Home Care U - Little Decisions That Had the Most Outsized Impact on His Business (Kunu Kaushal Pt. 2)

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

Kunu Kaushal returns to break down a handful of seemingly small decisions that he’s made, that have actually had a huge impact on his business—be prepared for some surprises.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

Welcome back to Home Care U, a podcast brought to you by Care Switch. I'm Miriam Allred, your host. Thank you all for being here. I want to start off by saying thank you for all the love. I've gotten so many messages the last couple of weeks about just the value and the takeaways of the show and I'm just happy and honored to have a platform like this to share so many great insights with you via these experts and thought leaders that I've got across the table from me. So thank you all. My only request in return

is that you continue to share this show, post it on LinkedIn, share your takeaways, share the value that it's driving, the actions that you're taking in your business based on what you've heard, shoot it to a colleague in a DM or an email. That's really the only thing I can ask for in return is just continue to share this show and share the insights that you learn from it. Today, we're back with Kanu Kaushal for

part two. I myself listened to part one again this morning as I was having breakfast. So many insights tucked away into that episode. We talked about some of the larger mistakes that Canoe has made over his time in home care and in his business. We really just covered kind of three large mistakes, but there's so much insight and value tucked into each of those. So I highly recommend if you haven't, that you start there and listen to that. On last week's show, we did do kind of a long introduction of Canoe and of Senior Solutions and of the Independent Home Care Alliance. And so today, I want to really just get after it so we can cover more ground. Two quick questions for you,

to get us warmed up for the show today. I'd love to hear one of your hot takes on home care, one of your maybe unpopular opinions about home care. You've been doing this for a long time, so I'm sure you have your own point of views on things, but I'd love to hear, put you on the spot here and have you share an unpopular opinion. Oh boy. I'll tell you one that I have found is a real challenge. I'm going to put the hat on for a second of just purely talking about this as a business, as an investment, as a like what to do next. And and I'm a popular opinion I think I have is that I don't know that being acquired. Right. So when you think about these private equity and venture cap

companies and people who are funded and back who are when when the money's good and the economy's right and the financing is correct, they have this really strong ethos of trying to go out and purchase companies. And I'm not going to use any names, but I think we can all think back to just a few years in the last two to three, and you saw this wave of acquisitions happening. I think it's really good for the owner if it makes sense for them for an exit ramp and get the other side of it. There is kind of a tongue-in-cheek comment that's made about small and mid-sized companies anyway, which is you really only make money when you change hands with an organization. It's in the selling of that company at some point. The part that's unpopular to me is I'm not sure

that the net number of companies that survive past that or continue to do a good job is as high as I think it's somehow presented. I think after the checks are signed and the dealmaking is done, by and large, now there are success stories out there, but by and large, I think it's such a culture warfare. So if you remember from last week's episode where I talked about even just doing a small company, acquiring another small company, that in itself is tough. When you've got a big company that does all their due diligence and all their stuff, and they're really good at it, and they can potentially have a big wallet to write you checks and things like that. Really understanding how this is going to change

the business for your relationships, for you as an individual, as maybe the owner or one of the top directors in the company, and also your teams, it really is a very big step and change for organizations. The good news is, I think, for clients and caregivers, that there's a lot of companies they can work with, right? And the thing that I've had as an unpopular opinion here is that what are truly your assets in home care? You've got a client list and a caregiver list. And how you maximize, I think, your organization, I would tell you for everybody who can stick it through and apply really good business operation skills to it, do not operate your business at a loss for a long period of time thinking, oh, we'll get there.

There's a lot of great books. There's things like Profit First. There's a lot of business acumen literature out there. Also, great content to help you really revive what you're doing in your business. You have got to get to a point where you're getting paid, you're creating a profit for yourself and your business to whatever level that satisfies you. But I will just tell you, I think the hoping for one day somebody's going to sweep you off your feet with just a really sweet deal can happen.

It has happened, but I do think it leaves a pretty wide wake and creates a little bit of a hole. And along those lines, unpopular comment, I also, in my competitive areas of the areas I operate, one of the best things I can ever hear is somebody sold their company to a really big company because I don't get threatened by that. I actually go, oh, well, there's another one off the list of just, we know they're going to lose total focus and control and relationships and so on in the marketplace. So I don't know. I mean, I think we all want this really, especially obviously if you're out there trying to acquire, I'm sure there's a few people listening that are,

you know, some of these big companies that want to go do that. Hey, all the power to you. You're doing what exactly your business plan says. So that is not throwing shade in any way. But I think the reality of what's happening is it is tough. It's really, really tough. That was great.

Own these opinions. Don't second guess yourself. That's why I asked. We got a lot of big names on the show. We've got a really wide listenership. And so I like to just give you a minute to share an opinion that you feel strongly about. That was great. Like you said, just a few years ago, we saw a lot of outside money coming in.

I would say today we're still early days seeing kind of like the ripple effects. And I too am very interested to see, you know, over the coming years, the longer term trends impact of, you know, what this outside money is doing and means for the industry. But I think we're still kind of early, you know, we're just kind of keeping like an eye on what's at bay and what's happening. One more quick question for you before we get after it. Who do you look to for business inspiration? And, you know, maybe answer that in terms of like in home care and outside of home care, you know, name names. Just who do you draw on for inspiration?

Yeah, I have. That's a really good question. I'll tell you, it's also changed for me as time has gone on. It was also where I was and what I needed at that moment. I think there's a future session you're going to have come out pretty soon with Home Care CEO. But Stephen Tweed, I give him a lot of credit. Historically, when I was maybe two or three years in the business, I knew right away that I was going to need to be able to interact with people who knew what they were talking about. And beyond just going to a conference and having a coffee or a drink with somebody, I needed to that continuous masterminding type element.

