Michelle Beard helps people continue living in their homes, and for some of her clients, their home is where they have lived for 60 or 70 years, raising their families before retiring. Photo: John Thistleton.
Michelle Beard once answered a telephone to discover the future King of England on the other end of the line.
The then-Prince Charles was the last person she expected to meet over the phone when she left Australia, aged 28, to follow her dream of working in England.
Her royal surprise had followed a month-long Contiki tour, after which she worked in a French restaurant where she met people from all over the world. She asked for advice on where to find more work.
“Someone suggested live-in care work and I thought, ‘Gosh, that sounds interesting, I’m going to look into it’,” Michelle said while recounting her journey to extraordinary business success in Goulburn.
A week later, she was working and training at Patricia White Personal Home Care Services as a carer.
‘‘I looked after everyone from lords, ladies, dukes, dutchesses, all the way down to common people,” she said.
“I looked after a retired actress who had a mini stroke, and a dowager duchess [widow of a duke]. That was probably my most prestigious position in a well-known English estate.”
That’s when the Prince of Wales called, inquiring after his friend the dowager.
“They had been long-term friends,” she said. “I was a little bit shaky after I got off the phone because it was quite something.”
Today Michelle is the principal of Michelle Renee Personal Home Care, employing about 50 people who look after more than 220 clients.
Hard work, passion and a motto all her staff can readily adapt to, ‘’Always be human first’’, have contributed to her rapid rise in the home-care sector.
During those five years in England, Michelle soaked up valuable home-care experience during long stints of working followed by six-month blocks of travel.
“I went to South America for six months, Central America for six months and learned Spanish because that’s something I always wanted to do,” she said.
In Chile, her first four weeks were spent having cold showers because she had no idea how to ask anyone if the water always was cold there.
Overall, though, she loved nurturing others in a homely setting and the holiday breaks, when she felt as free as a bird.
Back home in Goulburn and working as the manager of the Mercure hotel, Michelle had an epiphany after one of the guests fell in the hotel’s driveway, broke her hip and was taken to the base hospital.
“I spent the night up at the hospital with her husband, waiting to find out what was going to happen with her,” Michelle said. “And that was my moment. I knew then that I wanted to go back to care, that’s where my passion was.”
She began her own business, unafraid of hard work thanks to her upbringing, first as a small girl helping collect and wash eggs on her parents Stephen and Barbara Beard’s busy poultry farm on Sydney’s western outskirts.
Later she worked on the family’s farm at Windellama, then at Peppers Resort in the Southern Highlands, before travelling abroad.
She began her home care venture Michelle Renee in a business collective behind the Harvest cafe in Goulburn’s main street. Her future husband, Dean Seeley, designed her logos, and publicity in the Goulburn Post gave her immediate and future clients.
In three months she had 10 clients. Months later, she took on her first employee, Kim Wheeldon, who is still with her today, 11 years later.
As the business progressed, she moved to a small home in Taylor Street, outgrew that and relocated to another home, in Goldsmith Street.
Michelle says her staff share her passion for caring for people in their own homes.
“I think the other thing that is different for us is we are here on the ground and monitoring staff constantly (as opposed to being administered from an out-of-town head office),” she said.
Supporting and guiding staff to make them feel as if they belonged to a big family was essential because of the nature of the work, Michelle said.
“Helping people with declining health can be quite stressful.”
The key is having personalities of staff and clients that fit one another.
“We don’t guarantee a person [a carer], we guarantee a pool of people,” she said. “Once we know the personality type, happy days.”
Michelle believes enabling people to remain where they live as they age is often crucial for their wellbeing because everyone has unique ways of doing things at home.
