Comfort Keepers of Gainesville Share the Advantage of Capacity-First Scaling

0:02 Romi Gubes: If you can start with just a few dry facts on your agency, like size and years?

0:05 Julie Burns: I started out as a part-time bookkeeper at the Comfort Keepers that we now own back in ’07.

0:12 Julie Burns: I worked there for all these years and then fortunately got the opportunity to purchase the business in 2024.

0:21 Julie Burns: That’s where Bryan comes in.

0:21 Bryan Burns: I’m Bryan, Julie’s husband, a retired custom home builder.

0:32 Bryan Burns: We got married just two years ago in March.

0:35 Bryan Burns: The opportunity came up to buy the franchise, and Julie came home one day and said, “What do you think? You want to do it?” And I said, “Absolutely, let’s go. Let’s do it.”

0:44 Bryan Burns: We dove in with both feet and haven’t looked back since. It’s been so much fun.

0:55 Bryan Burns: It’s been an amazing time, and we make a great team.

1:00 Bryan Burns: A lot of people say that husbands and wives can’t work together, but we see how it works in this business. We see when we go to conferences, we’ll see the wives there and the husbands are doing something else, but we do it together. We make such a great team.

1:13 Bryan Burns: We don’t argue about stuff; we collaborate. As Julie says, together we make one complete brain.

1:21 Bryan Burns: She’ll think of something and I’ll add to it, or I’ll think of something and she’ll add to it. Together, it comes out as a great idea, and it just works.

1:29 Bryan Burns: It almost sounds like science fiction to me.

1:32 Bryan Burns: It’s a unique situation. When we met, we met later in life like a lot of people do, and it was just time. It was just time for both of us to meet, explore, spread our wings, and take off. You never know.

1:50 Julie Burns: I had been doing it for about 17 years at that point.

1:56 Julie Burns: I really knew the business because I was the general manager, so I knew pretty much all aspects of home healthcare as far as Comfort Keepers goes.

2:04 Julie Burns: My father died of dementia and Alzheimer’s, and I didn’t even know this world existed when that happened. I had no idea this world existed.

2:16 Julie Burns: To come into it now, it’s almost like I’m bringing my experience with my dad—taking care of him and watching him go through everything—and now we can train people to do it. The empathy and the caring were bred into me to do this one day. It’s interesting how it happens. It just came around so naturally, it was unreal. It was a cool situation.

2:39 Romi Gubes: The world takes you in all kinds of directions, even if you didn’t plan it.

2:43 Julie Burns: If you just listen and follow the path that gets laid out in front of you, it’s an amazing path sometimes.

2:50 Romi Gubes: Yeah, that’s super exciting for me. It’s super exciting also to be here with you. Thank you so much for coming and joining me on this initiative of giving back to the industry and to our community.

3:04 Romi Gubes: This podcast is all about growth, so we call it The Growth Operator in home care. I am super excited to tell your story to the world. If you can start with just a few dry facts on your agency, like size and years?

3:21 Julie Burns: We have four territories, and that includes three offices.

3:28 Julie Burns: They’re each about 45 minutes apart. The one in the middle is 45 minutes from either north or south, mostly in North Central Florida. We cover 13 counties.

3:37 Romi Gubes: Mhm.

3:40 Julie Burns: We probably have 280 employees; 20 of them are the office team, and the other 260, give or take depending on the day, are caregivers.

3:53 Julie Burns: We run about 240 clients or so on average. We’re averaging just over 5,000 hours a week of care, so we stay pretty busy.

4:05 Julie Burns: Our biggest focus—and we’ll get to this obviously—is the team. Building the right team is the most important thing we would say.

4:16 Romi Gubes: Yeah, I think, again, I am super excited to dive into your lessons learned because building such an empire is not easy. As owners climb through the different sizes of their business, there are all kinds of different stages and challenges, right?

4:37 Romi Gubes: One of the things I want to start with is: in this highly competitive market, how do you make sure that whenever you’re standing in front of a client or a potential client, you’re able to articulate your competitive edge and your added value?

4:57 Julie Burns: I believe we start by addressing our culture and our mindset. We don’t go into a client’s home telling them what we can do for them.

5:12 Julie Burns: We go into a client’s home asking, “Why did you call us? What do you need from us?” We’re not saying, “Okay, we’ll do this, we’ll do this, we’ll do this. What do you think? Do you want to sign here?” No, we’ll say, “Okay, Mrs. So-and-So, what prompted your call today?”

5:28 Julie Burns: Then we just let them talk and we listen. Then we’ll answer the questions they ask us.

5:38 Julie Burns: We’re not pushy. We seek to be their resource and to educate more than anything. It’s really important to us to have a lot of resources in the community that we can offer if we can’t help them ourselves.

