CURRENT FEED · June 30, 2026 · 00:31:53
How Delia Passi Turned a Dead End Into Schools in Five States
Delia Passi explains how MyCabinet moved from a stalled healthcare market into schools in five states, and what the pivot taught her about purpose, influence, and founder responsibility.
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Open in Spotify ↗Delia Passi had built and sold three companies. Then she found herself running a company with no customer.
That sounds like the point where a business story ends. For MyCabinet, Inc., it was the point where the real business finally started.
In our June 30, 2026 conversation, Delia walked me through the family emergency that started the company, the market change that nearly stranded it, and the conversation that sent it into schools. Four months after taking the school product national, she said it was already being used in five states.
What interested me most was not the speed. It was the way she got there. She stopped trying to force the customer she had imagined and listened for the person who was actually asking for help.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- why struggling to sell can be useful information instead of proof that you should push harder;
- how one small luncheon led MyCabinet into the school market;
- why education is part of the sales process when buyers do not yet understand the risk;
- how school nurses and other influencers help a solution reach the final decision-makers;
- what Delia means by building a redemptive company; and
- why a founder still has to understand the numbers she would rather delegate.
The Moment Delia Had No Customer
MyCabinet began with a problem Delia encountered during her mother’s medical emergency in 2021.
Delia was about 200 miles away when her mother was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack. While driving across Florida, the emergency team asked her to reconcile roughly 15 medications and identify a contrast dye her mother was allergic to. Delia could not remember the name. Her mother went into cardiac arrest after receiving the dye, but survived.
Delia said she prayed in the hospital and promised that, if her mother survived, she would work to keep another family from going through the same thing. She incorporated MyCabinet that year and built a medication-management app designed to let families keep and share current medication information.
The product was real. The need was real. The original customer eventually disappeared anyway.
MyCabinet expected health insurers to be the buyers. Then changes in the healthcare market pushed those companies to restructure, cut back, and stop taking on new products. Delia had investors and technology, but, as she put it, suddenly she had no customer.
Stop Swimming Upstream
Delia gave me a simple test for recognizing when a business needs to change: notice when selling feels like swimming upstream.
Founders fall in love with what they built. That attachment makes it easy to interpret every obstacle as a reason to work harder instead of a reason to reconsider the direction. But feedback from mentors, advisers, and the market is still feedback, even when it is inconvenient.
Her rule is not that every difficult sale means the product is wrong. It is that sustained resistance should make you curious. Where are you forcing the business? What is the market trying to tell you? What would it look like to find the current and swim downstream?
For MyCabinet, the answer came from a room Delia almost did not enter.
One Conversation Changed the Company
Delia was invited to speak at a small luncheon with about 10 business leaders in Georgia. She questioned whether the trip was worth making, but felt drawn to go.
The superintendent of Cobb County Schools was there. He saw the company’s technology and described a need inside schools: a trusted, independent, secure electronic health-record system.
That conversation changed the business.
Delia had experience as an educator and a parent, so she began studying how schools stored and managed student health information. MyCabinet spent about a year building and launching the new system with Cobb County. The company then took the product national in January 2026. By the time we recorded, Delia said schools in five states had adopted it.
The pivot did not abandon the original mission. It moved the technology into a place where there was a buyer asking for it.
Sometimes the Sale Starts With Education
Delia’s growth problem is not merely brand awareness. She believes many parents and school leaders do not yet understand how student health information is stored, or why combining it with a broader student-information system can create risk.
She told me that cybersecurity experts and attorneys she consulted argued that children’s health records should live in a separately audited, highly secure system. She pointed to breaches involving school software and warned that medical information, once stolen, cannot simply be recalled.
Those are Delia’s claims and risk assessment. Her larger business lesson is easier to generalize: when customers do not understand the problem, marketing has to teach before it can sell.
A buyer cannot value a solution to a risk they do not know exists. So the founder’s job becomes part product, part translation. Explain the stakes in ordinary language. Show the customer why the status quo matters. Then show them a better option.
