The Retention Playbook of a $32M Home Care Agency (Jen Kulig)

Jen Kulig, Director of Market Operations at Tribute Home Care, shares how a $32M agency hires and retains only the top 1% of caregiver applicants. She walks through their 7–10 day hiring process, driven by situational interviews that surface grit, empathy, and motivation, and explains why referrals make up 40% of new hires. Jen also highlights the Caregiver Excellence Department’s 90-day support program, quarterly awards, annual happiness surveys and the Everyone Out program. She also breaks down their Salary Program, Tribute Secure, that guarantees caregivers 30 or 40 hours per week.

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min

Sep 30, 2025

The Retention Playbook of a $32M Home Care Agency (Jen Kulig)

Miriam Allred (00:10)
Welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. Today, we are in studio in Dallas, Texas, and I am capitalizing on a bunch of home care leaders being in town, and we are in studio. And today I'm joined by Jen Kulig, the Director of Market Operations at Tribute Home Care. Jen, welcome to Dallas, and welcome to the studio. This is a first for you and kind of a first for both of us. ⁓

Jen Kulig (00:30)
Thank you so much, glad to be here.

Miriam Allred (00:36)
But I have been looking forward to this for weeks. Ever since we got it scheduled, I'm like, I have been waiting for this moment, and now here we are actually doing it. So don't take this the wrong way, but a lot of people don't know a whole lot about Tribute or about you. And so when I got connected with you, I thought, of course I want to have you on the show, and I want you to tell a little bit more about Tribute's story and what sets you guys apart and how you've grown so quickly. I think some people might know Jon Sneath a little bit, but you guys are a little under wraps in the industry, so that's part of why I wanted to have you on.

So let's start with just like a good old fashioned introduction of yourself, your background, your home care experience, and then leading up to kind of your role and your responsibilities with Tribute

Jen Kulig (01:16)
So I fell into home care. ⁓ I graduated ⁓ from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts with a degree in psychology and had no idea what I was going to do with it. And I ended up working for two years in an eating disorder ⁓ residential home and found that unless I had some type of advanced degree, I wasn't going to be able to go very far there. So I started to apply to some other jobs that seemed interesting that were kind of administrative in nature.

a recruiting company reached out to me and they had been contracted by the first home care company I worked with. And the first person who interviewed me was John Sneath back when I was in my early 20s. I spent, so John was the president at that company and I spent eight years there. He left about six, six and a half years into my tenure there.

He really had a very specific vision for what he wanted home care to look like and wanted to go out on his own. So I followed him very closely, left about a year and a half later, went and worked for a care management practice for two years, which was valuable in a lot of different ways. And then once Tribute was kind of up and running in Massachusetts, I joined Tribute. And I've been at Tribute for nine and a half years.

I worked my way up to an executive director position, the first home care company, and then started in a kind of, we call it client solutions manager, like a case manager type position at Tribute because that's all they needed at the time and I really wanted to get in because I knew there was a lot of hope for Tribute. then one of the most exciting things that I did after a couple of years is

think about how do we expand our service territory and kind of create a sister market. And so we had opened, ⁓ our first office was in ⁓ Baltimore, Maryland, and then Tribute came two years later in 2016, 2015, I guess. And ⁓ I really, ⁓ we were really excited about the idea, but how do we expand beyond these two kind of big cities?

but maybe with a little less risk. And so one of the things that I did first after being a client solutions manager for a couple of years was to expand our service territory. And so we moved further west outside of Boston and opened up another office and really created it, ⁓ thought of it as a separate market. ⁓ And that was a real big success and really being able to leverage the referral partners we had in the city and help them introduce us to people a little further out, hire caregivers that were further out. And ⁓

really expand in a very organic way. ⁓ And so from there, I took over the state of Massachusetts and we expanded ⁓ north and south as well and from the city and ⁓ and ⁓ then ⁓ my most recent position for the last couple of years has been to oversee all markets. ⁓ And so now I am I oversee all of Massachusetts and the operations in Massachusetts and then support our market directors in Chicago and Maryland.

