Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

All right. Hey, everybody. This is Valerie VanBooven. I just want to say thank you for attending today. If you are watching the replay, be sure to watch all the way to the end. This is some very good information that all private duty home care agencies need to have, at least need to know about. And my other recommendation would be that, if nothing else, make sure that you get signed up for a free demo of this based on your needs and your questions being answered with somebody from Home Care Quote with Karl or Valerie. So they can go through it and talk to you about it from your specific point of view. This is excellent software. But you definitely need to go through that free demo so you can see how it will change your business life. All right. So with that, I’d like to introduce Valerie Darling and Karl Ryder. Valerie D. and Karl, you guys can take it away.

Valerie Darling:

Thanks, Valerie.

Karl Ryder:

Yes. Thank you, Valerie. It’s exciting to be here today, and look forward to the discussion. How many folks do we have on?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

We have about 19 or 20 right now.

Karl Ryder:

Okay, great. Well maybe some more will join as we go.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Oh yeah. They’re going to keep filing in.

Karl Ryder:

Hope everybody’s well, and looking forward to the discussion. We have a …

Valerie Darling:

There you go.

Karl Ryder:

There you go. So, you saw the intro and the discussion regards that topic predominantly revolving around pricing. And so I’d just like to open up, if you would, just be thinking about your own business at the moment. Think about what your current business is and where you want it to be, what your marketplace is and where you want take it, and what your current prices are today. Just have that in the back of your mind. And I really want you to be thinking about what differentiates you in the marketplace right now. We’re going to go through some price processing discussion, discuss a little bit about differentiation. We’re going to talk about some fundamentals of base rates, what a generating piece or GRI might look like, and if you’re doing that kind of pricing discipline in your business today. And then a little bit about what dynamic pricing is and what that’s all about.

Karl Ryder:

As Valerie said, we’ve developed a pricing solution for our industry that was built basically for our Home Care Matters here in Flowery Branch, Georgia, to give some value propositions in differentiation in our marketplace. Through that process, we had several other people we knew in the industry approach us and ask if they could also use the tools. So we changed the dynamics and the solution, and made it available to others. And that’s what we have. And if we have time towards the end of today, we’ll try to do a little bit of a demo or a little bit of an introduction to the website so you can see that a little bit more firsthand. And as Valerie said, please feel free to reach out, go to our website, schedule a demonstration. We’ll be happy to you a deep dive and get more into particulars that would be relevant to your business directly.

Karl Ryder:

Thought this was a relevant comment that came out of the Harvard Business Review about pricing. If you talk about increasing your cases or your sales, 1% improvement, and that would be about 3.3% improvement in your operating profit. Whereas, a 1% improvement in your price that you put in the market will be 11% in a significant impact, almost three to four times on your overall profitability. That article goes on to talk about management’s responsibility, about properly setting price as one of the primary responsibilities to ensure the profitability the organization’s trying to achieve. So it’s a good article, and I thought it was very relevant for today.

Karl Ryder:

Our call to action, or any call to action for any company, would be, does your pricing strategy really support the demands of what your business is? We know we’ve all gone through some pretty interesting changes with the prices and the compensation rates in our industry, and the availability of resources to fill those care professional job responsibilities. So you got to have that pricing on your forefront of your strategy here to be able to enable some of those dynamics, but also the profitabilities of the company, what you’re trying to achieve as far as profitability. Some fundamental questions that we asked as we were developing this was why are some of our basic companion rates and full care rates, the same rate? We’re trying to pay the people the same. So I guess averages are deceiving. If you don’t have differentiation in your rates, then you might just be paying the people, and then obviously the care is not the same within those two scenarios.

Karl Ryder:

Why do we have rates that are in place that are less than our base rate? Obviously, you get a lot of your early on legacy clients that might have been at your early on rate, and then you really haven’t been able to migrate them, or haven’t put the time and the communication effort into making sure they’re at the current rate that your business demands. And then the third point here, obviously, is are you communicating, and is your messaging to your market a consistent message? Another question we asked ourselves, about the transparency, because many times, obviously clients are coming and having conversations, and they don’t really know the industry. They certainly don’t know a lot of the terminology that we all know. And they’re in that time of need, and part of the process that we go through is an educational process. And so we can explain what the cost of care is.

Karl Ryder:

We also get into, as we get into the continuum of care for a client, we want to make sure we can show the progress of the client care needs over time, and be able to review that with the client and/or their loved ones that are facilitating the care on their behalf, their family member. So we want to be able to share that and the tools that we’ve built enable that process for a side by side, very detailed review of the client to understand what’s going on in regards to the care that we’re trying to provide.

Karl Ryder:

And then we get into the idea of what dynamic price is, and what is it and why do we need it. Said another way, it’s really making sure that you’re being properly compensated for the services that you’re providing. There are services, obviously, that are basically built into your base care rates. But all those extra care services that you provide, and making sure that you’re being properly compensated as the care needs change, and then subsequently properly paying skill levels of your care professionals that are providing the care is really some of the fundamentals that we could pawn out.

Karl Ryder:

So the question often comes up, what is home care quote? And as I said earlier, it was built basically for our home care agency, and then was made available to others. It’s really an educational tool, as I discussed a moment ago. You’re helping to understand exactly what it is. This is a specialized tool that’s built customized to your needs and your business profile. It has two dimensions to it. It can either be on your computer and used as the tool when you’re engaging in conversations with your potential clients. It can also be a tool that’s been very intuitively design with hovers, and to explain the terminology and the tool. And a lot of times what we get is clients actually doing their own quote online, and then that message is sent to us.

Karl Ryder:

And I’ll walk you through that a little bit. So at the end of the day, it is a care plan tool. You’re capturing all these specifics in a five step process of what the care needs are for the individual, all the way from what the basic information about where they are and who they are in their contact, what their needs are, to their care, their conditions that need to be cared for, the environment that the care is being provided, information about them so we know them a little bit, we can communicate to the care professional when they go into meet them for the first time. Summarize all that in a fifth step, making sure we haven’t missed anything, and process that through the technology and the algorithms, and out comes a summation of that conversation with a picture of what level of care is being provided, and the rates, a custom license plate number for that quote.

