What’s up, everybody? It’s Steve, “The Hurricane” here. And for today’s episode of A Drink With The Hurricane, we’re gonna continue our four part series on getting referrals. And we’re gonna talk about having a multi-pronged approach towards generating those referrals, cheers.
So all right, I’m enjoying this series, I hope you are too, I haven’t done a series in a long time and I haven’t talked about getting referrals in a long time. So it’s a beautiful thing from my perspective to be able to do what I love doing the most right. Today we’re gonna talk specifically about having a multi-pronged approach, and and not just a multi-pronged approach by going into referral sources, but targeting multiple referral source types. When I think about over all the years, that I’ve been in home care, when I used to own my own home care business, before that when I was a marketing representative for the company I became the VP of.
When I joined SeniorBridge after selling care choice to them. I started thinking about all of the people that I’ve come in contact with, and I’ve met so many marketing representatives up until that point. And I’ve met so many other home care business owners up until that point. And then now fast forward, the last eight, nine years of my life, I’ve worked with thousands of home care business owners, in six different countries around the world and the United States.
So I know a thing or two about this. And one of the, like core mistakes that I see people doing, is they have this approach of, I wanna get into hospitals and I’m gonna hire a person just to focus exclusively on hospitals. And that has gotta be one of like the just, it’s like a Cardinal sin, because it takes months and months, and years to get into hospitals, to get the amount of referrals needed to significantly impact your business.
When you hire somebody just to do that, you’re setting that person up for failure, which means that you’re destroying their confidence, because you hired this confident marketing person, and they think they’re gonna be able to do it. And then a month, two months goes by, and they don’t have any referrals yet, and now their confidence is shaken. You’re wasting money, because you’re paying this person a salary, and if it’s a really experienced person you’re paying them a nice salary, which means that you’re not getting your return on your investment, so you’re bleeding, in the time it takes to develop the hospital.
And then you have, the hospitals, they don’t just let anybody in. You can’t just walk into a hospital, it’s gotta be somebody that they know, like, and trust. They gotta get the, you know, a chest x-ray, to make sure that they don’t have any disease and vaccinations and rep track and all these other things, and all this stuff cost money too, and time. And then if it’s a revolving door and it’s changing, you’re getting a bad reputation at the same time, ’cause you can’t keep a marketer.
All of these are problems that happen when you go after one referral source type and you don’t have a multi-pronged approach. You just go in through the front door. This is where with what we, Hurricane University, I don’t wanna keep talking about Hurricane University because that’s where I literally train thousands of people every year. I’m the one who’s training you on how to do all this.
Having a multi-pronged approach, targeting multiple referral source types. Some referral source types have great patients, but you can develop them faster, in assisted living, for an example. It’s a great referral source. You’re not gonna get the volume you can at a hospital, but inside a month you can start getting referrals from assisted living, home health and hospice, for the private duty folks, are great referral sources.
You may not get the volume of a hospital, but you might be able to get two or three patients per month from every home health, every hospice, that you’re working with. And it takes about four to six weeks to develop those counts, to get referrals. Skilled nursing facility, which is my personal favorite. You could have 50 skilled nursing facilities in your service area. They’re all not created equal.
So some have more of a potential to refer you than others. Be this your work qualifications, coming in and understanding what a target customer, who the home care target customer is, and identifying it and then figuring out, out of the 50 skilled nursing facilities in my market, these seven have the referrals of my target customer that they could send me. Where every month I can get two to three patients a month from that skilled nursing facility. And it takes about three months to develop a skilled nursing facility.
And so this is where this multi-pronged, diversifying our referral source type, really comes into play, because if I have one hospice, one skilled nursing facility, one home health company, one assisted living community, one continuous care retirement community, all referring me two patients a month,. Eight, 10 new clients a month, from four or five referral sources. And I, and most business owners would be very happy if their reps signed on and started eight clients a month after a month or two on the job, that’s very good, that’s what our marketing reps and our clients are doing when they work with us, that’s very good numbers. And then as you’re developing the hospital over six months time, then the hospital gets turned on, and then yes, you’ll get your five to 10 patients a month from that hospital on top of it.
And then your rep after six months time, is bringing in 16, 20, 25 new patients every single month. That’s 150, 200 patients a year. That’s what happens when you do the things that we train you in the program, and you’re following through with this. You know, multi-pronged approach, you don’t just go in one way, you attack every referral source that I just said, with five or six different approaches to get in there, because if I’m going at it from four or five different angles, let’s say five or six angles, right? One or two of them is gonna get through, to get to those key contacts where I can then develop a trust relationship to get that two to three patients a month referred to me, from said referral source. This is the big picture, this is the third lesson in a row, the third week in a row in the series, this probably should have been the first one, I decided to start with social workers, ’cause everybody wants to get in with the social workers. But this is how you do it, it’s one of the very first things that you do is determine where am I gonna go for business? And then what am I gonna do to get into those accounts? And then I start to execute.
And when you do it right, when you follow the things they train you in the Hurricane University program, you’re gonna get the leverage. You’re gonna get four or five places to refer you, two, three times a month, and that’s how you’re gonna significantly grow your business.
Now I love doing this. I have done this thousands of times with home care business owners over the last eight, nine years of my life. I lived it for seven years prior. If you wanna make 2021 your best year yet, if you wanna shatter records, if 2020 left you, not so hot and you need to rebound, click the link below, give us a call, let us help you blow away the competition.
