Struggling with the 24/7 nature of your Home Care Company? Watch this week’s episode of A Drink With “The Hurricane” to learn how a few small employee incentives can help take the on-call overnight and weekend shifts off your plate.
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Welcome to this episode of A Drink With The Hurricane. It is the solar eclipse edition. Right now the sun is out.
Steve “The Hurricane” here, down in beautiful Indian Shores Florida at our summer condo. It is amazing and since the moon is covering the sun right now, we’re going to do an episode about over night coverage. It is interesting because this is a challenge many people face in their businesses. We are going to talk more about this at The Millionaires Boot Camp is November 9th through the 11th, as part of the Care Coordination presentation. It is going to be amazing, so get your tickets now!
When it comes to overnight coverage, what do you do in your agency? There are so many different philosophies for it in the beginning. Right? When I was part owner, I was also the director of business development and every night of the week, I was on call. And for the first year and a half it was really difficult to be on call 24/7. Here is a quick story…
I was 26 years old. I was a single man and I was at a party at about 11:30pm at night with all my friends and I had a little bit to drink and I was enjoying myself. And then a phone call came in and I called Brian and I said “Hey Brian I can’t take this call because I am not in any shape to take it.” The only issues was that he said the same thing. He was at a party with his friends and his wife. So I waited a bit to sober up and then I ended up going. It turned out it wasn’t a big deal and I was able to take care of it.
But at that point is when I realized we have to be doing something better than just being on call 24/7. It’s too much. You’ve got to live your life, you’ve got to have a system that works. And so the system that we did at Care Choice was we would pay our staff more for being on call. How can I earn more income? That’s what everybody wants to do. We paid our office staff $25 per night that they were on call Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
And then whoever should be on call for the weekend received the hundred dollars compensation for being on call the entire weekend. Now if you didn’t take any phone calls, there were no call outs, and no issues or challenges… great! You did no extra work, and made a little extra cash.
What if it was a busy weekend and you had three or four call outs in all these cases, jittery staff, and a whole bunch of things that happened? You’ve got to do, what you’ve got to do to take care of the business. That’s why you’re on call. It ends up being a beautiful thing because I was on call maybe once a quarter because most of the time our staff took care of it. And so that’s what we did.
So that is all for this week. Remember the Millionaires Boot Camp is this November we’re going to be talking about Care Coordination. What do you do to ensure coordination to your business to increase the longevity of your clients? It’s one of the many topics at the first ever Hurricanes Millionaires boot camp. God bless. Have a great one.