Rick Gang, CEO and co-founder of Holistic HomeCare Associates, leads the way in transforming home care services from Riverdale, New York. Confronting the challenges of finding top-notch caregivers within traditional home care agencies, Holistic HomeCare Associates reimagined the industry. They prioritize family control, ethical practices, and high-quality care woven into every aspect of their process.
With nearly four decades of expertise in home care management, Rick joins Dr. Karen to discuss his business growth journey, emphasizing change, innovation, flexibility, and reinvention. He shares how leveraging technology and outside advisement has delivered exceptional solutions for clients while driving exponential growth and profitability for his company.
Tune in to discover how Rick and his team deliver white-glove service with a deep understanding of the home care landscape, kindness, and a personal touch. Gain valuable executive leadership insights to accelerate success and profitability in your business.
Contact Rick Gang at Holistic HomeCare Associates or call 646-240-4888.
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Rick Gang: CEO And Co-Founder Of Holistic HomeCare Associates On Reinventing Your Business And Industry
A Profitable Business That Serves Clients
When you understand your industry, the needs that most providers do not meet, and the frustrations of the clients who want better service, you are in a position to use your creative advantage to reinvent the industry and transform the client experience and results. Our guest has created a profitable business that serves clients at the highest levels because he saw the landscape and chose to operate in a different way. He shares his secret sauce for building a company that grew 30% during the pandemic and in 2024 saw a 40% increase in profitability. I invite you to read this episode for profitable ideas that you can apply to own business.
Let me tell you about my guest. Rick Gang is the CEO and Cofounder of Holistic HomeCare Associates, based in Riverdale, New York. In 2014, Rick established Holistic HomeCare to ensure that every client receives compassionate and high-quality service. Holistic simplifies the caregiver hiring process, prioritizes family control, and enhances overall quality. Fueled by the chaos of trying to hunt down top-notch caregivers in the jungle of traditional home care agencies, holistic reinvented home care to make hiring a breeze, the family the boss, and choice, control, and quality interwoven into every fiber of the process.
As a seasoned home care expert with nearly four decades of experience in home care management and a BA Degree in Sociology and Political Science as a minor, Rick has a knack for quick and accurate understanding clients’ needs. He and his holistic dream team offer clients top-notch employer support services, enlightenment on all things home care, and empowerment to make informed choices.
Rick ensures that he and his team meet every client with white-glove service, a deep understanding of the home care landscape, kindness, and a smile. When he is not focusing on home care, he also spent time as a deputy sheriff actively engaged in the community and he also parents his three children, River, Sam, and Ryan. Rick, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Dr. Karen. Pleasure to be here with you.
Difference Between Home Care and Home Health Care
It’s a delight to be here with you, and I know we have so much that we can talk about, so we’re just going to launch right in if that’s okay with you. My first question, because some people in the audience may not know about home care. First, give us a little bit of information about that. What is home care? Who needs those services? Is home care the same as home health care?
Home care is services that are brought into the home, typically paraprofessionals, all the way up to clinicians themselves. Home care is typically on a longer term. Whereas, home health is typically people like physical therapy and occupational therapy coming in for short-term, post-incident or fall, or whatever it is that’s needing their short-term services. We’re seeing more of a shift to in-home care of the medical delivery. Home health is also a developing field, but home health care is more of the long-term, some of the paraprofessional companion.
You have home health aides and certified nurses’ aides who are helping with activities of daily living, bathing, dressing, cooking, laundry, all of those activities. That’s the main differences. The services are usually received by anyone who needs any assistance with remaining at home or independent. It can be someone with a long-term chronic illness or a younger person. It can also be the seniors who are living much longer and wanting to remain at home.
Let me make sure I have this straight. Did you say that home care is typically the more long-term solution and home health the shorter-term solution?
Home health is also more the medical.
You can have more paraprofessionals in home care.
Correct.
Thank you. I just wanted to review that because I was thinking maybe I’d heard that incorrectly.