Karl Ryder:

And they notice that a care member of your team will be communicating with them very soon. It’s a pricing tool. So as I said, it develops a quote and a price. It’s a paid tool. You’re developing, paying for the services you’re providing. You’re getting more compensation. You’re able to convey that at whatever way you want to convey additional finance or compensation to your care professionals. And it’s a margin improvement tool. So if we go back to the early slides, like what did Home Care Matters want to be? And Val, do you want to talk about this or would you like me to continue?

Valerie Darling:

Yeah. So some of the goals that we had when we were looking at trying to do something different was what did we want to be known as? Just another home care agency or did we want to try and specialize and be able to talk directly to maybe some of our target referral sources, maybe a skilled nursing facility or a home health? So first of all, it’s all about the service because it is at the end of the day, we use a lot of technology, but it’s hands on, it’s customer service. It’s providing a very personalized type of care in somebody’s home, whatever that home environment is. So, as we thought through it as consumers, and we probably all relate to this, almost anything that you buy today, you get a quote for, you go to buy a computer.

Valerie Darling:

You want to know what’s in it, what’s on it. What kind of warranty do you have it? And how much does it cost? You go to get a phone plan. It has the minutes, it has all the data, it has what it’ll cost and how many lines can be on it. You go get a car, you get the base price and then you get all the extra. So you get everything except home care. We’ve never had that in home care. And so that is one of the most personal things that you can be doing. And this tool is going to help you educate your families and the loved ones because we all know that most clients are in total denial about how much care a family member needs. So you can educate them.

Valerie Darling:

You can give them a very transparent quote, and you can talk to them about specifics. It’s not abstracts. It’s very specific. We wanted to be a respected employer of choice. We want to attract the caregivers. Our market has become very small. We’re all competing in the same care professional pool with hospitals, and assisted livings, and hospice companies, and with each other. So being able to know what cases pet are going to be charged, and what we’re going to get in revenue helps us offset how we can compensate the people at the end of the day, that do the hard work in the homes. And they should be compensated as much as we can possibly compensate them. And then we wanted to be a sustainable high performing profitable enterprise. So we’ve been here. We just celebrated 11 years this month.

Valerie Darling:

And we want to continue that for as long as we can physically work. So is it differentiate through all our professionals, professionalism, our performance, our staff, our team members, the education, and then being able to be totally different from another agency down the street. We quote what’s your rate? Oh, we started this and then we go up. Well, why do you go up? How do you go up? When do you know to go up? Well, we just know. This helps it. This helps you communicate it. They can see it, gives them a pie chart about where they are. So all the visuals are there and it takes it from abstract to concrete.

Karl Ryder:

Thank you, Valerie. So just a couple of points that we brought up at the forward with your base rate, do you know what’s included? And I ask those questions to be thinking about? What is your base rate and why what’s involved in it? What would you like it to be? And how many hours and minimums do you want to have? And again, we capture all that information, whether or not you want to charge different for day, nights, weekday, weekends, holidays, all that’s in there. There’s a litany of facts that we capture in regards to your business, that then creates a custom URL for you to run this process on your business. Do you know what your top competitor’s rates are on their prices out there? I’m assuming that most people are looking at that, but if you’re not that’s scenario to go put some focus on. There’s many ways to go about that.

Karl Ryder:

Do you have a discipline of a rate increase? Do you know costs aren’t going down, if nothing more they’ve been spiking? You have to have a way of making sure that you are communicating and setting the process in place that allows you to put a general rate increase in and proper communication plan, no surprises. It’s good to give people information. We’ve done it. Typically we haven’t lost any clients through it. They understand it. Most people understand it, even if they just go to the gas station today. So there is a way to communicate it properly and be happy to work with you and help you on how we’ve been successful doing that. And then again, the dynamic pricing, and then what we say, there’s a tool really does it for us. It ensures that you’re charging for all the services. And as the service changes, we have those continuum.

Karl Ryder:

And each of those quotations and reassessments that are done, state of Georgia, we do them every 90 days per regulatory. We have clients that are doing every 30 days because they want to make sure they’re aware of everything that’s going on. And then obviously the life events would drive another quote or reassessment to be done. And then, then as Valerie was talking about, making sure that the available compensation, you put it in the right place based on the right skills and ensure the proper pay to the folks that are doing the heavy lifting. Current client users of the system are seeing 10 to 15% improvement over their base price. That’s pretty much a national average. I think we’re seeing somewhere around 12 and a half here right now in Georgia.

Karl Ryder:

So it’s having an impact and you go back and reflect on one of those early slides that I talked about with the Harvard business review comments. This is pretty material impact on your profit. This is just a little bit more information about myself and Valerie. You can actually reach out to us. We’ll be happy to sit down with you and understand where you’re at in your journey. And it’s all about trying to help each other, making sure that we’re the most professional organization out there with the most professional folks to take care of the loved ones of these families that come and trust us, making sure that we’re being properly compensated for the services that we’re providing. Val, is there any questions so far?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

I don’t see any questions so far, but I’m going to send out a reminder. I’ll put it in the chat too, there’s a little chat box there. If you have any questions, please put it in the chat. But I think what’s going to really spur some interest here and more questions is when you go to these websites and show them how home care quote works for Home Care Matters.

Karl Ryder:

Okay.

Valerie Darling:

Good. Can you see the website?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Nope, not yet.

Valerie Darling:

Okay.

Karl Ryder:

Yeah, sure.

Valerie Darling:

Yeah, share.

Karl Ryder:

Stop sharing.

Valerie Darling:

Share. And then we’re go back and share. Hang on just a second. Wait.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah, you’re fine.