Build From the People Closest to the Problem
The superintendent and school board make the financial decision. They are not the only people who shape it.
Delia is building from the ground up by meeting school nurses, lead nurses, student-health leaders, assistant superintendents, and parents. Those people work closest to the problem. A lead nurse may not sign the final contract, but Delia said the sale will not move forward without that nurse’s support.
That means MyCabinet has to do two jobs. It has to win the confidence of the person using the system, and then give that person the business case they need to carry the idea upward.
I like this because it is more precise than “reach the decision-maker.” In a real organization, the person with signing authority may rely on someone else to decide what deserves attention. If you ignore the influencer, you may never reach the buyer.
Build for Every Person the Company Touches
Delia calls MyCabinet her first redemptive company.
She has always wanted her businesses to help people, but she described this as something more specific than doing good with the eventual profit. Through a National Christian Foundation program called Amplify, she studied what it means to build a company whose foundation reflects her faith.
That pushed her to look at every person the business touches. How can the company help employees live better? How should it serve clients? How should it treat investors? She even described teaching investors about donor-advised funds so their investment and charitable goals can work together.
You do not have to share Delia’s theology to use the question underneath it: who is affected by this company, and what does responsible care for that person actually require?
Look for the Person Missing From the Room
When I asked how Delia hopes to be remembered, she talked first about passion. Then she named the more useful part of her answer.
She wants to be an advocate for the person missing from the room.
In the original medication problem, that person was the patient whose drug interactions were not known during an emergency. In the school product, it is the child whose medical information is being stored but who has no voice in the decision.
Most markets are crowded with people building for the obvious customer. Delia looks for the person affected by the decision who is not powerful enough to shape it.
That is a moral lens, but it is also an entrepreneurial one. The missing person may point you toward a problem everybody else has learned to overlook.
Know the Numbers You Would Rather Avoid
I ask guests what they currently suck at. Delia’s answer was the financial side of her business.
She likes having smart people report the numbers to her. She would rather hear the summary than dig into the details. Then she immediately admitted that a CEO still has to understand the cap table, outstanding shares, valuation, equity, and how those numbers were calculated.
That is an honest distinction. Delegation does not erase responsibility.
You can hire someone who enjoys the work your brain keeps trying to avoid. You still need enough understanding to ask good questions, recognize a problem, and explain the company to the people trusting you with money.
The Boss Wears Every Hat
At the end of the interview, I asked Delia what children’s book she would make. Her grandchildren ask whether she is the boss, then assume being the boss means she can stop working and go play whenever she wants.
Her book would explain what being the boss actually means.
The boss cleans the bathroom and empties the garbage. The boss handles sales, marketing, finances, HR, strategy, conferences, and customer problems. The boss thinks about whether employees will have food on the table next week when a crisis turns the business upside down.
Her comparison was wonderfully concrete: imagine being a child who suddenly has to run the entire household for a day. The lawn, dishes, mail, and every other job are now yours. Congratulations, tiny CEO. You will be exhausted by bedtime.
That is the version of entrepreneurship children rarely see. It is also the version adults sometimes forget when they only notice the title.
What I Took From the Conversation
- Do not confuse resistance with validation. If every sale feels like swimming upstream, investigate the market before you simply push harder.
- Listen for the adjacent need. MyCabinet’s school product grew from technology the company had already built for a related problem.
- Teach the problem before pitching the solution. An unfamiliar risk requires education before a buyer can evaluate the product.
- Equip the influencer. The person closest to the problem may need a clear business case to carry your idea to the person who signs.
- Design around everyone affected. Employees, customers, investors, and the person missing from the room all belong in the founder’s field of view.
- Know the numbers anyway. You can delegate the financial work without delegating your responsibility to understand it.
Delia did not save MyCabinet by clinging harder to the first plan. She kept the mission, listened to the market, and changed the path.
