The Care Home Coach team’s journey so far...
After a lot of preparation and a huge amount of work, just over twelve months ago Rob Hammond and I ran an event to officially launch The Care Home Coach.
The idea behind the event was to invite a limited number of care home business owners to a workshop where we provided support to help them address some of their biggest commercial challenges that they were facing. This was done with a view to working with them on a long-term basis if they bought into what we could do and how we could help them realise their aspirations.
Our plan was to support the delegates on issues like occupancy, increasing fees, getting the lowering agency costs and improving the public-to-privately funded resident mix. All of the usual stuff that helps care home businesses improve their bottom line figures so that they can continue investing into their provision, people and grow their business etc.
Honestly, before the event we were actually quite concerned. This was a brand new venture and we both knew that what we were doing was risky. Despite the amount knowledge that we cumulatively had about overcoming such challenges (mostly Rob’s experience I must highlight), it’s always going to be nerve racking because we knew that failure was more likely than success.
Luckily, our hard work paid off. The event was a success, albeit we ended up doing a smaller event that we first expected. But, everyone who attended the event wanted us to work with them to help them achieve their vision of success.
Since then, we have won at least one new client a month and added some big names to our client list including; Hallmark Care Homes, Gold Care Homes and Balhousie Care Group. All of our clients are intent-driven, have a vision for their future, but also have challenges that they are looking to overcome. We are lucky because we have the pleasure of helping them with their journey.
Some of the projects that we have been involved with include:
- Helping prepare a group for exit which has involved the alignment of the senior leadership team, improving care quality and increasing both the clients profitability and valuation
- Delivering Dementia Care Mapping to a medium sized group where we linked the maps back to the clients overarching dementia strategy to help them improve the well-being of their residents
- Dramatically improving a clients' occupancy from 74% to consistently in excess of 96% in less than one hundred and twenty days
- Significantly lowering a clients’ agency bill by more than sixty percent in less than ninety days
As part of our growth I have had the pleasure of hiring two new team members. Our next hire needed someone from a care quality background and it wasn’t hard to pick. When I asked Rob who the best care quality expert he knew, there was no hesitation in suggesting Sue Goldsmith.
In June, 2017 Sue joined us as our Director of Care Quality Services. Sue is a veteran Mental Health Nurse and amongst other roles before joining us was the Head of Care Improvement for Four Seasons Health Care. Sue is a dementia care extraordinaire and understands the dynamics of person centred care as well as anyone I have ever met.
To bring more structure to how we operate, in January 2018 we had the opportunity to hire a Managing Director. I now had the pleasure of asking my two team members who we should hire as an MD and again, both Rob and Sue had no hesitation in suggesting that I should hire Martin Murphy.
Martin has coming up to twenty-five years’ experience working within the care sector and most recently came from a Managing Director-level role, also with Four Seasons Health Care. Prior to which he had been an award winning Regional Manager, where he achieved outstanding success from a culture, care quality and business perspective.
If you’ll allow me to blow my/our own trumpet for one second, I don’t think that we’ve done badly for a start-up that’s only been generating revenue for twelve months. It wouldn’t be a start-up without some big challenges, some bad decisions and a few ‘Oh shit!’ moments but I really feel like we’re making good headway.
It goes without saying that I am immensely proud of what we have achieved and eternally grateful to my team and all of the people (too many to name!) who have helped us get to where we are today.
Trying to pick a ‘best bit’ of running The Care Home Coach is just too hard but there are two things that stand out as being ‘up there’:
- Having the pleasure of leading a team of award winning, highly skilled and highly committed team members is extremely rewarding
- And, having meetings and calls with clients who have experienced some form of significant transformation that has helped them get one step closer to achieving their vision of success makes all the hard work worthwhile
The future is very exciting for us. Our clients are experiencing fantastic results, we’re winning new clients faster than we could have ever hoped, we’re in the process of broadening our service offering and we’re growing our team.
When Rob and I first set out we kind of knew what we were onto but not with real clarity. Now we see the world in care home High Definition; our purpose is to help our clients to build outstanding care home businesses and our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal!) is to become the professional services provider for the care home sector.
Although writing isn’t something that I feel I am particularly skilled at I am going to commit to continue documenting our progress on LinkedIn (and some other forms of media). This is partly because my spelling and grammar could do with some work, partly because I think that documenting what we do will hopefully provide some inspiration for other people who want to go into some kind of business and partly because (we hope) that there are people out there in the world who are genuinely interested in what we’re up and what I have to say.
If you have enjoyed, found inspiration or some use from my ramblings please let me know. I am going to continue to do so either way but it’s nice to know that some people are listening!
As part of this I will also begin publishing interviews with our team, clients, business partners and also industry influencers who work within the care home space who have an interesting perspective or story to tell.
Is there someone specifically that you would like me to interview? Is there a specific question that you would like me to ask that person?
Please comment below and I will endeavour to get the answers to the questions from the person you wish to hear from.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
Best regards,
Simon
Founder
The Care Home Coach
T - 0121 232 4625
CLN is the professional network for Care Leaders ??
6 年Hello everyone and thank you for liking and commenting on my article last week! Scott Andrews, the Managing Director of Nursing Hygiene Group?asked me about what sets us apart from our competition - thank you again for your question Scott. To hear my answer in my latest article please click the following link -?https://bit.ly/2ynWji9
CLN is the professional network for Care Leaders ??
6 年Great shout, thank you Scott! I will definitely share more about what sets us apart from the rest of the market. I really appreciate the suggestion.?
Director
6 年Hello Simon, it's great to hear about the journey you're on. To compliment what you have written about so far I think it would be good to hear more about your services and what sets you apart from other 'care consultancies'. Could you share more information about this in your future articles?
CLN is the professional network for Care Leaders ??
6 年That's a really good idea - I will add a Dementia Care Mapping article to our content calendar. Thank you for the recommendation Peter.?
TCHD - innovative environments for better dementia care.
6 年Hi Simon, as you know I've been closely following what you and the team are up to.. You have posted about providing Dementia Care Mapping for a client. Could you write one of your future articles on this subject and to explain how that service helps residents well-being, supports your clients dementia strategies and can aid aspirations of achieving an Outstanding CQC inspection please? Many thanks, Peter Rose.