Celebrating Women of Color Business Owners: The Power of Storytelling in Alzheimer’s Care

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios, it’s time for Women in Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Hi. Lee Kantor here. Another episode of Women in Motion. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we wouldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women in Motion, we have Dr. Frances Richards with Arlean Richards Media and Communications Company. Welcome.

Dr. Frances Richards: Thank you, Lee.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your firm. How are you serving folks?

Dr. Frances Richards: Oh, thank you for asking. That is an amazing question. So, I am serving people primarily as a storyteller. And I reside in Las Vegas, Nevada, but we do our work globally. and we primarily work with individuals that are diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s and dementia, and we capture their story before their memory fade. And we also do asset inventory and documentation where we go in the homes, and we document all of their assets, and we inventory and categorize it in the unlikely event that they have a memory fade, a burglary or a fire. And we do know that when individuals are diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s or dementia, they believe someone is stealing from them. So, this also safeguards the care partners. So, what we say is we capture a piece of your mind, and we give you a peace of mind at Arlean Richards Media Company.

Lee Kantor: So, what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Dr. Frances Richards: Wow. This is a full-circle moment for me. I started out in broadcasting many years ago and ended up through my career journey besides being in broadcasting, and that was my ultimate goal was to be in broadcasting, and I many years have worked in with ABC, NBC, several other networks. And I eventually got out of broadcasting and moved into higher ed as faculty and found myself in 2017 with my own business doing podcasting. And so, what ended up happening in terms of us going into the audio family legacy recordings, that’s one of the offerings that we offer in our business model, it was birthed out of the loss of my husband. He passed away in 2022. And so, we didn’t have any children together and I thought I had some bonus kids. And I had a son, and he had six children, one preceded him in death. And I thought it would have been amazing if we would have captured his story to leave a legacy to his family, to his children and his grandchildren. And so, the audio legacy of the audio family legacy recordings was really birthed from that.

Lee Kantor: And then, how did you kind of connect the dots where you’re like, “Hey, this is going to be perfect for people who are struggling with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and also we can do some of the inventorying because that’s an issue,” like how did you connect all those dots to to turn it into the business you have today?

Dr. Frances Richards: Yeah. Thank you for that, Lee. So, we do audio family legacy recordings for anyone, and it started from a celebratory piece. I always like to come from a positive perspective and how we… nd our primary focus is around the Alzheimer’s and dementia. Mainly, I do a lot of work in the community with widows and seniors. And I saw a gap. And, also, I’m in the biotech space here, and we’re doing… it’s early but we’re in the process of doing a non-pharmaceutical trial around Alzheimer’s and dementia with African-American women. And so, I’ve seen over the last couple of years just this spike, the increase in Alzheimer’s and dementia, in the community. And so, I say that it was a God-birthed idea to really focus on individuals with Alzheimer’s or dementia, not a personal story per se in the family dealing with that by the grace of God, but I just saw a gap in the market in terms of once your memory is gone, the work that I’ve been doing around the brain, I’ve noticed that once that memory is gone, it’s gone.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re working with clients, is the client the actual sufferer of the Alzheimer’s or dementia, or is it the family member that’s like, “Hey, we have to capture some of this because,” like you say, “it’s fleeting and we have to get it when we can get it,” or else, like you said, it’s gone.

Dr. Frances Richards: And thank you for that, Lee. It’s both. It’s both. Most individuals who… most of my clients are coming from family members. And I want to be very clear, if you have the best, the ideal is early-stage diagnosis. So, we are getting the majority of clients that come to us from family members saying, “I’m noticing this with my sister, my brother, my mom, my dad,” or the other piece because as we were launching, we have gone into memory care centers, and we’ve done presentations. And once they’re there, depending on… you know, like once they’re literally in the memory care center, a lot of times, it can be too late to capture their story. And when I say that, I’m saying it from because we are preserving legacy, there’s moments when you don’t know what’s true and what’s not true. And so, that’s the reason we say that when we’re working primarily, like we said, we do audio family legacies for anyone but specifically, we like to capture early-stage diagnosis because later stages, we notice that when we’re having conversations, they’re in and out. And so, it’s really hard to really capture the real legacy of that person.

