Inspiring Conversations with Susan Asay of Apex Social Group

Today we’d like to introduce you to Susan Asay.

Hi Susan, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I am passionate about empowering the next generation of educators, care & health care professionals. Growing up in a small village in East Germany close to the Czech border, I never imagined that I would have the opportunity to live and work in the United States. Then the wall fell and everything changed. I soon found myself in California, where I lived and worked – it was a great experience and it eventually became my permanent home!

In 2005, after the birth of my first child, Klaus, I struggled to find childcare that suited my family’s needs. I knew I needed a childcare provider to live in our house, but I was disillusioned with the options available. After extensive research, I decided to recruit a pediatric nurse through my network in Germany. Not only were my children safely and lovingly cared for, my care professional allowed me to go back to work without worries. Based on this experience, Apex Social was established to help other parents who need reliable childcare from young professionals with specialized training and experience. Now Apex Social has grown to include amazing exchange opportunities around the world while providing live-in care professionals to help families with children with special needs. Over the years, I have grown a family of businesses based in the United States, Germany and Australia, and two of my companies are amongst the 15 official US State Department designated J1 Au Pair visa sponsor programs. I am proud that we are one of the few agencies focused on providing highly skilled care professionals, best able to support families with children with special needs. We’ve learned how to identify highly skilled, empathetic care professionals and have created strong partnerships with universities and organizations such as the German Red Cross.

Equally importantly, we’ve learned how to best guide host families towards finding their perfect care professional match. I am blessed to have an amazing team that works at Apex. In building these businesses, I continue to recognize opportunities to best empower and support these amazing care professionals. I am currently incubating a new business (I look forward to sharing the details with you sometime soon!) that will further this goal. I’m also spending more of my time supporting other female entrepreneurs and love taking advantage of platforms such as Clubhouse to share advice, best practices and network. I also invest in other businesses I think have great promise and most importantly, enjoy spending lots of quality time with my three children and fiancé, especially at the beach.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Building any business – let alone several of them – becomes a never ending pathway of opportunities and challenges. But in all honesty, 2020 may have thrown the biggest obstacles our way because they were worldwide, systemic challenges to our business and they were completely out of anyone’s control. With COVID locking down borders and closing embassies, 70% of our families who were already matched to receive a German care professional lost the ability to do so. We accelerated our plans to identify and recruit American care professionals – passionate educators, nurses, OTs, PTs, etc. While launching a new recruitment effort itself is a challenge – it took us years to create a dependable pipeline in the German market and for them to understand this was not a traditional “au pair” program – the biggest challenge has been how to best communicate the value this unique opportunity provides to these Americans. We had to figure out how to best express the uniquely beneficial learning experience for them which differentiates them from other candidates as they continue in their careers.

We also had to show how they would exponentially have an impact on a child’s life and be able to do so within a “Covid bubble” – which may not have been an opportunity otherwise. Besides, how often do you get a chance to move – for free! – to live and explore a new part of our large, diverse country? That truly was an added benefit that helped us launch this new division quickly. We are proud that we have American care professionals matched in homes and numerous more in the matching process. We’ve also already been able to quickly build new partnerships with American schools that have top care professional programs – such as Ball State University’s ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) program for special education teachers. Obstacles can be daunting, but with experience and a strong team that has been working remotely for over ten years, I have figured out the best way for me to take them in stride. I have a “bad ass” list – a list of things I’ve accomplished that I would never have imagined possible. I am a “bad ass”, and when an obstacle comes, that list reminds me that I’ve encountered worse and thrived. I encourage everyone to create something similar!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
In Germany, I worked on my three years degree as a bricklayer and foresaw becoming an Architect as my future. Then I saw the movie Wall Street and was instantly awed. I decided that I had to work for a Wall Street company. So I took a two years banking apprenticeship at a local bank to learn the basics. I sorted the bank statements so the customer could pick them up daily, learned about options and started to invest my own small savings on the stock exchange. Ten years later, I arrived in Newport Beach, California to work for Pimco, fulfilling my dream of working for a Wall Street company. And while I loved it, starting a family and looking for caregiving showed me a hole in the marketplace, and similar to my “a-ha!” moment while watching Wall Street, I felt compelled to pivot and become an entrepreneur.

I have been building the Apex Social Group family of businesses for over 12 years now, focusing on different needs in stages. At first, it was creating Apex Social, a non-profit which built a solid pipeline of highly skilled German care professionals who wanted to come to the United States to increase their abilities while having a cultural exchange experience. Then it was building out Apex PROaupair, an organization dedicated to matching American host families with these care professionals. Over the years, I’ve broadened our reach to include Australian host families, as well. Most recently, I’ve accelerated our growth plan and launched Apex Social US and Apex PROcare, sister companies which identify American care professionals and place them with American families.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
As a child, we spent weekdays in a “big city”, Bad Schlema (well, big to me, it was only 8000 people!) where my dad and mom worked in the local hospital. Every weekend we would go to my grandmother’s home in a 200-person village to work on the family farm with my cousins. Seeing my father who had a PhD doing manual labor every weekend after working all week long showed me that doing something productive was the way to live. I have applied that concept throughout my entire life – balancing my interests and work to make things better. At fourteen, I started my first business.

Going back and forth between city and village, I saw what was popular in each place. I asked a friend who was apprenticing in metal manufacturing to help me make pyramid studs, which I then turned around and sold to my goth village friends to add to their clothing. Keep in mind this was in East Germany. Since money was not that valuable, having a product that was in demand and couldn’t be easily bought in a store was the real asset. My early entrepreneurial spirit gave me access to cool people who had desirable goods to trade AND I was invited to all of the cool kid’s parties – what could be better than that for a teenager!

Contact Info:

• Email: info@apexprocare.com; info@proaupair.com; info@apexsocial.org
• Website: https://www.apexprocare.com/; https://proaupair.com/; https://apex-social.org/us
• Instagram: @apexPROcare; @apexproaupair; @apexsocial.usa; @apexsocial (German care professional-focused)
• Facebook: @apexPROcare; @ApexPROaupair; @ApexSocial – USA; @ApexSocial
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ProAuPair