Navigating the Future of Home Care as Technology Transforms Franchise Operations

Navigating the Future of Home Care as Technology Transforms Franchise Operations

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Ruby Mehta: Oh.

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Ruby Mehta: Welcome to CareSmartz360 On Air, a home care podcast. I am Ruby Mehta, VP of sales at Caresmartz. In today’s episode, we are thrilled to have Matt Erickson, Senior Director of Sales and Operations at Griswold. Matt is a true home care innovator with over 10 years of experience in home health and home care.

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Ruby Mehta: He currently leads the franchise operations and sales support team at Griswold, advising and supporting over 180 franchise locations across 31 States. His expertise helps these locations achieve their revenue and profitability goals. As a seasoned strategist, Matt is always on the lookout for growth opportunities. And he’s a pro at leveraging emerging technologies

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Ruby Mehta: like AI to solve key challenges in the industry, especially caregiver recruitment and retention. His passion for transformative business strategies and impactful leadership is driving real change.

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Ruby Mehta: Let’s dive into the conversation with Matt and explore how he’s shaping the future of home care. Welcome to the podcast Matt.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Thanks, Ruby, I’m great glad to be here.

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Ruby Mehta: Great. So let’s start with

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Ruby Mehta: with technology, technology, innovation. My 1st question that as a home care franchisee, look to the future. What are some of the key technological innovations and emerging trends they should have on their radar.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Yeah, it’s a great question. And there’s a lot happening right now within the realm of just technological advances, automation and so forth. So kind of where do you focus right when you only have a little bit of time when you’re managing clients and caregivers in starting high level, start with mindset understand that the trajectory of the industry is heading towards almost kind of the clinical acute setting that they’re at presently, or and have been for some years of data, driven insights

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: and facts right where home care historically has lagged there not so much anymore. The best providers are performing, and understand that the data is going to get them

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: better. Operational efficiencies and partnerships with vendors and payer sources right in particular, where you want to focus, is looking at the feedback loop. And so that’s going to be starting with your caregiver and client satisfaction. What is that information telling you? Are you taking advantage of platforms that can give you those insights and then turn them into action.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: So system like we use it was previously called home care pulse. It’s now activated insights their experience management platform. We’ve taken that, and we’ve embedded that into our everything from our P. And L. To our coaching conversations that we’ve had with our franchisees, and that data is allowing them not only to achieve rewards, to go to their vendor sources with

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: and their referral sources, but also, how do you manage the business better and make those decisions on which vendor partners to go with technology-wise if you identify that you’re a caregiver. Reputation with them. And you know you have high turnover, or there’s less client, caregiver satisfaction.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Well, there are partners out there from a technology standpoint that can help us, as far as improving those numbers far more efficiently than sending, adding another fte. And so those are just that’s like one example of many. I could probably be on a soapbox all day long about these. But that is a key. One is to understand. What is the information telling me what platforms I need to go to in order to help rectify this solve that solution. But do so economically.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Other areas you could look we look at is the overall integrated tech stack. So are these systems that we’re then signing up with right? So we use Ava, we use Sensi, we have our Power BI platform, well, sky, so forth. But what we’re very careful. And it’s a top priority when we are working with partners is, are our systems talking with each other.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: and I’ve been part of you know, past companies, and I’ve seen it in the industry where everybody has their system siloed. One system on, say, recruiting retention is not working with their caregiver management or the client management platform. When these systems don’t talk, you don’t get the data insights that you need

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: in order to make really actionable decisions, and with everything moving so quickly with, especially with like AI, the systems that are that are the systems that are adopting these integrated tech stacks and making sure that their business is reflective of that kind of strategy are going to be the ones that are gonna really capture those emerging trends and then also make those advances with, you know, their business.

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Ruby Mehta: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that’s that’s what’s happening today that you, you definitely need these tools and technologies to manage your data because there’s so much data out there.

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Ruby Mehta: So true. So what digital tools and platforms is Chris world developing to help these franchisees enhance the client experience.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Yeah, that’s another good question. And we’re really excited for the blend of the partnerships we have with our vendors. And then the organic internal tools that we’ve built at the Home Office, the franchisor that blend all this together right? And so we we really lean into the the tools that we can create in power Bi and the data dashboards

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: that we make available to our franchise owners, we understand. And having been on the franchisee side in my past life. I understand, you know intimately the lack of time that there is. You want to spend time. Every business owner wants to spend time looking at the numbers. But

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: how much time do you have relative to when you need to talk to a client when you need to talk to a caregiver your team right? So the power bi is our umbrella tool that we use to help them take all their systems and very quickly identify either kpis trend lines, stories

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: that they can use to take action, whether it’s elevated client risk, whether it’s hospitalization rate, whether it’s, you know you’re taking on, you know too many referrals from one referral source and becoming one dimensional. That’s a risk in itself, right?

