One of the keys to growing your home care business is systems.  There are many tasks in a growing home care company that are repeated every day or every week.  To grow your business successfully with high levels of client satisfaction and caregiver satisfaction, you need to have systems in place so those tasked are repeated in a consistent and high quality way.

So how do you begin to develop those systems?

The answer is to have a set of  home care policies and procedures that specifically define each area of your company, who does what, and how they do it.  You want to have policies to guide your office team members in how they should handle various situations that may arise in the course of daily business activity.

Over the years, working with hundreds of home care companies of all sizes, we’ve learned that it’s not easy to develop these policies and procedures on your own. You need a template or a framework to guide you. Then you can take that template and adapt the policies and procedures to your own company, and to the regulations in your own state.

Here’s a Policy and Procedure Manual for you   

To guide you in developing your policies and procedures, we reached out to Kathy Bailey, Founder and CEO of Mediquest Home Care and Staffing in Lancaster, PA.  Kathy is the author and publisher of The New Directions Policy and Procedure Manual published by Private Duty Solutions, Inc.  This is clearly the leading policy and procedure manual template in the industry.  It contains a complete set of policies and procedures in the following categories:

1. Administration and Office Management
2. Finance
3. Human Resources
4. Documentation and Record Keeping
5. Quality Assurance and Risk Management
6. Legal Issues
7. Marketing
8. Education

There is also a miscellaneous section with policies to help you with things like facility staffing, records retention, and non-traditional services.

Use Policies and Procedures to Start Your Business

While we are not in the business of helping individuals start a home care business, we get many calls from people who want to get into home care.  Over the past decade, hundreds of people wanting to get into home care have purchased the New Directions Policy and Procedure Manual.  They use these procedures to identify all of things they need to do to get their business going.  We have had many of these customers call us or write us five years later to say how much this valuable tool helped them get started.

Use Policies and Procedures to Grow Your Business

One of the lessons we have learned from our $5 Million Mastermind Group is that to grow your business, you need to be a systems thinker.  You need to put in place people and processes to perform those daily functions in a consistent and high quality manner.  The largest companies we work with have started with basic policies and procedures that they developed, and then refined and reinvented as their companies grew.  You too will need to develop those basic repeatable procedures, and then reinvent them on a regular basis as your business grows.

Use Policies and Procedures to help Sell Your Business

What is your exit strategy for your business?  Are you planning to grow it to a certain level and then sell it and use the proceeds for your retirement?  Many home care company owners we have worked with have done a magnificent job of starting a company, growing it, and selling it.  Some have put millions of dollars in their retirement fund from the sale of their company.

If you have an exit strategy for your business, you will increase the value of your company by having clearly defined policies and procedures, and by having your people follow those procedures consistently.

If you do not have an exit strategy, now is the time to create one.   When you are clear about your exit strategy, then you can get clear about what you need to do to build a company that has high value to a prospective buyer.  We are currently working with two company owners on developing processes to increase the value of their businesses so that they can exit in the near future.

Order Your Copy Today

If you are serious about starting a home care company, growing a home care company, or selling a home care company,  you’ll want to be sure you have the right policies and procedures in place.  To get started developing your policies and procedures, consider using a template like the New Directions Policy and Procedure Manual from Private Duty Solutions.