Taking Care of Tutu a winner | News, Sports, Jobs

May 2024 · 6 minute read

Taking Care of Tutu team members Ralph Thomas (from left), James Tolley and Meg Obenauf admire their winnings after taking first place in the Maui Economic Development Board’s annual Startup Weekend in Kihei on Sunday. Nearly 30 participants came to pitch their ideas and develop them into practical business plans over the course of 54 hours. Taking Care of Tutu is the brainchild of Obenauf, an estate planning attorney who wanted to help older clients pay for nursing homes without having to use up all their life savings. Maui Economic Development Board photo

As an estate planning attorney in Wailuku, Meg Obenauf has seen many clients overwhelmed by what it takes for their elderly parents to qualify for a nursing home.

“They’re exhausted because they’re caregiving for a parent and some of them work regular jobs, so they don’t want to spend their evenings and their nights Googling around trying to gather this information,” Obenauf said.

That’s why Obenauf and her team sought a way to help families navigate the process and find an affordable option that wouldn’t drain an elderly parent of his or her life’s savings. They came up with “Taking Care of Tutu,” a business idea that earned Obenauf and teammates, Ralph Thomas and James Tolley, first place at the Maui Economic Development Board’s annual Startup Weekend.

The fourth event drew nearly 30 participants to the MEDB Malcolm Center in Kihei from Friday to Sunday, giving them 54 hours to build a startup business from idea to launch under the tutelage of coaches and mentors.

“Every year, I’m just blown away by the quality and creativity of the ideas that these aspiring entrepreneurs come up with,” Gerry Smith, MEDB’s director of business development, said in a news release. “And, this year was no exception. Everyone brought their A game.”

Each participant had 60 seconds to pitch their startup ideas, and the top seven ideas were chosen. The people behind the top ideas got to recruit team members, said Obenauf, who joined up with Thomas, whose business background aided in practical details like revenue, and Tolley, a developer whose computer skills helped in designing ads and the website.

The goal of “Taking Care of Tutu” was to create an online platform for “helping Tutu save the family home and her life savings from the catastrophic cost of a nursing home,” Obenauf said. The interactive website provides video clips walking families through the steps of qualifying for Medicaid, pausing to allow a person to enter certain data, such as “the amount of money in Mom’s bank account.”

Medicaid can help pay for a nursing home, but Medicaid law is confusing and different in every state, Obenauf said. On Maui, nursing home costs can set a family back $10,000 a month.

“You can do it without losing the savings and the house,” Obenauf said. “That’s our focus, is to protect Tutu’s home and her life savings, so that she can leave that to the family. Because that’s what she wants. That’s why she was working as hard as she did.”

Obenauf and her team won several prizes, including a $250 check from SCORE Hawaii, which mentors small businesses; two passes to a business planning course; and six months of professional business coaching. She said she wants to start small with the new business while still operating her practice, Obenauf Law Group.

Obenauf said an idea for a business had been bouncing around in her mind for about a year, but between her law practice and her two children, she just didn’t have the time. The Startup Weekend was a unique chance to finally foster her growing idea.

“The difference between the pitches that everybody gave on Friday and what they were able to do on Sunday was remarkable,” she said. “It’s just astonishing what can happen in one weekend with that amount of support.”

The second-place winners were “Be Aloha,” described as a “gamified and incentivized version of Meetup with an environmental twist.” Team members were Diego Sanchez Gomez, Matt Barnes, Matt Bostwick and Jason Boschetii.

Third place went to “The Dance Garden” with team members Marluy Andrade, Lacey Abercrombie and David Johnston.

Andrade, a Brazilian-born samba dancer who runs a private chef business, said she wanted to create “the first comprehensive dance studio on Maui” that would offer a wide array of dance classes all under one roof. She said most of the dance venues on Maui are either yoga studios offering dance classes or small studios focused on specific types of dance. Choreographers who visit Maui often have to book a variety of different locations for classes.

“They come here and end up renting a yoga studio on Monday, and on Tuesday it’s this (other) location,” Andrade said. “So the students are following these choreographers all over.”

Andrade said she envisions a place that would offer hip hop, salsa, samba, ballet and many other types of dance, as well as provide a special events space for the community to rent. She also wants to partner with small hotels to hold dance retreats.

Andrade said there are two kinds of people when it comes to dancing — those who “will never leave the dance floor, and other people that will not be caught dead on the dance floor. And I want to be able to empower them both.”

Andrade moved to Maui four years ago after feeling like “a corporate slave” working in New York for Amazon and Walmart. She and her best friend launched The Beast and Spoon, an high-end private chef service, which Andrade said she would still operate while working on the dance studio.

She said she already has 10 potential teachers lined up who could teach burlesque, belly dancing, acro, salsa, hip hop and dancing in heels. She said that next she’ll need an investor; if she can get $100,000, she could potentially open a studio in Kihei or Wailea in the third year of her business.

Other startup ideas that reached the top seven over the weekend included:

• Aloha Kids, a business for biodegradable beach toys. Team members were Omar Sanchez, Mario Canul, Saxon Knight, Brian Leeper and Bjorn Lindquist.

• CulturALL, focusing on cultural connectivity for a better travel experience. Team members were Caitlyn Renee, Caitlyn Kuskowski, Kimberly Scott and “Worm” WormWood.

• Geckolocation, an app to connect people with local, usually mobile vendors. Team members were Kenneth Aldrich, Annie Alvarez, Leda Erlandson and James Keyhani.

• The Seeking Root, an online portal that connects healing providers with the community. Team members were Jeannine Bourque, Samantha Covington, Fred Echeverria and Tammy Bo Xavier.

This year’s judges were Virendra Nath, president of HDEP International; Michael Powers, former senior vice president at CBS Interactive; and Teena Rasmussen, director of the Maui County Office of Economic Development.

* Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.

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