Your Next Move - Keeping It in the Family

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

In this episode, Inc. executive editor Diana Ransom chats with Sheila Janakos, CEO of Healthy Horizons Breastfeeding Centers, which is ranked No. 1,698 on the 2024 Inc. 5000.   Healthy Horizons focuses on workplace lactation programs for big and small companies— any organization that wants to support their working moms and parents. In this conversation, Shelia describes how she started setting up these centers, what the company did during the pandemic to pivot, which eventually helped it grow, and what it's like working so closely with her daughter.

With the Venture X Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. Plus, the Venture X Business Card has no preset spending limit, so your purchasing power can adapt to meet your business needs. Capital One, what's in your wallet? I'm Sarah Lynch and you are listening to your next move, Audio Edition, produced by Inc. and Capital One Business. For this season, we gathered an array of conversations with entrepreneurs who made last year's Inc. 5000 list. They

joined us in our Your Next Move booth at the Inc. 5000 to share lessons learned and anecdotes from building their businesses. In this episode, Inc. executive editor Diana Ransom interviewed Sheila Janakos. She is the CEO of Healthy Horizons Breastfeeding Centers. They're ranked number 1698 on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list. Healthy Horizons focuses on workplace lactation programs for big and small companies or really any organization that wants to support their working moms and parents. Diana started the conversation by asking Sheila

about how they started setting up these centers. So what does Healthy Horizons actually do? You help these big companies or smaller companies theoretically set up lactation centers. What does that look like? We go into the company and help them source, design, furnish, and then supply the room with like the breast pump and all the little necessities that a new parent would need to pump.

And then once they're set up, we will come back and we'll maintain the room and service. And for example, Metta will go in and we do all their locations across the United States and Canada. So we make sure that there's consistency across the board. So if a mother is traveling and she goes to Canada, she's gonna have the same experience that she did in Menlo Park, California. That's great. What a neat idea and smart. You want to have a little mini-fridge

wherever you go if that's the situation. Right. Exactly. Tell us a little bit more about the company's growth trajectory. This is the second time you've been on the INC 5000 list. What do you attribute your growth? We had very humble beginnings. I started it 33 years ago in my living room. And then we branched out to have two breastfeeding centers in the San Francisco Bay area, and companies started contacting me. They didn't know how to support their parents, so we've never even had to market.

It's all word of mouth, and once you start working with companies, they all know other companies who are needing these services, and it just spread like wildfire. What really accelerated our program was my daughter, Cassandra, who's the COO. Oh, nice. She went to Berkeley, then Stanford. When she was at Stanford,

there was a program called Stardex. It was an accelerator, a business accelerator. So when she was in that program, she decided, hey, Mom, let's really just launch the corporate. And with the help of that program and all the connections, it just really was added like fuel to this wonderful fire. So at that point, clients were not actually big corporations? No, I had Meta and Google already.

But for it to just really grow with more companies, it really helped. What prevents a business from understanding how to serve their parents? Why is this so hard? Because it's a woman's issue. I think that you don't know what you don't know. So if you've never been in that situation and you've never worked with a woman who had a baby

and was struggling, you just wouldn't know that it's an issue. I started it because when I went back to work, your only option was a bathroom. They didn't even have portable electric pumps back then. It was a hand pump in a bathroom. Most people by six weeks stop breastfeeding if they even chose to breastfeed to begin with.

The rates were really low. I have a public health background and I'm like, no, this is not okay. I wanted to create an educational program. So I did my master's project on working in breastfeeding. And that was kind of the start of everything. So you were in your living room when you started it. So were you working on your master's thesis or something like that at that point?

I was working on my master's thesis and I started a pump rental program because that would at least allow these working women to have something that actually worked. There were very few in our county and I decided like this was gonna be my mission and so that's how we kind of started. That's amazing. And okay, so let's sort of flash forward here. So Cassandra's at StartX.

So how did you go from this program to now where you are on the INC 5000? So obviously there was a propellant in there. What was it? What were the steps? It was my daughter. We were together and we really just decided that we were going to look at ways to scale and we started expanding our staff and that was kind of the catalyst that really. And how many like how many clients do you have now and how many

locations do you service? We're in 125 different cities across the US and Canada and I don't even know how many I want to say at least 60. Some aren't just have one office like there's no size limit. If it's a little company that has one parent, that's great. We are now doing a lot of universities because there's a new federal law that now encompasses universities, any institution that does education. So even a correctional facility, if they have education, would be under the guise. They'd have to provide these services.

