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.