As a senior living facility, you have an important duty to your clients to perform as well as possible. You’re not just making products or giving services as a senior living facility. Instead, you’re caring for people and helping them keep living their fullest lives when they can’t do it themselves.
If you’re not operating at peak performance, you’re failing your clients. The worse your company performs, the worse the living arrangements for seniors will be.
That also means that there’s no shame if you think you need a turnaround for your facilities. Turning around your facilities can help them boost their quality and improve the care they can give to the people living in them. A turnaround doesn’t mean you’re selling out and abandoning your facilities; it means you understand the people in them deserve better.
That’s a noble goal, and it’s even nobler to ensure that the turnaround is done successfully. There are a lot of parts to keep track of while the facility changes hands, after all. It’s your responsibility to make sure the facility is handed off correctly and safely.
Keep reading below to learn more about how to make sure a turnaround is successful, for both the sake of your clients and yourself!
Identify When a Facility Needs a Turnaround
Timing is everything when turning around a senior living company. Waiting too long to turn it around can endanger your clients and will harm your company’s reputation. Yet, trying to turn around a company before it needs it can have the same effects.
By trying to start a turnover before the company needs it, you can hurt your own reputation by appearing to sell out. You also put people at risk, since new management may not be as familiar with each person’s individual needs. An early turnaround creates unnecessary risk for everyone involved.
Waiting too long to start a turnaround of your company can also endanger people. It can intensify problems that you may not be able to fix yourself, making things worse in the long run. The longer you wait, and the more that problems develop, the less your company will be worth, too.
So make sure to time your assisted living turnaround just right! Keep reading below to learn how to tell when the right time comes.
Compare Empty Beds to Full Ones
The simplest way to tell if you need to start considering a company turnaround is to compare the number of empty beds to full ones. If you have more empty beds, then your company may be hemorrhaging money. People may be abandoning your facility for other ones that more completely meet their needs.
Alternatively, you may simply be failing to attract new clients. Unfortunately, senior living facilities routinely need to find new clients to stay afloat. As you inevitably lose clients, you may be failing to replace them due to a marketing issue, or worse.
Move-Out Frequency Is a Strong Indicator
Another metric to watch for to tell when it’s time to start working on a turnaround is your move-out frequency. The more that people decide to move to other facilities, the more you should begin considering letting someone else run the company. They could be leaving for a variety of reasons, including costs, quality of care, or even marketing from your competition.
Always make sure to ask why a person chose to leave the company before they go. With that information, you’ll be able to identify your issue and start trying to fix it!
Watch For First-Time Visits
There is a metric that you watch to identify what your strengths are, as a company. Without knowing your competitive advantage in your local market, you’ll never be an efficient company. Before you can play to your strengths, you need to know what they are.
The more first-time visits that your facility gets, the more that you can be sure you’re doing something right. That means you may not need to immediately work on a turnaround if you consistently earn high amounts of visits. Yet, if you notice a sudden drop in the number of first-time visits, it may be time to consider turning around the company.
Make the Right Living Arrangements for Seniors
A turnaround for a senior living facility is about more than profit and revenue. A turnaround impacts the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in society. The elderly can barely stand up for themselves, and as a leader in the senior living industry, you have a responsibility to care for them.
That means the first part of a turnaround isn’t about money — it’s about people. You need to make sure that each person continues to get the care that they need, no matter what happens to the company. Take steps to preserve the medical documents of all of your residents, and be sure to introduce new staff to them immediately.
You should also discuss how your facility will continue to receive much-needed resources like mattresses and medicine after the turnaround is over. If the company switches hands, then your previous suppliers may not be able to supply the facility anymore.
Make sure that all suppliers are on the same page as you when it comes time to turn around the facility. That way, your clients may not even notice a transition until things start to noticeably improve.
Everyone Needs to Be Cared for In Their Own Way
Suppliers aren’t the only ones who should be notified of a turnaround. Your clients should be notified too, although they need to learn about the change in their own ways. Dementia is a serious issue in living communities, so familiar staff members should be the ones to walk them through what will happen.
The elderly tend to form special bonds with specific members of the staff. These members of the staff tend to understand them on deeper levels and care for them better than most others can. These should be the staff members that notify your clients of a change.
You should also strive to keep the same staff members working with the same clients. A turnaround that costs clients their relationships with the staff isn’t ever worth it.
Turnaround Team — Assemble!
The next step to a successful turnaround is to create a team of people to lead everyone through it. This team should include experts and advisers, from both within the company and from third-parties. That way, you can balance your company’s personal interests with the knowledge from other company’s experiences.
Your team should also be known within your company community. Investors aren’t the only people who should know who’s on it; your clients and your staff should know too. They deserve to know who is in charge of such a large change that may impact their entire lives.
This team will draft recommendations and policies that will be designed to lead your company through a turnaround. They will be responsible for making sure that the company improves and the clients can continue being cared for. Most of all, this team will be responsible for keeping everything fair during the changes.
Your team should also have a place in the company after the turnaround is complete. The people on it should have clear roles within the company after the changes are made. This will help motivate them to improve the company, and it will keep the company intact.
Bring in Someone Representing Every Interest
Your team shouldn’t be limited to people from executive managers offices. On it should be people representing the interests of the staff, of the clients, and even the clients’ families. When you have different people representing the interests of different parts of your company, you do more than help your company thrive.
You also protect yourself from complaints and hardships down the line. After the changes are made, people may want to know why some people’s interests were represented more than others. If you represent everyone’s interests, you protect yourself from criticism that the turnaround was done poorly.
The More the Merrier
In most of the business world, the more people involved in a decision means the slower it gets made. Yet, turnarounds aren’t like most of the business world. They actually benefit from more people weighing and contributing their own interests and ideas.
That’s because turnarounds aren’t just done in the name of profit like most business decisions are. They’re mostly done in the name of the company. They’re virtuous attempts to improve the services you provide to clients, and that means more people should be involved in it.
The more people involved, the more voices get heard. That means the better your team will be able to lead your company, and the more people your company will be able to help.
A Successful Turnaround Is Just the Beginning
After finding the right living arrangements for seniors, assembling the right team, and fixing your issues; you’re still not done. A completed turnaround is just a new beginning for your company. Your new story starts here.
After a successful turnaround, you’ll still need to run a company and lead it to even greater success. There are still jobs to do after finishing a turnaround. And if you need help with them, just contact us here. We are experts in helping senior living facilities achieve their full potential so that they can care for their clients!