Grit and Grace
SHELLEY WILSON, THE 46-YEAR- OLD FOUNDER OF THE WILSON CARE GROUP, OFTEN TELLS HER CLIENTS “YOU CAN BE A VICTIM OR A SURVIVOR, YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE CHOICE.”
They ought to listen. Wilson didn’t get that perspective from a motivational poster; it’s a personal choice that has defined nearly all of the decades of her life.
At just 18, Wilson was in a life-threatening traffic accident. The young National Guardswoman was driving home after a weekend of drill training when a drunk driver hit her car, almost taking her life, most certainly changing it forever.
Her family struggled to help her heal from severe injuries, and the experience could have been the end of Wilson’s dreams. Instead, it became the start. The turnaround began when friends invited her to Hawai‘i for the winter, where she finished her medical recovery at Tripler Army Medical Center. In Hawai‘i, Wilson reattached to the National Guard, where she completed more than six years on the active-duty list.
After her injuries, Wilson fought like hell to stay in the military, which she saw as her ticket out of a small-town life, with humble beginnings. Her hometown is the small farming community of Newton, Iowa, population 15,000.
She was just 17 when her parents signed the permission slip for her to join the military. The day after high school graduation, Wilson left for basic training at U.S. Army Fort Jackson in South Carolina. Next, she was transferred to Fort Sam Houston in Texas, where she became a licensed paramedic. Then, it was back to her guard unit in Iowa, where she served until the accident.
“I was just like Private Benjamin (the circa 1980 movie with Goldie Hawn),” she jokes.
To be sure, Wilson was young, beautiful and resourceful like the movie’s main character Judy Benjamin, who enlists in the Army after her husband dies on their wedding night. But the parallels stop there.
Private Benjamin was a comedy, while Wilson’s life ventures more into the serious drama/inspirational genre. Unlike Judy Benjamin, who found her footing after someone else took charge of her life, Wilson has always been her own woman— strong, determined and confident enough to be generous with her gifts.
Her longtime friend Dr. Nancy Pace says, “If we had more Shelley Wilsons the world would be a very different place.”
“Some people see the glass as half full. She’s got it about 1/8 of an inch from the top,” Pace explains. “Yes, there are bumps in life. But she’s found a way to look at them and get over them. She really is extraordinary.”
Certainly, in life, the way we evaluate history and current events often comes down to perspective. It’s what separates the takers from the givers; the bitter from the grateful; and the hopeless from the triumphant.
This is true in business, too, where entrepreneurs are often the first to find opportunity in challenge. These are the leaders like Wilson, who was inspired by the dearth of home caregivers after her accident to build a company around this model.
Never mind that she was only 21, broke, and still recuperating from a major accident. Never mind that the quest to heal had taken this Iowa farm girl thousands of miles from home to the big city of Honolulu, where she lacked family support. Never mind that she didn’t have a college degree or access to start-up capital.
“I went to the library to research how to start my company,” Wilson said. “I couldn’t get any loans so I put all my expenses on my personal credit cards.”
Wilson worked four jobs, including serving as a bank teller, to keep herself and her start-up going. Eventually, she procured a celebrity client—a major turning point for her company.
“It took about five years for me to finally be able to take a paycheck and wean myself off all my other jobs,” she said.
Flash forward to 2020. Wilson’s company is now known as Wilson Care Group, and it includes Wilson Homecare and Wilson Senior Living, a 22-resident care home.
At roughly 900 employees, Wilson Care Group has grown into Hawai‘i’s largest private-duty home health care agency. It’s such a great place to work that Wilson even got Alvin Wong, aka the “Happiest Man in America” based on a 2011 Gallup poll, to come out of retirement to offer consulting services on how to keep it that way.
“I’ve been in administrative positions and have always said the staff is your lifeline. You have to respect them and listen to them and talk about their ideas. Shelley does this and so much more,” explains Wong, who was once executive director of the largest oncology practice in the state.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wilson also founded two more companies—Be Well Hawai‘i, which supplies medical supplies and PPE to hospitals, first responders, government agencies and others in the health care field; and Alohamask. com, which provides these products to anyone who needs them.
When not pursuing her passion for business, Wilson is pursuing her love for home construction. She also fixes and races cars—the real full-suited deal.
“I had an older sister so my father wanted a boy,” Wilson says. “I tried to become the son that my father always wanted.”
Longtime friend Carol Ai, vice president of City Mill, attests that Wilson is equally as comfortable remodeling homes, fixing cars and even racing them as she is in boardrooms or glamorous events.
“She has grit. She’ll think of something and she’ll just make it happen,” Ai says. “She’s Super Woman.”
Wilson says her ambition as well as her construction and car skills came in part because she longed to please her father.
“My dad was always so disappointed that I never came back to Iowa. He was so old-school. He wanted me to meet a farmer,” she explains. “To him the American dream was being a wife and a mother—that was just what girls did. He was pretty upset about me starting the business.”
Wilson said it wasn’t until the later years of his life when his health was declining and she returned home to care for him that he finally made peace with her decisions.
“He had this overwhelming epiphany of why what I do is really, really important,” she recalls. “Right before he died, he told me how proud he was and how he couldn’t have ever imagined that he would have had a kid like me.”
Wilson said the experience of losing her dad, like her experience of being a disabled veteran, was a very “dark, but enlightening time.”
“Personal growth brings pain, but it can also be a very beautiful thing,” she says. “It’s like this year was a very difficult year, but I see so many positives. There are always opportunities to heal.”