So really appreciative of my time with him, with all those experiences, meeting a lot of home care owners. I think within the industry, there's so many conferences and things to go to. I've noticed at the national level, the Home Care Association of America, which for a long time, I was a member from really the beginning of our company, I was a member, and had the extreme honor to be asked to just even apply to be on the board for HCOA, which I continue to do that today, it is, to me, really valuable to be able to see leaders at that level, not just talking about operations, but thinking about advocacy, thinking about the broader industry as a whole. And I am there at this point, I guess, in my maturity where the operations piece isn't where I need help,

is I need a better understanding of the powers that be, right? That influence this business. And for those of you who think that it's just Medicare or it's just some VA program, you have to understand that the federal level, a lot of like, we're talking about immigration, wherever you sit on this, right? Get out of politics for a minute. You know, you're going to need more labor and workforce and we all talk talk about it. Well, how will we get there somewhere in there? we have to think through that. That influence within the industry has been really, really important to me. State associations or the Tennessee Association of Home Care has been a really big piece for me too. Not just name dropping, but giving examples for wherever people are. I would tell you just going to your annual conference

is not enough. Join committees, right? Whatever element of that business that you really feel like you are curious about or influential with, you got to jump in. It's not about, I've never been, I think, a resume chaser where I'm like, you know, just I need to sit on boards and not do anything. If anybody knows me from any of these boards, they'll actually tell you, I can be almost irritating, right? Because the question I have often is like, what are we doing here? What impact are we making? Where are we making the change? I want to be very involved. And that's all for the positive. It's either to understand or truly make a difference for what we do as an industry as a whole. Outside of home care, I've really been

leaning into more the customer service world. I think there's a lot of lessons there. For those of you who love the story of Shake Shack is a good example. There's a great book. I think it's called Setting the Table. I'd have to look back. But the founder of that group of Shake Shack, who now owns that brand, also owns some really high-end restaurants in New York and other big cities. But their approach to their clients is so unique to their people who actually come to the restaurants. They are not trying to be like every other restaurant. So what does it sound like? Where are they different? How do they provide a better experience. Just understanding to, for example, how are different companies that maybe are at a really big brand level, how do they still keep it local? And how do they make that happen?

So in search of that, I'm often doing lots of webinars, do read a lot of books in order to try to gain knowledge in that way. Another one I think is, I think I'm driven enough. We all have room for improvement. So let me start with that. I certainly know I have a lot of things that I could improve. For me, it's not so much my personal approach. I am the kind of person that probably wakes up too early, goes to bed too late, and oftentimes I'm like attached to work in some capacity. So this need or desire for motivation has not been my thing. Tony Robbins, who I'm a big believer in, when you get away from the personal space, and even in the business side,

I went to a thing that he does called Business Mastery. And I've actually been twice, which a lot of people are like, you must be a slow learner. But it's actually because of me, right? Five years apart that I attended this conference, it's a multi-day thing. To be around people that are that jazzed up, truly, and each of them isn't like, oh, I want to lose weight, which is a personal journey. They're about their business. And you've got people, I still remember my first one, I sat next to this guy who his entire business line was going into hotels and putting in now what we call the cardless key readers, where you can use your phone and do it. He was, so you imagine seven, eight years ago, where this was not a

thing that was out yet. his entire business was getting accounts like Hilton and whoever else to just let him go put those in places. And he was driving his business from nothing had found a manufacturer that had these locks to all of a sudden was in the 50, $60 million a year in product sales and services to support that kind of thing. You have to be around those people. And I would almost tell you it is as beneficial to get out of home care and understand what are the things they're doing and what you find are so many similarities. There's a big focus on yourself, time management, project management, leadership, surrounding

yourself with really good people, and also really how to deal with chaos. People love sharing their stories. I think back to our session last week as a good example of this. For someone listening to it, you either get validated and go, it's not just me, or two, sometimes it's a big warning sign of, hey, this is coming for you, right? You love your leadership team. And what happens when somebody moves, somebody's husband or wife has a new opportunity, somebody has a big life change, and now your whole leadership team is maybe swirled up in change. How do you survive through that? Those type of things, I think that those are, Tony Robbins would be a big one. There's so many more. I think it actually goes into some of the stuff I was going to talk about today.

But one of the little changes or decisions is be open, right? Your mind be open for being influenced in its right way. It's like just new knowledge, new information. So, so powerful. Yeah, well, that's a perfect segue. Let's, you know, just kind of make our way there. I just wanted to say, I love what you said about like your maybe infatuation with customer service. I hear more and more from larger owners. Like you said, it's not that you're deprioritizing home care, knowledge, expertise, content. It's just,

you know, drawing ideas, inspiration, innovation from other industries. Shake Shack is a great example. And I think there's just good insights for everyone to just be knowledgeable about this industry, be present here. But it's not a bad thing to look elsewhere and draw inspiration and ideas elsewhere as well. If you don't mind, Miriam, let me pull on that string because you like that Shake Shack thing. So I'll tell you the story in it that made it so powerful for me. And it was kind of a little decision. I'm reading this book. And the founder kind of talks through this idea that at his restaurant, one of his best restaurants he ever had, in which he said, we're going to make it all about the customer in New York City. And what they do is when you make a reservation,

they are one of the first few restaurants at that level that was integrating their CRM to their booking system. So the person who works, let's call it the maitre d' because it's probably that nice of a restaurant, you call in. If you've been there before, you pop up on their screen and it's your entire profile. And so they don't answer and tell you the name of the restaurant. You know who you called, right? So instead they answer and they say, oh, Mr. Koshel, thank you so much for calling us again. Are you looking for a reservation? And you go, yeah, I am looking for a reservation. They go, okay, how many will be dining? Is it

just going to be like you and your wife this time or something else? And then they put in the reservation. What's important, though, is that their entire meal ordering process is also in the system. When the waiter or server comes to your table, they review your profile. And so they'll greet the table, right? And they'll say, Mr. Kaushal, you know, are you going to be having a unsweet tea with no lemon again? Or would you like something different? And then they've got that, like, what was your last experience? I've reviewed the thing. Well, number one, everybody at the table is so impressed. They're like, you must be a local. It's like, well, I've only been here once. This experience journey was so big. And obviously, there's a lot more here that then with our own company, we've got a voice over IP phone system.

We've obviously got an EMR like most companies. One of the things that was really powerful for us is we thought about enhancements in 23 and 24. So just recently, I said, I want the experience that when somebody calls here, there's a screen pop on whoever's answering the phone. And you know who you're talking to if they're in our system, client, caregiver, referral source, family member, whatever. And we made it happen through a lot of hard work to get it to that point. Today, if you call Senior Solutions Home Care and you're already

in our system, when somebody answers the phone, they already have your profile pulled up. And so they can get to work. Like, are you calling about your schedule? I'm looking at it right now. looking at it right now, there's none of this, like, hold on, let me find you. Can you spell your name again? That kind of stuff. But just as in, that's like maybe a good one to kick off of theirs. It's not just about reading and being exposed to these things. The true magic in this would be, you've got to then process it and say, what part of this could we put in our system or as an enhancement? And it may take you two years to get it done. And that's okay. You just have to put it on your radar of these are things to be striving towards. You and I were talking about it before, just how tight margins are. No one's a stranger to that concept, but at scale, you break it down by minute.

