What’s up everybody, it’s Steve The Hurricane, here with another episode of A Drink With The Hurricane. On today’s episode, I want to talk to you about my biggest surprise from the Home Care Pulse study. And that is the weekly billable hours growth from 2019 to 2020. Which is something that I want you all to take a note of. Look at your own organization.
I’m doing these episodes of the Home Care Pulse report review so that you can compare what your organization is doing right now to what the industry average is. If you’re doing worse, fix it. You’re doing better, great, how much better? And do I need to fix it even more? So raise your glass and cheers with me to another episode of A Drink With The Hurricane.
Okay. So here we have it folks. Alright. This is another review from the Home Care Pulse. I love using the Home Care Pulse data because it really gives us an idea as to what’s going on in our industry, keeping our finger on the pulse of what’s happening, and there’s so much more. And if you don’t have the benchmark study and you want to get it, here’s a 25% discount code from my friends at Home Care Pulse. It is HURICANE all capital letters, 25 and then percent. So hurricane 25%, H U R R I C A N E, the number 25, and then the percent sign, boom, that’ll save you 25%.
And so as I’m pulling up my computer screen here, you’ll see real quick that the weekly billable hours 2017 was around 1200 per agency. 2018, went down to just under 1200, but not much. 2019, we came roaring back at almost 1300 billable hours per location. Now this is the median. This means that the average person, right smack in the middle of all the agencies surveyed, the median agency was doing this in 2019. And then all of a sudden, 2020 we went backwards. Many people, this is what was a surprise to me. So here I’m thinking to myself, it was COVID. Nobody wanted to go to assisted livings because assisted livings were essentially without getting, like, I don’t want to be nasty or mean.
But it really felt like a prison because it was so isolated. It was like a luxury prison. If you wanted to visit your loved one, they were able to come. A lot of people set up these vestibules that you could talk to them through the window, because COVID was so, such a threat to our elderly. It was very hard for our seniors to live in this. So not many people wanted to go there. So, that’s one less place that was pulling from potential for home care. Then you had your nursing homes. Well, when you look at what happened in our country because of COVID. The number one place where people were passing away from COVID infections was in nursing homes. Heck, my home state, I live in New Jersey.
My business is operated out of New Jersey. 30% of the residents of nursing homes in New Jersey, 30% died last year from COVID. We were the worst state, even worse than New York at nursing homes. Because when everything first happened, we didn’t enclose fast enough. I’m not blaming the governor, nobody knew. But 30%, 30% of the residents that lived there. So clearly nobody wanted to put their loved one in a nursing home. Adult daycare’s, that’s all about social interaction. We had to isolate.
So in a year, where the best option for care was home care, I expected to see the average weekly billable hours per patient increase. And instead, it went down. And when you look at this, this was almost 1300 hours in 2019, to 1100 hours. That’s just under 20%. It’s about 17% less hours. And so even if you look at like other, like live-in care, some of us do live-ins. You know, this right here, you know, 350, to two to three hundred, right? To 340 to 290, that’s 50 difference, 50 hours a week difference. That’s about 15, 20 percent. It’s, I’m at a loss of words because of this number here, right? And that is why I’m saying to take look at your numbers. If your business went backwards, you got to make sure that you are marketing.
And I know last year marketing was tough, I know. How do I know? Because I literally worked with 150 agencies around the world on how to help them market during the lockdown. And you know what? Everybody’s numbers went up. Everybody who didn’t stop marketing in 2020, all of my clients, their numbers went up. So if your numbers went down because you took your foot off the gas marketing. Here’s what you have to do, alright? Write these three things down. Number one, get back out there. Right now, today. It’s June 8th when I’m filming this 2020. All of my clients are telling me that their referral sources are open right now. They’re open.
Whether you’re in New York City, the most decimated city in the world from COVID, or you’re in the middle of nowhere, Utah, or somewhere else. Everybody’s referral sources are open. Heck, I have a lot of clients telling me that when they go marketing into their referral sources, they’re not even making them wear masks if they were vaccinated. So get back out there, get to networking events. I actually received an email the other day, inviting me to a local first in-person networking gathering again tomorrow morning for my township’s chamber that I belong to. First time in over a year.
So yeah, things are opening back up. Get your butts back out there and start marketing again. That’s the first thing you do. Second thing you gotta do, make power partners. Power partners, for those of you that aren’t familiar with my program and that’s fine. Hey, you know, I put these videos out there, they’re free. When you’re ready to commit and get the real training and really scale your business and grow, you know how to reach me, you know how to find me. I’ll even talk about that at the very end of this video. But in the meantime, a power partner is somebody who’s an advocate for your business.
