Miriam Allred (00:01)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with you this week. I hope everyone's having an awesome week and things are going well for you. Today in the lab, I'm sitting across from Gabby Hoing the founder and CEO of Kore Cares in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Gabby, welcome to the lab.
Gabby (00:20)
Thanks for having me.
Miriam Allred (00:22)
I have always been in awe of you and every once in a while I'll send you a message on LinkedIn and I'll say, hey, how are things going or what are you up to? You want to join me on the podcast? I think I haven't interviewed you maybe since my first podcast, but again, you're always on my radar and have wanted to have you on my new show. So here we are.
Gabby (00:38)
and awe of you as well, so it's mutual.
Miriam Allred (00:41)
You're so sweet. ⁓ For those that don't know you, let's start with your background. You are a CNA by trade and have had an incredible journey getting to where you are today. But tell everyone a little bit about your background and starting Kore Cares
Gabby (00:55)
Yeah, my healthcare journey really started as a CNA in a nursing home. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do for a career. was a...
think a junior in high school and one of my friends worked at the nursing home and said, you need to join me. You love, you'd be great at caring for people. You're going to love it. And so I started out as a CNA in a nursing home and I thought maybe I wanted to be a nurse, but I really became intrigued by the business side of healthcare and the leadership that goes with the business side of healthcare. And like, how do we become a better leader or how do we develop those skills to really lead a care team? And what does that look like? And so I went to business school and I have a business degree
and Health Services Administration and I put myself through school really being a CNA and a home care caregiver. I did both and I learned a lot from both of those experiences. I'm so grateful that I was able to start really from the ground up in those frontline hands-on positions and develop my leadership skills over time. So from there I worked for the Good Samaritan Society and I started one of their first private duty home care agencies in Sioux Falls and then moved to their
corporate office and design the business model for home care. And I think I got to start 11 different agencies in eight different states from Hawaii to Florida to Arkansas to Oregon, all over the country. It was a ton of fun. I learned a lot. I was a part of an acquisition and a part of a lot of new startups. But as the travel became more and more and I started a family, I wanted something more local and needed something different than the corporate life. So I went to work for a very eCare and sold Telemann.
to long-term care facilities. And also a great experience, I got to meet a lot of the healthcare leaders throughout the region, got to see inside of lot of nursing homes, assisted livings, and really feel the impact telemedicine can make every day in residents' lives. But I really missed home care. So in 2016, a friend of mine came to me and said, what are you doing? You are passionate about home care, like that's where your gifts and talents lie. I think God is calling us to start a home care agency.
We want to do things differently. We want to really focus on our staff and empower staff to use their God-given gifts and talents to serve those in need and really find the ways to support and train and lift up our care team so they can take excellent care of our clients. And so in 2016, we started Kore Cares with just me and one other person. And fast forward almost 10 years later, we're a team of 200 people serving a pretty
large geographic area in South Dakota. We serve over 95 communities, over 38 counties, and so we cover a lot of territory. And for those people that don't know, South Dakota is pretty rural. There's under million people in the whole state, and so we have a lot of rural areas that we serve.
Miriam Allred (03:53)
a lot of rural areas and you told me some of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. so when we, the lowest, when we talk about the workforce shortage and the challenge that that entails for home care in general, you know, you maybe like roll your eyes, like you guys don't even know because we have the lowest unemployment in South Dakota. And I love your background, CNA to then kind of corporatizing and then the medical sales with Avera, like what a great background.
Gabby (03:59)
SD has the lowest unemployment rate.
Okay.
Miriam Allred (04:21)
I wanna ask how old were you in 2016 when you started the home care company? Cause I look at you and you're so young still.
Gabby (04:26)
So I never tell anyone my age. I don't know if I'm willing to go there. So I was in my, had to be in my early thirties. I don't, I don't really even know my age today. So yes, I'm still pretty, I'm still pretty young, but I had a great, in my twenties, I had a lot of great experiences that led me to be able to open this company. So yeah, I was really fortunate to be kind of on an expedited path in my career and have good Sam.
Miriam Allred (04:28)
Okay. Okay, but so young.
Gabby (04:56)
I'm really... ⁓look at my gifts and talents and give me the opportunity to design a business model, a new business model for their company. I don't think very many people in their early 20s get that opportunity and they basically said, here, write the training manuals, the user guides, the SOPs, figure out what our finances should look like, our HR practices, put the business in a box and then go implement it throughout the country. And I was like, you're gonna let this 20-something very new college grad go do that and they did trust me and it worked out great it was an awesome experience for both of us so.
Miriam Allred (05:32)
I love it. I love it. I'm also young myself, but I just think, yeah, we're so capable and given the right opportunities at the right time and look where you are today and you look back at the last 10 years, the last 20 years, and it's like you were led along to do all of these things. And now you're right where you're supposed to be, which is amazing. So one of the things that you said ⁓ was about you being intrigued by the leadership position and leading a care team. And I think that's what's resonated with you in starting Kore Cares is how can you give back to the caregivers and put them at the heart and center of everything that you do? And so today we're gonna talk about some of the programs that you have built specifically to benefit and help these caregivers not just survive, but also thrive. And so we're gonna talk about wages, we're gonna talk about benefits. If we have time, we're gonna talk about ⁓ your specific benefits program and issuing bonuses and things like that. But you shared with me.
There's been kind of this like this evolution in your thinking as you've scaled this company, you've had more resources and abilities to be able to offer these sorts of things. Talk about just like your thinking and getting to where you are today of like what, what you started, how you started thinking about wages and bonuses and how that like, again, that mindset has evolved as you've gotten larger.
Gabby (06:46)
Yeah, I've... my really why for growing Kore Cares has been about our care team, our caregivers and our nurses and how we empower them to use our God-given gifts and talents, but also how do we support them to really provide excellent care and what do they need professionally and personally. And so, you know, as I look back at my CNA experience, we would sit in these all staff meetings and talk a lot about rules and regulations and compliance. And I never felt like the leadership team
stopped and took an account for our feedback and what we wanted and how we could improve operational systems and what some of our ideas were. And so that's one of the things I've always wanted to carry forward with me is make sure that I'm always talking to our frontline staff and figuring out what they want. so, and I always wanted a way to be able to recognize those that are going above and beyond the call of duty. Cause that was the other thing in a nursing home setting and even in a home care care setting, it can be hard to recognize that staff that are going above and beyond the call of duty. But I think it's really important and people.
People want bonus. mean, they'll tell you, ⁓ I don't need a bonus or I don't need to thank you, but people need that appreciation. So how do we really live that out at Kore Cares And so, ⁓ we have tried a variety of different things over time and we have tried a point system. when we started this company, we had very little benefits because we didn't have a lot of funds to work with, but it's always been important that we continue to seek feedback from our staff on what they want. And, and then try different things and let it evolve over time.
