On this episode of Banking on KC, Mike Vogt, President of Staying Home Corporation, joins host Kelly Scanlon to discuss how home accessibility solutions are helping seniors live independently and safely in their own homes.
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Kelly Scanlon: Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is Mike Vogt, the president of Staying Home Corporation. Welcome, Mike.
Mike Vogt: Thank you very much for this time.
Kelly Scanlon: Staying Home. It's all about just as the name implies, helping people. Live safely and independently as they age, and that aging in place, it's becoming more and more common.
Let's talk about your 44 years in the industry. so what first drew you to the work and what inspired you to step into. Ownership and leadership of the company.
Mike Vogt: Whether coincidence or divine providence, was a 20-year-old, tired of going to college. wanted to marry my high school sweetheart. So, began looking for drafting jobs.
That's what I had been working in as, mathematics, mechanical design, and applied at a machine shop. They said they didn't have anything, so they pointed me across the street where they had just lost a drafting person. And suggest that I apply there. It was a company called American Stair Glide, located in Grandview, Missouri.
And it had just been, let go of by Ewing Kaufman, who owned the Royals and of course Mion Laboratories, and he had sold it to several of his officers that took the company private. And it was a small company of about 60 people. I was 20 years years old. Walked in, was able to get a job there, had no idea what it was about or anything like that in the engineering department.
Started doing drawings right away and then I got a, a very fortunate break After just, two years, they found out I was a unique person with some engineering that could actually speak to people and do some things like that. So they had just bought a new product. In, it was Andover England, and they'd bought the rights to it.
It was a curved stair lift, and they needed someone with good math skills and the drafting background. And so though I was the youngest person there, they chose me to go to England for two weeks. The crazy part was I had grown up, parents were wheat farmers in central Kansas, so this was my very first airplane ride.
This was my very first time to see the ocean, which was from the English channel side. And I spent two weeks over there and got to stay in the same small town in a foreign country and get to know the people. And it was a great trip. Got back, things actually worked out pretty well, and that was kind of a kickstart to get things going and allowed me to, to go on to some additional products.
In 87, they bought the rights to a small elevator, because I think of the success in England, they sent me, uh. To Belfast, Northern Ireland. Just got some incredible opportunities for a small farm town kid to go do some of that. And, then I got promoted at about year 10 into doing the technical service department where we did training, troubleshooting things along that line.
We'd have a group of dealers come in every month. They got to know who I was, and that just helped me, kind of begin the. Stair steps to learning about the industry and more people.
Kelly Scanlon: And at some point along the way, a group came in and bought the company, didn't they?
Mike Vogt: And about my 19th year, a large German company came in, called Ssen Krupp.
they were a great big steel company, but also have a very large elevator division. And, told us how they make companies more profitable. They get rid of all the middle managers, of which I was a middle manager at the time. Right. And so we, took a step back and a couple of buddies of mine and I decided I was about 40.
Let's have a midlife crisis. Let's try to start a company from scratch. So, my wife and I were just in the middle of building a house. I quit my job. We got a few investors gathered together, and we started a company called Summit Lifts, making our own stair lift.
Kelly Scanlon: How did it morph into Stay in Home Corporation?
Is it the same company you renamed, or, or did you sell the other one and start this one?
Mike Vogt: So, summit Lifts, um, was located in Lake Winnebago area and after about six, seven years, there were some suitors that decided they wanted to look at acquiring us. I didn't want to sell, I wanted to buy out the partners, but I didn't have any financing or ability to do that.
So, the partners were ready to sell out, so we went ahead and sold the company to them, but the, the company called Harmar decided to keep me on as the COO, so I stayed on for four more years working for them. Got to learn just that much more about running an organization that was larger and what that looked like, et cetera.
it was owned by an equity group and after a time that wore on me a little bit, and so, left there. Thought about what I wanted to do and thought I really loved the industry. So I had a, I guess you'd call it a second midlife crisis, and, decided to go back and, and get another company started, and that's where Staying Home Corp started.
Kelly Scanlon: Let's talk about that focus on home accessibility products. You work from with stair lifts to residential elevators and, and so why, which of those solutions are most in demand and. What kinds of real life stories do they unlock for families?