Sometimes that is what purpose looks like in a business. Not stubbornly protecting your original idea, but caring enough about the problem to let the idea become something better.
Read the complete episode transcript32-minute timestamped transcript
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Delia Passi on business pivots, student health data, and redemptive entrepreneurship
This timestamped transcript was generated from the original episode audio and reviewed against the recording to correct names, punctuation, and obvious speech-recognition errors. Use the player above to hear the conversation in its original form.
Meet Delia Passi and MyCabinet, Inc.
00:00Timmy Bauer: What's up, Purpose-Driven Entrepreneurs? It's me, your host, Timmy Bauer, and my guest today is Delia Passi. She's a serial entrepreneur. She's sold three companies. She's very mission-driven and faith-driven. However, what we're going to be talking about today is the first time that she is really focused on building what she's calling a redemptive company. So we'll talk about that. The company is called MyCabinet, Inc. She's started over the course of her entrepreneurial journey six or seven companies, depending on how you count them. But today we're talking about MyCabinet, Inc., which she started because she saw a need out of a personal family trauma that she experienced.
00:37Timmy Bauer: But where the company is now, well, she has launched a new division in January that has already been picked up by five states' worth of schools. And if anybody knows anything about trying to start something that gets picked up by schools of an entire state, that's a very long process, but they've managed to do that in four months, which is pretty unheard of. Delia, thank you so much for being a guest on my show.
01:01Delia Passi: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
01:04Timmy Bauer: Did I get anything wrong in your intro?
01:05Delia Passi: Yeah, perfect.
01:06Timmy Bauer: Okay, great. All right. So Delia, first things first, if you could just kind of explain in layman's terms, like what exactly is your company? What does it do? What's the product? Who do you sell to? And yeah, what is it?
What MyCabinet Does
01:20Delia Passi: So MyCabinet itself has two divisions. One is a medication management app, which you could purchase on my, well, there's a free version as well on the App Store and the Google Play Store. It's for medication management, very much needed. And the other division is an electronic health record system for schools. So it's a very fast growing market that really was born out of our technology of our medication management system.
01:52Timmy Bauer: Yeah, and you were sharing with me before I hit record that this company started because you had a major family trauma.
The Family Crisis That Started the Company
02:00Timmy Bauer: So could you just talk about the, like how the company started?
02:04Delia Passi: Sure. So, and I'm sure so many could relate to this. I was working, actually thinking of selling one of my companies and thinking about, wouldn't it be great maybe to semi retire and just go around and speak and maybe even write a book, and I've written a book before, but you know, part two. And then I get a call that my mom's being rushed to the hospital with a massive heart attack and I'm 200 miles away. And as I'm driving, for those who know Florida, it's called the Alligator Alley, which is 75 from Miami over to Fort Myers.
02:44Delia Passi: There, the ER team is asking me to reconcile her meds. And what is that? every time you go to a doctor office, they ask you to write all your meds, they ask you to go over your meds, every time you go to a hospital, they'll say, okay, what meds are you on? And it's really frustrating, especially when you're in a hospital that is actually your health system, you would think, why wouldn't you know this? Well, they don't. And that can be the difference between life and death. So while I was driving, they were asking me, hey, do you know your mom's meds? And I said, you're her health system, she takes a boatload of meds, probably about 15,
03:23Delia Passi: and she's highly allergic to a dye. So please don't give her the dye. And they're like, well, if we do not give her the dye, because she has a horrible blockage, she will die anyway. So I said, okay, so you're telling me I'm gonna kill my mother because I don't know what med she's on. And all they could say to me was, we'll do our best. How horrible. So when I arrived at the hospital, I ran up to the surgical waiting area and I heard code blue. And I said, oh my God, they gave her the dye that my mom was allergic to. And I just knew in my heart that was her
04:00Delia Passi: who was in cardiac arrest. And I just prayed real hard. And I said, you blessed me so much, dear Lord. I said, please bring her back, and I promise to give back. I will make sure no one ever goes through this again. And sure enough, the doctor came out 45 minutes later all sweated up, so you know he was working real hard. And he said, you have a miracle. It was absolutely that dye that you couldn't remember the name of, but she survived, and her heart's like a 20-year-old right
04:36Delia Passi: now. And so in my tears of joy, I was also coming to terms: I had a new boss. So long retirement, and here we go. It's been an exciting journey for us. I'm very excited about where we are today, of course, but it was a trauma to get there.
