Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars

In his 3rd appearance on the Home Care Heroes podcast, Steve "the Hurricane" Weiss takes us through some very critical topics for "post-Covid times." 

Steve takes us through a lot of important content, including the following:

• Hit the ground running: Folks are craving face-to-face interaction. Be safe but get out their and don't let the "COVID Fog" hold you back
• Margins: Caregivers are commanding higher rates than in the past. This is inevitable. For your private pay and long term care insurance clients you need to raise your rates for your agency to thrive.
• Top referral sources have changed: Hospitals and Skilled Nursing are trying to minimize stays for non-COVID cases creating a larch opportunity
• Caregiver turnover: Some "mixed news" and some great recommendations

Millionaires' Bootcamp: Steve also announced an exciting upcoming live boot camp that will be held in November. This Millionaires' Bootcamp is targeted on helping agencies grow and thrive.  Here's the link to learn more, but for a pro-tip, leave a note with us at Ankota to see if we can get you a special discount code.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities are simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com. 

Mark Kulik is a 35-year health care veteran who has spend the last 13 years helping home care agency owners sell their businesses. Mark's company, The BRAFF Group only works with sellers, and his practice focuses on all aspects of home care agencies. The most important takeaway from this episode is that if you aspire to sell your agency now or at any time in the future, you should start to prepare now.

Mark walks us through the five points that agency buyers are looking for, as follows:

• Clean Financial Reporting: 3 years of accrual-style accounting records
• Key Performance Indicators: Be able to show the metrics you use to drive the business
• Staff: An exceptionally low caregiver turnover rate will raise your value
• Leadership Team: Buyers are looking at the horse AND the jockey(s)
• Referral Sources: Buyers want to see multiple referral sources

When asked how home care agency valuation is calculated (what your agency is worth), the answer was "It depends..." but then he gives a lot of details

Mark can be reached (in Atlanta - eastern time) on 770-955-1766 or at TheBraffGroup.com.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

Sara Moore had the passion to create a community where home care folks can learn from one another and she but it into action by creating the website AHomeCareCommunity.com. In this special version of home care heroes, Sara speaks with collaborator Jeremy Jed Hammel about the importance of community and core values. Then she speaks with community coach Brian Oblinger about how to grow and nurture an effective community.  Finally she wraps up with a "virtual tour" of  the "A Home Care Community dot com" website. 

Some of the great features on A Home Care Community dot com are as follows:

• Caregiver of the Month award
• Free Membership (giving you the ability to collaborate with other community members)
• Discussion forums with special features, including the following:
  • The "Monday Moore Mantra" featuring inspiration, motivation and action
  • The "Tech Talk" with Andrea Fahrenbacher
  • State-specific forums
• Then there's a rich page of resources ranging from how to manage millennial caregivers to how to comply with the EVV mandate in the 21st Century Cures Act.

Learn more at the  "A Home Care Community dot com" website.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

Today's guest, Kamran Nassar, grew his agency so fast that he was recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in America. In this episode, Kamran shares the importance of being different to stand out and succeed.  Some big ideas that Kamran shares are as follows:

• His company's unique name, NuevaCare started conversations and also helped with recruiting of Spanish speaking caregivers.
• He joined groups where he collaborated with other agency owners in the area, and although they were competitors they were also collaborators
• He brought an art-therapy program to his agency as an aide for memory care.

Later in the Podcast he shared lessons-learned including how as a small agency, he alternated his focus between sales and recruiting, but later he figured out how to work on both all the time and that turned out to be a big key to success.

Kamran recently authored a book called Caring for Millions that shares his journey as an agency owner and many success tips.  You can access the book and download chapters for free.

Kamran has started a new company called Captiva8 that helps agencies to quickly engage with website visitors (both prospective clients and caregivers) 24 hours a day.  We'll do a follow up episode on Captiva8!

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities are simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

 Today's guest on Home Care Heroes is Valerie Van Booven, who is an on-line digital marketing experts for home care agencies. She didn't start as a tech geek and in fact she is a Registered Nurse (RN) with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN). Her company is called the Approved Senior Care Network. 

We cover a great number of topics centered around your home care website. Among them are the following:

• Make sure that your site is updated every few years
• Make it easy for folks to get in touch with you when they come to your site
• Consider reading the book "Don't Make Me Think" (Here's the Amazon Link) for a treatise on how to make it simple for your visitors to connect
• Make sure that your phone number is prominently displayed on the top of your website (and not just on a full screen but also on smart phones - and make it clickable so they can click it to dial you).

We also went more deeply into the importance of letting people know who you are and telling the story of your agency. This is a great way to stand out in comparison to the national franchises.

We also went deep into a concept called "long-form content" which means that Google is giving preference to web pages that give deep explanations of topics as opposed to pages that have only a few sentences.

