By Stephen Tweed

It’s that time of year again. Time to dig into your company data, download the preparation
worksheet, and participate in the Home Care Pulse Benchmarking Study.
For the past fifteen years we have worked closely with HCP to promote and endorse their
annual benchmarking study. Over these years, this has become the industry standard for
information and data about home care sales, recruiting, operations, finance, and training.

Learn from Your Own Data

You’ve heard me say for years, “What gets measured gets managed. What gets rewarded gets
repeated.” Some friends from the professional speaking business have dubbed my “Dataman”
because of my interest in data, facts, and information.

As a home care company owner, there is no better way to understand your own business than to participate in the HCP Annual Benchmarking process. By personally going through the process of gathering the data requested in the survey, you will develop a much deeper understanding of your own business. Then when you compare your data to the industry, you will be even better prepared to grow your business.

Compare Your Data to Industry Benchmarks

For the past ten years, we have used the HCP Benchmarking study as a template for your own
Home Care CEO Mastermind Benchmarking.
First, we encourage all our members to download the worksheet, gather the data, and submit
their data to the study. We’ve found that our members learn a lot about their own businesses by
gathering and submitting the data.
Then we have our members submit this data, and some additional data, to our own Home Care
CEO Benchmarking process. We tabulate the data for each of our five mastermind groups and
compare the group results with national benchmarks from HCP. This leads to some very
interesting in-dept discussions about how to improve performance, how to grow the business,
and how to improve bottom line results.

Applying Data Oriented Decision Making

Several years ago, I developed a new keynote speech for home care association conferences
and corporate meetings on “Data Oriented Decision Making.” I dug deeply into the HCP
Benchmarking Report, and into our own Home Care CEO Mastermind benchmarking. I was
able to come up with some very interesting perspectives on some strategic decisions you can
make using your own data.
One of the lessons we’ve learned over the past ten years working with our Top 5% Mastermind
Group is that these company owners in the very top tier of our industry have a very good handle
on their own company data. They are very interested in our mastermind group benchmark data,
and they participate in the HCP Benchmarking Study.

As I like to tell the group, my favorite quote from W. Edwards Deming is “Without the data,
you’re just another person with an opinion.” These top tier home care leaders make
decisions based on facts and data, not on opinions.
If you want to grow your business to be in the top tier of our industry, then take action right now
and begin the process of participating in the HCP Home Care Benchmarking Study.