""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, Chief Operating Officer
The Challenge
Todd Dockerty, Chief Operating Officer of Dockerty Healthcare Services, oversaw operations across eight assisted living facilities in Michigan — a role that left little room to breathe. From team management to daily logistics, his days were consumed by administrative demands that steadily crowded out time for strategic thinking and family.
The problem came to a head during a weekly meeting when Todd realized an email he had requested sat untouched in his inbox.
"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."
Though initially hesitant — unsure how he felt about someone having access to his email and calendar — Todd's brother had been encouraging him to consider a virtual assistant. That meeting became the turning point. Within four days, Todd reached out to BELAY.
The Solution
BELAY matched Todd with Executive Assistant Beth Stefanech in less than a week — a fast and thorough process Todd valued from the start.
"I feel like BELAY did a really good job of really asking the right questions... it was pretty short, less than a week."
Beth hit the ground running immediately.
"We showed up to our kickoff call ready to go. I was in Todd's email moving things around right away."
Beth transformed Todd's workflow from the inside out: she organized his inbox into actionable folders — "Todd To Do Urgent," "Todd To Do Not Urgent," and "Beth To Do" — created custom filters to surface critical tasks, and separated work and personal emails to reduce overwhelm. She attached meeting prep directly to calendar invites, took over vendor relationships, managed project tracking, and became the team's primary point of contact, shielding Todd from a constant stream of inbound requests.
A daily 8:30 a.m. check-in became the backbone of their partnership, giving Beth the real-time clarity she needed to stay aligned and act decisively throughout the day.
""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, Chief Operating OfficerThe Impact
The results were immediate. Todd stopped compulsively checking his phone throughout the day — and his evenings became his own again.
"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."
Beyond personal freedom, Beth unlocked Todd's capacity for strategic leadership — freeing up the mental bandwidth he needed to pursue initiatives he had previously put off indefinitely. As Todd put it,
"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."
The impact extended well beyond Todd. Beth became a trusted resource for the entire team, intercepting requests that would otherwise have landed in Todd's inbox. The team took notice — during a group conversation about gratitude, Beth's name came up unprompted.
"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."