Valerie Darling:

Okay. Okay. So this is my website.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Woo hoo!

Valerie Darling:

Can you see that now? Can you see it?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. Look at that beautiful website.

Valerie Darling:

Yeah. Look at that beautiful website. I wonder who did that website? So we just recently updated the website. What we’ve done, we’ve embedded the tool in the get your quote here. A differentiator down in the boxes is the best in class. See what’s different. So when you click on that, you can get a transparent, accurate, effective, dynamic, personalized quote. You get your quote there and then we’ve also put it at the bottom of the page. I’m going to go right from here. So if a client was or potential client was just Googling stuff and found the site which they’ve been doing, this is what they would come up with. You could also do it from your computer in your offices, or you can embed the URL on your toolbar and just use it as a favorites, which is what we do.

Valerie Darling:

So we accept the terms and conditions. So you can see it’s personalized over here on the right side with my logo and my company name. This is the five step intake process. And then we have a color legend down at the bottom. And each one of these colors at the end helps us produce the pie chart and allows people to see exactly where their loved ones are on the care spectrum. Down at the bottom, we have a completion, there’s 60 questions that we go through. And I know that sounds like a lot, but once you see it, it’s really basically a lot of intake and very simple questions to answer and respond to. One of the very first question is, what language do you want? We have English and Spanish right now.

Valerie Darling:

So we’re going to select English and I’m going to go through this a little bit quickly, but I’ll explain some things as we’re going through, just so you can know and understand some of the different options that there are. You can do it if it’s a client, if it’s filling out it’s a son or daughter or family member or staff. So we’re going to use staff and ask, what staff member? So I’m going to use myself now as a reassessment or a brand new quote, let’s do a brand new quote. Are they calling about themselves or somebody else? So let’s just say somebody else. So who’s the caller’s name? What’s the caller’s phone number? So remember, you’re doing all this as an intake.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

And this prompts to your staff to ask these questions and make sure they’re getting everything.

Valerie Darling:

And the more versed you are doing it off of this screen, the easier it becomes. And then you start just leading people. You get a lot of calls. Sometimes people say, “my mom, she’s coming out of the hospital and we don’t really know what she needs. What do you guys do?” We can take them through this whole process. And it’s very easy and it’s a very smooth and it’s professional. It’s very, very professional. The relationship between the caller and the care recipient and then the care recipient’s name. So my family needs a lot of care these days. All right. So their birthday and you have to remember, I’m a regulated state. So this is all state required information anyway. So we designed the intake to be state compliant as well as informational. We made the care recipient phone and email, cellphone optional, because a lot of times they’re not calling for themselves. So we made it optional. If you have it, you obviously can enter it. And then we ask, how did you hear about us? And select one of those.

Valerie Darling:

And then, how do you plan to pay for your care? These are the pay options that we have at my company, yours might be different. We can change those on the registration. Then where is the care going to take place? And we’re going to do home. If you notice down here at the bottom too, we have uncertain. So that’s somebody that’s not sure where the care’s going to and they can put that in. If we say other, then they need to explain to us little more detail on that. [inaudible 00:21:16] other are all through all the questions as well. So you can take notes and add notes. You can do a lot of different things with those particular areas. Here’s the service address. And then if the house or it’s a community, you can give them the name of the community if there is one.

Valerie Darling:

Is it a gated community or no? If it is, it’ll bring up what else information to get in. If it’s no, then you just go on. All the services that they’re thinking about [inaudible 00:21:51] if you notice the hovers and has the IADLs, which is companionship and you have the personal care, which is the ADLs. And then in Georgia, we can’t say respite, so we call it short term care. And we define that as less than 14 days of care, that’s maybe just for somebody going on vacation or wedding or whatever. And then, how many days of service would this person want? We’re just going to put in there, flexible.

Valerie Darling:

Then how many days? We have a six consecutive hour minimum and we have a 30 hour a week minimum. So we’re just going to stay six to 12 hours. And then if they know how quick they’re going to be starting services, we’ll just put a date in. If they don’t, you can go past it. And then here’s all the activities that they’d like us to help them with. ADLs again, with the hovers, IDLs with the hovers and some companionship, maybe they’re a fall risk, medication reminders, toileting, transportation, maybe they have cognitive. Maybe they’re a smoker. Maybe they have some pet care. And again, uncertain another if they don’t sure.

Valerie Darling:

At this point, you can now save this as a draft. If for some reason somebody got in and doesn’t know what they want to do, they can save this. It will send a message to the agency and you can, as an agency, contact that particular person and complete the quote for them and with them. And this happens all throughout the quote as well. Now we’re going into the needs, if you can see over here on the right. So it’s transportation, what kind of transportation needs do they have? They have a car. We also say if we have to provide the transportation, some mileage charges will apply. Okay. You said you had pet care. What’s the pet care service? It’s a single pet and it’s minimal care. We added contagion. So other than COVID, which is still at the top of most people’s lists, there are a lot of other things that are contagious. If you select a contagion, it will change your rate only while those people are contagious. So the rate can go up, but it also can go down. It just depends on the situation. And you have to monitor that.

Valerie Darling:

We’re just going to say none on this one. Down at the bottom, we’re over 50% done. Here’s the eating. How can this person feed themselves? Are they able to? Do they require a lot of assistance? And we’re just going to say that they need extensive assistance. Their ambulation, how independent are they? How dependent are they? So we’ll just pick one that says they require an escort to most daily meals and activities or outings. These are their assisted devices that are in their home, that they use on a regular basis. A cane, say a [inaudible 00:24:45], wheelchair, maybe they have oxygen. Uncertain or other still available. There’s transfers. How do they get up and down out of chairs? Do they need help? So we’ll say, yes, they need at least one person.