5:54 Julie Burns: Just providing that value is key. We definitely are not the least expensive; we’re probably the most expensive in our area, and we are the largest.

6:04 Julie Burns: We sell based on value and that understanding that we’re here to educate you. We may not sign them up today—it might be next week or next year. We are playing a long game.

6:19 Romi Gubes: I love it. A value-driven sale is something that we sometimes forget in the industry. For one of the products we’ve built, we needed to listen to the intake calls of agencies. A daughter calls in during a crisis moment, saying, “My mom is coming back from the hospital tomorrow, she broke her hip, she’s not able to function, and I have to have someone taking care of her.”

6:48 Romi Gubes: The person on the other side says, “Yeah, we take a minimum of two hours, forty bucks per hour.” You don’t do that.

6:57 Romi Gubes: Sometimes it’s also hard, especially as you scale, to make sure your team is able to follow the DNA that you’re establishing, right? It’s a DNA thing, it’s not a training thing; it’s a mindset thing. So how do you guys make sure that your entire team is following your desired DNA?

7:17 Bryan Burns: Minutes before we came in here, we were rewriting our core values sitting outside the room.

7:27 Bryan Burns: We added two core values to our value board, and they are non-negotiables. If you don’t hold these certain core values, you’re not part of the team.

7:40 Bryan Burns: We pride ourselves on talking to everybody who goes through training. We really try to go in, sit down, and talk to them like, “Hey, welcome to the team.”

7:46 Bryan Burns: We ask them about themselves, their lives, and their history, and we let them know, “Hey, you made it.” On any given week, we might have 170 applicants, and 4 people will end up in training out of those 170.

8:01 Bryan Burns: As we drill down, we’re looking for those people who hold those core values and have that care. You can talk to someone, meet them, and tell if they have a soul for caring; you can just pick that up. If you don’t, you don’t work for us.

8:19 Romi Gubes: So you’re taking that all the way to caregivers? It’s not only the office staff?

8:22 Bryan Burns: Oh, yeah, definitely, 100%. If anything, it’s probably more prominent in caregivers than the office staff. If you have someone in billing and payroll, you can compromise slightly because there are certain core values that are not as non-negotiable there. We have eight core values, and there are three of them that are completely non-negotiable, no matter who you are.

8:44 Romi Gubes: Can you share those?

8:46 Julie Burns: Excellence, integrity, and professionalism are non-negotiable. I believe it starts at the top, so when we see a crack, we know it comes back on us.

9:03 Julie Burns: We have worked so hard to put together a great team. Part of the big growth we’ve had—we’ve had over 18% growth year-over-year.

9:12 Romi Gubes: 18%? Yes.

9:13 Julie Burns: We’re doing pretty well since we purchased it from the corporation. We felt that there was a big need that we could fill by hiring the best team.

9:22 Julie Burns: We’ve been very fortunate to have this unbelievable team. We recently added a new member who has been with Comfort Keepers for about 20 years, and we’re just so excited about our team. We meet with them every week for 90 minutes no matter what.

9:42 Julie Burns: We could be on vacation; it doesn’t matter. We never change the date. Every now and then we might push the time slightly, but the meeting is vital.

9:49 Julie Burns: That’s where we drill down, and then we trust them. Sometimes it can be combative.

9:56 Julie Burns: Sometimes a team leader will say, “I need to say something here,” and everybody sits back and listens. Then we’re open to it. We’ll say, “Okay, we got that, now let’s focus.”

10:10 Julie Burns: Just like the two of us make a brain, our team makes a brain for the company.

10:12 Bryan Burns: The best advice we can give everybody comes from what we see at the annual convention. There are 400 or more franchises, and at these events, owners are running around, stressing, on their phones, and solving problems in survival mode.

10:36 Bryan Burns: We’re just sitting back, having a latte, drinking our coffee, and eating our breakfast. They ask us, “What are you guys doing?”

10:46 Bryan Burns: We built a team before we went out and found clients. If you don’t start from the ground up, how are you going to take care of people? Before you go get clients, you have to have that team in place; otherwise, you can’t do it.

11:02 Romi Gubes: I’m sure that many owners listening to us now are saying, “I don’t know how to get out of this survival mode. I hear you, and I know that this is the right thing to do, but I just don’t know how to do that.”

11:15 Julie Burns: It’s hard. It’s hard because I was a GM, and suddenly I needed to train and delegate these responsibilities.

11:23 Julie Burns: I managed all the billing and payroll, and it’s hard to let go. You just have to trust in the process. As difficult as that is, it’s the only way you can grow. Now we spend time thinking about important strategic initiatives, like integrating AI or finding new ways to work with the community.

11:40 Julie Burns: It’s really important to us to give back. Sometimes we might be rebuilding a senior’s bathroom who is never going to be a client, but this is how we give back to the community.

