www.EldercareDecisions.com Growing your Eldercare Practice

Those of us in the eldercare business are all too familiar with disaster planning for clients, whether we do business in sunny, hurricane-prone Florida or in the snowdrifts of the northern cities.  Most of us are aware of how vital this is, and we follow professional requirements to best ensure our clients' safety, and probably go above and beyond those.  However, it is equally important to consider the business and its plan for surviving a natural disaster.  When people rely on you for services or their livelihood (including yourself), this is not optional.

Here are just a few tips from my ..

For many eldercare providers, marketing their services is an uncomfortable thought. Most recognize it is a necessity of sustaining and growing their practice but it is certainly not something they look forward to doing. I have always found having an annual Marketing Plan has helped keep me focused and dreading marketing far less. It provides a framework and some predictability so you are not caught trying to come up with ideas throughout the year.

Tips for developing an innovative Marketing Plan include committing to a periodic review of referral sources and their requested needs; development of an annual marketing tradition; enhancing ..

A company evaluation also provides an opportunity to develop benchmarks and reports. These tools will help you stay on top of your business and identify issues before they become a threat. It is akin to being proactive with your client; reports and benchmarks provide the threshold needed to make sound business decisions.

I would recommend, as a minimum, establishing benchmarks on your Cultivation Ratio; Budget; and Employee Billable Hours/Non Billable Hours. The U.S. Small Business Administration is an excellent resource for entrepreneurs and can be accessed at http://www.sba.gov/index.html. Reports should demonstrate whether you are reaching the benchmarks for success. Reports to ..

Let's face it- most of us enter into care management because we want to serve, enjoy working with older adults, and yes we think we can make a living doing it. We aren't MBAs or Business Administration majors or even Health Care Administrators, rather we are typically nurses, social workers, gerontologists or the like. We have never run our own businesses so what makes us think we can do it now? What separates the successful from the unsuccessful? I would argue the most important differentiators are the successful business owner's skill set; recognition of limitations when it comes to business strategies; ..

Many entrepreneurs form private pay elder service companies, or buy home care franchises, driven by statistics such as "More than 65 million people, 29% of the U.S. population, provide care for a chronically ill, disabled or aged family member or friend during any given year and spend an average of 20 hours per week providing care for their loved one."  http://www.nfcacares.org/who_are_family_caregivers/care_giving_statstics.cfm

That is one hell of a potential customer base. I'm not challenging these statistics. If anything they may be on the conservative side. But if your revenue model is based on elders and/or caregivers that must pay you from ..

One of the activities that we hope to encourage here at the National Eldercare Professionals Community is the sharing of great ideas, including books and articles that our members have read and found useful in growing our business.

We also will encourage our members to warn us to avoid some of the BS that claims to be the latest, best, most creative, and most innovative approach to business, but really is nothing more than over hyped blather.

If you have not yet read the Blue Ocean Strategy we want to recommend this very stimulating book. You'll find it at Amazon.com and ..

I spend most of my time , building my business. I found out, when you work for someone else, your paid what your job is worth. When you work for yourself, as many of us do, your paid what your worth. Ouch !! I'll be the first to admit, I want more business. I believe that if you help enough other people get what they want, you will automatically have what you want. To be sucessful, find a need and fill it. If your in business and you have a great product or service that truly fills a need, why wouldn't ..

We take so many things in life for granted. Before my wife, Gina, became sick in 1998, we lived, what most people would consider, a normal life. Our world, was pretty much like most of yours. Home to work, work to home, five days a week, with a weekend of activites, for family and friends. During the coarse of a week, we might cover hundreds of miles of territory. That being said, it's easy to understand why, with such a big life, little things at home, didn't always seem that important.  If something wasn't just right, no big deal. Putting it ..