Valerie Darling:

Are they independent in their toileting or they in incontinent? So we’re going to say that they’re incontinent, may need some help in queuing for that. And then what are they incontinent in? Bowel, bladder, or both? I’m just going to say bladder. How do they bathe? Can they do it themselves or do they need assistance? And we’re going to say they require assistance. Nutrition, we’re going to say that they are well managed as long as somebody’s there helping make sure that they get the right meals and they eat on time. If they had any major industries and we’re in safety now. If they had any injuries in the last year. So let’s say they’ve had some bruises and cuts requiring some medical intervention. How many falls? We’re going to say they’ve had more than six in the last year.

Valerie Darling:

How many ER visits from those falls or other instances? We’ll say they had one. Were they admitted to the hospital for anything in the last year? We’ll say that they had two admittance. What are all their medical diagnosis that we know of right now? So maybe they have CHF, COPD, some dementia, diabetes, and high blood pressure. How many medications are they? They require multiple, had a lot of diagnosis. This is if they’re coming out of a rehab, maybe they’ve been home. They’ve been bedridden. So sores, it’s not a lot of technicality in the descriptions, but it alerts us that if somebody has it, they probably need to be coming home with skilled nursing. Or if they’re at home, they probably need to get a doctor’s orders for that to get home health because as we all know, home care does not do wound care.

Valerie Darling:

That’s a discussion that you can have as the professional home care. Here’s all the treatments that they’re having at home. So they’re diabetic and they have some insulin, some IV, wound care. So right now, if they were telling us that, in my mind and your agency’s mind or as your staff, we should know that they’ve got to have some kind of skilled nursing for infusions. And they’ve got to have some kind of IV for the skilled nursing. And maybe they have home health coming in. And if they don’t, we need to be talking to them about that.

Valerie Darling:

And here’s asking them what home services are coming in? Physical therapy, skilled nursing, maybe palliative. Are they currently in a rehab or hospital? And it’s yes. We’ll say yes. When is this expected discharge date? And say, 09/01/2022. We’re down here. We’re in 85%. We’re almost done. If you have the name of the hospital or rehab. Are you ready to schedule an appointment? If you say no, you go on and it’s going to ask you, what else do you need to know before you can schedule it? If you say yes, what’s the best time to contact you? Let’s just say, we’ll see. And if you can call me at 10:00 AM in the morning.

Valerie Darling:

This is another Georgia requirement. We have to know the physician and their phone number and the address. We made it optional because a lot of people don’t know it right off the bat. This is personal interests, physician, their address. That’s all optional. We do go back and fill it, complete that here. And then here’s just a little something about that client that tells us a little bit about them. So maybe they were a teacher and maybe they have grandkids, eight. Let’s say have eight grandkids. Any additional notes we use, we call. Now we have the option to add a second person. So if this is a couple living together, another person may or may not need help. So what we’ve done is they live alone. They’re another person there, but they don’t need any help. Another person and they might need a little bit of help. And we note on there that minimal help does not include ADLs.

Valerie Darling:

Making an extra sandwich, maybe driving with them to the doctor, they both have doctor appointments, stuff like that. And then if it’s full care, then we would do that. The original information about the house, the service, the contact people would all be pre populated. And then a second person queue would come up and you would fill out all their safety and needs and personal interests. And then you’d have the second. So then you could determine as an agency, do you need two care pros in there? Do you need two care plans? Can one person handle it? So you just get a lot of information on that. So let’s say they live alone. So here’s a little quick summary of everything that we’ve input.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

We do have some questions when you’re ready.

Valerie Darling:

Okay. All right. Yeah, go ahead. Before we finish, go ahead. Shoot them to me.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

All right here. Do prospects complete this totally on your website without ever talking to a live person?

Valerie Darling:

They do. So we’ve had people that go in and do inquiries. What happens is when an inquiry is done, they get an email that says, “thank you for your quote,” gives them the price, gives them the care spectrum and tells them that an agency representative will be contacting them to discuss the quote and the care needs. So we do have a lot of people, more and more, as more people are Googling at night, we get them. We actually get them from other states. We had one from North Carolina about a week ago, and earlier this week we had one from Tennessee. So people are finding it and going on. We call them and then we try to find a professional referral in their area, but yes, they do.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

All right. And yeah, I think we’ve seen some of that happen from other things that we’ve done. Yeah. People do actually fill out and if they hit save draft the same thing’s going to happen. Even if they didn’t make it all the way through. And then-

Valerie Darling:

They get an email and the agency will get a copy of that draft. We can go back in when we talk to them and we can complete it with them at that time.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

So the next question is, so this gets built into an existing website?

Valerie Darling:

Yes. It can be. It can be embedded in the website if you choose. If you’re a franchise, sometimes the franchise, they’re very protective of their brand. So we do have approval through Visiting Angels to allow it to be embedded in their franchise locations that use this. If you’re an independent, obviously you have control over your own website. Like we said, it’s a URL. You can embed that and Val, you can speak to how you did it in ours.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Well, if you go to homecarematters.com, which is where we came from when we started this quote, it’s just a link on their website at the top. It’s in the main navigation and anybody can click on it and do that. You’re probably going to get a bunch of tests now, but if you go to homecarematters.com, anybody can go to it, anybody can fill it. And it’s great because they already get, you’re going to see this in a minute, a sense of what that’s going to cost. And then the next question is, what is the cost of using this? But you might want to finish this before you go into…

Valerie Darling:

Yeah, if you don’t mind waiting, there’s several different pricing plans and I’ll give you the website and everything. You can look through it, you can do a demo there as well. So let’s submit your quote. Is there anything else, Val? Is that it?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. Do you have any experience or data regarding consumers who actually complete the 60 questions versus the agency staff? It’s probably more often the agency staff, I would guess.

Valerie Darling:

The larger percentage I would say is probably like 80- 20 right now, a typical 80-20 rule, 80% in the agency, 20%. And some of our sales people, our nurses do it when they do the reassessments. They use the reassessment tool, but by and large right now, it’s primarily agencies.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

And then the last question goes along with pricing, you might want to discuss this at the end, are you selling this by any territory protection or selling to all and any type agencies? I can come back to those when you get done with this quote here.

