Hospice Advisors Case Study
Title: Building Your Billable Hours
Company: Personal Care Company Plymouth MI
Date: April 5, 2015
Problem: Flat Growth in Billable Hours
Presenting Issues/Challenges:Traditional sales model not generating results.
Plan of Action:This case study is on my own Personal Care Home Health Care Company.
Billable hours are the economic engine that drive Personal Care Home Health (Private Duty) companies. I know this well as I own a Personal Care Home Health Company called Homewatch CareGivers and also a company I am part owner of in Moscow Russia, First Home Care.
My challenge over the years has been understanding how best to drive billable hours.
My initial efforts started with a traditional sales model. I had three sales people working the segments of Geriatric Case Managers, ElderLaw Attorneys, Assist Living Communities and the well. Maybe I didn’t have the right people and/or I didn’t do a good job with training, but the results were poor.
Here are 4 action steps I took which started our growth again.
- The first thing I did was build a great online presence for my brand, but more importantly I took the time to educate myself and invested financial resources toward serious Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I met an expert in web development, digital marketing and SEO, Al Baiocchi, the President of FrontPage Interactive. Al helped me develop my website with a focus on maximizing the opportunities to rank all of my website 127 pages on the first page of a the major search engines.
- The second thing I did was invest in working with Caring.Com, an on-line referral service. I made sure we obtained clients reviews and posted them on Caring.Com which helped strengthen our position. I also work with ElderCare Link which is another on-line referral service.
- The third thing I did was to hire a publicist. The objective was to help enhance our visibility and establish Homewatch as an authority (not just an expert) in personal care services. This lead to people both accessing our web site and directly calling the office.
- Lastly, I employed a Public Relations/Communication professional to help support the publicist work occurring as well as establish our presence on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Outcome/Results:
Here are a few preliminary results:
- In 8-months billable hours grew from 3,500 to over 6,000.
- Last month we received 16 referrals from Caring.Com of which 3 converted to a Start-of-Care. One was a 24-hour Live In Case. The other referrals are on our pending list which we are working on.
- Projections are to end 2015 with 8,000 billable hours.
- The search engine ranking for the 127 pages of our website continues to climb everything and this upward trend has resulted in many page one rankings. SEO is a long term process that requires patience and long term commitment, but here is just one example how my site pages are displaying in the “organic” results of Google:
This type of “organic” or natural search traffic is highly targeted, build long term value and generally results in better lead conversion than Pay-Per-Click advertising.