There are Medical Insurance, Workers Compensation Insurance, and Long Term Care Insurance companies that do cover in home personal aide care services. We have 55 Corporate Long Term Care Insurance and Workers Compensation Insurance contracts. In addition, we help AHI Group Members get setup with Medicaid Waiver Programs in their state. Unlike our competitors, we do not charge $2,000 – $2,500 per program to get you access to all of the above. All of this is included in our lifetime membership at no extra charge. With that being said, getting signed up with Insurance and Medicaid Waiver contracts is usually a good idea (depending on what they pay per hour).

However, in all transparency – there is NO GUARANTEE that any insurance company will give any home care agency any referrals. Anyone who tells you any different is not being up front with you – and you should ask them to put in writing how many referrals you will be guaranteed on a monthly basis if they insist you will be guaranteed referrals. Like all referral sources, insurance companies work with the home care agencies they “like.” It is up to the home care agency to stand out from the crowd and entice the insurance company to “trust them with referrals” vs. giving them to the agencies who are already on their list of providers and “liked.”  This is no easy task – but AHI Group trains its members on how to successfully market to these insurance companies.

Aides and Companions assist seniors and others with activities of daily living (ADLs), which includes things like grooming, bathing, dressing, toileting, transferring, etc. They also assist clients with medication reminders, meal preparation, transportation, light housekeeping, and other similar non-medical activities that a client needs assistance with day to day. Caregivers provide service where people prefer them – in the comfort of their home or chosen place of residence.

Yes. We can get you access to our discounted professional liability, non owned auto, and a bonding group insurance policy that will save you up to $6,000 in premiums per year vs. going out on your own and trying to get such a policy. The premiums are usually $200 per month depending on the location geographically. This means that our clients, on average, save around $6,000 during their first three years in business vs. going out and getting their own individual insurance policy – if they can even get one.

You will need our AHI Group Lifetime Membership Fee. We recommend you also have at least $10,000 – $15,000 in additional funds available for start up costs like insurance, office lease deposit, etc. Due to cost saving programs and back office solutions you will not need to hire 2-3 office staff to get you up and running. Our back office solutions will help you save $3,000+ per month of your budget for activities and programs that will bring you clients and employees. Some franchises will require you to spend $2,000 – $5,000 per month up front on hiring 1-2 people to sit in your office and wait until your phone rings. Our back office solutions help you avoid these costs. Contact our business development team for more information on these cost saving back office programs. Need help with funding your new business? Click here for financing information if you have a credit score of 680 or higher (no exceptions) and meet certain requirements.

No. There are many directions you can take your business. Your clients may include seniors, new mothers, plastic surgery clients, rehab patients, mental retardation patients, developmental disability patients, etc. Most people have to “private pay” out of their pockets for the services of a home care agency providing personal care services. Once in our Boot Camp, we will provide training on four additional profitable ‘snap on’ businesses that can drive hundreds of thousands in revenue to your home care agency and allow you to provide a “Full Spectrum Of Care Services” to your community. Seniors can pay for care services in a variety of self, government, and insurance related ways.

There are Medical Insurance, Workers Compensation Insurance, and Long Term Care Insurance companies that do cover in home personal aide care services. We have 55 Corporate Long Term Care Insurance and Workers Compensation Insurance contracts. In addition, we help AHI Members get setup with Medicaid Waiver Programs in their state. Unlike our competitors, we do not charge $2,500 per program to get you access to all of the above. All of this is included in our lifetime membership at no extra charge. With that being said, getting signed up with Insurance and Medicaid Waiver contracts is usually a good idea (depending on what they pay per hour).

However, in all transparency – there is NO GUARANTEE that any insurance company will give any home care agency any referrals. Anyone who tells you any different is not being up front with you – and you should ask them to put in writing how many referrals you will be guaranteed on a monthly basis if they still insist you will be guaranteed referrals. Like all referral sources, insurance companies work with the home care agencies they “like.” It is up to the home care agency to stand out from the crowd and entice the insurance company to “trust them with referrals” vs. giving them to the agencies who are already on their list of providers and “liked.”  This is no easy task – but AHI trains its members on how to successfully market to these insurance companies.

No catch. First of all, there is a reason there are a lot of franchises in existence – they are making a lot of money – which they take from their franchisees. Second, AHI Group does not spend massive amounts of money on advertising our solution to potential buyers. Every magazine you pick up that has anything to do with franchises these days seems to have the same home care franchise listings. Third, Franchisers like to throw expensive ongoing events for their current franchisees who also need to spend money to attend such events that could be accomplished via conference calls and online methods at much lower costs.

All of this, and many other expenses, add up to a much larger overhead that a franchiser needs to cover in order to stay in business. Spending hard earned money you make them on advertising to their potential franchisees instead of turning it back into their business to help provide support and improved training programs for its current franchisees is part of what franchises have to do in order to stay in business and attract new franchisees. Fourth, Franchises pay large commissions to franchise brokers who bring them new franchisees. On average, a franchise will pay over $20,000 to a broker who brings them a franchisee. StartupHomeCare does work with franchise brokers but our fee is a fraction of the amount a franchise pays out.