Valerie's Company is Approved Senior Network and her website is https://ASNMarketingPlan.com,

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities are simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com. 

Agency owners Ophelia Cole and Barbara Gaines are also sisters,  Their interview with Sara Moore on the Home Care Heroes Community Edition is heartwarming and informative.

A central key to their success strategy is their devotion to pairing the right caregiver with the client, and to confirm the match. If the pair isn't working out well, they make a change.  As regular listeners know, the core theme of the home care heroes podcast is caregiver recruiting and retention, and this strategy from Ophelia and Barbara does just that. When a client and caregiver are well-matched the caregiver will have a strong reason to stay with your agency.

My favorite moment in the interview is Ophelia's advice for start-ups entering the home care industry. She tells them "stay out of my territory!"

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities are simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com. 

Laseandia Pounds has a couple of nicknames. She goes by Sean, but also goes by "Savvy Business Chick" which is her brand and website for her consulting service.

Sean didn't start out in home care or even healthcare.. Instead she "grew up" in her career working in financial services and worked with stockbrokers and similar folks. But then a family friend who ran a home care agency offered to mentor Sean to start her own agency.

Sean was a great student and grew her agency very rapidly to $3M in revenue in the first 18 months and ultimately to $5M.   Since then Sean sold her agency, became a mom and started consulting.

Another interesting item in our discussion with Sean was that she mostly focused on care for medically complex children. This put her in a great position to 1) get high revenue clients and 2) make friends (and get referrals from) the other home care agencies in her area. 

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities are simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

Today's guest, Latoya Thompson, grew up in a "healthcare family" with relatives who are nurses, CNAs and Aides. When Latoya's grandmother needed care, she couldn't find a provider with the standard of quality that she was looking for, so she started her own. One interesting aspect of Latoya's agency is that she has a blend of private pay and Medicaid clients and in fact she has two trending videos on YouTube, one about getting private pay clients, and the other about how the Missouri Consumer Directed Services (CDS) program works.

Latoya studied the interesting combination of social work and fashion and she considers her self to be a multi-preneur with ventures in home care, consulting and fashion. 

LaToya provides consulting services to home care agencies and other entrepreneurs. To connect with Latoya, go to www.latoyaelnora.com.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities are simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

This episode of Home Care Heroes is all about growing by bringing more clients and caregivers to your home care website. We feature two guests: Khadira Muhammed focuses on driving traffic to your site with Google ads and making sure that you keep in touch with everyone who visits your website.  Carl Rogers talks about getting your website into some key online directories so even if your site doesn't make the first page of Google searches, you'll be in directories that do.

Both guests tell the same story - that their initial intention was to help drive clients to home care websites, but that they quickly learned that attracting caregivers is at least as important if not more.

Khadira offers some great advice for smaller agencies that tell you how to "stay on the radar screen" of people who visit your site, but then talks about how she works with agencies with $1M or more in revenue to grow them by millions using Google Ads. Khadira's website is localseniormarketing.com.

Carl and Khadira both talk about the importance of having a good profile in "Google My Business." Then Carl talks more deeply about his area of expertise and passion which is online directories.  He encourages home care agencies to claim and pay attention to free listings like GoogleMyBusiness and Yelp, but then talks about his own company CareListings. Carl anticipates 2 million site visitors this year including caregivers and care seekers (clients).  You can list your agency (with pictures and a link to your website) AND post your job openings for FREE.  There are also some paid premium services to see profiles of caregivers in your area (even if they didn't look at your job posts) and to have your agency featured in your geography.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities are simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

With 33,000 followers, Karl Pierre is arguably the top home care influencer on Youtube. He started in home care at age 14 when he was "the computer guy" for his mother's home care agency.

In this episode of Home Care Heroes, Karl shares advice and perspective on questions from home care agency owners.  Topics covered include the following:

- Engaging caregivers for a higher  purpose
- Home Care Websites - what's important and what's not?
- Social Media and Search Tips
- Great Books for Home Care owners

You can learn more about Karl by visiting entplife.com.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

Stephen Tweed is one of the home care industry's top consultants. I met Stephen at my first home care conference, where he was a keynote speaker.  In my view, two things that set Stephen apart are 1) his process-centric approach, and 2) his ability to pull agency owners into "mastermind groups" to establish best practices.

Our conversation focused on Caregiver Quality Assurance and Stephen walked us through a 5-pillar approach (where he outlines each pillar in detail), as follows:

1. Company culture
2. Recruiting System
3. Selection
4. Onboarding
5. Retention

As a bonus, Stephen mentioned that the 6th pillar is using your Caregiver Quality Assurance program as a marketing tool to differentiate your agency. 

