Fast Track To 1 Million Your First Year In Business [By Leveraging Your HomeCare Software]

If you’re opening an agency or you recently opened your office, you want to get started fast. We’ll share some tips that will help you jumpstart and accelerate your growth. 

Becoming a business owner can throw your mind into a bunch of different directions at once, so let’s talk about a few specific areas that you can spend some time that will make an impact. 

Leverage your network.

Regardless of your background, you have a network of friends, former colleagues, family members, mentors and coaches, people you went to school with, and more. That is something that no one can give or take from you; it makes you different. 

Home care is a uniquely great industry in the sense that almost every person has their own care story. It could be that they took care of someone, watched a loved one take care of someone, or they visited a loved one in a senior living community, etc…

You can tap into your network in a few different ways, like:

• Posting on social media: You don’t have to post on every channel, but be consistent and intentional with the content you share. What’s more, you can direct message warm and trusted connections asking for a referral if they know someone in need.
• Make a big deal about your opening: Have a freelancer, graphic designer, or a team member put together a flyer or graphic announcing your business’s opening. Encourage other people to share it as well. Do an office tour, inviting people to visit.

Find your differentiator.

Home care is an industry that’s full of competition. That’s not going to change as time goes on, but what can change is your ability to hone in on your agency’s best work. 

Who is your target client? Who is the best fit to work with your company? 

You can’t serve all clients equally, and that’s okay! What’s important though, is to identify why that is, and who you can best serve—and why that is. And once you find it, double-down on it, and make that your value proposition. 

It can be as simple as: We provide premium in home dementia care services. Don’t over-complicate it. If you’re not sure where to start, be sure to check out Home Care Evolution’s video series on the Four Part Target Customer: NERD.

This might not be the exact system you use for your home care agency, but it’ll get you and your team thinking about your right-fit client. 

Another way you can identify your target client is pulling up your scheduling dashboard and picking out a few clients who have great relationships with caregivers, and finding commonalities between them. 

Are they mostly companionship clients? Do they all seem to live in the same town? 

Think about multi-pronged growth.

Growth is usually quantified as new clients or new leads. Not a bad metric at all, but there are other factors to consider. In a recent webinar with Home Care Evolution, The State of Home Care in 2024, Steve talks about home care business growth in three ways:

• Office staff: When are you going to bring on a general manager or other team members?
• Census growth: How do you bring on more clients?
• Caregiver growth: How do you find, hire, and retain caregivers?

All three of these forces inform each other and your ability to grow. 

You can’t add more clients without caregivers (and vice versa), but you can’t grow either without the proper internal resources to interview caregivers and do in-home assessments. 

Review these numbers with your team on a regular basis by running the proper reports in your homecare software. If you don’t already have set stand-ups or regular meetings with your team, make that a priority to add to the calendar.

Your golden opportunity for growth.

Over the last few years, Steve and his team discovered that home care power partners or referral partners have experienced a great deal of turnover. That means, that even if you’ve been marketing to referral partners for a long time and established great relationships, the same people might not be working there anymore. 

For newer home care owners, this turnover (although unfortunate for many), can be an effective playing field for you to tap into and to showcase why you’re the best agency to work with.

Home care is a relationship-based business. When you can “establish common bonds” with a referral partner as Steve shared, with a referral partner, you can scale your marketing efforts exponentially faster than other more traditional channels, like digital marketing or SEO (not that they are unimportant). 

What does establishing common bonds mean exactly? Show a partner that you’re going to help them out by:

• Co-hosting educational events in your community
• Referring your clients to utilize their services (as applicable)
• Sharing operational and business practices that have worked for you

This shows your community partners that you’re genuinely here to support them, and in return, they should send you a steady flow of referrals as needs arise.

How to scale your agency to 1 million in your first year

You can do it! Think about it this way: “If you can get 20 patients on your census to average 40 hours a week per patient, that’s going to generate about a million dollars a year,” shared Steve.

The right tools, the right resources, and the right support can make this possible for you. One of the best things we can recommend is tracking your referral partners and then pulling a revenue by referral partner report in your software. This will show you the partners that are sending you high-revenue clients on a consistent basis, and those should remain your north star as you continue to scale.

If you’re looking for a home care software partner that can support your needs upon start-up and when you scale, consider using or switching to CareTime today.