11:51 Julie Burns: It’s important to us to be at that level where we can think more strategically about the growth of our company and not be in the weeds every day.

12:00 Bryan Burns: That’s how we met Alon and you guys at Sensi.

12:05 Bryan Burns: I want to share something profound. When we were in Cabo with you guys, you had a lady on stage talking about her company. Somebody had called in needing care right away, and she told her team, “We will figure it out.” We say that all the time now.

12:32 Bryan Burns: When people bring up obstacles, I say, “You know what? We’ll figure it out because these people need our help. We will figure it out.”

12:46 Bryan Burns: I think she was from Ohio, but she stood on stage and said, “I don’t care what it takes. I told my team we will figure it out.” That just got ingrained in me, and that’s the mindset we want on our team.

13:02 Romi Gubes: And do you feel that the team is operating from this mindset today?

13:05 Bryan Burns: We do. Every now and then we’ve had to weed some people out. Another thing that really helped us was EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which is amazing for learning how to run and forecast a business.

13:20 Bryan Burns: The unique way we got into it was through a partnership with a company that sponsors Habitat for Humanity.

13:28 Bryan Burns: We gave a huge amount of money to them, which was a lot for us as new owners, but we believed in them and wanted to work together. In return, they sponsored EOS for us for one year, which is normally very expensive.

13:40 Bryan Burns: It paid off in dividends because it really helps the whole team. We go to these day-long meetings once a quarter with the leadership team, getting everybody on the same page, drilling down, focusing, finding the issue, fixing it, and moving on.

14:02 Bryan Burns: A lot of the hesitation for owners comes down to fear. So many owners, GMs, and CEOs have so much fear that if they don’t do it themselves, it won’t get done right.

14:14 Bryan Burns: That used to be me, and that’s Julie. In my custom home building world, I was incredibly OCD, but that’s what creates a great product because you care that much. Driving to the airport to come here, Julie—who handles the books and numbers—was talking about training a bookkeeper to replace her current workflow.

14:40 Bryan Burns: She said, “Oh, I found a mistake.” I said, “Okay, let’s stop a minute. Does that mistake have a process? Did the person make a mistake because they don’t know the process?”

14:59 Bryan Burns: If you don’t have the processes to run your business but you’re trying to fix everything manually, you’re going to be chasing your tail all the time. But if you take the time to step back, write the process, and train the people to follow it, it makes your life a lot easier.

15:14 Romi Gubes: Yeah, I think there are two sides to it. You mentioned fear, which I understand—it’s your baby, it’s your business, you want to make sure the clients are served in the best way possible, and you have very high standards. At the same time, I think many owners do not know what to do aside from being in the day-to-day and being hands-on.

15:38 Romi Gubes: If they aren’t hands-on, they don’t know what actions to take to grow the business. Implementing EOS is very uncommon for agencies and owners. It sounds like it is very natural for you guys to think strategically about how to build something for scale. What other initiatives have you taken that you feel were game-changers for the business?

16:04 Julie Burns: Bryan not having prior industry knowledge was actually great because healthcare knowledge can give you blinders.

16:11 Julie Burns: It almost gives me blinders, and he comes in with this big, open mind regarding all the great things we can do. He got onto the Innovation Council at corporate Comfort Keepers, and he’s on the team that interviews technology vendors.

16:25 Bryan Burns: I was on the board back in the fall when we had 44 AI vendors presenting products to corporate. I went to Julie and said, “You’ve got to look at Sensi.”

16:44 Bryan Burns: I have an analytical, working mind; I might not be the most book-smart person in the world, but I can see how things need to work.

16:58 Romi Gubes: This is how entrepreneurs think, right?

16:59 Bryan Burns: I looked at that product, took it to her, and said, “We have to do this.” She said, “Oh my gosh, it’s a big step. It’s AI; nobody is doing that yet.” I told her, “Yeah, but somebody’s going to, and if we don’t, our competitors will.”

17:15 Bryan Burns: If you don’t take the first leap—and that’s where a lot of owners get stuck because of fear—you lose. You have to jump sometimes because the future is not waiting.

17:26 Bryan Burns: If you look at OpenAI or Gemini, these platforms change every week; you can’t keep up with them. When the technology was proposed to us, I knew we needed to do it.

17:52 Bryan Burns: We were a new company, barely one year into business, and Julie was hesitant. I insisted we didn’t have a choice because nobody else in our area was doing it, and we’re already six months in.

18:07 Bryan Burns: Now we’re already leading the pack, and we are even providing it for free to key partners.

18:14 Bryan Burns: We talked to a local elder care professional whose family member was ill and said, “We will give this to you to put into the home so you can see how it benefits your clients.”

