When Andy Lange founded Wauwatosa-based Koru Health in 2017, he launched it with a mission of raising care standards for Wisconsin’s senior citizens.
Lange serves as president of Koru Health, a senior living community owner and operator that has grown through acquisitions, management partnerships and development projects since its founding.
Koru Health currently has 13 locations, including 11 in Wisconsin and two in Minnesota. The company has three more locations on the horizon – an acquisition, a new management partnership and a new construction project, called The Westerly Pewaukee – as well as another groundbreaking project in southeastern Wisconsin that has yet to be announced.
The anticipated new location in Pewaukee, near the busy intersection of Pewaukee Road and Capitol Drive, is a 138-unit senior living community for independent living, assisted living and memory care. It is Koru Health’s third ground-up project, following the Evin at Oconomowoc and Lumia Mequon projects. The company partnered with Wauwatosa-based Matter Development for the construction of all three projects.
Koru Health is among the winners of the 2024 Future 50 Awards of the fastest-growing companies in southeastern Wisconsin (see profiles of all the Future 50 winners on pages 32-63).
As Koru Health plans for its next development project, the company is looking for ways to provide residents at its current locations with a wider range of services and programming, Lange said.
“We think senior (care) can be done better, and how that materializes in a company is, our sights are always pretty high,” Lange said. “I tell our organization on a regular basis, our number one goal is to be the best senior provider in the markets we serve.”
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‘A life-changing, paradigm-shifting experience’
Lange, who describes himself as “the definition of a local product,” came from modest beginnings as part of a “blue-collar” family in St. Francis.
“(I’m) super grateful and proud of my background, so that’s not a negative,” he said. “But I’ve always been interested in trying to do more and do better, and that drove some of my business desires.”
Lange said he “felt fortunate” to attend the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in health care administration. He also holds an MBA from the now-shuttered Cardinal Stritch University.
Lange started working in senior living when he was a 19-year-old student at UW-Milwaukee. The opportunity came after Paul Soczynski, who was an executive at Brookfield-based Community Care Inc. at the time, visited one of Lange’s classes as a guest speaker. Lange said he caught Soczynski’s attention by asking “what felt like a million and a half questions” during the class discussion.
As a result, Soczynski offered him an eye-opening internship, Lange said.
“It was a life-changing, paradigm-shifting experience for me as a young professional,” Lange said. “It gave me clarity on how impactful this work is, how underserved it actually is, how uneducated people are about what senior (care) is.”
The internship at Community Care educated Lange about the “dramatic changes” seniors go through while living in senior communities. These facilities house a spectrum of people from those who are still active and working, all the way “through end of life,” he said.
“That’s a small period of time in your life, but you go through dramatic changes, and those changes impact families, neighborhoods, communities,” Lange said. “That internship was the first time I was exposed to that. It gives me goosebumps today, I mean, that’s the passion that’s inside of us. I saw frail neighborhood seniors being served, and it impacted me. It impacted me a great deal.
And I thought, what a noble way to commit your professional life.”
This internship experience propelled Lange’s career in serving seniors. Before founding Koru Health, Lange maintained a number of roles in senior living, including executive director and senior director of operations at Waukesha-based Capri Senior Communities, from 2010 to 2017. Lange now lives in Wauwatosa with his wife, Ashley Lange, and their two children.
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Realizing an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’
By 2017, Lange felt he had amassed enough confidence, as well as experience and knowledge of the industry, to start his own senior living company.
“I’ve really always felt some entrepreneurial spirit in me,” he said.
The timing was also right, Lange said, because of what he was seeing out in the market.
Even when he had just started out in senior living during his internship, he noticed the forecasted wave of aging baby boomers that would increase demand for these types of services. All baby boomers will be at least 65 years old by 2030, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report.
“The upside-down Christmas tree was coming, and there was just this big bottleneck coming into the senior sector, (a) funnel of aging Americans that were coming into senior (care),” Lange said. “At the time, that was a forecast, and it’s literally happening right now.”
Those factors, coupled with Lange’s partnership with Matter Development “that could bring development and some financial support,” led to the birth of Koru Health.
When Lange spoke about his future career plans with his friend Aaron Matter, chief executive officer of Matter Development, Matter encouraged him “to hang on and start planning, because he had something big in the works,” Lange said.
“That eventually became our first development, Oconomowoc, and we were kind of off and running from there,” Lange said.
