Miriam Allred (00:01)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. This is your host Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with all of you. Hope your new year is off to an awesome start. Today in the lab, I am joined by John Bennett, the CEO of Sunny Days in Home Care in Pennsylvania. John, welcome to the lab.

John Bennett (00:17)
Hey, excited to be here and happy new year to everybody as well.

Miriam Allred (00:20)
Yes,

I've been looking forward to this. You will forever be one of my first guests. You probably don't even remember this, but you I interviewed you and your dad early days at Home Care Pulse for me. And you will always be the football coach turned home care CEO. And I just remember thinking then and now, like, what an incredible story. And you're still a coach and you're still a CEO and doing it all. And I just think your story and your journey is amazing. So I've been looking forward to reconnecting. It has also been.

two years since you were on Home Care U, previous podcast. And so you have been up to a lot with your business the last couple of years. so this conversation is long overdue, but I'm excited to basically just hear like where you're at, what you've been up to and how things are going. So ⁓ first and foremost, how are you doing? How are you, the family, the business, how's everything going?

John Bennett (01:07)
Yeah, we're doing pretty good. Family's great. We recently moved a little bit south of the office, got out into the country a little bit more. I'm kind of a country bumpkin at heart. I love going into the city as much as possible, but like living out in the country. So we're excited and a little bit more space out there for the kids to run around and the dog loves it and you know, all of that stuff. So family's great. ⁓ yeah, business is good. We had a lot of changes happen since the last time we've talked.

and I do a theme word every year. In 2025, our theme word was transform.

And I feel like 2025 was a very transformative year for us from a business perspective. A lot of things changed. We got out of a lot of things that we wanted to get out of and started to get in and set up for future success, things that we wanted to. So it was a very, very busy year with Transform. When I picked that late 2024, I knew that was kind of what it was going to look like. Didn't know it would be quite so transformative, but it definitely was and that definitely fit. So yeah, was a lot of changes, but

I feel really good about everything right now and good about the direction we're going. And I think I have a really good team in place here and I'm excited for what we're gonna do this year in 2026.

Miriam Allred (02:24)
Amazing. I love that concept theme word. And for 2025, it was transform. So let's start with kind of a state of the company. Again, you have had a lot of changes and that's really what we're going to unpack today is your org chart and what's centralized, what's decentralized. You've gone through M&A and you're rolling everything up and rebranding. And so I reached out to you I was like, I just want to pick your brain and you just tell us where you're at and how things are going. But let's start with kind of a state of the company for those that don't know you or don't know Sunny Days very well.

⁓ I'll just kind of like rapid fire through some of these demo demographic questions and you can kind of just hit them hit them quickly. So first and foremost, where is headquarters and how many offices do you guys have today?

John Bennett (02:58)
Perfect. ⁓

So headquarters is just south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ⁓ and we have four offices, actually five offices now. ⁓ We have three located in Pennsylvania, all over Western Pennsylvania, ⁓ one in the upper peninsula of Michigan that serves Michigan and Northern Wisconsin. And we actually just opened an office ⁓ in Eastern Ohio and Boardman Ohio just outside of Youngstown. So we don't have any new clients or caregivers there yet. We literally just opened it about two weeks ago.

Miriam Allred (03:31)
Okay, congrats on that. How many of those were via acquisition?

John Bennett (03:37)
Yeah, so we had our initial Sunny Days company. We started from, you know, ground zero. And then one of our other Pennsylvania locations, we acquired it, but when it had 300 hours of care per week, maybe doing about 350,000 in business. And now this year we've grown that to, we're doing about 7,000 hours of care per week, about 8 million in business. So was technically an acquisition, but we've grown it. had other company in Pennsylvania, we acquired it doing about 10,000 hours of care.

⁓ 9,9500 ⁓ doing close to about 10 and a half million dollars in revenue ⁓ and it stayed about the same we haven't really grown it haven't declines been about the same and then ⁓ our last company up in the upper peninsula of michigan we acquired it it was about 600 hours of care per week ⁓ just under a million in revenue ⁓ and now we're doing about 4 000 hours of care per week up there ⁓

and a little over close to about 5.2, 5.3 million in revenue. So we've had three acquisitions, ⁓ but grown two of them significantly. We just have really great directors and boots on the ground teams in place. Then obviously Ohio is a fresh start. There's a word for that, blue ocean or something, don't know, green field, whatever it is. But Ohio is a fresh start, a company that we've opened on our own. So we're excited for that.

Miriam Allred (04:47)
He

Amazing. How many office employees across the entire company ballpark?

John Bennett (05:03)
Yeah, we have around 65 ⁓ at this point. ⁓ and that's, would say management, our model is a little bit different with our field managers. So out of 65, ⁓ a little over half of those are in the field. So our actual office staff is closer to 30.

Miriam Allred (05:07)
Okay.

Okay, awesome. And we're going to unpack all of this and I'm getting all these questions because this is going to be like the basis of the conversation. ⁓ Approximately like roster size, how many clients, caregivers again across the state of the company?

John Bennett (05:33)
Yeah, so we have just under a thousand clients. ⁓ think last week we had maybe 980. So we had and then we have about 1100 employees total. So a little over a thousand about thousand thirty or so thousand thirty to thousand forty caregivers.

Miriam Allred (05:48)
Okay,

awesome. And then payer mix. What's kind of the payer breakdown?

John Bennett (05:53)
Yeah, so payor break down, I'll break it into two categories. So in Pennsylvania, the payor break down is about 85 % Medicaid, 10 % VA, 5 % private pay. And then up in Michigan and Northern Wisconsin, we're 45 % VA, 45 % Medicaid, and 10 % private pay. So a stronger VA mix up there at that location.

Miriam Allred (06:17)
Okay, amazing, amazing. just for context setting, last couple of years you've been on M&A mode, but right now you're in implementation. You've kind of gotten the business to this point and now it's execution. Does that feel accurate?

John Bennett (06:35)
Yeah, we were on, I mean, we grew organically significantly, right? And then went to M M&A mode, had a step back. think we had talked about it on our last podcast, one of our acquisitions. had committed Medicaid fraud well before we acquired it. And we essentially were blacklisted, if you will, for a few years, dealing with the attorney general and government. We didn't do anything wrong, but we had to clean it up. couldn't get a loan, couldn't do any more acquisitions. And essentially we were playing defense for

couple of years. Couldn't really make a lot of changes because there was just a lot of moving parts from a legal standpoint. ⁓ So we were kind of stuck ⁓ and 2025 we were able to get out of that, get the investigation closed, get our loan paid off, get a new financial partner.

and really start to poise ourselves to, we wanna get back and continue to do some M&A. That's on our goal list for 2026 to do another acquisition this year. But also, we are setting things up to do organic growth as well. ⁓ So there's a lot. So right now we're in a process of restructuring, rebranding. We know that... ⁓

We want to really expand and do a lot of big things. And right now, mean, if you combine the math, we're doing a significant amount of hours, right around 37,000 hours of care per week total. It's a lot of hours. And I want to structure us in a way with my team and I that we're putting in place. We want to be able to have, you know, get the 50 as the next goal, and then from there to 100, right? Which I know sounds ambitious, but I think we have the team in place to do it. And so the moves are making.

