[EO San Francisco] Building a Compassionate Healthcare Business From the Ground Up With Genevieve Barter

Genevieve Barter is the President of Palmeira Home + Health, a leading home healthcare provider delivering personalized skilled nursing and therapy services to patients in the comfort of their homes across multiple states. After more than eight years working in home health, she acquired the company she loved to close the gap between small caregivers and large, impersonal providers. Under her leadership, Palmeira has expanded into multiple states while maintaining a human‑touch, goal‑oriented approach to care.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:40] Genevieve Barter reflects on her immigrant parents’ focus on education and her early resistance to healthcare
• [13:55] Lessons in leadership and self-development from network marketing
• [16:19] Taking over and scaling a home health company across multiple states
• [23:28] Building a business partnership with a spouse and navigating shared leadership
• [25:20] Managing clinician burnout and staffing challenges during the pandemic

In this episode…

Building a meaningful business in healthcare isn’t just about strategy or margins — it’s about mission, service, and resilience. What drives someone to stay committed in an industry that demands so much and changes so fast? And how do you scale a business that keeps compassion at its core?

According to Genevieve Barter, a second-generation entrepreneur and home health leader, staying grounded in purpose is what keeps the business and its people moving forward. She highlights that the best companies are built not only with operational systems but also with a deep understanding of the human element behind care. That foundation helped her navigate everything from industry burnout to supply shortages during the pandemic while continuing to expand across states. For her, empathy isn’t a soft value; it’s a competitive advantage that attracts top talent, earns patient trust, and fuels sustainable growth.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, John Corcoran sits down with Genevieve Barter, President of Palmeira Home + Health, to talk about how she built a multi-state healthcare company rooted in compassion. She shares how family legacy and unexpected turns led her to leadership, why resilience matters more than perfection, and what it takes to thrive in a people-centered business. Genevieve also talks about leading through crisis and the post-pandemic challenges facing the industry.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• EO San Francisco
• EO Accelerator
• Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
• John Corcoran on LinkedIn
• Rise25
• Genevieve Barter on LinkedIn
• Palmeira Home + Health

Quotable Moments

• “I think all businesses have a very similar base. You know, it’s just the business of people.”
• “What you fight against the most sometimes is what you end right back falling in love with.”
• “We go through all the pitfalls of being an entrepreneur, but we did good for people today.”
• “This is why I do this, right? To heal, to be supportive, to hold hands, to help.”
• “I think the theme of my story is family business, right? It just sounds like it.”

Action Steps

1. Invest in leadership development through self-awareness: Strengthening emotional intelligence and self-growth fosters more compassionate and effective business leadership.
2. Create scalable systems and SOPs early: Building operational structure from the ground up ensures smoother growth and sustainable team alignment.
3. Prepare for future crises with proactive planning: Stockpiling essential supplies and designing contingency workflows builds resilience in healthcare and service-based businesses.
4. Prioritize employee well-being and retention: Addressing burnout and supporting frontline staff improves care quality and protects long-term organizational stability.
5. Embrace mission-driven business principles: Keeping compassion and service at the core drives meaningful impact and deepens client and employee trust.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: 00:11

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of this show. And you know, every week we feature smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies and organizations. And if you check out the archives, we’ve got lots of great episodes in there.

And of course, this episode is brought to you by EO San Francisco, which is the Bay area chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which is a global peer to peer network of more than 20,000 influential business owners across 200 chapters, 60 plus countries. And if you are the founder, co founder, owner or controlling shareholder of a company that generates over $1 million a year in revenues, you want to connect with other like minded successful entrepreneurs. EO is for you. And the EOSF chapter was founded in 1991. Today has over about 120 members in industries ranging from marketing to agriculture, tech and professional services.

And you can learn more by going to eonetwork.org. And my name is John Corcoran. I’m the Co-founder of Rise25 and member of the board of EO San Francisco. And my privilege and pleasure today to interview Genevieve Barter. She is the President of Palmeira Home + Healthh.

