarter than me, that knows stuff I don't know. Right.
Coco Sellman [00:13:23 - 00:14:14]:
And if it has already in place a go to market engine that's going at least a little bit, or that it's firing on a cylinder in one continuous way, that maybe there's other channels that I can think about to help grow. That's what I'm looking for. And it might be serving the Small to medium sized market, business market because I know that market. It could be serving healthcare in some way. It could be a health tech platform, it could be something like that. I've been, I've looked at some travel nursing businesses, I've looked at, I've looked at SaaS businesses. I'm looking at a wellness organ, like a company that has a really great backend, digital backend and they have 20 different brands on the front end that are wellness types of brands and they, and they have a huge mailing list, tons of bit. They've been around for 20 years.
Coco Sellman [00:14:15 - 00:14:28]:
So like all different kinds of stuff. And I'm going through this phase now of having a lot of calls with founders looking at their. Now it's not my diligence, my, my data room anymore, it's their data boom and I'm gone. It's so fun.
Marcia Dawood [00:14:29 - 00:14:30]:
Oh my gosh. So fun.
Coco Sellman [00:14:31 - 00:14:31]:
It is, yeah.
Marcia Dawood [00:14:32 - 00:14:40]:
And so what would be the ideal role that you would want to play in the business? Would you be the CEO? Would you run the company or you have?
Coco Sellman [00:14:41 - 00:15:08]:
Yeah, I would be the CEO. I like to get my hands a little dirty but where I play best is orchestrator, strategist, orchestrator. At Illume, the thing that was so great is I really was able to play a CEO role. I did strategic sales, I didn't do everyday sales. Right. I wasn't providing the services, I wasn't a nurse. Right. I was every.
Coco Sellman [00:15:08 - 00:15:47]:
I was looking at data, I was seeing, I was getting feedback from what was coming in and able to say okay, here's how we can tweak this, here's how we can tweak this and then work with the team to create the outcomes. And that's where I do best. So that's what I'm hoping to do again and in a perfect. One of the things I like about this wellness company is aside from the fact that it has really strong net profit and it's. And the founder doesn't work a lot right now. It's been going for a long time. I like it because two things. One, what's working is working well but there's a lot of things they haven't done.
Coco Sellman [00:15:48 - 00:16:12]:
So there's a lot of things to layer on it. And the other thing is I could acquire other businesses and plug it into their high capacity, high conversion digital process that they their backend so that I we'll see what happens. But that's what I envision is being able to find something and see a way to grow it through organic growth as well, as through acquisition.
Marcia Dawood [00:16:13 - 00:16:28]:
Nice. Wow, that is so interesting. How do you even find out? I have so many questions like how. How do you even find out what businesses are out there for sale? Do you have to talk to an I banker or where do you start?
Coco Sellman [00:16:29 - 00:16:43]:
Well, in the range I'm looking. So I'm looking for companies that have between 501.5 of EBITDA. So that means they're probably somewhere, depending on the kind of business, they're probably somewhere between three and $10 million.
Marcia Dawood [00:16:43 - 00:16:44]:
Right.
Coco Sellman [00:16:44 - 00:17:11]:
And so there are different places to find things at that. At those price ranges. But the. I don't know, the Zillow of businesses is biz Buy, Sell. So you can go there and you can find all kinds of businesses. Whether you want to buy company or a bakery or you want to buy a SaaS company, you can buy. Everything is there. And then there are some more specialized sites.
Coco Sellman [00:17:11 - 00:17:40]:
I had a subscription to acquire.com and that's a little bit more filtered. And then you start to find brokers along the journey. I've been working with one particular broker that is only in the healthcare space. And so I'm. I'm looking at another home health business. Actually, it's home care, so I'd have to get permission with my previous sellers to buyers to do it. But there's that I could go back into home health. There's.
Coco Sellman [00:17:40 - 00:17:58]:
There's all kinds of. There's different specialties. There's ones that are more local, ones that are more national. So it's a little bit of. It's a little bit of a wormhole, but there's a lot of stuff. And then. And there's also a lot of competition. There's a lot of people that want to buy these businesses.
Marcia Dawood [00:17:58 - 00:18:19]:
I bet. Yeah. Wow, Coco, you are just such a powerhouse. Okay, so I can't let you go without talking more about your book. Okay. Tell us all about the things. This book has so many great recommendations, things that you should be doing as a founder. There's.
Marcia Dawood [00:18:19 - 00:18:30]:
It's so easy to read. There's lots of pictures and charts and ways that people can really start to think about their business differently. So tell us what prompted you to write it and what was that process like?
Coco Sellman [00:18:30 - 00:19:16]:
Yeah, you know, what prompted me to write it was I had just closed on the merger of my company with Allpoint Home Care. So we became 5050 owners. And. And it was an incredibly positive result at the end of the day. But the melding of the two businesses was hard. And so I wrote this book as A love story to myself really. It was like, this is how I will run every business I ever lead or grow or start again. And I'm just reminding myself this is how we do it.
Coco Sellman [00:19:17 - 00:19:50]:
And this isn't to say that I'm not trying to throw my, my partners under the bus at all. We just did things so differently. And it was, we cared about patients, we cared about nurses, but everything else, how we did things was so different. So this was a book that was all about helping. I've been Marcia. I am a systems person. I'm a flywheel person. I like to, anytime I do anything, if I think I'm ever gonna do it again, I like to put it in a recipe that I can find and pull out and then, and never have to do the thinking again.
