Home Care Strategy Lab

#78 Does this sound like your agency?

• You’re still doing almost everything yourself.
• You have one or two office employees.
• Your processes are still evolving.
• Every new hire feels expensive.
• Growth still depends heavily on you, the owner.

You know you need more help—but you also need to make the right hires, assign the right responsibilities, and build the right infrastructure before you and your team burn out.

This session will help you understand what your agency needs now, what can wait, and how to build an office team that supports your next stage of growth.

• Debbie Miller on LinkedIn
• Download the Build Workbook 
• Learn more about Helper Heroes VAs for home care
• Book a 1-1 with Helper Heroes team

#77 Most Medicaid billing problems begin long before a claim is submitted, with breakdowns in eligibility, authorization, scheduling, EVV, documentation, payer setup, or coding. Julio Barea, founder of the Home Care Revenue Institute, explains why agencies need to think beyond billing and manage the entire revenue cycle from intake through payment. He walks through the controls behind a clean claim, including how to verify authorized hours, reduce EVV exceptions, and catch problems before they become denials. Julio also shares the daily, weekly, and monthly cadence agencies should follow, along with critical KPIs like denial rate, payment time, EVV acceptance, and scheduled versus authorized hours. He closes with practical ways agency owners can better support their billers and develop them into trained revenue cycle management specialists.

• Julio Barea on LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected]
• Home Care Revenue Institute
• Home Care Revenue Specialist Certifications
• Slide Deck that goes along with the episode

Sponsors:

• Reel Home Care Consulting / reelhomecareconsulting.com

#76 - More revenue doesn’t automatically solve cash flow—especially when payroll is weekly and payers can take 30, 60, or even 90 days to reimburse. Domenic Colavito, co-founder and COO of the $15 million OurCare Health, breaks down lines of credit, payroll funding, factoring, asset-based lending, SBA loans, and equity financing. He explains how an agency’s size, payer mix, profitability, collection time, and growth goals determine which options are actually available—and which are worth the cost. Domenic also explains factoring in simple terms and shares how predictable cash flow helped OurCare grow from roughly $6 million to $10 million without giving up equity or worrying about weekly payroll. The conversation covers the risks of financing, the billing problems it can expose, and what owners should clean up before approaching a financial partner.

• Domenic Colavito on LinkedIn
• [email protected] 
• Greeley Capital / www.greeleycapital.com/thelab
• Mention the LAB and get discounted financing for the first 3 months 

Sponsors:

• Helper Heroes / https://helperheroes.com 

#75 Keyur Shah entered home care with no ownership or healthcare experience and grew Senior Helpers of Coastal Orange County to 1,000 weekly hours in just 20 months. He walks through the agency’s growth month by month—from reaching 300 hours in Month 3 and becoming profitable in Month 9 to generating $700,000 in Year 1. Keyur explains why he opened with an office manager, added a VA recruiter in Month 4, hired a full-time scheduler near 500 hours, and waited until Month 18 to hand off client care. He also shares the ~$150,000 investment it took to reach operational breakeven, the impact of sudden client losses, and why consistent referrals took more than two years of networking. His biggest lesson applies to owners at every stage: don’t wait to grow before you hire—hire the team that can create and sustain the growth.

• Keyur Shah on LinkedIn 
• Email: [email protected] 
• Senior Helpers of Coastal Orange County

Sponsors:

• Vitable
• Reel Home Care Consulting

#74 Tribute Home Care has no engineers, so Andrew Dobson stepped up and is helping build AI tools in-house that collectively save 300+ hours per month. He explains how a scheduling dashboard evolved into an availability analyzer that helps staff new cases faster at 90–95% caregiver utilization. Tribute also used a Viv-built voice agent to fill 75% of its open weekend visits in an early test. Andrew shares how they condensed a five-system lead process into one workflow and reduced two days of financial reporting to a button press. He offers practical advice for finding the right AI projects, developing an internal champion, validating outputs, and keeping humans involved wherever judgment and relationships matter.

• Andrew Dobson on LinkedIn
• [email protected] 
• Tribute Home Care
• Claude Code

Sponsors:

• Phoebe—AI scheduling teammate that fills 75% of shifts in under 15 minutes
• Reel Home Care Consulting—my recommended consultant for startups focused on differentiation and delivering a hospitality-like experience

#73 After six home care companies merged, Caregivers of America was left with six ways of doing things, costly process gaps, and no clear ownership of the full client journey. Regional Administrator Jenni Scherer explains how the company rebuilt operations around five stages of the client journey: FirstTake, InTake, UpTake, CareTake, and ReTake. She breaks down the touch-points behind the model, including an in-home visit that converts close to 99% of prospects, five coordinator calls during the first 30 days, and regular in-person visits for VIP clients receiving 30 or more hours of care each week. Jenni also shares why the journey shouldn’t end at discharge: returning former clients have become Caregivers of America’s second-largest referral source, followed by referrals from clients’ families and friends.

