By Stephen Tweed

“If I could just get more caregivers, I could double my business!”

That’s the comment I’ve been hearing from members of our Home Care CEO Mastermind Groups as we work on the biggest barrier to growing your agency … the caregiver shortage.  For most of 2021, the fifty companies who are members of a Home Care CEO Mastermind Group have been focusing on innovative ways to find and keep caregivers.  And while many of these ideas are working, most members still don’t have enough caregivers to meet the growing needs of their clients and their referral sources.

Increase Hours by Shifting Referral Patterns

If you can’t take on more new clients because you can’t find the caregivers to serve them, what if you increased your revenue from your current number of clients?  What if you could give your caregivers more steady hours and more stable schedules with the same number of clients?  What if you could make life easier for your scheduling team by providing more hours of care for fewer clients, requiring fewer caregivers?

We’ve learned over the years that …

• You can increase your revenue serving fewer clients by increasing the average hours per client per week.
• You can serve more clients with fewer caregivers by increasing the average hours worked per caregiver per week.
• You can make life easier for your scheduling team by bringing in clients with more hours per week and longer length of stay, making it easier to keep caregivers on those cases

The way to achieve these results is by refocusing your marketing efforts, and reaching out to referral sources that give your more hours per client per week, longer lengths of stay, and more word of mouth referrals.

Analyzing the Dollar Value of a Client by Referral source 

Several years ago we were working with a $3 million home care company in a mid-sized Midwest city.  We did an analysis of their clients by referral source for the calendar year, and we discovered that the “Dollar Value of a Client” varied widely based on the source of the referral. The average lifetime dollar value of a client ranged from $183,931 for clients referred by a “specialty advisor”, to $4,568 for a client referred by a guardian.  We calculate the Dollar Value of a Client by taking the average length of stay in months times the average revenue per month.

That means that the two big variables are the hours per client per week, and the length of stay.

You can analyze the value of your clients by creating a spread sheet listing each client you served during a calendar year, their start of care date, their end of care date, and the revenue for each month.  From that, you can calculate the average length of stay and the average revenue per month. Multiplying those two numbers gives you the total dollar value of each client. Then you reorganize the spreadsheet, dividing clients by referral source category, and doing some additional analysis.

To the right is a chart showing the results of one case study.  This particular case study shows the dramatic difference in dollar value per client from the various referral sources.

Full Time Caregivers with Regular Clients Don’t Quit 

In studying the causes of caregiver turnover, one thing we have learned is that caregivers who work full time, and have a regular client that they serve every day tend to stay with the client and with your company much longer that caregivers who have to move from client to client, or who care for multiple client in a day.  If you can focus your marketing efforts to find clients who buy 40 or more hours per week, and who have a length of stay longer than a year, you’ll be able to find caregivers who will stay with you and serve those clients.

By analyzing your own client referral patterns, you can identify those individual referral sources who bring you long term, high-hours clients.

Discuss These Case Studies in a Home Care Mastermind Group

One way to learn more about how to use data and information to find more clients with longer lengths of stay and higher hours per week is to be part of a Home Care CEO Mastermind Group.  These are groups of ten to twelve companies that come together on a regular basis to share ideas, solve problems, and support one another.  During these mastermind meetings, we regularly share data to help members analyze their own situations and make strategic decisions to grow their business.  In 2020, 69% of our mastermind members grow their business over 2019, and the average annual growth rate was 14.45%

Explore Home Care Mastermind Groups today.