Miriam Allred (00:01)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's so good to be back in all of your ear listening to this. I hope you are having a great week. Today in the lab, I am joined by Olivia Jones, the Executive Vice President of CareAdvantage. Olivia, welcome to the lab.
Olivia Jones (00:21)
Hi, Miriam. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It's my pleasure to be here.
Miriam Allred (00:25)
It's my pleasure. It is so good to see you. I was just telling you before we jumped on, I interviewed you almost six years ago on my first show, many, many years ago, and you and I have both come such a long way. So it feels like long overdue to have you back. So thank you for being here.
Olivia Jones (00:42)
Absolutely, absolutely my pleasure.
Miriam Allred (00:44)
For those that don't know you, let's start with a brief introduction of yourself and then we'll talk a little bit about CareAdvantage as well. talk about yourself, your background and your story.
Olivia Jones (00:52)
Okay. Yeah, sure. So I grew up in home care. I've been with CareAdvantage for 28 years. I know, hard to believe. I started when I was five. ⁓
Throughout my time here, I've worked in just about every capacity you can imagine. Care coordinator, recruiter, ⁓ I've managed individual locations. And the only thing I haven't done is be a nurse, but I think I could play one on TV at this point because I've been around them long enough. ⁓ yeah, it's been an amazing journey doing this work worth doing here at CareAdvantage.
Miriam Allred (01:23)
Yeah. 28 years, we should be talking about what they've done to keep you for so long because we talk about retention all of the time, including at your executive level. They're clearly doing something right to keep you for so long.
Olivia Jones (01:44)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. You know, it's a ⁓ culture. I know people say it all the time, but it really is a family culture. You know, the poster behind me, your family is our family and the people that I work with. So many have been here right alongside of me for all that time as well. So, been a fun ride.
Miriam Allred (02:05)
That's so precious. For those that are just listening to this, Olivia has a poster of her two sons, both football players behind her with kind of the CareAdvantage logo and their logos all painted together. I just love that imagery. Let's talk a little bit about CareAdvantage. Where's the headquarters and about how many states are you guys in and about how many locations total?
Olivia Jones (02:28)
⁓ So we are headquartered out of Richmond, Virginia in the downtown area. We have 28 locations across our footprint and we cover five states as well as DC. So that's Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Delaware, Maryland and DC. Not a franchise.
Miriam Allred (02:50)
and not a franchise, it's a different structure. What do you call it in your own words?
Olivia Jones (02:56)
⁓ So I still consider us to be privately owned ⁓ with a sponsor.
Miriam Allred (03:03)
Okay, great. In five states, lots of locations, huge footprint. What is ⁓ the payer mix? Are you guys heavily private pay or government payers?
Olivia Jones (03:15)
We are, the mix has shifted as we've acquired new brands into our company. So we're about 80 % Medicaid and the other 20 % is made up of private pay and VA.
Miriam Allred (03:31)
Okay, awesome. And what about the the back office operation? A lot of large companies of your size have some consolidated operations, something still out in the field. How would you describe just kind of the breakdown of operations high level?
Olivia Jones (03:50)
Yeah, so you know, I think we've tried to centralize as much as possible over the years. Like those functions, intake, our recruiting functions, accounting and finance, things like that that can be...
centralized, we've taken the opportunity to do that. years ago, growth meant you expand by entering new markets. So we, our growth strategy from an organic standpoint was de novo locations. You want to get capture more market share, you pop a de novo into that spot.
But recently we've realized caregivers with technology and everybody's getting more comfortable with it. And I think some people might say in the home care world, we're a little slow on the uptake on that end. But.
we're advancing and caregivers are adopting technology with EVV and things like that. So they are coming into the physical locations less. So recently in the last year, we've consolidated some of those physical locations into more.
Welcoming, I guess is the word I would use and sophisticated professional engagement centers. So we went from in our central and East regions as an example, we went from five physical locations all located within 30 minutes of one another because that again used to be the way it was. If you wanted to recruit caregivers, you had to be in their backyard. And now we have found,
We invested in those centers, branded it, featured some of our longer term caregivers on the walls and have a training lab in there, computer stations so they can come in and access that at any time, a big conference room for trainings. that's been a bit of a shift, but so far it's worked really well and they've appreciated that kind of upscale place that sets the
when they come in for onboarding.
Miriam Allred (06:11)
You called them professional engagement centers. Is that just the verbage you use internally or externally as well?
Olivia Jones (06:17)
Externally, we actually branded them as Caregiver Engagement Centers specifically.
Miriam Allred (06:23)
Okay, I love that. Wow. You're already sharing interesting things. Every time I talk to you,
the really neat thing is CareAdvantage has been around for a long time, but every time I talk to you, you guys are thinking differently and pushing boundaries and reestablishing yourselves in an example like this of, maybe five years ago we did it one way, but the market's different, the landscape's different, technology is advanced. Like we have to do things differently at every juncture. And that's been part of your success and your growth is leaning into
new ways to structure your processes and operations, which leads us to today's topic. You and I were both skeptics, but we have landed on something fantastic for your organization, which is so fascinating, which is how you all have integrated virtual assistants into your recruiting and on-call function. And the reason why I wanted to bring you on, I have people reach out to me every single week about virtual assistants. They have kind of taken the industry by storm lately.
Olivia Jones (06:56)
Yes.
Thank
Miriam Allred (07:17)
And like us, there's a lot of skeptics, you should we offshore? Should we be doing this? Is technology catching up to where we don't need virtual assistants? Like we're in this really unique time in home care where there's a lot of resources and opportunities to differentiate. And you and I, again, we're both skeptics. reached, you know, we connected a couple of weeks ago. You told me the story of you listening to this podcast while you were in bed, which I don't know how I feel about that.
Olivia Jones (07:43)
Yeah.
Miriam Allred (07:43)
but you decided to take a chance and hire a virtual assistant. Talk a little bit about your, just like your sentiment, your hesitation before, your fear, your concerns, and then what like tipped the scales in your mind.
Olivia Jones (08:00)
Yeah, so that's funny because, you know, even in my downtime, I'm focused on home care. And I find the lab is a great place to learn new ideas. So
Miriam Allred (08:07)
Yeah, you love it.
Olivia Jones (08:14)
You know, I think, I don't think we're alone in our skepticism. I started out, you know, when I clicked on that particular podcast, ⁓ that night, that's kind what I started out with. Hmm. Let me see, you know, how this is because I think we've all experienced that offshore, ⁓ whether it's as a consumer, and you call in and you experience an offshore team that's kind of helping you navigate what you need. ⁓
And then, you know, I immediately thought, some of the things Debbie was actually saying on that podcast that day really resonated with me. The accents, you know, I was concerned about that. ⁓
Our clients, our demographic is oftentimes hard of hearing, has a low tolerance for things that maybe cause frustration for them. And that's one of them, not being able to understand communication. I mean, we've had that even sometimes with caregivers that go out to a home that may have an accent. So, you know, that was probably the biggest reservation I had. I also...thought about are they just going to be really transactional? Because, I think of other services that we've outsourced, like an answering service that ends up being really transactional. Again, putting on my consumer hat, when you call in and you have a specific need and you know where you want to go, but you have to go through the list because they are following a script. Like, that's been my experience and that's really where my skepticism was rooted.