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Especially with how the industry is trending on having a very diverse referral source strategy. So we use that to kind of make it easy for our owners to take more actionable decisions then from there, once they under, we understand, like a present day, where their business sits.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: We have business forecasting tools and modeling that we’ve built and incorporated the home care pulse, activated insights, their benchmarking report, and that’s been really helpful in taking their trailing indicators that they have in their P. And L, or maybe like the last 3 months worth of sales or marketing information, and we can then convert that into a leading indicator based off of all the benchmarking

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: and the historical performance of both them. The network and the industry. And these tools have helped them understand where the business needs to go, the decisions they make and be more forward thinking

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: with that and then we I mean, like I mentioned earlier, Sensei and and Ava really have been 2 of the ones that have been really helpful as far as the AI realm, as far as taking advantage of

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: and often used where I mean, AI is turning into like that kind of like that shiny object syndrome, right where everybody wants to use. Everyone’s not incorporated. But how do we operationalize it? Well, they’re using it for as far as client you know, satisfaction reducing resell hospitalizations, and then at the highest level. Ava! It’s been fantastic as far as reducing caregiver turnover, improving their satisfaction, which helps

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: clients.

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Ruby Mehta: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, with so much admin work and that administrative burden that people have. And then I’m saying this,

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Ruby Mehta: because we have

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Ruby Mehta: in the audience. We have so many smaller agencies or agencies who are growing fast. But there’s so much administrative burden they have. So your insight on maybe some of the ways Chris Ford is using automation or data analytics or other technologies to really optimize that work, optimize workflows and reduce that administrative burden.

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Ruby Mehta: For our audience to really learn from there.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Yeah, that’s a great question. And that’s a question. I think that a lot of our franchisees, regardless of their size, is facing, is that constant balance between, you know intern, you know. Where’s the internal labor going? You know what tasks, what assignments. And so where we focus really, specifically, there is you know. Probably one of the better examples is in our recruiting world. So right now, majority of our franchisees significant amount of them.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: they never manually enter a caregiver ever into any system whatsoever. It’s fully automated and digitalized from the point that the caregiver applies, saying, like on indeed, directly through our ats. We use hierology, and then from the Ats directly into Wellsky. And so we’ve created

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: through integrations a system where the care, you know, you could show literally a caregiver, a QR code. They scan it, they input their information. It flows right through our systems. And in real time we can. We can really manage their experience to be at an exceptional level

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: and turn them around and get them working, and ultimately a paycheck within one to 2 weeks, and that level of efficiency has helped our our offices really identify the top talent, especially, for when you’re a larger volume office, you have 100 150 applicants in a week. How do you find the right people for your business that right fit, and for your offices that are, you know, say, below the industry average. It’s about 2 million

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: annual revenue, you know. At that size you may have one to 2 coordinators in your office. You really need to be focused on sales and marketing and generating that what we call the community consciousness, the ability of the greater territory that you’re in, that to know that you exist. You need to be marketing. You shouldn’t be managing back end. And when you have these efficiencies.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: where the systems can automate and take out that back end inputting. You can talk to more clients. You can talk to more referral sources and really increase the touch points you have at any given week with the people on the other end of the care that you’re hoping to provide.

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Ruby Mehta: Awesome. Yeah, that really makes sense. And that actually brings my next question, because

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Ruby Mehta: a lot of agencies, they they really

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Ruby Mehta: wanna keep the costs low. Talking about all the growing agencies and then they want. But they wanna maximize the workforce, the utilization of that workforce. And whatever resources that they have.

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Ruby Mehta: So that’s that’s good insight. Now, my next question is about those, you know, smart decisions that you make. And those decisions are coming from some historical data, right?

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Ruby Mehta: Because you learn from your historical data. And that’s how you make your predictive analysis. So as you are expanding the franchise footprint, how is this for leveraging those data? Driven insights and predictive analysis to analytics, to identify the most promising growth opportunities and make really informed and strategic decisions.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Yeah, no, that’s

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: I’ll try to not go too long on my soapbox in this one. This is one I’m really intimately involved with, with, especially with our new franchise owners. And we’d look at. We have a tool that we use for new office location. Selection, right? And so what this does is we’re blending a bit of our physical and digital impact points together. For like, kind of fair, how do we choose the office location in the physical realm, while also understanding the impact that that can have in the digital realm