Valerie Darling:

Well, I mean, we can answer it. I mean, right now it’s an open market. We don’t have any proprietary relationships with any one franchise or independent, or anybody like that. So it’s a first to market opportunity, really. All right. Let’s submit the quote. So the confirmation on this quote is it’s $31. Now, remember my base rate is $27. So there were $4 of what I’m going to call accessorial care charges. So over and above what my base rate includes for personal care and companion care, that type of thing, the care rate came out to $31. This is the quote ID. That’s…

Karl Ryder:

15%.

Valerie Darling:

… About 15%. That’s a 15% increase over my base rate. And I have $31 that I sign this client up that I know I have between $15 and $16 to pay my care professional. So as soon as that was done, I’m going to have to stop sharing and go over to the email. So I can show you a couple different things if you don’t mind. Just be patient here real quick.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Well, that’s great. So if you think about your own organization while she’s pulling this up, how many of you would just have quoted the $27 right off the nail and not added in that $4 for the complexity of this case?

Valerie Darling:

Correct. All right. So can you see that, Val?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yes.

Valerie Darling:

Okay. All right. So this is a general email that comes right to the agency. What you get down at the bottom is a PDF. We’re going to open that up and let me make that larger. Okay. Can you see that okay?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yes.

Valerie Darling:

All right. So this is the PDF, so it says Home Care Matters. It’s got all my stuff on it. It’s got the quote ID, when it was created, so it’s date and times stamp. Here’s my care rate. And pardon me?

Karl Ryder:

Just verify that’s what’s on-

Valerie Darling:

Yeah. You can see that, right, Val?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yes.

Valerie Darling:

You can see the quote? Okay. All right. So here’s the pie chart. So we have almost 43% of that person’s care is in notable care. They’re in caution care. And then they don’t have really very little independent and basic care. You go back through and you’ve got this whole PDF full of all the information that that person gave us that called in. At the end, here’s the pie chart definition. So this is how you can explain to a family where their person is on that care spectrum. Hang on a second here.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

There you go. Oh, you were there.

Valerie Darling:

There you go.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

There you go.

Valerie Darling:

All right. So here, I mean almost 90%. What is that? 85% of their care is caution and notable. So when we go down here and we look at caution and notable, we’re saying that there are many conditions that require additional help. And we’re talking about the six to 12 hours, maybe 12 to 24 hours, because based on whatever it is that’s going on there. So if somebody that has dementia, that’s not the six hours or 10 hours that we’re there. That’s full 24 hours. Who’s going to be there outside of us? So it’s a combination and we want people to know that we’ll be there and we’re going to do our part, but you got some serious care issues going on. And when you go back through it and you say, well, you know what makes you say that? They had more than six falls. They were in the hospital a couple times. They had injuries and other things that went on, you can explain it. And once they see it and they and they have, it’s much easier for them to comprehend and consume that.

Valerie Darling:

And you’re educating them because before they called, they didn’t know what they needed, and they didn’t even know how much it costs. Now they have a lot more information. They’re more well armed, and yes, they may shock you. But when somebody calls and says, well, I just got a price down the street that’s $3 less. What do you do that they don’t do? And I say, well, did they give you a quote like this? Is it spelled out? And what’s the most important thing to you? Is it the price or the value or that your loved one’s going to get the care? Because we’ve just put you through pretty much a base assessment right here. We know what our care professional needs to be skilled and equipped with, we know how much it’s going to cost, and we’re going to be there at minimum of every 90 days to take care of it. It’s pretty powerful, really. All right, let’s stop this share. And I’m going to show you what the client gets. Okay, what the person completing the screen gets, or the quote. I can’t make that bigger. Can you see that, Val?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yep. It looks fine. You can…

Valerie Darling:

Yeah. I just stopped it. Hang on just one second. I got to go back to it. Okay. Here it is. So this is what the client gets. As soon as we hit that submit the quote, the agency got the quote, and this message went to the person that helped us do it, tells them thank you for doing that. Here’s the pie chart. Here’s their level of care based on the pie chart, the estimated hourly rate, the quote ID. And it says that somebody from the agency will be calling them and we always say nothing is confirmed until we come out to see you and we do the assessment. But this gives them a pretty good bulk of information, doesn’t give them the PDF. That PDF is yours to share with them as you choose, maybe you having a living room visit. Maybe you need to discuss more because they’re not quite sure what, what all the differences in the pie chart are. So the PDF is basically up to you. You can make it in person, or you can share it with them via email. All right. So let’s go back to…

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

That’s a great selling tool.

Valerie Darling:

Yes.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Nobody else is going to hand somebody something like this. We do have a couple questions when you’re ready.

Valerie Darling:

Okay. Hang on. Let me get back over here. What I’m going to do is pull up the home care quote. Okay. I’m sorry. Go ahead. What are some other questions?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Let’s see. Who determines the rate? Does the agency have a say in what goes in the algorithm? Absolutely.

Valerie Darling:

Yeah. Let me put up the pricing plans here for you. So you can be looking at those.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah.

Valerie Darling:

So here’s the pricing plans. All right. So when you subscribe to a pricing plan, what you do is you subscribe to the one you want, you join, and then you’ll be taken to a screen that says create your member profile.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Valerie, we can’t see the screen. We can only see the PowerPoint. Sorry.

Valerie Darling:

No, no, no. I’m glad. I’m glad. Here, hang on a second. Let me do the screen share.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

All this technology stuff.

Valerie Darling:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s switching the screens that’s a pain.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Now we’re still seeing the PowerPoint, just so you know.

Valerie Darling:

Okay. Let me see. Why can’t I get that up?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

There you go.

Valerie Darling:

Okay. There you go.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Look at that beautiful website.