Miriam Allred (07:57)
Wow.

John Bennett (08:14)
may not need to be made right now at 37,000 but they're gonna need to be made at some point so we're just kind of overhauling it and we're setting ourselves up so it's already in place so we can hit 50 and then hit 100.

Miriam Allred (08:26)
Incredible. And you've come out the other side of the Medicaid fraud. You're jogging my memory on that, I don't spy any gray hairs in your beard or hair. So I'm glad you've come out the other side because I know that was like a nightmare. ⁓ And that's probably an understatement. You lived it. But here you are out the other side and achieving like incredible goals. You just said it. Thirty seven thousand hours of care per week. That is

John Bennett (08:39)
Thank

Miriam Allred (08:51)
Incredible. Can I ask ballpark revenue what that equates to across the business?

John Bennett (08:56)
Yeah, so Pennsylvania is the lowest reimbursed state out of every adjacent state, right? So our average bill rate in Pennsylvania is like $20.60 an hour because we're in two different regions. You go to Michigan and we're like $25 an hour, right? Ohio, it's like $28-ish, right? So Pennsylvania is just significantly lower than everybody else. So you figure if you do about thousand hours of care per week in Pennsylvania, that equates to just over a million in revenue. So pretty easy correlation. You do 4,000 hours, it's about 4 million in

So 37,000 hours, we did just over 40 million in revenue last year, which our goal was to break 40, we did. So we were pretty excited about that.

Miriam Allred (09:37)
And the sky is the limit, man. The sky is the limit for you guys. Last demographic question. You are structured as a holding company, which I think is interesting. Like that was an intentional path that you guys have gone down. Explain a little bit about the thinking about how the business is structured and why you went the holding route.

John Bennett (09:52)
Yeah, so initially we just had Sunny Days, right? Sunny Days and Home Care, that was our initial company. ⁓ And then we acquired Compatti, which was another one of our companies, and it was just owned by ownership. There was no entity in place. And then we started to, guess, become a little more sophisticated and talk to some different people, some attorneys, which I love attorneys.

Talked to them more than I would like, but there's some really great people out there do a great job. ⁓ Not only in keeping people updated, but they're just experts on how to protect businesses and make sure that things are set up and structured the right way. We talked to some of them and talked to some people that had went through some business owners, that had went through some horror stories and really felt like, excuse me, if we wanted to get to a certain level that we needed to put a holding company in place and then have all of our operating entities underneath the holding company. ⁓

from a let's protect ourselves like if you've heard a term corporate veil piercing the corporate veil ⁓ and so we followed everything they said to a tee we also opened what we call a shared services division so myself and a lot of the centralized leadership team are employed it's essentially the administrative branch ⁓ from the holding company that that oversees you know each one of the operating entities ⁓ and corporate veil people hear it and they're that's legalese and it is but when we had that fraud investigation at

one location, if we didn't have ourselves structured so that the corporate veil was protected, we would have had, it was already a big issue, it have been a lot bigger. ⁓ So I've lived, if anybody's like, do I need to do this? ⁓

Maybe you don't need to today, maybe you'll never will, but if something happens, I could sleep better knowing that we had everything structured from a legal standpoint in a way that protected each operating entity from the other one kind of pulling over into it. So we did it out of abundance of caution, but also to make sure that ⁓ we set ourselves up in a way that made the most sense.

So that's kind of why. There's some other things too. Like you think about like, so workers comp, right? Because they're all owned the same. How do you pay workers comp? Well, we pay it out of our shared services division, right? Because it's under the holding company. And then we sweep up, this company pays X percent, this company pays X percent. Workers comp is easy to calculate, right? Based off employees and kind of payroll and everything. ⁓ But we're paying it out of one location. So it makes sense to have that holding company set up in the structure with all of the different entities. just, makes things flow.

easier as well besides the legal ease it's just operationally it's it's just more efficient.

Miriam Allred (12:25)
So did you have the holding company in place before the acquisitions or it came into place after the acquisitions?

John Bennett (12:32)
So we want to start our plan in 2021. We actually thought about selling the business and we met with an advisor and he said, you know, you guys have a really great product here, a great platform. You need to start acquiring companies. If you want to stick around in this business and you guys seem to genuinely care for people, you should start acquiring. you're one of the good companies out there that's actually doing good work and you're in it for the right reasons. Like, and you're sophisticated from a, you know, from an operational standpoint. So let's get this set up.

So we set it up at that point. We had done the acquisition of Compati back in 2017. We actually acquired another company, Daily Care, had it two years, working with people with intellectual disabilities, which we're getting back, we're working on that this year too, but we sold that company in 19. So we had a couple little things we did, but we weren't really focused on M M&A. And then in 21, when we made the decision not to sell.

we really doubled down on, let's get this set up right so we can go aggressively do M&A and some new organic locations as well. So that's when we put it into place. But it took a couple months to get it all structured and set up and everything.

Miriam Allred (13:36)
Yeah, and the reason I ask you are like advising like owners if you get to this point, like this is a good path to take. I was curious if you wish you would have done it sooner or do you actually feel like when you did it made the most sense?

John Bennett (13:42)
I need it.

⁓ I think when we did it made the most sense, you know, if you just have one location, maybe even two, I don't know that it's necessarily to get that in place. I would say if I was starting over again, as soon as I open my second location, I would set it up. That would be my recommendation. I didn't get away without it. ⁓

But I know I have a good friend up in the Connecticut area and we talked a lot about this and you've interviewed him before but his second location ⁓ he has a hold co and everything set up as well and I know it's working really well for them. ⁓ So I would recommend if you have a second one you know getting that set up it just makes things work a lot better and it adds protection.

Miriam Allred (14:27)
I love the honesty already and even you saying like you were ready to sell a few years ago and I've also heard you say you consider the franchise route and then you went on M&A mode like just talk a little bit about like that side of the stress and the complexity of this business like You're not the first to want out even of a successful company I think people might look at you and be like wait you were thinking about selling you were so successful and you have this great business but it also is hard and wears you down and it's

Does it get easier in some extent? Yes. And in other ways, no. But I don't know, just transparently like talk a little bit about like your journey in making these big decisions and deciding to stay in it, et cetera.

John Bennett (15:10)
Yeah, so in 2018 and 2019, at the beginning of 2018, we were doing 7,000 hours of care per week out of Sunny Days. We had just acquired Compati, which was doing 300, just to say 7,000. By the end of 2019, between the two companies, we were doing almost 16,000 hours of care. So we more than doubled in size in two years. That was a lot of work to get to that point. And then in 2020, COVID happened and

just COVID wore me down to be honest with you. ⁓ I'm sure a lot of people had the same impact on. I mean, was rough. mean, just dealing with...

At the beginning, a recommendation was to send people into nursing homes. And I still remember one of the ladies, she had COVID, we didn't have, it was very early on, right? We didn't have any PPE and we said, you need to go to a nursing home because you need care and they're gonna provide care for you. She was crying because that's the last place you go before you go to, she said, the next place I'll go is gonna be in the funeral home.

