Home Care U - How to Make Organizational Culture Your Competitive Advantage (Aaron Stapleton)

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Culture is like a garden—something is going to grow whether you like it or not. It's your choice whether what grows is weeds or flowers. Listen in as Aaron Stapleton, longtime home care leader and CEO, breaks down his experiences and strategies for intentionally creating a great organizational culture.Enjoying the show? Send me a text and let me know!Learn more about Careswitch at: careswitch.comConnect with the host on LinkedIn: Miriam Allred This episode was produced by parkerkane.co

Hey, welcome to Home Care U, a podcast made by the team at Care Switch. Nobody went to school to learn how to run a home care agency, so we're bringing the education to you. Join our live audience by going to careswitch.com slash homecareu or listen on your own time wherever you get your podcasts. Home Care U is hosted by myself, Miriam Allred, and Connor Koons of Care Switch. Enjoy the session. Welcome to Home Care U is hosted by myself, Miriam Allred, and Connor Koons of CareSwitch. Enjoy the session. Welcome to Home Care U.

This will be a really good topic we're addressing today. But first, let me go through some housekeeping and we'll introduce our guest. To start with, as a reminder, Home Care U is both a podcast and a live class. Thanks to those who are joining us live today. We're excited for you to be part of the conversation as you ask your questions in the chat. If you would like to join future classes live and you're hearing this via the podcast, just go to homecareu.careswitch.com and you can register live free. It is every Wednesday at 3 p.m. Eastern.

Or you can listen to the podcast as Home Care U, wherever you get your podcasts. We've had lots of awesome guests, lots of great topics. It's become super popular and really fun to do. And I have learned a ton just being part of it. So excited to learn from our guest today and go forward there. One thing just about myself as the host, if you haven't heard me do this podcast before or haven't heard me on like an event I've spoken at before or anything, you might see that I do have a stutter. Sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn't. It's pretty random. Just know that if you're listening and there's like

a random pause when I'm speaking, it's not your internet buffering. It's not Zoom buffering. It is me buffering and it's okay. We'll get through it. So just letting you know that. Last thing I want to mention here before we introduce our guests and our topic for the day. So as you might know, this podcast is produced by the team at CareSwitch. We are a premium agency management software system driven by artificial intelligence. Our team is doing some super cool stuff, and we have a couple spots open right now for agencies that want to do pilot programs of our system. Generally speaking, we need these pilot program participants to be at least 5 million in revenue right now, though there may be circumstances where we look at other agencies too. So if you're interested, go and request a demo on our website and we'll be in touch. Like I said,

really, really cool stuff. Just me as the marketing person watching what our team's producing has been really fun. And to see the reactions from our current pilot users as we show them things like our assessment flow that is driven by artificial intelligence

or the way that we can use it to predict and solve no-call no-shows has just been awesome. So definitely look into that if you're intrigued at all. Okay, without further ado, I want to thank and introduce our guest. So our guest today is Aaron Stapleton. He is CEO of Trinity Home Care. So first of all, thanks for joining us. And if you want to take just a second and introduce yourself, your background, and anything that is important for us to understand about you and your perspective as we get into our topic today. Yeah, thanks, Connor. So as you said, my name is Aaron Stapleton. I'm the founder and CEO of Trinity In-Home Care in Cincinnati,

based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. We have a second location up in Dayton, Ohio as well. And my goal today is really to help those of you on this call with some of the things that we've learned via experience. So, you know, Connor and I were kind of having a conversation before we hopped on this call. And I was telling him a lot of the stuff that we're going to go over today has been a trial and error type of thing. So culture is very important to me. I am also on the board of the National Home Care Association of America. And I am on, I'm the chair for the board for the Cincinnati Better Business Bureau. So the culture is not just something that I look at from an employer standpoint. I also look at it from a board standpoint. And I think, you know, I say that just because some of the things that we talk

about today are things that I don't just look at on my nine to five, my quote unquote nine to five. I'm pretty sure nobody on here works nine to five. If you're in healthcare, there is no such thing. But it's also something that we look at outside of our main jobs and we look at in our day-to-day lives. So I'm really excited to have been asked to be on this call and to share some of my experience. Sweet. Well, thanks, Aaron. I'll just briefly introduce what we're going to talk about and we'll go from there. So as he mentioned, we're going to talk about culture today. One thing that I found from just consuming lots of content about

culture and how to build culture within your organization is that it can be really easy for this to be a topic that gets super fluffy, high level, not super actionable, and lots of things that you would just kind of chalk up as being obvious or common sense. My hope with today, and especially with our choice of guest today, is that we can go far beyond that and make this like super actionable, super nitty gritty, and talk about the specific things he has done in his business to make a great culture, and also shed some more light on the importance of that