So the laws have helped. There weren't laws before. In 2010 with the Affordable Care Act, breastfeeding now needed to be covered, so that was like helpful, and there was a pretty weak law, but there was a law. So that was like helpful. And there was a pretty weak law, but there was a law. So that was like the beginning. But these two new federal laws are just everybody needs to do it. Now, it doesn't matter if you have five people or two people or 100.

So like what happened during the pandemic? Did people halt services or did they have to continue to have these like press pump areas? So they had them in place nursing areas. But what happened was the majority of our clients all closed their offices. So at that point we're like how are we going to pivot here? So we started providing a lot of education that people could do from home. And then we started doing new parent gift boxes. And so the companies could send them to, we would send them on behalf of the company to

their employees as a way of keeping them engaged, and that really grew our business also. So we pivoted and grew. It was like our best year, which should have been like our worst year. Then companies started slowly opening, and even if people were only going back two days a week because of the hybrid, they still needed to have the space.

Wow. So that didn't go away. And are you still doing the gift boxes for new employees? Yes. This is, I mean, not a new employees, but new children of the employees. Yeah, it's been amazing.

I think the first month we did it, we sent out 30,000. Like something crazy. So how did you do this? Did you email all your clients and say like, hey, we have this new service. Well, we continually meet with our clients to make sure that their needs are being met. And so yes, we let people know that this is what we were doing.

And it just took off. Is it like an unboxing experience for them? Is it pleasant? Oh yes, it's very pleasant. Yes, there's like a welcoming note and then the different layers of really nice baby gifts. Oh, that's great. So it's part of like the whole like here's the gift for you and for your new child. Right.

Wow. It's not just for a nursing mom, it's for any parent. When we come back, Sheila tells Diana about running the business through the pandemic. But first, a quick break. Here's a tip for growing your business. Get the Venture X business card from Capital One and start earning unlimited double miles on every purchase. That's right, with unlimited double miles, the more your business spends, the more miles you earn. Plus, the Venture X Business Card has no preset spending limit, so your purchasing power can adapt to meet

your business needs. The Venture X Business Card also includes access to over a thousand airport lounges. Just imagine where the Venture X Business Card also includes access to over a thousand airport lounges. Just imagine where the Venture X Business Card from Capital One can take your business. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Venture X Business. It's kind of interesting that this kind of came out of such an arduous experience like

the pandemic and it's a wonder like what people will do when forced to innovate. Well, you'll sink if you don't, right? You have to decide to pivot. And throughout our business, we've had to pivot multiple times as things would change. When I first started, I was like the only person in Northern California that even was able to sell the portable breast pumps.

So people had to come to me and then they went into Target. So then you have to pivot again. Right. Yeah. That's pretty neat. Why were you the only one who had portable breast pumps? Because I started as a rental station with these companies and so I was basically in the loop early. Okay.

In the right place at the right time. But then you had to pivot, right? So, many times we've pivoted. Yeah, this is so cool. What was the mistake that you made in running the business or dealing with fast growth, for instance? I think not getting help when we needed it. We learned that lesson that we just can't do it all.

What's something that you don't do? Gosh, I still kind of do a little bit of everything, but like the bookkeeping, for example. Oh, right. Yeah. At some point, you've got to hand the numbers over to somebody else. Exactly. Yes. Okay. That's really interesting. We're talking about word of mouth. Any way to kind of like prompt word of mouth or do you ask people for referrals or do you ask people to like you know spread the word or how do you how do you go about that? We develop pretty close relationships with the HR people that we work with and when you're on that level they want to help you. So yes we tell

them if you know anybody who would be interested and that's really the way it's been working so far. I mean, we'll get to a point where obviously we probably should like actually mark it, mark it, but it's been working so well so far. Where do you go from here? What's the next move? International. We are in Canada, and most of our clients want us to start doing like the UK and Latin

America. Because they want to have the similar service. Because they have offices everywhere. So they want the consistency. Are the laws such that would promote this kind of thing? That's a great question because as you know, some countries have a three-year maternity leave. Okay, no, I did not know that.

