How to Create a 12-Month Strategic Plan For Your Home Care Agency (Julio Briones Pt. 1)

[ 00:00:01 ] Okay, welcome to Home Care U. We'll give people just a few minutes here to join the Zoom room. Apologies to those joining us live. We're starting just a bit later today. We had a few hiccups to get started, but we are here now, so we'll get rolling in just a minute. Thanks for joining us. Always fun to see some of the same crowd joining. We look forward to your questions and just you being a part of it and supporting the classes and the podcast.

[ 00:00:38 ] Okay, welcome to Home Care U. We'll go ahead and get started for today. I'm excited for today's episode. We are bringing back what I think is our first returning guest outside of the two weeks we regularly give most guests. So, I am excited to have with us here. The man, the myth, the legend, Julio Briones himself. He was our first guest on the podcast, and we're bringing him back for an encore. So, Julio, thank you for joining us today. Hey, Connor, thank you so much for having me back. It's always a pleasure to be on with you guys. Really, always look forward to talking and chatting with you. Same. So, I'll introduce our topic in just a minute here, but I guess first, if you just kind of want to give a brief intro to yourself, your background, your journey in home care, and what you do today.

[ 00:01:31 ] All right. So, yeah, my name is Julio Briones. I started my home care journey way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, when I was 15 years old. And, you know, it all started just because my mother was working with a home care agency, and she decided that I'm much better off going to work, go to work with her than I was hanging out in the street with my friends, and that was kind of where it began. So fast forward now, 32 years later, almost going on 33 years later, and I've, if you name it in home care, I've probably done the job. You know, I've, I've been involved as an office manager, as scheduler, recruiter. I've driven around caregivers, getting them to live in cases. It's been a business developer and salesperson and ran sales teams.

[ 00:02:26 ] And eventually my career led me, led me into the world of franchising and the franchise support system design and operational design. And ultimately, up until recently, even into the world of actual home care ownership. And today I full-time am a consultant where I help agencies kind of find their way. And overcome these big roadblocks to be able to excel from that million to 2 million mark up into the, you know, 5, 7, 10 million revenue range in the private pay space and transition lately. A lot of it's been transitioning from the Medicaid into the private pay markets. A lot of people are exploring that. Sounds good. Well, we're excited to learn from your expertise and experience today.

[ 00:03:24 ] For those who might be interested, we will have information at the end and in the show notes on how to get in touch with Julio, if you're potentially interested in working with him. So, our topic today is how to create a 12-month strategic plan for your home care agency. To frame this a little bit, like, I think this is something that to some degree every agency has, but that plan might be something formal. It might be something really built. And it might be something that lives in the head of the owner. There's also something to kind of talk about here in the sense of a business like a home care agency is something that it can be tempting just to kind of like start and try and grow it and kind of do things that you think will help without having a super planned out direction or a detailed plan of how to get there.

[ 00:04:19 ] And frankly, the business might still grow that way. The first thing I want to understand is what is the importance of having a strategic plan like this for the next 12 months or whatever the time frame might be if you might be able to grow regardless. Look at the strategic map, the strategic plan. I'm sorry. Kind of like, you know, trying to get from New York to California. Okay. So. This is the easiest way I can describe it. If I'm in New York and I want to get to California, I can just pick a direction and start walking. Eventually I'm going to hit some body of water. Right now, with a strategic plan, I'm going to probably head West and cut across the States in a certain direction, find the path of least resistance, the least dangerous path, and I'll eventually find the state of California.

[ 00:05:22 ] And there we go. Without the strategic plan. I'm kind of, kind of just going to keep going in whatever direction I went in and hoping for the best could lead me to Texas could lead me right to the Hudson River, because I didn't know where I was going to begin with, or, and eventually it will get me to California. The difference is speed. Okay. How fast do I really want to get to where I'm trying to go? And so, if we can put this into perspective of a business of a home care agency. If I start today and I'm just bright-eyed and all, all with my illusions of where the business is going to go, it's very simply, I can just sit there and go, 'I'm going to be a million-dollar agency', or 'I'm going to grow this agency to $10 million.' Well, fantastic.

[ 00:06:13 ] How, how, how is it that you're going to get there? How fast do you intend to get there? And that's where the difference comes in. If I have a plan and I, if I have a direct trajectory as to where I'm going to go and how I'm going to get there on average, I will get there a lot faster. So let me give you an example. Alright. Well, early in my consulting career, I, before I started really working and trying to get agencies focused in on this, my average time from, you know, that I would work with a client from zero to monthly break-even. Because that's the good night's sleep number. Okay. That's the number. Where the, your stop bleeding out funds and you have your first good night's sleep.

[ 00:06:58 ] It was an average of about nine months because we would just go with whatever direction the agency owner thought. And we said, okay, we'll work on a project wise without, and without working on them, developing a plan in their head as to what they want to get to. And we realized that nine months, that's a long time. And we, we would end up losing that enthusiasm because the client, you know, would, would sit. There and go start to worry. Oh, my goodness. What's going to happen next. I'm not seeing the phone ring. I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm. I'm spending all this time getting ready. I'm going to run out of money. What happens? And then, pop, something happens, and it starts to get there.