and the hard business results that it can drive. So that being said, I guess just to kind of set the stage here, like my first question is for the purposes of this conversation, how are you defining culture within your organization? And what is the importance of intentionally thinking and focusing on culture? Yeah. And I thought about this, right? Because I think a lot of times when somebody asks you about culture and you try to define it, or I try to define it, I try to define what our culture is, right? But that's not everybody's culture. And so I wanted to, I guess, peel back the onion a little bit, or maybe even put some more layers on the onion and not look as granular. And ultimately, I think that culture, from my standpoint, is a set of beliefs and assumptions that people share, right? And so if we're looking at a community, and we're going to talk about Trinity In-Home Care and other companies as a community,

we have to look at those shared beliefs and those shared assumptions, because that's really what drives the quote-unquote culture and what people are defining as the culture, right? So those shared beliefs and assumptions are the things that drive your culture. And a lot of times whenever you're you're hearing people talk about culture, that's what they're they're they're talking about. Right. They're talking about what they've been told, but then also the assumptions that they've made based off of the engagements and interactions that they have on a day-to-day basis. That makes sense. I think something I would maybe add to that, and you can disagree if you think this doesn't quite capture it, is I've heard this defined as the behaviors that are implicitly encouraged within an organization or the behaviors that are rewarded within an organization. So to explain that, every business has their values that are on their an organization. So to explain that, like every business, you know,

has their values that are on their wall and their website and everything. And then there's the second set of values that are like actually the things that are encouraged and rewarded within an organization. And sometimes those are the same and sometimes they're not. And so it's like, what are people taught to do by watching the examples of the people around them in like small and specific ways and also in really big general things can also be considered culture. I mean, would you agree that that's kind of a good assessment of some aspects maybe of how we're looking at culture today? Yeah, I think that there's also the opposite side of of that it's it's what's uh rewarded but i

think it's also what is swept under the rug right the things that people see that you know leadership or the people around them their co-workers do that are not as important right and so i think that's where it's extremely important that leadership shows the way that they show how things are supposed to happen, which then trickles down. And that helps. So it's not just the things that are rewarded. I think it's also those things that are, it's very apparent that they're not ever talked about. That makes sense. I think that's a good angle for people to think about with this. So you have a reputation within the industry as a leader who thinks and cares about this kind of thing. And that's reflected in your business and in its success. So let's kind of

get into the meat. What have you done to build culture in your organization? And what are you still trying to do? And what do you plan to do in the future to keep improving it? Well, I think the first thing that I want to make sure I'm very clear about, because sometimes people will ask me, hey, how do I get culture? And I want to be very clear that you have culture. Everybody has culture. It might not be the culture you want, but there is a culture. And so there, if you are asking yourself, how do I build a culture? What you're really, what you should be asking yourself is, how do I get the culture that I want? Because you have one, but it might not be the one that you're looking for. And so

for us, it's about being intentional with things, right? I think a lot of times as business leaders and management, we think of things like our mission statement, our vision statement, our virtues. These are things that, hey, we're going to go over during orientation. We're going to put them up on the walls. It's going to be the thing that we talk about whenever it's convenient for us, but it's not something that we live by, right? And that, to me, is your first break in culture. Because if your mission statement, so I look

at it this way, your mission statement should be your foundation for the company that you have set, right? Your vision statements, your North Star, that's the thing that you are aiming towards. That's where you're going. So everybody knows this is the direction we're heading in. And our virtues, really a lot of times your virtues are built into your mission statement. That's, again, your foundation. When you're making decisions, these are things that should be thought about in the decision-making process, right?

But a lot of times these are window dressings for our company. They're marketing materials. It's not what we use in our culture and in our day-to-day operations. And for instance, whenever we have management because it's not just fluffy words. Like these are the things that should be driving the decisions that we're making. Right. And so for me, that's where it starts is if you truly believe as a leader in your mission, vision, statements, your virtues, these should be things that you're going over with people in your organization maybe not on a daily basis but I would say you know on a weekly basis it doesn't hurt to do that

we did something a couple years ago that I really liked and unfortunately we we kind of lost it um so what I did was I came up with 25 foundation statements and they were really based off of our our handbook. But those 25 statements were things that we you know, I believed in our company. Right. It was, you know, that that we would be team players, that we would be, you know, that we would have a smile on our face, right, at all times, whenever we're engaging with a client. And that means client also means if I'm a manager, I'm engaging with our employee, that employee is my client, right? And so we, these are things that we would go over on a weekly basis. I would send out to all of our employees and talk about that foundation statement and what it meant to me.