Mike Vogt: It really came about that it was more seen by the relatives and stuff.
Once COVID hit and it and it, it happened then when families couldn't go visit their mom and dad in the nursing homes and they were all of a sudden realized. The importance of being able to keep mom and dad at home and accessible to them. Of all things, the, the most common products sold by far are the stair lifts, just because they are economically more feasible.
So a person can get a stair lift for maybe three or $4,000, put in the house, brand new, and they can stay in their home, go up and down the steps. Um, it's, it's a little bit ironic. There's, there's two quick stories. One was a. tied to this issue, I called American Pride, and Americans are great. They fight hard, they work hard to do everything, and they never need any help for any from anyone.
So getting a stair lift is a little bit of a humbling experience for them. Whereas if I sell someone an elevator, they'll have a block party and they'll have everybody come in.
Kelly Scanlon: Of course. Isn't that crazy? Yeah.
Mike Vogt: But if it's a stair lift, it's almost, Hey, could you come around the back door and not tell anybody you're here?
I'm buying this for my wife. It's not for me. I don't need it. And so there has to be a little bit of a realization, the danger of falls and things like that that's out there. But, um, we had a lady who would not be released from the hospital until she had a stairlift put in due to a major hip issue and.
She, we put the stairlift in. She passed away about three months later. We needed a stairlift for our church. So I went to the auction and I had the neighbor let me in just to make sure it worked and that type of thing. When I walked into the home, though, she lived by herself. She had tied bedsheets up and down the steps to use to climb up and down the steps right next to the stairlift because she didn't need a stairlift.
Okay? And so there is that element that's a little bit crazy where some people fight that a bit. But there's the other side where the when I got back from Belfast and went to put the first elevator in, it was in Jacksonville, Florida. A gentleman was in a wheelchair and he went upstairs to his bedroom after we completed the project and probably took 10 or 15 minutes till he came down.
I thought something was wrong and he came down and tears were running down his face, and so I asked his wife, I said, is everything okay? Said yes. He hasn't been in his bedroom for six months. Oh, and so he was blown away. She was blown away. She ended up inviting me and my wife over for dinner the next day, and that was really the first time.
I was about eight years in the company then, and that was the first time I had a good understanding of the difference that these products make in, in the lives of, of different people.
Kelly Scanlon: Yeah, the mobility, and the accessibility that it gives them nationally, I believe the statistics say that 90% of adults over the age of 65 do wanna stay in their own home.
You've attributed that in part to COVID. but Kansas City, just Kansas City, over 65 population is expected to double. By 2030. And so how is Staying Home Corporation preparing for that surge?
Mike Vogt: So there are, there's a billion dollar company in Canada. There's a two $50 million company in Wisconsin. Oh yeah.
Okay. They a hundred million dollar companies and we're a smaller, you know, 10 to $12 million company doing our thing. So we have a lot of competition. So, and the, and the competition is also coming over from Europe now. Because the population has aged out over there, and so now they're coming over to where the baby boomers are at, and you're absolutely spot on.
The, the crazy numbers are, I think we're still at 15 years left, that every single day, 10,000 people will celebrate their 70th birthday. And then in addition, the seniors make up about 25% of the US population, but they have 40% of the money and 50% of the disposable income. So it's, it's still gonna be a growing market for some time.
And I think what will happen is. In, in the near future, and it hasn't happened yet. Somebody will step up and they'll get a brand name on a lift, which hasn't happened yet, so everybody just knows it by a stairlift. There's not a, you know, it's not like an adhesive strip as bandaid or something along that line.
And then once I think that occurs, it'll become a little bit more feasible. Um, in England where it's not unusual for a sportscaster to be talking about a soccer player and say, you know, he's at the end of his career, he's about ready for a, in that case, a stana, which is a stair lift over there. And so it's part of the vernacular, it's part of their verbiage, but it's not that way in the us It's still kind of this, yeah.
I don't wanna admit I really need this yet. Right. But, that will come, I think. Time as bigger companies and more companies start getting into this.
Kelly Scanlon: Well, you talked earlier about how COVID made staying at home or aging in place, really a social imperative because families needed to mingle and, and to visit with their loved ones, their older family members.