• Jenni Scherer’s email: [email protected] 
• Caregivers of America
• Take5 Model ’T’ Chart

Sponsors:

• Reel Home Care Consulting // https://reelhomecareconsulting.com

#72 Saying yes to every family might increase revenue, but one wrong-fit client can cost your agency caregivers, reputation, and weeks of scheduling headaches. Becky Reel explains the waitlist mindset she used to protect her team, strengthen the client experience, and create demand—and why a true waitlist is fundamentally different from a staffing problem. She shares the hard lines her agency established around shift minimums, geography, caregiver safety, unrealistic expectations, and families who began negotiating from the first conversation. We also break down what a hospitality-driven intake call sounds like and why every office employee should be prepared to handle one. Becky closes with four super powerful mindset shifts that will help your agency become easier to refer, more memorable, and impossible to confuse with the competition.

• Becky Reel on LinkedIn
• [email protected] 
• Reel Home Care Consulting
• Becky’s Dinner Series 

Sponsors:

• Vitable Health - https://learn.vitablehealth.com/lab

#71 Total Care Connections CEO Daniel Stringer shares how his team supports a workforce of roughly 1,000 active employees delivering 17,000 hours of care each week. He breaks down a paid-leave program that provides six weeks after childbirth plus two weeks of parental leave for birth, foster, and adoptive parents. He explains the company’s employee relief fund and how it has awarded 264 grants totaling more than $200,000, with employees eligible for up to $1,000 annually. Daniel also shares how moving to self-funded health insurance helped the company keep employee costs flat despite receiving a 76% renewal increase—and reduced some employees’ prescription costs from $500–$700 per month to $50 or even zero. This episode gives home care owners three tangible ways to invest in caregivers and start building benefits that meet our workforce needs.

Connect with Daniel

• Daniel Stringer on LinkedIn
• Daniel’s email: [email protected] 
• Total Care Connections

Employee Relief Fund

• Total Care Connections Grant Circle powered by Canary
• Canary—emergency relief fund solution to aide your team members in times of crisis 

Self-Insured Health Care Partners

• To set up Self Insured Health Plan Options: https://www.thegibsonedge.com/services/employee-benefits

Vendors they use in the health plan:

• SHARX: https://sharxplan.com/
• Auxient: https://www.auxiant.com/
• Pareto: https://paretohealth.com/
• Procedures/Imaging: https://www.valenzhealth.com/
• Pharmacy Benefits Manager: https://truerx.com/

Sponsors:

• Vitable Health
• Helper Heroes—mention the LAB

#70 A typical $4-5M home care agency usually has the team, infrastructure, and capital to consider their next growth move—opening a new office, adding a new payer contract, or investing in a strategic leader. Adam Shriver, Client CFO at The Home Care CPAs works with dozens of agencies to evaluate revenue, profitability, and operational stability going into making these large growth decisions. He walks through the evaluation he conducts, the questions he asks, gross margin vs operating margin, and the other factors agencies should consider before going down a specific growth path—if you’re considering a new office or new payer contract, this episode is highly relevant.  

• Adam Shriver on LinkedIn 
• Adam’s email: [email protected] 
• The Home Care CPAs
• Margin Matters—a home care-specific online financial community for owners or finance roles (free until the end of ’26) 

Sponsors:

• Phoebe—best AI scheduling agent for home care
• Vitable Health—health plans for home care that your team will actually use

#69 Most home care agencies are drowning in reports but still struggling to identify problems before they impact growth. Krystal Wilkinson, President of Adultcare Assistance Home Care, shares the 18 core KPIs she and her leadership team review every week across recruiting, scheduling, care management, sales, and HR & finance—and explains why leading indicators matter far more than monthly reports. You'll learn why her agency targets a 25–27 hour average client census, aims to hire caregivers in under 7 days (currently averaging 9 days), tracks 25 meaningful referral visits per week, and uses data to predict staffing needs, revenue dips, and referral trends before they happen. Krystal also explains how her team uses AI-powered dashboards, why every department owns specific numbers, and how they've refined their scorecard over 15 years of trial and error.

• Krystal Wilkinson / [email protected]
• Adultcare Assistance 

Sponsors:

• Vitable Health - learn.vitablehealth.com/lab