Beth Copeland: Hire Before You’re Ready, A Counter-Intuitive Growth Strategy

0:02: Romi Gubes: Hi Beth.

0:03: Beth Copeland: Hello, how are you?

0:04: Romi Gubes: I’m well, thank you. How are you?

0:06: Beth Copeland: I’m good. Thank you for joining me.

0:08: Romi Gubes: Thanks for having me, and thank you for letting us at Sensi be a part of your agency journey. An important one. We’ve been very excited to support you in the last couple of years now, I guess, right?

0:20: Beth Copeland: 1.5 years, yeah.

0:22: Romi Gubes: Very inspired to see your agency’s growth. First of all, I just want to start with if you can introduce yourself real quick to our audience and then we’ll dive right in.

0:33: Beth Copeland: Sure. So I’m Beth Copeland. I’ve been doing this since 2014. I have a master’s in nursing, so I’ve done a little bit of consulting, kind of been all over the map doing things, and finally found my passion. It took a little while, but I finally did it. It was being exposed to this role and then realizing that making a difference is the best way to have a career. There’s nothing better than knowing every day you go home and you’ve changed somebody’s life in a small way. It’s a nice, wholesome feeling instead of just butting your head sometimes against the wall and working for corporations.

1:08: Romi Gubes: It’s amazing to see that you remember that as you scale, and it’s not just something that you are passionate about in your first years and then dissolves. In terms of your growth, you’re a pretty large agency right now, right?

1:26: Beth Copeland: Yeah, but it’s funny, I never really think of it that way. I just look at this year by year and look at where we are from where we were last year or the year before. In 2014, we started with less than 100 clients, about 80, and then we grew well over that. Mostly what we’ve grown in, in terms of our hours, is the length of hours that we care for our clients. We used to have a lot of small-hour cases, so you could have a lot of clients, but yet your hours were very low. We really worked on increasing the hours with our clients to better provide care. That’s just a piece of the puzzle in terms of looking at how we do that, who do we choose, what does it look like, and how do we provide the best care for them? Then they want us longer, and with that, you grow to where we’re running at about 7,600 hours a week. We’ve come from 1,000 to a lot, significantly. It’s taken time though, there’s been ups and downs. COVID was interesting, but we made it through.

2:39: Romi Gubes: But I’m sure time is not everything. I’m sure you implemented some very good processes into your agency, and you had some impactful lessons learned throughout the journey. Scaling is hard. You need to do it correctly without impacting quality.

2:57: Beth Copeland: That was the biggest thing. It took us a little while to realize what that looks like. You don’t wait to hire what you need in your office to handle more hours. You do it ahead of time and you grow into it because when you’re behind, that’s when quality suffers. That was one of the biggest things we learned: don’t wait, go ahead and staff ahead. Even though it’s a little harder initially, you will then have the capability and capacity to grow without pain, and that’s very significant.

3:27: Romi Gubes: So today you’re trying to have enough caregivers and forecast growth with that, right? It’s very challenging.

3:41: Beth Copeland: That’s our newest challenge because when you get to the size we are, you have to find these quality caregivers that are out there somewhere, but they could be working for somebody else. What makes us different and what makes us a better place to work are things we’re having to concentrate on more than we’ve ever had to in the past.

4:00: Romi Gubes: How many caregivers do you have today?

4:02: Beth Copeland: We have probably about 260 at the moment, but we can always use more. We spend a lot of money on overtime, and it is something that we do for our caregivers. We charge the clients. Usually, this is to keep them—they have to have a living wage, and sometimes having overtime changes everything for them. There are a lot of other agencies that won’t do it.

4:33: Romi Gubes: I feel like if I’m looking at the journey of an agency, from 0 to 2 million in revenue is one phase that handles specific challenges. Then you have 2 million all the way up to maybe 6 or 7 million. And then it’s a whole another phase.

4:55: Beth Copeland: Yeah, we’re in the third phase, moving over 10 million.