And she was crying on the phone and that really, mean, we have to make tough decisions like that as home care, leaders and executives and everything, but that type of stuff, and that happened a lot, Thankfully she got out and was okay, but there's so many stories like that that are just mentally, I felt like mentally beat up after 2020. I mean, it wasn't just 2020, I the first half of 2021, I felt like that was the same. And...

there were so many government incentives to assist people during COVID, but then they kind of got, ⁓ I would say people kind of took advantage of them and milk them longer than necessary, probably into 2021. So it was extremely difficult to find caregivers. was just, it was a tough time, right? And we felt like maybe we do want to get out of this and, look at doing something else. ⁓ So that was, that was kind of where we were at, but I think.

Miriam Allred (17:01)
And then what relit

the fire? Yeah, what conversation like turned it around for you? Was it the legal conversations or conversations with outside sources? What brought you back?

John Bennett (17:11)
⁓ Talking to one of our one advisors who I still work with, I'm in four years in now, and him just saying like, you know, I...

And this is his viewpoint on business, any business, right? Especially true when you're working with people. But there's really three types. There's one who, they care about is money, right? There's one who all they care about is the actual operations of the business, but they're not savvy and not smart with money and how to handle things, right? We see that a lot in home care. A lot of people start home care because of something that happened in their personal life, and they're amazing at covering shifts, but they don't know how to ensure that they're collecting on their billings and all of that. And then the third type is...

you can be really financially savvy and really compassionate and care about the people you're taking care of. And I feel like that's what we are. And I think of some of my other friends in the industry who I would describe as that. And when he described us, he said, you you guys really care about people, but you also are really savvy in how you have your business structured. Like, and you he said, which this is how I describe, we focus on hours, right? That's a big thing we focus on. He said, you do a lot of good.

And so when I talked to my team last year, I we did around 1.8 million hours. And I describe it as we did 1.8 million hours of good. Think about what you can do in an hour for somebody. Right? Just think about if you've been a caregiver, think most people probably listening to this have caregived whether it was for a loved one or professionally or for a neighbor, even a child, right? How many good things can you do for somebody in an hour?

and times that by how many hours your business is doing, that's how much good you're doing in the world. That's a really good feeling. And that concept really got me excited and I was like, man, we can really do a lot of good for a lot of people, especially people that are vulnerable. ⁓ So that really lit the fire. And then kind of secondarily,

I just saw some instances at the time with some nursing homes and there's some great nursing homes out there, but there's a lot that aren't. And I saw some instances that, and there was an increase, I had a couple of family members that some predatory calls trying to get people to give up information. And I almost feel like if you're a good home care agency, we do a lot of things that...

we're not supposed to be doing with ensuring that people are okay. We're not getting paid for, not contracted to, but we're doing them because it's the right thing to do and this is a vulnerable people. And I've talked to our company and our management team sometimes that we're almost like the sheepdog. ⁓

And maybe it's like, I know it's kind of a military concept being sheepdog, but I think it does resonate. A lot of times we have to protect the clients that we're taking care of and the kind of this more vulnerable population of elderly people, especially with all the technology that's out there right now. ⁓ I just feel an obligation to try to make sure that I think of people as my grandparents, right? And what would I want someone to do to protect them when they don't know? that kind of that protective, I used to be an offensive lineman and my job was to protect people, right?

Miriam Allred (20:08)
and

John Bennett (20:09)
maybe that's where it came from, but we really try to emphasize that at our company and we have some really great employees that they go above and beyond and do so many things that they're not getting paid to do, right? But it's the right thing to do to help that elderly person be safe and not get taken advantage of. So thinking about protecting people ⁓ and doing good for them, ⁓ it's like altruistic, but that's what got me excited again.

Miriam Allred (20:34)
thank you so much for sharing that was super vulnerable and I'm putting you on the spot with that. But one point eight million hours of good in twenty twenty five. Like how can you not just like get the chills hearing that? And I agree when you have one conversation, one interaction, you change one life, you feel incredible. Like that's what this is all about. That's what life is all about is helping people and doing good and serving the one. But you do that at scale. Like there's nothing better than this. So I don't know. On my behalf, I'm so glad that you stayed in it because

listening to hear you say, you 50,000 hours of care a week to a hundred thousand hours of care. Like you're impacting millions of lives through your business. And I think there's no better way to, to live than to do what you're doing. And I'll honestly, I know that's like really broad, but I honestly think it's the best use of your time.

John Bennett (21:22)
No, it's...

It is, and I have a special connection, I guess, with the people that we take care of. I we have some really great private pay clients as well. I when there's a couple thousand hours of that, but predominantly Medicaid and VA. And the people we're taking care of mostly are lower income individuals. And there's a lot of agencies out there that are getting out of that, right? And there's a need for people to get care on Medicaid. we, mean...

I have some really good friends who just run private pay agencies and they're still doing amazing things, right? So I don't want to talk negatively about them because they're doing just as good as we are and even better in certain things. But we just really feel that there's people out there that other people overlook that are maybe even more vulnerable or people don't care about. And those are the people we want to find. Those are the people we want to help.

⁓ and pour into, right? And so that's one of the reasons we're expanding. And then we see it, and I'll tell you, maybe this is gonna come up later, but we're in a process of expanding into the Northern Panhandle West Virginia as well. West Virginia has a certificate of need state, ⁓ and so they don't award new contracts until ⁓ there's enough people that want services and aren't receiving them.

And there's enough people right now that want services and aren't receiving them. And so we were approached about it and we're going to be going into there as well and opening a location hopefully here the next few months or in the process of it. And there's right now like there's 86 people that I'm aware of in a couple of the counties we're going into that aren't getting care. ⁓

Can we help those 86 people and do good in their lives? And that's what motivates me. I think about 86 people right now that should be getting help at art. Let's go help them. ⁓

Miriam Allred (23:07)
Exactly. There's

people that need the care that aren't getting it. And we have the ability to go out and serve them, find them, serve them and give them the care that they need, that they deserve. I agree, a life is a life. In private pay versus Medicaid, it's all important, it's all essential. But I love your kind of personal mantra and mission to go out and really help the underserved, the forgotten, the people that are kind of like in the shadows. They also need great care as well.

John Bennett (23:10)
Yes.

They do, they do. And the margins aren't great, right? So that's the unappealing part. They're not great margins, but that's why you have to have your business structured as efficiently as possible. ⁓ it's tricky, but they need help.

Miriam Allred (23:46)
Yes, and you can beat the margin drum all day because you are living it and breathing it every single day. like you are doing, what seems impossible to many others. So ⁓ let's let's talk about operations and let's talk about your org chart. I think this is really interesting. What stands out to me. So I had you send me your org chart and also your KPIs for your administrators.