Yeah. Canada has a year, a lot of Europe has two years, and then some have three years. So most- I'm sorry, where? And sign me up, because Jesus. Germany, for example. Wow, okay. So most people are not gonna be needing our services

at three, they're not gonna be pumping at work, even at a year, if a person is continuing to breastfeed, which is recommended for at least two years, they're not pumping during the day. They're nursing like before or after work. So the need hasn't been as big, but because we travel in the United States and we have terrible maternity leaves here, six weeks, I have people who go back at two weeks. So we need to have something in place. So that would be our next step is to help those women.

Yeah, that's heartbreaking. So sad. I definitely have had people who literally got discharged from the hospital and then went back to work the next day. And you're not physically recovered, let alone bonded with your baby, nothing. We have a long ways to go in the United States.

Are you in like fast food businesses? There are some fast food retail that we work with. We also even work with farm workers. So agricultural workers, we set up places in the fields. They have portable breast pumps that they could wear that aren't like no tubes, no plugs, and the milk is collected in part of the breast pump. Have you had a hand in helping design these?

Yes. Wow. So how does that work? Companies have contacted me over the years because we work with so many people and I've been on their design teams. So it's pretty fun. So are you like a contractor?

How would you work with these companies? Like if you're part of the design team? They'll contract with us. Okay. Yeah. So how does it work? So you help them design a product and then you also sell the product eventually? Eventually, if it turns out to be something that is workable, but we'll also help them

with testing. I was going to say, yeah, that's pretty neat. Gosh, how big is your staff? We have about 20 people. That's it? I know. We're lean. Nothing is beneath my daughter or I.

We will go into the field and we'll service. We've cleaned many breast pumps. We want to make sure our team knows that we're on the same level. So if we're traveling and there's clients in that city, like we're at a conference, I don't have anybody in Palm Springs right now, but I would probably be visiting the clients if we were here. That's cool. So how do you service all these different facilities if you only have 20 people who are from South? That's cool. So how do you service all these different facilities if you only have 20 people? We have regional. People are regional. So they'll just do their region.

Oh. So how big is a region? We have the South. We'll do the New York, D.C. area. So they visit all the Healthy Horizon locations in that one area. How many are in the biggest region? How many locations? Gosh, I think our Seattle is one of our biggest. Because so many companies moved up there because things were more affordable. And then Texas. OK, that's so fascinating.

I love learning about your business. And how is it going with you and your daughter? It can be tough to have a family member also on the team. She definitely acts like she's my boss. It's pretty funny. But I'm very easygoing and she's very analytical. She's an engineer by training. So she thinks like an engineer,

which I need because I'm more of the creative and the people person. So it's a good combination. Love it. Yeah, very blessed. It works. Do you ever talk shop at home or do you keep it like, no we cannot. We always do, yeah.

You know, family dinners, Thanksgiving. People are like, oh God, breast pumps again. It's funny, it is a family business. My daughter-in-law works with us. We have a cousin who works with us. Thanksgiving at your place must be fun. Everybody knows about the business and like we'll help out a little bit. Yeah. This is great. So like setting up field operations for farm workers is the most like eye-opening

thing. No, right? They need to express their milk and they need to do it safely and they need to be able to... Hygienically. Yes, it's so important. So we feel really good about those programs. We even have programs for like utility workers. Wow. Because they're like driving around in their vehicles, climbing poles, or doing whatever. Yeah, what about truck drivers? We do it all. So it would be like the portable pumps. Uh-huh. Yeah. So a company needs to provide a space and a means.

No matter where the people are, the last industry to be disrupted in this will be the airline industry and there's some laws that were passed and they're just going to be coming, they're like in stages. Wow. So they have to eventually build airplanes with nursing rooms? Or at least be able to provide a clean, safe, private space, yeah. Clean, safe space, okay.

Yeah, okay. Well, to be continued, there I guess. Yes, absolutely. Well, this is fabulous. Thank you so much for your time and for telling me your story. Thank you. That's all for this episode of Your Next Move. Our producers are Blake Odom and Avery Miles. Editing and sound design by Nick Torres.

Executive producer is Josh Christensen. If you haven't already, subscribe to Your Next Move on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your Next Move is a production of Inc. and Capital One Business.