28/05/2023
LA – At-Home Service Opportunity Highlights the LPC Value Proposition
1,700 words MAX
John W Mitchell
3/8/2018
Beginning in 2008, Denise Rabidoux, President, and CEO at EHM Senior Solutions suspected the future of their mission might no longer revolve around putting a shovel in the ground for new bricks and mortar. So, she did something that wasn’t easy; she spent six months asking her future customers what they wanted.
“When you listen to consumers, you might end up hearing something you don’t want to hear,” she recalls.
In taking this action, Rabidoux was putting an old sales adage into motion: you have to sell what people are buying, not what you are selling. Another name for this concept is defining the value proposition. For EHM, their value proposition quest turned up findings so disruptive, that the 138-year-old faith-based group changed its name to reflect its new-found mission. The organization, formerly known as Evangelical Homes of Michigan, became EHM Senior Solutions.
According to the 2,500 community members they spoke with in a series of fireside chats and focus groups, Evangelical Homes of Michigan was not providing the upfront support older people were seeking. EMH also conducted 500 follow-up phone surveys. They told Rabidoux and her team what they wanted was to stay in their home until they needed to make a move to a Life Plan Community (LPC), including assisted living, a nursing home, or even memory care.
These findings were so convincing, Rubidoux said, their board agreed to sell property slated for future housing development to fund a robust home services program. Today, EHM has expanded from providing services to about 4,000 onsite residents, adding 1,500 people through home-based and technology solutions, to serving 5,500 people in total.
“This led us to this amazing opportunity to connect with individuals - perhaps prospects…who had an impression of what we did and had an opportunity to voice their desire for the future,” says Rabidoux. “We found out that 75 percent of seniors in our communities are not ready to leave home (because) home is king.”
Rabidoux led their value proposition reinvention journey from a position of strength. The organization had nearly 100 percent occupancy and was not in any distress. But, according to Mario McKenzie, Partner at the strategy firm CliftonLarsonAllen, leadership for the future is about being good at peeking around corners.
“The ability is to connect with the consumer – not just the current one, but the future one – and really start questioning what they value,” says McKenzie. “Do they want to pay for an entire suite of services? What are we doing for the ones who don’t? Are we prepared to move out of our bricks and mortars and develop access to serve people at home?”
While the questions McKenzie poses run throughout the full range of operations, it is fair to say that at home services trend is emerging as an LPC value proposition. He stresses that the time to ask such questions is from a position of strength, which can be difficult because it’s also the hardest time to think about change. The financials may be solidly in the black for now, but by the time the financials look bad, McKenzie says, it can be too late.
“Unfortunately for many providers, their value proposition is tied to a lifestyle…that is greatly amplified by the bricks and mortar…all of these require pretty significant capital investments,” he notes “Often time there is very little return, outside of strategic return…that doesn’t bring in a single dollar of new revenue.”
Cecily Laidman, Executive Director of Cadbury Senior Lifestyles at Home, the second oldest at-home program in the country established almost 20 years ago, agrees that such changes can seem counterintuitive to a traditional LPC mission. She says that bricks and mortar communities sometimes consider that at-home services program is a form of competition, and it can be difficult to convince a board of directors to look beyond their traditional mission. This, even though the investment in at-home programs is much less than a bricks-and-mortar strategy.
But she says that their value proposition offers many benefits. Among the pros is expanding services to the other 85 percent of the people who have no interest in a residential LPC. Laidman said their original LPC parent organization came up with the idea of an at-home program because it was landlocked from any further building expansion.
“Once people wrap their brain around this and understand what the program is, they see the huge benefit,” she says. “It expands the mission to more people…in senior living, as different generations come up, this is offering more choices for people as one-stop shopping. You may want to move into a community; you might want to move into assisted living. But for the majority of people who don’t, it really opens things up.”
Because Cadbury does not operate any bricks and mortar operations, Laidman also says, they have stricter medical standards for participation than residential programs.
