by Stephen Tweed
What makes your home care company different from your competitors?
If you are a member of the Caregiver Quality Assurance program, how are you using the process to promote your company?
If you not a member of CQA, should you be?
Yesterday, I was sitting in a sales and marketing meeting with our friends and clients Jeff and Rita Pate, the owners of ElderCare 4 Families here in Louisville, Kentucky. We’ve been working with them for several years on marketing strategy and execution, and in exchange they’ve given us access to some of the facts and data to build case studies from their highly successful home care business.
During our conversation, we talked about how they use their “Safe 4 Hire” program as part of their strategy to gain and sustain competitive advantage. The other three elements of their competitive strategy are their Graceful Aging Program, their accountability program, and their professional matching of clients and caregivers.
Normally, I would not talk about a client by name, or discuss their competitive strategy. However, Jeff and Rita have clearly laid out their competitive strategy on their web site and in their marketing materials, and they have very successfully built their brand and their referral source loyalty in the Louisville marketplace.
In describing their Safe 4 Hire program they say,
“This program is unlike any other in our industry. We go above and beyond the competition to ensure we hire only professional, ethical and dependable caregivers. This process involves pre-screenings, applications, interviews, reference verification, nurse abuse registry checks, motor vehicle record reviews, criminal background checks, drug screenings, social security checks, orientation, ongoing training and continuous monitoring by our Senior Advocates.”
In fact, Jeff and Rita had developed the Safe 4 Hire program even before they discovered our Caregiver Quality Assurance program. They have added the pre-employment assessment and the training for their recruiters in recruiting and selection, but have kept the name of their program because they have already been using it to set their company apart.
So whether you use the CQA name and seal, or whether you use your own unique language to talk about your process for recruiting, selecting, training and retaining caregivers, you need to explore how caregiver quality makes you company different from your local competitors.
If you would like to learn more about how Jeff and Rita operate their company, ElderCare 4 Families, sell Graceful Aging, promote Safe 4 Hire, use telephony for time and attendance tracking, and match clients to caregivers, join us in Louisville, KY on May 15 and 16, 2013 for our next Private Duty Field Trip.