04:58Timmy Bauer: When did that story happen? How long ago was that?
05:01Delia Passi: That was 2021. That's when I incorporated MyCabinet and I had a vision for how we were going to help people. I teamed up with my friend, Cliff Francis, who was the head of strategic creative. He was a creative director for Procter & Gamble for a number of years, close to 15 years, a brilliant strategist. And he helped me create MyCabinet.
Where You Start Is Not Where You End Up
05:26Timmy Bauer: And so that was five years ago, right? So how what did the company look like then versus like what does it look like now?
05:35Delia Passi: So, I'm sorry, what it looks like now. It's really important for entrepreneurs to remember this: where you start is typically not where you end up. Always remember that, because the reason so many businesses fail, and it's happened to me a number of times, is that we're not smart enough to pivot. What happens is we emotionally get involved in our product, right? We fall in love with our product, and we are so focused on proving that we can build and sell this product that we forget to take in sometimes
06:12Delia Passi: the feedback from whether it's a mentor, advisers, or the marketplace. So my thing is, every time you have to swim upstream, if you're in a position where you feel like you're swimming upstream to sell your product, that is a very strong indicator that you're not where you need to be in your business. You need to find the pivot in your business. Now you're swimming downstream. The business is just coming to you.
06:39Timmy Bauer: Yeah, absolutely.
When Selling Feels Like Swimming Upstream
06:40Timmy Bauer: So what was the swimming upstream for you? What did that look like? And at what point did it pivot to where you felt like you're swimming downstream and business was coming to you?
06:49Delia Passi: That was really important because MyCabinet is a medication management app. If you see it, it's beautiful. It looks and feels just like a medicine cabinet. It is amazing. Everyone must have this because you share the cabinet with your family members, everyone, one call, you got everything shared with every hospital emergency response team, it is, it was like the best product ever. So I really encourage everyone to download it. There's a free version and a paid version. Now, what happened was I was really having a hard time because my customer was a health insurance player. And like those who got their business caught up in COVID, like what happened to you, the
07:27Delia Passi: same thing happened to me where I was doing great. And then all of a sudden, you know, the Trump administration came in, which, by the way, they're doing really good things on transparency and trying to fix a broken healthcare system. But while they were doing that, they wanted to pare down what we know of our healthcare industry, right, our health insurance, and help rebuild it so that it's better for us. In that time, what happened was these very profitable companies like United and all of those had to now scale back and reevaluate how their business was. That's why so many are closing or being acquired.
08:04Delia Passi: And so what did that mean? They're not going to take on a new product. Right? So in the middle of this restructuring of our healthcare under Kennedy and Dr. Oz and all of those, now those companies can no longer pay anybody, right? So suddenly, I had no customer.
The Moment Delia Had No Customer
08:23Timmy Bauer: Yeah. Okay. And I think if anyone lived through COVID, you know what that feels like. Suddenly, you have no customer, right?
08:35Delia Passi: But then a real blessing came into my life because I prayed real hard for it. I prayed for guidance. What do I do? Because I have a lot of investors. I was invited to speak at a small luncheon with business leaders in Georgia. It was only like 10 of them, and I thought, am I really going to make a trip? But I was really drawn to it. So I went, and sure enough, the superintendent of Cobb County Schools, one of the largest school districts in the country, was there and very impressed with our technology.
