Nurse Next Door

First aid of Nurse Next Door one of Wong’s legacies

THE DEAL’S IN: Nurse Next Door principals John DeHart and Ken Sim met 10 years ago this month. But the man who put them together and green-lit their international home-care company just missed the anniversary. Former investment-firm head Milton Wong died at age 72 on Dec. 31, six months after telling friends and colleagues that inoperable cancer would see him spend his remaining time as “a modern-day monk.”

There was nothing cloistered about Wong’s view of business and its place in world affairs. Regarding Nurse Next Door, it began with a near-revelation, and later entailed the self-denial that profit-takers seldom relish.

Back to January 2001, though, when Sim ended five years of investment and merchant banking with CIBC Capital. Like Sim, former venture-capital information-technology specialist DeHart also planned to start or acquire a business. Wong knew of that through DeHart’s father Bob, who was a partner in M.K. Wong & Associates and became CEO when the firm morphed into HSBC Global Asset Management (Canada) Ltd. in 1996. He also knew Sim through investment opportunities the latter had conveyed.

Urged by Wong to powwow, the two resolved to buy a firm that manufactured fleece jackets. But bankers left them shivering. “We’ll lend you $200,000,” Sim recalls being told. “But you have to put [it] in an account at no interest, and we’ll loan it back to you at thirteen-and-a-quarter per cent.”

Soon after, Sim’s then-pregnant wife Teena was ordered to emergency bed rest. When a hired caregiver said she’d yet to meet anyone at her dispatching agency, Sim and DeHart’s entrepreneurial light went on. Planning to consolidate the home-care industry rather than establish the franchising firm that actually evolved, they raised half the needed $500,000 from family and friends. Wong became the key.

“We spent an hour with Milty, and he got it right away,” Sim said. “We were two young guys with no operational experience and none in health care. All he had was a 12-page term sheet. But he said, ‘The deal’s in,’ and signed up for a quarter-million. He had the ability to look into the future. He saw something, and he believed in it.”

Wong still saw it last spring when recommending BLO Blow Dry Bar founder Judy Brooks join Dehart and Sim as chief of staff. “It’s health care,” she recalls him emphasizing. “It’s the next global issue.”

What Wong didn’t see was the Nurse Next Door name. “He hated it. We thought he’d want his money back,” Sim said of a moniker his entrepreneur brother-in-law, Rob Cheney, had proposed. Still, outsiders’ enthusiasm convinced Wong otherwise, and NND business cards soon identified him not as chair but “Raving Fan.”

“Solid Supporter” would have been apt in 2007. That’s when DeHart and Sim wished to drop a client that accounted for 80 per cent of NND’s $17-million revenue but compromised the firm’s principles and dismayed its tight-knit staff. Recalling that M.K. Wong & Associates’ assets once fell from $3.5 billion to $1.5 billion before rebounding, the two knew Wong was resilient. “Did you think this through?” he asked, when they presented a case that clearly imperilled his investment and dividends. After weighing their conclusions, he said: “Then pull it.”

“If we’d kept that contract, John and I would no longer have mortgages on our houses,” Sim said this week. Nurse Next Door rebounded, too, he said, and may take in $28 million this year. That knowledge likely cheered Wong during his final days as a modern-day monk.

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