And unfortunately, you know, it there are some things that I think we did a great job during the pandemic that we've lost, you know, being farther away from that. And that was unfortunately one of those things. But someone brought that to my attention that I believe it was the Hilton Hotels did that thing. And I was like, you know, I really appreciate that because to me, it really nails in the culture that I'm going for. And I want everybody to understand why, right? It's not just me telling you what to do. It's me saying, this is why I believe in this one foundation, right? And then next week, we'll go over the other foundation. So I know that's a little bit of a long-winded answer, but I think the intentionality has to be there. And it really has to start with that mission vision statements and and your virtues

um love that and lots to get into here i think my first response to like something you kind of said early on there i really really strongly agree with the idea that like your business has a culture um the question is is it something that you've intentionally shaped and um and grown or is it just kind of like whatever has grown there? Like I've kind of heard culture compared to a garden, you know, and it's like, there is something growing there now. Is it, uh, something that's very intentional and it's, it's, um, it's like useful, beautiful plants, or is it just a weeds that have grown? Um, and that's up to you. I think a couple follow-up questions for you here.

First, do you mind if I ask what your agency's mission statement is? Yeah, no, I don't mind. So our mission is to provide excellent care while keeping our clients as independent as possible and providing communication and support throughout the process. And this is the other thing I like to always point out because whenever I read that first part, our mission is to provide excellent care. Everybody automatically thinks that that is client facing. Right. But it's not. It is everyone facing. It is really starting with our caregivers, with our employees. But it encompasses our clients and our caregivers as well. So I always like to almost put the brakes after I say the mission statement and go, it is intentional that we

didn't say that we're giving excellent care to our clients. We are giving excellent care to anybody that comes into contact with Trinity. Okay, that's cool. I like that. And you mentioned just the difficulty of making sure that it's not just something that like resides in like the sign on your wall or on your website, but it's like something that people live by. I think that kind of statement is very important for home care agency. It's also an easy one that is, I think people can hear it and go, well, yeah, of course, that's what we do and just kind of move on. How do you make sure that it's something that is driving decisions, that it's something that employees think about that is like actually in the DNA

of your company? So I think it's both on the positive and negative side, right? So we'll start with the negative. If someone does something that goes against one of those virtues, right? And our virtues are excellence and care, customer service and communication. We dive into why that thing that that person did hurt one of those virtues, right? Which ultimately, we try to also help them understand how that affected not only the client, right? But how it affected maybe, let's say that there was a last minute call off, right? And somebody called off 30 minutes before their shift. Well have a shift guarantee which means we are getting

somebody out there right um and so that also means that that client might not ever have seen that person that's coming out there before right so not only is it affecting the client because now they've got a new caregiver but it's also affecting that team member that that we had to put in there because that team member now has to go in with a client who's probably upset because they're not happy that they have a new caregiver that they weren't prepared for. They might have, you know, we might not have been able to get them as up to date on the care plan as possible, even though they can look at it on their phone. But again, we're not giving that excellence in that care, customer service, and communication because that employee didn't give us the opportunity that we needed to give that time, I guess, to the client. The same way, if someone's doing a great job,

right. So the first thing that comes to mind is we do quarterly evaluation. So every quarter, our service supervisors, who basically oversee our caregivers, they're going over with the caregivers for a quarterly bonus, the things that they did well. And a lot of those are, you know, did you show up on time? You know, did you call off? Did you document correctly? That type of thing. But some of that is going into what did your client, what did your other teammates, what did your managers, what did they have to say about you, right? It's not just about going into your work, doing your job and leaving. It's about building that connection, that communication throughout, you know, the entire community. So those are things that

we're very intentional on building into the engagement, any engagement that we have with our employees. That's great, because that leads directly into what I was wanting to ask after this, which is like, have you taken steps to kind of integrate your mission and vision and other cultural things like that into your business processes? And if so, how? I mean,

you mentioned one of them, which is reviews. That's a great one. Are there more examples of that? Yeah. And so we do this a little bit differently. It's not quite the same as the quarterly reviews. It's actually on an off schedule. But we do stay interviews now. So a lot of companies would do exit interviews. Somebody leaves, you want to find out why you have the exit interview. But a lot of times, what we've found is that HR individuals or management, whomever is going over those, it gets kind of tossed off to the side it's well you know this person was leaving anyway they were upset and so you didn't really get a good feeling of what was going on and that's if you could get a hold of the of the employee to begin with right we really focus now on what's