Lange and Matter started working together at Capri Senior Communities in a similar fashion to their current partnership. At the time, Matter was responsible for real estate development while Lange ran operations at Capri, Matter said.
“I think we both have enjoyed working together and that blossomed into a friendship,” Matter said.
Lange is responsive and attentive to the needs of his business partners, and he’s often willing to prioritize those needs above his own, Matter said. Lange models this servant leadership style not only with his business partners and employees, but also with his family as well, Matter said.
“I always joke with him as a friend, it never seems like Andy ever runs out of energy,” Matter said. “He’s always got something left to give.”
While Evin at Oconomowoc was under development, Koru Health simultaneously took on management and an expansion of Parkview Gardens, an assisted living and memory care facility in Caledonia. The project required “an enormous amount of team building and labor growth,” Lange said.
“In our industry, you start a construction project, it can be anywhere from a year or two before it opens and stabilizes,” Lange said. “We kind of had to fill some gap there, so we went out and continued to find opportunities where I thought Koru Health services could really make an impact.”
Lange said he felt a lot of anxiety when starting Koru Health and had to lean on others to help him juggle everything. Some anxiety stemmed from the significant commitments he had to make to partners and financial institutions in order to secure the company’s expensive physical assets. Taking care of seniors was “another leg of that anxiety,” he said.
“We feel that there’s a big responsibility with that,” Lange said. “There were absolutely some moments that you feel some of that intense pressure.”
Overall, the process of starting the company and managing multiple projects “was the absolute definition of running as fast as you can, juggling 100 things at a time,” Lange said.
“Bless my family for their support,” he said. “It was extremely long hours for weeks on end, constant reprioritization and supporting team members to be as productive as they could. At the time, it was really a slimmed-down group. We considered ourselves kind of a bootstrap startup, and we knew we would have to wear 100 hats for that scenario to reach a point where we weren’t a bootstrap startup.”
On top of his new duties with Koru Health, Lange and his wife also had a 6-month-old child at home, he said.
“Talk about a leap of faith and receiving an enormous amount of trust and confidence and support from a loved one,” Lange said. “My wife was amazing. She was unwavering, and she had a lot of confidence that we could do it and we could do it well.”
While his wife does not currently have any day-to-day involvement with Koru Health’s operations, she’s still a sounding board for top leadership decisions, Lange said.
“She has a very deep, caring soul and is interested in a lot of the initiatives that we try to do for our internal customer,” Lange said.
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Supporting the team
As the leader of Koru Health, Lange said he feels it is important to prioritize those “internal customers.”
Lange’s term “internal customer” refers to Koru Health’s 537 employees. There would not be any “external customers,” or those who pay for Koru Health’s services, without them, he said.
“I think we want to continue our journey with valuing and prioritizing our internal customer, because we really believe that’s the core to our success,” Lange said.
He said it was important for his first hire at Koru Health to be a human resources professional so there would be someone to support the company’s growing staff. Lange said he “couldn’t picture someone more valuable than that.”
“What my journey has taught me is, we don’t have anything unless we have the ability to attract, develop and retain people that get that mission and are willing to serve human beings,” Lange said. “It can be a daunting and thankless career.”
Lange said he feels extremely fortunate for his opportunities working in senior living, because “along with that comes the blessing of working with some really talented folks.”
“To do it right in senior (care), you have to genuinely be excited about serving human beings,” he said. “And I think, to be successful, you have to have a mindset of taking care of each other along with that customer.”
Koru Health focuses on a “micromarket concept,” as most of the company’s customers and employees come from a localized geographic area, Lange said.
“The idea is, really focus on serving that group,” he said. “They’ve got individual needs. If we can continue to succeed in doing that, we’re going to continue to create a niche for ourselves.”
‘The most difficult professional period of my life’
Koru Health’s Evin at Oconomowoc facility opened in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, with construction at the site wrapping up in October 2020, according to the Matter Development website.
The company itself was still young, but “came out of COVID more charged than a lot of groups,” Lange said, adding Koru Health seized opportunities for improvement.
“What COVID forced us to do is really improve our ability to be responsive in a very rapid fashion,” Lange said. “I think it forced us to find inefficiencies. It forced us to micro-scrutinize productivity and quality of outcomes and how infection control is managed in a property, how the psychology of illness affects our seniors when they’re isolated.”
But Koru Health “embraced those struggles,” he said. “We as a team pulled together, and we succeeded in overcoming some of that, and we felt a little stronger when we got out of it.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Lange said. “It was extremely difficult. It’s probably the most difficult professional period of my life.”