18:25 Bryan Burns: You can deploy a solo Sensi audio unit for high-need clients who aren’t quite ready for physical care or don’t have the budget yet, and you can track them. That puts you above all the other home care agencies out there. Nobody else is doing that.

18:49 Bryan Burns: Again, it’s a fear thing because it takes a chunk off your bottom line to jump in since nothing is free.

18:59 Bryan Burns: There’s also the challenge of training the team. A lot of our office team members are our age and were skeptical about AI, so getting them bought in was a hurdle. Now we’re starting to see success, and we are seeing more positive things coming from it.

19:16 Bryan Burns: The team is getting excited about it, starting to see those reports.

19:20 Romi Gubes: You see the fruits of hard change management.

19:22 Bryan Burns: It’s like farming back when the tractor came out; the farmers who were afraid to change and stuck with the horse and buggy pulling a plow eventually went under because the other guy bought the tractor. We bought the tractor, and we’re running with it.

19:41 Romi Gubes: I love that story. You mentioned earlier that you share a complete mind together. I think this is another secret sauce that you guys have. From speaking to thousands of agencies out there, being an owner is usually very lonely.

20:01 Romi Gubes: You make decisions by yourself, and you think strategically by yourself. Here, you have a perfect tension of two different personalities challenging each other and making sure no one gets stuck in their ways. You also mentioned the Owner Council of Comfort Keepers, which is another great community of peers to learn from.

20:29 Romi Gubes: If other owners are listening and feel they don’t have a counterpart to push them out of their comfort zone, what other communities do you utilize?

20:49 Julie Burns: We are going to be in Houston next week for our Performance Management Group. That is set up through corporate, but it’s a tight team of four other owners.

20:55 Julie Burns: We are completely transparent; we share all of our financials and operations, and we dig in to help each other. We act as each other’s board of directors.

21:05 Bryan Burns: A lot of that comes back to fear, and I keep getting stuck on fear, but if you’re starting up a company, you often don’t want to show your hand to someone else because it’s like looking in the mirror at your own faults.

21:26 Bryan Burns: We follow the Dave Ramsey plan and offer the SmartDollar program to our employees. A lot of them don’t want it because it forces them to look inside at their financial habits. If owners are afraid of criticism, they aren’t going to look for help.

21:42 Bryan Burns: You have to ask the tough questions. We have lunch with our competitors; we don’t care, because we know we’re going to be bigger and better based on our mindset, and there’s enough business to go around. There are plenty of people who need care.

21:59 Bryan Burns: Don’t be afraid. Find people within your franchise system or industry, build a small team, do Zoom calls, and ask questions: “What is your bottom line? What are you doing here?”

22:16 Bryan Burns: Open yourself up. One of the members of our owner group was struggling heavily with his team.

22:33 Bryan Burns: He was struggling and didn’t know what to do, so we told him exactly what he needed to do and expected a follow-up call the next week. On the next Zoom call, we checked in on his progress.

22:44 Bryan Burns: We hold him accountable. “Did he do this?” “Not yet.” But he’s working on it, and we will find out next week because we have another meeting next week. A lot of people fear failure and don’t want criticism, but you aren’t going to get better unless you ask successful people for feedback.

23:08 Romi Gubes: It’s such an important reminder for everyone on this journey of leading a company and building a business. You have to be vulnerable, constantly learn, and evolve. You cannot do that if you are stuck in fear. Julie, you spoke about the franchisor giving you these communities and chapter meetings. Are there other groups you look to?

23:39 Julie Burns: We have our Florida chapter team as well, and we meet quarterly. Those meetings are focused on new innovative developments coming down the pipeline rather than a deep operational dive. For example, Comfort Keepers corporate is backing another type of AI feature, so our last meeting was discussing how to include that as an option for our clients.

24:11 Julie Burns: We like having multiple technical options. With Sensi, it’s not a matter of restricting other tools; we bring them on because we want a robust toolkit.

24:26 Bryan Burns: It’s like Toyota. I’m a Tundra guy, and to me, the Tundra is the best truck out there. But Toyota will still invite other manufacturers to shows because they are confident in their product.

24:35 Bryan Burns: We want to be open-minded and have as many resources as possible for our clients, and we want that same attitude from our team.

24:56 Bryan Burns: Accepting our big ideas is probably their biggest challenge.

25:04 Bryan Burns: For local networking, the first Thursday of every month we go to a health care networking event held at Ford’s Garage. It’s a gathering of local healthcare professionals, including people who own various types of medical businesses. We have a beer, chat, and share ideas.

25:28 Bryan Burns: Don’t be afraid to share. I call it hostile takeovers, while Julie calls it mergers and acquisitions, but you have to have the mindset that you are the best in the room and be completely open to talking with anyone.

25:48 Romi Gubes: Speaking of being the best in the room, I see how much effort you put into optimization. Do you have a concrete example of how you track performance, for instance, with care managers conducting in-home assessments to see who has the highest conversion rate?

