I wish I knew

When you started opening AFC homes, residential assisted living, maybe you were like me. You wanted to provide better care than others and make a living for yourself.

How hard could it be to find the right residents, the right employees, the right balance to stay open to provide senior care or foster care for adults with disabilities. How hard could it be to accomplish the mission we set out to achieve?

Well…..to be perfectly honest, I wish I would have known a few more things before I started.

Maybe you will find encouragement in what took us a 12 years to figure out to prevent making the same mistakes we did. 

Don’t give up

You’re not broken. You’re not alone. I wish I knew there are good days and bad days as an adult foster home provider. Dance on the good days. Know you will make it through on the bad ones. Be open to making changes at your adult foster care community so there are more good days than bad. You are making a difference!

Diversification

When one of the CMH agencies we were contracted with for ALL of our residents dropped their rates extremely during an economic downturn, it put our adult foster care homes so deep in the red, that we were within 3 months of having to shut down all of our homes. By following these steps were able to get back in the green and on our way to a profit before the doors needed to close. 

• • We took quick action.
  • We diversified with other agencies
  • We found new referral sources.
  • We found ways to cut costs.

Bring resources to the home

Gas is expensive and finding staff to cover the home for every appointment is sometimes challenging. Bringing resources inside the home helped gain back valuable time needed to get some sleep at night and less disruption to the residents in the home. Some of these ideas included bringing activities, doctors, and skilled nursing to the home and using automation tools for hiring and managing meds correctly.

Don’t believe the answers you hear

Have you ever hired a caregiver out of desperation because they answered the questions right over the phone? I did. I learned, don’t do that. Creating a streamlined process to create the ad, interview, screen, and hire right saved A LOT of headaches, reduced turnover, AND improved the care provided to the residents.

Get out of your own way

News flash – I wish I knew it’s impossible to do everything exceptionally well without a strong team and support system. I would avoid making courageous decisions that were impacting the success of the homes. We found these steps relieved the emotional stress I was carrying and stopped the bleeding of energy and happiness:

• • Hire the right people to help.
  • Let go of the bad eggs.
  • Empower the capable staff to take on more responsibility.
  • Learn strategies to communicate better.
  • Cut wasteful costs.