From helping seniors increase quality of life to mentoring youth, entrepreneur helps others realize their potential

Don MacPherson has long been a world traveler, but he didn't start out that way.

Originally from the Iron Range of Minnesota, when MacPherson transferred to St. Cloud State University in 1988 he felt like he was moving to "the big city."

"I was on the five-year plan — and people these days kind of laugh, like, 'You went to school for five years?' It was a really great decision because my fifth year was spent in Denmark," he said. "It was that international experience that really launched me and I think was extraordinarily formative for me. And since then, I've traveled all around the world."

MacPherson has been to all 50 states in the U.S. and has visited at least 80 countries. He recently returned from a trip to Japan and South Korea in spring 2026.

"It was really the Denmark experience that launched me to become a traveler, become very curious about the world, and gave me confidence to connect with people in ways that I previously never had," he said.

While at SCSU, MacPherson was an admissions ambassador, played intramural sports and was heavily involved with the University's student-run radio station KVSC. He was also a teaching assistant with former professor Dr. Ron Perrier, who MacPherson considered a mentor until Perrier passed away in 2024. The two were close enough that MacPherson spoke at Perrier's funeral.

"I've had a number of really, really, really good mentors — well-known, famous in their fields — but he was the first one. And he saw something in me that I didn't see in myself," MacPherson said. "I think that's the sign of a great mentor. I hope every student at St. Cloud State has that. I hope every student around the world has that, because we can limit ourselves."

MacPherson earned degrees in mass communications and history in 1992 from St. Cloud State, before moving to the Twin Cities. He then worked in financial services for a Fortune 500 company for about 18 months.

"I realized I wanted to have a more non-traditional path. So I sold my possessions and I moved with a one-way ticket to Germany. I had maybe a couple thousand dollars to my name and I knew one person over there and she was going to let me stay in her attic. So I moved there with just the idea that I'll figure something out. It was going to be my great adventure. I ended up playing basketball over there, got a couple jobs and the basketball club gave me an apartment to live in," he said. "That was an incredible experience. And it was at that moment that I realized I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I don't really want to work for somebody. And for the last 35 years or so, I've been starting companies and have sold one. Every one of them has been reasonably successful, financially successful."

In the late 2010s, MacPherson started the podcast "12 Geniuses," which explores trends that shape the way people live and work.

"These trends are really varied from artificial intelligence to quantum computing to space exploration, trust, privacy, aging, in all these wide variety of topics. I've even done episodes on political division and ways in which we can repair our political division," he said. "One of the topics I became very intrigued in is the topic of aging. I had the feeling

that we were on this edge of an aging explosion, or an advancement in aging that will be unrecognizable. So I wanted to dive deeper into this, and I started to learn more about it."

MacPherson said he learned that 90 percent of those over 65 years old want to age in place, or remain in their own homes as opposed to moving into a senior care or assisted living facility.

"They want to stay where they are, but in many cases, the houses are not appropriate for them; they're unsafe. At that moment, I was having my hips replaced. I had damaged hips and I was going through these surgeries, so I spent a lot of time thinking," he said. "I was homebound and I wasn't mobile, so I was reading a lot of things and investigating this. I just pulled on that thread and kept pulling on this thread. I was thinking to myself, 'There's a business here. How can I, with my skillset, help these people stay where they want to be?'"

Together with a friend of his, MacPherson launched Home at Home — a company that goes in and assesses homes for safety and functionality.

"What we've been doing at Home at Home is helping people age gracefully in the comfort of their own homes," he said. "We do that by assessing the home, pointing out where there are obstacles, where there are challenges, where there are going to be very likely falls. And then if they want to move forward with some of these changes, we go ahead and make the changes for them."

MacPherson said his company focuses on keeping people safe, but also happy.

"What we've identified is there's a misalignment between what adult children want and what the seniors want. What the adult children want — and their hearts generally are in the right place — the adult children want their parents to be safe. And for them, safe means in a home where there's care and there's responsiveness immediately. They want to extend life for their parents, failing to realize that is not what's going to make their parents happiest," he said. "They want to extend this life, but the seniors — the parents, the people living in the homes — they want to improve quality of life. They want to live. And so extending life and living are opposed to each other. The purpose that we have or the meaning that we want is to help optimize the quality of life that these seniors have. And for most of them, it's staying put."

There's a common thread through MacPherson's work and the projects he chooses to focus on.

"I've always been interested and fascinated by the idea of potential, and how some people can reach toward or approach the upper limits of their potential, and how many of us leave our potential unrecognized," he said. "One of the things that I've done, is for 30 years, I was a Big Brother, maybe even a little bit longer. I worked with young people and helped them reach their potential and help them understand what's possible.

"As we've made this transition to Home at Home, I want to do the same thing for our senior population — help them reach their potential in the last decades of their lives, and fill their lives with meaning. A lot of times we've seen seniors — their homes can be such an enormous responsibility that they never leave them, and we want to relieve them of that. We want their home to be a source of joy, and not an onerous responsibility."

In addition to his work with Big Brothers Big Sisters, MacPherson has mentored and tutored through Edina ABC, established the Inner City Ducks nonprofit youth sports organization, and recently helped sponsor the education of girls in Kenya.

The continuing theme of his professional success has been the relationships created along the way, something he said SCSU helped him establish.

"The greatest gift I probably got from St. Cloud State is learning how to learn and then learning how to cultivate relationships, meet people, establish trust and establish longstanding relationships," he said.

MacPherson encouraged others to be lifelong learners, and to remain curious and resilient.

"When I graduated high school, I felt I knew everything. When I graduated college, I felt I didn't need any more education because I had the credentials. It was really shortly after that that I realized, 'If I'm going to succeed in any capacity in life, I have to become a lifelong learner.' The minute you know it all, you will limit yourself. I would say the future is very uncertain. There's going to be a lot of unknowns, and what will help us get through these unknowns is resilience. One of the very, very important components of resilience is connection — human connection. Ask people how you can help. If you can be that person, if you're a helper first, you'll have success," he said. "Your definition of success really changes throughout life. For me, it was about getting some professional recognition and achieving certain things and financial goals and things of that matter. And right now, success: all that it means to me is being happy, helping people, watching my daughters grow and develop. To me, relationships are at the forefront of that, and I absolutely learned how to create those relationships at St. Cloud State.

"I would encourage people to get involved, whether they feel like they have the right background or not. If it doesn't make sense, after a while, you pull away and you find something else. But I find life to be a contact sport — the more opportunities, the more you learn about what's out there, the greater the likelihood that you're going to find where you need to be."