26:13 Bryan Burns: If you want to be successful, you have to drill down into the numbers. I’m a numbers guy, and Julie is the system administrator. I keep the key metrics in my head; I know what everybody is doing, the rates they’re converting at, and the percentages, even though I don’t sit behind the computer all day. Julie generates the reports for me.

26:33 Bryan Burns: We might see one care coordinator with a 30% signup rate—and I’m making these numbers up—and another with a 90% signup rate. We have to analyze the difference. Why is one hitting 90% while bringing in a certain level of revenue, while another has half the clients but higher overall revenue? How does that all tie together?

27:04 Bryan Burns: If you don’t know those numbers, you don’t know who is performing on your team, who needs training, or who needs to be replaced. If you’re too busy working in the business, you aren’t looking on the business to monitor those trends, and you end up chasing rabbits all over the place.

27:24 Julie Burns: I dig into our software platform regularly to look at sales reports. You can find detailed data on what each salesperson is doing, what their close rate is, and the exact revenue they’re bringing in. What you do with that information is what matters.

27:45 Julie Burns: It allows us to go to a team member and say, “Look, I see that you’re conducting a high number of assessments, but you’re only converting a small percentage compared to the rest of the team. How can we help?”

27:56 Julie Burns: That’s where EOS comes in; you give them clear measurables and show them the expectations. If we provide all that support and they still can’t perform, then you know whether that person is simply in the wrong seat on the bus, or if they’re on the wrong bus entirely.

28:22 Bryan Burns: Every team member of ours also carries around recruitment business cards with a QR code. I’ve hired great people right out of the drive-thru window at Panera Bread.

28:33 Bryan Burns: If I pull up and the employee remembers my exact order details and shows genuine care, I tell them to call me when their shift is over. You constantly have to be looking for talent creatively, rather than just waiting for Indeed to give you caregiver leads.

29:04 Romi Gubes: Absolutely, you have to be proactive.

29:04 Bryan Burns: Everyone on our team carries those cards. You can find high-quality people everywhere, but they don’t always know these opportunities exist. It’s the person at a restaurant who is always proactively wiping down tables and staying active. You go up to them and ask if they’re looking to expand their world. Don’t let fear stop you from talking to people.

29:29 Romi Gubes: Let’s take it one step deeper. What are you aiming for in terms of conversion rates from an initial inquiry to a case? What do you expect from a prospect call to a completed home visit, and then from an assessment to a close?

29:44 Bryan Burns: A 40% conversion from an incoming prospect phone call to an inquiry is standard, but from an in-home assessment to a closed contract, our target is 90% or better.

29:59 Romi Gubes: Okay.

29:59 Bryan Burns: Once our team gets into the home, they close nine out of ten cases. If someone misses a close, I want to review the file to understand exactly why. The reason we can set the bar this high is because Julie was a care coordinator for many years and maintained nearly a 100% close rate.

30:14 Julie Burns: Going backward in the workflow, you also have to evaluate if we qualified the prospect well enough initially. If we just send coordinators out to every single phone call, they won’t maintain a 100% close rate.

30:27 Romi Gubes: Most people listening would agree that a 70% to 80% close rate represents top performance, so 90% is exceptional. When you visit a home, that family is often vetting three or four different agencies, meaning your statistical chance to win is low, yet you are winning almost 90% of the time. What is your secret sauce?

31:02 Bryan Burns: Training, training, training, and hiring people who have a soul and true empathy. We’re not hiring tire-kickers to sell used cars. We want a coordinator who goes into the house and genuinely connects with the family’s story. We want a person who listens deeply; families know immediately when an agency truly cares. Those are the only people we send out to a home.

31:35 Bryan Burns: At the same time, we want to qualify our prospects thoroughly so we don’t waste our team’s time or the family’s time if our services aren’t a fit. For example, with Sensi, we use the virtual assistant feature, Sally, to handle initial home-visit appointment settings. I created a tracking tag in our system for Sally so we can analyze the data.

32:02 Bryan Burns: Even though it’s relatively new, this lets us determine if the conversion percentage for leads routed through Sally is higher or lower than our standard baseline. It helps us be knowledgeable so we can refine our pre-qualification process. We want to make sure that we’re not wasting our time and this person’s time if they absolutely are not going to be interested in our services.

32:42 Bryan Burns: In our weekly 90-minute leadership meetings, it’s just closed doors among the four of us. If we went to 10 homes but only signed up 9 clients that week, I want to know what happened to the tenth.

32:56 Bryan Burns: If the coordinator says, “Well, they were actually looking for Medicare coverage,” then we dropped the ball during the intake call. We shouldn’t have dispatched a coordinator to that home because that takes three hours out of their day that could have been spent elsewhere. Someone failed to pre-qualify them. We want to pre-qualify tightly without over-screening, which is a fine line we’re still perfecting.