Valerie Darling:

Yeah. And another beautiful website by, I don’t know who did that. Who did that? So when you go through the member registration, it will ask you your company name, you’ll upload your logo, your address, your website information, all your staff members, your locations, what your pricing is. So if you have a base rate, you put that base rate in. If you have a higher base rate for say, it’s a weekday and you have a higher base rate for nights, then you put a factor in. So it maybe it’s 10% higher. What is that? So 1.1, your factor is. If you have a holiday rate, take your base rate and the factor is 1.5 time and a half. So you choose what you want those rates to be, and what you want your base rate to be.

Valerie Darling:

And then everything else is based on what you tell it to do. You can change that at any point in time. It’s a live change. If you decide that you’re going to have you subscribe today, and next week, you’re going to have a price increase to your base rate. You go into your login and your member registration, and you change your base rate. And then everything else changes accordingly. If you change a staff member, if you add people or take people away, you can go in the day that it happens and you can eliminate that email and add a new email. You can decide who gets the copies of the quotes in your agency. So who’s going to be following up with them? And you can use it as a sales follow up tool. You can use it when somebody does it, if we get them done at night, like came in this morning, we had two actually.

Valerie Darling:

First thing we do is call the client and go through, say, “we got your inquiry. What can we do?” We go through it. We share the information with them. And, and then we go from there, but it’s meant to be a consultative tool. And that’s why we don’t give them everything up front, because we want you to call them. And we want you to show how different your agency is and how professional it is, and the types of things that we’re doing to try and keep home care, if you will. I know I’ve said this before, some people have heard it, is over the last two years, home care really got a seat at the grownups table, if you will.

Valerie Darling:

Doctors didn’t even know the difference between home care and home health and probably some still don’t. But we are there and now we have to bring a different level of professionalism and a different kind of effort to that game. And so as much referrals as we get, we can give back now as well. And we can start to establish our industry in a whole different light, at a whole different level of professionalism that’s not been there before with that, with the kind of people that we have in our industry that are full of compassion and want to do a good job. This is a great tool to do that.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

When I look at this, I’m like, I know me and if I own a home care agency, I’d be in for the $99 for three months and get my unlimited monthly quotes and my training and technical support to take care of.

Valerie Darling:

Yeah.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

That would be me.

Valerie Darling:

Well, that’s what we recommend. We recommend you start at the $99 so that you can get your processes in place, you can train your staff, you can get used to using it on the toolbar. And then when you get more comfortable with it, you can add it to your website. So the three months are up and you finish the $99, you’ve made it a part of your business decisions to operate. Anybody who calls your office, your staff puts them through the quote. So now you have a consistency. You have a very consistent professional message. You have a process that there’s probably nobody else doing it like that. So you take that and then you say, “okay, well, I can do it. Now that I’m ready, I’m good at this.” And you decide, do you want all the analytics that goes with it? So with the analytics, you can slice and dice. You get a CRM, you can slice and dice how you want your data. What’s your most profitable zip code? What’s the average age of your clients? Who do we take care of?

Valerie Darling:

Well, it’s men or female. What’s our top three, top five diagnosis in our market? So now, if you know what those top five are, instead of doing a shotgun approach to training, what about if you took it and you say, “our top five are dementia and stroke,” and you start taking your care staff and you start focusing your training on getting them skilled in the types of cases that you’re getting, those higher acuity cases. The higher the acuity, the higher the price of the service and the higher pay that you’re going to be able to pay. So the $99 is there to help you get through and make sure that you have your business processes in place, and that your staff is on board and you do the training, and then you migrate up. If you feel like you’re already there, you have some pretty good systems in place, you can start at the $399. You don’t have to progress from one to the next. You can start wherever you want.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

We have a couple more questions. And I would say this is what stuck with me is that in your agency and anybody who’s been around a while, or you have different people that answer the phone and it’s okay, because you want to answer the phone. So you have different people answering the phone, different people taking phone calls. Now everybody’s on the same page. You’re not giving out three different prices. You might have quoted one thing but it’s a friend of a friend of a friend and this person’s going to quote a different hourly rate. Everybody is on the same page. The hourly rate is based on the assessment over the phone. And it’s the same one. It doesn’t matter who takes the call, it’s always going to be the right rate for that person. I think that’s huge. And so we have a few questions.

Valerie Darling:

Okay.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Can all the various fields be customized? Can there be calls to action, like discounts or freebies?

Valerie Darling:

[inaudible 00:48:18].

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Like, “sign up today and get 10% off your first eight hours,” or something. I guess you could put that in an email if you wanted that.

Valerie Darling:

Oh, you mean for a client that subscribes to this service or to home care?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

If your person is on the phone with a customer potentially.

Valerie Darling:

Oh, oh, okay. Okay. And they want a discount?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

And then the email gets shot out. Or if they’re online doing this themselves and the email gets shot out, I don’t think that the stuff is going to change on the screen, but in the email might say something like, “sign up now for 10% off for your first eight hours,” or something like that. Can that be added in?

Valerie Darling:

You can. There are some fields that have some accessorial or some differentiators in there. I don’t really like discounting prices simply because I think that once you start negotiating everything, that leaves everything on the table. And if people think they can negotiate price, they can negotiate care and hours and who they want, that kind of thing. So we don’t negotiate and I don’t discount the price. If you wanted to take the most price, you could customize your note to them and say, “here’s the price that it came out to, and your first four hours are free,” or whatever you wanted to say. There are certain things that are customizable, the hard coding. It is the hard coding. And it’s the benefit that the larger portion of the audience instead of a lot of one offs.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Right. Got it. And that’s perfectly okay. I think that’s good. All right. Are we able to list a price range instead of a single rate of $31 per hour? Could it be, for example, $29 to $31 per hour?

Valerie Darling:

No.

Karl Ryder:

No.

Valerie Darling:

Not with the tool the way it is right now.

Karl Ryder:

No.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Okay.