Lange said the impact of COVID-19 on Koru Health employees – who were considered essential workers and had to return to work each day, even if doing so put themselves or their families at risk – “wasn’t lost on us.” He said the pandemic “helped us double down on our commitment to the internal customer.”
“It was an eye-opening experience in so many ways,” Lange said. “We saw a level of commitment from our team members that it just gave me goosebumps thinking about it.”
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Andy Lange. Credit: Valerie Hill[/caption]
“We think senior (care) can be done better, and how that materializes in a company is, our sights are always pretty high. I tell our organization on a regular basis, our number one goal is to be the best senior provider in the markets we serve.”
Weathering the industry’s everyday challenges
The senior living industry poses intense dynamics and a challenging environment for the Koru Health team, Lange said.
Providing care for seniors comes along with a high volume of government regulations, which present “all kinds of pitfalls and hurdles,” he said. In turn, the seniors receiving care from Koru Health have different levels of ability, and they experience substantial changes that can affect their families, communities, neighborhoods and those who provide their care.
While Koru Health team members are committed to serving seniors, “this industry is difficult,” Lange said, “so they require an appropriate and understandable amount of support and service internally.”
“What I’m trying to paint is as close to a psychological, emotional tornado that you could possibly imagine,” he said. “There isn’t a day or a week that goes by that we aren’t challenged on all fronts.”
The senior living industry has a high level of staff turnover that most industries don’t experience, Lange said.
“What we have found is a challenge is finding enough people that will commit to doing that type of work,” Lange said.
From a business ownership standpoint, Lange said capital markets have posed an obstacle for the company. He said Koru Health, as part of the larger senior living sector, is more limited than other types of health care operations when seeking additional revenue, such as through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“We feel that an enormous amount is being done, and there’s really restrained avenues of how we earn income,” he said.
Wisconsin’s tight regulations around senior living have also posed a challenge for Koru Health, Lange said.
“In many ways, that’s good for us, because we are operating in one of the higher (regulatory) environments in America,” Lange said. “That means we have a better chance that our standards are going to be best practice level or better.”
Expanding the company
Koru Health’s projected revenue for 2024 is a “moving target,” Lange said, but he expects the number to be above $50 million.
“We have three guiding rules in our company: Is it compliant, is it the right thing to do and can we sustain it?” Lange said. “When I talk about a financial milestone like that, it’s not about the revenue, it’s more about we reached the sustainable point that we shouldn’t fail at this point because we’ve got some scale, we’ve got team members.”
The company had 150 employees in 2021 and has grown to 537 employees (352 full-time and 185 part-time) in 2024. That’s a 258% increase in three years.
As it gets ready to roll out another acquisition, another management partnership and its fourth, yet-to-be announced groundbreaking project in southeastern Wisconsin, Koru Health is eyeing the goal of having a new construction project each year, Lange said. The company is also looking to grow its presence in Minnesota.
“We have some great, growing relationships that we think there’s a really good opportunity for us to have some sustainable growth there,” Lange said.
Koru Health operates two Minnesota locations through a management partnership with Spero Senior Ministries, the nonprofit that owns the properties. It operates another Spero location in Watertown. Koru Health entered this management partnership with Spero Senior Ministries in 2020. Koru Health has also been involved since 2021 with Sage Meadow Assisted Living & Memory Care, with locations in Racine, De Pere, Fond du Lac, Lake Geneva and Middleton.
Lange said Koru Health will “continue to move ahead with vertical and horizontal growth” as it expands services. There will be a revamped dementia program rolling out next year, he said.
“We’re already doing some amazing things in our lifestyle department with sensory stimulation, with art therapy, with animal and pet therapy,” Lange said.
Looking to the future
Lange said he believes “the demand and need for senior living residence and services will never go away.”
The high volume of baby boomers “is still projected, arguably, two decades out,” and it’s important to consider that people are living longer and care capabilities have expanded, he said.
When the baby boomers are gone, though, there might be consolidation in the industry as well as aged assets, Lange said. But the top-performing providers “will probably remain there,” he said.
As the number of senior citizens eventually declines, Lange said he thinks senior living assets will “follow the demographics” and some may be repurposed to meet the needs of different populations, such as for student or workforce housing.
“I think you’ll see developers find that opportunity and repurpose these,” Lange said. “But it would be my opinion that that won’t be at the high volume that people think, and I think there’s going to be a need for senior (care) providers for the foreseeable future.”