[ 00:07:39 ] When we started, when we changed our methods as a company, and we started beginning all our clients on an in-depth, you know, specific strategic planning session. Where we go over, you know, their goals, their values, you know, um, what exactly it is that they're trying to accomplish, you know, what challenges they face, what are possible solutions, all of this stuff, goes into the plan. Once we started working with them there in many instances, we were able to find, reduce that number from nine months to monthly breaks, even down to as little as four months in many cases, because now we got them focused; the way we understood what was going on and we never let them deviate from the path.

[ 00:08:31 ] And that's really the big, the big, um, direct impact of coming in and taking a shotgun approach versus building out this plan that you keep in front of mind. Um, a lot of people like, um, out there, they like to talk about vision boards and all of this other stuff. This is, this is the meat and potatoes. A strategic plan is the meat and potatoes. That goes with the vision board. I love it. Um, and I love the way of explaining it is, you know, you're going from New York to California, and you might get there regardless, but you might take a much more winding path if you don't have a plan and, uh, God forbid, end up going through someplace like North Dakota. So, let's help you avoid that.

[ 00:09:16 ] Um, yeah, it's going to be hard. You'll be hard-pressed to find the Pacific Ocean up there. Okay. Well, so my next question here is like, there are a lot of different initiatives that an agency might choose to pursue, um, in their course of trying to grow from launching a new caregiver retention plan to introducing new office software, things that will be investments that will help you grow, but they'll take time and effort and funds. What are the most important goals or type of goals that an agency might set in a 12-month timeframe, and how might they decide, uh, which ones are the priorities that are worth pursuing? Well, it, it's really going to depend on the stage that they are in their business. Okay.

[ 00:10:02 ] A startup is going to pursue, um, obviously there, they're going to have a number of different initiatives. They're going to need to, to put into place in order to accomplish whatever it is that they're trying to accomplish. And then while an agency that's trying to get from 1 million to 5 million is going to have different sets of initiatives. So really what it comes down to is first, very first step of any of it is figure out what you need to accomplish, right? Don't just go with, hey, I want to, uh, accomplish a retention program. I want to accomplish, you know, uh, increase in caregiver applicants. No, those, those are not the goals that we're talking about. Pick one. What is it you want to do? I want to increase my revenue 20% okay.

[ 00:10:52 ] I want to achieve monthly break even, I want to, uh, double up for the next three years, my monthly, my, uh, month over month revenue, pick that goal. Okay. Then at that point, if you're when that's when you have to decide, what are you willing to commit to get to that goal? And that's when you start working and really honing down the individual initiatives. So, if let's say I am in the phase were. I'm at about one and a half million annual revenue, you know, and I, I need to jump up and I want to double up. Um, and I want to double up in the next six months. All right. What, what is that going to take? I'm going to need to hire more staff. I'm going to need to increase the amount of volume that I have, uh, for caregivers. I'm going to need to possibly, um, increase the amount of money I have devoted to leadership.

[ 00:12:05 ] That's the number that I need to be able to say. So, the number that they want again, occurs the second kind of thing, but that's available to them through; he's got a good day that he's going to take and, and there's so many different applicants here tonight. Um, maybe all. Um, there's just a there's just a, um, are another beverage come up, out, you know, what our focus areas are, what the challenges are, you know, and that starts with a very simple question, you know, or set of questions you have to ask yourself is, are these initiatives going to make my vision actually happen? Are they going to help me achieve my goal? You're going to ask yourself, are all of these focus areas that we're trying to do, are they significantly different from each other or do they need to be enveloped into the same project? All right.

[ 00:12:55 ] Then, you know, we also, once the next test for this is, are these objectives, are these focus areas, are these projects that we're trying to put in absolutely critical for us to achieve our big objective? And finally, together, are these challenges or these focuses that we're doing, whatever these initiative projects are, are they going to capture 100% of my overall business activity? All right. So, let's, let's use that example that I was talking about a moment ago. I want to achieve; I want to double my business over the next six months. So, if I'm at a million and a half, I'm at 2 million, I'm at 5 million, regardless, what is it that I'm going to do? And, and I know I hear this a lot, especially clients when I start working with them, that that's a tall order.

[ 00:13:53 ] How do you double your business in six months? Well, you have to figure it out. That takes a lot of work, first of all, but is it possible? Absolutely. So, once we understand our goal is to double up, the next thing we need to do is figure out what our commitment is. Well, I have, let's just say for argument's sake, I have $200,000 budget. In order to do this, that's, that's what I'm willing to commit. As far as the budget, I have enough bandwidth in, in my current staff that I understand that I'm going to need to hire at least one or two more staff. That's part of the budget, you know, and then I understand that at this point, we need to work on these specific initiatives, initiative one, beef up our staffing.

[ 00:14:45 ] Number two, we'll look, take a look at where, uh, once we, we understand that what staff, that we need more staff, what staff is specifically necessary. So, let's take a look at our overall operations. Are we having a retention issue? Are we having a, a recruitment problem or which is it that we need to work on in the short term in order to get to that six-month goal? You know, how much resources do we need to invest? Um, and we have to put them all through this test. All right. So, once we increase our leads coming in, once we have more business development activity, once we have all of this stuff and we understand what challenges we specifically have, we need to start working on these solutions and coming up with, okay, our retention is great.

