Miriam Allred (00:06)
Hey everyone, welcome to the lab live. It is so great to be with all of you. Typically I'm just in your ear, but today we're face to face. Well, Debbie and I are face to face. I wish I could see all of your faces. I know you're here, but I can't quite see you. but thank you for joining us live. This is such a pleasure. I hadn't really done a lot of live sessions for almost two years, and so Debbie and I had this idea and this content, and I just thought this is too good not to share live and how fun to do it in a live setting. So here we are.
so let's go ahead and get started. Debbie needs no introduction. You've all seen her and heard her on the podcast. She's one of my, you know, peers and friends in the industry, but also she's a fan favorite, and many of you know her and know her story. So this is gonna
Debbie Miller (00:37)
you need to be able that. So you to be able that. that.
Miriam Allred (00:51)
be hot and fast, and we're gonna just gonna get right in. So strap in. So Debbie, welcome and thank you for being here. Let's go ahead and get started.
Debbie Miller (00:59)
Thank you, Miriam, for doing this and always being dedicated to bringing education to the industry. And this has definitely been a work in progress for me. And as many of you know, I'm a home care owner myself. I have a large agency in Nashville, Tennessee. I started from ground zero. We're now up to about 8,700 hours a week. And so what we're going to present today, the infrastructure blueprint,
the workbook, all of the work has come out of my own experience of growing an agency over 19 years and all the ups and downs of that. And Miriam, you and I have talked so many times about how difficult this business is to run. And it's not like you can just go and necessarily take a course and learn how to run this business. That's sort of on the job training.
So we'd love to be able to bring some tools and bring the experience that we've had so that maybe you don't have to make the same mistakes that I made, certainly. But I did want to share with you that, you know, where this has come from. It's really come from my own experience. I've basically packed 20 years into about 90 minutes here. And so, but also my experience in working with agency owners across the country through 52 weeks marketing.
where with that business, we've been really focused on helping them grow their referral sources. What we found though, was that a lot of folks were doing such a great job with that, but ran into some barriers in terms of growth because of their infrastructure or lack of infrastructure. So that's why we actually created Helper Heroes. I was able to use a lot of virtual assistants within my own organization after I did my infrastructure overhaul.
And we nailed it and scaled it across the country. Now we're helping hundreds of agency owners across the country to build their infrastructure using virtual assistants. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But what was really interesting, and I don't even know if I told you this story, Miriam, but I was doing a discovery call with an agency owner and I was telling him sort of my experience and he said, you know what, do you happen to have a white paper?
that
would help me kind of address this with my team so that I can do some of these things. And I said, well, I don't, but that's actually a really good idea. And so I got a little carried away and here we are with a 60 page workbook, both for build and optimize. so it really came from, he really triggered that thought process for me. I codified the whole system and we're down to nine steps. So let's dig in, all right?
So when a home care agency reaches the growth crossroads, what we've done is created a blueprint for each of these different phases. So I've broken it down into the build phase. This is where the owner is still carrying a lot of the tasks and the company in general. Optimize is for more established agency that already has an existing team
but the team and the work need to be redesigned. All right, and then we've got scale. This is larger again, but with lot more complexities and so that starting to become a barrier. So think about it this way, build the owner, I'm doing too much, the owner becomes the growth constraint. With Optimize, we're all doing too much and the way the work is organized becomes the growth constraint.
And then with scale, it's become so complex, the organization itself has become the growth constraint. when the experience that I went through, consider me at the optimized phase at that time. All so this was after COVID, we had lost a lot of traction. right, we were down about almost $3 million and struggling to get our growth trajectory turned around.
And so we were absolutely at a crossroad here. And that's what we're going to focus on today. I'm going to share kind of my experience. But what we're going to do is look at how we can free our best people to do the highest value work. So I did want to really quickly touch on the build, which is the session that we did last week. And we had lots of folks. And it was really fun to hear the feedback from a couple of those people yesterday, Miriam. But this is where the owner is.
basically the operating system, right? They're doing scheduling, billing. They're just, they have too many of their hands in all of the different pots, right? So the growth barrier sounds like, I'm only one person between me and my small staff, it's feast or famine. I can't afford to hire another person because my revenue isn't consistent enough. And so we hear that a lot. It's, can't hire anybody else, but I can't grow unless I hire other people.