I'd imagine you're breaking it down by second. Like you said, on those phone calls, you know, it can be 10, 20, 30 seconds to get a conversation rolling. If you could cut down on 30 seconds, that goes a long way when the call volume is hundreds, if not thousands of calls every single day. So great, great example. And like you said, you know, this restaurant, look at the innovation, look at the optimization of every part of the process and how applicable that is to home care. There are so many workflows, so many processes. How do we drill into every single one and look for time savings and efficiencies? Yes, it takes time. I love what you just said. It could take two years to optimize one process extremely well, but if it's worth it, if it has

the ROI, it's worth the effort to go down those paths. So let's keep going. You've prepared a few decisions that you've made over the years in your business that have shaped the company, that have shaped your people, that have shaped your mission. And so I'm really curious to hear what you've prepared. What are some of these altering decisions that you've made over the lifespan of your company? Yeah, absolutely. And I will say, I think what happens is when you ask somebody like myself about decisions, I'm probably not going to do as good of a job as explaining all of it that encompasses. And some of you may have

questions. I would encourage you, I know Miriam's going to use the Q&A box and the chat area. So please drop in stuff if you want me to clarify more. So the first one I would tell you is around positioning of the company. It sounds like such a little, it's a big decision, but it's a small thing I had to do early on is just go, who are we? And are we going to try to be, go back to the restaurant world here for a second. Are we trying to be like the Applebee's of food service? Or are we trying to be Ruth Chris? And there's a certain expectation that you also deliver. I think what we knew, the little decision for my side was that we would never be able to

compete with somebody who was looking for really high volume business in the early days. We only had so many caregivers. I only had so much staff. Me personally, I only had so much time on my own plate. And if you remember from last week, we talked about how many relationships can you truly manage. So we'll tell you a small decision that was made was I had to be very conscious about what if they say yes. So if I go into Vanderbilt Hospital and I say I would love a staffing contract with you all to staff CNAs or nurses or whatever, which some people love that business. The danger there was, what if Vanderbilt goes,

yes, we would. And we need 14 people for every holiday for the next six months. And you go, oh no, that's not what we are built for. It's not exactly what we want to do. I think for us, when I think about who all was really involved in that conversation as well, it was at every turn, we've brought in our leadership team and we've always said, hey, how are we positioning ourselves? At this stage, maybe to help bury the lead here in some way, I can tell you we're a highly technology forward business, which you've probably caught on to. And when we say technology, it is we think that by playing with multiple payers is one of the differentiators for our brand. We like to work with Medicaid. It makes sense in our state. So

for anybody that's about to poo-poo on that, I mean, right, it depends on the state, depends on the reimbursement, depends on the margins. But in Tennessee, it makes sense. We want to be able to say we are as sophisticated as you are at the managed care level. All right. And then the other is that we're really high on customer service. And so when you combine those three things for us, like the decision there is if we have said that, then we have to deliver on it. And so a lot of our future modeling, our investment of time and energy,

our financially backing up those type of maneuvers is what I would overarchingly call just positioning. And by the way, you don't have to stay in that lane forever. I think it is one of those where you go, be honest with people. I'll give you an example. Early days when we were pitching our services, when I was pitching our services, right? We didn't have a big team at the time. We purposely went in and would ask for referrals from the typical sources, a home health, nurse discharge plan or whatever. And I would tell them my ideal client. I didn't say just send us anybody. And that takes, I think, one sales training.

You have to be really comfortable doing that, making it sound like you're not cherry picking and all of it. But I remember saying multiple times, we just really want to do a good job. And this is how the kind of client we can do a really good job with. This is what kind of situation we can really excel with. And when you position yourself really well, I think you can really talk that through and give the other person a vision of that.

We also told caregivers, right, we are heavily focused on compliance. We're very big on professionalism. When, you know, anything's going to happen, here's things you can expect from us. And here's things that we expect from you. Once again, it just comes back to this little decision of saying, what's our positioning going to be? Some people might describe that as a brand and go, what does your brand represent? Today, as it sits, and for many years prior to this, anyone who has worked with us will tell you good or bad exactly the brand of Senior Solutions.

So, to give you an example, the same thing is a double-edged sword. For example, we're very big on process. And so for us, clocking in and out as a caregiver is very important. We have caregivers who have worked here for many years who go, you're the only company that is this strict about clocking in and out. And that's okay because we also payroll faster than anybody else. We bother them less than anybody else. We have more documentation from them than anybody else. We bother them less than anybody else.

We have more documentation from them than anybody else, right? It feels comfortable for them. Cannot tell you the hundreds, if not thousands of caregivers over the years who have left our company because they go, I do not want to be working under this hive and expectation, which is after five minutes of me not clocking in, you're going to call me. If I didn't turn in the timesheet on time, you're going to push my payroll to the next payroll period. What you allow is certainly what you're going to get. But once again, it goes to positioning and brand. It sounds like a very simple thing to say. The execution of it, the ripple effect off of that is incredible. And I would just say the integrity and accountability that's required to keep that up is really tough sometimes. I mean,

you get to a point where you go, oh, I really like this caregiver, but they're just not very professional. Once again, it's like, what are we positioning ourselves for? We have to hold to those standards as much as we can. Yeah. So I want to play kind of devil's advocate here for a second in terms of maybe like a referral source. You mentioned just like this high standard and expectation. I'm assuming at some point there's been a time when you've maybe over-promised and under-delivered, and that could be in regards to staffing or whatever it may be, but how did that shake out? Because I'm assuming, like you said, positioning and brand can evolve,

quality can improve, but there was probably a time where you said early on that Vanderbilt example, you said, yes, but what really happens if you couldn't? That's a really good question. I will tell you this. I, we had service delivery failures before. We learned very quickly over promising was not the thing to do. And almost in everything, our training today is that we go through 10 ways, right? To talk about the same thing and make sure we're not over promising. So even at this moment now, if we take an intake call, and there's a referral on the phone, and someone says, I need

care right now, our answer to them is going to be, we can get you in the system, we can get the process started, we can't make any promises, it all depends on our staff availability. So there's always this like footnote that we're very forward with of saying we may not be able to do the thing that you want. And I know you think we have a warehouse full of caregivers that just show up every day and they wait to be told like, hey, you know, like I got something for you. And it just it doesn't work that way. The way we back it up, I think, is also to have a lot of explanation on the front end to say things like we hire less than 1% of all of our applicants. Well, how can that be? Well,

it's not just that our standards are high. You have a lot of people that apply, number one, so they're not all qualified candidates. But from our side, when staffing is the biggest burden, our commitment is to high quality services. So we're unapologetic when things are not going well. Now, does that make it easier? No, right? Like Mrs. Smith doesn't have services. What are you going to do? And the daughter's upset. We get it. And so we just got to kind of work through it. I think there's other operational things that can happen. Like maybe the manager is going to have to go fill in. Maybe we have to pull somebody from another shift, whatever that looks like. But I will tell you the number