And, but on top of that, um, so many family members are caregivers. And another stat that I read is that they contribute around 600 billion. Dollars annually in unpaid care, you know, the time that they commit to their older relatives, and a lot of that is focused on helping them to stay at home. So how do staying home's products help them to ease that burden?
Mike Vogt: Yeah, the, the biggest thing is just looking at, for instance, elevators used to be something that were considered kinda like a swimming pool, only the, the rich and. Famous got a swimming pool, the rich and famous got an elevator. Well, now we've figured out designs to be able to put them in existing homes instead of just new construction.
And once the nursing home fees got up to eight, nine, $10,000 a month, families started realizing that, well, for 25 or $30,000, I can put this in. Folks can stay here another couple of years. This is gonna save a ton of money for us kids, even down the road. Not to mention most kids would, their preference is they really want to go see mom and dad, the.
Three times a year, you know, maybe Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. But they wanna do it at the house and they want their grandkids to see where they grew up at and what they did. And so it just, at all generations, it creates a little bit more of the ability to, to stay tight as a family and do those things.
Huge.
Kelly Scanlon: Yeah. You've talked about some of the breakthroughs and the innovations. one of the things that staying home builds is a battery powered stairlift called the Legacy Stairlift. So what, what were the breakthroughs that allowed, you to do that and, and importantly to function reliably?
Mike Vogt: Well, the, the battery powered units were developed a little bit before we did ours, but we went ahead and took it to the next level in that.
we developed a, a battery powered wheelchair lift, and now we have battery powered elevators. So the, the benefit we saw with the stair lifts, in fact just recently I got a comment from a gentleman in North Carolina, he sent me a big thank you. the hurricane had knocked out their power for five days.
He used our stairlift for all five days with no power to recharge it, and he just wanted to send me a big thank you because he could still function or he wouldn't have been able to before. Well, the same holds true with our elevators, especially in tornado alley. You can get down to your basement even if your power is out.
There's some, incredible, helps that the, the battery power serves to help these people out. Not to mention they don't have to bring in high-end electrical to, the cost that is associated with 220 volt motors and things like that. They just get to plug in a battery charger. Yeah. And so that runs the entire unit.
And then, um, a few years ago we went down to, Missouri Institute of Science and Technology and, they agreed to do a program with us and they had a couple of their seniors do a thesis with us. And the thesis was to help us develop a smart. Charger for our lifts that was solar powered. So, so the truth is we now have an option we could provide people that they could live off the grid and wouldn't need any electricity to run any of our lifts that they wanted to buy that option.
Wow.
Kelly Scanlon: Wow. That's crazy. So that really is, um, when you look at the outcomes, we talk about the social necessity. We talk about the cost savings when you compare it to the cost of nursing homes, but. When you talk about the health of seniors, you know, you, I'm thinking about fall related injuries, um, even caregiver strain, you know, lifting, their loved ones, to bed or taking them, you know, helping them get around the house.
How do your. How do your products, um, help in those ways? Can you share some numbers? Yeah.
Mike Vogt: The, probably the, most interesting number I saw just the other day was, falls are the leading cause of injury, death for people 65 and older. And, I hadn't realized that. I did, I had heard a stat before that if someone is 70.
It was either 70 or 75 and older and had to go into a hospital overnight due to a fall. There was only a 50% chance they were coming back out. And part of that is the body just isn't able to heal like it used to. And it can lead to complications, whether it be infections or pneumonia or other things like that that they're more susceptible to.
And so, you know, there's the difficulty of getting stubborn parents and grandparents to realize that you know, this is in your best interest. And in fact, one of the ways we encourage salespeople in the home. To get them to get a stair lift. We came up with a unique, um, a small basket that you can set right on the seat so you could carry your groceries or your laundry or things like that.
Even your pets.
Kelly Scanlon: Lot of con Oh wow. Lots of convenience there. Yeah. So,
Mike Vogt: okay. You guys don't need this right now, but you don't wanna walk up and down the steps with your laundry basket. You don't want your wife doing that, do you, sir? No. No. I'll, that's a good idea. I'll get that for her and my, I, I'm 64, my parents are both still alive, living in a two story house out in the country.
