Hand crafted consulting for senior living communities and programs. Customizing proven tactics and strategies from over 20 years of experience with over 360 providers to fit your team, communities, and programs…that’s what we do!
Research can be so much more
Demographic Market Studies: Historically, “market studies” are driven by census data, a significantly inaccurate source of data in many markets. Recent market demand studies for a LifePlan Community and a Continuing care at Home Program sourced alternate data sources with 3-7 times more age and income qualified households than the census data. Several of Longevity Markets for-profit clients are weighting the non-census data more and more heavily to plot their growth opportunities.
Extremely loyal affinity groups, such as Jewish and Catholic sponsored communities, merit a unique study in addition to the general demographic perspective. Hand crafted consulting tunes your market study to 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 introducing the concept of the program to the market for the first time so these gatherings educate the market, hone the program offerings, and prime the first-year membership growth.
Revenue never goes out of style
Maximize Marketing:
Marketing and Sales Leadership: Finding interim and new leadership for sales and marketing is easier with over 20 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 is 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 investments and partners.
Covenant Violations: Volatile markets often create bond or loan covenant violations. Many times, these occur in strong organizations … 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.
Maximize Pricing:
Pricing Studies: Occupancy history, wait list depth, market demographics, competitive review, and actuarial studies all contribute to ways to increase occupancy, margins, and revenue. Decades of growth and expansions often required special pricing to ensure the success of an expansion or to correct a pocket of stubborn vacancies… Longevity Markets helps reset your pricing so that it makes sense to your customers, your short term results, and long term goals.
New Agreements/Contracts projects: Many communities search for ways to minimize the refund liability of 90% refundable agreements. Other communities are 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 services while the Life Plan Community agreements focuses on the residences. Win Win!
Maximize Selling:
Sales plan and team: Maximize selling focus, activities, and time. Review, adjust, and recommend improvements to team structure, compensation, performance.
Sales Coaching: New additions to your sales team and proven contributors get better and produce more with short term sales coaching to 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.
Reinvention from the bottom up
Mission Governance:
Many projects involve 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.
New community and program models:
New: Adding communities, large expansions, and new 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 and how it will get there, and how the new world should work when it arrives. Too many communities and programs start with structural issues or unseen conflicts with existing business lines or internal competitive offerings. We employ the Hippocratic oath in our 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 them during their wait for their residences. Stand alone as well as continuum elements for nursing, assisted living and memory care are experiencing lower utilization. In house home care business are a first step but innovative communities connect and serve that rising internal and external demand rising demand in 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 longer provides a good return to mission and margin.
Has anyone asked this question?
New unique questions offer some of our most rewarding conversations. At Longevity Markets we relish stimulating conversations, and learning more about organizations’ biggest questions? We are happy to refer old and new friends to other advisors with specific experience or talents. At times, even an exhaustive search does not produce a group with the right experience to draw on. We wade into these gaps and work with our partners to gather data, test theories, and find answers to inform the best path forward.