So
that's one of the things that we're definitely going to tackle today as well. And it's a problem because this is what the revenue model tends to look like. It's that real see-saw or saw-tooth model. And so what happens is we get a client, this is exciting, and all the effort goes towards staffing that case, and we lose sight of those growth engine tasks like marketing and recruiting and those kinds of things.
So every peak is exciting, creates, it says, hey, I landed a new client, but every Valley says I don't have the momentum to sustain the group. And that's an issue, all right. Now with the growth or the optimized phase, the organizational chart looks a little more robust, but we've got particularly folks that are kind of taking the lead in certain departments now, which is really good.
But this is what our team looks like. Can anybody relate to this, right? Responsibilities have accumulated over time, roles can tend to overlap and workflows through people because it's how we've always done it, right? And so the organization can look kind of solid when you look at the organizational chart, but structurally it's completely overloaded. So we've got a lot of stressed out people on our team.
These are the symptoms that I hear from pretty established agencies. We're getting great referrals, but there's no room for more clients. I hear, I can, my goodness, when I hear about an agency that couldn't take a 24-7 or had to turn away a new client, it's horrifying, right? Office staff is constantly putting out fires. We've got leaders wearing.
several hats. And when I say leaders, I'm talking about the people that you really count on in your organization, sort of your right hand people like maybe head of scheduling, or you might have a director of operations or director of HR, those folks are what I am referring to when I talk about leaders. But they're wearing a lot of hats, right? Good ideas, never get implemented because they're just too busy. We were just talking about that, Miriam. And then what happens is we're not improving
Proving the processes we know like it's not going well, but there's we just don't have the time to do it. So busy not the same as scalable. That's what that's one of the things that we want to we want to reiterate time and time again here.
So we go from a revenue perspective, this is what it looks like. Startup is really exciting, right? We were building momentum, then momentum becomes growth and then growth becomes busyness. And if the infrastructure is not keeping up, we begin to see that plateau. And that's where I was. The demand is still there, but the organization just cannot absorb the growth efficiently.
And so you just kind of like you're gaining a little bit and then you lose clients because things are falling through the cracks or you're not keeping up with the recruiting engine and you can't bring on that other big case. So this is where I was as I was saying, everybody's hair was on fire. We had like just a lot of chaos in the office. And if you walked in and said, I've got a 24 seven, people wouldn't be excited about that.
All right, and that was a really bad place to be. So, and I've seen offices, I've walked through offices are three to $4 million and it's absolutely chaos. And there are others that, you know, it's just calm because they've got the infrastructure to support the growth and they're focused on growth. And that's the key. When you get to a point where your staff isn't excited about growing, we all have a problem, right? So.
Where when I did the infrastructure overhaul, I now have and of course I've grown significantly since then. But we're now such a well oiled machine that there's happiness in the and and you know we kind of ring a ring a bell when we get another big case to come into staff. So everybody is focused on growing and excited about growth and that's where we want to get to. So so what do I do? So a lot of times when people hit that that plateau,
their instinct is, I guess I need to hire more people. Or, and then they start to look at, well, do I need somebody internally? Do I hire a virtual assistant? What about AI? Everybody is really stressed out about AI and they think that there are all these opportunities and they got to jump on the bandwagon. And so those are some solutions, but before we jump to the solutions, we really need to diagnose the work and where the gaps are in the work.
right? And because I unfortunately have seen so many people sign up for say new technologies, then they think that's going to, you know, create this new revenue stream. Well, if you can't handle the work efficiently now, that's just another layer of complication. And you've got, you know, just more issues that your staff is dealing with. So what I love about the blueprint is it focuses on the work that should determine the solution.
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