Their success has not gone unnoticed. Springpoint Senior Living, a New Jersey-based provider with eight communities, affordable housing residences, and its own home care division, decided to affiliate with Cadbury to access its expertise for its service areas. Eventually, the two entities plan to integrate fully.
Anthony A. Argondizza, President, and CEO at Springpoint Senior Living, says the move is an acknowledgment that the percentage of age and income-qualified seniors in any given primary market that will choose to reside in an LPC is only five to ten percent.
“Springpoint is excited to provide a product that will be a valuable option to those seniors who will never move into an LPC. The affiliation with Cadbury brings with it one of the most mature continuing care at-home products in the country,” says Argondizza. “Continuing care at home participation is an expansion of quality programs, services, and choice …(a) goal that we identified in our Board-approved three-year plan.”
While home services are an emerging influencer on the value proposition important to potential future residents, no LPC can afford to overlook the opinions of its current residents. Nikki Rineer, President, Holleran Consulting Group, experts in community engagement, stresses that all residents want to be heard. This, she says, is vital to how well any community supports successful aging – which may very well be the ultimate value proposition. The best-practicing communities listen to their residents.
“The worst thing you can do is ask someone for feedback and then not do anything with it. I have seen communities with results that were not up to the standards they desired stand in front of their residents and say, ‘This isn’t what we wanted for you, and we are committed to turning this around,'" says Rineer. “It's hard to be that vulnerable, but the gift is that being genuine goes a long way. It’s even OK not to have all the answers, but ignoring the results has never gone over well.”
According to Rineer, the company primarily relies on Overall Satisfaction and Willingness to Recommend measures to gauge resident satisfaction as measured against its national benchmarks. This helps communities to position themselves with a greater competitive advantage. And she stresses that if an LPC wants highly engaged residents, they must first have highly engaged employees.
"This correlation is the basis of a true culture of engagement, and many senior living communities promote their distinct atmosphere by way of leveraging their value proposition to potential residents as well as for retention efforts,” Rineer points out.
In Ohio, Friendship Village of Dublin worked through its value proposition self-examination and ended up rolling out the first of its kind, in-home assisted living program in Central Ohio. The unique home services selling (value) proposition they arrived at reads:
“Our team of professionals will handle the day-to-day tasks and other burdens so you can sit back and enjoy life – the way you want to."
Friendship Village Executive Director Jerry Kuyoth reports the program required a cash need of nearly $1 million before breaking even, but it’s what the larger community wanted - and what Friendship Village needed.
“Don’t expect (all potential) members to flock to your CCRC. Most prefer a home-based option, and that diversification has strengthened all areas of the overall organization,” says Kuyoth. “Our commitment to top-tier bricks and mortar as well as a diversified platform of community-based options has been a winning combination."
According to McKenzie with CliftonLarsonAllen, Springpoint Senior Living, Friendship Village, and EHM Senior Solutions, all display a trait that he thinks LPCs could work to more fully cultivate: a focus on growth. He said that talk to the average nonprofit provider, and they speak a lot about mission, but not so much about growth. He maintained that a Board should be pleased with a growth initiative, but why not look at four growth strategies to help support the mission? McKenzie thinks there is, right now, an opportunity to make growth more natural in the nonprofit culture.
“The drive to grow does not seem to be baked into the average (nonprofit) DNA,” he explains. “But the biggest competitor is and will always be people who want to stay home. We need to stop monkeying around and say at some juncture, people at home and capital will continue to pursue solutions. Traditional providers should ask: how do I cast my net broader than beyond just my walls?”
The good news is that LPC Boards can have it both ways, as evident in EHM Senior Solutions’ success. Roubideaux asserts that its faith-based, not-for-profit status remains an essential part of its value proposition to its current and potential clients. She said that by leveraging that part of their traditional value, they were able to take the next step by taking the time and energy to find out what their larger community wants and expects. She asked one simple question: if you were the CEO, what would you do? It was a question that resonated deeply with the broader community.
“It was amazing the data we got from this journey,” she concludes. “There were lots of beautiful parts of that which described our value proposition and then made us think about what was missing for the older adult or family.”