[ 00:15:33 ] Our recruitment sucks. Great. How do we fix that? This is the solutions we need to put into place to do this. We need to work on our ads, uh, for recruitment. We need to bring in, uh, possibly a better vendor. We need to, uh, in, implement better systems. We may need to fire our current recruiter and hire a new one. You know, so now we're, we're looking at these, uh, at these, uh, challenges and trying to tackle them individually, really bringing down what, what it is, um, to more of a granular level in order to achieve that ultimate goal. And once we understand this, what's, what these potential solutions are before we get started on a single thing, we need to figure out, um, what are our milestones, you know, um, yeah, there's a great expression.

[ 00:16:24 ] What gets measured gets done. So that means we have to understand what our objectives are. We have to develop proper KPIs and set a date. If you don't have a deadline for when things are, should be accomplished, they end up getting put on the back burner. All right. Because the key to any strategic plan and the implementation of any new initiative or project is action. So, if we know that we need to have hired a business developer within 30 days, every single working day, there are 20 working days on average in a month. Every single working day needs to push us one step closer to accomplishing and having that initiative in place. Every single, um, every single activity that we do throughout the day needs to be run. We need to be able to do it.

[ 00:17:19 ] We need to be able to do it. We need to be able to wrap around what it is that we're trying to get to. So, our big goal is double up first initiative higher. So, let's start doing this or where our ads were interviews. Who are we screening? Have we made an offer? How long do we need, um, this person to take? Do we need to make a bigger offer in order to entice this person to not give two weeks' notice at their other job? What, what are our needs? We're not worried about the needs of the other business, you know, and all of this happens. We also tend this way. For a lot of developers, it's, it's very normal to really put a lot of I guess, you know what has to really fully encompass this. And once you have all of these plans in place. That's, that's where you start putting all the puzzle pieces together, pick a start date and start getting to work on your planning, start getting to work on Love it.

[ 00:18:07 ] Lots in there. I have several follow-up questions to help us break this down a little bit. So first, just curious, I mean, I don't think it's a new concept to people to say that the same skills and mindset that often lead people to start a business and be successful in it are often the same things that can lead someone to chase a lot of different unnecessary squirrels in the course of growing said business. Are there certain types of initiatives or kind of common distractions that you've seen are particularly maybe common pitfalls for home care agency owners? Yeah, yeah, it's with all businesses, we all run into this. I mean, I'm not, I'm including myself in this, you know, it's the shiny nickel theory. Okay, so yeah.

[ 00:19:06 ] You know, like, yeah, you're sitting there, you're focused on one thing. And the shiny nickel reflects the light somewhere over here, all of a sudden, you start looking for where that light came from. And now you're somewhere else. And this happens a lot in home care. There are so many moving parts to this business that as an owner, it's very easy to get caught going down these rabbit holes chasing these shiny nickels. Okay. And, and especially in agencies, once they hit a certain size, you know, once they, once an agency transitions from being a high-paying job into a business, that's when this can really happen a lot. Typically, that happens right around the million and a quarter to 1.75 mark. That's when you start to realize, like, wow, this is no longer just me creating a job for myself.

[ 00:20:04 ] Now, there are repeat responsibilities, there's people that depend on me to eat. Okay. And that's usually the time where the mind shift of the owner starts to change from, you know, hey, I need to put out every fire and to go on from there. And that's the most dangerous transition. And the one where an owners tend to get most easily lost, right, to move from that mom and pop into the corporate mindset. Okay. Because, again, lots of stuff happening. You can have a caregiver make a mistake, you can have a client die on you, a sudden drop in revenue can really throw an agency completely off. I've seen, I'm going to say, over, over the last 10 years or so, both when I was still working in the franchising world and as an independent consultant working with business owners.

[ 00:21:00 ] The revenue drop has to be number one. And that's a huge distraction in any business. So if you're humming along at, you know, 150, 200,000 a month in revenue, you know, and all of a sudden you have two clients die that were 24 seven, now you've dropped 50 grand in revenue, you'll people will get tend to get hyper focused on that one fact, rather than staying the course and working on growing the overall business. And, you know, without the problem. The problem with that is very simple. If you're, if you have a plan in place, and whatever your plan may be, it could be improve retention by 10%. It could be overall growth of your business, improve your customer service, improve your quality assurance, you know, programs,

[ 00:21:51 ] whatever it is that you're working on, all of it is going to lead to revenue growth, if you get hyper-focused on the fact that a client left, or, or a group of caregivers quit, let your staff do their job, hold them accountable, stay focused on what you're trying to accomplish. And that, by far, is the number one thing that distracts people. Love the specificity of that. I think it's really interesting to consider, like you mentioned that the danger zone for home care agencies is typically just after they hit that million-dollar mark, and then kind of plateau until they're kind of past 1.75 million or so. That does tie in with what I've kind of generally heard and observed. And I think it's really interesting too, that you mentioned that even though your most important goals are typically around what is your revenue goals. Yeah. It's right.