I usually pick a key takeaway and this time I have two:

1. Stephen's team measured cost of caregiver attrition at around $1,600.  He also shared that caregivers who come to you via the referral of another caregiver are likely to stay 10 times longer than one who finds you on an online site like Indeed,  and a $250 referral bonus goes a very long way with caregivers.
2. One of the most important keys to retaining caregivers early on is determining how many hours they expect to work and making sure that they get this number of hours. If for example, a caregiver is "expecting" 40 hours (and really is expecting the $345 after taxes that go with 40 hours), and they only get 30 hours, they can find themselves in a spot where they can't pay their bills and become vulnerable to being poached by another agency. 

To learn more about working with Stephen, visit CaregiverQuality.com or HomeCareCEO.com.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

Anne-Lise Gere is one of the foremost human resources experts in Home Care.  She works with Hurricane Marketing Enterprise (aka Steve the Hurricane) to teach the Momentum program (link includes discount code).

Our talk with Ann-Lise comes at a time when the US is in the process of "opening up" from the COVID-19 pandemic. Some key points discussed cover the following:

• The improved visibility of home care as a result of Covid-19
• The negative impacts of the pandemic on the home care work force
• Ideas on how to raise the profile of caregiving jobs
• The reality that the agencies with caregivers are the agencies who will grow and thrive
• How to compete by being the "best home care employer in your region"
• Best practice ideas*

* My favorite of Anne-Lise's suggestions was to reach out to each member of your caregiver team who  work fewer than 35 hours in a week to see if they'd like to work more hours. This initiative has the benefits that 1) you can increase your work force capacity by up to 40% with no hiring fees, and 2) the personal phone call will show caregivers that you care for them and will engender loyalty. 

Born in France and raised in the UK since age 7, Anne-List came to the US as an adult and as a military-bride. She lives in Coastal Virginia.

You can contact Anne-List and sign-up for her weekly insights email through her website www.gereconsulting.com.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

After successfully starting, growing and selling the home care agency NeuvaCare, Kamran Nassar set his sights on a new venture that would help home care agencies captivate website visitors in 8 seconds or less.  That company is appropriately named Captiva8 and you can learn more at Captiva8.com.

Kamran explains that many home care agencies spend a good deal of money creating their websites, optimizing them with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and driving traffic with Google Ad Words. But if those site visitors aren't instantly engaged, all of that effort is wasted. 

Some of Kamran's practical tips are as follows:

• Recognize that both prospective clients and caregivers come to your site
• Make your phone number very prominent and unobstructed
• Provide a capture form, and DON'T make it hard to fill out. Instead, get a name and number and "how you can help"
• Provide LIVE CHAT

Captiva8 is a live chat service that comes with both a chat technology, but more importantly it comes with 24 x 7 staffing with home care experts who can answer questions, capture leads, and even search for available caregivers. They literally get you clients and fill caregiver shifts while you sleep. Learn more at Captiva8.com.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

Steve "the Hurricane" Weiss shares great tips on caregiver retention. He starts with some very basic and actionable suggestions like adjusting your attitude to love your caregivers, speaking in the language of "shifts" and making sure that new caregivers get a lot of supervision. But then the magic comes where Steve shares some great ideas regarding career paths and puts important metrics around the benefits of retention.

Steve's team is offering a top-notch program on caregiver recruiting and retention called Momentum. You can learn more and sign up at https://homecaremarketing.net/momentum and get a $500 Discount with the code ANKOTA500.

As an added bonus, a friend of Ankota named Nancy Muckle tells us about her mom's caregiver and the impact she's had on their family. Nancy says that "home care heroes" doesn't go far enough and that in her case, the caregivers are Angels.

Steve runs Hurricane Marketing Enterprises (https://homecaremarketing.net). Steve and his team run boot camps and provide consulting services to help agencies to blow away their competition. To engage further with Steve, he recommends first that you check out all the free content that they've put on YouTube (search for "Steve the Hurricane.") If you like what you see and want to learn more, please send email to info@homecaremarketing.net. They'll give you a free initial consultation if you mention the podcast.

