Miriam Allred (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with everyone today. Today in the lab, I'm joined by the lovely Debbie Miller, who is the CEO of Senior Helpers in Franklin, Tennessee, and also the founder and CEO of 52 Weeks Marketing. Debbie, thanks for being here today.
Debbie Miller (00:22.2)
Thank you, Miriam. It's so good to be with you.
Miriam Allred (00:25.3)
You and I have spent a lot of time together, but it's been a couple of months and you are busy and thriving and running several businesses. And so I thought we've got to catch up and hear about kind of the latest and greatest for your businesses. So before we jump into the topic, some, some listeners may not know you as well as others. So I love to have you share your background about what you were up to pre-home care and then starting your own home care business.
and then the following businesses that have kind stemmed off of your own experience. So let's start there.
Debbie Miller (00:59.8)
Sure, well thanks very much for having me. am always...
I love getting together and having a chat with you and certainly sharing some experiences that I've had in home care. Prior to home care, and first and foremost, I am an agency owner, started Senior Helpers in 2008, started from scratch. I think we opened the doors with 10 caregivers and we now have almost 500 caregivers. But before that, I worked as a product director for a big pharmaceutical company. So worked in big pharma.
supported, gosh, hundreds of reps across the country. I worked on huge brand launches like Celebrex, of you are probably aware of, lines of home women's health care and arthritis medications. So what was awesome about that experience though is I really learned about how to target and how important targeting is and reach and frequency. So reaching the right people, seeing them often enough and
influencing them in a way that kept our phone ringing, right? In that case it was for our drug being prescribed in the home care space, it's our phone ringing for our services. So I was able to apply a lot of that experience to the home care business. When I started I was out there pounding the pavement like many of you myself for the first two years before I hired my first marketer. But during that time I was able to create the 52
52 weeks methodology and system and to this day we use it, my team uses it and now many many other home care owners across the country are using 52 weeks as well. So it's been quite a journey and as you said I've been able to parlay a lot of that experience from my home care agency into businesses like 52 weeks and we'll talk a little bit about Helper Heroes as well which is our latest endeavor, very exciting.
because as we are supporting agency owners across the country, we start to see what their pain points are, the same pain points as we've had. So as I've resolved some of these issues, then we're able to bring new solutions to folks out there experiencing the same kinds of things.
Miriam Allred (03:24.3)
You and I are always drawn to each other because we're both educators. You and I both take a very education first approach and you are just incredible at sharing firsthand experience, the good, the bad, the ugly of your own business with other owners, which I think is so powerful. And traditionally, I think most of the times that I've interviewed you or we talk, we're talking about the boots on the ground sales. That is your bread and butter. You've done it yourself. You've trained your team. You're helping hundreds of other home care businesses implement that methodology.
But today we're going to shift gears a little bit. You yourself have introduced virtual assistants, VAs, to your home care business over the last year or so. And I'm fascinated by that. I see a lot of companies kind of tinkering. I see a lot of VA companies coming on the scene. It's kind of up and coming right now. And you told me that you currently have seven virtual assistants in your own office. And I thought, let's dig into that. I want to hear the good, the bad, the ugly of implementing this inside of your own
business. So that's what we're going to focus on again, which is kind of a different topic for you, but also very top of mind and very relevant. So let's get into it. I want to just start by setting the stage and share with everyone how many office staff you have without the VA's and then about how many weekly billable hours your home care business is doing.
Debbie Miller (04:44.3)
Right. And I will correct you on something, Miriam. I've been using offshore workers or virtual assistants for about three years now. So I've had a lot of experience, the good, the bad and the ugly, which we'll talk about. So just wanted to correct that. But I am billing about 8,000 hours a week.
Currently, have about 25 full time employees in our office to part time and then seven virtual assistants. we've gosh, you know, bolstering our infrastructure at a much reduced rate has been such an incredible opportunity where we've been able to take so much of the weight off some of the shoulders of our of our staff with on call, which will talk through. But it's been, it's been where we are now is we're in a very good place. We're in a very stable place. But it was a little bit of a walk rocky road to get there. So I'll share some of the things that we've learned for sure along the way.
Miriam Allred (05:52.4)
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about three years ago, what was the initial thinking? Were you exposed to VAs via some other business or some other industry or did someone on the team say, hey, we should try this? What was the initial starting point for you all looking into VAs?
