Yes, AHI Group, Inc is a Strategic Partner of ACHC (one of the three Healthcare Accrediting bodies in the USA). There are only three other Home Care Organizations that have the coveted role of Strategic Partner with ACHC. Click Here to view AHI Group, Inc on ACHC’s website.
About Us
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If you have not owned a home care business before then you probably don’t realize how much you have to learn. As the old saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Reading a book about how to win a law suit hardly qualifies you to handle the day to day work of an attorney. The same goes for a home care administrator. Will the book train you on best practices of how to provide care services and show you visually so you know exactly how to train your employees to avoid costly workers compensation claims and worse yet client law suits against your agency for negligence or doing something an RN should have legally done? How about marketing? Does reading a book get you ready to hit the street and start getting referrals? How do you know the marketing techniques you may read about are tried and proven in the real world? What about on-going new and fresh techniques to get in doors that are closed to newcomers?
What about hiring the right caregivers, training them, screening them, incentive them financially and non financially? What is normal in the industry? What does it take to retain good employees? What do they expect? What are the best ways to bill clients? What if they don’t pay on-time, what do you do? What is normal? All of these questions and hundreds more will have you spending your precious time stressing about things that will bring you no or little revenue and cause you a lot of time consuming issues. Your time is your biggest asset as a business owner and you need to focus on things that drive revenue and provide quality care outcomes.
Having a proven business model in place to appropriately manage your employees, clients, referral sources, etc. will allow you to accomplish this difficult task. Without a steady flow of clients a business will die in its first or second year – no matter how slick its software or caregiver training programs are. Accountability is key to success and our AHI Group Members have weekly check points with their coaches and reports they are required to fill out weekly on their sales and marketing efforts that week. All of this and much more keeps our AHI Group Member agencies motivated, moving forwards, and handling situations correctly so as not to give themselves a black eye in their community which could end their agency before it really gets up to speed. We wish we could tell you that being successful in this business was as easy as reading a book – because we would publish one – or attending a 3-4 days seminar – but unfortunately that is not going to cut it as you compete with the best home care agencies already embedded in your community.
Yes, we have launched over 450+ agencies across the US. Of those there have been 34 that have not succeeded and went out of business. That is an 8.5% failure rate. Nine of them had unforeseen family circumstances (divorce and death) that pushed the owners to quit. The others were mainly due to the owner’s inability to follow our business model due to the fact that they believed their way of doing things was the best for their particular situation. Spending money on marketing techniques that we warned against, etc. will not help build a strong business. We do our very best to hands on coach and guide our members to success but sometimes some of our members are just not willing to do all that we require of them day in and day out and they eventually run out of capital due to not getting enough clients.
We also encourage everyone that comes to us to ask our competitors how many Private Duty (non medical) companies they have helped set up and how many have failed? The reasons are as varied as the “home care consultants” helping these individuals launch their businesses but one fact remains across the board – most don’t get the tools, programs, and support they need after opening their doors for business in order to effectively compete with their local embedded competition. At AHI Group we are also more than happy to give qualified prospective AHI Group Members access to speak with our AHI Group Members to find out what their experience has been with our organization after their all important first two years.
In addition, we encourage you to see the 230+ FIVE out of FIVE STAR Google Certified Reviews that our members have left on our Google+ page online. Just do a Google search on “AHI Group” to view our member’s online reviews. At the end of the day, AHI Group members are successful because they have unique tools and programs that set themselves apart from their competition. We keep our proprietary tools inside our small group of 450+ AHI Group members. You don’t have to worry about going out there with the same play book as 3,000 other home care agencies after working with a consulting company!
You will receive your initial AHI Group Training (also known as our “Boot Camp”) at Irvine, Southern California – unless we are offering it via LIVE BROADCAST over the internet. We limit the size of our AHI Group Boot Camp classes to ensure that everyone gets the required one-on-one training and attention they need in order to learn the basics of our proprietary marketing techniques and other important skills required to operate a new home care agency. Walking into a room with literally 100 people is not something you will encounter with AHI Group | StartupHomeCare.
We have been to “Seminars” with 100 people in a room and we realize, like most people, that getting personal attention in such scenarios is very difficult. With that said, our ongoing day to day support, coaching, and assigned mentor is the most critical to each of our member’s success because we understand that most people will forget half the things they learn in a week long training within a few weeks of leaving the training – it is human nature. However, we want to ensure that each of our members get that face to face initial comprehensive training at the start of their journey with AHI Group – which will be invaluable to their confidence starting out.
After all, if you are not confident in what your sales approach is then how can you expect others to have confidence in giving you referrals? In addition, AHI Group shares its proprietary programs and tools only with its 450+ members. Unlike working with a consultant, you will not go out there and find out that 3,000+ other companies have your same play book.
If you do not have work experience in the healthcare industry then we recommend that you get experience volunteering in your local community – for such organizations as Alzheimer Association or at your local hospital, skilled nursing facility, assisted living community, or senior center. Volunteering will give you a sense for the senior care industry and whether or not you enjoy working with seniors. If you really enjoy volunteering then you are likely to have the passion we require to join our organization. If you don’t enjoy volunteering then we recommend that you choose another industry as you will likely not find fulfillment in the home care industry.
