Miriam Allred: Hello, and welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with all of you. Today in the lab, I'm joined by Christian Alaimo, the co founder of Caribou. Christian, how are you doing today?
Christian Alaimo: I'm doing great. I'm super excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Miriam Allred: Time to get you back in the lab and time to get down and dirty on some good topics. You all are a sponsor of the show and we did a mini podcast together a few weeks ago, but I wanted to have you on to dig into the problem beneath the problem when it comes to this caregiver shortage. And so I'm gonna ask you some pretty direct questions about your take on some of these things. Before we get into it, everyone about your personal background and why Caribou and how Caribou?
Christian Alaimo: Yeah, mean first of all, I joke with a lot of people that I could talk about this stuff for hours, so thanks for giving me an hour.
Miriam Allred: The platform, here we go.
Christian Alaimo: Yeah, I appreciate it. So a little bit about my background in Caribou. I grew up living with my grandmother, my my Nona. My family's Italian.
And as a when you're younger, you're not looking for business opportunities. So I I didn't really contextualize how impactful the experience of seeing her on her care journey was until much later in my life. But I have these very vivid memories of her experience receiving care. She she used to bring her walker to the to the door, and she would wait before her caregivers would come. And some days the caregivers would be late.
Some days they wouldn't show up at all. And she was a really proud, Italian woman who immigrated to Canada, and she wasn't comfortable having her family know, shower or bathe her. So on some of the days, if they sent, you know, a man to to give her a bath, those would just be days or in some cases weeks where she would just go without. And so I had seen that experience and how it affected her, how it affected my family. And then, you know, obviously, years later, learning more about the space, just felt so called to trying to help solve the problem.
My original connection to the industry was almost exclusively around how do I help families get better access to care. In peeling back that onion and meeting more caregivers and office staff, coordinators, owners, I just fell in love with the industry, and, you know, my cofounder, Alex, and I have just become more and more impassioned to solve problems that exist here. And as you certainly know very well, it's really hard not to fall in love with the people in this industry. So as we learned more and more about the problems that existed, that's really what's propelled the journey of Caribou, from originally focusing almost exclusively on recruitment to, you know, what we do now across the entire operating model, recruitment, retention, compliance, all of that. So that was kind of the first jump in.
What was really that personal connection.
Miriam Allred: I love it. Thank you for sharing that. You used the word Nona. Have you watched the new movie Nonas on Netflix or at least heard of I
Christian Alaimo: have heard of it but I have not seen it yet. I've heard it's good.
Miriam Allred: I've heard it's good too. It's on my list and looks like a great maybe look into like women from Italy in their older years and cooking and just like the tradition. So you said Nona and that reminded me of that. If anyone's listened to it or watched it, you know, we'll have to keep tabs on that as well. Yeah.
Christian Alaimo: I'll open up my review next time. Yeah.
Miriam Allred: Perfect. Perfect. So you're already kind of getting into the origin story of Cariboo and you and Alex starting the company. Give us a little bit more color to that and your perspective on what was broken in the system truly that made you want to go all in on Cariboo.
Christian Alaimo: Yeah. And I think like most people, you you don't really find home care. Home care kind of finds you, and our story is not much different. Alex was working, in a finance capacity on some business deals for senior living facilities. And so he was the one who had the initial vision around, hey.
There's some macroeconomic trends here. Peel back the onion a few layers and realize, oh my goodness. We have you know, there's a caregiver shortage today. And if we don't solve this, it's only going to get worse as the population ages. And so Alex initially left his his job in investment banking to pursue a solution.
He and I were were friends from university. And when I saw that he was on that path, we connected and both have just been so passionate about solving the problem around the caregiver shortage. The way that journey has evolved has been really interesting. When we first started, you know, a lot of the research that we see today around lack of recognition and appreciation and schedule schedule stability, all of that was around, but the stacked ranking has kinda shift over time as well. But the challenge itself continues to persist.
And so when we first started Caribou, we were really focusing on the recruitment side of things and helping agencies attract more quality caregivers. That was kind of the first foray in around, hey. How do we turn your existing caregivers who are exceptional into recruiters who can help attract more high quality staff? And that continues to be a core part of our system. But as we look at the way the industry has evolved, we see that there's a lot more competition with other verticals, right, or other sectors, whether it's retail, for example, where caregivers can, in some cases, maybe make a higher hourly rate.
And when you talk to caregivers, you will hear some very consistent themes around a lack of, flexible schedules that have left them to to leave the industry or a lack of connectivity or sense of appreciation. And so I think when we when we talk about the caregiver shortage, it's really important that we recognize there's a variety of different factors at play. And what we're doing now is really working with agencies to help them understand, hey. Across a variety of different factors, whether it's financial, professional, social, emotional, where are you doing very well, and where are you maybe falling short with your existing caregiver experience? And then how do we pull different levers to help them improve the quality of that caregiver experience, then ultimately improve retention?
So that's really been the journey that we've been on is figuring out which ones which factor is really causing an issue at your specific agency, and then what can we do about it to help improve retention.
Miriam Allred: Very, very good. Little sidebar here. When we were prepping for this conversation, I asked you what term or phrase you all at Cariboo use when it comes to the caregiver shortage, the caregiver crisis. You know, we see it labeled a lot of different things. And you said something interesting about shortage being the word that you all coined because there's room for opportunity.
It feels like something that we can attack and solve for. Explain a little bit about, like, your thinking with that phrase.
Christian Alaimo: Yeah. I think for for us, it's quite a we have a quite a visceral reaction on our team. And if you you know, something I feel really fortunate about is the people who work at Caribou now, it's like a mandatory requirement that you are called to the mission. And the caregiver shortage, it's strong language, but, you know, I personally I struggle with, you know, other language like calling it a crisis that that feels so doom and gloom versus the shortage feels like it's this is an opportunity for us. You know?
There's there's a lot of demand. The demand is growing. This is a more positive spin on a problem space that I think for us as a partner to home care agencies positioning it as a shortage, at least feels a little bit more action oriented and motivating. It's like, hey. We can turn a lever here, and we can solve this problem rather than, oh gosh.
There's this overwhelming crisis that no individual can solve on their own. It just feels a little bit more action oriented.
Miriam Allred: I like that a lot. And I think how we talk about it really does matter. You know, when you read headlines about crisis, you know, labor shortage, labor crisis, like, those words create imagery and emotion and ideas and plant ideas in people's heads. And so how we talk about it, think is really important. And not that we need to universalize a term in the industry, but just be really selective and intentional about what words we use that put things in more of a positive, optimistic, hopeful light.
Christian Alaimo: Totally. And and in an industry as as big as ours where there is no shortage of challenges, I think it's so important that we take this lens as, hey. We're in it, and no one else is coming to save us. You know, we have to be the ones who evolve from the inside of the industry to advance for whatever the needs are of the future. So wherever we can take that action oriented language, I think, is quite critical.
Nobody's gonna solve these problems individually. We need to do it together. But if we don't have that positive language and view it as an opportunity that we quite literally can solve, then it's not gonna be motivating for anybody to come in and really try to solve these problems.