5:01: Romi Gubes: This is where you’re saying caregiver hiring is always a challenge. But as you scale, it’s hard to keep up with the pace because the market is limited at the end of the day, and I guess it’s also hard to keep the quality.

5:19: Beth Copeland: Retention is everything, keeping your good ones. It’s that turnover that will get you; it is just a lot of work. How do we decrease the work by keeping them with us longer? This office has been open for 22 or 23 years now, and we have several caregivers that have been with us since day one. Those are the ones we want to embrace. We look at how many have been with us 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, and then the 20-year mark, and we have a significant number. We’ve done parties and it’s fun to celebrate them, but when you look back, they’re the reason we’ve been so successful. It’s not us or what we’re doing in the office; it’s what they have done to help our clients.

6:03: Romi Gubes: Would you agree that there are two different churn reasons for caregivers: one bucket that is unavoidable and one that is avoidable?

6:13: Beth Copeland: The unavoidable would be if they moved to a different state, decided not to work in home care anymore, or went and got another degree. If they’re an RN going to work in the hospital, we celebrate those and we’re happy for them because they’ve grown. We love that for them.

6:35: Romi Gubes: And the avoidable churn, what would you say that is? What things can an agency put in place to avoid most of the churn?

6:43: Beth Copeland: Communication. Good communication, listening to what they have to say, following up, and returning their calls. You’d think that’s very simple, but as you get larger, it’s much more complex. There are a lot of moving parts and you can’t forget them. They’re really critical—as critical as the clients. A lot of times people do forget. Somebody forgot to cancel their shift, and then they get a message and they’re irritated with you. Or they want something and nobody calls them back. After a while, they feel like you don’t care and they’ll go somewhere else very quickly because they have a lot of other opportunities, a lot more than just us. How do you do this in a way that’s effective and lets them know they’re cared for and appreciated? It’s important.

7:28: Romi Gubes: Communication is a very big word. It entails so many things. It speaks about whether you are giving enough support, giving enough recognition, and if you are available—like answering the phone and being there to listen. It’s all of those different pieces. Did I forget anything?

7:50: Beth Copeland: Just even about their schedule. They’ll tell you, “I would like to do X, Y, and Z.” Did you listen? Did you make it happen? A lot of times it’ll go in one ear and out the other, and then they’re wondering why they weren’t taken off a shift when they already told you. There are details involved in that listening and communicating back.

8:08: Romi Gubes: Out of those four buckets that we just mentioned—the fourth one being accommodating to their needs, wills, and flexibility—where do you think that if you’re able to crack the code, things will change dramatically?

8:26: Beth Copeland: I think the ability to respond very, very quickly to them would be the best thing ever. The thing is, when you have the phones ringing and there’s so much going on, you can’t always get back to them immediately. If there’s an ability to get back to them right when they need you in some way so that they know they’ve been heard, that helps. The texting platform with Sensi has been fantastic because they get a message back immediately. They know that somebody’s looking at this. That has been really instrumental in helping them understand that we get it, because it’s now prioritizing stuff for us. We had another platform where we lost people’s comments all the time as it rolled down a list of 100 people typing something out that day. But with the Sensi platform, it’s allowed us to keep the ones that haven’t been read or that are urgent. We can look at those and respond really quickly. That’s been helpful. Little things, but they make a big difference.

9:21: Romi Gubes: I love hearing that. How many people do you have today in your office?

9:26: Beth Copeland: There are 18 of us, including myself, across two offices in two states. But we work out of one office a couple of times a week so that we’re all together, because we’re all doing the same thing and we’re sharing a lot of the same caregivers.

9:40: Romi Gubes: How do you make sure that there is a sync between everyone handling caregivers, so everyone is aware of the journey the caregiver is going through with your agency?

9:52: Beth Copeland: We have a weekly meeting to discuss issues, what’s come up, and any complaints or concerns. We find out how it happened, what we did, what we can do differently, and whether it was our fault or not. That way, the whole office is there together, and that’s the one day we’re all listening to what we can do better as a whole group. If we’re growing, we look at what next week looks like, what we need to make that work, and what our challenges are going to be so that we can be at our best. We problem-solve every week to do that.

