Skyler Betts, 35

For Skyler Betts, it’s important to walk the walk when it comes to getting things done. “You can say anything, but actually following through and doing what you’ve promised is very important,” she says.

Just ask her husband, who offered to move with her from Colorado to Florida if she could get a job in the Sunshine State. All it took was a few emails and a conversation with the area director for Brookdale Senior Living, where she was working at the time — and off they went.

Photo by Mark Wemple

Then she met Catherine McDermott while working with a family at Brookdale. “She kept joking with me, ‘I’m going to have a job for you one day,’” Betts says.

McDermott, now an owner of Town Square University Parkway, wasn’t joking. Today, Betts is the director of enrollment and business development at Town Square University Parkway, a 15,000-square-foot adult day care facility designed to resemble a town square from 1950s America. 

Betts’ career path has traced a similar arc to that of her mother, who transitioned from the advertising department of an orthopedic magazine into work with a placement agency for seniors seeking care in Colorado. Prior to her roles with Brookdale and Town Square, Betts did advertising for loan officers. This job is much more rewarding, she says, because of the effect it has on those who care for senior loved ones. “Instead of them being a 24-hour caregiver, they get to just be them again,” she says.

Betts’ mom, Kim Espinosa, is not surprisingly, is her mentor. Betts says her mom is “an out-of-the box thinker that always does what is best for her clients.”

In her “down” time, Betts cares for her almost 2-year-old daughter, flips houses with her husband (they’re on their seventh now), and travels the world. (Next stop, Tuscany, making up for their wedding plans which were canceled by Covid.) Oh yeah, and she runs a nonprofit, All 4 The Members, that raised more than $30,000 over the last two years to help seniors afford their care.