Miriam Allred (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with you. Today in the lab, I am joined by Krystal Wilkinson, the president and owner of Adult Care Assistance Home Care in Arizona. Krystal it's great to see you. How are you doing?

Krystal Wilkinson (00:16)
Great Miriam, thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Miriam Allred (00:21)
shows and I thought I'm circling circling back and so I've gotta have Krystal on the show. So apologies, it's taking me this long, but thanks for being up for it now.

Krystal Wilkinson (00:30)
Honored, I'm honored. I love your shows. I'm a big fan.

Miriam Allred (00:33)
Thank you. I also

usually ask guests about what they want to talk about, but I actually came to you with this idea. And luckily it's something that you're passionate about and think a lot about. And so it's kind of a natural fit for both of us. So excited to dig into

your scorecard, actually. Again, might seem like something boring or mundane to talk about, but you and I and a lot of owners like talking about data and KPIs. And so I've asked you to give me kind of like your weekly condensed scorecard and we're gonna walk through that.

And it's gonna be a lot of fun. But before we do, tell everyone a little bit about yourself personally and the business and getting into home care. Give everyone a little walk down memory lane of yourself.

Krystal Wilkinson (01:10)
wow. Okay, sure.

Do they really want to know all the history?

Miriam Allred (01:14)
Give us give us a few juicy

nuggets. People do like to know.

Krystal Wilkinson (01:16)
Right. So yeah, I stepped into the home care industry on January first of twenty twelve after my husband's cancer diagnosis. I think I've shared that in previous podcasts. it was kind of one of his bucket lists, but you know, cancer changes everybody and for me, being able to walk that journey and be the consumer on the consumer side of, you know, of needing that care and needing that help, I think really changed my whole

trajectory of my future. And so, you know, here we are fifteen years later and I'm loving every moment of what I'm doing. So I wouldn't wish cancer on my worst enemy, but I'm very grateful for the journey that we've had. but ironically our agency is thirty years old. So I've been doing this for fifteen years. Our previous owner, she had

You know, started the business in nineteen ninety six and she passed away on May first of twenty twelve. So we met through the cancer journey. She also had cancer, unfortunately. But I try to take her legacy and I've been trying to drive it forward. So when we started and I I bought the company, we had one location up in Northwest Phoenix out in Scottsdale, excuse me, in Sun City, Arizona, which is the northwest side of of Phoenix. I live in Tucson, so I tried to find an agency literally as far away from me as I could get and still be.

in the the you know Arizona in a sense. So I was making that commute and then eventually opened up a couple other offices and so I now have one in Tucson and and then we have

a office in Scottsdale and a virtual office in the Phoenix area and we're opening another virtual office at this time over in the Mesa area. So we're covering this the greater Phoenix area and all of Tucson and Green Valley and Sorita and t in the southern Arizona. So it's been a fun journey. and we also do care management. We started doing care management back in November of last year and that's going very, very well. So

Miriam Allred (03:05)
Amazing.

And did you say what your background is and your husband's kind of before getting into home care?

Krystal Wilkinson (03:10)
Sure, yeah. I was actually a I was in global outreach. I worked at a Southern Baptist church here in in the Tucson area. my original background is I was a theater arts major, which is much different than home care, I guess. I don't know, maybe it's all an act. and but I I was kind of like a case manager for 17 families from Arizona who are living abroad.

And so when they came home on furlough, I would help them with doctor's appointments, transportation, making sure they had housing, setting up, you know, all kinds of any kind of resources for them. When they were in out in the fields, then I was the one who was their connection back home, providing resources from you know across the country. It was an amazing job, lots of interesting stories and things. And my husband, he worked for a pharmaceutical company. He's a neurology specialist with the MS department with Nervar.

And he's currently in the process of retiring and he will be joining our team kind of on the peripheral here in August 1st. So very excited to have him joining us for the first time. He's always come to the conferences with me and things, but we can talk a little bit more about his influence on what we're we're doing and how he's gonna be joining us as we talk about the KPIs. So yeah.

Miriam Allred (04:23)
Yeah, I always see him and he

seems involved and he's right up to speed and naturally I'm sure the dinner conversations are all about home care and about business and things, but I always see him and he seems right involved. But that's exciting officially. He'll be kind of joining in more of a an official capacity. So that's exciting.

Krystal Wilkinson (04:35)
He's officially joining. Yeah.

I keep joking that, you know, so I get to be the boss at home and the boss at work. This will be good.

Miriam Allred (04:44)
That's awesome. And you said at the start,

you know, like you're still excited and fired up and passionate. And I've have interviewed you and talked to you over the years. And what you've shared recently is like continued growth, you know, like every business, you kind of hit these plateaus and you go through these kind of peaks and valleys. But it seems like you guys have been on the up and up, maybe post pandemic, or do you guys just have like a renewed fire in your belly right now? What's what's kind of behind like the growth and the excitement right now?

Krystal Wilkinson (05:10)
I think, you know, I don't know if I've ever lost it. I just feel I I feel like I get to do my hobby, you know, or whatever. I mean, like this this position. maybe I started my career, my true career really late in life or something, but you take what you love, what you're passionate about, and you make it your your job and that's a blessing. And so I'm I'm lucky to get to do what I really enjoy.

So I don't know if I've I mean I of course I have moments where I'm like, geez, do I still want to do this? Or you know, is it time for me to retire or try to get my my staff to fire me and they they keep telling me they that no, you're not allowed to fire you. But I screwed up because can you fire me now? But you know, I have moments, but for the most part, I have enjoyed every step of this journey and I think maybe some renewed passion for me is that I'm able to move as as we've finally really gotten

We have the right people in the right seats. We are moving the right direction. I mean, like we're we're really starting to figure it out. And I know I get asked all the time, you've been in this business for 15 years, when are you gonna retire? And I'm like, first of all, I'm too young. Okay, let's be clear about that. My husband can retire, that's up to him. I'm too young, my opinion. And and second of all, when I stop having fun, that'll be the day that you know I'll start talking about the retirement, but I'm getting to move into a different

r version of running the business. I'm not into the day to day having to step into the field last minute or what have you. I'm now actually getting to try new things like starting our care management. it's a new challenge for me and you know we're

a year in and it has taken off and it's just been really, really fun and how it's complementing our home care side of our business has been amazing. so that keeps it entertaining and interesting to me because I'm constantly learning how to do something new and I'm challenged by it. And so I like that.

Miriam Allred (06:54)
Hmm.

Is it safe to say you've been doing this for what did you say about fifteen years? Is it safe to say that it took you maybe thirteen or fourteen years to get to the business to the point where you could step back back and be more strategic? Like is that how you would define that?

Krystal Wilkinson (07:11)
It took quite that long, but yeah, it I mean it took us a while. I think I'm I'm starting to challenge myself in some different ways because I I'm one of those operators who really enjoyed being in in the mix of it and the day-to-day. And like I I used to go out to the clients' houses and I was the care manager, and and once in a while I still you know will step into that role and when I do, I'm like, my gosh, I miss this. And probably the hardest thing was for me was when I got to the point where I didn't

actually know each one of my clients, like like really know them. Like I was friends with each one of them. And now it's like I've met them, I know them, but like, you know, I'm I'm not as connected with them as I used to be and same with our caregivers. I remember the first time we did a caregiver training and I had some caregivers in there that had worked for me for three or four months and I never met them and it felt it felt like I was like letting my team down or something. But you have to get to the point of allowing

you know, you the people that you've hired and you've trained and you've poured into to actually step into the roles. And as long as I stayed in that, I think it probably took me about 10 years to really say, you know what, I I can't be that person because I'm I'm holding us back. But I mean I knew it and and things, but and then I started kind of realizing that there's other little pieces of the business that I enjoy just as much as being into the day-to-day. And so I've been able to kind of step into that and kind of and I I love mentoring and and teaching and so I'm also very blessed that I know

now have nineteen managers that I get to do that on a daily basis. I get to pour into them what I've learned. Because you spend fifteen years learning how to run your business, you finally figure it out, and then it's time to retire and then what do you do with all this knowledge? So

Miriam Allred (08:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Krystal Wilkinson (08:49)
we share it, right? So that's what I'm trying to to do. And that's why

Miriam Allred (08:53)
That's a really good framing.

