By Stephen Tweed 
The year 2020 was a crazy time for home care company owners and leaders. The Covid Crisis, racial discord, and political division combined to make for a roller coaster of emotions for those providing in-home care.
How did this upheaval affect your home care business? How did you end the year financially? Was your revenue up or down? Was your net income up or down?
At the Home Care CEO Forum, we have forty-one companies that are members of our Home Care CEO Mastermind Groups. We have another eight companies that are part of our newly formed Caregiver Quality Assurance Mastermind Group.
For our January online Mastermind Meetings, we asked each participating companies the following questions:
What was your revenue for calendar year 2020?
What was your revenue for 2019?
What was your percentage of growth for the year?
Then we asked each participant to tell us their focus for 2021 to grow their business.
You Know Me – The Data Junkie
Most of you know me, and you know that I’m a bit of a data junkie. I love looking at the numbers and analyzing performance to help my clients and mastermind members grow their businesses.
You also know that my favorite mantra is, “What gets measured gets managed, what gets rewarded gets repeated.”
A real benefit of our Home Care CEO Mastermind Groups is that members get to see real numbers. They get to have in-depth discussions about what worked and what didn’t to grow the business. They get to analyze the data to learn how to improve.
What We Learned
The discussion in our January meetings was a very simple exercise. Members of our four groups voluntarily shared their year end results and discussed what contributed to those results. While we have a strict non-disclosure agreement and we do not share any information or data about any member with anyone outside the group, we can do some analysis to see what lessons we can learn from the whole group.
There are several things we observed from looking at this data:
- Our Mastermind members range size from $1.5 million to $38 million in annual revenue.
- Our largest group, the Top 5% Group has ten companies that average $15.8 million in annual revenue.
- 69% of our members showed a growth in annual revenue from 2019 to 2020.
- The average annual revenue increase was 14.55%
- 23% of our members showed a decrease in revenue, and the average decrease was 12.33%
- 8% of our members were flat in revenue from 2019 to 2020
Lessons from the Leaders
The companies that showed significant growth in 2020 has these factors in common:
- A system for recruiting caregivers
- A system for retaining caregivers
- Established relationships with key referral partners, and a system to nurture those relationships.
- An established leadership team that works together for growth.
The companies that showed significant decreases in revenue faced some of these challenges:
- Disruption in their relationship with referral sources due to Covid-19
- Shortages of caregivers made more challenging by Covid infections and quarantines
- Disruption in the leadership team or the loss of key employees
- Disruption in the local marketplace and referral patterns
Let’s be clear about one thing. Every company in our Mastermind Groups is facing the caregiver recruiting and retention crisis. However, those companies that showed significant growth were able to apply their recruiting and retention systems more effectively than their local competitors and the shortage of caregivers was less disruptive.
Learning from Industry Benchmarks
While we do our own in-depth benchmarking in our Mastermind Groups, most of our members also participate in the Home Care Benchmarking Study from Home Care Pulse. We encourage you to participate in this study. You will learn a lot about your business when you download the preparation worksheet, dig out the data to answer the questions, and submit your data online. Then you will learn even more by purchasing a copy of the final report and comparing your company results to the data for similar sized companies in your region of the country.
The 2021 Home Care Benchmarking Study is now open, and you can download the worksheet and submit your data.
Would you Benefit from a Mastermind Group?
If you feel like you would benefit from regular conversation with other owners and CEOs of similar sized companies who share some of your challenges, then consider becoming a member of the Home Care CEO Forum. We now have openings in three of our groups because members sold their businesses in 2020.
If you are …
- An independent home care company
- Generating more than $1.5 million in annual revenue
- Not in a local market where another Mastermind Member operates
… then you may qualify for membership. Visit the CEO Forum Today and explore our Mastermind Groups.
Would you like to work on the Caregiver Recruiting and Retention Crisis?
We are happy to announce the introduction of our new series of Mastermind Groups. These are groups that will focus on sharing ideas, solving problems, and supporting one another in setting up systems for caregiver recruiting, selection, on-boarding, and retention. While owners and CEOs participate, these groups have HR Directors, Recruiters, and Retention Managers who share their real day to day problems, solutions, and insights.
If you would like to explore being a charter member of a Caregiver Quality Assurance Mastermind Group, visit CaregiverQuality.com and fill in the web form. We’ll set up a conversation to discuss the program and see if you fit into one of our CQA Mastermind Groups.
