Creating Competitive Advantage in Private Duty Home Care

by Stephen Tweed

How many of you have been to Disney World in Florida, or Disney Land in California?  What is it that makes the Disney theme parks different from other theme parks in the USA? 

I ask those questions about 100 times a year in my seminars, workshops, and conference presentation.  About 95% of my audiences have been to a Disney park.  How would you like to have that kind of market share in home care?

The two most common answers to the second question; What makes Disney parks unique?
1.  Cleanliness

2.  Friendliness (or service)

If you ask Disney, they’ll tell you two more things;  “Show” and safety.

What makes your private duty home care business unique in your local marketplace?  If you can’t answer that, then you’ll want to read into this article, and dig into the Seven Sources of Competitive Advantage.

The Seven Sources of Competitive Advantage

I wrote my first commercially published book in 1990, called Strategic Focus: A Gameplan for Developing Competitive Advantage.  In that book we discussed Five Sources of Competitive Advantage. Since then, we’ve upgraded our knowledge and added two to make The Seven Sources of Competitive Advantage.  Then we tailored them specifically for private duty home care.  Here they are:

1.  Specialized Program Packaging and Promotion – Offering specialized disease-specific services to your clients and families.
2.  Exceptional Customer Experiences – being so easy to work with that your clients, families, and referral sources have an amazing experience that they are willing to share with their friends and neighbors.
3  Caregiver Quality – using a specific, focused process for recruiting, selecting, training and retaining caregivers.
4.  Personal Relationships – based on the premise that “all things being equal, people would rather do business with a friend.”
5.  Organizational Relationships – developing mergers, partnerships, joint ventures, or preferred provider arrangements with other health care related organizations.
6.  Branding – using marketing and public relations strategies to create a unique position for your company band.
7.  Relationship Selling – having a dedicated sales person or sales force that is out on the street every day making high quality sales calls on referral sources and building long term sustainable relationships.

For more details on the seven sources of competitive advantage and how you can apply them to your business, stay tuned to Private Duty Today for information on upcoming webinars, live workshops, and video training programs.  We’ll continue to provide you with valuable information about creating competitive advantage in your marketplace.