10:31: Romi Gubes: I love it that you brought up the Sensi communication platform because this is one of the motivations for us to build that. We understood there is a huge gap there that can really move the needle. Do you have any other examples of things you’ve implemented to move the needle on caregiver satisfaction?

10:52: Beth Copeland: Just using Sensi in general. One example is we had a client that fell and got the call in the middle of the night. The client wouldn’t answer, so we called the caregiver. The caregiver answered, was totally rattled by the whole thing, and was so upset. She was so thankful that I called. We had to call 911, and I stayed with her on the phone the whole time. Afterwards, she said she didn’t know what she would have done. If we hadn’t had Sensi to alert us to what was going on, we wouldn’t have been able to help the client and help our caregiver feel safe in her job. That’s a big thing to them—that they feel safe in what they’re doing and know that somebody’s available to them. It was in the middle of the night, but I was talking to her and stayed on the phone for a long time. It’s instrumental in making a difference because they will tell people how they’re treated.

11:40: Romi Gubes: It’s also a very lonely job if you think about it.

11:43: Beth Copeland: It is, you’re alone a lot. You’re alone with a senior who sometimes cannot communicate or communicates in a way that’s not always very nice, and you’re not always appreciated by them. It’s a very difficult job.

11:58: Romi Gubes: And you have no one to speak to about that.

12:01: Beth Copeland: We spend a lot of time on the phone with caregivers during the day. Our coordinators let them vent, talk, and tell us what’s going on in their lives. Some people don’t have anybody to talk to at all, and we are their family in a lot of ways, but you have to have the time to do it.

12:18: Romi Gubes: So you’re trying not to be transactional with the caregivers, and really be there for them and support them.

12:23: Beth Copeland: We know about them, their lives, and what’s hurt them. If a client passes away, give them a week and don’t bother them. Somebody else might say, “No, call me right away, I need to work.” We get to know who they are as a person and how to respond to them so that they know we recognize them. We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from our long-term caregivers that this is what’s made us so special and why they haven’t gone anywhere else.

12:49: Romi Gubes: Obviously you have 260 caregivers, which means you’re doing many things right. But I’m sure you also have some lessons learned on things you didn’t do as you wished, within the standards that you hold yourself to. Do you have any concrete examples of something that went wrong with a caregiver?

13:12: Beth Copeland: Yeah, there are times we’re just not perfect. We try to do a really good job of screening them and trying to figure out what their motivation is for working for us. Some are very good at pulling the wool over your eyes. It requires staying in touch enough with the caregiver and the client to know what’s going on. What we don’t want ever is to hear from a client that a caregiver came and did X, Y, and Z. It’s happened, and we’re like, “How did we let that happen? How did we not know?” It means we weren’t keeping in touch with somebody enough, and again, it all boils down to communication. How many times do you touch these people? A lot of times you get complacent when nobody’s complaining. They just go to work every day, clock in, don’t call out, the clients don’t say anything, and then afterwards you hear something and think, “Oh my gosh, how did we not catch that sooner?” The more clients you have, the easier it is to let it go if it’s not the squeaky wheel. With the caregivers, it’s important that we really keep in touch.

14:20: Romi Gubes: There is a lot that is noticeable and you can see or hear, whether it’s from the client or the caregiver sharing. The most challenging piece is: what am I missing? What do I not know?

14:34: Beth Copeland: Exactly, that’s a big piece. You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s huge. I think about it a lot because that’s where we’re going to meet challenges if we can problem-solve ahead of the game. That’s why I love Sensi; it helps us think through a lot of things that we haven’t thought through before that can be done in a better way. It allows us to spend our time not doing tasks, but actually doing the work that matters, which is our relationships. That’s what our business is about, and we really pride ourselves on knowing our clients and our caregivers. When we fail, it’s because we didn’t have the time to do what we should be doing.

