The number 1 rule of marketing is that you MUST know your ideal customer. In today’s episode of A Drink With “The Hurricane,” Steve explains that your target customers are N.E.R.D.s! Watch today’s video to find out more!
All right, everybody, so in today’s episode of “A Drink With The Hurricane” we’re talking about our target customer. The reason why I’m bringing this up is because I spend the majority of my time training the staff, the business owners of the members of my Home Care Elite Academy. Every single person in that group is a multi-million dollar home care business, as high as $23 million a year in revenue. I spend a ton of time working with them and part of their program and their training is building an entire operation around getting this target customer.
When you have an abundance of this target customer, I’m going to write out here with you today, you can have full control over your business. You don’t have to worry about your prices because you’re gonna be charging the right price that people who you’re targeting can afford the services. You don’t have to worry about low hour shifts, or high turnover, or caregivers not wanting to take a low hour shift and trying to piece together a crazy schedule because every person that we’re gonna be targeting has a great need, and they need 56 hours a week of care or beyond. You’re not going to have to worry about where they live because you’re going to be marketing smartly by working in a specific geographic area.
Everything comes down to your ability to attract this target customer. And you’ve probably seen me do this at conferences and events, before, but I want to put this in “A Drink With The Hurricane” so that you can learn it for yourself, all right? Our target customer is a NERD. A NERD. Now this is an acronym. It is a four part customer.
The first part is need. We are looking for people who need home care and not just a little bit of home care, a lot of care, like so much of a need that if they don’t have us coming in the house, they have to sell their house and move into a nursing home or a senior home of some type. That is how much help this person needs. There’s a lot of folks with that kind of need, all right? If you want to go specific with it, five-plus CC. Chronic conditions, five or more chronic conditions. If somebody has five or more chronic conditions, you know that person has a great need and they cannot be by themselves.
Next, the E. Real easy, elderly. 65 plus, that’s who we’re targeting. A couple of people a little bit younger but for the most part we’re looking for elderly, so that’s self-explanatory.
The R. Resources. This is a private pay target customer that we’re looking for here. They have to be able to afford the services. The good news, more people can afford services than you may realize. This is where a lot of people get tied up in, I don’t know what to charge? I don’t want to charge too much, yada, yada, whatever, ’cause they think that a lot of people can’t afford it. And you’re right, a lot of folks can’t. About half the seniors in your area who have the need, who are 65 and older, about half of them can’t afford private duty home care. That’s what Medicaid and other payer sources is all for. But in a private pay, you’re looking for the 50% who have the need, who can afford some level of services.
And then the last one is disabled and/or dementia. If you have a patient who suffers from dementia, advanced Alzheimer’s, that patient is not gonna be able to get adequate care without one-on-one care, even in many of the memory care assisted living communities that exist out there. Yes, they have dementia care. Think about how much those places cost, like on average, $9,000 a month, so we’re talking about over $100,000 a year. And even in those places, if somebody is too combative, too disruptive, that person still can’t be in that memory care unit without one-on-one care. So for the person who has the means, dementia one-on-one care is the best way to treat and take care of a dementia patient.
Then when it comes to somebody who’s permanently disabled. Yeah, I always think about strokes. Stroke is the number one cause of long-term disability. You get somebody over the age of 65 who has a massive stroke, if they survive the stroke, ’cause that’s the key is they got to survive it. If they survive the stroke, they’re probably gonna be permanently disabled. At the very least, it’s gonna take them several years to get back on their feet. If they live by themselves, or say they do have a spouse but the spouse is 85 years old, him or herself, and they’re not able to take care of their loved one, that person’s going to need help and it’s not for a couple of days, a couple of weeks, it is literally for years.
So, if you build your business around finding someone who has all of these needs, you will be able to scale your business fast. You will be able to scale your business strongly, meaning people who are going to sign up on services and stay on services with you for a long time so you can build upon it. And you are going to be able to make your business very profitable while, and this is the best part, helping this person stay at home because this person right here, if you’re not able to find this person and sign them up and do right by them, they’re going to go somewhere else. Remember this is somebody with resources, so that means they’re going to pay someone else to do what you’re not able to do if you don’t target them and find them, and unfortunately, this is usually going to be in your nursing home and nursing homes costs on average, $120,000 a year for round the clock care in a nursing home. And I know most of you, and I’m not putting down nursing homes, nursing homes, they are there for a reason.
A lot of nursing homes when it comes to the residents that live there, a lot of them are on Medicaid, they’re not paying out of pocket for it, right? So for somebody who doesn’t have resources and that’s all they have, that’s what they gotta do. Like I understand that. But for the person who has the resources, which means they have some options to decide nursing home or home care, if you are marketing, finding these folks in your area, you are gonna be able to really grow your business. And I just want to show you real quick, take a little bit more time here to give you some quick math. If you have, say, 100,000 people in your area, just 100,000 people, 15% are 65 and older. That’s 15,000. Government Medicare statistic, 1 in 3 seniors will go to the hospital every single year. That is a fact. Times 0.33, that’s 5,000 seniors will go to the hospital in your area every single year.
Here’s another Medicare stat, 1 in 5 seniors suffers from five or more chronic conditions, like I talked about before. That’s 20%. That’s 1,000 seniors in your area suffering from five or more chronic conditions who will be in the hospital. Here’s the last one, who can afford it? 40% of the senior population are on Medicaid, which means that that population has no resources, they’re not gonna be able to pay for out of pocket. That means the other 60% has some level of resources, not indefinite, but some level that they have to spend down before they go on Medicaid. That is literally 60%, which means that if you have 100,000 people in your market, you have 600 target customers. There isn’t an agency watching this video right now with that many people in their area who can handle that many patients coming on-services.
You literally could get 10% of that, 60 clients and those 60 clients are gonna be averaging about 50 hours a week of care. That’s well over $1 million dollars in revenue. You’re actually probably in the ballpark of about $3 million in revenue from 10% of all the people in your area who need help. That’s your target customer, that’s understanding it. You want that, you want to be able to grow your business, you want to be able to do exactly what I just said there? The smartest thing you can do right now, join the Home Care Elite Academy and all the other clients that I’ve helped over the last decade of my life scale and grow their business. Pick up the phone, call us and let us help you blow away the competition.