By Stephen Tweed
Focus – noun
- a center of activity, attraction, or attention
- a main purpose or interest
- a point at which rays if light, heat, or sound converge
A Magnifying Glass and Sunshine 
When I was a young boy, my grandmother gave me a magnifying glass. It was just like the one she kept on the reading table by her chair to magnify the words as she read her Bible. Gram was an elementary school teacher, and she often took me with her to the two-room schoolhouse where she taught grades 1, 2, and 3. Across the hall, her friend taught grades 4, 5, and 6. Gram often created learning experiences for me like she did for her school students.
One day, she took be out into the back yard with my new magnifying glass, and she showed me how to focus the rays of light on a very tiny point. When I focused the tiny point of light on a dry leaf, it created heat and the leaf began to smoke. Eventually, if I held the focus long enough, the dry leaf would burst into flames. By focusing the rays of light and magnifying the heat, we could start a fire.
Start a Fire in our Home Care Company in 2022
Want to get your team fired up for 2022? Create a clear focus, and concentrate their energy and effort on a few things. Keep your focus long enough, and things will begin to heat up. From my experience in working with home care owners and CEOs over the past three decades, I believe that you need to pick three things on which to focus for the coming year. If you can concentrate on just three things that will have the biggest impact on growing your business, you will be amazed and what happens.
The reason most home care companies never grow beyond the industry median of $1.9 million in revenue is that owners do not have the ability to focus on the three most important things they need to work on. Instead, there are 27 things on their to do list, and 12 goals, and they are always putting out fires caused by the friction from lack of focus.
Instead of putting out fires, start your own fire. Focus your energy on one, two, or three things that will make a difference for your clients, your caregivers, and your company. Then turn up the heat by maintaining your focus.
What Will Be YOUR Focus?
There are many things you can focus on. The big question is how you select the three things that Will Be Your Focus for 2022.
Nearly everyone in home care says their biggest issue is caregiver recruiting and retention. Owners often tell me that they could double their business if they could only find enough caregivers. But Caregiver Recruiting and Retention is a huge issue. What will you focus on within that subject?
Will you focus on crafting a company culture that creates a place where high quality caregivers really do want to work?
Will you focus on refining your caregiver quality recruiting system to attract the very best applicants available in your local market?
Will you focus on improving your caregiver selection system to make better quality hires? One of the three big causes of 90-day turnover is bad hires.
Will you focus on caregiver retention? Turnover in our industry was 65.2% in 2020.
The Strategic Focus Pyramid 
Many years ago I was refining my Strategic Business Planning model for home care, and I created the Strategic Focus Pyramid. The concept is to pick one key strategy as your primary focus at the peak of the pyramid. Then you pick two supporting strategies that complement your primary focus. Then you develop a strategic action plan for each item with a goal, action steps, who to do, target dates, and resources required.
Your pyramid rests on a foundation of core values, systems, and people.
Using this action plan, you keep your team focused on the strategy, the goal, the action steps, and the target dates. The key to making focus work for you is execution.
Life is like a Camera
While I was writing this article, my cousin, Tammy sent me a note.
“Life is like a camera…”
- Focus on what’s important
- Capture the good times
- Develop from the negatives
- And if things don’t work out, take another shot.
What are you creating on your film? What will the picture of your company look like at the end of 2022? What will you focus on to get there.
Have a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2022.
To grow your company in 2022, consider becoming a member of a Home Care CEO Mastermind Group, or a Caregiver Quality Assurance Mastermind Group.