called stay interviews and so again every quarter we're reaching out to our employees, personally to say, hey, what's what are we doing well here? What are some things that we need to improve on? You know, what do you like about working for us that you didn't get at another company? What's something that you had in the past that you don't have now and you wish you did? But also, it's about understanding who they are and what some of their goals are and understanding how we can possibly help them, right? A lot of times I hear employers talk about, oh, you know, my employee just, you know, doesn't want to show up or always has these caregiver issues or, you know, has transportation issues. And from our standpoint, because we want to have and believe we have a culture of caring, we want to look into, okay, well, what does that mean? I might not be able to buy you a car, but are there resources in our area that can help you with getting an affordable car right and and that's something that we actually found uh about a year ago there there's

a in cincinnati there's a group called city link and they basically are a community resource that is in one location that helps with multiple different areas so if somebody's having transportation issues they have a driver's license but they just can't get the funds to to get a car this group will help you through a financial literacy class an education on how to properly care for your car they'll help you get a car for a much lower cost than what you typically would right the same way with education so basically what I'm trying to say here is we look at the problems and it doesn't just have to be the problems that we see from an employer standpoint but you know somebody might want to own a house for the

first time, right? How can we help them? How can we prop them up? And again, that probably doesn't mean that it's something that we personally can do, but there are a lot of community resources if you're looking. And whenever that employee knows that you care about them, they're going to appreciate you more, but a lot of times they're going to appreciate you more. But a lot of times they're going to appreciate their client more. They're going to care for their client because they know that they're getting that level of love and respect. And so if that's what we're asking them to give, they should expect that from us as well as employers. Okay, love that. So I'll have more questions around how you're connecting them with resources like that that you mentioned.

But I think first, regarding these stay interviews, just kind of logistically, are all of these happening as interviews or is some of it surveys? Is there a mix of that? How are you doing that? How are you gathering the information or having those conversations? It's a little bit of both. So we do use Home Care Pulse for our, for, you know, those surveys. This is a little bit different because, and we've gone through a couple different levels of how to get this information.

We started with calls. Sometimes that worked well, sometimes it didn't. We had our lead caregiver go out and do, and we still have her go out and do those kind of check-ins with the caregivers. And so we would say, hey, once a quarter, whenever you're out there, make sure you're getting this information. And so we would say, hey, once a quarter, whenever you're out there, make sure you're getting this information. And then we realized that, you know, sometimes people want to give information anonymously, right? And so now what we do is whenever we're making those, whenever we're making those, those quarterly lead caregiver going out and doing the assessment with the caregiver and client.

She can leave if the person says, hey, I'd like to leave that information. Our lead caregiver can leave a self-addressed stamped envelope with a pre-written paper, I guess, that somebody is able to just write out their thoughts on what we're doing, not leave their name, and then they mail it in. I'm still the only person that opens the mail. So I don't know who it comes from, right? But it gives us the opportunity to get some feedback that people are able to give. And we want

individuals to feel comfortable in leaving whatever feedback they give. Sometimes that is, hey, I trust you. I trust that the information that I'm going to give is not going to hurt me. But there are some individuals who maybe haven't been here as long. It might be their first day interview, right? And so they're like, yeah, I do have some ideas, but I don't want to get in trouble. And so we've got to build that trust with them. And so we felt that that self-addressed stamped envelope option was helpful for people. Okay, that's cool.

One question real quick is, and you may have addressed this, but I missed it if so, is there a reason that you chose to have them have the option to send you actual physical mail versus having an anonymous place online that they can leave it or something like that? Have you found there to be a preference by your caregivers or maybe one way just ended up receiving a lot more feedback? Yeah. You know, we, we've tried the we've tried the online version, you know, as far as coming online and doing something on our, on our website, we haven't had a whole lot of, of luck with that. Now, I think some of that is just because we've, we've tried to do it low budget, I guess. So I'm not saying that that's not an option. I'm saying that we probably tried it not as full force as we should have. That makes sense though. And I mean, it's going to depend on the agency and the demographic of caregivers they're hiring and things like that. So I think that the really important thing you mentioned there is to have multiple ways that they can leave feedback, which includes, you know, having a way that they can say who they are and what they're thinking,

and also have like really anonymous, you know, kind of more like safe ways to do that too. So I think that's really good. I want to ask about what you mentioned before, as far as finding out like what kind of their financial needs or goals might be and connecting them with resources. Like tell me how you get into those conversations, how those go and then I guess how you differentiate between needs that make sense for you to help with at some level and needs that are kind of outside of the purview of you as their employer? Yeah. Well, I think one of the great things that if you are building a culture of trust, right? And again, a lot of times in the beginning,