Like it didn't take y the business ten years to get to this point. It's almost like you were so involved and loved being involved that you it just took that much time for you to decide like strategically where was the best use of your time and stepping back and and yeah, you feel like you're losing touch with the clients and the caregivers and the operation, but it's like there's there's a good use of your time strategically and pouring into your team. And that's why I think what our last latest episode was. It's been a little while now, but leadership development, that's something that really

makes you tick is being able to to pour into your leaders and develop them and entrust them with the important responsibilities and roles that they have.

Krystal Wilkinson (09:30)
Right. It's it's so cool to be able to to step back and look. I have one of my of one of my managers now. She started as a caregiver with me for seven and a half years. She sat in the caregiver seat and and just really she was very early on she was very green, had really no experience when we first brought her on, ended up being one of our top caregivers.

Promoted her into a case aid position, which is kind of like a lead caregiver, is another way to describe that. From there, she actually ended up with a foot injury, and she stepped into a role of just helping out with the schedule and ha answering the phones during the time that she was recovering from her her f foot injury. And now she's my lead scheduler. And she has been with us for eight and a half years. No, I'm sorry, for four fourteen years now, I think is that she's been with us. So she's been with us for a long, long time. And it's like just being able to watch like this person when I'm I can remember when I first hired her.

like s she was one of my first ones and how green and how much she didn't understand. And now here she's like really like, you know, just rocketed. And it's just been really fun. And I I have that story after story with so many of the managers that are in our office. We promoted them up through the ranks, whether they started as a caregiver or in another position, maybe they started out as front desk receptionists and now they're leading our recruiting department.

So it's it's kind of fun to be able to to do that. And those who the one thing I've learned though, you can't dream for them. And so if they really want it, you can play into it, but you have to be willing to be able to stop and say, you know, if this isn't your dream, that's okay too, you know, and not push it.

Miriam Allred (11:00)
Yeah. Would you say office

staff retention is like one of the keys to success in this business? Because we talk a lot about like employee churn and also the client churn is inevitable. But like I I feel like the most successful businesses, they build and then maintain really strong office teams. And that gives you, as the owner, the ability to breathe and to be more strategic and start to like focus on growing the business because you have people in place that you trust.

And and you retain them, therefore the business can kinda thrive and grow, is would you say so?

Krystal Wilkinson (11:33)
Yeah, I definitely think so. I mean, you know, you kinda hit the nail on the head is like you have to be able to trust your team and and part of that is, you know, every time you have a turnover, you're being thrown back into so that that's something that like you take two steps forward and you know

And then all of a sudden you're back to square one again. Because, you know, you you've maybe hired a a new scheduler and everything's going really well. They've been with you about three months and then they leave you and then now you're back to scheduling. And then you hire another scheduler and it's just like that constant. You might get a little bit further ahead, but it seems to be that that

whole thing. So getting the right people, getting them in the right seat, and then really being able to figure out how to support them and make them feel like I think that the key is making them feel as if they're an owner of the company, like they have a say. but giving your you know empowering your own staff to feel as if they are actually have a say in what's happening. I think is kind of a key point to that for sure. But once you have those people and you have that lung

longevity and they're sticking around, then that's when you get the freedom to be able to to play in the other areas that, you know, and challenge yourself because you're not going being pulled back into doing the same thing over and over again that you've been doing.

Miriam Allred (12:39)
Yeah.

One more question in this vein and then I'll bring us back. home care is different than it was. Like this industry, technology, you've

Krystal Wilkinson (12:46)
Sure.

Miriam Allred (12:47)
seen it the last 15 years how fast we're moving. When I talk about retaining office staff and how important that is, the flip side is also I see owners struggling to let people go that aren't keeping up with the times. Like operations, technology, we're gonna talk about some of this. Like times are changing and operations look very different. Have you had to let

people go that aren't keeping up with the times.

Krystal Wilkinson (13:11)
I mean you know, I mean and sometimes I I tend to hang on to people too long, you know, give too many chances or whatever. But the adage of, the people who brought you here aren't necessarily the ones who are gonna take you into the future is is so true. You know, not that pe I don't think that I can say that your people have expiration dates, but if you get somebody who's stuck in the well, we've always done it this way and times are changing and so you know

Let's talk AI. AI is something that some people are just really, really afraid of, right? It's it's

you know, especially twenty twenty five when everybody was really coming on the scene, everybody's like, I'm not doing that, you know, that that scares me or whatever. And if you have somebody who's just digging in their heels and you know, as all of our platforms are are changing and they're all starting to use more AI and they're not willing to utilize that, that's gonna keep you from being able to have the growth that that's going alongside with the industry and you're gonna lose ground. So if you're not willing to make those changes, that person may not be the same person to take you into the future because they're gonna be hanging on tight to what the past was and it's just not what home care is.

Anymore. So it might be something that it you know it it might be time to, but w when that does happen, the main thing you have to do is make sure you're celebrating them on the way out. That doesn't mean that all of those years they didn't pour into your agency and make you who you are. You know, I've helped managers find, staff find new positions that better suit them and you know and try to celebrate them on the way out. If they decide that you know it's time for them to move on, we celebrate that and

And sometimes we step back and say, you know what? They learned so much here. Take a little bit of us with you and maybe bless somebody else. You know, take that and and change the culture at another another place that you're gonna go, at the hospice you're going to or whatever wherever you're leading. And try not to just take it so personally. I think that was something I learned early on that every

time somebody left I felt like they were you know abandoning me because they didn't like me and that's that's not what it is. It's just like it's no longer the right fit anymore. And it might be on both sides or one or the other, but that's that's the nature of being human and that's it's good to be able to to celebrate them even if it's you know not necessarily the decision you wanted.

Miriam Allred (15:19)
Yeah, that's good

good advice. And I ask you these questions because I'm talking to owners all the time. And these are some top of mind things that I'm hearing and observing. And I think a lot of people needed to hear that. And it's hard to let good people go, but times are changing, operations are changing, technology is changing. And if you want to see your business into the next 10 years, you've got to have an adaptable, dynamic team right now, or you're going to get left

Krystal Wilkinson (15:41)
Right.

Miriam Allred (15:42)
behind, or there's going to be just a lot of friction going into the future. So

Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about KPIs. before we get into

your scorecard specifically, I'd imagine your thinking about KPIs has a change over the last 15 years, you know, as an industry, like data sophistication and what we've tracked and why has changed. So I guess I'm just curious today how important is data to you and, you know, like weekly KPIs, like how essential to that is is for you as the owner, but then also like the business holistically, like how important is it?

Krystal Wilkinson (16:16)
Right. I'll be the first to admit that early on I didn't I didn't understand KPIs. I didn't I didn't think that they were super important. And so I will have to say probably the five first five to six, seven years of our agency, I think I was just in a survival mode. you know, like I I was coming into a newer industry because that was not my background. I didn't have a healthcare background and so I'm learning what I'm doing. I'm I'm already

in an existing company, I was just running to catch up in the very beginning. And then once I caught up I just I didn't know that how important KPIs would be. and then I met Aaron Markham.