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Miriam Allred (04:39)
Give us a little bit of like day in the life. Director of market operations sounds stressful, sounds large, sounds like a lot is like in your purview. What are you thinking about and doing on like a day to day basis?

Jen Kulig (04:51)
I what I love about home care is there is no typical day, and I'm sure you've heard that before, ⁓ but it really is true. I think some days it's focusing really on Massachusetts, and ⁓ now there's more layers than there were before. So we have somebody that oversees our client solutions team. I myself used to manage the whole client solutions team. I don't do that anymore, but I manage the manager of those folks. And there are crises that come up all the time.

We work with pretty affluent families who spend a lot of money on our care and they have certain expectations and we've promised to deliver at a certain level. And so we have to manage those things as they come up. ⁓ There's a lot of strategic focus and really thinking big picture about where do we want to go? How do we get there? ⁓ How do we implement change in really effective ways? We are constantly evolving and changing. And so that's really exciting. ⁓ I traveled to Chicago and Maryland. ⁓

Probably every six to eight weeks or so on average to really support the teams there. ⁓ I spend time in the field visiting caregivers and clients ⁓ by myself and with colleagues. So it's a whole bunch of things. ⁓ But I think at the end of the day, it's, you my focus is on how do we make sure that we give everything we possibly can to caregivers, because if we do that well, we will continue to succeed.

Miriam Allred (06:16)
That was awesome. That was really well said. And it's actually interesting where you started of someone of your size, it may seem like there's less fires. You've thought about processes and systems and no two days are ever the same, but you would almost, I would almost think that like there's less fires, there's more stability at an organization of your size, but that's not necessarily the case. It's care and it's humans at the end of the day and there's always variables. There's always going to be fire.

Jen Kulig (06:43)
Yeah, I mean you can have a lot of operational consistency ⁓ if this then that but There ⁓ I Still hear new things happen every day like something happens with a client you're like, well, that's a new one. So ⁓

Miriam Allred (07:02)
Never-ending firsts in home That's what it feels like. Everyone I talk to, you've been doing this for a long time. People that have been doing it for 20, 30, 40 years. No two days are the same. Which I just again think is interesting. It doesn't matter how long you've been in this business. There's always something new you haven't actually seen at all. Tell us a little bit more about Tribute. You're kind of highlighting where the headquarters are, locations, growth, all of that. But just kind of like fill in again where it started. the kind of three major markets that you're in and just talk kind of broadly about like census numbers, revenue, payers, just to kind of people can kind of get the lay of the land of tribute.

Jen Kulig (07:37)
We're all private pay, other than if families have long term care and then those policies will oftentimes kick in and we can support that. But otherwise it's all private pay. So no Medicare, no Medicaid, no VA benefits, none of that. We are about a 30 to 32 million dollar company at the moment. We have grown every single year, usually at a 10 to 15 percent clip. Some years more, some years a little less.

So seeing that growth trajectory continue to go up has been really exciting. Right now we service 14 to 15,000 hours a week of care between our three markets. Massachusetts is our biggest market. We're between 9,000 and 9,500 a week in Massachusetts. Maryland hovers around 5,000 right now. And Chicago's a really young emerging market.

⁓ More like six to seven hundred hours a week. So ⁓ So, you know all three markets are kind of in different stages obviously Maryland and Massachusetts would be considered very established markets, but also very different markets ⁓ and You know really our our mission is to bring love visit after visit for those who need care and the remarkable people who provide it and I just think that really encompasses what we're truly all about and ⁓

growth is really exciting, but it wouldn't be possible if we didn't have the caregivers in place and we hired carefully. ⁓ And ⁓ it wouldn't be possible without a kind of growth mindset ⁓ and the willingness to embrace change day in and day out.

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