Karl Ryder:

You can have that narrative when you talk to the client and during your follow up in the selling process. But no, the system’s integrity produces the rate based upon the inputs.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. Got it. Can there be multiple users if an agency has three intake coordinators, can they all access?

Valerie Darling:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Karl Ryder:

[inaudible 00:50:43] unlimited.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yep. Got lots of questions here. Is the $99 quote, I mean, I guess they’re talking about what’s on the screen here, only valid for three months? The pricing, well, it goes up to $299 after three months if you decide to stay.

Karl Ryder:

Okay.

Valerie Darling:

$299 or $399, you choose.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. If you don’t want to continue, you don’t have to. But if you decide to stay, you’re going to want to use this tier advantage and yeah it grows up. But this is to get you started and to make sure you like it.

Karl Ryder:

And the way to think about the finances on this valve is that, as I said earlier, we’re seeing a 10% to 15% increase over base rate. So if you’re an agency at a $100,000,000, you’re looking at a $100,000 to $150,000 improvement in your pricing to market. And the cost on an annualized basis would be less than 5% of that. So you’re really retaining 95% of the improvement and only really using 5% or less to fund it based on whichever subscription you slip.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah, absolutely.

Karl Ryder:

And there’s very, very, very few things out there that you plug in, you immediately get an ROI like this.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yep. Okay. Are you willing to tell us if you have sold this to any of the leading franchises? If selling this to anyone until other competitors sign up for this, we could say that this is our differentiator until it’s not. I have some opinions about that. But yeah, you’ve had a few Visiting Angels that use it, right?

Karl Ryder:

We have, yes.

Valerie Darling:

We have several Visiting Angel locations. I think Visiting Angels right now is the number one subscriber. They’re not through corporate, they’re individual franchises.

Karl Ryder:

But we have-

Valerie Darling:

And we have several independence.

Karl Ryder:

But we have a lot and we do a lot of demos. We did a demo for another franchise last week that came across the [inaudible 00:52:44] report on the technology.

Valerie Darling:

Oh, good.

Karl Ryder:

Accolades that were received by the industry. So yeah, they’re coming at us. And obviously when we do that, it’s an open market right now, typically a franchise as Val said earlier, we have to go through the protocol. They’re controlling the brand on their websites, but they gave us the green light on that. And we anticipate getting that. That Largely was driven by conversations that we had with corporate, but really the user group that was advocating they’d be able to put on their website.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. I would say that too, in 15 years of online marketing and doing things that we’ve done is that we’ve never done it territorially. We do limit maybe a few things, but getting in now is really what’s going to help grow your business and help increase that revenue. Don’t worry about what everybody else is doing.

Karl Ryder:

Well, we-

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

It takes a while, we got a long way to go before everybody’s using this.

Karl Ryder:

And we’re continuing to make edits too. We just did another version release yesterday that we take feedback from our user group plus we have vision of what the tool needs to be able to accomplish. And just to give you an example, we have several users that have multi franchises and multi locations. And now we’ve enabled on the $399 version for you to be able to look over top of all your locations.

Valerie Darling:

Individually or [inaudible 00:54:20].

Karl Ryder:

And that means that a corporate, a franchise, or could be looking at this at a corporate level, if that was the way they decided to go as well.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. I mean, there’s several clients that we have that just have multiple offices across the state. And the pricing’s going to be different for a super rural area than it is going to be for Dallas proper or-

Karl Ryder:

The algorithms just for markets to that point about-

Valerie Darling:

Well, and that’s exactly what I have. I have a Atlanta Metro office, which is my Flowery Branch suburb of Atlanta. I also have another location that’s down south that’s in a more rural [inaudible 00:54:59] Georgia area. And our base rate is about $3 difference. So I subscribe to two separate ones so my team down there can use it for the clients that are there. And we use it up here for us but it’s two different base prices based on location, two different marketplaces.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Next question is, are you sending the recording? Yes, absolutely, Rebecca. We are recording this and I’m going to send it out to everybody. Next question is, since the quote is dependent on the initial information provided, how do you recommend adjusting a quote if after the assessment, it is determined that the client requires a higher level of care? Perhaps they forgot to include some information when filling out the form.

Valerie Darling:

So that was when you would take that initial quote and then you would do a reassessment quote. You would plug in the original quote ID number that we had. And it would populate the general intake and then everything that’s different, you plug it in. And then when you finish and you review it, the quote will tell you here’s where you were, here’s where you are, and tracks the differences for you. So you can go back to the client, you can say, “based on the actual onsite assessment, here’s what we found and here’s your new price.” It could be up, it could be down, but that’s what it does.

Valerie Darling:

And then that initial quote is your parent quote for the life of that client. So through the life, they may be companion care now, and you keep them for two or three years, but they have some diagnoses that send them on a downward spiral. So, as often as you do a new quote, you put the old quote in and you put the new parameters in and for the life of your client and you can track it. You’ll know exactly what it is. So you have the base quote and that’s the parent. And then all the siblings that come afterwards, if you will.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. And that’s nice because I mean, let’s face it. Most of your clients are not going to get better over the years or going to require more care over the years. So your pricing will adjust based and it won’t stay $27 an hour for the next three years. It’s actually going to adjust because you’re doing reassessments and all that. And I liked what you said about the life event, so a fall, a hospitalization, a new diagnosis, a medication change, something like that.

Valerie Darling:

Correct.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

New assessment, new set of numbers.

Valerie Darling:

Correct.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Next question is, are your intake people not giving any price over the phone and requiring any prospect to either complete the intake process or has intake person completed before rendering any price offer? This seems like it might stall things if you have a customer with an immediate need. Because it’s a long conversation or…?

Valerie Darling:

Well, I mean, typically the conversations are pretty lengthy. So when somebody calls in to my office and says, “I have my mom, she’s in the hospital, she’s going to be coming home. I like to talk to you about what services you offer.” And one of the next things we say is, “all right, tell us a little bit about your mom. What we have is we have a system, we put everybody through, we get a pretty good idea of where she is on the care spectrum, what your pricing will be. And that can change up or down. Do you have about 10 to 15 minutes? Do you know to go through it?” And as we’re talking, because once you get them talking and you’re leading them through this conversation, so say they didn’t even know you were putting them through a quote.