For a large robust organization, you keep it really tight and really simple. So kudos to you for that approach. I think it's like so lean and clean and I'm just like impressed by that. ⁓ I wanna talk about what's centralized and what is decentralized and the evolution of like centralizing your operations because I think this is relevant to businesses of really any size. But like you said, even that second location, that third location, like this starts to become the bottleneck, the headache.

the sticky point for everyone is what are we doing at HQ and what is out in the field and how do we strike that balance? And so you've been through this process the last couple of years. So just high level today, what functions are centralized and what is not centralized just to set the stage there.

John Bennett (24:52)
Yeah, so when I say today, like we're going to be there in two weeks with what we're doing. But finance is centralized. And we have finance really broken into two categories. We have revenue cycle management. All right. So you're billing collections, essentially. And then we have payroll and benefits. So those are the two categories we have for finance. So that's centralized. As we've done acquisitions, we've picked up players from each of our acquisitions that were on finance.

or partially in finance and we made them fully someone into finance. But those are centralized. We had that centralized really before acquisitions as well.

⁓ So just maybe zoom out a second. My philosophy on running a home care business is to have the people in the field focused on the people in the field, our field managers focused on the clients and caregivers and automate the heck out of everything else. And automate might mean somebody else doing it, right? It's not actually like automated, but it's automated for the people in the field in their mind, it's happening and they don't have to do it. And that's been our strategy. So finance, central.

compliance, centralized, although there are a lot of compliance tasks being performed by people out in the field, Like EVV, think of that. ⁓ I try to design everything based off the RACI chart, if you're familiar with that. So each task, somebody's responsible for doing it, somebody's accountable, could be the same person, often not. And then somebody can be consulted and somebody may need to be informed. So for instance, clocking in and clocking out of a shift, right?

that correctly. Who's responsible for doing that? Your caregiver is responsible for doing that. Who's ultimately accountable for that? The caregiver supervisor. We call that person a field manager, you may call them a scheduler, director, whatever it might be. Who may need to be consulted? Maybe there's glitches with know, AxisCare, WellSky, whatever your system is, AlayaCare, whatever, know, there all the different ones out there. And maybe you need to consult IT or consult someone from those teams. I know we talked to WellSky.

a regular basis. that person may need to be consulted and who needs to be informed. Right. So we have someone in charge of compliance. They're tracking our EVV because sometimes we have some payer incentives if we do really well with EVV. So they need to be informed so they can keep tabs on that. Right. So take a pick a task in your company. You can Google RACI R A C I and it's it's been I mean we've been doing that since I've been involved. I took it from my dad used to work for Komatsu used to be joined mining. They use the RACI

and he kind of taught me how to use it and now I use that as well and it's really really helpful. We don't have it officially on paper for every task but it's the mindset of how we think about tasks and it's been really helpful with designing everything.

Miriam Allred (27:46)
Yeah, that's great. So yeah, RCM and billing and payroll centralized, compliance centralized, but with tasks out in the field. Keep going.

John Bennett (27:51)
Yep.

Clients centralized, yep, yep,

yep. And then we have our onboarding centralized as well. ⁓ And it's really the collection of all the documents, right? We'll have like the initial screening, but collecting, there's so many different documents that we have to collect for caregivers in a very some state to state. Now we've been in multiple states. I mean, it's kind of a pain. So that's all centralized. And then it becomes decentralized at the end because our field managers

ultimately interview and have the final say on whether they should hire this applicant or not to become a caregiver. So we centralize the onboarding process of collecting everything. And we do onboarding and hiring at the same time. That's different than some entities. know for Andrew in St. Louis, he kind of does it the same way. A lot of people do it differently. ⁓ But the document collection, you could even think of hiring, right? If you do the more traditional model, hiring people is centralized. Onboarding could be centralized.

or decentralized depending on your setup. But for us, that's centralized. And then, so that's kind of all the back office aspects. The part that's decentralized is ops. So we have a head of ops that's central, my executive director of ops, and we have a director of operations at each location. Then we have field managers that live out in the communities that they're serving. And that's decentralized because if you call our company and you are looking to get an intake, let's say Newcastle's

It's an hour from our office, right? Hour and 10 minutes.

it's going to feel like you're getting an intake done from a very small mom and pop entity that's very personal and is right there and cares for you because that's what that field manager is. They almost function as like a satellite office. They're right there. They're in the community. They know the caregivers. They know the clients. So it's got that very personal feel despite our size. And that's kind of our secret sauce. So that's decentralized always will be because that's what allows us to maintain that close personal feel and keep that personal.

and not become so corporate and cold that we're not connected with our people.

Miriam Allred (29:59)
And that's going to remain decentralized or how are you thinking about that? Because like you said, like that's the secret sauce. You need people out in these communities to keep that like personal feel. So, and just to jog back, director of operations, you have executive director of operations reports to you, director of operations at each office, and then field managers that report to that director of operations. And then I believe caregivers that report to those field managers. Is that correct?

John Bennett (30:03)
Yes.

Yep. Yep.

Correct, yes. So we have caregivers that report to the field managers. ⁓ And then the other layer that we have in there ⁓ is our on-call team. So right now our on-call team, have a ⁓ on-call manager. She reports to the executive director of ops and then we have on-call supervisors. So we're in a process of centralizing all of that. ⁓ We've been working with Zingage, We do a lot of caregiver engagement stuff with them, which is great. But we're also working with them

our on-call ⁓ so they're the ones that are answering our calls right now ⁓ at our main location. ⁓ We're perfecting it. I'm extremely OCD so we're going on perfecting everything with them and we're really really close and then we're going to be rolling it out here hopefully next month to every one of our locations so that will be centralized as well. Obviously we're using AI to assist us with that.

But once again, that's the automating aspect, right? Automate everything we can so that people can focus on the people. Because we want our on-call team not bogged down by like dealing with like, hey, can you let Grandma Jones know I'm gonna be 15 minutes late? Like, hey, I can handle that. But hey, Grandma Jones just fell and I'm not sure what to do. We want a live person handling that, right? So that's the live people dealing with more important issues.

So I'm sure we're going to see more of that with AI with every kind of facet of life. ⁓ But we're trying to use it to centralize and allow our people to focus on our people.

Miriam Allred (31:54)
Do you foresee any detriment to centralizing the on-call? As you expand into West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, you're in these other states. I imagine it's fine to keep on-call centralized, but I don't know. guess my mind just goes to, there any reason to keep it decentralized? Or you feel like based on what you know, it's fine to centralize?

John Bennett (32:12)
So, so

yeah, so centralized structurally, right? But we still hope to have a lot of our on-call team are caregivers and that's kind of a stepping stone. have a career path, right? You're a caregiver and then you go to on-call and you can be like a, what we would call a case manager. You're like half caregiver, half manager and then a field manager. And ultimately we have a senior field manager position now, director. So there's a, there's there's a career path now. But.