And I remember he handed me a book and I I had been reading a lot of books, trying to figure out how to do these things, and we had just started doing, you know, big audacious goals. It was some book I can't even remember who the author is or what the book is, but you probably know exactly what it is. I just read that book and we our team, we were having these weekly meetings and honestly we were kind of looking we were looking at our hours. I'd learned that, that we were supposed to be looking at how many hours or rebuildable hours these need to be going up. I knew that type of thing, but I didn't have anything where anybody in the in the company had any actual

numbers or KPIs that they were looking at. was just looking at very basic, like is our revenue going up and are is our are are we growing? Those are the two important things we have to be doing, right? and Aaron handed me the book traction and we started talking and he I just remember him describing that KPIs, he's like Krystal, if you got stuck on a desert island and you know you could only have the the little cabana boys gonna bring in your favorite

beverage or whatever and a little card and he's bringing that card and there's only, you know, a few items on that card. What items on that card would tell you whether or not your agency is healthy and growing while you're sitting here on the beach? And I was like, and I kind of started thinking about it. So we started actually trying to do our KPIs and and in, you know, at the beginning it was just kind of a trial, hit or miss. How does things work? How does not you know, what's not working? and sometimes we really kinda got into there's some that we were just sitting there and

you thinking back is like, well that's a fun number, but what story is it really telling us? And so over the years we've really kind of honed in on it and it's something that has become we've always had our weekly meetings. We now because we have so many different locations and things, we have a different we call you know, different morning or

weekly weekly meeting for each office or each department. our HR department meets separately even though they're not in their own office. They're kind of couple scattered over two different offices. And but we meet every single week and we go over our KPIs every week. And I've learned that every single person on our leadership team has to have some numbers that they're responsible for. And part of that is because I can't be in every office at the same time and

You know, I also want to be able to help them. So if they're struggling with something, sometimes those numbers are the first indicator that something is not going right. And so I can come back to them and kind of like help them hone in on what's not what's working or what's not working because the number can be kind of a a like a red flag before it's something goes really south. It's also accountability though. You know, when they have to and they're reading out their numbers to their entire team. And so if they have goals for each of their numbers and they're not achieving those goals.

they have to account for that to their team members because all of those team members, you know, their bonuses and and the way that they're being paid and and things are all being reflective on the growth of the company and but it takes everybody doing their job in order for that company to go.

So, if you think about it, you have you have all your different departments. So it it's kind of this is kind of maybe a dumb analogy, but think of it as, okay, so you have your your branch manager or the the sales manager, whatever you want to call them, who's in charge of the growth of the of the company, right? They're the one who's in charge of bringing your your new people in and things like that. So they're kind of like the contractor. They're building this big building and they're out there trying to fill the building, you know, sell all the bet, you know, all the rooms or what have you, right?

Then you have your care manager or your supervisor, whatever you call them. We have care managers who oversee all of our care. So you have that care manager, and that care manager is kind of the property manager. They're the ones who are protecting the revenue that's already there. You already have the residents there, you want to make sure that they're happy, that their lights are on, that you know the water is you know running, they're not having, you know, the ceilings not falling in on it.

So that care manager is the one who's working with them. Then you have your scheduler who's going to be, you know, putting everybody together. They're the elevator operator, right? They're making sure that they're putting everybody in the elevator and making sure they get to the right floor, to the right room, because they want to make sure you're matching the right caregiver with the right client. Otherwise, you aren't going to be able to have, you know.

that people aren't gonna be happy because you know they're lost or their caregiver didn't show up or you know what have you, right? And then your HR or your recruiting team, they're actually the foundation of it all because they are the ones who actually are the staircase. So there's maybe five levels to your to your building, right? And so without having a solid recruiting platform, that solid staircase for people to climb up and get to the right places, you're never gonna have that growth because you will never have enough caregivers to be able to to handle all of the stuff that the

all of the the people in the building that you is being built by that branch manager, that salesperson. So you need to have a really, really strong foundation amongst your recruiting team. So how do I know that each one of those different people are doing their job? So we need to have, you know, a few numbers that you can report back to me to know whether or not I have that really strong staircase so I can have my my different you know care caregivers getting I have that pipeline of caregivers going to the right places and

you know, being able to to support the growth that the the branch manager, the sales manager is is creating. So

Miriam Allred (22:00)
Yeah, great analogy. I can like picture it in my head. We need to like put that bit

of the recording into an AI and it can give us like an actual visual of that. the way that I think about

Krystal Wilkinson (22:08)
There you go, right.

Miriam Allred (22:10)
this is kind of like there's leading and lagging indicators. And I think the thing that stands out to me about what you said is they help you identify problems. Like in home care, there is so much flux, and there are good times and there are bad times. And it's like sometimes you don't know what to chalk it up to, like what's going right, what's going wrong. But to me, KPIs are reflective of.

w where things are going right and where things are going wrong. And if you don't have them in place, you can't pinpoint like where the the root issues are. So I think that's

Krystal Wilkinson (22:35)
Yeah.

Miriam Allred (22:35)
you know, for anyone that's not tracking or not tracking well, it's like if you're wondering what's working well and what's not, like KPIs give you the ability to identify w those things specifically.

Krystal Wilkinson (22:45)
Right, right. And reports are typically something that you're looking at that's happened after the fact. So it's like typically like monthly reports, right? So those are lagging indicators. They're gonna tell you something's wrong.

well behind when it's actually happening. But if your team has weekly KPIs, those are leading indicators that something is happening so you can move much more quickly. So for example, let's say that your your sales team, they need to be getting out and making, those those connections and those visits. And so you know you'd need to typically we have like our our sales team has a minimum of like around 25, you know, meaningful conversations each week that they're having one on one visits or networking events or you know doing lunch and

learns or something about 25 a week at minimum in order to bring in enough of the

you know, enough inquiries to to create the revenue that we need. So if they're only making eight or nine visits a week, that's a leading indicator that we're not gonna have the pipeline filling up because we're not hitting those numbers. And you can actually see it even when they go on vacation by, you know, those numbers drop when they're off. And then you can almost like know that in two weeks we're gonna have a drop-off because we didn't have the number of of visits or those connections that we really needed. So that can be a leading indicator versus just looking at those reports. I mean like all of our software programs

Have amazing reports, especially now that we have KPI, but often it's a little too late to get that information, so then we're playing catch up.

Miriam Allred (24:10)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a really good distinction. Reporting is like is historical. It's the look back. It's the lagging indicators. But this report card that we're about to go over is, you know, kind of like predictive and identifying, you know, what's what's coming, which is which is super important. Do you feel like this is just an example? Someone I talked to recently, they lost like several 24 hour cases. Therefore they hit that dip and you've been through that. Everyone's been through that.

Krystal Wilkinson (24:33)
Yeah.

Miriam Allred (24:34)
Have you been through that enough to where you can kind of

predict and prepare for those like big dips? Like do you feel like, you know, maybe early on there were like higher highs and lower lows, but now you've been doing this so long that you can like kind of fill your pipelines and identify the KPIs that help your dips not be as high or low? Does that make sense?

Krystal Wilkinson (24:53)
Yeah. It totally makes sense. I'm I'm trying to like I'm not getting all nerdy on you, I'm like, yeah, we can talk about this.

Miriam Allred (24:59)
Yeah. Well yeah, is that possible? I guess I wanna hear you confirm that that is possible or that isn't possible

because this is home care. Like I don't know what you're gonna say.

Krystal Wilkinson (25:06)
Well it it's it's so you know, we have we have two different ways that we look at our KPIs. So we have our weekly reports that our care our our care team or our management team is like reporting in their weekly meetings, how many visits or or whatever are we making in our sales, you know, is is one of them, right? And then as far as the owner, I also have KPIs I'm looking at that are more report driven, but we're th we're looking at on a a real life, you know,

like a live view of it. So every day I can look at it if I want to, and it's being updated every single day. We've created a way of utilizing AI to pull information out of our platforms to be able to give me the the information I'm really looking at. And one of the things I look at is, you know, our our weekly billable hours per client. What is the average per each client? And you like you just said that. So we're all gonna have what we call the Fed Fatal Monday where I actually had in one week I lost seven clients. you know, and it was just like

you know, you wake up that Monday morning and and you're just like, my gosh, like I I don't know how to breathe right now because that's devastating. D and I don't care who you are, that's that's like it hits you, right? So, we all love the twenty four hour clients, but sometimes having some clients that are kind of like dispersed in there is it's kind of not a a bad idea. So we're actually looking probably right around

Twenty-seven hours seems to be like the sweet spot. If we're averaging 27 hours a a week per client, it doesn't hit quite as hard if we do lose somebody. So, you know, we don't need them to all be 24 hour live in type, you know, 24 hours a day. Yeah, absolutely. Those are easier to staff. Those are the money makers. Yes, we want to be heavy on that, but it is okay to also have somebody who's lesser hours so that we can be averaging it out so that when we're getting hit, you're not taking everything away from you. It's like on the flip side for your

You know, your sales pipeline. You know, if you are this is something that we kind of identified recently, just looking at some of our numbers as we're starting to utilize the AI to bring in more of the information. we were having a conversation with our team because we were noticing that a few of our referrals, referral sources you know had kind of dropped off. And I asked my team one day, I was you know, who do you think your top referral source is? You know, I I went to each different office to ask that. One of the offices was like so-and-so hospice. And I'm like, okay, why is that? And they're Well, they're giving us three to five.

