Lessons from Building a Multi-Million Dollar Home Care Business

Lessons from Building a Multi-Million Dollar Home Care Business

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Justin Currie: Yeah.

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Erin Cahill: Welcome to CareSmartz360 On Air, a home care podcast. I’m Erin Cahill, Account Executive at Caresmartz. Today. I’m thrilled to have with me the one and only Justin Currie, a renowned home care business strategist. Justin has an incredible track record of building successful home care agencies, and his expertise is invaluable for anyone looking to take their business to the next level

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Erin Cahill: over the last decade and a half Justin has founded and grown 3 thriving companies and he’s currently the owner of a multimillion-dollar homecare agency. His mission is to inspire 1,000 home care agency owners to deliver the highest quality care to seniors while building profitable businesses. On this podcast, we’ll be diving deep into Justin’s strategies for lending Vip, private pay clients, automating core systems and building a high performing team.

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Erin Cahill: So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn from one of the industry’s leading experts

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Erin Cahill: welcome to the podcast Justin.

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Justin Currie: Yeah, thanks. Erin, excited to be here.

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Erin Cahill: So we’ll jump right into it. What are the most effective strategies for scaling a home care agency without compromising quality of care?

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Justin Currie: Yeah, so important question. Obviously, when you’re scaling up, it becomes a little bit more difficult to keep control of things, especially with when you’re adding new caregivers, new clients. But one of the big things for us was a hyper focus on client experience. So a lot of agencies when they bring on a client, and you know they get them all settled. They get their 1st shift staff.

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Justin Currie: After that there’s not a lot of communication. There’s not a lot of follow up. There’s not a lot of touch points. So we really broke down the client experience overall. And what we did is we put in structured visits, structured touch points. We have a feedback collection that’s on automation now. And what that did was it just helped us proactively, you know, get in front of clients, and I guess eliminate some of the problems before they happened.

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Justin Currie: So just having those that increase in touch points. You’re just gathering that valuable feedback, so you can always improve. But also, when there’s little concerns that the clients have, you know about caregivers being on their cell phone? Or maybe somebody fell asleep. Or you know anything along those lines we’re staying ahead of. So ultimately, it’s actually saving us time and money in the office, as well as just delivering a high level of client satisfaction as well.

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Erin Cahill: And can you share specific tactics for attracting and converting high paying private pay clients.

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Justin Currie: Yeah, so there’s a few. There’s a lot of variables to that, actually. But one of the most simplest ones. And this kind of surprises people is is location, I mean. And look in your area. Look at the US. Data websites. It’s gonna tell you what the medium annual income is in different areas within your service range. Right? So we look at that really, really, closely. And further to that.

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Justin Currie: we look at, you know the facilities, the communities that are rated at a really high level. So you know, you’re looking for 5-star skilled nursing facilities. Those are the ones that we want to be at in those more affluent areas. And that’s ultimately how we, how we really target the clients. But we go into some more advanced strategies, you know, regarding value perception price anchoring. There’s a lot of advanced psychological

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Justin Currie: factors we do on kind of the back end of that as well. And so when you combine those things, and you have a strong brand and a strong presence and reputation in your community, you really start to evolve, as that leader in your area. And what that’s gonna do is it’s gonna start to bring you the right clients. So I mean, if you’re if you’re getting a lot of leads, but they don’t want to pay. Your don’t want to pay your rates. You know. They’re looking for low hours. You’re just looking in the wrong spots, because those Vip

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Justin Currie: clients are absolutely out there.

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Erin Cahill: Yeah, that’s great advice. And what are the essential technologies and automation tools for optimizing home care agency operations.

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Justin Currie: Yeah. So the most basic of them are, gonna be your scheduling softwares and believe it or not, I still see agency owners that are. They do not have any scheduling software which drives me a little bit crazy. Cause it’s an absolute necessity, you know, nowadays, especially if you wanna try and scale up. But we’re using some pretty unique things like Chat Gpt. I’m sure most people have heard of this by now

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Justin Currie: we use that to help us build out our procedures, our processes and our checklists, our policies. We use that I. I’ve built prompts that basically we can add in there. We can put our specifics in, and they’ll build a policy around that. And then what I do is I just go in and review it. To make sure everything. Everything makes sense. I’ll make some little changes and add what I need to. But it’s ultimately, you know, eliminating probably

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Justin Currie: 75% of our work. And so that’s been really helpful.

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Justin Currie: And one other thing, you know, that’s a real game changer. And we’re only about 80% built on this now. And we just call it the home care automation platform. And so what that is, there’s a client side, and there’s a caregiver side. But that’s automated touch points. So it’s not going to be. You know, your super super personalized touch points that you’re gonna get with a care manager going out there. But what that is is for things like birthdays. And you know.

