By Stephen Tweed
A while ago, I spoke at the closing general session for the annual conference of the third largest franchise company in our industry on the topic of “Scaling Your Home Care Business with Data Oriented Decision Making.” I began with a question:
“Which referral source gives you the most new clients with the highest hours per week and the longest length of stay?”
Over the past three years, we have learned that in a post-Covid world with an extreme shortage of caregivers, you will need to do one thing to grow our business:
Find New Clients who give you the Highest Hours Per Week and the Longest Length of Stay.
We’ve learned that the best caregivers in our industry, who really want to do this work, are looking for home care companies that can give them a consistent schedule with the same client over a long period of time. In order for you to attract and retain those caregivers, you need to find new clients with high hours and long length of service. How do you do that?
Begin by Looking at Your Own Data
How many clients did you admit to service last year?
Which referral source brought you the most clients?
What were your average hours per week per client last year?
Which referral source brought you the clients with the longest length of stay?
What was your average length of stay for the clients you served last year?
Which referral source brought you the clients with the highest hours per week of service?
In preparation for my presentation, I spent some time looking at data from home care companies that are members of our Home Care CEO Mastermind Groups. I learned that there is a significant variance between the companies in our groups. As I analyzed the largest companies, and fastest growing companies, and the most profitable companies, I began to see some very clear patterns.
I learned that the largest, fastest growing, and most profitable companies are those that are focused on attracting and retaining clients who want high hours per week and long length of service, and they focus on attracting caregivers who want to work 40 or more hours per week and who want to have a long term relationship with one client.
Which Referral Sources Should you Target?
As part of this analysis, we also looked at a number of examples of home care company data on the dollar value of a client. We looked at their list of clients served in one year, and separated they my referral source. Then we analyzed that data to find the referral sources that provided the most valuable clients.
While we don’t have any industry wide data, we have some anecdotal examples that show us a pattern. The clients with the highest hours per week and the longest length of stay tend to come from a small group of referral sources:
Specialty Advisors
Geriatric Care Managers
Bank Trust Officers
Current Employees
Current and past Clients
This list came from an analysis of one company. To get a clear picture of your most valuable referral sources, you need to analyze your own data.
HCP Home Care Benchmarking Study
One of the ways to become more familiar with your own data is to participate in the Home Care Pulse annual Home Care Benchmarking Study. Each year, over 700 home care companies submit answers to a series of questions. Then the team at HCP analyzes that data and publishes a detailed report. This year will be the 15th year for this study.
You will save a significant about on the purchase price of the annual report by contributing your own data.
Don’t delay … download the HCP Benchmarking Preparation Worksheet and begin the process of gathering and submitting your data.
Home Care CEO Mastermind Benchmarking Study
At the Home Care CEO Forum, we run our own parallel study to the HCP study. We encourage all of our members to participate in the HCP Study. Then we gather that same information, plus some added data based on the questions of our member companies.
Then we compile individual benchmarking reports for each Mastermind Group. Our groups are organized by size, so all of the data for one groups represents similar sized companies who do not compete with one another.
At our annual spring in-person meetings, we share our own data plus the HCP data and have an in-depth discussion about what each member has learned. Each member considers their own data, the Mastermind data, and the HCP data. This leads to some very interesting conversations among our members and we have some amazing lessons come from this conversation over the years.
If you are the owner of an independent home care company over $1.5 million in annual revenue, or the owner of a Franchise home care company over $5 million, there is a mastermind group for you.
You can learn more at https://www.homecareceo.com/mastermind-groups/ .