You

know, inquiries a week, and I'm like, wow, that is amazing. And then when I pulled up the numbers, because I can I'm looking at how many hours is that person, like that referral source, you know, has given us what is our weekly billable hours for that referral source. So you have to really track you know your referrals. Who's who are your referrals coming from? And we looked at it, and they were number five on the list, even though they're giving us more inquiries than anybody else. But if you think about it,

Hospice is going to be short-lived because, you know, they typically are not somebody who's going to be 24 hours a day for years or months or whatever. Typically, you know, we're at end of life stage with them. Or, you know, it's you know short hours just to kind of be a respite care for for family members. So, another office kind of said, it's this, you know, the re my placement agents you know feed me all the time. Again, same thing. You know, the short shifts and typically they're short-lived because that person is actually needing to be placed into a memory care.

unit or a skilled nursing facility and they just need somebody to help out during that transitional period. So they're shorter lived even though we're getting a lot of so all that just to say that you know you when you look at that and you're tracking the data, you know, you can tweak the way that you're you're actually approaching it. So now my sales team, they're still working with the hospices and they're still working with the placement, but maybe they're changing their focus maybe to a skilled rehab or maybe to a fiduciary or something that actually can

can be more of a longevity versus having it be like these ones that are quick, easy, low-hanging fruit in a sense.

Miriam Allred (28:53)
Yeah,

that was so good. So many little nuggets that you just sprinkled in there. The one that I wanna just call out to owners is if you don't know your average weekly billable hours per client, go and identify that number right now. Because what you said, that twenty seven hours, like that's just really interesting. Like that's what it is for you. It it may or may not be that for other businesses, but you found that that's kind of like your sweet spot. And then all the other like data and information kind of like backs that up, which I think is

is really fascinating. You know, it's coming to mind, you've heard Steven Tweed like use this quote of and I don't even know the exact quote and I should, but it's like, you know, there's data and then everything else is an opinion. That's

Krystal Wilkinson (29:27)
Right.

Miriam Allred (29:27)
really common in home care. You ask a sales rep, you know, what's our number one referral source? And they just, you know, they they know what it is, but then it's like, wait, the data doesn't actually support that. And so this is a people business and it's really easy to, you know, listen to your heart and make, empathetic decisions. But at the end of the day, like

Numbers are in place for a reason and knowing them and understanding them is super important.

Krystal Wilkinson (29:49)
Well, I think it kinda goes back to that, you know, that analogy where my team, you know, if I wasn't looking if we weren't looking at the numbers or knowing, you know, you know, what is the number of hours per referral source, that's another really big one that I don't

thing I I didn't think about tracking for a long, long time. We would have still continued along the same way. Or if you didn't know that, you know, you had all of your clients for twenty four hours a day, that's amazing. But then when you get hit, you know, and you lose two or three of them, that hits you so hard. And so it's like, just being able to kind of figure out the balance and you know, being able to be hit with having a a you know a

losing a couple of clients in a in a week or something and still be able to be sustained is is important. It's kinda like number of number of hours for the caregiver. What's their average hour per caregiver? Again, you know if you have everybody, at

I only want four hours a week. it's gonna be you're gonna need lot more employees to staff the same number of hours for the clients. You're gonna have a lot of possible turnover. You're gonna have you so it's just you wanna make sure that you're you're keeping on track of those hours because it helps you to be able to navigate through your business and through, the next steps to know, okay, this is where I need to be searching for more caregivers or,

why are we having so much turnover? Is it because are we not giving the caregivers the hours that they're needing and looking at their utilization scores. So it it really does help you be able to kind of make those fine tweaks that makes it a much smoother and honestly as a as an owner, it makes my life a lot easier because it's like we don't have to be stepping in as often because we have more of that consistency because of it.

Miriam Allred (31:21)
Yeah, more consistency. That's a key word. Okay. You're touching on a lot of these KPIs that are on the scorecard. And I I didn't even I'm not even intentionally like stringing this out to get here, but let's let's get

Krystal Wilkinson (31:29)
Yeah.

Miriam Allred (31:30)
into the scorecard here. So you've sent me everyone listening to this, like

this is literally three to four metrics for each department in the office. And we're gonna go through each of these. And I want to start, I think you've got them up in front of you. I've got them up in front of me. I wanna go through and we're gonna we're gonna state what the metrics are for each department, but then I wanna have like a little conversation about each because you've

These have changed over the years and you've boiled it down to these like universal evergreen metrics. But I'd imagine, and you said it a minute ago, like you've tracked things that sounded cool or you thought were a good idea at the time, but then like those fizzle out. So I want to hear some of those so that other operators can whittle their own down and understand like why do I avoid certain things and and and so forth. So let's start with recruiting. share the foremost important

metrics for recruiting.

Krystal Wilkinson (32:16)
So when we're talking about, just to be clear, we're talking about, What are what are their numbers that they're gonna be reporting to me? Because I feel like it's very, very important that everybody has a number that they're responsible for. and so our recruiters need to let us know how many applicants are coming through, you know, how many, how many people are applying for the job. Then the second one is going to be how many interviews were completed.

The third one would be how many people got hired or completed orientation. Our final interview is when they come into orientation. And once they've completed the orientation, they've been given the green light to be able to be, put into the field. They've had their skill assessment and everything done. And then the final one would be speed to hire. So from the time that they actually apply to the time that we're entering into the field, you know, what is the number of days that it took for us to get there?

Miriam Allred (33:07)
Let me ask about speed to hire. I think the first three are like pretty standard. You know, when we think about kind of like recruitment funnel, like if you're not tracking those, like everyone needs to be tracking those. I think the interesting one is speed to hire because there's a lot of other kind of recruitment metrics that you could be focused on. Why is speed to hire so important?

Krystal Wilkinson (33:23)
I think that for us or f for the the industry itself, I mean there's a lot of competition out there for our caregivers and everybody's talking about you know, g not getting enough caregivers. And a lot of times when I'm talking to to somebody who's asking some for some advice with the recruiting side,

it's taking them, you know, two to three weeks to actually hire somebody. Well, the caregiver needs a job today. They're not somebody they're typically somebody who is, you know, living paycheck to paycheck. They're needing to find work. They're needing to start working right away. And if it's taking you too long to hire, you're gonna lose out on some of those really good applicants. So you don't want to cut the corners, but a lot of times it's just stopping and looking at your recruiting process and what are some things that maybe you're doing. Like we, for example, early on

we started trying to put things onto, you our our AxisCare We we use AxisCare so being able to have them apply through AxisCare. But we had them like filling out their basically there's their name, their address, their phone number, like all their d

you know, demographics four times in like the process, like when they were like, you know, they put in the application and then, you know, now we need to, you know, give them a background screening. Here you again. And then it's like, you know, all of these little spots, okay, now we're gonna create their their profile in AxisCare. Can you put it in again? And so there was like four times that they were having to do that. And so it was like, is there any way that we can like streamline that down? So when you're looking at speed to hire, that might be a an indicator that there might be something that you need to relook at your

processes if it's taking you two to three weeks, what are you doing that's taking so much longer to get them there? Is there anything that you can that that's an obstacle you can remove to make that speed of hire less so that we can get those people in the door? Because just like the caregivers, most of the time when we're trying to hire the caregivers, we need them yesterday. We don't need them three weeks from today. We're we have the need now and so how can we make that a much faster process?

Miriam Allred (35:13)
I hope no

one is asking their applicants for their information four times anymore. Those no, no, no. Those days are long gone. And if you're still in get out.

Krystal Wilkinson (35:17)
We've changed, okay? We've grown up but we've gotten better. That was a few years ago.