people might not have that full trust in you. If you ask an open-ended question and just let people talk, they're going to tell you what's on their mind, right? And so a lot of times, that's the question that we ask is, what's your goal? Where do you want to be in five years, right? And so people answer that in a lot of different ways. It might be, hey, I really want to be a nurse. I want to go into nursing school. Or it might be, I want to own my own house for the first time. Or it could be, you know, I just want to have a stable job. And so everybody has different goals. And I think that's where if we're able to listen to them, then we're able to say, okay, here are the things that we can help with, right? And a lot of times, so Kanu Kashol helped me with understanding this, and I'm sure a lot of people on this call know, Canoe, he helped me with understanding that really, we shouldn't be asking people how many hours they're looking for. We should be helping them

with understanding what's the level of money that you need on a monthly basis or biweekly basis or however you pay, right? And walking them through that helps them number one feel that they can trust you because you're you're trying to help them with hey i've got a thousand dollars worth of uh worth of bills that i have to pay okay well let's work that back how many hours do you have to work to get those right um and so from our standpoint if we're able to not just do it the way that everybody's done it in the past, i.e. how many hours are you looking for, but we're able to look at what's the real deterrent, which, you know, a lot of times it's, I need to make X amount of money to stay in my house, to put food on my table, to make sure that my kids are safe, then that's where we want to look at, okay, how can we help with that? So obviously the pay piece

we can help with. There are some things that we can't help with, but the next bucket is, are there community resources that we have reached out to that we can put our employees in communication with those community resources? And then there might be other ones that, you know, we just can't, we can't help with. Maybe they were already in with a loan company and they have, you know, a really big loan that they have to get out of. Well, unfortunately, you know, we can't help you with that. We might be able to assist with getting you in touch with, you know, a community resource, but there are some things that we just say, I'm sorry, I can't. For instance, I had an employee

call me and say, hey, Aaron, is there any way you can help my cousin who is in from Jamaica. She's going to be, she's a hard worker. I really need to have her working, but she doesn't have her visa yet. I'm sorry, I can't. But what I can do is I can put you in touch with some of the community resources to see if she can get that expedited, right? So again, these are just, I don't like to just say no to people. I like to try and figure out how I can, if I have to say no, it's no, and here's where you can go, right? And that's really what I'm trying to do is not just say no, but say no. And here's where you can find that resource. Gotcha. Lots of good stuff in there. I kind of want to recognize something that I really appreciate that you said at the beginning, which is the value of having conversations

with your employees about like, what are you trying to accomplish like financially with this job? Which sounds obvious, like we're all trying to make money, but like, it's important, especially with the demographics that often become caregivers because they're often living paycheck to paycheck, things like that. And this is something that I've heard about a lot more this year, especially is specifically, you know, as, as you're working out their schedules,

as you might be establishing like future paths for them as far as their learning or how they might work toward raises, things like that, is like talking expressly about their goals and needs and then working backwards as far as pay paths to raises, schedules, and like you've said, extra help outside of that or connections to help them reach that. I think that's really great. And we need more of that in the industry. And I mean, like I mentioned, that's not something that I was hearing very much five years ago in conversations about caregiver retention, things like that. But it's something that I'm consistently hearing about this year, which I think is really good. It does obviously require judgment and like sensitivity and how

that's handled. But it's going in a direction that I think will make life better for caregivers and make it a more like viable career for more people, which is super important. Someone is asking a question that I would kind of want to hear your thoughts around this. So someone says, with our caregivers, they have not wanted to do the work to change their financial issues. Have you run into those issues? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, there are plenty of people who say that they want to work 40 hours a week, but their schedule is Monday through Friday, nine to five or nine to one, right? The math doesn't add up. And, and, you know, that's where again, all we can do is be honest with people, right? It is, it's, what we can say is, look,

we can give you nine to one, or we can give you 40 hours a week. But we have and I'm not going to say that there haven't been exceptions to this just because there have been some client and caregiver schedules that have meshed up really well where, you know, somebody has gotten their 40 hours a week, Monday through Friday. But we tell pretty much everybody who walks in here that is looking for full-time work, this is healthcare and you are going to have to be working on some weekends. Not every weekend, but every other to every third weekend, you're going to have to work. And so we're very honest with them about that. I want to make sure that everybody understands. I think sometimes honesty is seen as like this negative culture, you know, thing, because sometimes honesty can be not giving somebody what they're looking for. But I look at honesty as this is the opportunity for you to tell that person that they might need to choose,