She’s been a leader in the home healthcare industry since about 2009, and also expanded the company to the San Francisco Bay area and overseeing operations across California, Nevada and Arizona. So we’re going to talk about all of that. Genevieve, such a pleasure to have you here today. And let’s dive into your background, your story. You come from a line of entrepreneurs and your parents.

Father’s from Ireland. Mother’s from the Philippines. Where did they meet?

Genevieve Barter: 01:48

Yeah. Interesting story. Right. They met in New York City, as I think, a very American story. My father was in his residency for ophthalmology.

He came from Cork, Ireland, and my mother went to Saint John’s University for her business and her MBA and her law degree. So I think they were set up on a blind date and ended up meeting and just having a whirlwind romance in New York, and then ended up moving over to California and finally settling in Southern California.

John Corcoran: 02:18

Naturally, they thought, let’s get out of this New York and move to the high desert of Southern California, which is where you grew up.

Genevieve Barter: 02:25

It’s a very odd place to end up. Yeah. As people from across seas. But it worked.

John Corcoran: 02:30

Yeah. It’s not like Ireland and not like the Philippines.

Genevieve Barter: 02:33

A little different, but I think because of what the profession my father was in, once you kind of sit down, shop as a physician and you start to get a patience, it’s hard to move and start all over again. And he had a pretty big business in the high desert because the population just exploded. From the minute he kind of stepped foot in that whole Apple Valley. Victorville. Barstow.

I think people from Southern California might know these small towns because it’s on the way to Las Vegas from Southern California. I feel like you would. I’m speaking a different language right now.

John Corcoran: 03:05

Yeah, well, it definitely is different from a lot of the coastal cities in California. Very different. Very different. The last time I stayed in Barstow, we were kept up in the hotel room from the sound of trains going by. I think there’s a lot of trains that go through.

Right. Or maybe.

Genevieve Barter: 03:24

Yes.

John Corcoran: 03:24

Might be thinking of a different city. But anyways, so your your parents were immigrants to the country? Both of them. And so they put a premium like many immigrant parents do on education for you when you were young.

Genevieve Barter: 03:40

Sure. I think that’s the immigrant story, of course, in America. Across the seas, just how to better yourself is to make sure that take advantage of the American educational system. So yeah, I mean, I feel like I don’t sometimes I’m like, where did this entrepreneurial journey start? Because I was just always in school and thought of myself as more of like a scholastic person.

And it just was summer breaks, you know? Never had the lemonade stand, never had, like, you know, side gigs, which is always cool. Always in.

John Corcoran: 04:09

School. And did you feel like. So your father basically ran his own business as an ophthalmologist. Do you feel like you were aware of that? Because sometimes you know someone highly educated, medical professional, it’s like the business is secondary.

It’s the primary thing is the service.

Genevieve Barter: 04:26

Yeah. You know, that’s so true. And even speaking to you, I can see where my not making sense in my own statements because you’re right. He was an ophthalmologist. He had three offices.

At one point, my mom ran his business. All the kids were required to work there over Easter break or, you know, Christmas break. So here I am saying I don’t know where my entrepreneurial spirit comes from, but here we go. Have parents that are entrepreneurs.

John Corcoran: 04:50

So now sometimes people.

Genevieve Barter: 04:52

Make myself a liar.

John Corcoran: 04:53

Sometimes people react to that by running away from entrepreneurship, saying, I hate this, I don’t want this, this highs and lows. But do you recall having a feeling towards it when you were younger?

Genevieve Barter: 05:03

That’s really interesting. I think because my mom was a lawyer. I thought of myself as a lawyer. We kind of two options. You’re either going to be a doctor or you’re going to be a lawyer.

And I promised I would never be a doctor, and I was going to go into law school. And so I guess the entrepreneurial ism wasn’t really the initial calling. You know, in that way, it was always just more of a what profession, where you’re going to go, what kind of professional are you going to be? Yeah, that was really important. I said I would never get into healthcare, did not like that side of it.

And years later.