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: and being able to kind of blend us together into a happy medium is critical to their success. Understanding, you know, some of the key points we look at and understanding that relationship is, where is your target demographic for clients relative to say the zip codes of your caregiver populations, and we can take the historical presence. Griswold’s been around for over 40 years. And so what that gives me is a fantastic amount of data.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: and understand deeply rooted territory trends across the country, and where we what will work and what won’t work from a location relative proximity of caregivers and clients, and that can help us advise new owners, even current owners, as far as where’s the best place to be. So when a Google search happens and Google’s going even more hyper local now than ever with the search results is, where do you place yourself.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: That’s easily accessible to the caregivers. They’re going to be the primary foot traffic through your front door. But then, how do you also make sure that doesn’t alienate you to your clients when they’re searching within the proximity of their home. All these factors have really a real business impacts. Once we get the decisions made. But if we can figure out through this proprietary tool, you know, where’s the best place to optimally put you for the best of everything.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: then, that really empowers our owners to have a very strong initial 1st year in business ahead of the industry average as well as our ongoing owners when they are looking to relocate, you know, making that good decision with their own internal historical knowledge to your point. I can take an owner that’s been there for 20 years, take their historical data of that territory. And then we can make even sharper decisions more

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: more focused on decisions based off what they want in the next location, as well as what we know, clearly won’t work, and we can really kind of hone in on a very exact few spots for them to to go to, and it actually, it saves them a lot of time. They’re not shopping around. They’re not looking kind of poking around the dark, wondering where to go. They know exactly where to go. These are my 3 options. I need to make one of these 3 work, and this is what’s gonna set me up for success for the next 20 years.

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Ruby Mehta: Yeah, absolutely such a good insight. There.

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Ruby Mehta: final advice. What? What advice would you give to

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Ruby Mehta: home care? Agency of franchise owners? I should say who are looking to take their businesses to the next level. Through this transformative leadership and forward thinking strategies.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Yeah, it’s this one’s near and dear to my heart because I like I’ve I would say I learned the hard way. I’m not one that kind of like. Oh, probably shouldn’t do that, Matt. Nope.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: I got to do something and then see kind of works out. But what that has kind of given me is an opportunity to really learn from my mistakes, but also be hungry, for, like all right, how do I avoid future pain points, and one of those ways that I stumbled across was, there was a book I read, called Extreme Ownership, by Jocko Willick

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: early in my management career, where I got sick of making so many mistakes early on. And what that left me was that there’s a few kind of like just takeaways like, Wow, like this is really what’s going to drive franchise owners in now forward is one own everything in their world. No one else is to blame. So really, you gotta. It’s you. You’re the business owner. It all. It stops with you.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Leaders take ownership of everything that impacts the mission right? And so you have to own the communication to your team on how you want to be successful. If you want to try new initiatives with technology, you make sure you communicate effectively what the goals are of this trial, and your default should be action, not reaction. And so, if you want to try something, try it, fail fast or be successful. But don’t just kind of

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: dottle on it. Right? Don’t just kind of like I’m kind of trying this. I’m kind of not be decisive. Be assertive. That’s gonna help you really understand and and know what it’s gonna work, what’s not, and not waste time on anything

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: and really

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: be be open and receptive, I would say, is the next thing to the technology that’s coming through, especially if you have been in business for more than 5 years transformationally that the home care industry has changed drastically, even just the 10 years I’ve been here. So when I talk to a franchise owner that’s been in business for 30 or 40. It’s unbelievable what’s happened in that time period, and it’s only and it’s only increasing exponentially now. And so be open. Try new things that the franchisor

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: has an idea on technology, or there’s a new tool out by one of your vendor partners try it because chances are that that’s gonna help you reduce your future headcount, not current headcount, but it allows your coordinators. Maybe your coordinators. Now, with this new technology that you’re trying can provide excellent customer service to not just 30 clients. But maybe they can try it to 40 to 45. You’re able to fight that margin compression that we’re seeing with rising costs. But you know, we’ve topped out Bill Rates.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: But these tools that these technologies are in providers now are gonna allow us to be more effective in a new model, and you have to be open and you have to listen. You gotta watch for stuff.

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Ruby Mehta: I love that. I love that 100%. People normally think that whatever they’re doing, it’s working for them. And it’s how it should be. But then.
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Ruby Mehta: unless you are open and you are receptive, and you look for new tools and technologies, and especially AI. These days in the last few years things have changed.

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Ruby Mehta: and you can

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Ruby Mehta: really, exponentially grow if you are open so definitely. Well, thank you so much, Matt, for sharing your expertise and I’m sure it’s very insightful for our audience, and thank you so much. Everyone who’s listening in until next time. Goodbye.

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Matt Ericksen Griswold Home Care: Yeah. Take care.