[ 00:23:11 ] I'm new here. And yeah, yeah. I would say in terms of how long I have run this educational platform. We really, really seem to think that we are a role model for sexual change over the years because so many people believe that as mistakes happen. So, for me, it's really interesting to realize how that's going to be different than like for any of us, however long that you literally think is going to happen is from about 20 versus like an obvious sign that we're not reaching our goals and that there's like something seriously wrong with the health of the business? Okay, there's two ways to look at this, okay? Number one, the revenue of your business because we are dealing in a somewhat volatile industry, meaning we're taking care of people who are seriously injured and of people who are ill, okay? Chronically ill, if not severely ill. That means, and it's an aging population, that means that you have a variable that is absolutely uncontrollable and that is death, okay?

[ 00:24:10 ] The second part of that equation is that it's also uncontrollable for you as an owner is we're an expensive service. Many states keep driving up that minimum wage, especially in the healthcare field, which is making it, you know, forcing owners to drive up the pricing, which is, you know, taking these people's income or savings and dropping it down, you know, I mean, if you look back to 2018, 2017, average price for home care was about $20 to $22 an hour in the most expensive cities, okay? Today, we're creeping up on 50, okay, in some areas. That's a significant difference. Now, you have to understand that part. Now, that is an uncontrollable variable, which means if you're looking at a sudden $50,000 drop, for example, in your monthly revenue, take a look at how it's coming.

[ 00:25:15 ] Did you lose two clients, or did you lose five clients or seven clients? See, that's the big danger sign. $50,000 revenue is one to two clients. If you had a 24/7 client, okay? That is, while worrisome, because it's a big drop, it should not distract you from what's going on because then leave it in the hands of your business development team and your care managers. Let them go out and do their job. Put a little pressure on them if you need to. Hey, this is a big loss for us. We need to increase that but let them worry about doing their work. Now, on the other hand, if you're losing $50,000, $100,000 in revenue because you lost eight to 10 clients, now we're looking at something is wrong in the business.

[ 00:26:07 ] Either we're pursuing the wrong clients, or our level of client services went down, something dramatic happened. So, it's not the amount of revenue that should be the distraction. It's the source of the revenue drop. If it's one or two clients, that caused a big drop off the cliff, so to speak, then treat it no different than what some of these guys that do long-term investments will tell you in the stock market. Ignore it. It's going to correct itself. You got a client. If you need to, this is why you should always focus on your billable hours, not the number of your clients. And you should have 1.2 to 1.5 in your pipeline. That's what you're doing for every hour you're currently building. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, that's all.

[ 00:27:02 ] Make sure that your referral partners are sending you quality referrals instead of chasing those big money clients all the time. Makes sense. Thanks for sharing. Let's kind of return to the topic of high-level growth goals here. I like how you framed that there are lots of different things people can focus on, lots of different goals they can set. But at the end of the day, the important thing is to start with the very most important metric-driven things they can and then orient their efforts around that. When it comes to trying to set growth goals, what tips and suggestions do you have to help agencies set ones that are challenging but realistic? Right. So, yeah. That's a good question. That's actually really good. The reality is, number one, your vision needs to be tested, like whatever that big goal is.

[ 00:28:07 ] So, you have to ask yourself, number one, will achieving that goal, will that big high in the sky make a positive impact in your business? Okay. So, I'll give you an example of what I mean. There's a big difference between saying, 'I want to go' from $1.5 million to $5 million, okay, over the next two years, three years, whatever it is. All right. Big difference between saying that. That is something that will make a positive impact in your business versus saying, I want to have exclusivity with every skilled nursing facility. Yes, it'll have a positive impact, but it doesn't, will it pass the other, I mean, is it realistic? You know, let's look at it like this. Many times, sometimes these facilities don't have it. So, take, that's one thing.

[ 00:29:00 ] Is it realistic? Will achieving it make a positive impact in your business? You know, I want to have, I want to be the number one referred agency in the area. Great. How are we going to get there? We can offer the lowest price and just do the race to the bottom. Is that going to have a positive impact? Absolutely not. All right. Because then your margins are going to suck and you're not going to be able to grow your business. Now, the next step of this is, will achieving this goal improve the quality of my life? That's a big one people forget about. Look, not every business owner, not every home care agency owner should strive for the $20 million agency. Quality of life could get severely impacted if you're trying to achieve these goals in the wrong way.

[ 00:29:51 ] Okay. The whole purpose of becoming a business owner, quite frankly, needs to be, you know, you have to look at it. Why did you do this? Did I want freedom? Did I just want to be rich? Did I want to be able to enjoy what I'm working for? Am I trying to leave a legacy? What is it that you joined, that you started a business? Like, why? And if it's not improving the quality of your overall life, it may not be worth pursuing. So now, that's two things. Beyond it being realistic, is it going to positively impact my business? And is it going to improve the quality of my life? And then the last thing is, is my goal achievable in the timeframe that I've set?