09:11Delia Passi: And he said, Delia, what we're missing in our industry is a trusted, robust, independent, and secure electronic health record system for our schools. Could you take your patent, because I patented our technology in five countries, no, probably like 25 countries, but Europe is under one, and can you bring some of that technology to our school? And I took on the job with tremendous passion,
09:46Delia Passi: because I was an educator and a parent. And when I started to investigate the problems with electronic health records in schools and the dangers for children, I realized this is where we can make a difference. So we built a brand-new, very modern, very robust, very safe electronic health record system for schools. And after a year of building it with Cobb County and launching it in Cobb, after that initial launch in January, we went national with it, and we're now in five states.
10:22Timmy Bauer: That's amazing. That's awesome. That's great.
Why Education Is Part of the Sales Strategy
10:26Timmy Bauer: What is required at this stage now for you to grow? Like what exactly do you have to be focused on or what is the avatar that you have to connect with and do what with in order to continue to grow the way you are?
10:45Delia Passi: Well, you know, obviously marketing, right? People need to know who you are. So when you're building a brand, it's brand awareness. But in my case, it goes beyond that. I have to educate. So there is brand awareness And then there's an education piece that's extremely important because what's happened is I built something to protect children's data. And you probably, many of you on the phone have heard of,
Why Hackers Target Student Data
11:14Delia Passi: you know, the data breaches in schools, Canvas and PowerSchool, and all of these. SIS systems are student information systems. And anybody who has kids knows because all their information is in this SIS system. So I have met with a number of cybersecurity experts and attorneys, and unanimously they said to me it should even be outlawed that children's health data is in an SIS system, which is a target for hackers. It should be a highly secure, SOC 2 Type II compliant
11:53Delia Passi: and audited system on its own, with blockchain technology around it, to protect our student health data.
12:02Timmy Bauer: Could you just explain what those terms mean? What's an SIS system? And then what is what you just said?
12:05Delia Passi: Well, so if you're a parent or if you, when you went to school, you remember you got your report cards and all of that was in a student information system. If you're a parent today, you know, you have an app, you have things and all of your data, all your teacher's information, everything is in a student information system. The problem is years ago, There always used to be a separate, right? The school nursing and the healthcare used to have its own way of doing things, most of the time in paper and folders. With modern technology, now these SIS systems, and many of you know them because your children are in them, whether it's Focus or PowerSchools,
12:41Delia Passi: Infinite Campus, there's just a ton of them. So what happens is these companies just started going, hey, wait a minute, we can add this module, We could have that module. We could do mental health in our SIS. We could do student health in our SIS. We can do it all. And then they go to the superintendents and go, why do you need to spend extra money on this and that? Just pay us a little bit for our modules. We put everything under this one umbrella. How convenient for you. Convenient, yes. Maybe a little cost savings, maybe.
13:19Delia Passi: But where the risk is, significant risk is that because SIS systems have become such a target for hackers, because guess why? They are smelling blood. They know that that SIS system has the most sensitive data, your child's health information. Okay, their social security number. So let's say you have a child who's type one diabetic, or, you know, was diagnosed with maybe ADHD, or something like that. And it gets hacked. Now that data is out there the rest of their lives. Okay, can't get
13:59Delia Passi: retrieved. It's done. It's out there. And so one day your child wants to run for Senator, or they want to, they want to get a job. Well, that data is out there. Your child now has type one diabetes, diabetes, their risk. They wanted to run for Senator, they have some mental illness, their risk. They could be used. So think about how this data could change the trajectory of your child's life. Until parents go, wait a minute, I'm not going to accept that my child's data is in an SIS system. And until school boards go, this is all wrong. We need to protect our
14:40Delia Passi: children's data. We need to protect our schools. It's a problem. So I have a lot of educating to do because I have, I want to have the courage to go out there and try to just empower parents and school leaders to do the right thing for the kids.
14:59Timmy Bauer: Yeah, this is going to show my ignorance here, but like what's in it for a hacker who's trying to get at students' health information?