Miriam Allred (35:26)
can I put you on the spot? Do you know what your across your offices average speed to hire is today?

Krystal Wilkinson (35:31)
It is five point two days from the application to the time that they're actually scheduled for orientation and it's just over a week with them actually getting into orientation and it is nine days to get into the field. So

Miriam Allred (35:46)
And how do you feel

about that? Do you feel good about that? Do you think I and I ask because everyone's different. Like s when it's too fast the quality goes down. When it's too long you lose Like it's a that's a juggling game. So I'm curious if you feel like where you're at is a good place or do you wish it was faster?

Krystal Wilkinson (36:01)
We're

to get them into the you know get them through the process within a week from when they apply and and so I I'd like to see them get through like we interview them we have a way of because we use a lot of AI and a lot of automations that we've created on our own and so you know the we utilize something I think this is something a lot of people use but we actually when somebody applies we want to see that they're being contacted within like three hours of that that first initial

application being put in and so AI has actually even helped us where we have a even a ringless call that is sent out within three hours of the application being you know being submitted through our you know if they go online and they apply. and it's basically just a phone call that it doesn't ring their phones we're not waking them up in the middle of the night, but it is our our lead recruiter and she's just like, Hi, this is you know Jill from Adult Care Assistance Home Care. I got your application. We're super excited. We'd love to schedule an interview. So we're trying to get those interviews on right away. If they call back,

they can be transferred to one of our our recruiters, to have a live interview right there on the spot, to have a screening interview right there. So you know, being able to really move quickly with, okay, I got the application, let's get them interviewed. And then if we're able to get them interviewed, we need to start the process of getting them in for orientation and and that type of thing. So we can kind of move through that much quicker. So right now we need to to I think bring it down a little bit. I don't like nine days. I'd like to have it closer to the seven days to get them in

I don't think we're

Miriam Allred (37:32)
Okay. Okay. Co

Krystal Wilkinson (37:33)
bad, but we're not. But we're averaging right now. I looked at yesterday with one of our team meetings. We're at nine point seven caregivers per week is what we're hiring right now. So

Miriam Allred (37:43)
Okay, kudos

to you for knowing these numbers. I'm impressed. But also that

was a good example of like speed to hire is is the metric on the scorecard, but then there's like, you know, three or four micro numbers inside of that that make that up. And it's good to be aware of both, but the team is focused on on speed to hire and being aware of that.

Krystal Wilkinson (38:02)
Yeah, sh they don't need to dig down to each one of the other things, but I can go in and look at those reports, you know, and but I'm wanting to look at those reports, not waiting until each month to be like, at the end of the month, how did we do? We want to be looking at it on a regular quick basis so then you can make those slight slight adjustments to be able to make things happen a little bit faster. So Sure. Pardon me.

Miriam Allred (38:20)
Absolutely. Okay. Let's keep going. This is great. Let's move on to scheduling, which is another important good one. Jog through kind of the you're fine,

jog through kind of the four metrics and scheduling.

Krystal Wilkinson (38:30)
Sure, okay. So we want to start out with weekly billable hours. I think we all pretty much track that, but we wanna, you know, scheduling needs to know how many weekly billable hours are we working on. I also like to have them watching the caregiver utilization score. Then that's the score where the caregiver tells me I need to, in order to to pay my bills, I need to be working at least twenty-five hours a week or thirty hours a week or forty hours a week, whatever it is. And how close are we getting to that score? Because and we can go, I guess, into the others later, but that's the utilization score.

We also want to look at our percentage of overtime. we all try to keep that down to the bare minimum and so we want to make sure that we are you know watching that that overtime and also well I was I get into the w the reason why, but the the overtime versus the the number of billable hours.

And so, you know, and and the utilization score. So if your utilization score is really low, like you're at 20-25% to utilization score, but you are at like 20 to 25% of overtime, then can we maybe move a few things around? Because it tells me there's some caregivers who are not getting the work that they're needing, and there's other caregivers who maybe you know getting

Favoritism, I guess, you know, or

Miriam Allred (39:40)
Mm-hmm.

Krystal Wilkinson (39:41)
we might be providing maybe they're the ones who answer their phones quicker or whatever, but let's try to figure out why are we having, you know, such a big overtime when we have such a low utilization that so those how those kind of correlate with each other. and then the other one would be the

Miriam Allred (39:58)
Average hours

per caregiver.

Krystal Wilkinson (39:59)
Yeah,

but the caregiver, yeah. I was I was thinking of the client for some reason. Yeah, average hours for the caregiver. So again, you know, what is that sweet spot where if you lose, you know, you want to have enough caregivers if they're all working, forty hours a week or whatever, but you have a client, that needs to do a little bit more, well, they're all at your over you know, right at that cap. And so you're gonna be putting somebody into overtime if you just have a few more hours or whatever. So being able to have some flexibility with that as well. So what is your average hour per caregiver? and I again it's right around that twenty

twenty-five to twenty-seven hour mark as well with the caregiver to at least for us to be able to say that we're giving them enough hours that's keeping them super happy and but they may have other jobs or other school or families or or what have you, but the average, i it for us is right around twenty-five to twenty-seven hours a week.

Miriam Allred (40:45)
Okay. The one that I wanna dig into is the utilization. So when they first get hired, you ask them that question of like, well, you know, you there's just the conversation around scheduling. they want this many hours, these are their days, their times. That changes pretty often, right, with a lot of your workforce. And so utilization to me kind of feels like a moving target. How do you track it repeatedly well, like ongoing?

Krystal Wilkinson (41:12)
Yeah, so again, we are looking at the utilization score, and most of the software companies now give that to you. And so the first thing is getting the the care team to actually give you their preference. What is their what is their request? We do that in orientation. We actually fill something out, we call it a client matching questionnaire, CMQ. and it's a little form that we ask them about their skill set as they're coming into orientation, you know, what are some of your experiences, what are your your likes, your dislikes, what's your favorite?

Food you like to cook, you know, so we can kind of help match them up. And then on that as well, we're asking them, you know, how many hours do you feel like you need to be able to work? That you know, what is what is your request? What is your desire? And and then so those get entered in right away as soon as they finish orientation. That's the very first thing the scheduler receives that, and they're putting in all their attributes as well as all of their utilization score. And then as the schedulers are going along, they're actually watching those utilization scores. And so, if they're what you know, that it's a great tool when you're trying to talk somebody into taking another life.

Last minute shift is like I can see that you have said that you need 35 hours a week in order to you know make ends meet. You are currently at 28 hours. I have another, it's a last minute shift. it's six hours. I'm trying to help you get up to that. Anyway, you might pick up this other this other shift because I really wanted you to have the paycheck you need this week, or whatever. So, and if they are seeing that it's not matching up, then the care the the schedulers are asking, you know, it looks like maybe you're not available for as many hours. I'm I'm seeing that you've turned.

Down quite a few things. Do you think something has changed? So same with the changing their availability. You're no longer available on Thursdays because you have the job. Good to know. So maybe we should, you know, is maybe twenty five hours a week a better, a better number for you to be trying to get because I'm trying to make sure we get to your what your ness needs are. So we're speaking to their needs,

Because it's important to them, it's important to us, but it really has helped us to be able to kind of you know make sure that the caregivers are getting what they're needing and what they're wanting.

as well. And it also helps us to be able to figure out if there is somebody, you know, who's coming through orientation, but then they never get offered any kind of work because they're not at the utilization score. So sometimes those newer caregivers takes us a while to trust them with our favorite clients and things. And so it's like, you know, we see that right away versus waiting until, you know, that person quits and like you never gave me anything. We're able to like, change that d that continuum as well.

Miriam Allred (43:31)
It's a really good conversation

point, this utilization, you know, in all different ways. you said average hours per caregiver right now is kind of 25 to 27 hours. I'm curious, and I know this is gonna be a range, but when caregivers come come into orientation, they fill out that questionnaire, what are they putting for desired hours? You know, are they

Krystal Wilkinson (43:51)
Right.