[ 00:30:40 ] If I set a one-year timeframe and it's something that's really not going to be able to happen for five years, am I going to achieve it? No. What's going to happen is I'm going to set myself up for failure and I'm going to be disappointed. So, if I have, for example, a million-dollar agency and I say, I want to hit $10 million in the next 12 months, is it realistic? Yeah, I guess you can do it if you're properly invested. Is it going to improve, make a positive impact on your business? Maybe, because you may damage your reputation along the way. It might not be possible because it's in the allotted timeframe, might not be something that you can achieve with the resources and everything you have. And that's, that's really the biggest test.

[ 00:31:27 ] What sort of impact is it going to have on your overall business? How's it going to affect your life? And, you know, is it achievable in the timeframe that you have in mind? You know, I've seen many, many divorces happen because of fast growth, you know, and if your family is important to you, like it is for many of us that start a business, that's part of why we do it. We have to decide at what point is, is the business going to, is it going to be become more important than other aspects of our life? I like that you point out that the end all be all goal is not just going to grow the business and how much will it grow the business, but what, like how does the business growth fit into your life and your lifestyle?

[ 00:32:11 ] I think a good example of that. So recently we had Becky real on the podcast. She sold her agency last year after growing it for seven or eight years and her objective, uh, with the business was very specifically to provide for her parents' retirement and to have a really big nest egg to make sure that they have a good life, you know, for the rest of what's left, right? Their retirement days. And that led her to realize that what their objective was, um, it wasn't to have the largest possible agency they could grow, but to have one, one that they could achieve the right growth where it didn't get huge, but they could sell it for the right amount.

[ 00:32:58 ] It would not completely destroy, you know, their lives and schedules in the course of building that, um, and that it would be conducive to, uh, making the right relationships in the community, having the impact they wanted, having the impact in the places in the community they wanted rather than simply focusing on growing above all else. So, I love that you frame it as, it might seem like the most important thing you can do is grow the business, but how, how you want to grow it and how much you want to grow it will change in context of the reasons you're starting it in the first place. Exactly. Um, so if I'm listening to this and, you know, maybe my agency's at like 1.2 million right now, and I want to set the goal of reaching to, by the end of this year, what, what factors, what list, what litmus tests are there that I can use to decide, is that a realistic goal for me?

[ 00:33:58 ] Oh, the, the first thing that I would recommend to anyone, you know, um, is take a look at what, take a look at your service area. Like if you're a franchise, you know, uh, when's the last time you looked at your territory map, you know, let really take a look at it. Look, something that people don't realize is that, that demographics shift all the time. I mean, especially in the last few years, uh, with, since COVID, like for example, if, if you had an agency in New York, New Jersey, um, there's a huge population that left that area. So now that can impact, you know, how you're conducting your business. You may have to implement care management, things like that, just because of the demographic shifts. Okay.

[ 00:34:45 ] So that that's something that, you know, I, I always do recommend to people, take a look at it. Just you, there's a lot of resources you can, you know, you can either find a company that does it, you know, uh, that will come in and work with you and create reports for you. Or just, I mean, if you want to really save, save for yourself, and try to figure it out on your own, go online and just type in demographics, you know, and pick a city. All right. And kind of go from there. So, you know, that's, that's the first thing. It should be something you should be doing every one to three years anyway, just as general thing, because that's going to tell you a lot of information as to what's, what's going on.

[ 00:35:32 ] If I want to hit that, that, uh, you know, increase my business by 800,000 in revenue, that's going to tell me a lot. Can you know, you have to understand you need three things to find an ideal client. People have to be the right age. They have to have the right number of resources. And if, if private pay, we're talking about a median household income, so that that'll tell you if they can afford it and they have to be either ill or injured enough to justify having the service. So that's, that's really what it's going to tell you. If you see that, you know, there's not much change in the demographics, that's fine. Now let's take a look at the other side of it. What, how much of our market is really untapped?

[ 00:36:18 ] Okay. Your average agency, at one point, at one between 1 million and 1.5 million will only effectively have relationships with about 10 to 15% of potential referral partners in any given territory. Okay. That's tiny. A, if you take your average, let's, I'm going to put this in the realm of franchising just because mom and pops don't have defined territories a lot. You know, they, they can do whatever they want, uh, within reasonable limits with licensing. So, if we're going to take, let's look at it from a franchising perspective, your average franchise territory is about the population, roughly 300,000 people. Okay. Give or take. All right. So, if, you know, for you to achieve maximum saturation in one of those territories, all right now we're, we're, you know, that's not a $1 million business.

[ 00:37:16 ] You're actually moving into the realm of three to $4 million. So, let's take a look at what the breakdown is and where are you missing? Where don't you have relationships that you can, and this leads to the, to the other thing. Do I have the right team in place to do this? Look, business developers, they're salespeople at the end of the day. That's, that's what they are. Um, you have hunters, you have farmers. So, do you use your business development team? Have a skillset and personality, personality set that is more geared towards being a farmer, meaning they're fantastic at maintaining existing relationships. But if they, if they don't have that hunter skillset, how are you breaking into new facilities by chance? You know, you throw enough spaghetti at the wall.

