Overcoming Plateaus to Ensure Long-Term Growth
Every agency strives to master a delicate balancing act: having enough caregivers to meet clients’ needs and having enough clients to provide consistent hours for caregivers. These see-saw phenomenon can really stifle your growth. Here are some strategies to help you regain your balance and overcome plateaus.
Don’t Stop Building Your Brand
Are you delivering a branding message that attracts new clients AND new caregivers? Your networking, sales, and marketing efforts should deliver a message that does double duty by emphasizing the quality services you provide and communicating the value of being employed by your company. Your staff are central to what you do every day, and you can’t succeed without them. You should make your caregivers the focus of your sales and marketing efforts.
Avoid the Pitfalls of Wait-Listing
We often hear that home care agencies are placing prospective clients on waiting lists while they recruit additional staff. This may sound good in theory, but very few providers have a clear process for how they manage their wait lists. And without a well-managed process, wait lists are usually pointless for both providers and families.
Wait-listing at the time of the intake call is essentially turning away business. Instead, consider these best practices:
A client should only be added to a wait list after you have completed these steps, and you should remain in contact every few days to provide updates. In-person meetings are invaluable opportunities to learn about a client’s needs and establish rapport. Furthermore, you don’t want to devote your resources to hiring more caregivers, only to have a prospective client secure care elsewhere in the meantime.
Embrace Creative Solutions to Delivering Care
Home care agencies are no strangers to caregiver recruitment and retention issues—the competition for employees has always been intense. However, the current shortage of qualified workers around the country has exacerbated staffing troubles causing providers to turn away families seeking care. And even well-managed wait lists don’t help grow your business.
Ditch the all-or-nothing mindset and prioritize community over competition. If you can’t accommodate a client, offer to reach out to other local providers on their behalf to see who may be able to assist them. This shows families that you take their needs seriously, allows you to form relationships with other agencies, and positions you to work together to care for clients.
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By collaborating, you can meet the needs of families who require immediate care or more shifts than you can currently handle on your own. Splitting a new client’s care needs with another local home care company delivers a quicker solution for everyone involved. Initially, families may not like the idea of coordinating services with more than one agency, but this has become increasingly common.
Be Responsive and Follow Up
Slow reaction times and poor follow-through result in lost opportunities (and revenue) for home care companies. Technology has enabled individuals and businesses to be accessible 24/7, and we have come to expect a certain degree of swiftness in our communication. Families and job seekers don’t just want something from you; they are reaching out because they’ve determined they need your service or employment to improve day-to-day life. If a company doesn’t respond in a timely and personal manner, prospective clients and caregivers will lose interest and look elsewhere.
Few companies have a solid nurturing campaign in place to remain in touch with clients/caregivers. Most are operating day to day or week to week and cycling through new leads with very little follow up on the old ones.
All inquiries you receive should be handled with the same sense of urgency and follow-up communication, both for potential clients and potential employees. Ensure your administrative team understands this, and establish a system for delivering prompt responses and nurturing these leads if necessary.
Responses to both applicants and clients should occur the same day. Ideally, someone should be answering the phone live and talking with the family or applicant at the time of the call. No one likes to wait for a callback. If you don't "strike while the iron is hot," the caller will find someone who does answer the phone and give them the info they need. If you do need to follow up after the fact, phone calls and emails are still the norm, but texting is increasingly popular and effective.
Even if you can’t accommodate a new client or caregiver, ensure that you and your team maintain ongoing communication with these prospects. The potential client who hired another agency because you were short-staffed may still need help three weeks from now. The applicant who only wanted to work overnight shifts when you didn’t have any available may still be looking for employment in two months. Things are constantly changing in this business. Take the time to circle back once you’ve made a few new hires or when a client requests care overnight.
In conclusion, mastering the balancing act between caregiver availability and client needs is vital for the growth of home care agencies. By effectively building a brand that attracts both clients and caregivers, avoiding the pitfalls of wait-listing, embracing cooperative solutions, and ensuring responsive communication, agencies can overcome growth plateaus. This approach not only fosters sustainable business development but also ensures quality care for clients and a supportive environment for caregivers, ultimately leading to long-term success in the home care industry.
If you are a provider in the A Place for Mom network, additional resources and best practices can be found in the Resource Library of the Home Care Portal.
If you are not currently receiving home care leads from A Place for Mom, we’d love to have you in our provider network. Contact our sales team at A Place for Mom or call (239) 594-3230, option 2.