of times recently, this may be a maturity thing that we have over-promised has gotten to almost none. And we have some pretty big meetings as well. I mean, you can imagine we're one of the largest providers in our state. We have a really large geography. We're also desired by the managed care companies, by people who want to do pilot programs. And we have gotten really good of saying, listen, these aren't excuses. We're just going to lay out the playing field for you really quickly so you understand the sandbox. We turn it into an educational experience. We turn it into an opportunity for them to understand our business a little bit more. You'd be surprised how many people that are in government,

in government positions that are doing contracts like a Medicaid for in our state, it's called TennCare, who they themselves do not understand all the employment laws, right? And they go, I don't understand why you can't just have them work 60 hours. I mean, they would want to get paid that. And I'm like, yeah, now you got overtime and you don't pay us for overtime. And the margins are already very thin. There's that aha moment for them to go, oh, now it's not just your company. These are all companies. You're like, yeah. And so I think there's an opportunity when you talk about it that way to say, that's how professional we are. That's our level of standard.

And I would tell you going back to the restaurant piece is if you go in and say, hey, I am highly allergic to nuts. Can you make this dessert without peanuts in it? Don't you want that restaurant to just actually tell you, hey, that's not possible. We don't have that possibility. It's better for us to not be able to serve you than do the wrong thing here and totally screw this up. And you go on whatever, right? Nobody wants the ambulance showing up to the restaurant. And so I almost look at quality of the business is how honest you are with your business practices. Yeah.

So I'm curious on the client level and the caregiver level, you mentioned these maybe like footnotes or disclaimers that you're very transparent about. Does that translate to guarantees? I know that's kind of a topic in the industry of do you have guarantees? What's your take on that? Do you all have them? What do they have guarantees? What's your take on that? Do you all have them? What do they look like? The only guarantee we have is a satisfaction guarantee.

And so I'll lay it out if anybody wants to use it. I don't know how amazing it is, which is we have said that if you are dissatisfied with services, let's talk about the client for example. If you're dissatisfied with services, you can let us know and we will replace four hours of care by making an adjustment.

Maybe a different caregiver, maybe a different time, maybe a do over right at no cost. If at the second time that we've tried to do this to satisfy you, you are still unhappy, we will refund you, you know, whatever that shift was. What we don't do is like our guarantee is not going to be you're a 24-7 client. You didn't like care. Now we're going to retro pay you back for the last 30 days. So we take things as like, you know, same thing. We're going to talk about four hours of gap of time. We're going to deal with four hours and we'll put at risk. And are now going on close to 14 years of service. I can count on one hand, the number of times someone has called us on that and said, Hey,

I want to do the satisfaction guarantee. And part of the reason is, is I think there's the customer. That's really there for that customer who can not be satisfied. You know, like they are going to find fault with no matter what you do. And it gives them an off ramp to go, okay, hey, here you go. We're going to credit you back. But obviously, we're not meeting each other's expectations. What we find happens more often than not, is that there is a trust and confidence on both parties that they say, hey, I know you're doing the best you can. Listen,

this isn't really there's something wrong with the caregiver. It's just we don't like her personality and her style. So can we pick somebody else? And we go, sure. And they don't ask for a refund or something like that. From the caregiver side, from a guarantees perspective, the only thing we've ever guaranteed is we have a position called a lead caregiver. It is a certain number of caregivers in which we guarantee them a certain number of service hours a week. So 30 hours a week, no matter what, because one, we think you're a great caregiver. We just don't know if we're going to have enough hours right away, but we're willing to pay you to get you on the roster, keep you on the roster. There's a host of things you have to do. You have to keep a uniform in your car. You need to be able to go to a shift if we call you with at least two hours worth of notice. You need to be available every other weekend in order to be in that program. When we say guarantee, they're going to get the 30 hours. There's no question about like, well, we don't feel like it this week. I don't know what other guarantees people are making out there.

I would tell you no caregiver can guarantee you their availability, but they can tell you, you know, like they think that's how it's going to go. Our guarantees are that we will process payroll if you've done everything you were supposed to do and we will get it out on time. We've never missed a payroll. I've missed many paychecks because in the building phase, that's not what's important. You got to pay your folks and make sure it happens. We knew that that's what other companies were known for doing. It's like they

would show up to the office, nobody's there. They can't get them to pick up the phone on payroll day because they know it's going to be screwed up. Our differentiator was just be a real business, right? Like process payroll the way it was supposed to happen. For those of you who've struggled with maybe cashflow issues, you've got a billing policy problem, not a payroll funding issue. And so we made decisions in our business, like a little one, I guess we can go into another one, which is we are mandatory ACH or credit card. We bill every Monday for the prior seven days. If your credit card or ACH fails on Monday, you do not get services on Tuesday until you fund your account. We are not meant to be a creditor.

We're not a banking service. We don't want to have a really big accounting team. Our accounting team spends the majority of their time dealing with invoices and vendors and things like that. Client side should be a no-brainer. You pay or you pay ahead. And we basically bill on Monday. We're funded by Thursday. Payroll process is Friday. At this point, it's clockwork. Does that mean no paper checks? No paper checks. We'll have four to five because somebody closes their bank account.

They don't let us know or something like that. But even those are mailed out. And usually they're mailed out with a cash card. We just go, hey, we noticed you don't have one. Here's the envelope. This is where it's going to get funded. If you want to put it somewhere else, you can call the 800 number on the back of the card. We no longer do paper checks. Yeah. Incredible. Incredible. So let's go down this kind of billing path. Yeah. You're

mentioning like a billing policy. I'm assuming your billing policy has evolved over time. At some point you were probably accepting paper checks. Just talk about some of the decisions that have shaped what's gotten you to your billing process and efficiency today. I think the biggest one is that we had two or three 24-7 clients and those rack up pretty quickly. And what we found is that we were slowing down billing because Mrs. Jones loves to write her own checks. And I may have misunderstood Miriam, you were talking about paper checks from a billing side. You know, Mrs. Jones loves to write her own checks out. And so by the time we mail her the invoice, because she doesn't do email, right? So we mail her the invoice, then she writes the check.

