What We Learned from the 2021 Home Care Growth Summit

Even before COVID-19 turned all events virtual, a thousand agency owners gathered remotely for home care’s original virtual conference: the Home Care Growth Summit. This year, we hosted the second annual event and heard from some of the industry’s top experts. 

Even before COVID-19 turned all events virtual, a thousand agency owners gathered remotely for home care’s original virtual conference: the Home Care Growth Summit. This year, we hosted the second annual event and heard from some of the industry’s top experts.

Although the 2021 Home Care Growth Summit has ended, we can’t help but continue to talk about all the great insight that was shared by this year’s presenters.

This event included three days of presentations: A pre-conference day (exclusive to premium ticket holders), day one (sales and marketing), and day two (recruitment and retention). As you might have noticed, the pre-conference day was something new that we added this year and included extra sessions from leading home care entrepreneurs, consultants, lawyers, and healthcare referral partners.

Whether you were or weren’t able to attend, we still want to keep you in the loop. Here are some highlights from the event and what you can expect for next year.

Pre-Conference

We’re excited to have launched the pre-conference day this year. This new initiative gave premium admission attendees the opportunity to hear more content from entrepreneurs, consultants, lawyers & referral partners. It also included:

While we can’t share everything (although we wish we could), we’re going to highlight a few stats that Erik Madsen shared from early participation in the Benchmarking Study survey. From the results so far, we’ve learned that:

Don’t forget, you can still complete the survey by March 31^st and receive $250 off pre-order.

Day One: Sales & Marketing

With day one of the Summit focusing on sales and marketing, we heard from a lot of great speakers about how you can improve your numbers and boost recognition across the industry.

These sessions included:

Day one started off with a presentation from Todd Austin, COO of Home Care Pulse, highlighting how marketing has changed over time and what the best agencies are doing to adapt. Here are some of the most important data points he shared:

According to this information, agencies that grew at a high rate spend 3% more on sales and marketing per year than those with negative growth.

From these high growth agencies, we’ve learned some of the most important steps you should be taking. These include:

Along with this, some of our other presenters shared their take on referrals and what you need to be doing to improve your sales/marketing process. To become a high-growth agency, you must be taking all the necessary steps.

Gregg Mazza, Founder/CEO of Home Care Breakthrough Solutions, emphasized the importance of differentiating your agency. In Gregg’s presentation, he shared that:

“High-growth firms are almost 3x more likely to have a strong differentiator.”

In practice, some of these differentiators might look like:

On a similar note, Steve “The Hurricane” Weiss shared that you can’t market the same way you used to.  One step in this process involves “targeting.” You need to understand who your target customer is and centralize your operations around that. According to Steve, your target customer is a NERD: need-based, elderly, have the resources to afford services, and are disabled or have dementia.

Day Two: Recruitment & Retention

The second day of the conference followed a similar format to day one, although focused on the two biggest issues in home care: recruitment and retention.

The takeaways we received from this day were insurmountable for agency growth. In fact, across all of these presentations, we found a common thread: You need to focus on your caregivers – what they want, what they need, and what motivates them to keep working.

Here are some quotes and data to back up those sentiments.

In this clip from the webinar, Cyril Vergis discusses the importance of making your agency the best, most enjoyable place to work.

In order to be successful with recruitment and retention you need to be identifying and portraying a strong brand image. Who are you? What do you want to represent? What do you want caregivers to recognize you for?

Adam Robinson of Hireology talked about this a bit in his presentation when discussing how to attract applicants. Your employer brand is important because it plays a part in all of the top things that job seekers need:

There are a million (if not more) things that you can do to attract caregivers. We recommend starting from the ground up and asking them directly: “What can we do to make our agency a better place to work?” This will give you a baseline moving forward.

Emilie Bartolucci, Executive Director of Private Duty Home Care at NAHC shared with us a little bit about the importance of understanding caregivers and the research she’s done to back this up. Here are some of the problems she identified:

No matter where your agency is, it’s important to elevate the voice of the home care aid and give them the opportunity to grow, learn, and belong to a “community.” Here are the key recommendations Emilie suggests:

The 2021 Growth Summit & beyond

We also wanted to give a big thank you to all our presenters and partners who made this year’s event possible.