Stop -Before Starting Geriatric Care Management Business – Do a Competition Survey

September 24, 2019

If you are thinking of starting private geriatric care management, a competition survey is critical to decide if you can make a profit in this business.

You are surveying who your competition is in the geographic area you want to serve. You are discovering if you can achieve market share in the area you choose to serve.

You want to create a survey in excel that tracks the individual care manager’s in your services area, and find out what their hourly fee is, do they include homecare, what geriatric care management services does each GCM offer, do they answer in two rings, how is their customer service, are they on call 24 hrs a day, are their care managers certified.

Use a staff member or outside person to be a secret shopper and make the calls, as you are doing market research. You must find someone who feels comfortable impersonating someone else. You need to give that person a customer story- they are a daughter looking for services in your area and calling around and a description of the fake mother and her problems

This will also tell you if the local market is too saturated for your new business to compete with the other care management agencies. It will test whether you can make a profit- can you make money, pay your bills, actually go to the next step while doing good?

Fewer businesses are failing in 2019 for many reasons. One is the tendency of would-be entrepreneurs to evaluate business opportunities more carefully before taking the plunge, by doing a competition survey. Potential company founders are more selective than they used to be. This means fewer marginal companies – businesses whose products are not needed or whose markets are already being served by other businesses – are being formed. As a result, the average American company is stronger and more likely to survive than it once was. This means doing a competition survey to find out if your product care management is really needed in your market and are too many geriatric care management competitors, in your area for you to successfully compete as a new business.

Learn how to do your market sizing and competition survey and discover whether you have enough customers in your area to start your care management business. Don’t Guess and fail.

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How to Do A Competition Survey
How to Learn GCM Financial Literacy
How to Give GCM Concierge Service
How to Bill 85% of your time
What GCM Products Services to Sell
SIDESTEP THE 8 OUT OF 10 ENTREPRENEURS WHO START BUSINESSES AND FAIL WITHIN THE FIRST 18 MONTHS
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Caregiver Assessment- When The Caregiver Loses Sense of Self

September 22, 2019

One Homeostatic System

When you assess an older client with a family caregiver, you really have two clients. The needs of the family caregiver are different than the needs of the care receiver and the geriatric care manager or aging professional must differentiate those needs to make sure the care receiver’s functional and psychosocial needs are met. The care receiver and the family caregiver are one homeostatic system encompassing the whole aging family. To keep that family healthy and whole, in the middle of swirling care crisis, the care manager must first recognize that there are multiple clients including the person who gives or supervises care. In a health care insult, family members who give care are often referred to by the inanimate wooden term “ resources”. They have also been referred to as “ informants “.

Stripping Caregivers Personhood

This stripping of personhood denudes them of their status as individuals and melts them into the caregivers, thus breeds professional ignorance, like the crowd who watched the emperor with no clothes. We are blind to caregiver’s humanity and thus their own needs.

Seld-Esteem Vanishes With Caregiving

Many family caregivers lose their self-esteem because they fail at so many other parts of their lives when their whole life seems to be taken up by caregiving. They do not get vacations as the care-receiver does not take a break from illness and aging. Often there are few others to give them respite. Caregivers, often they just do not know where to find help or even ask for it. If family caregivers have children and husbands, they are often squeezed between their needs, the needs of the care receiver – thus have no room for their own needs. They are breathless and slogging forward.

Find out more in the YouTube from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

Starting A Geriatric Care Management Business- How Are You Going Make Money?

September 18, 2019

How will you make money with your Aging Life or Care Management Agency?

The answer is through your value proposition. What’s that? It’s a promise of value to be delivered to your GCM or Aging Life customer. It’s the primary reason a client and their family should purchase a product or services from your aging life or geriatric care management agency. In a nutshell, a value proposition is a clear statement that

Explains how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation (relevancy),
Delivers specific benefits (quantified value),
Tells the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition (unique differentiation).

The critical part

You are a Top Tiered GCM or aging life professional who welcomes long-term engagement of customers, who can afford care management and home care for many years. That is part of your value proposition leading to one-time/long-term client engagements because that is how you make money. A long-term income does not appear on your website but in your business plan but it must be believed by every member of your team. The team shows it in how you and your staff serve your customer.

Hire Care managers who understand (and convince yourself) that you want to make money and will bill for all your services. The door to profit is opened by hiring care managers who have no ethical dilemma about billing. You go through that door by employing care managers who are happy to bill clients and do not have to be trained, coaxed or even counseled to bill clients for their billable time.

Make your target market the top 10% who can afford you.

The target market for a private geriatric care management business is not the 65 million families who need those concierge care management services, but the much smaller subset of those families who can afford to hire a GCM or aging life care manager, is willing to pay for the services that GCMs and can actually find their way to you. This subset really represents the top 10% of the economic spectrum and more precisely the top 1% who actually held onto its share of national wealth in the 2008 economic crisis, and may have even gained a bit.

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What GCM Products Services to Sell

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Find out more in the YouTube from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

SIGN -UP For My Newest Free Webinar- 5 Critical Steps To Start a GCM ALCA Business

September 17, 2019

What is a Mission and why is it a Critical Success Factor in Beginning or Adding an Aging Life or GCM business?