Debbie Miller (06:12.0)
I actually, I think we got cold called.
by an agency that did the staffing for virtual assistants. And I just, I loved the concept because of the cost savings more than anything, but also at that time, which was just after COVID, we had a very hard time getting a solid team and that actually wanted to work in the office because we had so many people that kind of got used to
working from home and when you want really we started to reel people back in it was really hard we had a lot of turnover in our operational staff and it caused a lot of issues of course you know it's really hard to when you don't have a consistent staff your clients are upset your service goes down caregivers aren't happy you know the recruiting was a whole other situation which the VA's really helped us with that as well. anyway, so my main issue was the wage inflation that we were dealing with.
every time we lost somebody when we went to rehire, they're wanting five, seven, ten thousand dollars more a year, just in a matter of months. So it just became so unaffordable to really build the infrastructure that we needed for our size. So we needed to do something and so started working with the first agency and we had, know, there's as much training that goes into on
Debbie Miller (07:54.6)
onboarding a virtual assistant as it does if you're hiring somebody in your office. So we would invest all of this training and then we were seeing as much turnover with our virtual assistants as we did in the office, which was really frustrating and it defeated the purpose, which was why we offshored in the first place. So we had to really resolve that. and so we had, again, just a lot of ups and downs. We, invest all this time. We would fall in love with this person. They become, you know, really part of the team. And the next thing you know, they've got another opportunity.
And so when I really got to the bottom of what was going on with the agencies and then we started working with some other agencies, that particular one that we started with was sourcing talent from Columbia. And then we started working with folks that were sourcing from Africa. And we've also worked with people that are sourcing from India. And so we kind of ran into the same kinds of issues.
with a lot of turnover. We had some issues with people not very happy with accents, that kind of thing, because it's an adjustment, right, for people to...
in this space in particular, where we're just, it's not a common thing, it's getting more common obviously, but it wasn't a common thing to have somebody that wasn't there in the office answering the phone and dealing with issues and things like that. So those were some of the things that we were dealing with.
Miriam Allred (09:36.1)
Okay, a lot to unpack here. And I love how honest and upfront you're being because we're going to talk about language and country and culture. Like those are huge factors in this equation. And so we're going to talk a lot about each of those. Let's talk about your seven VAs. I want to actually start here because I'm so curious exactly what each of them do. But first, just answer like who, what was your first VA?
hired to do? Was it scheduling, billing, after hours on call? What was your first VA hire and what were they doing?
Debbie Miller (10:10.96)
We actually hired, we hired two right out of the gate recruiters.
And why we did that was because it was, and by the way, before we hired the two VAs, we had four people working in HR. So we streamlined our whole process and worked with, we implemented an engagement platform that had less human touch points using technology, which streamlined the whole process to begin with. So there was a combination of
technology as well as offshore workers. So what we did is and as a result, we were able to go from four full time people to two virtual assistants. So you can imagine the significant savings, wage savings there. But also what happened was when you have folks that are just focused on these tasks, not being pulled into these other areas, putting out a fire over
here or that, but they're where they are, they're working from where they are and they are just solely focused on interviews. would, we do back to back, every 15 minutes we're doing interviews and they're able to do that because the minute they start, they get on the phone, they hit the phone and it's a go versus when your staff comes in, they talk to somebody, they get a coffee, they do this, they, you know, then there's some sort of fire over here and everybody starts
brainstorming on how to fix this and then what happens two hours go by and we haven't been recruiting. So that completely changed where we now are using a technology we start interacting with applicants and then this whole calendar is filled up and somebody's got to be managing those and so we have two people that are just doing that and so that that went well the accent was a problem.
Debbie Miller (12:14.9)
We live in Tennessee. We have a lot of southern folks and they really struggled with understanding that at that time our recruiters were Colombians with very heavy Spanish accents. And so what we did is we over time we moved to sourcing from the Philippines and the accents of the folks not only that they were
they were able to really problem solve. The task of a recruiter is a real sales position. Now you're selling them into your company. You're trying to recruit them. They may be working for several other agencies. So it's sales position. And the Filipinos, they were a little bit more strategic. They could kind of read between the lines because they're very Americanized.
TV, they know our idioms, were able to think on their feet. And I would say they're literally like, they think like we do.
That's my only way of trying to articulate it. Where other cultures are very different. They maybe wouldn't push the envelope a little bit like Americans will. Like, well, you know, we'll kind of not be pushy, but take it to the next step. Like, you know, try to really lure them into, no, hey, you sound like the perfect candidate for our organization and be able to do that versus just reading a script.
