Steve “The Hurricane” (00:00):
What’s up everybody? It’s Steve the Hurricane, and for today’s episode of a Drink with the Hurricane, we are going to continue our five part series on the top five referral sources, specifically talking about assisted living communities. So raise your glass and let’s toast to your success. Cheers.
(00:26)
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. The assisted living community, and notice I called it a community, not a facility. I will tell you right now, assisted livings do not want to be called facilities. So don’t ever call an assisted living a facility. For those of you who are clients, you can actually go into the home care evolution daily archive, and you can find a specific training that’s an hour long and it’s called All Things Assisted Living. Go in there, watch it. I’m going to give you a whole bunch of content there. But for everybody else, what I love about assisted livings more than anything else is assisted living.
(01:30)
Actually, there’s two things. Number one, every person there has the resources to afford the services, otherwise they wouldn’t be living in the assisted living because it’s private pay and assisted livings are not cheap. Most assisted livings are anywhere from 75 to a hundred thousand dollars a year. So by understanding that, you know the person has the resources and if they need help, they could bring you in. The second thing I love about assisted livings, and this is for my favorite type of referral from an assisted living, is you have a director of nursing who is responsible for all of the medical things that our patients or her patients slash residents need in that assisted living community. And there is a specific term that I want you to write down called Al appropriate. Al appropriate. When a person is at a point where they’ve declined, they come in, and I want you to also write this down too.
(02:30)
Assisted livings have a seven year life cycle. What does that mean? That means if an assisted living in your territory is brand spanking new today and they just opened their doors, the residents that move in today will most likely start to pass away about seven years later. That’s how long the average person stays in an assisted living. So a brand new assisted living is probably not going to be in the position to refer us that often, but if I have an assisted living that’s been around for four or five years, many of those first residents will start to decline and need additional help. So there’s a tip on how to qualify the assisted living for their potential to refer you. But along those lines, the director of nursing has to make sure that every single person who lives there is al appropriate. If they decline to a point where they’re no longer al appropriate, she has a very difficult decision to make.
(03:25)
She has a conversation that she has to have where she talks to that patient’s family and that patient together and say, unfortunately, Mildred, you are no longer al appropriate, and we have to have you move out. And here’s the real unfortunate part. The next level of care is a nursing home. And Mildred is now going to have to leave the assisted living, which has been her home for five to seven years and move into a nursing home, which is where she does not want to be. The nursing home is not going to be 75 to a hundred thousand. It’s going to be more like $150,000 a year to be in a nursing home. And if she has the resources, she’s going to pay privately for that. Here’s the alternative or the option. The alternative is to make sure that Mildred knows well, she could move into a nursing home or she could bring in your company for additional hours of care.
(04:27)
And what’s cool about this for you is the director of nursing is the one who dictates how much care is needed. So that director of nursing will say, Mildred can stay, but she’s got to have eight hours a day, seven days a week, or four hours a day, five days a week, or whatever it is in order to be here safe. Because if she doesn’t have it, she needs too much help and we can’t get there enough, and it’s a liability for her to be there. Something bad or tragic could happen. That’s what I love about the assisted living. That’s the best kind of referral that we could have. So there’s so many different ways to get into an assisted living, and I don’t have time to get into all of it. But one quick way that you could get into the assisted living is through working with your marketing director.
(05:12)
And it’s a completely different approach, but you actually want to talk to ’em about finding out what their occupancy is like. Every assisted living is operating between 80 and a hundred percent occupancy. Their goal is to get to a hundred percent because that’s how they max out their commission bonus structure as the marketing director. So in an effort to help them max out their census, when patients come in and they’re thinking about moving into the assisted living, that’s not an overnight process. They don’t come in and just tour today and move in tomorrow. Does it happen? Yes, but it’s once in a while. More often than not, people and families are going to look at several communities over the course of several weeks and several months before deciding on where to move in. So by you working with the marketing director, you can actually talk to the marketing director at the assisted living and ask them, how often does a patient move in when you do a tour, one in 10 tours, one in five tours, move in, great.
(06:15)
Here’s how I can help you increase that percentage by when someone is thinking about moving in here, ask them, what are you doing for care right now? And they say Nothing. Why? Well, if they’re looking for an assisted living, it’s because they need some level of assistance and I can provide the assistance for them. Now while they’re looking for a permanent place to move. I come in, I take care of the patient for 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, and then when they ask me feedback on what I think is a good or assisted living community, I can help them move into you. And that’s how I can help to improve your numbers. There’s also a very small percentage of folks who end up never moving in because while they’re deciding where to go, something major happens to them because they didn’t get the care, and then they end up going to a nursing home, and that’s where they’re going to stay for the rest of their life.
(07:16)
So by you coming in, you prevent that from happening to which when you have this discussion that I’m sharing with you right now with the marketing director at the assisted living, she’s going to say, that does happen. And so you can reduce the likelihood of that happening further, guiding more patients to eventually moving in there, and you share a client before they ever step foot in the door helping the assisted living grow their census, and they want to work with you for all of their patients down the line. So there you have it, folks. That’s a quick tip on getting into assisted livings, which are one of the best referral sources for private duty. If you want more help with this, you want to get more business with this, you want to grow and scale your organization, you need help getting more caregivers and having a smoother operation, removing yourself as the owner of the business from the day-to-day operations, click the link below. Go to my website and register for the next Home Care Evolution Bootcamp, where I’m going to give you everything you need to blow away the competition.