Nancy Muckle is a serial entrepreneur and a contracted sales executive who has helped many companies with sales, funding, strategy and more. Her latest venture is called "Problems Solved" (https://probssolved.com/) where solving elder care issues is one of her specialties. We'll invite her back to talk more about problem solving for seniors and their families.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

On this episode of Home Care Heroes, we feature two of our winners for the Home Care Community Caregivers award! These caregivers embody what it means to be an exceptional caregiver in the home care industry:
- Chisha Elam from Exceptional Touch Home Healthcare
- Elisa Casey from Silver Companions

We also hear from their managers who nominated them for this award, Karmisha Miller-Wallace and Leslie Rothenberg.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

Providentia Marketing makes websites and manages the online presence for some of the country's most successful home care agency.  On this episode of Home Care Heroes, Jason Chagnon), the CEO of Providentia Marketing shares success tips for managing your home care website, including the following:

• Make sure that the site is built for the market and not for yourself: Jason shares some of the top key phrases that people are searching for
• Make your site attractive to caregivers as well as clients
• Testimonials from happy caregivers can get you more caregivers and more clients
• Don't put up a roadblock for caregivers to apply for a job on your site. If you make them fill out a long and arduous application, they'll move on.
• Measure everything so you know where you stand and how you can improve

Jason also shared that Providentia Marketing would be happy to have a free no obligation call with your agency and that if you just have a quick question, you can email him on jason@providentiamarketing.com.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

A subset of veterans are entitled to paid home care from the VA, but it's hard to qualify and hard to sustain benefits. This is where Veterans Care Coordination (VCC) comes in. Today's guest, Cheryl Hammons, explains how your home care agency can partner with VCC to add a new source of revenue providing home care for veterans.

To learn more about working with Veterans Care Coordination, you can reach Cheryl Hammons on 855-380-4401. Her email is chammons@vcchc.com and the website is http://www.veteranscarecoordination.com/.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

This is a rebroadcast of the inaugural episode of the home care heroes podcast featuring two of the industry's best and brightest, Steve "the Hurricane" Weiss and GInny Kenyon, who give their best advice on how to get your agency off the the right start in 2021.

Both guests are spot on with their focus on caregivers, "the Heroes of Home Care." Steve focuses on planning, whereas Ginny focuses on recruiting. You will come away from this episode with ideas that you can put into action today!

Steve runs Hurricane Marketing Enterprises (https://homecaremarketing.net). Steve and his team run boot camps and provide consulting services to help agencies to blow away their competition. To engage further with Steve, he recommends first that you check out all the free content that they've put on YouTube (search for "Steve the Hurricane.") If you like what you see and want to learn more, please send email to info@homecaremarketing.net. They'll give you a free initial consultation if you mention the podcast.

Steve's team is offering a top-notch program on caregiver recruiting and retention called Momentum (introduced in Home Care Heroes Episode 4). You can learn more and sign up at https://homecaremarketing.net/momentum and get a $500 Discount with the code ANKOTA500.

Virginia "Ginny" Kenyon runs Kenyon Home Care Consulting (https://www.kenyonhcc.com/).  If you need an outstanding and updated home care policies and procedures manual, you can get these right on Ginny's website (pick the right  206-721-5091 x101 gkenyon@kenyonhcc.com)

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

Nicole McBee has worked with over 300 home care agencies, many in her home state of Missouri but also many in Michigan, North Carolina, Florida and other locations. Her expertise and bubbly infectious personality are unmatched. In this episode of Home Care Heroes, I learned that Nicole likes to organize her advice into 3 part plans.

Since we share a lot of customers with Nicole in Missouri, we tended to talk about Missouri Medicaid home care a great deal, but as you'll see from the outlines below and listening to the episode, her advice applies nationwide.

Nicole's 3 Pillars of Home Care Consulting:

1. Compliance,
2. The Business, and
3. Recruiting and Retention

Nicole's 3 phase plan to rolling out systems:

1. Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) first: Get your schedules clock-ins and clock-outs flowing smoothly
2. Payroll: Next have your EVV system flow to your payroll
3. Billing:  Nicole said "If your butt cheeks are in the seat, your not out caring for your caregivers."

You can reach Nicole on 314-650-6712 or visit her website at www.newdayconsult.com.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.

Mark Kulik is a 35-year health care veteran who has spend the last 13 years helping home care agency owners sell their businesses. Mark's company, The BRAFF Group only works with sellers, and his practice focuses on all aspects of home care agencies. The most important takeaway from this episode is that if you aspire to sell your agency now or at any time in the future, you should start to prepare now.

Mark walks us through the five points that agency buyers are looking for, as follows:

• Clean Financial Reporting: 3 years of accrual-style accounting records
• Key Performance Indicators: Be able to show the metrics you use to drive the business
• Staff: An exceptionally low caregiver turnover rate will raise your value
• Leadership Team: Buyers are looking at the horse AND the jockey(s)
• Referral Sources: Buyers want to see multiple referral sources

When asked how home care agency valuation is calculated (what your agency is worth), the answer was "It depends..." but then he gives a lot of details

Mark can be reached (in Atlanta - eastern time) on 770-955-1766 or at TheBraffGroup.com.

Home Care Heroes is produced and sponsored by Ankota - the Software for the Heroes of Home Care. We truly embrace the notion that caregivers and home care companies are heroes. Our top priorities simplicity, caregiver retention and outstanding service. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com.