15:07Delia Passi: Well, if you have a minute, just go ahead and Google PowerSchool data breach lawsuit. That's one of many. And you will see hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits now. And the hackers, what they do is because let's face it, the parents go, you destroyed my child's life. So now they're doing class action lawsuits against these, what do you call it? Against the schools, right? It's funny because I'm looking right now for a little card that I got in the mail.
15:47Delia Passi: I don't even have kids in the school district, but I got a card that asked if I wanted to be part of it. Well, here it is. I got a card in the mail that said, would you like to be part of a class action? That's your school district. Interesting. Why? So what happens is, because they know this class-action lawsuit in Broward County, Florida, for example, is going to cost the school tens and tens of millions of dollars, a hacker goes, I got the data. How about we just settle this quietly
16:25Delia Passi: for $2 million? Guess what's happening all over the country. They're settling quietly, but guess what? That data is still in the hands of a hacker.
16:37Timmy Bauer: I see. And the parents don't even know it. Wow.
Reaching the Real Decision-Makers
16:40Timmy Bauer: So who are the decision-makers that you have to reach with this messaging to basically educate them, convince them, get them to realize, or maybe they already realize? Who are the people that you have to reach to say, look, I have the solution for this?
17:00Delia Passi: Well, the decision-makers will always be the superintendent. The buck stops up there, right? The superintendent, the board, and the school-board members are the ones who make the financial decisions for the company. The people under them are the influencers, the people who care just as much as a parent does. The superintendents and the school board, mind you, they do care, but they're looking at cost and efficiency and so forth, and they're trying to play their risk adjustment, right? And they listen to SIS systems who go, oh no, we're secure, you don't have to worry about it. Well, you know what? That's just putting blinders on.
17:36Delia Passi: But the influencers are the assistant superintendents who are the directors over student health services, the school nurses who we love and who are under-appreciated and then you have the parents. At the end of the day, these are your children, right? So you should show up at those board meetings and ask tough questions. Why would you create the risk around my child's future by not having an independently audited electronic health records, like I do when I go to a doctor's office or I do go to a hospital.
18:13Delia Passi: Could you imagine Epic? I don't know if you've heard of Epic. That's the big hospital EMR system, right? MyChart, you may have heard of MyChart or something like that. Well, could you imagine if all of a sudden they started doing cafeteria inventory and employee benefits? You would be shocked if they took the health data and put it in the middle of all those other systems. It's unheard of. And that's what all of these do. And it's not against the law.
18:49Delia Passi: They can do it. It should be, but it's not.
Delia’s Ground-Up Growth Strategy
18:55Timmy Bauer: And then just putting my business-owner, I'm-curious-how-you-grow-your-business hat on, what's your primary way of reaching those decision-makers right now?
19:10Delia Passi: Well, really I'm building a ground-up approach. I go to a lot of school-nurse conferences. I'm heading to Vegas next week to a big one. And so I'm working with the people on the ground, the people who see it every day, who are struggling with their SIS systems, who hate their software. And I'm talking to them about, you know, let's build up. Let's talk to them together. Let's show them how much better it could be, because this is all we do. We're not a side thought. We are truly the most amazing electronic health system for our schools. There's nothing that can compare to us. So when the school nurses see it,
19:47Delia Passi: they get very excited and it'll bubble up. At the same time, I'm doing blogs, podcasts, trying to email, email campaigns, I show up at board association conferences, just to try to introduce myself and let them know that they have better options out there and safer options because if you take the most sensitive school data away from the SIS, the SIS is no longer a target.
Why Influencers Matter in B2B Sales
20:21Timmy Bauer: Yeah. And again, just keeping my business-development hat on, curious about how your business works, when you go to an event that's for school nurses, do the nurses have decision-making power, or do they have a lot of influence over what decisions the higher-up boards are making?
