Hand crafted perspective and direction for senior living communities and programs. Customizing proven strategies and tactics from almost 30 years of experience with over 360 providers for your team, communities, programs, and customers …that’s what we do!
Creation and Reinvention from the bottom up
Mission Governance:
Many opportunities and challenges require board education, guidance, and strategic considerations. Active service as a director on the board of a not-for-profit Life Plan Community and Continuing Care at Home program adds insights to decades of consulting experience. The board, management, team, customers, and other constituents all want to feel like they are working together and clearly understand why we do what we do…and why we should do something new. Change often benefits from an external hand to help move it forward.
New community and program models:
New Communities and Programs: Adding communities, large expansions, and new live at home programs are a team effort. Longevity Markets is an experienced partner to help ensure the right people are at your table, that the team knows where it is going, how it will get there, so they can envision how the new world should look when they arrive. Too many communities and programs start with structural issues or conflicts with existing business lines. The Hippocratic oath is good to consider in strategic planning, first do no harm.
Early Acceptance and Early Advantage Programs: Communities with deep wait lists and excess healthcare capacity are pre-selling and pre-qualifying wait list members to protect and hold them close during their wait for their residences. Nursing, assisted living, and memory care are and will continue to experience lower utilization. In house home care business are a first step AND innovative communities are connecting and serving internal and external needs and increasing demand for their residential offerings.
Care Coordination: Continuing Care at Home in community: More and more Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs), Village to Village Networks, and Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) are building care coordination into their offerings. Helping people stay connected and stay safely in the place they call home provides a good return to mission and margin.
Revenue never goes out of style
Maximize Pricing:
Pricing Studies: Occupancy history, wait list depth, market demographics, competitive review, and actuarial studies all provide direction on tactics to increase occupancy, margins, and revenue. Decades of growth and expansions often required special attention to and adjustments to existing pricing to ensure the success of the next expansion. In other scenarios internal competition is the cause for pockets of stubborn vacancies. Longevity Markets helps upfit your pricing so that it makes sense to your customers, team, short term results, and long-term goals.
New Agreements/Contracts projects: Many communities search for ways to minimize the encumbrance of refundable agreements. Other communities are adding options to provide something new between an “A” and a “C” contract while some are contemplating adding homecare as part of their Modified or LifeCare agreements to match customer behavior and desires. The newest opportunities connect Continuing Care at Home agreements for the health-related services while the Life Plan Community agreements provide all the residential and hospitality services. Win! Win!
Maximize Selling:
Sales plan and team: Maximize selling focus, activities, and time. Review, adjust, and recommend improvements for team structure, compensation plans, and performance.
Sales Coaching: New additions to your sales team and proven contributors get better and produce more with sales coaching to grow your team, build good habits, hone focus, and build creative responses to common customer concerns and objections.
Customer Incentives: Marketing budgets are tight but small investments have outsized benefits to sales and occupancy. COVID and market volatility are just the latest calls to action for these tactics. Change is the only constant and customers’ perception of that change may merit adding motivation in a way that is sustainable.
Maximize Marketing:
Marketing and Sales Leadership: Finding the right sales and marketing team is easier with almost 30 years of relationships and connections to speed things along. Longevity Markets has served dozens of communities to bridge them to their new sales and marketing leaders.
Marketing Plan and Partner Review: Marketing tactics are changing rapidly and what worked well just a few years ago may not merit the same budget allocation anymore. Creative firms are key partners, but they are changing, consolidating, and reengineering their offerings rapidly too. Longevity Markets helps you and your team choose, structure, and review these partners and investments.
Covenant Violations: Volatile markets often create bond or loan covenant violations. Many times, these occur in strong organizations that are expanding. In other scenarios these violations are a sign of significant issues. Longevity Markets has worked on dozens of these reviews and action plans to correct and recover sales velocity, occupancy, and revenue.
Research can be so much more
Demographic Market Studies: Historically, “market studies” are based on census data, an inaccurate source of data for many markets. Recent market demand studies for a LifePlan Community and a Continuing care at Home Program sourced alternate data that showed four times more demand than the census data. Several of Longevity Markets clients are weighing the non-census data more and more heavily to plot their growth opportunities.
Extremely loyal affinity groups, such as Jewish, Catholic, and military sponsored communities, merit unique study approaches in addition to a general demographic perspective. Hand crafted market studies fit your market, history, and affinity.
Consumer Research: Once your new concept is defined and vetted, test it with small groups in your marketplace. These shaped conversations combine customer feedback that refines your new offering with a search for passionate advocates who become your first customers. New continuing care at home programs are often first movers in their markets so these gatherings help educate customers, hone the offerings, and prime growth.
You never really know until you try… with customers… so we work with you to find ways to try with customers sooner!