33:23 Romi Gubes: So if a daughter brings in three different home care agencies and meets three different care managers, having a highly empathetic manager who listens is obviously a massive piece of the decision-making process. But how do they represent your agency technically to ensure you stand out?

33:58 Julie Burns: We emphasize that we are a W-2 employment agency, not a registry. We provide our staff with health insurance, paid time off, and performance incentives. They are also required to complete continuing education modules monthly, and we pay them for their training hours. Doing this helps us retain exceptional caregivers, which guarantees consistency of care for the client so they don’t see a different face every day.

34:30 Julie Burns: An initiative we introduced since taking over ownership is employing a tier of full-time, salaried backup caregivers. These are exceptional, proven caregivers who can handle any client or challenging situation. They shadow our more complex cases regularly so they know the clients.

34:56 Julie Burns: If a primary caregiver calls out, we can notify the client and send an authorized backup caregiver who has already shadowed the case. Being a large agency allows us to provide that operational consistency, which is the most valuable thing we can offer. We try so hard—of course we’re not perfect, nobody is—with communication. We will communicate with you and talk to you. When we meet somebody, we give them our business card and say, “I’m one of the owners. Call me at any time of day or night, I don’t care.”

35:40 Julie Burns: That is something that we’re always striving to be better at is the communication, constantly letting that client know your caregiver called out, but we have a backup, and this is her name, and she’ll be there. Letting them know what’s going on all the time. If we feel that that’s sometimes where we drop the ball, that’s another number we track.

35:54 Julie Burns: If newer people in the business are struggling, we want 1.25 caregivers for every client. Every week we look at that number. We were at 1.19 one week, 1.20 the next, and we haven’t hit 1.25 yet, but that’s what we want.

36:22 Julie Burns: If we drop below 1.1, we immediately instruct the recruiting office to freeze new client intakes until we onboard more staff. What’s the point of signing clients if you can’t staff them safely? You have to build the team infrastructure first, then scale the client base. Many owners try to bring the client revenue in first and build the team later, but that leads to service failures and disappoints families.

36:43 Romi Gubes: What you’re saying sounds like an unfair advantage. You have scaled to a point where you can invest heavily in your workforce and quality control, making it difficult for smaller competitors to match you.

37:02 Bryan Burns: I look at it differently. If someone wants to start a home care agency today, they can go find 12 high-quality caregivers, train them to the absolute best of their ability, and then sign 8 clients. You can optimize your team regardless of size.

37:19 Bryan Burns: My advice is to flip the traditional mindset: don’t wait for clients to appear before investing in your team, processes, and values. Build a solid operational infrastructure first so you never drop the ball. One of the owners in our performance group has eight clients and only two caregivers; you can’t run a reliable business that way, and eventually, the word gets around town that you can’t deliver.

37:54 Bryan Burns: When Julie was a GM under corporate ownership, they wouldn’t allow her to recruit caregivers until a client contract was signed. I always argued against that: if you have a client but no staff, how are you going to care for them? Corporate wanted growth first, then recruitment. Our original franchise founders believed that if you build the capacity, the clients will come.

38:22 Bryan Burns: When Julie was the bookkeeper, she would worry about the overhead cost of adding administrative staff, but we established clear KPI thresholds: we must hit X amount in weekly revenue before hiring another internal team member. We recently hired a highly experienced manager who put us temporarily over our standard administrative budget, but her industry knowledge will rapidly jump our revenue.

38:56 Bryan Burns: You can’t be afraid to make investments in quality people; they pay for themselves by driving growth, whereas hiring a subpar employee costs you more in turnover, retraining, and lost clients. It takes well over a year to fully train a quality care coordinator, so turning those roles over is a major financial mistake.

39:20 Bryan Burns: We met our latest care coordinator at a marketing networking event a year ago, maintained the relationship, and when he was ready for a career move, we hired him immediately because he is exceptional. If you pay minimum wage, you get minimum wage work. He wasn’t cheap, but the return on investment is undeniable.

40:27 Romi Gubes: What guardrails do you put in place to ensure an investment leads to revenue, and what are some past hiring mistakes that cost you money?

40:52 Bryan Burns: Last year, we made a bad leadership hire. It was someone we had known years prior who was an exceptional professional, but it wasn’t the right fit for our current business stage. We invested heavily in her onboarding, but we began to see operational failings. What we did right was reacting quickly without dragging it out.

41:23 Bryan Burns: We held her strictly to her KPIs and accountability metrics. When expectations weren’t met, we had a transparent conversation and offered her an alternative position within the company to keep her on the team. You have to have the right person in the right seat. Two of our leadership partners wanted to terminate immediately, and two of us wanted to try to salvage her employment, so we attempted the transition. When the new expectations still weren’t met within 30 days, we parted ways.

