Our Company's Current Events

WATERTOWN - Though frustration is seldom thought of as a productive force, it can sometimes lead to positive results.

Lisa Taccardi, the president and owner of Angels Watching Over You, a Watertown company that coordinates health-care and other services for elderly clients, found herself in a difficult, Catch-22 situation several years ago.

It was the late 1980s. She was working as a nurse's aide at a convalescent home in Waterbury; a job she says she loved. She was providing comfort and aid to a group of people who found both in short supply. The work was rewarding and fulfilling. She felt needed and appreciated.

Unfortunately, the job was as frustrating as it was enriching.

"The problem was there were so many people who needed my attention I felt like I was being pulled and tugged in a million different direction," she said. "I would go home at night and my stress level would be up to here. I felt terrible because I knew I wasn't spending enough time with my patients. I knew I wasn't giving them the human, person-to-person interaction, which is the one thing elderly people need the most."

A range of services
Those frustrations eventually led Taccardi to leave the convalescent home and become an independent provider of services to the elderly. The move not only enabled her to better control the time she could spend with each individual client and the quality of the care she was able to provide, but also it turned her into a successful businesswoman.

Today she is the head of a company housed in a large office overlooking Main Street that serves about 100 elderly clients. That number is likely to grow since she is exploring the possibility of opening a second office in Fairfield County, probably in the Westport area.

Taccardi and her small staff work with a network of about 100 independent service and heath-care providers, like nurses, certified nurses' aides, social workers, nutritionists, homemakers, massage therapists, optometrists and audiologists, to provide clients with a wide range of services that help make their day-to-day lives a little less stressful and easier to manage.

Her company helps elderly clients take their daily bath or shower, prepare meals, do their banking or shopping or do the housework. The company can help them pay their bills or keep their medical appointments straight. It can help them take their medications, shop for groceries or find a hairdresser.

Aside from the little day-to-day things that can help seniors live richer and more complete lives, Taccardi's company also helps them cope with some of the bigger problems they face. The company provides financial services. It can help a client find specialized medical help. It can even help locate a live-in companion.

Taccardi's clients can be elderly people who still live at home, hospital patients, or residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. To date, her services have only been available to those who can afford to pay for them privately, but she recently began discussions with the state in an attempt to make her company's services available to elderly people receiving public support.

"My heart goes out to all those people who need help but don't have the resources to hire a company like mine," she said.

"I often find myself asking, 'Who does my job for them?' Hopefully, we'll be able to work something out and get help to these people in the very near future."

Pictures of grandchildren
Those who know her have no doubt that Taccardi will ultimately meet the challenge of bringing help to those who cannot afford her services.

"She's an extremely capable woman, the kind of person you can give a task to and then rest easy because you know she'll do it well," said Darryle Willenbrock, the director of Watertown's senior center as well as the town's social services coordinator and municipal agent. "From everything I've seen, her company offers a wonderful service and her clients are definitely in very caring and very dependable hands."

Becoming a businesswoman was not exactly Taccardi's No. 1 priority during her formative years. In fact, Taccardi, who grew up in Griffith, Ind., says she never gave any thought to starting her own elderly-services business until she realized that her work at the convalescent home was producing more personal heartache than happiness.

"On many occasions, all those people really wanted was a little bit of your time," she recalls. "All they really wanted was someone they could tell a story to, or show pictures of their grandchildren. All most of them really wanted was to have someone listen to them."

Unfortunately, the realities of her position at the convalescent home worked against her.

With so many elderly residents and so few workers, she could not afford to spend large blocks of precious time with any one particular resident. Therefore, while the primary need of her patients were always met everyone was fed, everyone got their proper medication she often did not have time to augment the physical care she was giving with a few extra minutes of personal communication.

"I'd go home feeling very frustrated," she recalls.

"I remember thinking, 'Wait a minute, I'm supposed to be feeling good about the work I'm doing.' Instead I'd go home every night feeling unfulfilled and overwhelmed."

Her experiences in the convalescent home were making her so unhappy she jumped at the chance to work as a private duty aide for an elderly woman living at the Heritage Village complex in Southbury.

Her new position forced her to wear many hats. Aside from helping with the shopping and running errands, she also found herself acting as the woman's bookkeeper, financial adviser and medical-services coordinator.

Growing Reputation
As word of her good work spread throughout the tightly-knit Heritage Village community, more residents began asking her to perform various services.

One woman needed help paying her bills. Another needed help doing light housework, while another needed help with her medications.

Another needed her to act as a liaison between himself, the nursing home he was living in and the medical team that provided his care.

As satisfied clients and their families began passing Taccardi's name and phone number around and her reputation spread, her workload began increasing exponentially.

"Every day, it seems, someone new would call. The volume of work just kept getting greater and greater. Pretty soon, I was putting in 90-hour work weeks, and still couldn't get around to all the people who needed my help."

Taccardi solved the problem by hiring an assistant.

When a single assistant proved insufficient to handle the ever-increasing workload, she began aligning herself with a small group of carefully selected associates, becoming a de facto services coordinator.

As each new call for help came in, she would dispatch an associate with the appropriate skills to solve the problems to the clients home.

"Before anybody really understood what was happening, things just started growing and evolving," she said.

Taccardi owned and operated a cleaning services company in New Hampshire before moving to Connecticut shortly after meeting and marrying her husband, Vito Taccardi, in 1988. She started this business in the kitchen of her Watertown home in the early 1990s.

A few years later, Angels Watching Over You had grown to the point where she needed to build an addition to her home to house all the extra papers, documents, files and equipment. By 1999, the business had outgrown the addition, triggering the move to 686 Main St.

"I never really intended to start a business or open an office or any of that," she admits. "I didn't even have a pencil when I started this, much less a business plan. All I really wanted to do was help elderly people."

"I just followed that one dream and all the rest of this just kind of evolved from there."

Back to the Top