20:54Delia Passi: So in school districts, typically there is a lead nurse, right? She is the person over all the nurses, and she has a voice around the table. She's the one who the superintendent trusts to listen to what is going on. Sometimes she reports right into the superintendent. Most of the time she reports to a director over student health services. But she has a loud voice, and she is critical, because if she doesn't choose us, they will not go forward with us. So that's really where the buck stops. But then I have to give her the tools to sell it up, right, with the business reason for why they want to do it.
21:31Delia Passi: And I have to tell you, when we do speak to a superintendent, they get it immediately. They do. They do. It's a matter of education on our part. Basically, a lot of the work is just getting in front of them,
21:46Timmy Bauer: just getting their attention, basically. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, got it. Switching gears completely.
What It Means to Build a Redemptive Company
21:52Timmy Bauer: When I was talking to you before we hit record, you told me that this was the first time that you've done a redemptive company. And I'm curious if you could talk about what you mean by that. This is not your first company. You've done six or seven, depending on how you count them. And now you're doing, you know, instead of a retirement, you're doing a redemptive company. What do you mean by that?
22:16Delia Passi: So I've always felt that everything I've done was to help people live better. Every business I had was never motivated by profit, even though I wanted to make a lot of money so that I could sell it and do more good things. But it was always to help people. When I made this pact with God to create MyCabinet, I realized for the first time, what does that really mean, to build a company whose foundation was built because of my faith? And not just, I want to do good, right? We all want to do some good, right?
22:52Delia Passi: It was really, so I went through a program called Amplify by the National Christian Foundation to understand what it truly means to build a redemptive company. And so you look at all the pillars of your company and you start to look at now, how does this better the lives of everything we touch? So it's no longer, I wanna do good out there. It's a matter of how do I help my employees live their best lives? How do I help my clients understand that being a redemptive company is bringing the teachings of Christ basically
23:31Delia Passi: into every touch point of everything we do for our clients. How do I help my investors? So I'm educating my investors on charitable donor accounts where instead of investing cash with me, put it into a donor-advised fund so this way we can do good because we build your charitable donations and it's all tax deducted. So I've spent, I look at every touch point of my, of my business. And now I have five principles around that.
24:08Delia Passi: That's a whole other podcast by the way, but it's exciting.
Building for the Person Missing From the Room
24:10Timmy Bauer: That's super cool. Have you, have you done, I'm sure you have the work of developing like a personal mission statement for your life. And if you have, what did you come up with? Like what, how would you describe that? Or I guess another way of asking that is like if, if when you die, how do you, how do you hope to be remembered? or what impact do you hope to have made on the world?
24:31Delia Passi: So when I'm gone, people will most likely talk about, they rarely met somebody as passionate as me when it comes to their business, because no matter what, good or bad times, my passion for what I do is really my, it's my driving force, right? So that's it. But I have always had a knack for looking at who's missing from the room and then having the courage to build for that person. So in case like MyCabinet, when I first built it,
25:09Delia Passi: it was the patient who was dying because they didn't know their drug-to-drug interactions at the hospital. For the children, it's their lives, but they have no voice in this, right? So who's missing from the room, and do you have the courage to build a business around that person?
25:28Timmy Bauer: That's awesome. So who's missing from the room? Why is that so important to you that it's the thing that you want to hang your life on? Because it's not the obvious market, right?
25:40Delia Passi: I'm not trying to compete and, you know, sell another widget or whatever. I'm trying to find how do you take those people who don't have a strong enough voice, like, you know, look, it's a child's future. As a parent, you've lived your child, but if I have type 1 diabetes and, you know, and my parents are not here anymore in that sense that, you know, they could take the blame and it's out there and it's in the market. And I've lived with this all my life that people will have the stigma around me. That child did not have a choice when they were a child
26:17Delia Passi: and who was protecting their rights when they, when the school was choosing where to put their health data. And that's why I say, I wanna be known for the advocate for the person missing from the room.
Why Founders Need to Know Their Numbers
26:34Timmy Bauer: That's awesome. That's so awesome. And this has been an awesome conversation and I just have two for fun questions for you before we go. Yeah. So the first for fun question for you personally, this is just person to person. What is something that you currently suck at that you're trying to get better at by next year?