John Corcoran: 05:35

Look where you are now. Right. So and you also had entrepreneurship on your mother’s side. So your mother’s grandfather only had the equivalent of an eighth grade education in the Philippines. He had kind of a farming background and then ended up buying up different businesses and kind of building an empire.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Genevieve Barter: 05:58

Yeah. It’s again, you know, where does that entrepreneurial streak come from? Yeah. It’s this really fascinating story. My grandparents were farmers.

In a small town in Luzon, in the middle of the the island where people would know the capital Manila is. And. Yeah, bought and sold multiple businesses sometimes, you know, just kind of working their way up and eventually ended up in the hotel business, condo complexes, apartment units, and did kind of pull, I don’t know that old saying of kind of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and did really, really well in the time they were on this earth. They both passed now. And it’s just it’s truly an incredible story.

I’m I’m here because of that. Right. They’ve sent my mom to New York to get an education because that was they knew they didn’t have it and really invested in their own children in that particular regard. Yeah. And you think, I don’t know, you think about these crazy opportunities that you’ve been given because these people made really insane sacrifices in a totally different place on Earth.

It’s a fascinating story when you go into the details of it, but we could be talking about that for hours just on itself. But yes, my grandmother really was probably the driving factor there. I think my grandfather was went along for the ride in most cases. She was the one pushing to buy a hotel. Apparently she bought in secret, didn’t tell him, and then just was like one day like, hey, by the way, we have this hotel now.

John Corcoran: 07:26

She bought hotels in secret. Crazy. Wow.

Genevieve Barter: 07:30

Yeah. Crazy story.

John Corcoran: 07:31

And so. And these exist to this day. This is a family run business in the Philippines to this day.

Genevieve Barter: 07:37

Yeah, so my uncles have run it. My mother has run it. And now, as of two years ago, my sister actually moved from Orange County, California to Baguio in the Philippines. And she is now the new CEO for the last two years.

John Corcoran: 07:54

And you were involved in convincing her to go over there? Tell us about that. Tell us about how you convinced her to go over there.

Genevieve Barter: 08:02

Not sure she would appreciate me taking. I don’t know if she loves or hates me.

John Corcoran: 08:08

I wouldn’t say sole credit. I just said involved and convincing. You are very persuasive.

Genevieve Barter: 08:14

Because you listen to this podcast and be like, oh yeah, I forgot.

John Corcoran: 08:16

This is this.

Genevieve Barter: 08:18

Situation. It was a big sacrifice for her. And she, you know, was in the wellness space. She owned a gym. And, you know, Covid didn’t really do too well for her.

And so I think she was looking and she also has a very entrepreneurial streak in her. If anybody of all of my siblings, my cousins, really most people I’ve met on Earth, I think my sister was an insane operator. She does have a background in operations. I’m just so awed by her ability to just get things done and get things moving and set down process. And we all know to build a really good business, you need somebody who’s really good at putting down process and SOPs and procedures.

And so I thought, gosh, this is, you know, small businesses. This is the kind of person this business needs. And so I hey, there’s this thing in the Philippines and I feel like you’d be perfect for it. It took some convincing. Even when she was there, she was like, well, just one year now, she’s been there for two.

And I think they’re having incredible, what do you call it? Incredible success at the hotel under her, under her guidance record months and has been now for quite a few months. So she’s just amazing. And she is really a big inspiration for me to get on the phone probably once a week and just talk about our mutual kind of, what do you do in these situations?

John Corcoran: 09:47

Do you find that there are similarities that you come across in your business versus hers.

Genevieve Barter: 09:52

I think all businesses have a very similar base. You know, it’s just the business of people. I’m in the service business. She’s in the service business. And so it is it doesn’t matter that we’re in two separate countries, you know, dealing a lot in two different languages, potentially people or people or people the world over.

And they want a good job, they want a good employer. They want to be good employees. They want to get paid fair wages. They want to excel in their work, and they want leadership, and they want someone to tell them how to win every day. I think that we have a lot of those conversations.