right? They might need to choose either one or the other. If they need full time, then we can give you that. But you're going to have to give up something, right? If you only want 20 hours, we can give you that. But you're probably not going to be able to pay the bills just from our employment. So I think that's where we try to sit down and go over that with them. And then ultimately, it's their decision to make. And I think sometimes we get caught in this, hey, we're trying to help you because you need a job and we need an employee. So let's work together, come and work for me full time. And then that person doesn't show up to their first shift, right? Or, you know, they ghost you or what have you. And so from my standpoint, we try to put as

much on our employee to make that decision as possible. And then that way, if they decide that, hey, they've ghosted us, they've no called, no showed, and we still get that, then we look at, we've done everything that we can. This person just wasn't right for our company. And that happens. That makes sense. I think that's a good reply here. And it is a tough topic because for sure, you know, there, I think everyone has, has different levels of desire and ability to work through things. And there are often someone who like doesn't show up to a shift, for instance, I find that that's usually a sign of an unmet need on their part. But sometimes that's one that you can help with as their employer. And sometimes it's not.

And it's good to remember that and understand it. I kind of want to shift gears a little bit here real quick. Did you have something to say? Well, you know, so one of the things that we've implemented more recently, so it was at the beginning of this year, is we actually implemented two shadow shifts to our orientation. So we actually have our new employees go out with some of our more experienced employees who have been with us for a longer period of time to shadow with them for at least two two-hour shifts and this is for a couple

reasons number one we want the more experienced employee to give us feedback on you know how much this new caregiver is engaged you know are they asking questions are they you know doing the things that we're looking for but it also gives the new employee an opportunity to understand some of that culture, right? It gives them an opportunity to ask the older, more experienced, and I don't mean older in age, I'm just talking about that's been with us longer. It gives them an opportunity to ask that person, hey, what's it like working for this company? What do they do well? And so I think that while culture is definitely lived from the top down, it's grown from the masses, right? Like if you can, I can have all of the best ideas of what our culture

should be. But if the masses decide, well, that's not what we're doing, then that's not your culture. And so we really want to get our employees ingrained in the culture, not by what I have told them during orientation, but really what they see whenever they're working side by side with their team members. Okay. That makes sense. Thanks for addressing that part of it too. We've talked mostly about how to kind of have the right culture among your caregivers, or at least for their benefit. How much of the things that we've talked about are you also doing for your staff and what are um like some of the additional things you might be doing to maintain and grow the right culture among your staff and management

first and foremost it is and i've kind of said this before it is extremely important that we are showing the way it's not just telling it's it's showing right and so if i'm saying hey we have a culture of caring but i'm not caring for my employees or as a company we're not caring for our employees then you know that is something that is counterproductive it it doesn't mesh up and so for instance you know ever since we started, we've had a benefit program. We've had health insurance, dental, vision, supplemental insurance that we've built into. We most recently, about a year and a half, no, it's been about two years now, started a new 401k program. So we had one before, it kind of disbanded, it didn't work out for us. But we brought on a new one about two years ago.

And I said, if we're going to do this, we're doing it right. And so we now have a match on that 401k. So anybody who puts in to the 401k gets a match up to a certain point, right? And our feeling is not just to offer it, but also to educate and help our employees understand. Again, you said it, Connor, a lot of our employees are living paycheck to paycheck. So even holding back 3%, right, is a big deal. But if we're able to help with educating them on why that is important and how that helps them in the long run, then again, it's their decision. They have to make it, but we're able to say, look, you're doubling your money that you put in because we're able to give you that level. It helps us to help you. And that's just one way that we've, I guess, listened to our employees because I had, I don't know, a handful, five, 10 people that said, hey, we really want to have this. And so it wasn't just about having it. It was about having it and explaining why it's important to them. I will say we also in the, in the heart of the pandemic,

we had to become a vaccinated employer. The facilities that we were working in, they were all requiring that. And so we didn't have a choice. Now, I had two options. I could have either said, hey, you all have to get vaccinated, no ifs, ands, or buts. Or what I did was I said, let's do some education on this, right? I had a lot of employees who were afraid of getting the vaccination. They were afraid of health care as a whole for for many different reasons. But some of that had to do with the history that their demographic had had dealt with. And so I needed to be empathetic to that and not just say, hey, look, this is where we are as a company. You have to do it. For me, I had to trust that I was going to give them as much education as possible, but I had to let them make that decision.

