By Stephen Tweed 

One thing I look forward to every April is receiving my copy of the latest Home Care Benchmarking Study from Home Care Pulse.  This is the single most valuable resource for understanding your home care business, and I use it every day with my Mastermind Groups and my Strategic Coaching Clients.  I purchase three copies of the report every year; one for my desk, one for my briefcase, and one for Jill Scott, our Manager of Member Services.

We Use it Every Day

There’s rarely a day that goes by that I don’t look in the report for some fact or piece of information to fill in a conversation.  The most frequently use section of the report for me is the Financial section.  Being able to look at the median revenue for various size agencies, the direct cost of care, and the gross margins helps me analyze a company and help the CEO develop strategies for pricing and cost control.  Looking at the marketing section helps me guide clients and mastermind members in crafting their sales and marketing strategies.  And of course, everyone in our industry is working on Caregiver Recruiting and Retention … the biggest barrier to growing your business.

Understand Your Business

I’m shocked how many owners and CEOs of smaller home care companies don’t really understand their business.  I ask them some basic questions and they say, “I don’t know, I’ll have to check with my accountant.”  My experience in working with CEOs in the Top 5% of our industry is that they can write their numbers on the back of an envelope.  They look at their metrics weekly, and even daily, and they review performance with their team members on a regular basis.

One of the best ways to really understand your home care business is to download the Benchmarking Study Prep Worksheet.  This is a tool with all of the questions on the survey. You can use it to did into your own data to find the answers to the questions. Then you go online to upload the data.  Just the process of looking at these questions and digging up the data will help you get a clearer picture of your business.

Then, order a copy of the report at the discounted rate.  Compare your answers on the Prep Worksheet to the benchmarks in the report. How are you doing compared to your peers?

Set Goals and Make Plans

Once you understand your business and  you know where you are compared to your peers, you can set goals and develop action plans to improve the performance of your company.  One of the best activities we do with our Home Care CEO Mastermind Groups is collect our own benchmarking data for each group and give them an opportunity to talk with each other about how and where they are spending their money, and what results they are getting.  For example, several of our groups had major discussions about marketing.  They looked at how much each member spent on marketing compared to the benchmarks, and then looked at their sales conversion rates and growth percentages.  It was amazing to see how much they learned by comparing data with their mastermind colleagues and then developing plans for improvement.

Take Action NOW!

If you are serious about growing your home care business in 2020, take action now. Go to the web site, https://benchmarking.homecarepulse.com/ and download the Benchmarking PREP Worksheet.  Read through the questions and begin digging up the data.  When you have all of the data pulled together, you can go back to the web site and upload your answers. Then order a copy of the report.  Keep in on your desk or in your briefcase and look at it regularly.