What’s up, everybody, it’s Steve “The Hurricane,” and for today’s episode of “A Drink With The Hurricane,” I’m gonna go over the best way to increase those weekly billable hours of services. So raise your glass, and let’s toast to your success. Cheers.
This is A Drink With “The Hurricane,” the talk show discussing all things growing your home care business. This video is sponsored by Home Care Evolution, where we help home care agencies adapt to changing circumstances, transform their business, so that they can thrive for years to come.
Weekly billable hours. This is a metric that every single home care agency must track, week in and week out. We have to know what we are billing every single week, because that adds up to 52 weeks in a year, which gives us the total amount of hours provided of service in a year, times our hourly rate, and gives us how much revenue we’re generating in a year. And I will tell you, the agencies that keep their finger on the pulse of how many hours they’re billing do significantly better than the agencies that don’t.
Now, in the Home Care Pulse Report for 2022, they showed that the agencies around the country grew by about 10% weekly billable hours in 2021, versus what they did in 2020. 2020, it was about 1100, and it was closer to 1200 weekly billable hours for the average agency in 2021. Now, with that said, the best way to increase our weekly billable hours is to specialize in something. That’s right, specialization. Now, this is something that I go over in huge, specific detail, it’s literally an hour-lesson as part of my fast start course at the Hurricane University Program that I rolled out many years ago to people.
So my clients, they’re actually growing their average billable hours by 63% over what industry averages are doing. So my clients are crushing it. That’s how I know that specializing is the way to go. But when you specialize, I want you to think about it from this perspective. Every single person has a doctor that they go to. It’s usually a general practitioner or an internist. And when you go to your general practitioner, they’re gonna take a look at you and make sure that your blood pressure is good and your sugar is good and your heart rate is good and there’s no issues. But if you talk to your doctor and you say, “You know, doctor, you know, my stomach hurts,” or, “I have headaches all the time,” or, “my feet are killing me,” chances are, that physician, they’re gonna make a recommendation or a referral for you to go see a specialist. And one thing I can guarantee that you’ve experienced is when you try to get an appointment at a specialist, it’s usually very difficult. You know why? Because the specialist is so busy that they don’t have time to take on new patients. And often, you have to wait two weeks, a month, sometimes longer just to get an initial consultation for something that is seriously going on in you and your life.
So follow what the doctors are doing. The same thing applies for the agencies that specialize. When you specialize in something, now all of a sudden you’re taking your competition away from competing with every agency in your market, which, I know some markets around the United States, if you’re in a major city area, you have a thousand competitors. Even if you’re in a rural market where there may only be five or six agencies, still, there’s four or five other people competing with you. When you specialize, well, out of that thousand agencies in a major city market you’re competing with, now you may only be competing with two or three. And people who have specific disease diagnosis, they’re calling you before everybody else because you specialize in what their loved one has. To the more rural folks, you’re probably the only person that specializes in this. So if you have this particular condition, you are the first person they’re gonna call, you get first crack at it. It’s gonna make it a lot easier for you to be able to grow because you get first shot at every single referral.
Some other things that go with specializing. Well, when you specialize, that means you’re building your program or you’re building your agency, rather, around taking care of this type of a patient. Which means that you’re probably offering some kind of specialized training for those caregivers. You might have telephone devices or monitoring devices that you’re placing in the house. You might have additional field oversight and management. All of those items that I just said and so much more are value added propositions. That means that it’s more expensive because you’re getting more value for this type of service. This will allow you to charge an above-average price, justified, which also means it will allow you to attract more caregivers to work for you because you’ll be hiring caregivers with experience with this type of patient. And how do I know that this works? Let’s just use dementia as an example of something to specialize in. Looking at assisted livings, the average cost nationally right now for an assisted living is between $5,000 and $6,000 a month for the base level of care. If somebody has dementia and they go to a memory care unit at an assisted living, the national average ranges from $7,500 to $8,500 a month. And that’s your average figure. Some markets, it’s closer to $10,000, some markets a little bit closer to $6,000. But straight across the board, dementia units cost significantly more than base-level care at an assisted living. And why is it? Because it requires more care, it requires more oversight, and therefore, you have no choice but to charge a premium for it, and people will pay the premium because of the specialist.
Even going back to my example I mentioned with the physicians. Physicians and specialists, if you look at your copay going to your primary care versus going to the specialist, the primary care physician is usually $30 to $50 to go to see that primary care person. Whereas specialists, usually you’re paying $75, maybe $100 as a copay for that because the specialist charges more as well. So this is a great way for you to capture more leads, capture more caregivers, differentiate your agency from all of your competitors out there, which will allow you to get the lion share of referrals when it comes to patients with specific disease groups.
Now, if you like this video and you like this information, then I highly recommend you subscribe to my free downloadable copy of the Home Care Evolution Quarterly. The spring and the summer issues are available to download, you just go to my website, homecareevolution.com, where you can download it. And if you wanna buy the print copy, we’ll send that to you as well. Some people like that option, but every single one of these is gonna have 8 to 10 articles on all things scaling and growing your home care business. And if you’re not in home care, you definitely wanna know how to scale and grow, so that if you do decide to get into it, we can help you do that too.
So there you have it, folks. There’s the tip for this week. And remember, don’t just beat your competition, but blow them away. So, folks, I’m Steve “The Hurricane,” and I just spent three days teaching all these people how to…
“Blow away the competition!”