Lastly, AHI Group spends very little on marketing to the public and relies heavily on free organic google searches and social media to attract new members. This allows us to keep our overhead low and in turn keep the total cost of our solution much lower but still provide outstanding quality.

In short, everything needed to own, operate, and grow a successful home care business and beat out the embedded competition in your local area. See Our Services page for a more detailed list of the main things you get as a member of AHI StartupHomeCare. Some other things to consider: You get an assigned coach/mentor (one of our seasoned former home care agency OWNERS) to guide you step by step after you launch your business. How many other organizations out there have coaches/mentors on board who started their own home care agency in a highly competitive market like Southern California (with 200 existing home care agencies) in March 2007 at the beginning of the longest recession in 50 years and achieved $1.5 million in revenue ($20,000 a month net profit) in their second year.

Starting a home care agency in this struggling economic era and ever changing Affordable Care Act regulatory environment means that the ‘old way’ of marketing and running a home care agency is not going to give most new agencies the edge they need in today’s changed healthcare market place. The founders and their team of experienced home care professionals (with a combined 38 yrs of experience in owning super successful home care agencies during the last 12 years) are now teaching others how to start and grow a home care business into a large multi-million dollar operation – but without the restrictions and cost of a franchise.

Our AHI Group, Inc coach/mentor team have actually owned home care agencies and successfully grown them into multi million dollar agencies – not just worked as employees of home care agencies. As those of you know who have owned businesses before, there is a major difference between being an owner of a business and being an employee. Only those on our AHI Group team who have owned a successful home care agency are assigned as coaches/mentors. This ensures our member agencies get the highest quality training and support in the industry – combined with our proprietary programs and marketing tools – have the ability to beat out their local competition.

At AHI Group we have a Lifetime Membership Fee up front and then no additional royalties or “add on fees” thereafter. Our members get assigned a personal coach/mentor from our team of former multi-million dollar home care agency owners to help them grow their business day to day after they go through our initial 10 days of training. The funding for our one-on-one coaching/mentors is built into the revenue we receive from our three optional AHI Group programs that our members can opt in to use if they deem them of value. We also recommend that you have access to an additional $10,000 – $15,000 for initial startup costs for such things as professional liability insurance down payments, office space deposit, laptop computer, printer, etc. and enough funds to pay your monthly expenses until you get your first client(s) that cover your expenses – which should be within your first or second month. Financing is available for those with a credit score of 680 or higher (no exceptions) and meet some requirements.

A non-refundable down payment of half our lifetime membership fee is due before your training can be booked and pre-course tasks started. The remaining balance of our membership fee is due three calendar weeks before the first day of your scheduled initial training. We accept checks, VISA, Discover, and MasterCard.

We are an active Chapter Member of the Irvine (Orange County) Chamber of Commerce – click here to view our profile. We also understand that you may want to do some research on any complaints against our company. We recommend that you do a search for “AHI Group, Inc Complaints” online. You will find there is not a laundry list of complaints out there as our AHI Group Members are very happy with the services we provide to them. In fact, we have 220+ FIVE out of FIVE STAR reviews on our Google+ Page disclosing what our members think about our organization. We also encourage you to talk to our AHI Group Members and see what their experience has been past that all important two year mark.

We are not subscribed to our local Chapter of the BBB (Better Business Bureau) Franchise System as we inherently do not want to support any organization that has independence issues built into their service model. The BBB is a national franchise system and each franchise office gets paid by businesses in their area to manage their customer reviews. However, this leads to independence issues as a BBB Franchise office does not want to lose its high paying customers and has the ability to award an “A” Rating despite the business having multiple negative customer reviews.

We prefer Google Reviews (which are free for businesses) and therefore provide no concerns about “independence” when it comes to the reviews and ratings. Google also does a very accurate job of validating all customer reviews are real and not fictitiously created by the business itself. Overall, we feel that Google Reviews give a trustworthy, independent, and accurate picture of what a business’s customers think about them.

NOTE: Anyone can still leave a review on any business’ BBB profile whether the business has an active BBB Franchise subscription or not. You will see that some of our members chose to leave reviews on our AHI Group, Inc BBB profile – even though we don’t have an active subscription with the BBB Franchise system – and therefore don’t have a BBB Rating.

A home care business requires fairly minimal start up costs compared to the massive upside of potential revenue and income you can drive from a successful operation. In addition to our AHI Group Lifetime Membership Fee, we recommend you have an additional $15,000 you can access during your first 6-8 months in business (credit card is fine). You will need an office address to look professional in your community but we can show you some great rates on flexible short or long term office space leasing options located in over 950 cities throughout the US with rates starting as low as $200 per month, furnished, including utilities and a shared receptionist – to give your agency a professional feel and assist you when performing potential employee interviews.