Building strong relationships with clients is easy. The work you do with your consumers is very personal and sometimes intimate. The nature of their work builds strong relationships.

While building strong relationships is part of the job, most companies are not profiting from these relationships. There is a perception that serving your clients is noble, and making a profit from them is a necessary evil, at least in the minds of your clientele. This absolutely isn't true.

You're hearing it now, direct from a consumer's mouth. "I want my home care company to be profitable, extremely profitable." If the company that provides me with home care services is not fiscally sound, I'm at risk. The relationships I have with the company and the caregivers are at risk anytime the company isn't operating in the black. For that matter, I realize the bigger the profits the more likely my relationship will remain stable. Admittedly, I'm unique in that I truly understand the business of home care.

There are two techniques for improving profits using your clientele.

• Upselling
• Word-of-mouth Referrals

The key to success with both of these techniques is the same -- enthusiastic customers. Enthusiastic customers are individuals you serve in a way that exceeds their expectations. Doing great work overall is terrific, but it only guarantees a certain number of enthusiastic customers. Focusing on the expectation of your clients, and exceeding them, creates far more enthusiastic customers.

Encourage your staff at every level to constantly ask themselves these two questions:

• What does this individual expect from this interaction?
• How am I going to exceed that expectation?

This technique can be used by every member of your staff from caregiver to CEO; when schedulers communicate with caregivers, when CEOs communicate with team leaders, and in our examples today, any staff member interaction with consumers.

Before you can tap into the profit potential of enthusiastic customers, you must ascertain whether or not they are truly enthusiastic. A satisfied customer is not an enthusiastic customer. A satisfied customer gets everything they expect from their agency. You can be flawless, and still only have a satisfied customer.

Most agencies do some supervisory visits. This is a great opportunity to determine which of your clients are enthusiastic customers. Ask them direct questions then give them the opportunity to address issues. Some of your best opportunities for enthusiastic customers actually stem from negative issues or objections. If you able to solve a problem or address a concern in a way that exceeds expectations, you can actually convert a dissatisfied customer into an enthusiastic customer.

Now you've done a great job by providing great customer service. For most companies, improved customer service is reason enough for the added effort. But it also can be profitable.

Upselling can occur with every private duty client you have. We will take a look at two examples.

Private pay clients

The first block of service is always the hardest to sell. Once you have a private pay client, keep looking for opportunities to offer them additional service. This could take the form of additional hours of caregiver time, or added value service such as geriatric care management or home safety technology.

Turn a respite case into regular hours. Family caregivers recognize the value of respite after they've used the service. The simple question "Could you use a weekly break?" could turn a one-time client into regular revenue.

Medicaid waiver and other third-party payers

Whenever a third-party payer is involved, sometimes people perceive the payer as a customer. In fact, you have two customers. Both of which can be involved in the buying decision.

Health care in America today is very consumer driven. If you're feeling sad, suffering from allergies, or having trouble sleeping, pharmaceutical companies are encouraging you to visit your physician with the name of their drug in your mind. It wasn't long ago, that people with yellow toenails simply wore socks, now they visit the doctor and ask him to attack the fungus with a pill.

Your consumers, even the ones with case management, have tremendous influence over the quantity of care they receive. This doesn't work in every situation, but if you could encourage your consumers to be self advocates, then you could see dramatic increases in revenue without added overhead administrative costs.

Word-of-mouth is not passive advertising. Many of you build your business based on word-of-mouth, and you haven't even established a clear strategy for generating additional referrals.

Go to every enthusiastic customer and ask them one question. "Do you know someone like yourself who would benefit from our service?" If they say "yes", ask them for an introduction. If they say "no", at the very least your enthusiastic customer will probably keep their eyes open for an opportunity to spread the word.

Take this technique one step further. Ask clients to introduce you to referral sources. You'd love face to face time with bank trust officers, Elder Law attorneys, case managers and physicians. Your clients, particularly private pay clients, will often employ a wide variety of potential referral sources.

Ask the most enthusiastic of your clients to call these potential referral sources and ask them to give five minutes of their valuable time to a representative of your company. These introductory calls can often get you through the gatekeepers and identify referral sources that you may not have known existed.

Direct sales professionals, we know, spend a huge amount of time trying to identify new referral sources, and a huge amount of energy attempting to get face time with them. Direct sales efficiency and effectiveness drop dollars directly to the bottom-line.

By Kathy Clater

That comment was made by a Private Duty owner in a recent recruiting and retention phone survey of 18 companies conducted by Leading Home Care. It’s a sentiment we’ve heard from many of you who are struggling with how to hire reliable caregivers. Okay, maybe only the Creator can truly know the heart of a person, but we don’t have to continue to make the hiring decision “blind” either. The fact is that behavioral assessment technology has advanced to the point that we can get objective, reliable and valid information about every applicant before we even conduct the interview! We can also compare the behavioral traits of each applicant to the behavioral traits of successful caregivers.