Miriam Allred (43:52)
I'm just so curious if there's like a trend or a

pattern there. Do most of them want forty hours? Do most of them want twenty five to thirty? Can you identify any ch I know. Give me something though. Or you can just say

Krystal Wilkinson (43:59)
It's a loaded question, Miriam.

Miriam Allred (44:03)
it it's across the board twenty to forty hours.

Krystal Wilkinson (44:06)
Well it it's so funny because that is actually one of the hiring points. Like I said, you know, they're not completely hired until they complete the orientation. We need to do that skills assessment, we need to do those those things. And part of it is that, you know, they're telling, the recruiter on the you know, d on the interview that I, you know, I have open availability, I'm available forty hours a week and then they walk in and they're like, I'm available on Tuesday from two to five PM.

Miriam Allred (44:27)
Exactly. Exactly.

Krystal Wilkinson (44:28)
And you're like, how am I ever gonna get that 40 hours? You know? And so sometimes,

you know, it's it's a a ploy to definitely get into the door. But I do see a nice range. There are some people who come in and they're just honestly like, I I'm a mom, I'm looking for some part-time work because I I need to be home with my kids at certain times, but I really would love to see, you know, 15 hours. And we have a we require them to have a 12 hours of availability. I'm

hire somebody who has four hour availability. I'm looking for at least 12 hours of availability within their schedule. And sometimes those are really great people for, some shorter shifts that we need or that last minute fill-in or what have you. But if they're not available for at least 12 hours.

during their work week, then it's probably not going to be a good fit for us because it's pretty long. But we do have

Miriam Allred (45:12)
Twelve is pretty low. Twelve to me seems low.

Krystal Wilkinson (45:16)
we have some caregivers who are at twelve hours, but they are the most consistent as well because it's like I'm available all day on Sundays, but I have another job and I'm going to school. And I have a you know a client who just wants to go to church on Sunday or whatever, and so they're very consistent and they've been working for three years with that same client, you know, or whatever. So but normally twelve hours because we do have

I don't have like a a weekly minimum of hours or whatever and and we are able to staff those shorter shifts and so we can work with them. And honestly having an office up in the Sun City which is obviously the retirement mecca of the world, a lot of our clients are

sweet ladies who have lost their husbands and so they are really really great caregivers and but they don't necessarily have forty hours a week that they want to work so that twelve hours is a nice you know transportation companionship those are really nice shifts for them and so it it works out well so but yeah you see it across the board but you always do have a few that maybe aren't as honest but we normally figured out pretty quick that you didn't match up with what you were saying. so but you do

Miriam Allred (46:20)
And that's why the metric, and that's why

the metric is utilization, because every caregiver wants something different. And therefore on the agency, you just track utilization. Are we meeting people's needs and expectations?

Krystal Wilkinson (46:31)
Right. Right.

Miriam Allred (46:33)
Okay. Very, very good. Let's let's keep going. I want to make sure we get through all of these. let's move on to care management. Yeah, care management next. What are the metrics

Krystal Wilkinson (46:39)
Care manage. Yeah.

Miriam Allred (46:42)
for that?

Krystal Wilkinson (46:43)
So we use care management. Some agencies will use nurses or supervisors, whatever it is that you use that's gonna be over the oversight of the of the client. and so this is the client experience. So and so we're gonna be looking at, number the for us, now your salespeople may be the ones who go out and actually do the the initial consultation or what have you and sign the client. For me, I want that care manager to have the start of service and the end of service with that client. So, you know, the our our sales team will take an inquiry call and immediately

set up the the assessment or the intake or the consultation, whatever it ends up being with the care manager. I want them actually meeting with that care manager. So they're kind of in a sense a little bit like a salesperson, but it it's it's because I want a full assessment to make sure it's appropriate care, that we're not taking on something that's beyond our scope. So we're gonna be looking at, you know, client net gain, you know, the number of clients that we're signing and that is a net gain, not

Not the the whole, because you're gonna have clients dropping off, so we wanna make sure that that's a growing number. Number of care management visits. So we do require our care managers. We're not just going out to reassess every three th you know, 90 days or whatever the requirement is. We are ac actually having them go out into the field and do those those those visits with the client, depending upon if they're a twenty-four-hour client, we're gonna probably have a care management visit once every week to just kind of make sure that

things haven't changed. if there's somebody who's, utilizing us three or four days a week, we might come out, once a month or something. But they're gonna have a consistent visit from that care manager, being able to see the client and and supervise the caregivers, make sure everything is going well, any concerns, that type of thing. and then client satisfaction score. You know, everybody should be tracking and and asking their clients, you know, how happy they are

Home Care Pulse, which is now Activated Insights, has a great platform to be able to do that on. We've come up with a way to be able to track that them ourselves. You can do it a lot of different ways through just simply calling your clients. How how you know how happy are you? You know, you can send an automated email out to your clients asking a few questions about how likely are you to refer us to somebody else.

You know, and when your care managers are out there, can they be asking for a Google review? You know, or what have you? So what is their their satisfaction score of that? and then number of referrals given out. that I kind of talked about a little bit earlier, but that is such a a big one. So, we had a a referral source that had been a a really great referral source for us for a long time and we started noticing we hadn't got anything in for a long time, like a couple weeks, a couple of months or whatever. And so we asked them

Why hadn't you know, why aren't you referring to us anymore? And they're like, you never gave anything back. It was like, really? And we went back and we looked and we were like, hey, we're not even tracking the referrals that we're giving out. Now we're non-medical and there's a lot of times that we have, you know, wound care that needs to be done or physical therapy, or it might be it's time for them it's no longer safe to be at home, so maybe it is time for them to move into a community. So maybe using a placement agent. it might be somebody who th the bills and and they're, you know.

And things are getting beyond them. So have we ever thought about bringing in a licensed fiduciary to kind of help them out? So are we referring out? And so those care managers who are in the home for that client satisfaction, are they looking at who they can refer things out and are you tracking those? And once we start realizing we weren't giving them back the referrals, no wonder they're not referring back to us anymore. So that we were able to actually tweak that a little bit as well. And now we can go back to them, like, we haven't got any referrals for a while, and we can look and be well, actually, we gave you three. Here are the three.

people we got and then we find out well they don't take the type of insurance that our our client had

Miriam Allred (50:20)
Mm.

Krystal Wilkinson (50:21)
so okay well now maybe we need to ask different questions before we give that referral out so we we are learning and being able to adjust by the number you know by the numbers themselves so that's an important piece to in my opinion to our care management team as well constantly looking at the client as a whole not just the ADLs and which ones can we help with.

Miriam Allred (50:40)
Yeah, super, super good. I wanna just jump right into sales because I feel like the way that you just positioned like care management is kind of like lockstep and parallel with sales and that those two functions,

Krystal Wilkinson (50:51)
Absolutely.

Miriam Allred (50:52)
it's like, you know, what sales does leads into care management. Like there's a lot of bleedover. So let's just jump right into sales and walk through the four that are under the sales department.

Krystal Wilkinson (51:01)
Yeah, so I actually only had three underneath the sales department because a lot of them are being like brought in. So you know again we're looking at the billable hours, you know. Are we having a growth over growth? and so we look at it month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year. So you know we're looking at you know July versus June. Are we having any growth there?

also looking over quarter two versus quarter one to see was there any growth between those two quarters and then we're also looking at twenty twenty six this quarter over twenty twenty five the same quarter, right? So we're wanting to see that growth over growth. So you know what is our our billable hours? Those face-to-face interactions with our

With our referral sources. Are we getting out into the field? A phone call does not count. During COVID, believe me, we tried. And and we were all doing the same thing in those Zoom meetings and things. And and it did okay, but you don't get the same interaction unless you're in the field talking to them, making those connections. You know, walking the hallways of a skilled rehab with the the director of nursing or something and asking her about what is your biggest pain point, what are the things you're struggling with, and really stopping to learn what she's trying to go through.

and then trying to figure out how to help her. And sometimes it's not a a referral that we get, you know, we can connect them with, but maybe it's a resource that we have. Again, we're referring something out, a referral given. You know, you're really needing to make a good connection with a home health nurse. I have a

That we work with, maybe I can give you her information as well. So maybe she doesn't have something right away, but showing that we are a partner and being able to do that is a you know much better if you're making that face-to-face interaction with them. And then again, number of referrals received. So how many referrals are re being received back from you know from that person and then the inquiry calls that are coming in. So when they're we're taking the inquiries, the people who are calling in and finding out how they heard about you and digging in, it can't just be like

probably at least half of the ones that say they found you on Google or on the website are probably a referral that was given to you, but then they checked you out on the website and then that's the last thing they remember and you're so how'd you hear about this? Well I found you on Google. And it turns out you know Dr. Pierpont gave it to you or whatever. So you want to make sure you go back to that person to re to say thank you, but you have to track those referrals in order to be able to do that.