42:05 Bryan Burns: The entire process from start to finish took about four months, which is quick for a leadership role, and EOS really helped us identify those metrics clearly. You must be explicit with your team regarding three to five core KPIs so that if they fail, they essentially fire themselves based on objective data.

43:14 Bryan Burns: Another mistake companies make is automatically promoting a valuable employee who is doing a great job in their current role, watching them fail in management, and then firing them. Don’t fire them; they were great in their previous seat. Move them back down, take ownership of the mistake, and say, “This is my fault. I saw your tenure and your desire for promotion, but this position is causing you high stress and affecting your performance.”

43:57 Bryan Burns: When you return them to a role they excel at, they are much happier. We have one valuable team member who occupied three different seats before we found her perfect fit, and now she is doing an amazing job because she has the heart and soul for the company.

44:26 Romi Gubes: Those are great lessons: react fast, don’t avoid tough conversations, and utilize clear metrics. As an owner, you have to maintain a high-level view of the business to spot these operational issues quickly.

45:01 Romi Gubes: If you’re stuck in the weeds, you lack the mental bandwidth to see where the moving parts are failing.

45:06 Bryan Burns: Exactly. And in that specific employee case, she realized management wasn’t for her. We now have another individual in that supervisor seat who is doing exceptionally well. As leaders, you have to take ownership, look your team in the eye, and say, “We tried an initiative, it didn’t work, and that’s on me. If you have questions, come directly to us instead of engaging in water-cooler gossip.” We maintain a strict open-door policy.

46:21 Julie Burns: We do encourage staff to utilize the proper chain of command with their direct supervisors first because initially, everyone was bypassing mid-management and coming straight to us with basic requests.

46:45 Julie Burns: For example, an employee came directly to us asking to alter their schedule to work from home. We redirected them to their supervisor because that supervisor manages their daily schedule. If a supervisor denies a request and the employee asks us for a second opinion, we support our management team. We tell the employee, “Your supervisor consulted us, we analyzed the operational impact, and we made the collective decision to deny the request for this reason.” This builds strong, independent mid-management units as you scale.

47:32 Romi Gubes: Those are super important lessons as you scale a company. You need to make sure that your mid-management is well-set to be their own independent unit because you cannot be everywhere. You cannot have a discussion with every one of your employees or set all the cadences.

47:55 Romi Gubes: If you were buried in the weeds like so many owners are, you never would have discovered Sensi, which is putting you ahead of all the competition. It’s your job to find those tools to help your company grow because you have 280 mouths to feed that you’re responsible for. That’s your job to make it grow and give them the tools they need. Our job is to know what their challenges are; their leadership brings it to us when they have challenges, and then it’s up to us to go out and find the solution.

48:34 Romi Gubes: This takes me to my next question, which actually I didn’t plan to ask, but my head is spinning from listening to you. You guys think so strategically about your business, and it’s a pleasure to listen to you. How do you think strategically about your technology stack? There are so many vendors offering automated tools and AI features right now. How do you assess what fits your operational DNA?

49:21 Bryan Burns: First, I am intensely loyal to vendors who deliver. We put our trust in Sensi, and we are going to grow with their platform as much as we can. If another vendor presents an outstanding product that solves a specific problem, we are open to evaluating it, but we don’t flippantly jump from platform to platform.

50:00 Julie Burns: Corporate is currently promoting a new administrative scheduling platform, and while we experience limitations with our current software, we are gathering mixed reviews from other franchisees who migrated to the new one. We are open to switching administrative platforms only if it meets all of our automated needs seamlessly.

50:35 Julie Burns: One feature we have been searching for fruitlessly for months is an automated, text-based client communication workflow. We want a platform that automatically texts a client or their family saying, “Your care coordinator will arrive at 3:00 PM for your appointment,” or “Reminder: your caregiver will arrive at 9:00 AM,” followed by a post-shift text asking, “How was your care experience today?” Software vendors try to sell us everything else under the sun, but we haven’t found a platform that handles that specific text touchpoint reliably.

51:13 Bryan Burns: Until a vendor proves their product is explicitly better than what we currently use, we stay focused. Chasing every shiny object disrupts your staff and hurts your business. Once our leadership team collectively decides to adopt a technology, we go all-in, and our team trusts our direction because they know our heart is in the right place.

52:05 Bryan Burns: We are completely transparent with new hires during training; we own our mistakes openly, which eliminates fear within the workforce. If ownership shows panic or indecision, that fear trickles down to everyone. We tell our people, “Hey guys, we tried something, it didn’t work. We thought it would, but it didn’t. If you have any questions, come talk to us.” Let them give feedback.