Can you make better hiring decisions if you objectively know the extent to which each applicant is:

• Dependable, conscientious and reliable
• Unlikely to be aggressive, hostile or disruptive
• Honest with high integrity
• Low risk of substance abuse
• Kind, likable and respectful of authority
• Hard-working, dedicated and thorough
• Outgoing, lively and persuasive
• Calm, resilient and optimistic
• Flexible and curious

How much more effective could your interviews be, if an applicant’s assessment report pre-identified any areas of concern and automatically generated follow up questions for you?

Leading Home Care will soon be offering a new selection process for home care caregivers that will include cutting edge technology pre-employment assessments, behavioral interview questions based on assessment results, and core performance indicators already benchmarked for successful caregivers in the home care industry.

Let’s face it, if you are going to make better hiring decisions in the future, you are going to have to have more and better information than you are getting right now. Objective assessments can be powerful tools when applied to the hiring process.

We're heading back to Las Vegas in November for the 9th Annual Private Duty National Conference sponsored by Private Duty Insider and Decision Health. If it's anything like last year, you won't want to miss it.

Stephen Tweed, CEO of Leading Home Care, was privileged to speak for the first conference, called Private Duty Boot Camp back in 1997. This program has come a long way since then, as it has grown in size and content.

This year's conference runs from Monday, November 13th through Wednesday, November 15th. Stephen will kick off the last morning of the conference with a program called, "Building Your Private Duty Referrals Dashboard: An Electronic Tool to Gauge Your Success."

In this program, Stephen will be describing in detail our Private Duty Scorecard and the success we have had with our Private Duty Planning and Coaching clients in measuring the success of their businesses. He'll show you step by step how to set up your Private Duty Scorecard, and how to measure the Critical Measures of Success in Private Duty Home Care. We'll also be sharing some new benchmarking data that we're collecting through our collaboration with Outcome Concept Systems.

There are some other wonderful presentations on the schedule that you will want to be there for:

• "Build Your PD Business the Right Way" - with Lucy Andrews
• "HR Pitfalls" - with John Gilliland
• "State Law Roundup" - with Tim Purcey
• "Non-solicitation and Non-compete Clauses" - with Liz Zink-Pearson
• "Magical Customer Care" - with Al Jensen
• "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Home Care Managers" - with Dexter Braff

Don't delay! Make your hotel and plane reservations today for a terrific time in Las Vegas, and come back with some valuable tools and techniques to grow your Private Duty Home Care Business.

Joins us in Indianapolis in November for a day of learning, listening, and laughing as a group of Private Duty Home Care owners and administrators come together to discuss how to grow their businesses and get ready for the future.

Leading Home Care along with Indiana Association for Home & Hospice Care, Illinois Home Care Council, Michigan Home Health Association and National Privated Duty Association are partnering to sponsor the Academy for Private Duty Home Care in Indianapolis on Thursday, November 30, 2006.

As the CEO of a successful Private Duty Home Care company, you're often alone in your decision making. There's no one in your organization who really understands your feelings, frustrations, and concerns.

Based on significant research, the Academy for Private Duty Home Care has been designed as a one day institute expressly for owners, administrators, and CEOs of Private Duty Home Care companies.

This is your opportunity to come together in an intimate, high-impact learning environment to share strategies, ideas, and insights on how to grow your business, multiply the performance of your team members, and increase your income.

Come Join us:

Thursday, November 30, 2007
8:00 - 4:00
Holiday Inn North at the Pyramid
3850 DePaw Ave.
Indianapolis, IN.

For more information, download the brochure, or call IAHHC at 317-575-8751.

Private Duty Today! is published every other Wednesday by Leading Home Care . . . a Tweed Jeffries company. We invite you to pass this newsletter along to your friends and colleagues in Private Duty Home Care by clicking on the link below.

• Publisher - Stephen Tweed, CSP
• Circulation Manager - Diane West
• Editor - Jason Tweed

Permission to Reproduce: Permission is granted to home care companies, home care associations, and home care related publications to reproduce articles from this newsletter as long as appropriate credit is given as follows: "Printed with permission from Private Duty Today! Copyright 2006 Leading Home Care ... To sign up for your FREE Subscription, log on to www.privatedutytoday.com."

You may also sign up for your FREE Subscription to Stephen Tweed's Leading Home Care Report. This bi-weekly electronic newsletter is written for home care company CEOs and senior executives who want to grow their businesses and multiply their performance.

email: jason@leadinghomecare.com

phone: 1-888-668-9333

web: http://www.privatedutytoday.com