Coco Sellman [00:19:50 - 00:21:11]:
Make it a shortcut. So any company like, and I started doing this 25 years ago. So like I, whenever I was build a new company, I would start with the same framework, ask myself the same questions. And over the time it became this four page growth plan, which the book is basically the four page growth plan. And it includes what, what do you need to know all the time? What do we need to be thinking about so that you know what to do to be of highest and best use for your business every day? Like, that's really the point of it is like, when I wake up today, what should I do right? What should I do today? Is it that phone call to that customer? Is it calling and advocating to Capitol Hill, what is the most powerful thing I can do right now? And the four page growth plan allows you to, to put everything down on a page, four pages. And that process of working it out and continuing to come back to it and working on it with your team is what helps you develop and refine that clarity over and over again. And so it's a tool that has multiple tools to support it and a thinking model around how to run a company. And.
Coco Sellman [00:21:11 - 00:21:55]:
But it's designed to help. It's really about growth. It's all about how do I grow faster, how do I spend less energy on the stuff that doesn't matter, how do I. Where are the levers? Where are the accelerators? And part of that answer comes from knowing your core purpose, knowing what your vision is. Part of it is who is your customer and why do you love them so much? Part of it is, what is the main problem I need to solve this year? What is that core constraint and how do I make sure that is the thing I'm focused on all year? So It's a distillation of all of that into four pages that then helps you take those steps.
Marcia Dawood [00:21:56 - 00:22:01]:
Amazing. Imagine if every founder used that framework.
Coco Sellman [00:22:02 - 00:22:14]:
How. Yeah, yeah. Incredible. It's actually, it's. I. What I like to say that business is amazingly simple, but that simplicity is very complex.
Marcia Dawood [00:22:15 - 00:22:16]:
Oh, my gosh.
Coco Sellman [00:22:16 - 00:22:42]:
That's such a great way to say that. Right? Yeah. It's like, we want to go out, find customers, add value to their life in exchange for money. That's what we're going to do. That's what we do. But, like, how you do that is complicated. It's. It is a way that tries to make it as simple as possible and get you through the complexity so you can do the thing that is most powerful today and that your team is doing the thing.
Coco Sellman [00:22:42 - 00:22:44]:
So it's fun. I enjoy it.
Marcia Dawood [00:22:45 - 00:23:20]:
Well, I love that you talk a lot about profit, as we all should, but everything is. I feel that everything in your book, in your business, in you as a leader, is about this force for good and that you really exude that as, like, your mantra. But at the same time, you're like, hey, no, we're not doing this as like a charity. No, we're here to have a business that does good things and is profitable, purposeful and profitable.
Coco Sellman [00:23:21 - 00:23:33]:
A hundred percent. And I. It's the reason why I want to go and buy another business and grow that's cash producing, is because then I can do more good in all the other things I do.
Marcia Dawood [00:23:33 - 00:23:35]:
Yes. Yes. Right.
Coco Sellman [00:23:35 - 00:23:59]:
And the other thing, and this is, I feel as an entrepreneur, there's, There's. I've been on two sides of this entrepreneurship coin. One is where you're creating something that you just love so much and you just want to follow your heart all day long. Right. And that can get you into trouble because. Because that, that can. That has no guardrails. That is.
Coco Sellman [00:24:00 - 00:24:35]:
Is it a passion project or are you really trying to innovate a quality, sustainable business that can perpetuate and deliver more and more value forever? And that's. Those are two different things. And it's just, it's. I think it's important for us as entrepreneurs to know what we're doing when we're doing it. Because without. If you don't have a board and you don't have a boss and there's not a lot of accountability, these can. These lack of boundaries can get us into trouble.
Marcia Dawood [00:24:36 - 00:24:36]:
But.
Coco Sellman [00:24:37 - 00:25:19]:
Right. And so that's. It can become what sabotages us from actually manifesting what we want, which is this business that is Prosperous and gives us a level of freedom in our lives and we're not at the grindstone all the time. And like that's what happens when you go down that path. And I've done it where you, you just do what you feel like and once feels like you're feels good and you give everything away in the journey. But then now you can't afford to buy the, to, to hire the good people, you can't afford to improve your programs, you can't invest in the technology to, to make it scalable. And that's where you end up burning yourself out.
Marcia Dawood [00:25:20 - 00:25:30]:
Totally. Yes. Coco, what is one thing that you would like people to walk away with our listeners to know about entrepreneurship and the things?
Coco Sellman [00:25:32 - 00:25:34]:
Well, I'll tell you that.
Marcia Dawood [00:25:36 - 00:25:38]:
Focus. Yes.
Coco Sellman [00:25:39 - 00:26:36]:
Not sexy, but it is. If we were to really think about something in your life that you were absolute, you knew you had to do it. It was your family, your child, an illness, something, you had to do it, you had to do the thing. It's. You behave differently. Right. When you focused and you know what you want and you care enough to do it, then you can innovate and do whatever it is. So I really believe one of, one of my most like, anytime I start a business, anytime I start at project, have that one, one big breakthrough goal for a year and have 12 months is a great time frame because in 12 months you can achieve almost anything, right? And so what is that thing you want to achieve in your business this year? That's profound.
Coco Sellman [00:26:36 - 00:27:10]:
So maybe you want to double your revenue or double your profit. Maybe you want to double the number of customers that achieve a particular result and then don't have three goals have one, it doesn't mean those others aren't going to get done. But if you don't make this one breakthrough, really give it the oxygen and have a weekly meeting, have KPIs around it, meet with your team every week about it, set up celebrations around it along the way. If you don't give it that level of attention, it's not going to happen. But if you do, you'll break through.
Marcia Dawood [00:27:11 - 00:27:33]:
Amazing. That's not just business lessons. Those are life lessons. I love this. Coco, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today and telling us all of these amazing things that you've done and are doing. Of course we're going to put everything in the show notes so that people can buy your book and learn all about a force for good and all the amazing things that you have out there in the world. So thank you.
Coco Sellman [00:27:33 - 00:27:36]:
Thank you for having me. Marcia. It's a pleasure to be here.