15:20: Romi Gubes: I think home care is one of the most challenging businesses in terms of anticipating things, because you’re in the dark. Your workforce is out there in the field, you have no visibility, and it’s not only about the client but also about the caregiver. You’re not sure what they’re going through. In this balance between caregivers and clients today, you feel like caregivers are more of a blocker for your growth than demand, am I correct?

15:58: Beth Copeland: Yeah, the demand—knock on wood—we’ve been in this market for a long time. They know us, we’re well known, and people call us. I’m not marketing per se. We’re very fortunate, but we worked very hard to get there. The biggest barrier to growth is finding quality caregivers. I’m not just going to say caregivers, because they’re out there. We’re looking for quality caregivers, and the amount of work trying to find the ones we really need or want is time-intensive. We’re finding we have to root through a lot more than we used to.

16:36: Romi Gubes: One of the things I face with Sensi is constantly being challenged by our board. They ask me, “If you had an unlimited amount of money, would you be able to solve that?” If you had that, would it help?

16:50: Beth Copeland: It would help some with caregiver retention, absolutely. I can think of a lot of things we’d like to do that we’re just not able to do because of time or resources. Every day the state requires new training and new things that we’re responsible for paying for. Health insurance has skyrocketed. I have 30 people that I’m taking care of with health insurance, however, there are 230 that don’t take advantage of it. Because it costs so much for those 30, it utilizes resources that I can’t use somewhere else. There are a lot of things I’d rather do with that money, believe me. Part of money is paying enough people to do the outreach that you want to do and having a staff that is caring and good. Every day is looking at your resources, where you are, and how you keep all of these people employed. When I go to bed at night, I think about that. It’s my responsibility to take care of them and take care of my clients. It is a job like no other. My mom asks me all the time when I’m retiring because it’s stressful. It’s not non-stressful, but at the same time, when you make a difference and somebody calls you crying and thankful, you go home satisfied. We were at a Christmas dinner with the whole team celebrating, and these people walked up and asked if it was a work dinner. We said yeah, and they asked where we work. We said Griswold, and one of the women started crying and said, “You took care of my brother and you guys were absolutely amazing.” Then we’re all crying. How many times do you get that with your work? It’s rare. Those are the little moments that change everything for you and make you realize why we come to work every day. That’s our “why.”

18:52: Romi Gubes: We’re in one of those industries where the challenge is as high as the reward. Both of them are very high, and it can take you down some days, but then it can uplift you dramatically when you’re experiencing something like that. We feel it also at Sensi. Obviously, we’re not in the field, so we’re not experiencing that firsthand, but we’re experiencing it through our partners sharing those stories. It’s an amazing place to be. I didn’t fully understand that when I started to build the company. I understood we’d do something good for the world, but I didn’t understand how it would impact my day-to-day and my employees’ day-to-day, and the DNA that it would create.

19:37: Beth Copeland: It’s been monumental for us. Our growth really in the last year and a half we can directly attribute to Sensi. We implemented it, we weren’t great at first, but we got a lot better once we found the “why” of having it and utilized the data. We grew 36% in revenue growth in a little over a year. It was momentous, and a lot of this was because of the data we had and the communication we have with our clients that we didn’t have before. Someone falls, I call them in the middle of the night—yes, it’s inconvenient, but they are so appreciative and they remember us. Those are the things that have allowed us to market in places that we’ve never been able to get into before. They’re thrilled that we’re taking care of their clients in a way that nobody else is doing. The tool has made what we do more valuable to everybody, including our caregivers and our referral sources.

20:32: Romi Gubes: Thank you for sharing that. It gives me chills. Also, 36% growth at this level is exceptional.

20:38: Beth Copeland: It was why we never thought we could ever do it.

20:41: Romi Gubes: It’s exceptional. And hearing you say demand is not an issue is something not everyone can take for granted.