That they built when they were 80 of all things, which was crazy. But um, they recently were talking about how difficult it was to do the canning downstairs and things like that. And I told my whole company I would be a cat if I didn't go put a stairlift in for them. They said, well, we really don't need it.
And since then I found out they both use it regularly and it's a common assistance for them, whether it be Christmas decorations outta the basement or things like that. But they, their knees and joints are going and so once they have it, they use it all the time. Yeah. But it's just, it's a hard realization that, that people have, that I'm at that next step health wise, where I need that assistance.
Kelly Scanlon: Yeah, it is. It's it, you know, it's interesting because in some ways, the way they probably perceive it is they're giving up some independence, but in reality, they're extending their independence through this well,
Mike Vogt: well, they're extending their independence. They're preventing the, the stairs are brutal for falls, and so that's another big part of it.
And they're also able to continue to have their family events and things there that they couldn't do otherwise. And so if they really stop and look at it, for the kids a, a three or 4,000 stairlift is a great investment. That's half a month in a nursing home. It's like, mom, let's just get this done.
And the irony is we typically get a lot of calls right after Thanksgiving, which seems to be the most family oriented holiday. And I think what happens, the kids go visit the folks and then they have this discussion. You know, they can't, mom and dad aren't gonna be able to stay there much longer. They need some help, so let's, let's get 'em a stairlift or which one of you are they gonna come live with?
So they all. Kick in, put the money in, get a stairlift, and then go back there next Thanksgiving and go from there.
Kelly Scanlon: Yeah. What kind of technologies are emerging as we speak, or, or perhaps partnerships like maybe telehealth or, smart home integration. That you're excited about and that can further support independent living for people's over the age of 65,
Mike Vogt: Being 64 myself, that's not my strength.
However, we've been experimenting a little bit with, um, some Bluetooth stuff. with regard to controls on our lifts, we've added some, just some LED indicators that give the, the customer the ability to troubleshoot themselves to see what's going on. We've looked a little bit at some, some voice actuated stuff, but that's not great for seniors.
Strength of voice, different illnesses, things like that, we haven't dealt. Too far into that type of thing though we're starting to use, AI a little bit more for maybe helping us for ideas, for designs and some things along that line. Just some, some general, some general abilities. But, on, on the smart home systems.
They're great for the communicative part of it. And you know, we could probably take a lift tomorrow and get it to, you know, match up to a, Hey Siri, come upstairs or downstairs, something like that. Pretty easy. But the lift itself is still, it's a mechanical device, still has to carry 350 pounds up and down the steps.
And so there is that element that you don't get around that with just the technology side.
Kelly Scanlon: So what's the future for you and you personally and with Stay Home Corporation as far as the future goes?
Mike Vogt: I. I really would enjoy continuing what I'm doing. Maybe not on the same 50 hour week. Work schedule, I'm working right now, but to work in the industry, maybe be a consultant or, maybe even work with some other dealers to them, with their businesses a little bit down the road.
But, for now, I'm, I'm incredibly spoiled. half our staff has worked with me for over 20 years, and so I've built relationships that are. Pretty spectacular and pretty unusual, but when you have a relationship with that many people, it's not too tough to get up and go to work and continue to work with them.
And you're all kind of fighting the same route.
Kelly Scanlon: Mike, we're so glad that you took the time to come and talk with us about this trend that is growing and is only gonna grow more, as we talked about, so, so thank you for being part of that, for helping our seniors and for sharing your story today.
Mike Vogt: Well, it's been my privilege and thank you for the time and we appreciate you sharing this information.
Joe Close: This is Joe Close, president of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Mike Vogt for being our guest on this episode of Banking on KC. Mike's journey from a young draftsman to entrepreneur and industry leader in home accessibility is a testament to innovation, purpose, and perseverance. Through staying home corporation, he empowers seniors to age in place with dignity and independence, improving the quality of their lives, strengthening families Across Kansas City, Country Club Bank supports entrepreneurs like Mike, whose work addresses real community needs, and helps create a more inclusive, livable Kansas City for all.
Thanks for tuning in this week we're banking on you, Kansas City. Country Club Bank --Member FDIC.