We have a lot of caregivers that are on call on our team. So the idea is, even though they're reporting to somebody at like headquarters, if you will, ⁓ the on call at each location are caregivers that are familiar with that area. ⁓

So they'll all be reporting to the same person ⁓ and we'll run it through the same system kind of in a sense. But the actual on call people that are taking the calls when they're escalated from the system ⁓ will be caregivers that are kind of in that area. So we've had people do it from out of state to fill in and everything and it's went really well, it's went smoothly. know a lot of companies kind of farm out their on call to whether it's like a VA solution or something else. ⁓ But we think that's a really great career opportunity for our caregivers and

It's kind of a good testing ground, a proven ground if you will, if our caregivers can handle the phone aspect of it. ⁓

you know, then potentially they're in the top of the list whenever we need to hire another field manager in the region that they're in. You know, they're one of the first people that we would reach out to and tell them to apply for the job. So, and some people do it and say, I just want to be a caregiver. I don't want to do it. And we have some people, I think of two of our employees right now who are phenomenal caregivers and phenomenal on-call. I've talked to both of them about being field managers and they both have said,

No interest. We love what we're doing and they're really great at on-call, right? So it just depends. I like that, you know, it just, once again, if they're local to that area, even though we're centralizing how it's reporting and flowing there, they just have a better feel of the people in the region and everything and may even know like locations better and all people don't like to drive over this river, right? We get that in certain areas. So that's our thought. So that was a long answer to your question, Mariam, but

Miriam Allred (33:54)
We're good.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. No,

that's great. I want you to just kind of dial through your thinking. Like, how do you think about these things? My next question is going to feel broad stroke, but I want to see where your brain goes of what parts are most challenging to going from decentralized to centralized. Like, you've done this with different aspects of the business. I'm sure there's a lot of challenges, but what are like the most challenging components of

John Bennett (34:22)
That's the setup.

Miriam Allred (34:46)
transitioning or transforming the business to this new structure and also maybe like this new way of thinking.

John Bennett (34:54)
So the biggest challenge that comes to mind initially is the name change. ⁓ So we acquired the company in Michigan and renamed it Sunny Days, right? We acquired, since the last time we've talked, we had an acquisition in North Carolina that didn't work out. ⁓ So it sounds like all sunshine and rainbows here at Sunny Days, but we did have a failed acquisition. ⁓ We learned more from that than any of our successful acquisitions, right? Which oftentimes is the case, right? You learn a lot from your failures. But we rebranded that as well.

I have been hesitant to rebrand the three companies in Pennsylvania, Sunny Days, ⁓ the other two. I'm a big analogy person, right? So I'm always like, well, this company is really fishing for sea bass and this company is fishing for salmon and this company is fishing for tuna. So if we rebrand them all and have everybody fishing for salmon, then we're not gonna catch as many fish and we're not gonna be able to help as many people and not do as good, And because the referral sources were really different. ⁓

That was when the acquisitions and our hoarding company was kind of structured back in 22, even in 23. I think over the course of 24 and 25, just some things have changed in Pennsylvania and referral sources are not that different anymore. And all three companies are kind of fishing for all three types of fish. So there wasn't necessarily a, no, we're gonna lose referral sources if we make this change. And so...

you know, that was always something I drug my feet with. But now that we're opening up Ohio, we're gonna be opening up in West Virginia, ⁓ we want everything to be Sunny Days. Our goal is to become a regional player kind of around the Great Lakes region. And in doing so, we feel like we really need to have everything be Sunny Days So centralizing everything, I'm a-

also want to make sure that the names are the same. Advertising, we can pull our stuff together. mean, we used to franchise, right? So we're kind of structuring it somewhat like a franchise entity. So if you're on, listen to this and you're a franchisor, like think of that a little bit with how we're setting it up. there's people that, there's some good things about the previous names that we have here in Pennsylvania for our acquisitions. And so some of that like brand loyalty and know, family connection too at our one location.

which is tough to like, this was kind of family legacy to change the name, but ultimately it's gonna be for the good. So I would say that, ⁓ just some of the feelings and stuff involved with the name change. And then the other thing is...

People don't like change. People who are resistant to change, even if it's good change. So telling somebody, hey, you're doing a really great job at this, but we're gonna tweak your job and change it. And so now you're becoming less of a generalist and more of a specialist, which I think is, that's kind of the direction we're heading as we grow. We need more specialists and less generalists. When you're smaller, you need generalists, right? And people questioning, well,

Why do we need to do this? If I'm killing it and I'm doing a good job and my company's doing good, why do I need to change? And ⁓ explaining like...

Miriam Allred (37:51)
Mm-hmm.

John Bennett (37:54)
We're setting ourselves, everything's great now, but we're setting ourselves up to hit 50 and hit 100. So we need to make these changes in order for us to do that because we're kind of at capacity or close to capacity with where you are now. So getting people to buy into this is for the greater good of the company. And if it's for the greater good of the company, ultimately it's for the greater good of our caregivers and clients. That's went fairly well, but that's been the thing that we've had to emphasize and.

Sell people the most on not just sell people convince people ⁓ And and I would also say I mean we have to we have to walk the walk now, So we've we've told everybody like we've talked the talk. This is what we're doing This is why we got to deliver now that it is really the best thing and and I've explained everybody to be flexible and there's gonna be some bugs that need to you know worked out but ⁓

We got to deliver now on, we said we were gonna do it, this is gonna be what's better and it has to be now. So there's some pressure on my leadership team from that. But yeah, the name change and then kind of the why do we have to change if things are going good? Those are the biggest things.

Miriam Allred (38:57)
Yes. Yes.

And my mind goes to the second because I've talked to other leaders about this. People change, roles change. Sometimes they don't change together. It's not linear. You know, have good people doing good work, but the nature of their role changes. I love that they go from generalist to specialist, but they like being a generalist or there's certain parts of their job that they're willing to do. There's other parts of their job that they're not willing to do. that is the...

John Bennett (39:11)
Yes.

Miriam Allred (39:25)
like the puzzle that you're trying to solve as a leader with this evolution of centralization is who fits where and not plugging people in to plug people in. It's it's I'd imagine a lot of conversation of what do they want? What does the company need and how do we fit people where they want to be and where they're supposed to be? How is that going? Like you said, it's a challenge, but how are you like mitigating that? Are you having a lot of one on one conversations? Are you?

John Bennett (39:47)
Yeah.

Miriam Allred (39:53)
like losing good people because it's not a right fit. I'm just curious like the state of how that is going.

John Bennett (39:58)
Sure,

So ⁓ it's going well. We haven't lost anybody yet, ⁓ which is good. I don't think we're going to lose anybody as one person that I would say is a little iffy, ⁓ which would be unfortunate, but ⁓ is what it is, unfortunately. I don't know how else to say it. I don't mean to sound cold, but... ⁓

But we've had to design it. I sometimes am a people pleaser, naturally, I don't know. ⁓ And I've got ⁓ more and more away from that because when you really focus on pleasing people, it can be detrimental to the company. When you're a CEO, you can't focus on that all the time. So we're really looking at it from the perspective of what's best for the business. And when I say business, I'm talking about our clients, ultimately. Our caregivers are extremely important, but our number one job is deliver care. ⁓ And so what's the best?

for our care delivery and then secondarily kind of 1B if that's 1A what's the best for the people that are delivering care our caregivers and build back from there and set it up and structure everything and create these positions to make sure that that's getting done the best it can possibly be done now and at 50,000 hours and at hundred thousand hours right I know there's gonna be changes in between so just say 50 for now and then figuring out who fits those positions the best. ⁓

somebody who was on a leadership team at one of my locations and she's no longer going to be on the leadership team and she doesn't have anybody reporting to her but now she's in the holding company in an expanded role. ⁓ That was a tearful conversation. was...