This is somebody who’s a marketing representative, a business owner, an executive director, who loves you and your company. And they do things to help you grow your company. Some of the things such as co-marketing together, collaborating on events, and of course referring each other back and forth. Now, why would people do it? Well, it’s real simple. When you find these power partners who are basically people who offer a product or a service that is synergistic to yours. And you’re going after the same target customer, but you don’t directly compete. An example, private duty home care and hospice.
Similar service, but we don’t compete with each other because hospice patients aren’t necessarily private duty, and all private duty aren’t necessarily hospice, right? So we don’t compete, but we go to the same places to get business. When I have an established relationship with that marketing rep, and I’m collaborating on events with them and I’m promoting their events and we’re co-marketing and doing all these other great things together. That will help me get my foot in the door in referral sources that I’m not getting business.
It’ll also help me to strengthen relationships at ones that maybe have cooled off in the last 12 months, because I haven’t been out there and been there. Power partners fast tracks referral source development. Number three, make sure that you’re charging enough money for your services. I can also see that part of the reason why people drop the hours last year is because they couldn’t get caregivers to do work. And so they had to turn away business. You should never have to turn away business. You can talk to a patient.
Now, if you talk to a patient and you say to a patient, hey listen, you know, right now our rates, they used to be $25 an hour. But in order for me to get caregivers to work, we have to charge $32 an hour. So if you need the help, we can do it. But I have to charge you $32 an hour. That’s not raking somebody over the coals. If you’re charging $32 an hour, you’re probably compensating 17, $18 an hour. It’s what you have to do, right? To get the caregivers to do the work. If the patient’s willing to pay that much for the care because the need is there. And this is why you don’t stop the referral marketing.
When you’re marketing the way that you’re supposed to, you’re gonna get target customers. A target customer is somebody who has a great need. Who has a great need? Somebody with five or more chronic conditions. This is somebody who’s been in and out of the hospital, especially during COVID time. This is why my clients grew so much last year. During COVID those patients were scared of going to the hospital. They didn’t want to go to the hospital. They knew they needed the care and they knew they had to stay at home. And if they had the resources, they would pay whatever they had to, to get the work.
To get the work needed to help keep them home. On the flip side, my clients were paying the caregivers what they had to pay caregivers to get them to work. And I know why, we had the unemployment plus the stimulus on top of it. I can’t blame a caregiver for not wanting to work when they can stay at home and make $15 an hour. So if you want me to come in, yeah, I’ll do it, but you’ve got to give me $17. I understand. So as long as that is still happening, we have to compensate accordingly. It really is, this is the most objective, not mental. I’m not talking about heart strings.
Like I know, it makes it less affordable for you. I know that. I’m not dumb, you know. I know it makes it less affordable. But you gotta do what you gotta do to get the caregivers, right? So if you are turning away patients, give the patient the option. I can do this for you, but I have to charge at $32 an hour. If they say yes, staff it. Give the caregivers the 17, $18 that they’re commanding, and then you staff it. And then you provide what the very best care that you can possibly provide, and make sure you keep that patient home safe and out of the hospital. That’s business. That’s why people are signing with you because they’re trusting you with their care. Give them the care, give the caregivers what they’re commanding, get the care delivered that the person needs, and stop turning away business. When you do these three things.
Bringing in an abundance of referrals. Create the power partners to keep referrals coming in, and then increase your rates. And then you’re just upfront and transparent and real with people, let them know this is what it costs. It really is as easy as those three things. That will help you so that you can stop this backwards trends of decreasing billable hours and get those hours going in the right direction again. By the way, I’m gonna share my computer screen one more time with you. As I’m gonna talk about the upcoming bootcamp. You should know a stat last year that my clients had. Alright.
My clients last year increased their weekly billable hours by almost 65%. Increase from what they did when they started. That is ridiculous. Industry went down 17.6. But my clients went up 63%. If you want to grow your business and grow those weekly billable hours by 63% more than what you’re currently doing, what do you have to do my friends? It’s real easy.
You want to come to the Home Care Millionaire’s Bootcamp that I’m putting up this November, alright? November 17th, 18th and 19th. It’s a three day jam packed event. Operational support, sales and marketing support in re-systems and practices. As well as caregiver recruitment and retention systems. When you get the caregivers and you retain them, bring in the referrals that have your operations sound so that they can match the demand. That’s how you scale and grow your business. This bootcamp is a thousand dollars ticket per ticket. It’s gonna sell out. Jump on right now. Early bird before the early bird ends. I don’t know when this is gonna air. It may already be over. Early bird price is just 599. Literally 40% off. And I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna give you everything that you need to blow away the competition.