[ 00:38:10 ] Some of it will stick, you know, but if you want to be intentional about your growth, you really have to look at what your team consists of, you know? Um, and the final thing you have to take a look at is your internal operations. Okay. What are you doing as an agency? How are you handling quality assurance? Now? I don't mean that stuff that's regulatorily mandated where, you know, you have to come in and make sure that all your dots, uh, eyes are dotted and your T's are crossed. I'm talking about, are you as an agency owner, um, having your staff, your care management team, your coordination team, your schedulers, um, your business development team, your office manager, maybe you yourself are people openly and transparently communicating with your, with your, um, clients apart from the time that they're with the caregiver and with your caregivers apart from the time that when they're with their client, all of this stuff, are you taking a look at the business?

[ 00:39:15 ] Did you know that 20% of revenue can increase just, just by having a solid, uh, quality assurance plan that's followed strictly in place just from existing billable hours. There's a lot of good stuff in what you're saying. Uh, I did not know that specific stat. Explain that a little bit for me. Well, if, um, your average client, okay, let's, let's just take-home care as a general industry. If you're doing private, private pay home care, um, if you're getting leads from digital sources, place for Mom, Karen Homes, Care.com, Karen.com, those lead generation services, or from places that are typically according like digital leads, like Google pay-per-click, Facebook ads, things of that nature. They tend to, a lot of them be window shoppers. Okay.

[ 00:40:12 ] So meaning these are people who need help, but they may not be in a hurry. So, you're, your conversion rates are a little bit lower. All right. You're looking at usually somewhere between a five, five and 10% conversion on those initial conversions and turning them into clients. But because of that, they also have a tendency to look at it at the business from lower, uh, lower hourly needs. Um, Mom went, had a slip and fall. She's at the hospital. She's okay. I'm just worried. Yeah. You know what? I think 12 to 20 hours a week is enough. That's all she needs. I just need somebody to come in and give mom a shower. All right. So, your average hours from digital sources are about 12 to 20 hours a week, where if you have clients that are coming from trusted referral partners, skilled nursing facilities, hospitals, care management companies, things of that nature, they tend to need more hours.

[ 00:41:09 ] So in, in my experience, that average is about 40 to 50 hours a week. Okay. Because your average person works 40 hours a week. Then, you know, travel time - you look at it, 50 hours over the course of the week, because that's the time I would not be able to come in to watch my mother. All right. So now that can, that is something that leads to opportunity because you have 168 hours in a week. So, if mom already went to the hospital, for example, and they're getting 20 hours a week, you know, just to make sure that mom's okay and has something going on. And let's say, you're taking care of mom Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. till noon. Mom ends up in the hospital two more times since you've started services.

[ 00:41:57 ] And when we, just by doing our regular customer, customer service activities, client, you know, quality assurance checks, we find out that it's because mom has a pill that she's supposed to take at three o'clock every day and forgets. This gives you as an agency owner, the opportunity to increase, to increase the hours so that there's coverage to make sure mom got her medication reminder at 3 p.m. And this is such a common and mainly overlooked thing that many of the, over the years of doing this with the agencies that I've worked with, just by implementing some simple practices that increase the contact and the follow up with the client and the caregivers when they're not around. Because a lot of times this information doesn't come from the client themselves.

[ 00:42:45 ] It'll come from the caregiver. And understanding this opens the door for you to have an honest conversation with the client, maybe with the client's family or the POA, and for you to say, hey, listen, let's increase the hours. And again, over the years of doing this, I have found that if you take your existing client base and increase the amount of communication and trust that you're building with the relationship between agency and client, you can see a 20% increase annually. In billable hours without acquiring a single new client. So much good stuff in here. Give me just a second here. I'm just like, wow, like what to dig into. So, I think one thing to mention here, this is probably a good time to mention that if, if you're listening to this and you're interested in the meat of how you look at your territory or,

[ 00:43:46 ] I mean, if you're not a franchisee, just like the market you operated in, how do you look at the demographics, look at the growth that's happening and make all these decisions about what is realistic based on the area you operate in. We will be going deep into this next week with Julio. Our topic for next week is analyzing and optimizing your territory, you know, doing market research, making decisions based off, you know, of it. And so, if you're interested in that, we will cover that in depth. I'm really excited for that. But let's get back to the topic at hand. That being said, so I think one thing that would really help me in this is to kind of visualize maybe with some specific examples or stories that you've seen of how to do or not do any of, of the above.

[ 00:44:47 ] Are there specific examples you can share of times when you've seen an agency owner handle goal setting wrong and what happened or if they kind of fell into some of the pitfalls you've described? Let's get into some case studies here. That's actually that that's actually all the time. That's all right. I have a bunch of stories like that. Okay, so here's the thing. I had a, a client from one of from one of the major franchisors about I'm going to say about two years ago at this point. All right. Fantastic individual. They decided that they were going to implement the implement private pay into their agency. They were they were a particular agency that was focused on the territory they were in on Medicaid.