Miriam Allred (53:18)
Okay, so one observation that I just find interesting is so net client gain is under care management and then billable hours is under sales. I think a lot of people may think, like, you know, client gain should be under sales, but it might be how you have your organization structured and the role of the care managers.

Krystal Wilkinson (53:36)
Like.

Miriam Allred (53:36)
They're really the ones that are doing the assessment and kind of like closing the sale. That's therefore they're responsible and own that metric. Is that kind of the reasoning?

Krystal Wilkinson (53:45)
It's correct.

Yeah. Yeah, you could have it under sales and that might make really good sense for your agency. But like I said, I don't actually send my sales manager out to to do the the consultation unless it's an I mean they're all trained to do so. We do a lot of cross training and they could go out and do that. If the let's say the care manager is on vacation or is on another assessment and we need to start something right away. Obviously we can get out and do that. But because I want that connection from the beginning, we we used to have it as a salesperson, but I'll be honest, the reason why I changed it over to the care manager.

manager is because why we had a a big problem with them getting really connected and like I'm

they didn't want to let go of the relationship with a salesperson and then they're calling the salesperson for all of their care management needs. And so if you can have that from the beginning, like I'm gonna be your care manager, it's a great saling point too, that I'm gonna follow your case and be able to watch over everything that happens here for you from the day that you sign on to services until the day you discharge from services. I will be your point of contact. So then you're not having to like, well you're calling the wrong person. And that salesperson may not have the

information that they need. They need a a resource for home health coming in. Mom just had a fall and you know, now we have a wound that we need to take care of. And so they're calling the salesperson. They may have the contact, but you know, i is it the right one for that specific type of need. And that care manager would be more of a person who could assess it. So

Miriam Allred (55:08)
Super, super

helpful because you see in a lot of other businesses the handoff is so tricky. The salesperson owns the relationship up until this point, and then it's a handoff. And and I I see all sorts of different shapes and sizes and how people approach this. But you've heard me on the podcast, like I'm just like becoming more and more of an advocate for like formal care management, but also for this piece specifically of like the sales to care transition, having someone dedicated that owns that process and owns that relationship, start to finish.

Krystal Wilkinson (55:39)
But I think it also it's it's funny how making that small tweak in our business actually solved a little issue that maybe maybe it was unique to me, but I I like to think that I wasn't the only one who's ever had this issue. But we did have some friction between, like the salesperson and the scheduler or the care manager because they're like, This is my client and then they would be trying to guide and direct exactly how that

you know, we staffed that that specific person or what have you. Where the care manager I think is a a more of a of a of a better

connection with the with the scheduling department because they're looking at it more holistically than a salesperson who's built developed a relationship and it becomes kind of a little bit like it's like my client, my mom, you're gonna do it my way, but they didn't necessarily have the full rounded you know skill set to be able to look at all aspects of it to say actually that caregiver may not be the right fit. And so it it's kind of just kind of alleviated a little bit of that friction that we had in the office as well. And they're they're very happy to hand it off and and you know be able to to move it to the care manager.

Sure.

Miriam Allred (56:41)
That's super important because otherwise it can stifle growth in that the sales rep is spending more time managing clients

and relationships than growing the business and finding net new clients. And so I actually see that being a hang up for a lot of businesses. The sales rep are doing some selling, but they're actually doing a lot of like relationship management and client oversight when that's taking away from their time growing the business.

Krystal Wilkinson (57:03)
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.

Miriam Allred (57:04)
So yeah, really, really good on care management and sales. let's talk about HR and finance. This is the last kind of department category on the on the scorecard. So let's do HR and finance.

Krystal Wilkinson (57:16)
Yeah, and I I find a lot of people don't feel like their their finance or their HR department should have any kind of of metric. And I'm thinking, why wouldn't they? I mean, like we always think about like sales metrics, we always think about, you know, hours for scheduling and stuff, but i I think sometimes we skip over the ones it's like, well, they're just the finance department. They're just you know, they're just HR. But if you think about it, you know, they're just as important as everybody else. And so, for HR and finance, you know

that employee satisfaction score. We already already talked about the client satisfaction score, but you know, that caregiver turnover is real. And so, having somebody who's following up and you know, we actually look at metrics on, what is our caregiver turnover in, that seven days is our highest turnover, the first week. Sometimes we might be scaring them off in orientation. I don't know, but you know, do they ever actually really enter the field? Because we do pay for orientation whether they are ever into the field for us or not. And so do you know

Do they ever enter the field after that or not? So we look at seven days, we look at you know, like thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, and then

we look at annual as well. So we're constantly looking at that and so what is the satisfaction score? And so that means that we're doing check-in calls on a regular basis. So guess when we're doing check-in calls? After their first shift, at their seven day, at the 30 day, 60 day, 90 day, and at you know at least once a year, we're checking in with them, just kind of saying, is do you need any additional training? How are you feeling? Are you getting the hours you want? And it's nice because it's not, you know, somebody that you feel like your job is attached to, like the scheduler going, you know, are you gonna complain about me to me?

Having

somebody else in your business actually reaching out and giving that information is really helpful as well. of course your accounts receivable, aging receivable invoices, are they keeping up with, bringing back in the money and you know

That type thing. And then the net caregiver gain. again, because we're trying to keep that satisfaction, so that net caregiver gain, yes, we're gonna have the turnover, but we want it continually to be growing and so we want it to be staying steady at the top. And so those are are the big ones that we kind of look at. other things that we might be looking at is you know, errors in the

billing your payroll errors or billing errors, things like that. or maybe another metric that you may want to sometimes you're looking at at things to try to find out why we're having so many so we can tweak it and then maybe you can lose that metric. You don't need it anymore once we figured out the the perfect formula, if you will. So

Miriam Allred (59:44)
Just a little side question.

You've lumped HR and finance together. In your organization, are they lumped together? Does HR report to finance? Are they actually connected or no?

Krystal Wilkinson (59:52)
They're they just I have them come into one meeting because otherwise I'd be kind of meeting one on one in a couple of different areas. So I I lump that together in our weekly meetings as that is one team that works together. So it's actually the the lead recruiter, the lead in finance and the lead HR director are the three people that meet in that meeting. and they are reporting to each other their numbers and their scores. So

Miriam Allred (1:00:13)
Krystal, that was amazing. I love this, just like boiled right down to again the universal metrics. Like there are so many distractions and, shiny objects when it comes to metrics, but I really feel like this is tight and consolidated, and you've you've done done it justice to kind of like boil it down. The question I want to ask you though is over the years, you have sprinkled in different things. I'm just curious, like, you know, top of mind, what comes up around things that you've tracked.

That were a distraction? Have there been any specific metrics or KPIs that you can recall that you remember kind of like going down a rabbit hole on that you wish you would have avoided?

Krystal Wilkinson (1:00:48)
Yeah, I'm trying to think of a few. I think that we've had s some I'm trying to think of some that that come to mind. I'm I'm kind of drawing a blank right now, but there have been a few where it's like, why are we tracking this? Every single week. We've been asking the same question and we put it down and we talk about, it's like, and what you have to kind of stop and think, you know, is it really giving you any value? Is it giving me any information whatsoever? And you know, I I think that I'm I think maybe it was Stephen Tweed. I'm gonna give him credit for it, but that might I he may or may not have been the person I think it was Stephen Tweed.