How do we set people up to win? And therefore as owners, as business, as leaders, we win. Yeah, it’s a struggle. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure it out. Yeah.

That’s hard.

John Corcoran: 10:38

So you you go off to college and you get to college. And in spite of having spent a lot of time in academia and school, you felt that you didn’t excel in college. Talk a little bit about that.

Genevieve Barter: 10:54

Yeah, I think it was just very distracted. I was very impatient. I feel like I, I went to school at 17. The University of San Diego, I just flailed I just didn’t have any direction. Didn’t you know, I had this whole thing of, since I was four years old, of being a lawyer.

And when I got there, I was like, oh, I don’t know if I want to do this for the rest of my life. I had been in it’s kind of like a almost like someone who’s been over overly educated. I wanted a break from being in school and it just didn’t seem to suit me. And so I just didn’t do very well. You know, I was probably the poster child for maybe should have done a gap year, maybe should have just taken some time off to figure things out.

It was probably a little bit too young and didn’t relish in the experience.

John Corcoran: 11:36

So you ended up discovering network marketing. Tell us about that experience which kind of opened you into the entrepreneurial journey?

Genevieve Barter: 11:46

Yes, It’s kind of a love hate relationship. You know, I think it to be perfectly honest, I think it did open me up to business, you know, really kind of what that journey could look like. Making something for yourself, running an organization, leadership, finance, service industry. I’m not sure that that was in the end, looking back where I should have been. And I was 17, but it definitely opened up the eyes of like, oh, there’s a whole nother world out here of people that aren’t in school all the time.

And I wish, I, I wish I had paid more attention in school, I think is the yeah, what I wish I would have relished, but it definitely opened me up to a different side of life and probably more leadership. I think one of the things that network marketing does really well is speak to in order to be successful in business, and is is the crux of it, is you yourself being a great leader and, you know, the head of the organization being always and constantly evolving themselves and being a better human being, and therefore attracting really good human beings to thyself. And I think as someone like my father, who was a practitioner, I think that that really interested me in what made him really good at his job was he was just a really good person, and he tried to be a good physician, and he tried to tell the truth to his patients. And he tried when he didn’t know the answer, remember, he would be like, I have to send them down to Loma Linda or send them to UCLA, because I just don’t know. And I appreciated that, that truthfulness, you know, and I think he was a leader and he didn’t even know it and never explored that avenue about himself.

So that was very intriguing as the work on thyself and, you know, to become a better person and someone kind of flailing around in college and not really getting a grasp, I think that spoke to me. This education of self really spoke to me.

John Corcoran: 13:42

And through the the network marketing, you got opportunities to do public speaking. And I believe I recall you were going around the country speaking in different places. Tell us a little about that.

Genevieve Barter: 13:55

Yeah. You know, life is your stage. Maybe a different life. John, I was supposed to be an actress. I was really good at the I don’t know.

Yeah, I think that is one of the parts that is about, you know, facing your biggest fear, getting up in front of people and really being able to weave a story where people pay attention is really fascinating. And maybe that was the part that I was supposed to be a lawyer. Maybe that’s a skill that I wanted to share. You know, when you’re 17, 18, you find these things that intrigue you about maybe these passions that you find you kind of go in and out of it. But yeah, that that also was a big part of that journey, was facing a big fear getting up in front of people.

All the things that I think that entrepreneurs should work on. Yeah. Or I still work on. Which is taking the things that make you the most nervous. Supposedly.

That’s like one of the top fears in the world not getting eaten.

John Corcoran: 14:51

By.

Genevieve Barter: 14:51

Sharks.

John Corcoran: 14:51

But yeah.

Genevieve Barter: 14:52

Speaking publicly.

John Corcoran: 14:53

No, not getting eaten by a shark. That’s like, that’s preferable to standing in front of a group of 50 people.

Genevieve Barter: 14:58

Yeah, I can agree with that. Very scary.

John Corcoran: 15:02

So what what drew you away from the industry because you aren’t in it today?