Lee Kantor: Now, what is kind of the… it look like when you’re doing one of your recordings? Is it just with the individual or do you have the whole family present, and it’s kind of a discussion about it, and then the family can ask questions or do you kind of… are you the facilitator and you’re the one that’s kind of driving the conversation?

Dr. Frances Richards: That’s an excellent question. So, we tailor ours. And so, they’re custom. So, there’s no two audio family legacies that are alike. And so, we have arrangements where there are some people who would like their legacy stored in the Library of Congress. So, we have arranged that for people, like some military individuals, that would like their story actually preserved and everyone to hear the story. Most of the stories that we capture are very personal. And so, we do them with individuals, we do them with couples, and we do them with family. It just depends on what you want your legacy to say or how you want it to go. We do… my secret sauce is the ability to pull story out. And so, I am driving the conversation. And prior to the individual, we have certain things that we have them do prior to coming to the interview. We do prep them for the interview, and we get all of that information. We do have the ability to do just audio. We do audio and video. We can embed if you want pictures in it. We are able to do books if you want to turn it into a book. So, we do custom your legacy.

Lee Kantor: Now, this kind of work that you do and the stories you capture, I would imagine that for the family, this is super valuable. This is something, like you say, it’s going to be part of their legacy and that it can be passed on from generations to generations. But does it have any mental health benefit to the individual suffering? Does it give them some sense of, “Okay, this is captured. This gives me… Like, I’ll know that this is here for me. So, I know my memory is fading, but I know I also have this. I can listen myself back to it, and I can be reminded of my younger self”? Is there mental health benefits for the sufferer?

Dr. Frances Richards: Yes. It’s not… And thank you for asking that. It hasn’t been proven. We do believe that it is a benefit for the individual that is listening. We have had… because most of the time what’s happening with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and there are several types of Alzheimer’s and dementia, but most of the time people can remember things that have happened way in the past. And it’s that immediate memory that’s fading. Things that like they had yesterday or what they did today or that moment, those are moments that they can’t capture, or what happened last week or whatever.

And we had a client that we went into a memory care center that she was actually, you know, diagnosed with the Alzheimer’s and dementia. And normally, when we do our audios and videos, we like to do them in one setting because we are working with the senior population, and a lot of times, the memory, the hands cramping, that’s the reason they don’t want to write out their story. There are other individuals that they’ll send you books, or they’ll send you papers each week, or they want you to do it yourself. And a lot of seniors, it’s not that they don’t want to do it, they don’t have the ability to do it or the time. They don’t want to do it, whatever.

And what we’ve noticed is that when this one particular client, when we came back, we had to shoot multiple weeks for this particular client, and she remembered us, and she remembered the stories that she told. And so, her sister, when she actually heard the whole interview, she just… And that’s what we’re finding when we actually give them the thumb drive with all the information on it, they are literally just bawling because for her to see what her sister remembered, even from not just the past but even from our time recording. And she said, “Oh, you have more equipment” or “You have less equipment.” So, she was very intuitive of what was going on. And if you’ve ever worked with anyone or experienced someone living with Alzheimer’s or dementia, that’s really important for you to see that. It gives you hope. And so, thank you for asking that.

Lee Kantor: And I would imagine it gives comfort to the family as well because with your skill and you mentioned your superpower of being this excellent facilitator of these stories and conversations, you’re able to probably uncover some memories or some important things that have occurred in the past that maybe that can be useful in the future. Like, I know a lot of people with Alzheimer’s, the music of the time or maybe they enjoy dancing, and then they haven’t done it in a while, but by just uncovering some of those things, you can kind of insert some of those activities into their life as they get older and that will bring them comfort.

Dr. Frances Richards: Absolutely. And that is true because one of the questions that we’ll ask, depending on the client, we did ask this specific client her favorite song, and it was embedded in the video, and it was shown to her family that this is her favorite song, which people may or may not know that information. And when I play the song, what was interesting, when she shared the song, when we concluded the interview recording each time, I would play the song, and she would just sing the song. And so, it is. And that’s one of the things that is so important, even for us that we are exercising our brain, just like we’re exercising our bodies. And each and every day, it’s so important that you not wait until that moment but that every day, you’re doing something, whether it’s puzzles, or something with numbers, or something to stimulate your brain and that interaction. And I know that we’re becoming more internet sociable, Zoom sociable, but it’s so important that we interact with people. That’s so good for the brain.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you have any advice for people. Maybe they’re not ready for your service just yet but maybe they’d like to try this on their own, or are there some things that an individual can do on their own to capture some of these moments and stories?