By the time we get it and put it in our system, we're ready to send another invoice. And now we're giving her an invoice that says you still have a balance and all this stuff. We had kind of a decision to be made for us is that what was going to make us a great employer where we couldn't pay more than any other option for a worker to work somewhere? We knew that we could pay faster. So this is even before things like tap check or any of this payment, early wage access stuff. I'm just talking about getting to a point where even doing a biweekly payroll shouldn't have been as stressful as it was. And it was. I mean, I didn't have a bunch of money just sitting aside. So when you've got two or three 24 seven clients that owe you in totality, like 30, 40 grand, and you've got payroll to process that 30, 40 grand is really needed right

now. We grandfathered the program in because, you know, Mrs. Jones just loves her checks. And well, when I signed up for you and it just takes time, But every net new client was on ACH and credit card. Then we would do a price increase for Mrs. Jones and say, oh, but we'll honor your rate if you sign up for credit card and ACH. And so as we started to pivot, we at this point, any private pay client, we no longer take any paper check of any kind with one caveat, which is, or exception, if somebody wants to just pay like a month ahead of services, because that's just, that's how they like to do it, which is fine. Even long-term care insurance, we do not bill long-term care insurance directly. The client pays us, but we will submit billing to long-term care insurance directly. The client pays us,

but we will submit billing to long-term care so they can get reimbursed. It's that kind of, I think, from a mechanics of the business, understanding cash flow is so critical and is usually the source of stress for a lot of owners and companies. We knew the negative ripple effect of having a poor cash flow would be now you're messing with people's paychecks. On the other side for the clients, they're like, hey, your invoice doesn't make sense to me. I know I've mailed you a check yesterday and now I have an invoice that says I'm two payments behind. We just wanted to make all that a lot smoother. And honestly, we just leaned into our technology. We're like, oh, the technology already does it. I mean, we weren't doing anything special.

It's just we had to get comfortable with the idea of saying, this is just how we do business. Yeah. I want to ask about kind of the back end structure of your billing. Billing, like you said, is kind of the backbone. Cash flow is what you need know, kind of the backbone cashflow is, you know, like what you need at the end of the day. And billing is a headache for most agencies, small, large, everything in between. Like I just hear so often just these, these struggles with billing. And to me, it seems like, you know, you put this process in place and it can kind of run itself. So I'm just curious

what, what you would chalk up, like the strengths of your billing process to be like on the backend, when you think of like how your billing is structured, what are like the core pillars that really make everything run smoothly? I think first of all is we today, out of the hundreds of employees that we have, I can name you the 11 that do not have a smartphone

because they are kind of our problem children, right? I've even gotten to a point where I'm thinking I will buy you a cricket phone or whatever, just to like get you to a point that you can do this. But that's who we're hung up on because it starts there. Caregivers need to do as absolutely much as they can do and technology allows them to do so that we are not doing so much when it comes to billing slash payroll, which, by the way, so connected, it's the same thing. So in my view, going to things like you must as a requirement of employment at Senior Solutions have a smartphone is we think that like, you know, I got caught up myself in this idea of like nobody has a smartphone. Oh, our best caregivers are older and they don't have a smartphone is we think that like, you know, I got caught up myself in this idea of like, nobody has a smartphone. Oh, our best caregivers are older and they don't have a smartphone. And this whole thing got debunked for me in my mind. The moment we sent out a survey

and just asked like, do you have a smartphone? 90% of our staff had a smartphone. And then it kind of, it dawned on me, it's like everyone's playing on their phones, right? Like somebody's got Candy Crush on their phones. You can be, gosh, you know, in your 40s and 50s and 60s, our clients have Candy Crush on their phones, right? So when you think about it in that lens and you go, there's really no reason.

Now COVID really propelled that forward. Lots of places were going contactless. They were doing kind of the device piece was so part of how they do business. And you also have to remember, what are the other things our caregivers might want to do? You can call the gig economy, but I got to tell you, you can go work at Taco Bell and guess how you apply. You got to get on your phone. They don't have a thing that you do in the place. They don't even take your paper application anymore. How does everybody do their HR update for their forms? How does everybody see their pay stubs? It's all electronic on their phones. I think we realized

if we're going to be in that environment, unlike a hospital where you can go down to the accounting office, I guess, and get a copy of your stub, we are in a decentralized environment as work. So smartphones are going to be very much required. Can't emphasize that enough because I think there's a lot of people who are listening right now that go, oh, that would work for some of our caregivers. It has to work for almost all, and it will. You just have to make that decision. Because the caregivers clock in and out electronically, we have a high compliance rate. 93% last I looked are clocking in and out using EVV, electronic visit verification. Because they do that, we then were able to do things like offer that early wage income, early wage access. We now today use TapCheck after using many different things.

And so when somebody clocks out, they can truly go into the application overnight and advance themselves money if they want that. So they can get kind of a pre-check. But beyond that, the other compliance piece we do internally is, you know, doing payroll and billing is not as hard when you think about the fact that this morning when I came into the office by about 9 or 10 a.m., why would I, as an owner or leader in my business, not expect every shift from yesterday to be accounted for? It either happened or it didn't. We don't need to do these like people are time traveling to get stuff done. The shift's either complete or not complete. Somebody either clocked in or they didn't clock out. Because our expectation is pretend like we're doing billing and payroll every day, so we take it in small chunks, it's fresh on our mind. You can call a caregiver, you can call the client, you can get a sense of reality and truth from yesterday. Our expectation is to have everything reconciled for yesterday by

10 a.m. Now, for your business, right, depending on how many people you have to support and what's going on, that might be 11 a.m. But gosh, push yourselves. Nobody's having lunch, right? Nobody's going to lunch until we decide how many ever shifts it was, 100 shifts. All right, well, by the time caregivers are super annoyed that you're calling them or writing them up or doing discipline and saying, hey, you didn't clock in and out of your shift appropriately yesterday. That's why I'm calling you. We've got to get you doing this. In my eyes, also, it's too late, right?

You should have known five minutes after they were supposed to be there that they weren't there. The client probably called you and told you they weren't there. At the end of their shift, you can't just walk out the door and hope for the best. We're calling you because you should have clocked out five minutes ago and you still, so you're on shift. What's going on? So that type of thing is so powerful. Compliance, professionalism, you know, going back to the restaurant industry here for a minute, at the end of the night, they pull all their checks and they go, have all the checks been paid? Right. They reconcile the drawer. This is just good business mechanics.

So in reality, by 10 or 11 o'clock every day, yesterday is cleared. That means billing and payroll for yesterday is also ready. By the time Monday rolls around, we're really just working on the Saturday, Sunday shifts because maybe we weren't around for that. By Monday afternoon, we can bill all week for last week. So send it out. ACH and credit card processes immediately. And then payroll is ready by Tuesday afternoon because if billing's done and payroll's attached to that, then payroll's also ready to go. We're now on weekly payroll, which by the way, for those of you who can manage it and your cashflow is right and so on, one of the best benefits as an employer you can provide for

our industry is getting caregivers a weekly check. They need it. I am a believer you could continue to throw out numbers for what we should pay caregivers and they deserve every bit of it. It's the economics of what can clients afford and so on. But when you are in a business in which you've got caregivers that are working 20, 30 hours, they might have two and three jobs. If you're the employer that pays them every week on time and correctly, when you need a shift filled, they're going to come work for you, right? They're not going to come pick up that shift to move their life around for the company who's like, well, we'll put it on the next pay period. And oh, I never got your timesheet because it was scanned in upside down or whatever nonsense is happening. Or you have to come to the office to pick up your check.