You know, she was very, very adamant about, very passionate about being on a leadership team and passionate about the people that report to her and felt like she was being demoted or punished in this process. And that was tough. And she's worked with me for a while and she's just, she's an amazing person. And it pulled my heartstrings some, but I know that what we're putting here is going to give her more opportunities for growth in the future. ⁓

It's gonna get her out of her comfort. A lot of it's comfort zone, right? She's gonna get out of her comfort zone. She's gonna have to you know, expand her horizons a little bit and be pushed a little bit. But I really think she'll excel in this role. And ultimately it's gonna really, really help us with identifying the best placement for, she's really gonna be focused on, we have all these leads coming in.

where's the best place for them to go in Pennsylvania and with which field manager. That's a major part of her position. And then coming out, where do we need to have ads at and really communicating with the field managers is the most efficient place and way to put the ads so we can get applicants. She does well in that. She's going to be specializing in that now. That was a really hard conversation. I thought I may lose her. She's excited.

nervous, sad to be pulled from another role, but we're designing it on what's the best for the company and then figuring out who fits. It's almost like Tetris or a puzzle. So we're doing right now, so what's an actual tactic that we're using right now? We are doing a two week time study.

Miriam Allred (42:55)
Yeah.

John Bennett (43:03)
and I have printed out, you know, the chart. There's some more complicated time studies, literally a detailed explanation of the task. It's got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. How many hours did you spend? So today's Tuesday, right? How many hours did I spend on this on Tuesday?

And I want to know, like, we haven't gone to the nearest 15 minute increment. And I told everyone, like, if you're only in the office for eight hours and you put eight hours of tasks on there, I'm not going to trust anything you're saying because I know you get lunch. I know you use the restroom, right? Know you may, like, your spouse may call you or text you or your girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever. Like, so if it comes out to seven hours and 30 minutes, like, I know I'm being realistic, right? Like, if you're here for more than eight hours and you have eight hours on there, great. But.

We have some people that are really great, but they're eight to four and that's it. ⁓

So, but we're taking that and we're gonna put that kind of all together to get an idea on tasks. We know what everybody's task is, but how long is it taking them? And which days are they doing it most frequently? And then meeting as a leadership team, of locking ourselves in a room for a morning and getting that all pieced together ⁓ with really finalizing this restructure of the office. So that two week time study is something that's really gonna be helpful for us here. We have to get everybody to do it, everybody to buy in, everybody to be honest.

That's the big thing. But that's one of the things that we're really looking forward. It's going to be a huge tool in getting this done kind of as efficient as possible.

Miriam Allred (44:28)
Yes, and makes all of the like intangibles tangible. I, from my personal experience being an employee at companies that did something like this, like it sucks while you're doing it, but it's super helpful. And it's also very much like self-reflection. I don't know if you're a big fan of EOS. I've worked for companies that have been, and I actually think there's good tools and resources, but the GWC get it, want it, have the capacity to do it is a great tool. And then there's also another matrix. I'm forgetting what it's called, but it's kind of like the like it, love it, dislike it, don't love it. And you kind of break down your role into like,

John Bennett (44:37)
tough one.

Yeah.

Miriam Allred (44:58)
what you like and what you want to do, what you don't like and you don't want to do. It's so helpful for leadership to understand how you view your role. And then you can, again, back to the Tetris board, it's like, okay, we've got everybody's matrixes and their thoughts and feelings on their role. And then how do we like kind of plug and play and figure out where everybody fits? And like you said, especially when you have good employees that you don't want to lose, you want to make it work. You want to figure out where they fit to keep them on board.

John Bennett (45:21)
Yeah,

this would be way easier if we just said these are the positions, this is who's in it, deal with it. Like, that's not real life or I mean, maybe that's like ultra corporate and you don't really care about your people, right? ⁓ So that's not us, that's not who we are. So that's why we're taking the time to do all this. ⁓

Miriam Allred (45:29)
But that's not real life. That's not real business.

John Bennett (45:42)
We want our employees to be happy in the roles that we're in and you talk about like it love it like I have traction and stuff over on my bookshelf I'm not like an EOS disciple, but I'm influenced by a lot of it and Talking about like it love it dislike it and all these things I explained to our team like let's say you have 12 tasks right now that you're doing You can't just keep all nine that you love and the three that you dislike get rid of them And then one person gets all the dislike tasks that person's not gonna stick around like every job has tasks that you don't enjoy doing and has

that you like and has tasks that you love. You're gonna have some that you don't like because there's tasks in this business that everybody does that they don't like. It's just part of life. So just know that it's not gonna be all the most amazing thing and you're gonna love every single aspect because it's not fair to dump everything on one person and it's not good business practice.

Miriam Allred (46:30)
Yes, exactly. I'm curious, You have grown so substantially and we talk about like buy-in for all of these administrators. When you talk about going from 37,000 hours to 50,000 hours, are your people on board right now, are they mission motivated or are they money motivated or both? And why is that? And do you have both?

Because you also, talked a minute ago about like rewards and bonuses and like incentivizing people. I'm just curious how much your team is motivated by this growth and by the monetary incentives that come with this type of growth.

John Bennett (47:09)
Yeah, so ⁓ we've structured particularly our field manager position, right? Anybody else, impact and growth. ⁓ Most people are WIFM people, right? What's in it for me? Even if you really want to do good in the world, right? Ultimately, people are WIFM people. So ⁓ we've structured our field manager position that our mission, which is to take care of as many people as possible. And they should have, we have 98.5 % or better shift coverage across the board, right? ⁓ If you ask me like, what's the main job of a field

manager, really high shift coverage because we say when we're going to be there, we're going to be there and growth and growth means we get more people, which means we're taking care of more people, which means we're doing more good in the world and helping more people. Right. People aren't sitting at home without services. They're not getting sub park here where they're getting 50 % of their shift staff. Like they know if they're coming to Sunny Days, 98.5 % of their shifts are getting covered. Right. And we're going to get somebody in their home pretty quickly. So we've taken those two things, the top two priorities for field managers, um, hours.

they get paid tier pay and it's literally based on hours completed per week. And then it gets docked if their shift coverage drops below a certain threshold. Nobody's dust because we really emphasize shift coverage and the dock is significant. So are people doing it because they want to do good in the world and help people and take care of our clients? Yes. Are we also paying them and incentivizing them financially to do those good things? Yes. ⁓

So if their motivation is truly financial or if it's truly good and they don't care about the finance, it's hard to separate because we've essentially unified those two things in our company ⁓ because our company's mission is to do good. So if somebody's only motivated by money but they are doing good, I hope that seeing the good that they're doing eventually will cause them to ⁓ have motivation at least somewhat from the good that they're doing as well.

goal. But you know I've got to have some great conversations with Steve and Tweed and thinking about like what gets measured right if you get measured then that's something and I'm blanking on the particular what gets measured gets managed right and we measure those two things and they get managed really well. And I know Stephen and I have talked a lot about that and that's really how we have our company structured and designed and it's worked great so that's good.