Right. And I messed up on that. Right. Like the first person that I had do our education was, you know, a great doctor. I appreciate him as much as I can. He looked exactly like me. That was not the demographic that I needed, right? I needed somebody that they felt comfortable with. And so the next two educations, we had African-American doctors come on and talk about this. And again, at the end of the day, I said, look, I will help you if you want to get it, but it has to be your decision.

So that has always been our focus has been we're going to educate, but it's ultimately up to you and how you make that decision. So much good stuff in there. And I think there's a few things you said that speak to the leadership and culture in your company, kind of beyond even what you explicitly said. I want to make sure that I recap for our listeners, like two things specifically. So first is there is always the question of, should I offer benefits and what benefits should I offer? And there is a universal answer to that, which is ask your employees what is important to them. And I think you mentioned a second really important part of it, which is, but also recognize if there is room for you to educate them

on benefits that they might not see as important that are really important. Before I went into home care, I ran a service business that was very similar in kind of like the staffing processes and things like that to home care. And we were like preparing to offer health insurance. And we made the mistake of like, not asking who like would actually want it and benefit from it. And we went through all the process of, of jumping through the hoops to offer great health insurance and found that only a very small handful of people signed up for it. And they were the admin staff. And like part of that has to do with the benefits cliff and concepts like that of people, you know, depending on their income and

services that they're on, they might actually be best with Medicaid and things like that. But we just made a big mistake of not asking them what was important to them. And so I like that you hit on that point specifically. So we're kind of in our last like 10 minutes here. And I have a couple more questions that I think we'd be remiss if we didn't touch on. I hope that we've already like kind of addressed these, but to make sure we really do, first of all, like what hard business results have you seen that you can attribute to your efforts at growing a good culture? I think the first thing that comes to mind is our retention rate. And so in an industry where turnover is typically in the high 90s,

right? I think the Home Care Pulse benchmarking study showed it this past year, maybe in the high 80s. Our typical turnover is in the high teens, right? So we're typically about 17 percent. So hang on really fast. I want to make sure I've got this right. So annually you have a 17 percent caregiver turnover rate. I feel like we should have started with that. That's impressive. OK, go on. Well, and that's you know, so I will say this, that has honestly been the thing that has saved us. Because for about nine months to a year, we could not find people to hire. And that was the thing that saved us during the pandemic. So basically, you know, we're talking for about two years, you couldn't find new people to hire. You know, the people that we did find weren't right for what we were looking for. It was almost like we were trying to fish in the desert. Like

there was just no water, but it was our retention that really saved us and helped us to, to stay afloat because we were keeping people on and we were talking to them about what was going to keep them on, right? And sometimes that does have a dollar signal in front of it. Not always though, right? And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that we didn't increase our wages during the pandemic, that we didn't, you know, do everything that we could to make sure that we were properly reimbursing our employees for the work that they were doing. That was a priority. But I think even more than that, it was about communication. It was about listening to them. It was about understanding their needs, which you just said, right? And so the point that I wanted to make is if somebody says, you know, culture is this thing that just, it is I would say, look at your retention. If your retention is

high, my guess is your culture isn't what you want it to be. If you are having trouble, and I would say this more pre-pandemic than I would now, just because hiring is a little bit different of an animal. But if you were having trouble pre-pandemic hiring people, again, people in the community will talk. The caregiving community will talk amongst one another and they will say, yeah, go work for this company. Don't work for this company. There are some websites that have, people will come in and say, oh, yeah, I saw that you had this great review on on this website. I'm like, okay, we've never been on that website before, right? So again, people are going to talk, you do have a culture, how much are you

focusing on that? And if you don't think that it affects your P&L, what I would say is look at your retention rate. And if your retention rate isn't what you want it to be, then you need to work on your culture. I think that's a really good, strong response. And I definitely agree. This is a conversation that I've had lots of times and something that I often hear when we mention an agency who has, for example, a 17% retention rate is, well, they must be just like paying out the ears and outpaying all their competitors and things like that. My guess is you probably do pay pretty well, but that it's probably also hard to attribute it all to that. Do you mind if I ask like competitively where you sit as far as your caregiver compensation typically? Yeah, I mean, so I would say we're on the higher end, but I would say we're middle to high, right?