You make those kind of things frictionless for them. That is customer service for them too. I love this level of specificity. And I just looked at the clock. I don't know how it's been 45 minutes. I thought we were like 15 minutes in. This is like the first time that's happened. I want to ask one more question before we get to something else. This clocking in and out issue, I hear it every single day. And to me, it's like you're saying, it's this granularity. You know, we talk about like plateaus. You know, we see businesses kind of stall at 2 million, maybe at 5 million. I think it comes back to this, clocking in and out. You're clocking in and out policy because downstream that affects billing and payroll. And if you don't have your act together on those two things, you can't be a

successful thriving business. So you've referenced a couple of times a really strict clocking in and out policy. Can you just download that really quickly so we understand what that means exactly? Yeah. So at its basic level. You have to have a smartphone. You have to have our apps. You have to basically we also now do not call us and ask about your schedule. Log into the app. There's a soft way. So you also have to remember there's the brand new caregiver that needs to learn your system. So we do a lot of e-learning in the beginning so that they understand how the systems work. Then we coach and mentor. So they go to their training visits.

They have to clock in and out. They go through their first billable shift and they have to clock in and out. And in each one of these, we document if they had an issue or not. So I have to tell you, the caregiver who's been on with you for six months, who all of a sudden one time ever forgets to clock in, that's a whoopsie moment.

You just go, oh, I walked in, the client needed care. I just was having a bad day. My phone was dead. You can tolerate that. So be soft, be realistic. People are people. But the caregiver who never clocks in or it is like pulling teeth to get them to clock in, at some point, you have to say, either you can comply or like, I'm going to write you up again. But I have to tell you, if you can't clock in and out, this is so important for what we do. One, it's documentation. Two, fraud and abuse protection. Three, there's some labor law around it as well for timekeeping, making sure you're doing what you're supposed to. If a caregiver is disgruntled because your expectation is that they're going to clock in and out of work, there's at some point you go, hey, this is just a baseline thing. What else are they skirting the requirements on? I got to tell you, if you're not shocked by that, what about the caregiver who's like, I don't think I have to

wash my hands every time I first walk into a client's home. That's hand hygiene. I don't think I should have to do X, Y, and Z. I don't want to follow the care plan. There are actions, I think, that we all give that make staff more powerful. One thing that's unique to our business, which in maturity or time you can get to as a company, which is we also, that's how we bonus. And that's also how we do performance-based bonuses. So we can, every month, we look back at the prior 30 days of a caregiver's shifts. They have two whoopsie moments that they're allowed. If they have missed a clock in or out more than twice in the last 30 days,

they do not get a performance bonus. They are out. Why? Because it cost us money. Now I had to go call and confirm. Now I had to go manually do stuff in the office. When caregivers do things that keep you efficient, so you updated your file without manual intervention, you clocked in and out the way you should, you requested time off

using the process that's supposed to be done. Those caregivers that are excelling at doing the things that they should do, I think the best thing you do is you reward those kind of activities and you go, hey, great job. Then we send out a newsletter and give a list of all the people that got their performance bonuses. And it makes the other caregivers go, why didn't I get it? It's like, oh, talk to your supervisor and they'll tell you. Yeah. Like, you know how every week magically on Saturday and Sunday, you can't clock in and out right for some reason. And we all know what's happening is they're showing up 10, 15 minutes late. They're leaving half an hour early. And what they know is if they don't do anything,

you'll pay them for the whole shift. That's the kind of stuff we don't want to get involved with. Okay. I didn't mean to make this all about compliance, but I just, I hear this time and time again. And so I just was so curious, you know, what this looks like for you all. We've just got about 10 minutes left. I know you've got a list of ideas and thoughts. So maybe you pick and choose like where to take this next 10 minutes of another decision you want to share with the group. Yeah.

And I wouldn't say we're totally derailed, right? I would tell you like the little decisions are you're going to make your billing process really tight. That sounds like a little decision, but so important. Who all has got to participate in that? Oh my gosh, everybody in your company. The salesperson cannot say like, oh yeah, you don't have to do ACH or credit card. Your payroll person can't say like, oh, that's okay. You just keep not clocking in and out. So this actually, once you rip the bandaid off and you

make these little decisions, and I would tell you, you start by saying, do one thing at a time, right? How we change a little decision about our billing policy is that we said, okay, all new customers will do it this way. We'll start to grandfather some older customers. Then when we go to price increases, we'll create another opportunity. And now today, we really don't have anybody grandfathered in at all because of just time. And we've influenced almost every client to go into the category that we like with that. Same thing with our caregivers. You know, did we the moment we said we're going to be really strict on EVV, did we go, we're going to fire you when you don't clock in and out, right? That's

wrong. What we did do is we challenged caregivers and said, hey, you have a smartphone, you clock in and out correctly. Tell you what, we will make you eligible for a raise because every caregiver wants that. Maybe they were going to anyway, quarter here, 50 cents there. And you say, for those caregivers who clock in and out correctly, 80% of the time in the month of blank, we will be doing, and you've been with us for longer than six months, we're going to give you a rate increase. Oh, well, now I've got something to shoot towards and I do want to participate, that type of thing. I would say another one that's really been big with us, which kind of follows all of this is our use of technology. It's not just a little decision. I would tell you the little decision is to say we're going to be technology friendly.