A mission is a – tool for communicating fundamental business objectives,

Part of your mission must state that you are 100% clear you are serving high end entitled clients

Read GCM Bob O Toole’s chapter Private Revenue Sources in the Handbook of Geriatric Care 4^th edition on the Fee-Based Geriatric Care Manager.

He shows you about the very limited market you must serve for financial success. That Market is the top 10% who can afford you.

So give a try to rewriting your mission statement – here’s how

Your geriatric care management business plan starts with your mission statement, which should state the core of your business in a few sentences. The mission statement should reflect the goals and values of your organization. It should be short, focused, perhaps only 20 words, written in the present tense, in positive terms, and without qualifiers.

As part of your business plan so you are adding a major part to a document that will allow you to plan your business and perhaps get investors, who will want to be paid back with your profit.

Try a good mission statement on your own that is short focused and those 20 words.

Here is an example :

“Premium care management services and choices delivered by extraordinary health care professionals”

Learn 5 critical success steps to start and run a profitable, GCM business, including marketing to Concierge clients with your mission, from Cathy Cress MSW, the author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care Management now in its 4^th edition.

Sign Up for My Newest Free Webinar

5 Critical Steps to Start and Run a GCM/ALCA Business

THIS WEBINAR BEGINS: Tuesday, October 22 at 2 PM PST Ends 3:15 PM PST

Learn how to transform your GCM entrepreneurial dream into a money-making business with 5 profit driven steps!

How to Do A Competition Survey
How to Learn GCM Financial Literacy
How to Give GCM Concierge Service
How to Bill 85% of your time
What GCM Products Services to Sell
SIDESTEP THE 8 OUT OF 10 ENTREPRENEURS WHO START BUSINESSES AND FAIL WITHIN THE FIRST 18 MONTHS
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Find out more in the YouTube from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

Caregiver Assessment – Ms. Handy the Burnt out Caregiver

September 16, 2019

The Dutiful Daughter Syndrome

A caregiver assessment can reveal the problems of the dutiful daughter syndrome of who daughters take on all the care because in her family ” that was just her fate” . When the caregiver assessment reveals overload, depression, and or burn-out or a caregiver is thinking of placing an elderly parent inappropriately , then the GCM should come to the rescue with alternatives

GCM Coaching Skills Needed

One other choice can be the GCM using coaching skills to help the main caregiver ask adult brothers and sisters for help. Often the communication between brothers and sisters involving parent care is very poor and weak. Sisters especially need help in asking assistance from brothers, and all need help in asking for assistance from estranged siblings. After the help is requested, coaching siblings to say, “Thank you, and I love you,” and then to set up the new caregiving system, which is an expanded circle of care, is a primary GCM job.

Coaching Sharing the Care Between a Family

The issue of how the family can fairly share the caregiving with the primary family caregiver may be a key issue that can be discussed after a caregiver assessment. To offer the main caregiver respite, periodically one family member could take the care receiver for a weekend. Another may foot the bill for formal paid caregiving rather than do direct care; one may handle all bill paying using an online bill-paying account and have the care receiver’s mail forwarded to them.

One family member could manage a social media group, like a Facebook page, or organize a chat room dedicated to the older adult where friends can communicate with the person. One family member could set up a caregivers’ sharing site such as through Lotsa Helping Hands . One may do a family newsletter summarizing the caregiving month. A family member or friend who is tech savvy could set up all caregiving websites, calendars, emails, and videoconferencing needed by the family. One family member could manage ongoing house repairs for the care receiver. The idea is to be creative, meet the care receiver’s needs, and divide tasks up so that long-distance and local family members can share the tasks according to their abilities, skills, time available, location, and preferences. This is called striking a balance in the family.

Watch Ms Handy Almost Going Over The Edge

Watch my YOU TUBE channel to how GCM coaches Ms, Handy , after a caregiver assessment , when she requested help as an overwrought family caregiver who is is going to place her Dad because she cannot ask for help.

Caregiver Assessment – Ms. Handy the Burnt out Caregiver

The Dutiful Daughter Syndrome

GCM Coaching Skills Needed

Coaching Sharing the Care Between a Family

Watch Ms Handy Almost Going Over The Edge

Contact

Connect with Cathy

Get Cathy’s “10 Critical Success Steps to a Profitable Aging Life or GCM Business”

One Homeostatic System

Stripping Caregivers Personhood

Seld-Esteem Vanishes With Caregiving

Find out more in the YouTube from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

How will you make money with your Aging Life or Care Management Agency?

The critical part

Make your target market the top 10% who can afford you.

THIS WEBINAR BEGINS: Tuesday, October 22 at 2 PM PST Ends 3:15 PM PST

Learn how to transform your GCM entrepreneurial dream into a money-making business with 5 profit driven steps!

How to Do A Competition Survey

How to Learn GCM Financial Literature

How to Give GCM Concierge Service

How to Bill 85% of your time

What GCM Products Services to Sell

Find out more in the YouTube from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

What is a Mission and why is it a Critical Success Factor in Beginning or Adding an Aging Life or GCM business?

Find out more in the YouTube from My Geriatric Care 1 Channel.

The Dutiful Daughter Syndrome

GCM Coaching Skills Needed

Coaching Sharing the Care Between a Family

Watch Ms Handy Almost Going Over The Edge

Contact

Connect with Cathy

Get Cathy’s “10 Critical Success Steps to a Profitable Aging Life or GCM Business”