So, and I'll just give you a number. So if you're living elsewhere, this number might be arbitrary to you. But, you know, our typical pay range is somewhere between 15 and $17. Now, again, you know, we do some quarterly bonus things for our employees, as long as they're hitting certain marks. But, and again, I think that's about mid to high range of where we've heard that, you know, people are paying in our industry. But here's the thing. We're not just dealing with our industry anymore when it comes to employing our team members, right? We're working against assisted living, which we had done in the

past, nursing homes, right? But we're also working against fast food restaurants. We're working against the Amazons and the DHLs and UPS and all those companies that are giving these huge signing bonuses and are giving higher rates. And to be quite honest with you, they're also giving better career paths than we're able to give. And so from our standpoint, it is, okay, we have to focus on what we can control. And a lot of times that is our pay range, that is our culture, that is what we offer. And again, I'm going to steal something from Canoe where he said, hey, look, we might not be able to pay you twice as much, but we can pay you twice as fast, right? And so we started last year, what's, you know, it's called an on-demand pay, where people, if they have worked, it's not a daily pay, but if they have worked, they're able to take out from that check, you know, so many times in a month. I think it's something like six or eight times per month, right? Because we recognize

that sometimes people have bills that come due that aren't every other week, right? And we saw that as an opportunity to give them another reason to work for us. So I would just say that it is extremely important that you're listening to your staff as to what their burdens are and then try and figure out, is that something that you can help them with? And a lot of times you have to get a little think outside the box because I think sometimes we just get used to the same old, well, it is the way that it is, or it always has been. And unfortunately, you can't think that way anymore, because we're not just trying to compete against another home care agency or against assisted or independent living facilities or, you know, nursing homes, we're competing against a lot more companies that are doing things. And just to give you a heads up of one of the things that I'm working on,

I talk about a career path. One of the things that I'm trying to work with our community in is our nursing schools in the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area, our skilled home care companies. I'm trying to work out is there a way for us to build a career path in our community where if somebody does want to be a nurse we can work with the local colleges to help get them into those nursing those nursing education opportunities we're able to work with those skilled home care companies to find out what are the skills that they're looking for for people that they're going to work with those skilled home care companies to find out what are the skills that they're looking for for people that they're going to employ and how do we help them to have that

opportunity on down the road so for me again it that might hurt our retention because we have people that will be leaving going to skilled home care but i think it also helps the community and our team members understand that we are putting them above our bottom line, right? I went off on a rant there. Sorry about that. No problem. For the sake of the person who is listening to the podcast and thinking what service or payroll provider is he using to do the on-demand pay? What's the answer to that question? Yeah. So we use Paylocity. I know that there are some other options out there, but we use Paylocity. We've been pretty happy with them and they've given us a great opportunity to use that. Okay, cool. Thanks for that. We're right up at the end of our time here. So I guess just last question, like, is there anything you haven't said that you'd like to something seven times to have it sink into your brain. And then you have to do something, I think it's at least 21 times,

but I think now it's showing that like you have to do something 66 times to make it a habit, right? And it's just about intentionality. It is about making sure that you are intentional and that you are being consistent. Intentionality, consistency, those two things. If you're able to do that, it is going to help you in the long run. I am more than happy to answer any questions. Connor, please feel free to give out my email address and contact information. My goal here, whenever I started this company 12 years ago, was not just to build a good company. It was to increase and elevate the industry as a whole.

So my hope is that I could have been of service to the listeners today. And I am more than happy to answer any questions directly that you might have. But intentionality, consistency, that is how you build the culture that you will be looking for. Awesome. Thank you for that. And thanks for being on the podcast and for everything you're doing to help the industry. For those who are listening, how should they get in touch with you if they have questions for you? Yeah. So I would say either my email address, A. Stapleton, that's S-T-A-P-L-E-T-O-N at Trinity,

T-R-I-N-I-T-Y-I-H-C as in inhomecare.co. So that's not.com, it's.co. Once again, a stapleton at trinityihc.co. Awesome. Thank you again for that. And thanks for being willing to do that. I know it's a huge help to people who are just starting their businesses or even are years in,

but hit plateaus or something to be able to talk to someone who's in your shoes and learn from them so thanks again for that speaking of trying to get around growth plateaus i want to briefly give kind of a teaser for next week's episode um so we are bringing on jesse walters he is the ceo Hillandale Home Care. He was previously on the leadership team at the Key, which is home care assistance. And he is a master of growing revenue at home care agencies. And we're talking specifically about growth plateaus, how to beat them at different, and not just that, but what types of problems might cause you to plateau at different stages of an agency's growth and how to overcome each different cause of growth plateaus. So a great, super packed episode. I'm excited for that. Thanks to those who have joined today. Thanks again, Aaron, and join us next time. Thank you. That's a wrap. This podcast was made by the team at CareSwitch, the first AI-powered

management software for home care agencies. If you want to automate away the menial of your day-to-day with AI so that you and your team can focus on giving great care, check us out at careswitch.com.