And what I mean by that is that we are okay with making investments in technology, but it needs to perform for us. I can tell you without a benefit of doubt, we've been really big experimenters. We love the idea of going like, oh, let's try it. Let's do a small little pilot or test. Let's see if this will make a difference for us. The big thing for kind of the decision internally that we make is to say it's either going to work or we're going to decide very quickly after a really, you know, the good old college try that we gave it its best shot. We're also going to sunset this and say it doesn't work. The other element is that we don't have any piece of technology, including our phones. I am surprised that I meet a lot of home care owners and I'll use the phone as a really good example of this. They have a voice

over IP system, which just means that your phone is fully electronic. And if they've gone that far, they've never pulled a report. They've never gone into the system and said like, well, how much time does Canoe spend on the phone versus Miriam? How many calls did she take versus somebody else didn't? And I think those kinds of things are really the difference of whether you're fully utilizing a platform that you've brought in or not. And by the way, you can't do it all day one. I mean, we kind of, we stage it in and go,

okay, in the very beginning, we're going to do implementation and training. Cool. By month blank, 60 days, 90 days, we want to be in the reports. What can we figure out? Is this giving us better business intelligence? We ask that of everything that we hours and so on. We're looking at, there are some really cool, we use Paylocity. There's some really cool reports in there. There's a turnover indicator. Gosh, who cares about turnover? Well, definitely our industry, right? We love that kind of information. But we're looking for predictors, like, is there a lot of turnover under this one manager? Is there a lot of turnover in a specific area? Is there a lot of turnover? And what's the comparison of that to training? Maybe we're getting a lot of caregivers who are uncomfortable being here. And how it's informed our decisions is gotten to a point where we go, hey, as a company, there's nothing scarier to us than having an under-trained staff member who's put out into, I don't even

want to call it the wild, it's they're put out into performing services and they don't have enough information to be comfortable. And red flag, a little wisdom here for you. The caregiver who tells you they've been a CNA for 15 years and have all this experience, having them go through an hour or two of some CEUs isn't going to be the end of it. They just don't want to do it. We have caught more bad behavior and bad skills. And they're not bad people. It's just the last five companies they worked for, their form of training was, hey, guys, when you walk into a home, make sure you wash

your hands. Everybody got it? Got it. Good. All right. We're going to sign you off of having this skill set, which now, right, we know about infection control. We know about things like, how do I deal with a diabetic patient? How do I deal with somebody who has COPD? Giving them that training in a lot of early on has produced a better product for us, reduced complaints so that when the client says, hey, this caregiver showed up and doesn't seem like she knows what she's doing, we can say, oh, we have proof of the fact that they've gotten a bunch of training, but we are happy to send out a trainer or a mentor, somebody else to work with this person. I think the technology piece can't be understated. By the way, this is a shameless plug, but I'm so interested in what CareSwitch is doing

with the AI piece of it. I think it's that level of innovation. The scariest thing for me, I would tell you for home care in general, is for any of us to think that any technology, any workflow, anything that we used in the last two to three years is what's going to be the difference maker in the next two to three. I think innovation is speeding up. I think how we use these things is big. And it goes back to what I said earlier, the little decision is you got to open your mind, just be open to the idea that, hey, we may do this totally differently. And one of the things that I think we'll see, give you a little futurist type of mentality here. From last week's session that we did together,

I think managing relationships is going to be really big. I think where chat GPT, AI, all that's going to go is we will get to a point in the not too distant future in which caregivers, because there's a lot of them and very few of us, will interact with your brand slash company in some ways in which they are okay with the fact that it wasn't actually a person, but they still need the information. So I do think a caregiver, instead of calling you, might text your company portal and say, hey, when's my shift on Saturday? Can I move it to 10 instead of nine? Because I've got to do something for my child.

And the system will at least just say, hey, your shift is at blank clock. I'm going to leave a message for your scheduler so that they can make sure they make that adjustment. I think just that little thing feels so big when you look at the number one complaint of caregivers is they don't feel like they get great communication from the company. So when I look at challenges, the influence I'm not looking for for AI to do is process payroll faster, although that would be cool. I do think it's that managed relationships communication. Can you get my phone not to ring as much? Or when I'm on the phone, I'm having a lot of really deep conversations instead of just

surface, surface, surface. Where's the walker? Where's the medications? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'll kind of just like, yeah, tease a little bit, but that's what we're seeing as well. How do we reduce the low yield tasks, the low yield phone calls that free up your team's time to focus on the deep conversations, on the people, on the one-toield phone calls that free up your team's time to focus on the deep conversations,

on the people, on the one-to-one interactions. That's the power of AI is not replacing people, not replacing, you know, even key processes. It's replacing and reducing all of the low-yield minutiae-based tasks that are happening in home care. And I love what you said about, you know, even what we've adopted in the last two to three years, we're going to see a very large shift in the next two to three years. I think if the pandemic's taught us anything, a lot can change in a very short period of time. You know, we're already hearing that probably GPT-5 will be coming out this summer. The innovation and the speed at which innovation is happening is so fast and it's startling in some regards, but it's also exhilarating in some regards. The labor shortage, you know, inflation,

they're things that we've never seen before. And so we need to rely on technology to make up as much of the difference as it can. So I love like the futurist context here of, you know, care switches at the forefront of it. It should be on all of our minds. You know, how do we make technology an ally? How do we use it to our benefit? How do we shape technology to do and to be what we want it to be

rather than, you know, kind of like stiff arming it and trying to avoid it for as long as possible. I want to ask maybe just one, one question about tech stack volume. Someone kind of asked him the question, like, when do you bring on all these technology partners? I don't know if you can kind of download like the whole timeline, but you know, where you do using maybe three to four tools very early on today are using 20 tools. Like, I'm just curious, like the evolution of technology and even just like from a volume perspective, how many tools are you using today to manage a business of your

scale? Yeah, it's a really good question. I will tell you. So if you remember my background a little bit, I came from the private duty nursing world. And that exposed me to the fact they had a really decent or archaic EMR that was helping them build. That's basically all it did was build Medicare and Medicaid for certain services. They needed clinical coding and stuff like that. But I saw how this pretty robust company had such a lack of efficiency. So I think they looked at me as going, yeah, we know that you're the administrator here, but I kind of turned into like the chief technology strategy person and paint a picture for you. We had nurses that were opening their laptop, clocking in, closing their now, and I would tell you for us, early days, I knew we would have to have a real payroll system because you don't want to screw that up.

As an employer, there is a ton of liability that comes from you're doing payroll wrong. And I don't, you know, my kind of operation mentality is I really don't want to invite the regulators, auditors, and other people in. So the best way you do that is you just go, we're going to always be above board. So if there's a way to do it more professionally, efficiently, better, compliant, so on. So in the very beginning, we had three systems. We had a scheduling platform, we had QuickBooks Online, and then we had ADP, like their most basic version of payroll services. I was functional on those three. And I think for sure I needed them no

matter what. You need the three big key pieces to be working for you. We operated for a pretty long time without a dedicated CRM. And I will say that's one of my regrets is I wish we would have brought in a CRM strategy a lot earlier than we did. But for those of you who've been around for a while, you know that no matter how big or small the CRM is, like Constant Contact or HubSpot, that may not have been even out there at that time. But you almost have like, it's a second job for you. You got to go not only buy that, you got to really have people who can work it and make it happen. And I think the challenge is if you don't have enough people that can master those things. So what we did was that we found like, for example, a marketing agency that would manage our CRM because we had to let somebody else do it for us type scenario. Today, where we sit for technologies is I think our application, our stack of technology has come to be more because we've taken the basic level of doing certain things and said our need to go so much deeper in those areas is so high that our scheduling

software isn't doing enough of that or something else. We still have QuickBooks online. We still have a scheduling platform. Our HR system now is Paylocity. So it's an enterprise grade platform that does a lot. I'll tell you, we actually have less technology stack today than we did five years ago. And the reason is five years ago, if you wanted to manage applications, you needed a separate ATS. If you wanted something to manage your onboarding paperwork, you needed a separate e-documents thing. If you wanted something to manage your benefits program, you need a separate benefits manager.