20:54: Beth Copeland: We work for it, and satisfaction is key. We pride ourselves on our Activated Insights results, and that we’re a provider of choice and an employer of choice. Those are important to us, and we get there by having tools that actually allow us to be better at what we do. It’s hard when you start getting a mass of people; it changes the dynamics of what you do every day and how you do it well. It’s easy to forget little things, but you just can’t.

21:26: Romi Gubes: How do you look at a moat? I know that many agencies are popping up around you in the last few years, mainly after COVID, but also in the last couple of years we are seeing a huge growth of newer agencies. Obviously, you have credibility, time in the market, and a story told for years, which is a moat by itself. But how do you think about that further in terms of continuing to move your presence out and owning the market?

22:08: Beth Copeland: Again, word of mouth has just been it for us. One bad review goes so far. One good review goes far, but bad news travels and people these days can spout it all over the internet. You can’t afford to have it, so word of mouth is so important. You want the neighbor to say, “Oh, you have to use Griswold, they’re the best.” You want the case managers at the hospital to say, “Here’s a list of care providers, only use Griswold, they’re the best.” To make sure you’re out there doing that takes a lot of work and effort.

22:50: Romi Gubes: Do you do something to encourage word of mouth or do you just let it happen organically?

22:56: Beth Copeland: There are certain groups that we reach out to. We have certain referral partners that we’ve worked with for years, and we’re still very close—I’m actually friends with them. We go to lunches or dinners, and I know them personally now. Because of that, they know they can trust us. They know that if something goes wrong, they’ll call me and I’ll fix it. That is such a big piece of the puzzle: who’s accountable, and if something does go wrong, how do you respond? Once you get that out in the community—that something happened but they fixed it—that builds trust. That’s what it really boils down to: who do they trust? If somebody refers to us, they know that we’re going to take really good care of them because we don’t want to let them down.

23:46: Romi Gubes: What I’m hearing is that when you just start your business, there is incremental growth as you build your assets. If you invest in the right things at the beginning, at some point on this graph, you’ll start to see exponential growth because of building relationships and trust for years. Once you accomplish that with the referral sources around you, this is where you’re able to hit that hockey stick growth and see it coming naturally on an ongoing basis. It sounds like you’re now feeling the fruits of things you worked hard on for a long time.

24:35: Beth Copeland: It’s funny, we just had a work conference and we did personality tests that showed these quadrants. They said based on this, you’re probably very good at X, but there’s this bottom quadrant you’re not good at, so don’t do it. Marketing was in my bottom quadrant. Who would have thought that I would own an agency where this is what I’d have to do? I hated marketing. But what I like is people and I love relationships, so I just looked at it a little differently. I don’t want to go cold call or do lunches for physicians. I looked at it differently: I wanted to try to meet the people that were doing the referrals, get them to know me, and work on it that way. That’s how it really took off, and I’m much better at that than general marketing. I don’t want to go stand behind a table and say, “Here’s Griswold.” I loved having Sensi and being able to go to a group of case managers and say, “Look what we can do,” because to me, it’s about what we are providing that makes what we do so valuable. It’s not just saying, “Okay, I’m a home care company, we provide care.” There’s meaning and meaningful information that we can give you on how we’re going to take care of your clients. That was really helpful to us.

25:48: Romi Gubes: I think it’s an amazing lesson learned because you mentioned two different things here. One is understanding your qualities and playing to your strengths. Not many people know how to say that about themselves, especially when starting out. You feel like you have to do everything, although it might be better for you to focus. Find your strengths, double down on them, and slowly find people that will complete you instead of battling against your weaknesses, which is almost impossible.

26:29: Beth Copeland: That’s a good point, because the team you surround yourself with is key. I’m not everything, but the team of people that work for me are remarkable. How do you build a culture in your office of the same traits? I believe we need to care about everybody, but not everybody feels that way. How do you find a group of people that actually feel the same way, who will give back, do anything for these people, and love the caregivers as much as you do? That has taken us a long time to find—a really great, cohesive team. We just kept working at it. If people started dragging us down, we recognized it wasn’t a good fit and that maybe it was time for them to go somewhere else. But that’s also hard. It’s again taking a look at yourself and figuring out where you fit into this dynamic and what you’re looking for in your team to take care of everybody.

