By Stephen Tweed
Happy Happy Happy New Year! We hope you had a successful and prosperous 2019, and that you were able to grow your home care business.
What will your 2020 look like? What is your vision for the future of your company in the coming year?
Four Big Factors Shaping Your Future
As you get ready for 2020, there are four factors that will shape your company in the coming year:
- The Forces and Trends driving the home care industry
- Your Vision
- Your Company Culture
- Your Business Growth Strategy
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing some new insights on these four factors, and giving you some tools to grow your business and get ready for the future. Today, I want to take you on a helicopter ride up above the day to day busy-ness of running your agency and give you and opportunity to look at the major forces and trends shaping our industry.
Five Forces Causing Change
Forces are those pressures that cause change in an industry or an individual company. For two decades, I’ve been observing five specific forces that cause change in our industry:
- Economic Pressure – The overall economy of our country, and the specific factors that drive the economy of the home care industry.
- Demographic Changes – The aging population, the caregiver shortage, and the demographics of “best caregivers” are all factors that affect our future.
- Consumer Choice – Clients and primary family caregivers are making choices about aging care and the selection of a home care company in different ways than they did in the past.
- Technology – Advances in technology are providing ways to make your agency more efficient and effective. AND, new developments in technology are creating new forms of competition in the marketplace.
- Political Change – Politics at the federal, state, and local level are having significantly more impact on how we do business in home care.
As you study these Forces, you will begin to see “Trends”, or patterns of change that are being created by these pressures. A major part of what we do at Leading Home Care and the Home Care CEO Forum are to study these trends and anticipate what the future will look like.
Six Seismic Shifts Shaping 2020
While there are many trends that we are tracking, here are Six Seismic Shifts that we believe will have the most impact on shaping the future or your company in 2020.
- Medicare Advantage and In-Home Care – The biggest buzz in our industry has been around the decision by CMS to allow Medicare Advantage Plans to offer in-home supports as a supplemental benefit in 2019. While there has been a lot of talk, we’ve not see much action yet. We’re looking closely at what this trend will mean in 2020 and beyond.
- Private Equity and Industry Consolidation – For over a decade, I’ve been watching and anticipating consolidation in the home care industry. Over the past three years we’ve seen a significant increase in the entry of private equity and venture capital groups into the home care space, and that has resulted in consolidation in software companies, franchise organizations, and independent home care agencies.
- Increasing Competition – The growth in the number of new home care companies, compounded by the consolidation of independents and affiliated home care companies, means that there is more competition and stronger competitors in your local marketplace.
- The Caregiver Recruiting and Retention Crisis – We continue to do research and monitor this trend that is the biggest barrier to growing your company in 2020.
- Disrupting the Digital Disruptors – If you have been reading our articles for the past three or four years, you are familiar with the “Digital Disruptors” who attempted to “Uberize” the home care industry. While “Uberiziation” has not worked, the technology they have developed is creating new competition in local markets.
- Data Oriented Decision Making – The ten year history of the Home Care Benchmarking Report from Home Care Pulse, plus consolidation in the industry, means that home care leaders are depending more on data, information, knowledge, and wisdom to guide decision making.
We’ll be giving you much more information on these five forces and six seismic shifts over the next few months in Home Care CEO Report.
Join Me for the Home Care Growth Summit
If you would like to take a deep dive into these factors affecting your future, join me on Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 11:00 am eastern time as I kick off the Home Care Virtual Growth Summit sponsored by Home Care Pulse. I’ll be leading the way with an in-depth look at these forces and trends. I’ll be followed by 20 other thought leaders in the home care industry for the largest virtual growth summit ever presented in our industry.