Genevieve Barter: 15:08

No. Yeah. I’m not sure that it was just the right industry for me. I think I’ve seen a lot of people have success in that industry, but I think I would I did well under a brick and mortar. I ended up going back to school actually at 26, to try to try to get a little bit more education now that I was a little bit more focused.

I think network marketing also draws you away from kind of the university setting, which I think I, you know, had it been a little bit older and just kind of knew what I wanted. I appreciate the structure. I appreciate the time you’re given to kind of grow up in the university setting. So I just wasn’t it wasn’t right for me. And I just I think I wanted something different.

And, you know, I think I did all the right things in your 20s, which is basically wander around like a lost puppy trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Yeah. Thank goodness I got the opportunity to do that in my 20s. It was privileged to, you know, have parents that kind of supported me on, well, whatever you want to do next, I guess you’ll land on something someday.

John Corcoran: 16:08

And and your, your mother ended up buying the home health business, which you eventually get involved in, and you ended up buying from her. So how did you end up getting drawn into that?

Genevieve Barter: 16:19

Yeah, I think just I think the theme of my story is family business. Right.

John Corcoran: 16:23

Just it sounds like it.

Genevieve Barter: 16:24

Yeah it does. We’re just going to get behind.

John Corcoran: 16:27

Yeah.

Genevieve Barter: 16:28

We’re bad. Yeah. So in my parents retirement, my father, like I said, was a ophthalmologist. My mom ran his businesses. And I think one of their thought processes was the home health care.

How could they invest in a business that was looking to take off over the next few decades and plan for their retirement. So they invested in a small home health care company in Las Vegas, which is about 2 or 3 hours from where we grew up in the high desert. And, you know, the partnership didn’t really work out. So my mom ended up kind of owning a home health care company. She thought she was an investor.

And all of a sudden she was the she’s right. Yeah. So she’s spending a lot of time in Las Vegas. And I think at a time in her life where she probably didn’t really want to have a startup company. You know, as she was trying to prepare for her retirement.

So it was just one of those, hey, what are you doing? Maybe you’re going to go to law school. Maybe not. Let me come to Vegas and help you out and see what I can do. I had this kind of sales network marketing background, and I thought, well, I can help you out with some of the home health sales or the marketing structures and ended up, you know, what you fight against the most sometimes is what you end right back, falling in love with the healthcare industry in a different way, I think, than what my father had done, but very similar.

And so I ended up here’s kind of, I think, where the last 20 years of my life kind of probably starts. The entrepreneurial journey really, really revs up. Worked in the office for a couple of years, worked on the sales teams, worked on the marketing structures that ended up working as an administrator inside the office, and then ended up buying the company from my parents a couple of years later. And then, you know, we had it in Vegas, we expanded into Arizona. And then more recently, like you stated at the beginning of this, more recently, the Bay area.

John Corcoran: 18:18

And so you expand to Arizona and the Bay area. How how are those expansions? How did that go?

Genevieve Barter: 18:24

You know, I was, again, luck, I suppose my my aunt, who has a home health care company in Palm Springs, super successful in the industry. She too had tried to expand into Phoenix and she herself. I remember she called me up and she said the same thing. I don’t know why I’m expanding into Phoenix when I myself am trying to retire. This seems silly.

Why don’t you just buy it from me? Vegas is close to Phoenix, and I did. So we had, you know, the expansion into the Arizona, the Phoenix marketplace probably about ten years ago. And we were always looking for kind of to expand more the home healthcare. You know, Vegas is a smaller town. Phoenix ten years ago was much smaller than it is now.

And I think the economies of scale played well into having multiple home healthcare agencies. So we looked in Southern California. We’re looking really for that West Coast expansion. And about three years ago, almost four years ago now, we ended up buying a third company in the San Francisco marketplace.

John Corcoran: 19:25

Was it hard to tie those together? Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Francisco? I mean, for someone on maybe on the East Coast, they think, oh, well, those not that far apart. But, you know, in many ways they are kind of far apart. And from managing a business standpoint, it could be difficult to manage.

So was it hard to tie them together?

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