27:28: Romi Gubes: So you’re saying it’s not only knowing your strengths, it’s also knowing your team’s strengths and building according to that.

27:34: Beth Copeland: Yeah, build on each other’s strengths. Not everybody’s going to be the same. Look at who’s doing what they should be doing versus maybe what they were hired for. We have people that we hired to do one thing, and they were not good at that, but we had something else that was going to work really well for them, and they’re excelling. You have to look every day; it’s an evolving process.

27:56: Romi Gubes: It’s very similar to how we think about manpower and human capital at Sensi. It’s super important for us to make sure people are set up for success, and that only happens when they are doubling down on their strengths. Also, you have to look at a team not just by hiring someone for a role, but hiring someone for a role within a complete team and seeing how they interact, manage interfaces, and complement their colleagues. The other thing you mentioned that I find very interesting is finding the right way to go to market according to your strengths. You said you hate marketing, but there is another way to look at it: you did do marketing, but marketing that was right for you, which is relationship-based marketing. There are all kinds of ways to go to market—it’s not just social media campaigns, SEO, or marketing agencies. It’s also this organic legwork.

29:20: Beth Copeland: Yeah, there are so many different ways to look at it. That’s why I love meeting with other innovative leaders in this field, because they’ve probably thought of something I haven’t, and I love hearing what they’ve done. Being able to be around people that have done it differently helps, because just because we’ve done it this way does not mean you always have to do it that way.

29:45: Romi Gubes: Every market, point in time, and owner is different. You have to put a recipe in place that fits this specific environment. It’s a super important thing to keep in mind as you build your business. Sometimes we try to follow playbooks and it’s clunky, and we don’t understand why. This is maybe the reason: because it doesn’t fit our specific case.

30:10: Beth Copeland: Absolutely. What are your strengths and how do they look? There’s a lot of introspection. We’ve had disastrous team days because I just wasn’t at my best, and I had to step back and look at how I was affecting what things looked like. There’s been a lot of self-reflection over the years. This journey made me very humble and very vulnerable at the same time.

30:43: Romi Gubes: What are your support systems? Where do you go to vent or get uplifted?

30:51: Beth Copeland: Friends. I have good, wonderful friends. I’ve been very fortunate. We live in a smaller community and we’re very tight-knit. But even my team members—we’re really close. A lot of times we just sit there after work, talk, chat, and laugh. Sometimes you just have to laugh because it’s so hard that you can’t even believe it happened. Our motto is, “You can’t make this up.” Sometimes that can be team-building when you sit down, look at something pretty horrible, laugh about what was funny, and then figure out how we’re going to fix it. You get through it, but friendship is important.

31:32: Romi Gubes: So it’s actually people outside of your professional network.

31:37: Beth Copeland: Some of them I’ve dragged in because I needed help, so now they are working with us and understand what we’re going through. But typically, it’s just being with friends, getting away, and talking about other people’s jobs and what they’re going through. Then I realize a lot of times that I’m pretty fortunate. I am my own boss. I hear these other stories about bosses getting moved over and people having to report to someone else, and I don’t have to worry about that. It makes me think about what I am doing to everyone else in my team when they say that to me. The cliché of the neighbor’s grass always being greener—it’s not always.

32:29: Romi Gubes: Do you have any mentors or coaches when it comes to home care specifically? Did you ever have someone?