26:52Delia Passi: So I am really not, I would, I've never been good at, and maybe it's because I don't want to be. It's the financial part of my business, right? So that, if I had my investors were listening to this podcast, they're all gonna be cringing because as a CEO, you have to really know your numbers. You need to know that. Yes. I want somebody to report on that to me every week. I just want, okay, tell me how we're doing, where are we, blah, blah, blah, blah, I don't want to go into the weeds, right? But one thing I will say is that if I had to advise,
27:29Delia Passi: to advise entrepreneurs, especially it's do study that, understand what it means to have a cap table, understand what that means, understand the basics about what your equity play is and how many shares outstanding you have and what's your valuation and how did you come to that valuation, things like that. I'm one of those people, I like to have very smart people around me so that I don't have to think in that part of my brain, which is still like a child who goes, I don't wanna do that. So, you know, when I say I suck at it, it's something I just don't want to do,
28:05Delia Passi: but do I, and should I, of course I should. And that would be the thing that I would recommend is sometimes you just have to get out of your comfort zone and push through it and do it.
What Being “The Boss” Really Means
28:15Timmy Bauer: Yeah, last for fun question. I'm a kids book author. If you were to make a children's book or your company were to make a children's book, what would the topic be? And why?
28:26Delia Passi: I would do it personally because I have grandchildren now and they asked me, what do you do? And I say, well, or no, they asked me, are you the boss? And I say, yes, I am. And I've, most of my life been my own boss. So it's hard for me to not think of myself as always the boss, but they don't know what that really means. They think that I could just get it from my chair anytime I want and go play with them, for example, right? Or let's go to the movie, Honey, I'm Working, but I thought you're the boss.
29:03Delia Passi: And they really do need a book on what a boss is and what is it.
29:08Timmy Bauer: Yeah. That's awesome. There's a question I always like to ask when I'm helping somebody make a children's book. I didn't plan on asking you this, but I'm curious what your answer is. Taking that topic, what is something that you would want to say that, if your grandkids were to latch onto it and they were to get it, they were like, oh, this is what it means to be a boss, it could change the trajectory of their life? What is the thing about it that you would want to say?
29:50Delia Passi: I want them to understand that the boss wears every hat, so let them understand how a boss can clean the garbage cans and the bathrooms, run the financials, run the sales and marketing, go on podcasts, show up at conferences, handle HR, think through strategy, and struggle when a client is having a problem, or when you live through something like COVID or 9/11 and your whole business is turned upside down. Think about paying people their salaries and how what you do will depend on whether or not they have food on the table next week. It is so encompassing for a child. It is beyond
30:30Delia Passi: understanding for a child. So break it down. Imagine that you were almost like Home Alone, the movie, and you had to do everything. All of a sudden, you're a child, and you have to cook your meals and wash your clothes. You have to mow the lawn. You have to go out and get the mail. You have to clean the dishes. You've got to do everything. You're the boss of your home. What would it look like if you had to be the boss of the business? So I'd love for kids to try that for a day, right? Run a household and see what you do, and they'll be exhausted.
Where to Find Delia Passi and MyCabinet, Inc.
31:06Timmy Bauer: That's awesome. That's great. We should do it. So okay, Delia, this was super fun. I'm so glad I got to talk to you. I'm so glad I got to know you and everything that you're doing so much more. Where would you direct people to look at the various things that you've been building?
31:28Delia Passi: Well, I hope they'll connect with me on LinkedIn. I would love to connect on LinkedIn. I'm the only Delia Passi, D-E-L-I-A, Passi, P-A-S-S-I, on LinkedIn, so I'm very easy to find. Also go to mycabinet.com and you'll see it. And we're also on the App Store and the Google Play Store, so definitely check us out.
31:47Timmy Bauer: Awesome. Thank you so much for being on.
31:50Delia Passi: You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.