[ 00:45:43 ] So rather than seek out help and do this, they decided that they were going to create their own strategic plan and they were going to follow through and kind of make this happen, then hire somebody. So, they had their own plan. They started part of it and then came and started looking for me. Well, they didn't think through what was actually supposed to happen. Their goal was that, or in particular, that they wanted to achieve $1,000,000 in private revenue after having zero over a 12-month period and expand into a new territory. Right. Sounds simple enough. Well, the problem is that the territory they went ahead and purchased it without doing a demographic analysis, even though it was a franchise. That provided this this information for them. They didn't understand the numbers.

[ 00:46:48 ] They didn’t understand the impact of the business, and they just went ahead and bought it. And, you know, they hired a, um, they went ahead and hired a business developer marketer that was that had Medicaid experience, did not understand the private pay market. Well, basically everything you can check in boxes, that that they shouldn’t have done is what they did prior to reaching out to me. I was actually the second consultant brought in on that project. So, if I can jump in here, what are like as complete as you can share, what would that list of check boxes that they should have done but didn't look like? All right. So, the first thing if before you ever start, like, start looking into expansion, take a look at your existing book of business, okay, and try to look at where business is coming from.

[ 00:47:52 ] All right, that that's a big thing is if you're a non-franchise unit or if you're in a franchise system that has empty territories around it, take a look, take a look at your business, say, okay, I have 5%, 10%, 20% coming out of territory. All right, most scheduling software will actually tell you if you set the parameters as to what your territory is in the software, it'll tell you this much is coming out. Okay. Now, why is that important? Whenever you're going to open a new location, you your investment should come after somewhere between 15 and 20% of the business that you are specifically trying to attract is in that new area. Okay, so, um, let's put this into perspective, um, you know, I'll, I'm, I'm in Indiana.

[ 00:48:47 ] Let, let me use Indiana as an example. Okay, so if I am, if my agency is located in Plainfield, Indiana, okay, and I wanted to expand into, you know, let's say I was primarily focused on the Medicaid space. All right, so most of my clients come from Indianapolis. That's where it would be, because that has the highest population of lower income people in the surrounding area. So, what's going to happen if I wanted to expand into, let's say the private pay market, um, I would now need to take a look at how much private pay do I currently have? If the answer is zero, that's number one. I have to start to look at, I have to figure out, how I'm going to attract some private pay.

[ 00:49:37 ] Then once I figured out, and once I've gotten, some private pay signed up, I want to take a look at my overall revenue and see one, where's this revenue being generated from? Where's my private pay business coming from? If it's coming from Hendricks County, which is the county next to Indiana, Indianapolis, where you have a higher likelihood, or is it coming from the far north side of Indianapolis, you know, in different areas like Carmel or Fishers, you know, so those, where is it that it's focusing? That is going to give me an idea as to where to begin. All right. So, if let's say I'm in Plainfield, which is here's Indianapolis, which is here. And let's say most of my business is coming from up here in Carmel and Fishers.

[ 00:50:21 ] It would not make sense for me to purchase the territory here. Okay. I would want to take a look at it up here because that's where I'm already generating revenue. Okay. And for those who are listening, he, he gestured to a place that is far, in the air, north from the place where he was saying the business is already coming from. Okay. Yeah. Let me, I forgot the podcast. I apologize. Okay. So, if we are looking at it, if we're going to take Indianapolis as a center point, do West would be Hendricks County. And that's where I was pointing at, you know, to my left, which would indicate West and the other area was pointing at what was way above the, where my fist was, which, you know, is in the middle of the city of Indianapolis, which is far north.

[ 00:51:12 ] So the difference in commute time at highway speeds is approximately 30 minutes. So that is, that is one of the considerations that I would make. That's the first thing I would take a look at. Where is the business coming from? And is it the type of business I'm actively trying to pursue? So, the next thing that we're going to take a look at is what is, what are the capabilities of my sales team? So, in this particular instance that I was talking about, it was an agency focused on Medicaid. Look, salespeople are great. Medicaid people are great. I have nothing against that line of business, but in my experience, people who concentrate their career on Medicaid have a very difficult time adjusting to the tactics and to the approach and the mindset needed in order to successfully, successfully sell private pay business.

[ 00:52:11 ] Not that it's not possible. It's a skill set. It could all be taught, but that if you're expecting spontaneous adjustment, it's not going to happen. It has to be taught. Okay, because, because the approach is different. The methods are different. Just the general way and from state to state, the way you approach and get business for each model, very different. All right. So that, those are the two, two biggest points when it comes to this checklist of stuff. The next thing is, what does your care coordination team look like? Did I, you know, do I have a warm body big air quotes type of a scheduler where all I'm trying to do is plug a hole or do I have a care coordinator that understands the concepts of scheduling and how they're going to, you know, how personality, how skill set, how distance, how everything matches up in order to play somebody with a private pay client.

[ 00:53:13 ] When we talk next week about territory analysis, that will go into a lot more detail about what are the demographic differences when we're looking for private pay versus Medicaid caregivers because demographically, you tend to find them in different, different parts of your territory as well. So, these are all things. That you have to take into account and it kind of becomes a checklist. So, let's say perfect world. My strategic plan was to open a new office. First thing I would do is take a look at where the bulk of my business is coming from. Then, I would start before I would open an office there. I would start actively trying to attract more clients from that area and get them signed up once I've achieved an average of 15 to 20% of my total revenue, overall revenue, in that area.