32:36: Beth Copeland: Well, the person I bought my office from. The story about Jean Griswold is part of the reason I love the franchise so much. The woman that started it had MS, was in a wheelchair, worked at her dining room table with her family, and did it all from the heart. The person that I bought my office from had worked with Jean and had one of the first franchises. She took me to meet Jean when I first started, and Jean wanted to know why I wanted to do this and why I was here. She was very insistent that the people that worked for Griswold had her values, recognizing that there are vulnerable people in terms of the elderly we care for, as well as our caregivers. In between, you need to charge the least amount you can and pay the most amount you can. There’s a livelihood in between there that works, but if you do it for the right reason, what goes around comes around. I truly believe if you just do the right thing, it works, and we’ve been successful because of it. There’s an award within our company named after the lady whose office I purchased, Mary Anne Murray, called the Mary Anne Murray Integrity Award. One office is given it every year, and it is really important because not everybody operates that way.

33:59: Romi Gubes: So you felt this is something that guides your journey every day and is the mindset you’re following.

34:07: Beth Copeland: Absolutely, every day I think about it.

34:10: Romi Gubes: I guess aside from that, you are also communicating with other owners within the community. Is that effective, or what are the main reasons you approach this community?

34:27: Beth Copeland: A lot of them are really good friends at this point. Our annual conference is a lot of fun because we all know each other very well, but we use each other as resources all the time. If we need a form for a program, we ask if someone has it and can share it so I can tweak it instead of starting from scratch. Little things like that. Sometimes it’s just bouncing things off someone who has been doing this a long time when you don’t know what to do. It’s also about being a resource for some of the newer offices. The more successful the newer offices are, the more successful we are as an entire enterprise company. We want our name to be a good name.

35:17: Romi Gubes: It’s amazing that you see it this way and find the time to focus on this effort, because it’s easy to say but hard to follow through with the day-to-day.

35:34: Beth Copeland: After the conference two weeks ago, I have three people that are now interested in Sensi because I was talking about what a profound impact it had on my business. I know a lot of people heard there’s work involved, and I said, “Yeah, there’s work, but here’s how you use it.” Now I have phone calls set up all next week to talk about it. When you believe in what you do and how it works, that’s when things are effective. You can implement any tool, but it’s not effective unless you believe in it, know how to use it correctly, and put the time and effort in.

36:09: Romi Gubes: Do you recall any specific advice that you got along your journey, aside from the amazing story about Griswold, that really impacted you?

36:29: Beth Copeland: It’s probably lots of little things, not one major thing. The biggest thing I have always noticed within our company is that the owners who are involved and are doing it because of a mission to help people are the most successful. You have to figure out what your “why” is. If your “why” matches doing the right thing and feeling the impact you can have on your community, the people you care for, and the caregivers, you can’t not be successful. That’s just my belief.

37:14: Romi Gubes: I totally agree with you. Is there any goal you’re still looking to accomplish that is on your bucket list?

37:27: Beth Copeland: I want to be number one in our company. We have full employment models and independent contractor models, and I want to be number one for both models. That’s my goal before I go out.

37:41: Romi Gubes: You’re super competitive.

37:43: Beth Copeland: Just a little. That’s my goal.

37:49: Romi Gubes: I think when competitiveness combines with having your heart in the right place, it’s a recipe for winning big.

37:55: Beth Copeland: Without that “why,” if it was just about money, it wouldn’t work. You have to go after it for the right reasons. To me, that’s the whole business.

38:08: Romi Gubes: So what are you saying to your mom when she asks you when you’re going to retire?

38:13: Beth Copeland: Not yet. I haven’t hit my goal.

38:20: Romi Gubes: That’s amazing. Shifting gears to a different topic, can you talk to me a little bit about how you think about tech as you scale?

38:34: Beth Copeland: It’s my favorite topic in the world. Everybody laughs at me because I’m such a nerd. I’ve been looking at tech forever. We went down every route and rabbit hole looking at wearables, socks—I interviewed so many companies to find out where they were going and what they were thinking. What we found was that the wearables were just not doable; they just didn’t work. When Sensi came along, I was so excited to have something that was plug-and-play, that could make a difference without clients having to wear it, and yet could give us this tremendous data. For me, tech is not only for caring for our clients but also for streamlining what we’re doing in our office and business as a whole. If we can help with client and caregiver satisfaction and respond to caregivers more rapidly, I’m always on the lookout for technology that can assist. It makes what we do better so that we can continue the personal touch, because that’s what we’re really good at, and the tasks wear us down after a while. If we can get the tasks that don’t need to be done by us out of the way and allow us to spend more time doing what we love to make our product better, that to me is everything.

