Miriam Allred (00:01.)
Welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. Today in the lab, I'm joined by Jonah Francis, the president at Pansy Home Care Services in Hartford, Connecticut. Jonah, thanks for being here in the lab.
Jonah Francis (00:16.9)
Man, I've been looking forward to this. I can't wait. Thanks for having me.
Miriam Allred (00:20.8)
The feeling is mutual. was just telling you, I see you at conferences, I hear your name in different rooms and I was like, I'm reaching out to him, I want him on the show, let's do this. So sorry this is long overdue, but I'm glad we're connecting today.
Jonah Francis (00:24.0)
Thank you.
Same, same.
Miriam Allred (00:35.6)
Awesome. Well, let's let's jump into it. People may or may not know a whole lot about you, but I want to start with kind of the background of the business. Your mom is Pansy and she started the home care business and you've been involved basically since the beginning. So tell us a little bit about her background and starting the business and then how and when you got involved.
Jonah Francis (00:55.0)
Yeah, so Pansy is a flower. So I go with the seed analogy. So the seed was planted back in 1966. My mom was a CNA when she immigrated up to the United States. Well, well before that as well. And eventually what took place was she's always been kind of what you see from caregivers overall, right? A hustler, a grinder, somebody that puts passion in their heart into everything they do. So starting a business was from the inception what she always wanted to do.
The business though was officially launched in 2013. And in terms of like my role with the company, I always like to tell people I was like, volatile to be a part of the business, whether I to or not. My mom was gonna get me to help and support in some sort of way. But I officially started full time with supporting my mom in 2017.
Miriam Allred (01:46.6)
Okay, and you're young now, so you were probably pretty young back then, right?
Jonah Francis (01:51.9)
Yeah, yeah, believe I was 26 years old.
Miriam Allred (01:54.9)
Okay. And what was your background coming into it? Were you working? Were you in school? Like what were you up to until you got kind of all untold to get into the family business?
Jonah Francis (02:02.7)
Yeah, I was climbing the corporate ladder. I was an analyst with Cigna, a healthcare organization, and at night I was a sports multimedia journalist with a local TV station here. So I was running the beat at night and, you know, crunching the numbers during the daytime. That was my background.
Miriam Allred (02:21.2)
What in the world? I did not know either of those things. That's amazing. And this was all in Hartford. So the business is in Hartford. You mentioned to me, you guys are from Jamaica originally, is that right? And then moved to Connecticut.
Jonah Francis (02:34.0)
That is correct. So specifically we're in Hartford County. West Hartford is the town that we're in, but we cover all of Hartford County. In terms of our background, yep, I was born in Jamaica, as was my mom. My mom migrated up when I was relatively young and struggled and eventually found a way and made a way to be able to file for myself to come up as well. And then eventually my father. So again, hustler, hard worker. Doing exactly what a lot of our caregivers do today, which is sending their funds back home to support their family as well.
Miriam Allred (03:08.0)
Yes, I love that Pansy. I love all the photos of you and her and her on the website. Just so many great photos. She just seems like the most incredible woman and you get to work with her every day. And you were just telling me how involved she still is in training the caregivers. You know, it's her name on the business, her name on the door and she loves caregivers and she can relate to them. And so she's very involved from the training standpoint. So you all are a dementia first dementia focused home care business.
Jonah Francis (03:24.1)
Hahaha.
Miriam Allred (03:37.)
Has that always been the case, you know, from day one? Was that kind of the thinking or what was the kind of the strategy early on and when did you all decide to focus on dementia?
Jonah Francis (03:47.2)
Yeah, well, great question. It was not the strategy from the beginning, especially when I started. We were kind of like most small businesses, most entrepreneurs, just trying to do anything that you possibly could to kind of make it, to survive, to create a name for yourself. It really wasn't until a few years after, as we just kept finding ourselves caring for people living with dementia, we looked at our census as well and our heart started to go in that direction and our senses was also telling us at the same time, it's always great when those two things align, right?
Our census started telling us the same time that that is the direction that we should go in. So what kind of I kind of summarize it is it started it started as like again doing anything we could to survive, then it became a specialty, right? Because we started to put some a lot more effort behind it and then it became our focus, which is where we're at today.
Miriam Allred (04:41.6)
And when you talk about it becoming your focus about how many years ago was that that you were like, we're really going to lean into this and make it our identity basically.