[ 00:54:11 ] So if I'm making a million dollars, I want to get somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 projected into the new area, which is not much. It's just enough to cover the expenses. Then I want to either fully transition my sales team into that area or begin hiring a second salesperson to focus on that area and simultaneously open another office. Start growing that business, you know, get all the things in place. And once everything is set and the revenue is there, it's all based on revenue trigger points. Then we're going to set up the secondary account for the scheduling software and we're going to start putting other resources in place in order to handle multiple offices. Centralize our on-call centralize our recruitment potentially, depending on how many offices.

[ 00:55:05 ] As you have, you may want to build a centralized scheduling team and have individual care managers at each location. And all of this happens in this. It actually once you have a second location to go from two locations to 10 is actually very simple and very fast because it's a repeatable process at that point. So, it's that second location. That's the tricky one. That's always that first secondary location. Is always the most complex because there's a lot of policies. There's a lot of adjustments you have to make in how you operate. But once you have that tuned, it usually takes about three to six months to get that process complete. Once you have that done it, you can actually open three or four locations at once without a hiccup because you have your infrastructure in place.

[ 00:55:59 ] This is great. This is making me really excited for next time. We don't have time today. I think to ask all the questions. I want to about this, but there's a lot going on here. A lot of good meat they were getting into for the last few minutes of our podcast today. You know, we've kind of touched on a lot of different things. We've gone down several very interesting tangents. I want to bring things back with kind of like a last question here, of is there anything related to the topic of goal setting and making a 12-month strategic plan? That I should have asked about but haven't or else just any kind of like last words. You want to leave everybody with on that topic? Yeah. Yeah.

[ 00:56:44 ] So I am a firm believer that everyone should have a strategic plan that's going to encompass 12 months up to 36 months. It's two separate events. Okay, the one for your 12-month plan should involve your immediate team. Okay. Everyone who's currently working for you or with you should be involved in the planning because they need to buy in. It's a psychological buy-in. They have to, they have to understand what your expectations are for the business, which means what is their expectations for workload? Okay. Some people are just happy where they are and they're not great team players when it comes to growth and expansion. And this is why team involvement is really important. Then as a business owner you need to have a plan that's going to encompass somewhere between 36 and 60 months.

[ 00:57:39 ] Okay, three to five-year plan. Why because you need to know where your business is going, where what are your revenue goals? What are your personal goals? And it's not just the business. Like I mentioned earlier, you've got to take into account your personal life, your kids, your spouse, your parents, whatever it is that makes up your own little world. You have to take that into account because like for example, I have; I have three kids. I will one of my one of my children is 25. The other two are four and seven. The needs of my 25-year-old and my involvement in her life are very different than the needs of my four- and seven-year-old. Therefore, when I'm planning, when I do my own strategic planning, I have to take.

[ 00:58:32 ] To account the changing needs of my family as they age, and that's going to impact how I grow my business; when you know, when you have kids in grade school, it's very different than having kids in college, very different than having then being an empty nester. It's so your life is going to directly impact your ability to grow your business, and your business growth is going to impact those in your life. Okay, always keep that in mind. So, your 12-month plan has to be business-focused. Hey, this is what this is the team; these are the people that most directly impacts your mid-to-long-term plan must be you see; you focus. It's not selfish. It's prudent. Okay, and keep that in mind and when you're building all of these plans out run it by someone else.

[ 00:59:29 ] Okay, what sounds like a great idea? To you may not be realistic. I may say come December 1st. I want 20 million dollars in my bank account. That may not be realistic. You may be able to generate 20 million dollars’ worth of business, but those are two very separate goals and how your mindset is when you set these goals is going to indicate your ability to achieve them in the long term because if you set unrealistic goals, that you are not measuring milestones and you do not have good KPIs to track your progress. All that's going to happen is you're setting yourself up for massive disappointment and failure because once you're disappointed your enthusiasm towards achieving your old goals diminishes and you have nothing to belay mark you along the way that's going to tell you, 'Hey, I'm on the right track and I need to keep going.' Okay, where or hey, I deviated slightly.

[ 01:00:33 ] I need to make adjustments. Where all you're doing is you're going blind and we're taking our trip to California without GPS, and we're probably going to end up in North Dakota. Love it. Thank you for sharing. For those who might want to get in contact with you. How should they do so? Well, the easiest absolute easiest way is just going to my website. It's www.thebrionesgroup.com or I'm all-over social media. You guys can find me Julio Briones. Find me on Facebook. You can find me on LinkedIn, or you can just look up Briones Consulting Group on either platform or Twitter or wherever and just shoot me a message. More times than not, I'll answer your questions on the spot, and you can always set up a discovery call 30 minutes – absolutely free. We can see how or if I'm even able to help you. Great! Well, thanks again for joining us and sharing your expertise with us. We'll look forward to talking more next week. Have a good rest of your day – you too. All right, thanks for having me.