Miriam Allred (49:17)
What gets measured gets managed. Yeah, what's managed gets repeated.

And it's actually

back to what you said earlier, which an advisor told you that you are good at both the care, the compassion and the operations and the business management. And I think the companies that thrive master both, but you have people on your team that gravitate one way or the other, but actually it can balance the team out when you have people that are highly, you know,

John Bennett (49:46)
Yes.

Miriam Allred (49:57)
financially incentivized and motivated versus people that are compassionate motivated. Like there's no right or wrong, but I was just curious, you know, like what that looks like for your team. But again, I think you as a leader set that tone to focus on both. And then you also ripple effect that down to the rest of your team of we need to be focused on both and there's value and benefit to both.

John Bennett (50:04)
Yeah.

There is, because you have people that all they think about is what their hearts are, some field managers. Who cares if we're putting all these people into overtime, we're covering the shifts. And it's like, great, we are covering the shifts, but we're losing four or five dollars per hour on these shifts and we're throwing people into overtime like this. we're not gonna stay in business very long if we're doing that all the time. So you're not thinking about it from a financial standpoint. And there's other people who like, we're gonna cover the shift and I don't care if this caregiver wants to go or not. Because then it gets their tier up higher and they make a little bit more money.

that caregiver is probably going to quit if you're kind of bullying them into covering a shift, right? So that's the two sides, right? And it does balance each other out just like you said.

Miriam Allred (50:54)
Yes,

I teased it at the beginning that I'm super impressed by the simplicity of your KPIs. I want to just go through that briefly here at the end because I think people are fascinated by how you structure these things. The things that stand out to me as well, you are very focused on hours and I want to get your take on why every business is different. But I see a lot of home care companies focused on revenue, focused on margin, focused on payer source. Like there's a lot of different ways to like

John Bennett (50:59)
you

Miriam Allred (51:23)
slice the pizza and there's no one right way, but I've always been curious as to why hours is your North Star. So has it always been that way and why is hours your primary focus across your entire organization?

John Bennett (51:38)
Yeah, so it has been that way out of the gate since the company was started. It's been hours. And why was it hours? So when my father-in-law started the company, he had came from a home health care company that really only cared about the money.

and he wanted to do a company, start a company that savvy with the way we ran things financially, but focused on the people. ⁓ So hours became the priority. Now, do we look at margin? Yes, right? It's on our KPIs. Do we look at revenue? Yes, it's on our KPIs as well, right? But hours is first because that's what we want people focused on. We want people focused on how much good are we doing for people in the community, right? And like how many hours of good did we do last?

That's a thing that people can get behind and unify on. And if the number one thing you talk to people about is margin, they become disconnected. Field managers, caregivers, they don't care about margin. They don't care about revenue. But what do they care about? How much good we're doing in the world and the hours that we're providing of care.

Now it's our job to take those hours and make sure those hours are profitable so we can stay in business and continue to expand and grow. But caregivers can generate hours. Field managers can oversee and manage and generate hours. ⁓ It's our job on the back office and with the leadership team and structure of the company to make it profitable. So that's why it's hours because that's a good thing for people to be focused on. And honestly, it's what we care about, what our company's founded on is how much good can we do in the world? And it's through the hours of care that we provide.

Miriam Allred (53:09)
I like it. One layer deeper on your KPI chart, like on your highest level is average weekly hours from both like a total perspective and also under clients and caregivers average weekly hours. Explain the thinking on that. And I'm curious, is that universal or does that have anything to do with being Medicaid heavy, the focus on average weekly hours?

John Bennett (53:23)
Yeah.

So it's it's universal for us even with the VA and private pay aspect and everything ⁓ we pay field managers weekly tier pay and something that I'm a very big believer in is

incentives when they're so far away, even if it's quarterly, people can lose focus on them. Now, do we have quarterly incentive with some people that are focused solely on growth? Sure. ⁓ But if you're looking at it from a week by week basis, ⁓ that's like now, live time. What are we doing right now that's helping people when delivering care? And that's why we do it weekly because we want to know like what's happening right now. Snapshot, what happened last week? And it's really easy. I guess it's like,

driving a lot of cars on the road now, if you start to cross over a line you get like the vibration or the beep or everything like...

When we're looking weekly, we know right away if we're starting to bump into that line and something's gone off course. If you're waiting to do it monthly or quarterly or annually or whatever, like you may be way off course, gone down a different road, the wrong direction for two months before you realize it. We can see very quickly if we start to go off course one week, all right, we're keeping an eye on this. Okay, we're even farther off course next week. Why are we off course? Why did our hours decrease? What happened? Like we were responding in live time, right? It's one of the reasons like

The live view on WellSky, we love it, because we know right away because of the color coding, is somebody not where they're supposed to be and now care is not being delivered to the client. We want to be as responsive and quick as possible in this industry because...

Sometimes people's lives depend on it, but oftentimes and maybe it's not life-threatening, but that person's gonna have a really bad day and suffer and not get what they need if we're not there and can't identify it right away. And as a company, we're not gonna be doing a good job delivering that care if we start to get off course. And if we wait too long to identify that we're off course, then it's gonna be a farther and take longer time to get back on course. So that's why we're checking in on a weekly basis.

Miriam Allred (55:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, and I think that also goes hand in hand with shift coverage. It's course correction. If there's bad behavior out there and you need to weed out maybe the bad apples or the bad behavior, shift coverage is the metric that can help you dial into that. And you said you have incredible shift coverage, like unheard of shift coverage, but I don't hear enough home care companies like focused on that and tracking it as diligently as you do. What advice would you give? There's hundreds, thousands of people listening to this podcast.

John Bennett (55:56)
Yeah.

Miriam Allred (55:56)
What

would you say to them? Like, why should they be tracking shift coverage specifically?

John Bennett (56:00)
So I've asked this question to a couple hundred people now. I'm giving you a million bucks, maybe five million, however much you want. We're gonna go buy a home care company. You can look at three metrics. What three metrics are you gonna look at?

For me, it's how many hours of care are you completing per week? Because that tells me is your company growing, declining, right? What's your margin? Because you could be completing all these hours of care, but if you don't have a great margin, your company's in the red, it's trending down, right? That tells you, like, is your company healthy from a financial standpoint? And a third one is shift coverage. And out of the hundreds of people I've asked to, the first two are pretty common. There's some variances, but the first two questions, how much business are you doing? You could say revenue instead of hours if you

right? Revenue and then margin. ⁓ Most people are saying that. Most people don't say shift coverage. What shift coverage tells me and our acquisitions none of them have checked it. I've had to go manually in their system and manually go in with my team and figure out what their shift coverage is. But it tells me culturally do you care?

It's really simple. Do you care? And if you do, are you able to meet the needs of the people that you have? We looked at a company, really great people, really seem to care. Shift coverage was like low 80s, I think it was 82, 83, which is actually decent compared to a lot of ones I've looked at. It's kind of average, if you will, maybe.