Jonah Francis (04:51.3)
Yeah, about three years ago, we said, you know what, everyone is talking about this dementia specialty. And my theory is that everyone likes to theorize or whatever the right word might be, dementia care and dementia support. And everyone does a pretty good job of just kind of talking about it. We didn't want to just talk about it and be like everyone else. We wanted to lean in because during situations, our families are looking for us to be the experts.
And what we do today, our team talks about it all the time, is we lean in those situations and try our best to make sure that we're supporting them in the ways that they need, including our caregivers, of course.
Miriam Allred (05:34.2)
Yeah, I love that. So I want to talk about today what that looks like, you know, from the client side, the caregiver side, training operations, partners, technology, like what it looks like and what it means to be a dementia first or dementia focus agency, because I've heard you say you all want to be the service provider, the preferred kind of dementia service provider in Connecticut. And that's what you're working towards. And so I just want to like unpack what that means to you. So
Let's start with the client side. What are the specific marketing strategies that you all have deployed to target dementia clients in your market?
Jonah Francis (06:13.8)
Great question. Starting right off from that side of things. I would say what was very apparent was when we were going out into the marketplace looking for like marketing training programs, everything was pretty like open. It was all of home care and how do you sell all of home care? Nothing was really focused. So what we ended up having to do was we took all of the Steve, the Hurricane's, the Sarahs, the Melanie Stover's, we took all of them and just kind of comprise them into what fit who we are and what our messaging had to be on a consistent basis. So we do some of the same things and we're going to a lot of the same areas, but we found success in flipping the message from what other home care agencies usually goes out to sell, right? Other home care agencies are going out to talk about, we do everything. yes, and we have this specialty program.
Well, what we did was we flipped it. We have, this is our focus and we built it around ASA, approach, skill and ability. And yes, we can also help with some of those other individuals that you have, but this is our focus and having such a targeted message when you're going out and speaking to people at least makes people from what we've experienced go, hmm, what does that mean? How does that look like? We're listening and that's kind of all you want. You're starting off a relationship anyways, it's just for them to listen.
Miriam Allred (07:44.5)
Yeah. And when you think about like referral partners and the people that you're going out and, you know, cross selling with, have you found that there's any specific referral partners that are best suited to refer you dementia clients?
Jonah Francis (08:00)
Great question. Yes, for us, our GCMs out in the area, we don't have many in Connecticut. I think if you go like over into Boston, Boston has a whole field of them, right? But right now in Connecticut, I want to say there's less than 15 throughout the entire state of Connecticut. But we've developed really, really great relationships with them, including one that has been growing throughout the state of Connecticut. And so in terms of referrals, that's been a great partnership.
They love our concierge program that we bring to the table that helps families start off low and scale up to what they need. In terms of other referral sources, we go to memory care communities a whole bunch. And what we're telling our assisted living communities, we're not looking for your entire organization, right? We're not looking for every resident under. We're coming in at your assisted, we're coming in for your memory care.
And then what usually happens is again, that tight focus then starts to expand out. And so we started Memory Care and then we ended up providing support for other residents in their community as well.
Miriam Allred (09:08.0)
Nice. Would you say those are your two primary referral partners, those GCMs and then this memory care?
Jonah Francis (09:14.2)
Specifically, yes. Memory care is overall, but specifically coming to the top of my mind, those are the two places that we receive referrals from the most. We partner with some specialty hospitals as well. However, what we found is that's more along the Medicaid waivers line. So again, having to refine our marketing approach has been something that we've learned over time.
Miriam Allred (09:38.2)
And what about your online presence? You you think of like SEO and being able to like really lean into like keywords and that specialty. Have you all made like online marketing a big focus and have found success there or not as much as these referral partners?
Jonah Francis (09:47.2)
Yeah. Not as much. That's something that we are really like honing into. Just got Alex Hormozzi's book for the $1 million lead, so I can't wait to start digging through that. However, we decided not to go in the SEO direction because when we attempted with Google, Google started off as a small number and before we knew it, we were spending every last dollar that we had. So we pivoted to the social media.
And through social media, it's been some growing pains. However, we found like a really nice little niche. We call it, Let's Talk About It. That's like our segment. And then, you know, so from our Let's Talk About It, we're like putting people in real life situations and role playing it through. And that has actually turned into a really good niche for us. And we've been gaining a lot of support from it as well.