Agency owners who have a passion for the industry are always the most successful in this industry – all things being equal outside of that. Home Health and Personal Care at Home are very different. Home Health is providing skilled nursing, physical therapy, and occupational therapy care to seniors in their homes. This requires a Home Health License from the state, accreditation from an accrediting body like CHAP, Joint Commission, etc. and a Medicare/Medicaid Provider License. The average time frame for this process is 1.5 years and average costs range from $150,000 to $350,000 depending on the state you are in. Much of the cost is due to office space, software, personnel, patient care costs (that are paid out of owner’s pockets and not recoverable from Medicare) during the application process.
The application process also requires that an agency get and maintain 10 clients for a minimum of two months in order for Medicare to come in and test the care scores of these patients to verify the agency met the regulatory and care minimum standards. Keep in mind that each client only last two months and then their care episode ends and they are no longer your client. If you don’t get to having 10 clients all at once Medicare will not schedule your on-site care outcomes inspection. You also need to have a Director of Nursing (licensed RN in your state) and a licensed MD on your board of directors.
So, there is a lot of time, effort, risk, and cost with starting a home health business. Add that to the fact that the President of the National Association of Home Care and Hospice recently said that Home Health Agencies will need to diversify into providing personal care (non-medical) services in order to maintain profit margins due to Medicare cutting Home Health billing rates consistently year over year and projected to continue that way into the future. In addition, due to Obama Care (Affordable Care Act) hospitals are in pilot programs (that could go nationwide in the not too distant future) to require Medicare to pay the hospital a lump sum of money and they then get to decide how a patient gets the care they need for all of their ongoing services (home health included).
Given that hospitals are getting Medicare cuts in certain areas of their operations, they are more than motivated to make up those losses in other area’s which is leading them to cut out losing profits to a 3rd party home health agency and instead hire their own RN’s directly to go out and do the home health visits – effectively cutting out the home health agency altogether. Please do your research on the home health industry before making a leap in that direction – there is more to it than initially meets the eye.
AHI Group is a respected home care organization with 450+ members nationwide that comes with a lifetime membership fee that won’t break your new business budget. You will be taught and coached during the life of your business by people that have been in your exact shoes and have successfully grown a home care business from the ground up into a multi-million dollar operation and have a track record to prove it. The founders of AHI Group | StartupHomeCare launched their own agency in January 2007 at the beginning of a large global recession in a market with over 200 other existing home care agencies (Southern California).
Despite the recession and the competition, the founders were able to successfully grow their new agency into a million dollar company within 18 months. The founders are now sharing the secrets of their success to help others achieve the same revenue in a recessive economy and provide quality care to their local senior community. Note: StartupHomeCare is the business development & training arm of AHI Group. Here are some of the main things our AHI Group members get:
No Catch. AHI Group is a Membership Organization with no franchise royalties and no territory restrictions. AHI Group, Inc (StartupHomeCare’s parent company) is an nationwide membership network of 450+ home care agencies. You do not have to purchase a franchise to grow a million-dollar home care agency – but you do need people behind you as your personal coach/mentor who are financially motivated to help you grow and have previously owned large home care agencies themselves. We encourage people to do a Google search on “AHI Group, Inc” to verify we don’t have a laundry list of complaints from our member agencies. We provide an affordable alternative to purchasing a franchise and charge no ongoing royalties and have no restricted territories. We have a one-time lifetime membership fee for all of our services with no additional “add on fees” ever.
AHI Group pays for its “post launch” one-on-one coaching and mentorship via recurring revenue from three optional programs that it offers to its members. Members can choose to participate or simply decline. Those that decline will pay no more fees to AHI Group and will continue to get full membership privileges. Some thing note worthy to keep in mind is that one thing a franchise will rarely disclose is how much they pay their sales team or “independent franchise brokers” to bring them customers. On average, a franchise will pay at least $20,000 to an “independent franchise broker” for every franchise they help sell. Our internal business development team bring new clients to our organization. Saving on overhead costs helps StartupHomeCare keep its total upfront pricing down which, of course, benefits our members.
A franchise may tell you that you will always need their constant hand holding and support as you go out and grow your business. However, what you will find if you actually talk to one of their franchisees is that after the first year or two they rarely call their corporate franchise asking for help because they have already encountered 95% of the situations they will encounter and therefore already know how to handle them and don’t need someone to tell them what to do again. In our minds, if one of our members should ever be call us a lot after their first 18 months in business, then that would mean that we have failed on our end to effectively coach and develop them to that point.
No, it is not required. However, we are looking for people who meet certain work experience requirements to become a member of AHI Group. We have 300 – 400 people a month that come to our organization with interest in joining us and we have to funnel that group down to a handful that we will bring on as members each month. Our comprehensive ten day initial AHI Group Training “Boot Camp” (5 days in our Corporate Office and 5 days remote from your home) assumes that you know nothing about the home care industry and will start you on your journey to becoming a seasoned and successful home care business owner.
Your assigned AHI Group coach/mentor (an individual who has started their own home care agency and grown it to a multi-million dollar home care business) will then guide you along the path to growing your business day to day after you open your doors for business. The day to day coaching/mentorship from our team of seasoned former home care agency OWNERS combined with our comprehensive training, tools, and unique programs will allow you to hit the ground running and beat out your local competition.