54:47 Bryan Burns: We also involve our staff in the development of new metrics. Before implementing a new KPI, we ask the care coordinators for their feedback: “What do you think is achievable? What tools do you need to hit this goal?” This gives them direct ownership of the solution. Nobody is allowed to come vent to their supervisor or bring their problems without a proposed solution. You come with a solution, let’s discuss it, and that way they feel direct ownership in that respect.

55:19 Julie Burns: One of our core values is growth mindset, and we just changed that to think big and take ownership as we were sitting out there waiting for this. We want everybody to be part of the decisions that we make.

55:49 Julie Burns: If we ever modify a core operational platform, it is a collaborative transition, not a forced mandate. We explain what we’ve discovered, why we like it, and then we just sit back and listen, much like we do during a home assessment.

56:21 Romi Gubes: What are your explicit growth targets for 2026?

56:23 Bryan Burns: We have our 2026 growth goals outlined line-by-line. Our top-line target is to scale from a $9 million company to a $12 million company this year, driven by organic growth and strategic acquisitions. We want to reach 6,000 weekly care hours; we are currently running just over 5,000. To hit that, we calculated exactly how many caregivers we need to recruit and how many new clients we must onboard weekly.

56:58 Bryan Burns: In EOS terminology, a $3 million jump sounds like a big, hairy, audacious goal, but when you drill it down to the data, it means adding roughly four net-new clients per week. When you look at it as simply signing four clients a week, it becomes an achievable goal. We currently have four of our key team members attending an intensive sales seminar in Tampa to give them the exact tools needed to capture those clients.

57:40 Bryan Burns: We also prepare our capital reserves so we are financially ready to acquire independent agencies within or adjacent to our territories when owners look to retire. If you think big and break the macro goals down into bite-sized daily pieces, scaling becomes highly manageable.

58:31 Romi Gubes: I love that approach. To wrap up our discussion and leave our audience inspired, where do you see the home care industry heading over the next three to five years? What major shifts do you foresee?

59:01 Bryan Burns: AI technology is going to expand exponentially, but it will never replace the physical caregiver. You cannot automate the hands-on care and human connection required in this industry. AI will act as a powerful assistant that enhances quality control, allows agencies to manage a higher volume of clients safely, and optimizes care outcomes.

1:00:01 Julie Burns: We train our intake team to offer a solo Sensi audio unit as an introductory service line for families who aren’t quite ready for in-person caregivers. It allows us to monitor the senior’s environment remotely, establish a relationship, and review the data reports with the family monthly.

1:00:21 Bryan Burns: Sensi recently delivered an automated risk alert for an independent senior client whose family lives out of state. The system detected a pattern of “suspected loneliness.” It noted the client had minimal vocal data, hadn’t left her bedroom environment, and wasn’t active in the kitchen for an extended period. We called her daughter immediately and said, “The data indicates your mother is experiencing severe isolation; she needs a companion caregiver visits weekly just to talk to her.” The daughter was incredibly grateful because she would have had no way of knowing that remotely. It brings business that way, and it amazes me every day what it can do.

1:01:21 Romi Gubes: No, you gave me chills. I think you changed both of their lives.

1:01:28 Bryan Burns: We had another instance where the system detected a 182% increase in coughing frequency overnight for a solo client. We notified the family to schedule a physician visit, caught what turned out to be early-stage bronchitis, and prevented a hospitalization that likely would have turned into severe pneumonia. A massive percentage of home care clients suffer frequent hospital readmissions, and utilizing AI alerts for falls, UTIs, and respiratory changes allows us to intervene preventatively. It provides families with immense peace of mind during the hours a physical caregiver isn’t in the home.

1:02:29 Romi Gubes: That is a perfect summary of where the industry is heading. We will get more caregivers, but maybe not in the same ratio as clients, and we will integrate more technology and AI to expand the reach.

1:02:44 Bryan Burns: When we first onboarded Sensi, we tested a unit in our own home where Julie’s parents live. My mother-in-law is in her 80s and minimized her symptoms to us, but the audio data captured her expressing significant pain and mobility distress when we were away at work or asleep. It forced us to step in and arrange professional care for her.

1:03:40 Bryan Burns: Seniors frequently hide their decline from their children out of fear of losing independence, and AI data exposes those safety gaps objectively. It expands the reach of home care to protect more people, and naturally, that grows your business in a selfish world, but our goal here is to take care of people.

1:04:15 Romi Gubes: I think this is a good way to summarize everything. Thank you again, guys, for spending this time with me. I learned a lot from just listening to you.

1:04:29 Romi Gubes: No, I love it, and I think you’re right. You are like completing one whole brain altogether, so thank you, guys.

1:04:37 Julie Burns: Oh, it’s my pleasure. This was fun.