So your target customer, okay, many people who are my clients, or who have been to a boot camp, know who the home care target customer is. But if you haven’t been to one, or you are not a client of ours, like a coaching client, then you don’t know who our target customer is. And our target customer is a four-part customer.
Our target customer is a nerd, a nerd, all right, and you can write this down with me. The first letter, the N in this four-part customer stands for need. Our clients and patients are someone who has a great need, because if they didn’t need home care, they’re not gonna get home care. So like, when you think like people don’t just go on the internet and be like, “Hmm, I wonder what home care costs today,” and they start shopping around. No, something happened to their loved one that caused them to now need home care, and that’s why they’re contacting us.
Now, I want you to write down next to the need, this, five plus CC. Five plus CC stands for five or more chronic conditions. So five CC stands for five or more chronic conditions. When you have a patient from a home care standpoint, private duty, if I need to get a patient and even hospice too, I noticed some hospice people on here, for somebody who’s end of life, is somebody who has multiple things wrong. It’s very rare that you get a patient come on hospice with just one condition. They usually have several other preexisting conditions, and then this one condition that’s gonna be what ends up causing them to expire, to pass away, right? So five or more chronic conditions, that’s a target customer.
So in the assisted living world, kinda tying this together, people don’t move into an assisted living with five or more chronic conditions. People move into an assisted living so that they can get help with the basic necessities, like meal preparation and keeping the house clean, and then getting social interaction with other people, and going on the trips and the sponsor activities, and then, yeah, maybe a couple of levels of personal care. But when a director of nursing, or any other contact at a referral source, that’s a skilled nursing, sorry, assisted living community or CCRC, when they get patients that five or more chronic conditions, this is the person that’s going back and forth to the hospital.
This is the person that is what they consider no longer AL appropriate, you can write that down too, AL appropriate. Meaning their level of care that is required for them to sustain life is beyond what the assisted living can offer. So five or more chronic conditions is a great need, that is one part of our target customer.
Easy, elderly, 65 and older. That’s what we’re looking for so I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on that. That’s the second part of the target customer.
The R stands for resources. We’re looking for people who can afford private duty services. Now, hospice is different, you don’t have to worry about the resources financially, but hospice is also a very difficult sell, I will say too. Because just like with the private duty, you get a referral, now I have to go out and sell that for referral on, coming onto our services to pay for it, that’s the private duty challenge.
And then hospice, you have to sell the family and convince them on putting their loved one on hospice, cause a lot of times they don’t wanna to do it, or they wait until it’s too late. And I can tell you right now, I know Megan went through this before, but I can tell you I’m a big, big, big advocate for hospice. Why? Because when people get on hospice early enough, they actually have a better quality of life in their remaining, you know, three to six months. They’re not in the pain and suffering, they’re actually, you know, enjoying themselves, and the medication management for the pain and everything is all taking care of it.
And a lot of times, like more often than not, they live longer if they go on hospice earlier. But the problem is people don’t want to say goodbye to mom, or say goodbye to grandma, and so they continue to seek treatment and ultimately the treatment weakens the person, so much so, that they die faster, than if they had went on hospice, it happens all the time and I feel it’s a tragedy when that happens.
So, if you know, from a hospice standpoint, you don’t have to worry about the financial, but you still have to convince that family to sign up for hospice services when it’s earlier on. So, you know, just, just kinda, you know, adding to the challenges on the hospice side. But for the private duty you got to make sure you have people who are financially qualified. Well I just said, the assisted living community did the hard work of finding people who are financially qualified, so everybody in there is paying privately, you know they can afford some level of care if they need it.
And then the last one. Dementia and/or disabled, dementia and/or disabled. If you have a patient who is permanently disabled, they’re gonna need help. They’re permanently disabled.
If you have somebody who has advanced dementia, they’re a wander risk, they could be running down the street, they could get in their car and drive away. In the assisted living communities they start to get to a point where they require more help than the community is ready and able to offer. When you think about an assisted living community, how many CNAs do they employ at any given time? Three, four per shift. If there’s only three CNAs in an entire building, that are employed by the assisted living at any one given time, and they have 80 residents, they have to take care of, they cannot spend all their time with one patient. They just cannot do it. And that is why when you have a disabled or dementia patient in a community like this, and then they have these other three categories, well, this is your target customer. So again, need, elderly, with resources, and they’re dementia and/or disabled. That’s your target customer.