40:02: Romi Gubes: I know that you’re always looking. I think it’s a very important thing to focus on as we go through this AI transformation, with many different products popping up. Recently, from going to conferences, I can see the overwhelmed eyes of owners going between the different booths, not sure what to approach and how everything comes together. When I figured this out, I built a quick assessment form on how to assess your next technology and whether you should implement it or not. I posted it on LinkedIn, it went viral, and I saw many different people using it because it’s really hard to make the final decision. Can you help me understand how you assess a technology? Maybe go through a specific example of something you looked into and decided not to implement, without mentioning specific vendor names.

41:10: Beth Copeland: In terms of monitoring our clients, I have found some technologies that just don’t seem simple enough, or are so complex or very expensive to utilize that I don’t think they can be broadly applied. I want technology that can be broadly applied to all of our clients in a way that makes sense, where as we grow, it becomes less expensive to provide. In terms of the office and looking at how tasks and work evolve, it really comes down to breaking down what we are doing that we probably don’t need to do, or that we can do differently in a more efficient way. There’s a lot of introspection in terms of how you do things, why you’re doing it, and comparing that to what is offered to see if it makes sense for what you’re doing.

42:18: Romi Gubes: Correct me if I’m wrong, but there is also the compounding effect of how much the tech stack eventually costs you. If you’re putting more and more solutions into a tech stack, it becomes expensive at some point.

42:28: Beth Copeland: It does have to balance, but that’s why you have to look at everything you’re doing and what’s important. At some point, if you feel the ability to grow or do things better because of the technology, the cost becomes less of an issue.

43:03: Romi Gubes: So you’re saying it comes down to: how much of a problem is it, and can I really make things better—not just replace someone or cut costs, but actually improve that process through technology?

43:22: Beth Copeland: Improve it, and then also just give somebody else time to do something that may be more important and repurpose them. Absolutely, that’s my goal.

43:31: Romi Gubes: With that in mind, how do you envision the home care industry in 3 to 5 years from now?

43:39: Beth Copeland: Very different, and I don’t know that I know. Two years ago, I would not have thought I’d be doing what I’m doing now, honestly. I think back to when ChatGPT came out and I was amazed, and now you can do anything. It’s astounding how rapidly the changes have occurred. I don’t really know, but I’m excited because I love it.

44:08: Romi Gubes: You feel the change, you’re just not sure where it will take us.

44:11: Beth Copeland: I’m just not sure, but I know it’s going to get better. Two years ago, I never would have dreamed I would have been thinking of doing some of the things we’re doing now.

44:23: Romi Gubes: From being in this field for 7 years now, I’m always saying whenever I open a talk that this is the most exciting time to be in our space. I completely believe that this is our time to really focus on relationships and scale like crazy, which wasn’t available before due to all kinds of limitations and barriers to growth. I am very much excited to see our agencies grow with the power of technology.

44:59: Beth Copeland: I’m excited to be part of it. Thank you so much, I love working with you all.

45:04: Romi Gubes: Thank you so much for your partnership, I really appreciate that. It’s a pleasure seeing your agency grow from the sidelines. Thank you for giving us this opportunity.

45:14: Beth Copeland: Thank you all for offering. You listen. It’s really lovely that you listen to the people that are doing the work every day so that you can actually understand. I feel like you really get it because you are listening. A lot of people just think they know what people need, but they don’t necessarily, or they just say no, you can’t do it. I don’t feel that way with you.

45:36: Romi Gubes: I think that this is our secret sauce. Having partners like you that are thinking so strategically about their business and are willing to communicate it back to us is our secret sauce. So thank you for that.

45:49: Beth Copeland: Thank you, it was lovely. Thank you so much for having me.

45:53: Romi Gubes: Thank you.