They took on so much business that they didn't have the staff for. So they had all these new clients coming on board. They couldn't meet the need with caregivers. So instead of turning business down like they should have, they were taking it on and they didn't have the caregivers to fill the shifts. So they were covering a lower percentage of shifts than they should have. So help us identify, you need to either increase, increase, you need to figure out how to get more caregivers or you need to take on less clients really to simplify it. So it really tells me about your culture. Right now, do I have to go?

two, three, four layers deep to figure out what's going on with the culture? Yes, but shift coverage tells me does your company genuinely care about the people that you're taking care of? If you have high shift coverage you do. If you do not have high shift coverage either you don't or you're not set up to properly care for them.

Miriam Allred (58:12)
Really well said. I'm just writing that down. It's I think of like business health and culture health is hard to quantify, but I actually love the connection that you're making, which is shift coverage can be a business health metric for culture because culture can be hard to quantify, but this is one that like actually covers like the nature of the culture. And then you said there's definitely layers to it that you can unpack, but this is like a good initial metric to give you kind of the health or the pulse on your culture.

John Bennett (58:29)
Peace.

And how do we track shift coverage? like, how do you do that, right? I'll explain that real quick. So let's imagine you have a thousand hours of care scheduled this week, right? And 40 of those hours, the clients cancel because they have family in town or they're feeling ill and don't want any care, right? So now you're down to 960. And let's say you have two clients go into the hospital and they're each 30 hours of care per week. So now you're down to 900.

Those 900 hours of care is your denominator now when you're calculating shift coverage. The other 100 clients did not want care or couldn't receive care because they were in the hospital or a sniff or whatever type of facility it may be. Now let's say out of those 900 hours of care, you provide 880 of them. You're taking 880 divided by 900 and that's how you figure out what your shift coverage is, right? So that's essentially how to do it. It's not that difficult. I'm just doing it on my phone right now.

97.8 % shift coverage. It's pretty good. Not 98.5, but it's pretty good. So it's really easy to calculate. You just have to figure out what shifts that the clients not want care for. ⁓ And that's how we figure out our shift coverage.

Miriam Allred (59:52)
And work

backwards. Yeah, John, this has been fantastic. You are so easy to talk to and so knowledgeable and I just could keep pounding with questions, but I want to wrap soon. I think my last question is just you're starting a new year and new growth and new opportunities and rolling up these brands like what what's in store for you for 2026 and what is your theme word for 2026 if you haven't set?

John Bennett (1:00:15)
Ha!

Yeah, so, uh, 2026 we're going to continue organic growth at all of the locations we have all four that have been operating get Ohio off the ground and running. We're really excited about that location. Um, we'll be in West Virginia here, hopefully, um, some point in quarter two, uh, get that off the ground. And then, um, we're also opening Sunny Days developmental programs. I think I mentioned earlier, we used to take care of people with intellectual disabilities. My youngest son has Down syndrome, so that's kind of near and dear to my heart. Um, so we, uh, we're opening that division up.

Hopefully by the summer we have that going maybe late summer. So we have a lot going on ⁓ But we have the right people in place doing it. There's that I've been living by this It's a Confucius saying lately, but he who chases two rabbits catches neither ⁓ and So I've added the John Bennett lingo on the end of it unless you hire a hunter to go after those two rabbits Then you can get both of them And I have specific people that we were blessed to get that have been really great that I have in, Ohio that I

have doing developmental programs. We're going to be getting somebody in West Virginia. ⁓ And our team is just doing a really good job of identifying people that have the same mission and values as us to go do those things. So we're really excited for that. Hope to acquire a company this year, have somebody kind of heading that up. I'm just excited as we continue to expand to have really good people in place that I'm working with, that I trust to be able to go do these things. ⁓ And we want to do a lot of good, right? So we did 1.8 million hours of good and we want to do over two and a half this year. That's super.

aggressive but with adding these new locations and acquisition we think that's a reasonable goal. So I don't even know what that equates to revenue wise you can see like how much I focus on that but we want to do a lot of good and help a lot of people this year so that's what we're looking forward to and our theme word for 2026 I wish it was 2025 because it would rhyme ⁓ but our theme word for 2026 is thrive. So we really want to thrive and thrive as a business ⁓ and going to each individual I've talked to them about how can you

Miriam Allred (1:01:53)
I'm ⁓

Awesome.

John Bennett (1:02:15)
thrive, right? How can our caregivers thrive and what they're doing for our clients? And we want the clients to thrive, right? They're in their last, could be 20, 30, could be two months of life. We want them to thrive and really do better and have a better quality of life than they had if we weren't in the home, which is ultimately what it's all about is we want to make those clients happy and be able to stay in their home as long as possible. So we're going to thrive in 2026 and we are super, super excited. I don't know if you can tell my energy from this, but I feel like I've been stuck in this limbo.

been going for the last couple of years with with kind of the investigation everything we had on and my team and I are ready to get after it in 26 and do a lot of good in the world.

Miriam Allred (1:02:54)
And you're going to, you're manifesting it right now. You just said all of those things out loud and they're all going to happen. Yes, there's going to be bumps and bruises along the way, but everything that you just said, you're going to make it happen and we're going to stay in touch. I'm going to interview you every other year. You know, we're just going to keep up. But I want to see you hit that 50,000 hour mark in the near term. Like you guys are more than capable of doing it with the trajectory that you're on. It's absolutely, within reach. So I am just, I'm over the moon, John. think, I think really highly of you and the team. And every time we reconnect,

John Bennett (1:03:08)
Yeah.

Miriam Allred (1:03:24)
I just learned so much from you. So thank you for being here in the lab. Thank you for everything that you've shared so openly and honestly today. This is where home care thrives is people like you sharing what's working so that other owners and other markets can learn from you and from this. And we raised the industry up. We thrive as an industry and we've picked up so much momentum over the years and I just want to see that continue. So thank you so much.

John Bennett (1:03:49)
Yeah, thank you. And I think this is a really, really exciting time to be in home care. ⁓ just, the amount of great conversations I had at HCOA this past year, and just with people since then that I connected with and, you know, were text or email or zoom or on the phone. I just feel like the network of people that actually want to do good in this industry is growing. And that's really exciting to see that there's people, like this all over the country and even some people internationally that are really trying to do some amazing things and help take care of the

really people that want to stay in their homes. mean, that's what they want to, that's what we all want to do. And just that unified mission is, it's just really cool to be part of this and see the momentum that's happening.

Miriam Allred (1:04:27)
Yeah, I love it too. That's why I do what I do is just, it's this, it's just sharing good ideas, best practices, surfacing those and building a stronger industry as a whole. And, and you and I are a part of that and we're only going to continue to see the fruits of our labor over the coming years. So John, we'll wrap here. Thank you so much. Um, you are so gracious with your time. So people connect with John on LinkedIn email, reach out to him. There's a lot more that he couldn't share. Um, so highly recommend you connect with him offline as well. So we'll wrap here. Thanks, John.

John Bennett (1:04:56)
Excellent. Thank you.