You basically said, you know, your KPI, you need to be able to to define it in a sentence. Just one sentence, what it is. If you're having to like go on and on and on about it, it's it's not really a KPI. It's just a you know a diversion. you're ranting on something, or whatever. But there have been a lot of KPIs where we've created it because you know something wasn't working. So like

I'm trying to think like maybe in in billing or or something, it's like, okay, let's say it's something like, you know, schedule errors. You know, so we're tracking how many schedule errors are we having every week? Well, we shouldn't be having any schedule errors, but that was something we were tracking at one point when we

seeing a lot of errors what were happening in the schedule, like the caregiver was not, was never put on the schedule, or the caregiver was the client wasn't informed of a caregiver change, or you know, any reason why we wouldn't be able to bill for that for that client, we need to to maybe track that. So then it will give us an idea as to is this an ongoing issue or is it something that we need to you know make some tweaks? Is it what's broken, and so you also have to think about what is the story you're trying to

get out of it. So if I'm having us track something, it needs to have a reason. What is the story is it giving me? And if you stop and you've tracked it for a you know a few weeks, you know, try it for a quarter and at the end of thirteen weeks you're like, what story am I even getting out of it? You probably don't need to be tracking it. It's probably just giving somebody busy work that's taking time to go pull that number out to make sure that they're putting it in your system to be able talk about it. So

Miriam Allred (1:02:45)
Yeah, numbers definitely, numbers

will come and go and identifying, okay, we didn't we need to track this for a time, but then okay, we're through that time and like we can pull it back. There's definitely a lot of flux. this is might be another loaded question. You know, I've got this scorecard in front of me and so do

you. As the president of the company, what one number are you most focused on? Or do you look at every single day and go, okay, like we're doing all right?

Krystal Wilkinson (1:03:11)
Yeah, I like the numbers. So I mean like I guess if there was like only one number, you know, to tell me if the company is is, you know, growing or not, obviously it's gonna be your weekly billable hours, you know. Is there are you having that growth again, month over month, year over year, quarter over quarter, whatever. is is there the growth? is the pendulum heading the right direction? You know, and you're always gonna have the serpentine, especially here in Arizona, we were just talking about this. summer hits and

You know, we hit a hundred and

ten, hundred and fifteen degrees and it's honestly too hot to live. And that is our biggest like a lot of agencies see it in the wintertime when it gets so cold. But all the kids disappear, they all get out of Dodge because it's too hot. Mom and Dad are left behind. It's hot and we see more deaths in the summer months than any other time of year. So typically I I can actually track it. And this is something that I was kind of struggling because I was seeing our numbers drop at one point.

and if you go back and track you know your five year see if it's a trend and and it was it was like almost you could almost exactly on the same day you start seeing that that immediate dip and it's about the time that all of the kids who snowbird to other cooler places disappear that's when we see a decline and in a

But then it's funny because about July we see it just starting to skyrocket again, which is like, okay, you know, mom and dad can hide a lot of things over a telephone, but then you know, towards the end of July, August time, we start seeing either they're catching on, somebody's reported to us, or maybe the kids are coming back from business, like, yikes, and then we start seeing that increase again. So being able to track those numbers, those weekly bill hours. But I do like looking at the

holistic and digging in a little bit deeper on some of the other things like you know our recruiting stats and and things and being able to even like with our recruiting you know taking it and looking at how much money are we spending I think it's I think the average is five hundred dollars per applicant is what everybody's pr typically spending on you know posting for your

for your applicant. What are some ways that you can be tracking numbers that's going to be able to decrease that? What are some things like keeping that that post at top of mind, you know, like at the but don't to post too often because you won't see it then either, right? So what are some different things that you can be tracking and looking at as the owner that nobody has the number that they're reporting to me, but I'm looking at and so we've used we're we have you know some things that that pull in and I look at on a regular basis. But

Miriam Allred (1:05:41)
Yeah, you're teasing we're gonna need to do two part two with your husband who's building all of this kind of proprietary AI technology right there inside of your business and

Krystal Wilkinson (1:05:49)
That's why he's gonna come work for me. Like I said at the beginning, this is he's not gonna be involved in the day to day, but he's back there behind the scenes going, This is fun. He loves AI.

Miriam Allred (1:05:56)
And he is gonna take adult care

assistance into the future, you know, pulling all of this good information. There's like so much data and information coming in and out of a home care business. He's gonna kinda like aggregate it all and then, put it in this dashboard that you can do something with and action on and so so that you and the team can stay focused on the most important things, being able to kind of see all this comprehensive data and what to do with it.

I think kind of one last question I wanna ask you is do you think this scorecard and these metrics we've talked about are going to take your business into the future? You know, when you think about where you've come the last fifteen years, you think about the next ten or fifteen years, do you feel like these metrics will actually be universal and take you into the next ten years?

Krystal Wilkinson (1:06:35)
I think so and I think that, even like some of the different ways that we've learned to look at over the years, it's helped us to be able to predict our growth a little bit differently. And so, you know, like like I kinda talked about how, you know, I kinda know that twenty seven hours, average client hours is like a really good spot for us because, you know, we don't lose our shirt every time we have a death, right? And so, you know,

it it's it's kind of nice to be able to to be able to to do some things. I know that if I make it at least twenty five visits to referral sources that we're gonna be most likely getting the influx of the of the inquiries that I need to keep that pipeline going. I know that, I can almost predict exactly how many caregivers I need per zip code or per location in order to handle the the people who are in the pipeline because we're able to stop and look at that by, you know, tracking these numbers and being able to do it across the board.

over a a period of time. And when we ever we do our state of the company, we had it this week and we always look at those five years like over

we I layer them on top of each other as well so we can actually see the growth. And even like in the last three years, watching our growth from twenty twenty four to twenty twenty six and being able to even look across the the metrics that we've been tracking to see how that actually is playing into so we can actually predict faster versus waiting for those lagging indicators. So absolutely these are helping us with with our growth and how we move into the future.

Miriam Allred (1:07:59)
it. Krystal, this has been so good. You've been like so on point this entire conversation. So kudos to you. And thank you for being willing to share this. Like again, I love that these concepts are universal. I hope everyone listening to this can think about their own scorecard from this lens of like what are the universal metrics for my business that are gonna take me into the future. And I I think it's what we've shared today. Granted, there are little nuances to everybody's businesses, but really getting this dialed in and back to the question I mentioned I asked earlier of just like the peaks and valleys. Like

I really do think, yes, there are like anomalies in home care because we're dealing with people, but there are trends and patterns and behaviors year over year. You can look at the data, you can look at the time of year, you can look at all of the the factors, and you really can start to extract patterns and trends that help you, maintain more consistency and predictability as you go. And that's so important to be able to scale this business.

Krystal Wilkinson (1:08:51)
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I love this stuff and I and like I said at kind of in the beginning, I I absolutely probably my favorite thing is I have I've learned along the way. Not that I have all of this knowledge, but it's like, what do I do with all this stuff that I have now in my head? I've kind of been able to kind of figure out some of that stuff. So I love being able to help somebody else, maybe not have to go through 15 years to to maybe learn it. Maybe I can get you there faster. I'm always willing to have a conversation and maybe share just a little bit of what I've learned and

What's always so ironic is I always end up learning from whoever I'm talking to. doesn't matter if they're brand new into the field or if they've been here, longer than me. It's it's so fun to be able to to share and collaborate together so that we can make each other better.

Miriam Allred (1:09:32)
Yeah, I think that's why you and I get along so well because I share that same philosophy. It's like it doesn't matter how long I've been doing this or how long you've been doing it, like it's still so interesting and there's infinite amount of problems and infinite amount of solutions and like where home home care is headed, like there's just still so much more for us to like learn and grow and figure out. So Krystal, thank you

Krystal Wilkinson (1:09:48)
Absolutely.

Miriam Allred (1:09:49)
so much. We'll go ahead and wrap here, but fantastic conversation. I'll have your information in your website and the show notes. If anyone wants to reach out to Krystal, please do so. She is an open book and a wealth of knowledge like she just shared. So thank you so much.

Krystal Wilkinson (1:10:00)
Thank you, Maryam. Thank you for having me on your show. I appreciate it.

Miriam Allred (1:10:03)
Absolutely.