Dr. Frances Richards: Yes, absolutely. So, if you want to do it yourself, what you I would recommend that you do is do a set of questions for that person and ask the person who are they talking to? And that’s so important. And you can start recording the stories. You can also capture. You can be informal where you just hit your recording when you’re at a family gathering and pull a patriarch, a matriarch aside and start just recording. And I think that that’s a way to get started if you want to do it yourself.

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for you to have your firm and you be so involved with the WBEC-West community?

Dr. Frances Richards: Oh, you know what I like to say? WBEC-West is the gift that keeps on giving. I just concluded as vice chair of WBEC-West here in Nevada. And I tell you, the women are so empowering. They’re so uplifting. And you heard me talk about the value of community, the value of communing and being with individuals. And that’s what I have to say about WBEC-West. Is that just to know that you could pick up the phone and call someone or you can meet up. They are so supportive of the women. Women business owners are so supportive. And they understand it doesn’t matter where you’re at in terms of your business, whether you’re a startup or seasoned, they are just helpers one to another. And they understand that we have this common goal. That we are entrepreneurs, and we are women entrepreneurs, and we believe that all of us can win collectively, as well as individually. And so, that’s what I admire. And I am so pleased to be a part of a community of women. And when we come together, whether it’s a national event or we’re coming together just for the West Coast, just state to state, it’s just they want to see us win. And from the top of the leadership into all the women involved, it’s just that synergy that we can all win.

Lee Kantor: Now, any advice for that person that’s in the corporate world and has “real job” and maybe has a desire to, at one point, become an entrepreneur, any advice for that person when it comes to starting your own business and building your own legacy?

Dr. Frances Richards: Absolutely. And I call it a hybrid entrepreneur. And I was once that. And I would tell you to start and do it. So, one time, at one point, I had a 9 to 5, and I called them my investors. And I was also building my business on the side, not knowing what it is I wanted to do or be but knew that I needed an exit plan because, one, it was a passion for me. I have always been bit by the entrepreneurial bug at a very young age and didn’t even know what it was. And so, I would tell them to start and it’s actually the best time to start when you have your 9 to 5, when you have those investors because I would say, as you start building that business and building that capital, and that gives you the ability to go on and launch and have the ability to just leap if that’s what it is you want to do. But I would say that if you have any desire to be an entrepreneur to do it. That’s one thing you don’t ever want to leave with or have your legacy said. And one thing we say the grave is full of a lot of dreams that were never realized. And so, if you have a dream to actually become an entrepreneur or even see if that’s something you’d like to do, the best time I think to do it is when you have your investors, I call your business to be able to do that.

Lee Kantor: So, what do you need more of? How can we help you? Do you need more relationships with Alzheimer’s and dementia organizations? Do you need more people, clients? Like, how can we help you? Do you need investors in your business? What can we do for you?

Dr. Frances Richards: Thank you so much. And I do need… We’re doing clients one-to-one now, and we’re moving into a business-to-business model. So, any relationships with organizations that you would see that would actually benefit them, we see that would be great for us. We’ve been meeting with a lot of neurologists, and any general practitioners there, or speech therapists. Those are frontline individuals that have those clients. They’re the individuals that tell them that they are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia. Any nonprofit that has funding that they would like to see some of their clients with their own legacy preserved. Any of those relationships, we’re open and we’re always open to take clients one on one, as well as we do look for investors as we move further into bringing our non-pharmaceutical trial to commercialize it. So, thank you for that, Lee.

Lee Kantor: So, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, is there a website? Is there a best way to connect?

Dr. Frances Richards: Absolutely. They can reach. The website is drfrancesrichards.com, and that’s Frances with E-S. And you can always also reach me at fr@francesrichards.com. And I’m on most social medias. You can also reach me there. Also on LinkedIn.

Lee Kantor: Well thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Dr. Frances Richards: Thank you, Lee. Appreciate you and the work that you are doing.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Women in Motion.