Today, like our HRIS system is one platform that happens to do all those things. So we consolidated a lot of that work down. So it's very robust. Our phone system in the beginning used to be, you know, like four phone lines from AT&T when we had literally four like home phone things at every desk. It was four desks. Today, we have a voice over IP system that can work on any phone anywhere in the world, you know, all the time, and is very, very robust. So although it is a new technology stack, it's replacing something that was very basic in the past. The maturity of the business, I would just tell you this, there are versions of every technology out there that are meant for small businesses all the way up to enterprise. And you can pay a little, almost free in some scenarios, and you can

pay way too much. I tell you, we experienced, I bought the Ferrari of HubSpot and realized like, we didn't have the bandwidth of being able to drive that Ferrari. And so now we downgraded a lot to a CRM product that's highly customizable for us and is the right fit. And it's kind of something that we can all wrap our heads around. So with all that said, I would just tell you, it doesn't matter, don't get caught up

in how many technology applications do I have or which one. Start rather with what problems are you trying to solve? If you spend a lot of time on the phone and you know the phone burden in your business is a big deal, if you're going to spend a lot of time on the phone, at least get a really good phone system that you can then start doing things like transferring calls a little bit easier, scheduling certain call volumes. When a client calls in, that they go directly to their scheduler and not just to every phone is ringing.

So those are examples of some problems that you might try to solve through that technology. And start slow. Don't sign three and five-year contracts, you know, like all the lessons learned in the mix. And then at the same time, we realized if we were going to scale as a business, we needed a really good learning management system is a good example. And to this day, we still have one,

we're going on six years with it and we feel good about it. It's Relias Learning. But the reason is it's solving the problem for what we have as the issue. I can name multiple other learning management systems, which are all really good, have great content, and they're the perfect fit for someone else. I just happen to have a really high compliance need when it comes to Medicaid, and they solve one of those issues. So I need to use that one. So whatever you choose, be careful about don't buy the Ferrari.

So lesson number one. And number two would be get the system you're comfortable with actually using. You know, just saying you have it's not enough. You got to use it. You got to drive it. You got to use every, you know,

element of it that it can do. Yeah, that's the term you used earlier was platform utilization. It's so easy as businesses scale to bloat that tech stack. Oh, we just need to have this. We should have this. Even though those two systems do kind of the same thing and there's overlap, I think that's what's key as a leader. And as you scale is to be really cognizant

of platform utilization. Are you using 20% of the platform, 50% of the platform, 80% of the platform, like just constant analysis of how much you're utilizing those platforms. And I, and I love what you said, you know, there's, there's like enterprise packages. HubSpot's a great example. I think that's above and beyond, you know, most home care owners and operators. Yes, it exists, but if it's not fit for you and your needs and solving the problems that you have, you know, don't, don you have, don't have kind of that FOMO of going after having a full-fledged CRM system. And I'll use an example of QuickBooks Online. Over the last 14 years, we've actually often

found QuickBooks experts, our CPA, we found other people. We're not asking them to work in the system. We ask them to optimize it. We're not asking them to work in the system. We asked them to optimize it. We're like, hey, here's a thing we're trying to solve. We have multiple locations. What's the best way to deal with that in QuickBooks Online without, you know, we would say, oh, you can't do it. Well, they just very quickly go, oh, there's a setting in here and you can do classes. And then if you build out your budget this way, it's going to take some work, but then you'll get all the things that you want. Well, guess what we don't have? We don't have QuickBooks Enterprise. We don't need that, right? From that side of bookkeeping, we're actually really simple.

So from a bloat perspective, to use your words, you get people who get these really big enterprise systems and it's way too much. It's the Ferraris of the mix, where really what you needed was spend a little bit of money of somebody who knows how to use it. Sometimes it's the actual vendor. And just say, do you have a QuickBooks expert that could help us just look at it and see if it could be better? A lot of times, if you have a bookkeeper in your business, as a good example, business office manager, whatever they are, you might be using that system to the level of understanding that that person has. And you just got to go, hey, this isn't personal. You're doing a great job.

We're going to bring in someone else to look at this and maybe level this up. And we want you to work with them to really understand that. And you're going to keep it going. I think we all want some professional development. Our accounting team, which is three people at this point, they all continuously do QuickBooks certifications. And we pay for it. We pay for their time. And for those of you that go, oh, well, if I get them too knowledgeable, then what if they leave? The old saying is, what if they stay and they don't get any of the new knowledge?

What did you accomplish? It's the same thing. Yeah, that's a really good call out. It's not uncommon for the platform, the technology to reflect the person behind, you know, and that's not always the indicator that you're maximizing that technology. And yeah, it's no offense, like you said to the person, but it's just how do we dig in here and see what, where our gaps are and how we could be more efficient and where we could optimize. Canoe, this has been awesome. We have really just kind of found our way here. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. I think the day that you get into podcasting, I become irrelevant. So keep me posted on that front,

but thank you really. You've given so much good information the past two weeks. I wish I could interview every single week and we could dig into every little bit of operations in the business. But I encourage everyone to reach out to you. I know you're a busy guy, but you are so gracious with your time. So connect with Canoe on LinkedIn,

shoot him an email, catch him at a conference. Don't hesitate to associate yourself with someone like Canoe on LinkedIn, shoot him an email, catch him at a conference. You know, don't hesitate to associate yourself with someone like Canoe. He is a wealth of knowledge. So thank you for being here. Thank you for giving your time. I look forward to seeing you probably later this year at some conferences. And I hope you have a great rest of your weekend, great rest of this year. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

And who knows, maybe I'll see you in the next season, right? So we can do it again. Exactly. I'll take you up on that. No doubt. Thanks, everyone, for being here. Great, great session today. I'm really excited about some upcoming guests.

We got Jensen Jones. We got Bob Roth. We've got Steven Tweed, one of Canoo's mentors. So we've got a lot of great content coming the next few weeks. So continue to listen. We'll look forward to seeing everyone back again next week. 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.