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Justin Currie: when they 1st on board, you know, sending them a welcome email introduction to the team. You can have your, why video in there, you know why you started the company so little things like that just kind of explains your brand and who you are a little bit more. But you can automate, you know, 90% of that client communication. And then, you pair that with having your care, managers and stuff going out to do the visits.

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Justin Currie: And it’s a really powerful way to sort of automate and be efficient in your office.

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Erin Cahill: And how can homecare agencies navigate the complexities of regulatory compliance.

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Justin Currie: Some people are not gonna like my answer, probably, but avoidance and elimination is kind of my mantra when it comes to regulatory compliance. You know, there’s always gonna be some level of compliance that you have to work with. And it’s important. I mean, you know, you can’t have agencies just running wild out there. But in a lot of cases they’ve really overstepped their boundaries right? So it’s it’s

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Justin Currie: it’s made it really tough for providers to provide actual quality care to the clients. And that’s 1 thing that I don’t really agree with, because I don’t think they, you know, when you step back and look at regulatory compliance with something like Medicaid. For example,

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Justin Currie: you know they’re providing really low reimbursement rates in most states. You have extreme billing complexities, you have credentialing, you have, you know, your regular audits, and there’s so much work to do that that’s, you know, involved with, with something like Medicaid, that it makes it unreasonable, and it actually hurts the quality of care for for the clients. So

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Justin Currie: really they make it really difficult to work with, even though you want to be able to help everybody. But sometimes, when they, when they add in too much of that regulatory compliance. It makes it so. It’s not even you can’t run a business that rate, right? You can’t have healthy margins. The only thing we’re seeing now with things like Medicaid is the very, very large providers, you know, the 30 million dollar plus providers.

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Justin Currie: They’re doing well with Medicaid, because they’re like the Amazons of our industry, right? They can operate on a razor thin margin, and it makes sense for them. But most smaller agencies can’t, can’t run that way, so that would be my. My best advice is, avoid it as much as possible. Stick to the private pay, you know. They just had rules come out with Medicaid, the 80 20 rule. And you know we’re totally unaffected by any of those rules.

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Justin Currie: So.

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Erin Cahill: Yeah, that makes sense. And the last question for you, Justin, what are the most common challenges faced by home care agencies, and how can these be overcome.

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Justin Currie: Yeah, so there’s 2 that are pretty common that I see all the time. And one is pretty simple. It’s mindset. And there’s so many agency owners that you know they just started. Or maybe they have 5 or 10 clients something like that, and they are absolutely trying not to lose instead of trying to win.

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Justin Currie: So what that means is they’re not investing enough time into it. They’re not investing enough money into it, and they’re just kind of hanging on, so it really delays their startup if they even get started up at all, because they’re not. They’re not playing the game to win. They’re not committing to the agency, and I think that’s really hard, because some people don’t want to go outside their comfort zones right? But as a business owner and home care, or any other business

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Justin Currie: I mean, you have to commit, and you have to step outside of that comfort zone. If you want to be successful, because, yeah, there’s so many that I’ve seen. I think I spoke with an agency owner the other day, and she was I believe she was 8 years in business, and she only had 5 clients at the time. Right? And so I’m working, working with her to try and improve that mindset and just get her so that she can commit and start moving forward in her agency.

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Justin Currie: And the one other thing I was gonna mention is cash flow. So I

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Justin Currie: I believe they say about 82% of businesses fail because of cash flow problems. So that’s something that I don’t think people know enough about when they’re starting, especially. There’s a lot of people that want to come in directly and just work with insurance right off the start. If you’re gonna work with insurance, you have to understand, you know, all the bill billing complexities, the regulatory compliance.

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Justin Currie: But also, when you’re gonna be paid right? So historically, you know, depending on who you’re working with, that can be anywhere from 2 weeks to 30 days to 60 days. So you have to be really, really cognizant of that and make sure that you’re prepared. Right? You have to pay your team members. So you know if you’re working with strictly insurance, you better have, you know, either deep pockets or a line of credit, or

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Justin Currie: something that can help you float payroll. So.

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Justin Currie: So I think, being really really careful and cognizant of your cash flow is really important. You can. You can improve that with the payer sources that you work with who you’re working with, but also your payment terms as well. So we’ve been lucky enough in the 7 years I’ve owned the agency. We’ve never taken on even a dollar of debt, you know. I invested Startup capital at the start. But to run the business. We’ve never taken a dollar of debt, and that’s because of how we’ve structured our payment terms.

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Erin Cahill: Right? Yeah, that makes complete sense. Well, thank you so much, Justin, for sharing your expertise and to our lovely audience. Thanks for tuning in until next time. I’m Erin Cahill signing off.

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Justin Currie: Thanks, Erin.