""It freed up brain space for me to be able to think about the bigger picture... Prior to Beth, I would look out and say, 'I don't have the commitment in the next two months to see this project through. So, therefore, I'm just not starting it.' So it's allowing us to look at stuff like that and actually start the project, get the project done, get it rolled out, which is all part of getting more organized as a company.""
— Todd Dockerty (Operations Assistant), Chief Operating Officer
The Challenge
As COO of Dockerty Healthcare Services, Todd Dockerty was responsible for keeping eight assisted living facilities across Michigan running smoothly. But the operational load of the role had quietly become the role itself. Vendor communications, project follow-through, an inbox that never stopped filling, and it all fell on him. The work that actually required a COO, the strategic, forward-looking work, kept getting pushed to someday.
The breaking point came in a weekly meeting.
"I went into a meeting one week and the director asked me if I had gotten the email that I had requested the previous week and I said, I did. And it's still sitting in my inbox and I've done nothing with it. And I left that meeting and I'm like, I have got to figure out something different because I can't ask for people to be more consistent, and not be consistent myself."
Todd had reservations about handing someone access to his email and calendar, but his brother had been nudging him toward delegated support for a while. Four days after that meeting, he contacted BELAY.
The Solution
BELAY matched Todd with Operations Assistant Beth Stefanech in under a week, and the vetting process immediately earned his confidence.
"I feel like BELAY did a really good job of asking the right questions... it was pretty short, less than a week."
Beth didn't ease in.
"We showed up to our kickoff call ready to go. I was in Todd's email moving things around right away."
From there, she rebuilt the operational systems around Todd's role. His inbox got a working structure: folders for "Todd To Do Urgent," "Todd To Do Not Urgent," and "Beth To Do," plus custom filters that surfaced what actually needed his attention and a clean separation between work and personal email. Meeting prep started arriving attached to the calendar invite. Beth took over vendor relationships, ran project tracking, and stepped in as the team's first point of contact so that requests stopped landing on Todd by default.
A daily 8:30 a.m. check-in anchored the whole system, giving Beth the context to make decisions and keep things moving all day without waiting on Todd.
""It's allowing the focus to be on the right stuff. Our business has become significantly more successful in the last year for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is Beth.""
— Todd Dockerty (Operations Assistant), Chief Operating OfficerThe Impact
The change showed up fast, and it showed up at home first. Todd stopped living in his inbox after hours.
"A lot of the time, I would spend my evenings in my email. That's when I would be cleaning up my inbox and responding to emails. And I mean, those first few weeks, it was kind of like, what am I supposed to do at six o'clock at night? It took me a few weeks to adjust to having that extra time, which allowed me to focus more time on my home life, on my spouse, on what we were doing. I wasn't being interrupted by work. I wasn't choosing for work to interrupt my life anymore in the evenings."
At work, the effect was bigger than saved time. With the operational layer handled, Todd finally had the bandwidth to start the projects he'd been indefinitely postponing. "It's allowing the focus to be on the right stuff. Our business has become significantly more successful in the last year for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is Beth."
And the whole team felt it. Beth became a trusted resource across the organization, catching requests before they ever reached Todd. During a team conversation about gratitude, her name came up without prompting.
"Everyone's like, 'Oh my god, Beth's amazing.' It's all the people that she's communicating with that are making me look like I'm really consistent in following through on things, but it's not me, it's Beth."
Beth didn't just clear Todd's plate. She built the operational consistency the company needed, and gave its COO room to actually lead.
