By Stephen Tweed

What does it take to grow a top tier home care company?  What can we learn from listening to the owners of companies in the top 10% of the industry?  What is it worth to spend a full day in conversation with ten to twelve company owners and administrators talking about success in home care?

Over the past two years, over 100 owners, CEOs, and administrators have attended one of eight private duty field trips in Phoenix, AZ; Louisville, KY; or Virginia Beach, VA.  We have actually had one owner who attended field trips in all three places. He was so intrigued by what he saw and heard that he just couldn’t stay away.  The result of his continuous learning and his deep curiosity about the home care industry has led him to become the latest member of our $5 Million Mastermind Group.

What is a Private Duty Field Trip?

A Private Duty Field Trip is a one-day visit to a highly successful home care company where the CEO and COO give freely of their time and experience to help a small number of non-competing guests get new ideas to grow their businesses.  Over conducting eight of these field trips, we have developed a model that works.  It begins at 6:00 pm on a Tuesday evening with a group dinner in a very nice local restaurant.  This is an opportunity for the participants to meet one another, meet their hosts, and make introductions.  The next morning at 8:00 am a van picks up participants at their hotel for a drive to the offices of the host company where we have coffee and muffins.  Then we get right into the details as the CEO and COO of the host company walk us through the five phases of movement through a home care company:

1. Attraction – make the phone ring
2. Conversion- convert callers to clients
3. Staffing – find and keep top talent, especially caregivers, to grow the business
4. Caregiving – match clients to caregivers; schedule, track, and supervise care
5. Collection – keep cash flowing

Given this format, the owners and administrators give specific details about how they do each of these functions in their companies, the challenges they have faced, and how they have overcome these challenges.  The home care companies we have visited have ranged from $3 million to $12 million in revenue

Lessons from our Field Trips

As we look back over the discussion in our field trips, the feedback from field trip participants, and the measurable results they have achieved, we have summarized six key points that participants have taken away:

1. Have a Huge Vision – the companies we have visited are all run by owners who had a big vision about growing a company and the purpose behind that vision.
2. Be a Systems Thinker – the owners of the largest companies in our industry think in terms of processes and systems for doing critical tasks over and over again with repetition and consistency
3. Try lots of New Things – All of the leaders of our host companies have tried lots of things.  Most worked. Some didn’t.  Don’t be afraid to try things that don’t work.
4. There is a Season for Everything – Some ideas that worked for a few years didn’t work later as the company grew. Each time your company grows by 20%, review your processes and your people.
5. Hire a COO – all of our host companies have a CEO who is the owner, and a COO who runs the company on a day to day basis and handles most of the details
6. Measure Everything – all of our host companies have processes to track activities and results, gather data, analyze the data, and make new decisions based on what’s working and what’s not

To get more details on each one of these six learning points, you will want to consider joining 8 to 12 of your peers and spend a day inside one of these top 10% companies. These are companies that are billing more that 3,000 hours per week, and generating more than $3,000,000 in revenue.  What do they do? How do the do it?  What are the results?

We have one more Private Duty Field Trip remaining in 2014, and it is coming up on October 7 and 8 in Louisville, KY.  There are only 8 places available in this trip, and a number of them are already taken, so if you would like to personally learn the Lessons from our Field Trips, visit The Academy for Private Duty Home Care and Register Today.

*As of this morning (Monday, September 29, 2014) there is only 1 space left for this Field Trip!
**Another update: As of September 30, 2014 we have expanded space to 15 attendees, however, only 5 spots remain.