Miriam Allred (00:01)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. This is your host Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with all of you. Hope your new year is off to an awesome start. Today in the lab, I am joined by John Bennett, the CEO of Sunny Days in Home Care in Pennsylvania. John, welcome to the lab.
John Bennett (00:17)
Hey, excited to be here and happy new year to everybody as well.
Miriam Allred (00:20)
Yes, I've been looking forward to this. You will forever be one of my first guests. You probably don't even remember this, but you I interviewed you and your dad early days at Home Care Pulse for me. And you will always be the football coach turned home care CEO. And I just remember thinking then and now, like, what an incredible story. And you're still a coach and you're still a CEO and doing it all. And I just think your story and your journey is amazing. So I've been looking forward to reconnecting. It has also been.
two years since you were on Home Care U, previous podcast. And so you have been up to a lot with your business the last couple of years. so this conversation is long overdue, but I'm excited to basically just hear like where you're at, what you've been up to and how things are going. So ⁓ first and foremost, how are you doing? How are you, the family, the business, how's everything going?
John Bennett (01:07)
Yeah, we're doing pretty good. Family's great. We recently moved a little bit south of the office, got out into the country a little bit more. I'm kind of a country bumpkin at heart. I love going into the city as much as possible, but like living out in the country. So we're excited and a little bit more space out there for the kids to run around and the dog loves it and you know, all of that stuff. So family's great. ⁓ yeah, business is good. We had a lot of changes happen since the last time we've talked.
and I do a theme word every year. In 2025, our theme word was transform.
And I feel like 2025 was a very transformative year for us from a business perspective. A lot of things changed. We got out of a lot of things that we wanted to get out of and started to get in and set up for future success, things that we wanted to. So it was a very, very busy year with Transform. When I picked that late 2024, I knew that was kind of what it was going to look like. Didn't know it would be quite so transformative, but it definitely was and that definitely fit. So yeah, was a lot of changes, but
I feel really good about everything right now and good about the direction we're going. And I think I have a really good team in place here and I'm excited for what we're gonna do this year in 2026.
Miriam Allred (02:24)
Amazing. I love that concept theme word. And for 2025, it was transform. So let's start with kind of a state of the company. Again, you have had a lot of changes and that's really what we're going to unpack today is your org chart and what's centralized, what's decentralized. You've gone through M&A and you're rolling everything up and rebranding. And so I reached out to you I was like, I just want to pick your brain and you just tell us where you're at and how things are going. But let's start with kind of a state of the company for those that don't know you or don't know Sunny Days very well.
⁓ I'll just kind of like rapid fire through some of these demo demographic questions and you can kind of just hit them hit them quickly. So first and foremost, where is headquarters and how many offices do you guys have today?
John Bennett (02:58)
Perfect. ⁓So headquarters is just south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ⁓ and we have four offices, actually five offices now. ⁓ We have three located in Pennsylvania, all over Western Pennsylvania, ⁓ one in the upper peninsula of Michigan that serves Michigan and Northern Wisconsin. And we actually just opened an office ⁓ in Eastern Ohio and Boardman Ohio just outside of Youngstown. So we don't have any new clients or caregivers there yet. We literally just opened it about two weeks ago.
Miriam Allred (03:31)
Okay, congrats on that. How many of those were via acquisition?
John Bennett (03:37)
Yeah, so we had our initial Sunny Days company. We started from, you know, ground zero. And then one of our other Pennsylvania locations, we acquired it, but when it had 300 hours of care per week, maybe doing about 350,000 in business. And now this year we've grown that to, we're doing about 7,000 hours of care per week, about 8 million in business. So was technically an acquisition, but we've grown it. had other company in Pennsylvania, we acquired it doing about 10,000 hours of care.
⁓ 9,9500 ⁓ doing close to about 10 and a half million dollars in revenue ⁓ and it stayed about the same we haven't really grown it haven't declines been about the same and then ⁓ our last company up in the upper peninsula of michigan we acquired it it was about 600 hours of care per week ⁓ just under a million in revenue ⁓ and now we're doing about 4 000 hours of care per week up there ⁓
and a little over close to about 5.2, 5.3 million in revenue. So we've had three acquisitions, ⁓ but grown two of them significantly. We just have really great directors and boots on the ground teams in place. Then obviously Ohio is a fresh start. There's a word for that, blue ocean or something, don't know, green field, whatever it is. But Ohio is a fresh start, a company that we've opened on our own. So we're excited for that.
Miriam Allred (04:47)
Amazing. How many office employees across the entire company ballpark?
John Bennett (05:03)
Yeah, we have around 65 ⁓ at this point. ⁓ and that's, would say management, our model is a little bit different with our field managers. So out of 65, ⁓ a little over half of those are in the field. So our actual office staff is closer to 30.
Miriam Allred (05:07)
Okay, awesome. And we're going to unpack all of this and I'm getting all these questions because this is going to be like the basis of the conversation. ⁓ Approximately like roster size, how many clients, caregivers again across the state of the company?
John Bennett (05:33)
Yeah, so we have just under a thousand clients. ⁓ think last week we had maybe 980. So we had and then we have about 1100 employees total. So a little over a thousand about thousand thirty or so thousand thirty to thousand forty caregivers.
Miriam Allred (05:48)
Okay, and then payer mix. What's the payer breakdown?
John Bennett (05:53)
Yeah, so payor break down, I'll break it into two categories. So in Pennsylvania, the payor break down is about 85 % Medicaid, 10 % VA, 5 % private pay. And then up in Michigan and Northern Wisconsin, we're 45 % VA, 45 % Medicaid, and 10 % private pay. So a stronger VA mix up there at that location.
Miriam Allred (06:17)
Okay, amazing, amazing. just for context setting, last couple of years you've been on M&A mode, but right now you're in implementation. You've kind of gotten the business to this point and now it's execution. Does that feel accurate?
John Bennett (06:35)
Yeah, we were on, I mean, we grew organically significantly, right? And then went to M M&A mode, had a step back. think we had talked about it on our last podcast, one of our acquisitions. had committed Medicaid fraud well before we acquired it. And we essentially were blacklisted, if you will, for a few years, dealing with the attorney general and government. We didn't do anything wrong, but we had to clean it up. couldn't get a loan, couldn't do any more acquisitions. And essentially we were playing defense for
couple of years. Couldn't really make a lot of changes because there was just a lot of moving parts from a legal standpoint. ⁓ So we were kind of stuck ⁓ and 2025 we were able to get out of that, get the investigation closed, get our loan paid off, get a new financial partner.
and really start to poise ourselves to, we wanna get back and continue to do some M&A. That's on our goal list for 2026 to do another acquisition this year. But also, we are setting things up to do organic growth as well. ⁓ So there's a lot. So right now we're in a process of restructuring, rebranding. We know that... ⁓
We want to really expand and do a lot of big things. And right now, mean, if you combine the math, we're doing a significant amount of hours, right around 37,000 hours of care per week total. It's a lot of hours. And I want to structure us in a way with my team and I that we're putting in place. We want to be able to have, you know, get the 50 as the next goal, and then from there to 100, right? Which I know sounds ambitious, but I think we have the team in place to do it. And so the moves are making.