Valerie Darling:

You could just say, “okay, what’s your name and your email? What’s your mom’s name?” Or whatever, and her birthday and you just start going through it. And the more detail you get on the front end, the better. If they didn’t have time, which we’ve had. We had, “oh, I’m in the carpool line. And I really don’t have time right now can I call you back?” We say, “you can call us back. We’re happy to go through it. You can go to our website, we could do it yourself. And we’ll call you after you complete it.” We have several people that do that.

Valerie Darling:

And I guess if push comes to shove and somebody says, “well, all I really want to know is what your price is.” You probably pretty much know that’s pretty much all they care about. And you say, “well, we don’t have any services that start less than whatever your base rate is, goes up from there.” And that’s probably about the easiest way that you could do that. We prefer not to because we think that the tool and the whole process should be consultative. We should be educating people, we should be helping them understand what’s involved and all the things that we can do to help them.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. Hnestly, I can say, again, from the lead generation perspective, when somebody calls in, I have been able to see over the years, how long do those calls take. And I can guarantee you, there is no less than 20 minutes on the phone, up 20 minutes to an hour is usually the length of time that a real lead is going to take on the phone with one person in your office. So just going through this assessment is no longer than that.

Valerie Darling:

And it’s a good way to start. Once you go through, you have a base assessment, our nurse takes the base assessment from this quote and then goes out and confirms or adds to, and make sure that we know if they’re diabetic. How are they being treated diabetic with their IVs or medicine or diet? So there’s a lot of things that now we can provide additional education and we can help them with additional resources if they don’t know where to go or what they should have at home.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Sure. So I have one last question. If anybody else has a question now would be the time to enter it in. Oh, I have two questions. I’m a Visiting Angels franchisee and I’m interested, do I reach out to corporate first for approval or to you directly?

Valerie Darling:

The only thing you need from corporate is to be able to put it on the website. If you want to use it yourself, you can call us. We have some Visiting Angels that we’d be happy for you to talk to, but you can call us, Rick, and we can talk about what your thinking is and maybe help you on a more personal level about what would be best for your location.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. Well, if you go to homecarequote.com, by the way, yeah, you can go to get a live demo. You can go to the bottom of the screen, there’s a phone number at the bottom of the website. We’re going to place it at the top of the website later today, but you can see their phone number and their email at the bottom there, and you can call and talk to them directly, or you can sign up for a demo, which is just filling out a form basically. And then go from there. I got one more question.

Valerie Darling:

Okay.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah, click on get a live demo, which is what you just did. Yeah. There’s a form there you can fill out, it doesn’t have Valerie’s information in it when you do it. So you can fill out that form and it’ll go straight to Valerie and Karl. Okay. So I think one of the things that the software also requires that everybody has a bit of a change in mindset here. And so the question is, I like it, but it seems heavily dependent on the intake algorithm. What if an on call staff is on the road, a call comes in, can’t quote until the 60 questions are done? Do you ever lose a prospect because they want price now and not willing to spend the time? And I think you’ve kind of already answered this, but that’s the last question I have.

Valerie Darling:

Yeah. We have not had that as a problem. We given the option that say marketing person might be on the road or walking into appointment and just call them back, can redirect them to the office or can have the office reach out to them, or then give them the website directly. It is heavily involved because you want the detail. We want to know how much care is needed and it involves so we can price it. And we haven’t had anybody who has, because they couldn’t get the price right then, not allow us to contact them through another time or another person at the time. Our marketing agent or rep gets calls from all different people.

Valerie Darling:

And she’s busy and says on her voicemail, “I’m not available right now. Please contact the office if your need is urgent.” So, we just haven’t had that as an issue. And I’m sure you could come up with some kind of solution. I don’t think it’s a deal breaker as far as using the tool and having people. At the end of the day, if somebody says, “well, I just need a price.” You say, well, we start at whatever your base rate is. And we go up from there and we can give you exactly what that cost is when we have a few minutes to go through the tool.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Absolutely. You have a standard answer for that but you need more information to be able to give them an accurate.

Valerie Darling:

Exactly. Exactly.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

I think that seems a fair answer. If you’re in a hurry, I can give you what I can give you, but let’s get together and talk about-

Valerie Darling:

Exactly. Again, it goes back to the consultative side of it and I get people are busy and they just want to know, and they want to know what they know. So if push comes to shove, that’s the answer. And then hopefully follow back up with them and then get more detailed information from them.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Well, Valerie and Karl, you guys did a fabulous job for this webinar. And I think you answered every question so nicely. Any parting words that you would like to give everybody? And then we’ll call it a day, you did a great job.

Valerie Darling:

Thank you. Thank you. No, I really hope that it was informative and that people got a good feel of it. I think it’s a really differentiator in the market and you just need to decide how you want to run your business and define it. Maybe take it to the next level or you’ve got a good level and just increase that value that you bring to your communities and your clients.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. I say-

Valerie Darling:

Hope that we hear from you.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. Read through the Home Care Quote website, go there, look at all the pages, read the information there and get some better ideas of how things are working, read the testimonials. And I think you’ll sign up for that free demo or the $99 and find out what impact it could make on your business and on the pay that you’re able to offer those care professionals. I think that is something that we need to focus on a lot. Everybody wishes they could pay more and here’s the way you could do that, quote accurately.

Valerie Darling:

Correct. Well, good. Well, thank you everybody. We appreciate it. And if anybody has any questions after this, you have our email and phone numbers. Excuse me. We’re more than happy to schedule a time to do a demo or answer any questions.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

All right. Great. Thanks everybody.

Valerie Darling:

That was great. Thanks, Val.

Karl Ryder:

Have a great day.