By Stephen Tweed
How many other home care companies are there in your local market? How fierce is the competition becoming? What are you doing to make your home care company different from your competitors?
According to the Home Care Association of America there are over 24,000 home care companies providing private-pay, non-medical home care in America. We know for sure that there are over 5,500 franchise locations from 59 different companies offering home care franchises. There are also 12,611 Medicare Certified Home Health Agencies as of the end of 2013, and many of them also offer private duty home care.
According to the 2014 Private Duty Benchmarking Study from Home Care Pulse, of the five things that owners use to set their companies apart from the competition, the Number 1 is Caregiver Quality. Number 2 is 24/7 availability, number 3 is client satisfaction, and number 4 is exceptional customer service.
Back in 1990, I wrote my first commercially published book called, “Strategic Focus: A Gameplan for Developing Competitive Advantage.” The premise of the book is that if you pick one thing, and do that one thing better than anyone else, you will be successful in business. In the book, we identified five sources of competitive advantage for small businesses.
Over the past ten years, I have been closely studying the home care industry, and specifically how company owners and CEOs try to differentiate their businesses. As a result of this research, we have identified Seven Sources of Competitive Advantage in Private Duty Home Care.
- Caregiver Quality
- Exceptional Customer Experiences
- Personal Relationships
- Organizational Relationships
- Relationship Selling
- Branding
- Specialized Programs and Services
What I have discovered by sharing these concepts with thousands of home care owners and CEOs around the US and Canada is this. It’s all about execution. The home care company that has a clear strategy, and executes with excellence wins in the marketplace.
What are you and your team doing to execute with excellence?
This Month’s Monday Morning Marketing Meeting 
Our theme this month for the Monday Morning Marketing Meeting is “Dare to be Different.” In the discussion packet are two short videos. One describes the seven sources. Then there is a Competitive Advantage Strength Finder worksheet that you can use to define which of the of the seven is your greatest strength. The second video is about action planning, and there is a Strategic Focus Action Planning tool to help you.
The idea behind the Monday Morning Marketing Meeting is to engage your office team and your marketing team in a regular weekly meeting. The purpose is to discuss the results from last week, provide a short educational program on a marketing related topic, and develop a short term action plan to execute your marketing plan.
All of this is contained in the monthly packet from The Academy for Private Duty Home Care. If you are a Premium Member of the Academy, you should have received an email with the packet from Jill Scott. If you didn’t see it, or it got lost in your spam filter, you can login to www.privatedutyacademy.org and go to the Monday Morning Marketing Meeting page on the Online Learning page and download the packet.
If you are not yet a Premium Member of the Academy, you can download a Free Trial copy of the packet. Here’s a link.
