In today’s episode of A Drink with The Hurricane, Steve “The Hurricane” reviews the statistics of industry leaders and discusses the best referral sources. He also explains the three-legged stool! What’s that? Watch and find out!
I’m holding the 2018 Home Care Pulse Report in my hand, and I love using this as a reference because it really gives a lot of credibility to the things that I’m gonna discuss with you because this is where to go for business.
So many people over the years have so many questions, and what I love about this particular part is you see there are different referral sources for all home care businesses, but then there are referral sources for people who are the leaders. And I always like to point out what the leaders are doing because the goal of every home care business should be to be a leader. The leaders are people who are doing over $3 million in annual revenues. The average leader surveyed had a $4.5 million revenue per year. So, if your business is not doing $4.5 million, you should be doing the things the leaders are doing to work towards getting your business to that point. If your business is doing that or greater, then obviously, we wanna make sure we’re doing what our peers are doing.
If you are good at running your business and you’re doing a certain amount of volume, by default, you’ve been around for a while, you have a good reputation, you should get business from existing clients or past clients. That just makes sense, that comes back to your operation. So, if you’re not getting referrals from existing clients or from your past clients, there’s probably something going on in your organization that you need to correct. So, take a good look at yourselves internally and decide what we have to do to get to a point where we start getting business from there.
Now, these other referral sources they talk about on here are great places for business, things that I talk about all the time. Skilled nursing facilities, as a matter of fact, almost 10% of the people who participated said that was their number one referral source type. This was my number one referral source type when I had my home care business many years ago. And the people who said that it was their number one referral source type said that it accumulated 36% of their total annual revenue. So, we’re talkin’ about almost 2/5 of all the revenue of this $4.5 million business came from skilled nursing facilities. I love skilled nursing facilities as a referral source.
Now, other referral sources they talk about are…
- Assisted Living Communities
- Continuous Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs)
- Trust Advisors, like geriatric care managers and elder law attorneys
- Hospitals
Hospitals are very difficult. Less than 5% of all of the leaders said that hospitals were their number one referral source. Now, there are two that I didn’t mention that are referral sources.
For anybody who’s understood my program, anybody who’s been to one of my boot camps, anybody who’s one of our clients, you know that I talk a lot about referral sources and talk a lot about power partners. A Power Partner is somebody you can do a lot of business with. You’re going after the same target audience, and they can refer you. So, this is a referral source, but if you’re one of my clients, this is a power partner. And if you’re not a client, you wanna work with these two referral source types and turn them into power partners and really blow up your business.
That is home health and hospice. Home health, hospice, private duty, that’s what I refer to as the three-legged bar stool of home-based service providers for the elderly to keep them home and out of the hospital.
How do we improve outcomes? By the three-legged stool working together to support the people who don’t want to be or shouldn’t be in a nursing home permanently. That’s us working together, that’s the power partnership, alright?
Now, there are two other referral source types that I’m not gonna really mention on here. State Medicaid programs, that’s hit and miss based on the state that you’re in. If you’re in a state like Massachusetts or Delaware, where they have really good reimbursement, great, take the Medicaid. Arizona, another great state with Medicaid reimbursement that’s a high number. But if you’re in a state like New Jersey, where I’m located, where the reimbursement is like 10 cents over the cost of doing business, you have to have tremendous volume, we’re talkin’ about 400 or 500 patients or more to be able to make the kind of revenue you need. That takes a lot of resources to lay out to get paid back. I don’t really recommend going after state Medicaid in that case.
The last one is the Area Office on Aging. Again, I don’t really like that because everybody goes there, and whenever you do what everyone else is doing, you’re not gonna get the results that you’re after. So, for all intents and purposes, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living, hospice, home health, CCRCs, geriatric care managers, and hospitals, that’s where you want to go for business.
And folks, if you can’t get in these places and you need help, this is why you contact us. Let’s sit down, let’s have a conversation, let’s figure out what fits within your budget and the services we offer to help you get into these places and truly BLOW AWAY THE COMPETITION.
https://www.homecaremarketing.net/contact_us/