It is a place where there’s a lot of gray crossover. You can have nurses in a home care agency, and home care services provided through RN services. In home health, it would be more of an episodic situation rather than an ongoing relationship.
I think we have the landscape. Tell us a little bit then about who you see as your clients in the business and how you add value to those clients.
In our registry model of home care, we have two clients. We have the families that come to us for care, and we also have the caregivers coming to us looking for work. We act as matchmakers in the home care space. It’s a different model than the traditional licensed agency. Who’s coming to us are families who are looking to hire caregivers. Also, as I said, the caregivers looking for work. It’s our duty to vet the caregivers, and then also match them with the clients as best fits all of the personalities, the skills, the schedules, and all of the nuances. Whether they can play chess, speak French, and are not allergic to the cat.
Social Justice for Caregivers
I love the way you frame it as a matchmaking service of sorts. I know, Rick, that you also have a perspective that says you want to do a form of social justice, if you will, for the caregivers. Talk about that a little bit, and how you benefit the caregivers as a client as well.
It’s a win-win-win. It’s one of those places where, if you can identify a win-win-win and put yourself in that equation, it’s a home run and a guaranteed success. The way that we’ve done that is by having the caregivers work directly for the families. The overhead of my office, I have an internal office of under ten people but yet, I’m able to work with over 500 caregivers. If I were a typical agency, my overhead would be cost-prohibited for me to pay the end user, the caregiver properly. The margins keep getting tighter and tighter.
In our model, the caregivers are able to earn significantly more than their counterpart at the traditional agency. Typical agencies in my region are anywhere from $19 an hour to $22 an hour. We don’t have anyone below $25 an hour. Most of our cases are $30 an hour and up. In that regard, the caregiver is able to secure a higher paying wage. They have the steady, long-term relationship with the employer. They don’t have that turnover that they have at the agency.
That puts us in a position to lift up caregivers and get them into better-paying positions and reward them for their hard work. The family wins because they’re choosing who they want to hire. When they’re employing the aid directly, they can control those tasks as I said before. If you have a family member who has a long-term chronic illness such as Parkinson’s. You may have peg tube feeding or something.
An agency aid is not going to be allowed to handle that. They would require an LPN to come in. When the family employs directly, it’s just as if another family member is there to do that task. That’s another win for the family. We’re able to put ourselves in that equation and make sure all of the employment is done properly. There’s workers’ comp and disability, unemployment insurance, and all the payroll taxes are done properly. It’s a win-win-win. Everyone is happy. That’s the secret sauce that we’ve created here.
That’s a beautiful story because if you think about the people who usually do home care and are often not paid a living wage, this gives them an opportunity to provide for their own families and have a career that has a long-term trajectory to it. The families get to select the people who they want to have and not just have someone from the agency show up and lose control over that.
If you can identify a win-win-win and put yourself in that equation, it is a home run and a guaranteed success. Click To TweetNavigating New York’s Complex Home Care Landscape
Yet, all the back-end, back-office stuff that most family members would know how to do, your organization makes sure that that gets taken care of, the insurance, the benefits, and so on. Which brings me to another question, because you’re operating in New York. This is a field that’s regulated. New York can be a tough place in which to work. Say a little bit about how you’ve managed to make it work in New York. You know what they say, if you can do it in New York, you can do it anywhere.
That was one of the reasons I didn’t want to do this business without a business partner, honestly, because of the licensing requirements. I said I need a business partner for this and the universe was very good at that point and introduced me to Anne Sansevero, who’s my cofounder with me.
What we’re talking about is this whole notion of how you’re surviving in New York with all the regulatory demands and just the difficulty of working in New York. Part of the answer, you say, is your cofounder with you. What else is making it work for you?
Leaning into all of the regulations, figuring out how to make New York City’s sticky and overbearing laws fit into best practices so that we can check off the city’s boxes to work under our license that we need to oblige by, but also facilitate everything for the family. Part of it is we also develop software to do the registry model and to manage all of the moving parts. As we’re speaking with other registries nationwide, the rules are just very different and much more friendly to do business.
It’s like what we built it in New York. The only place that’s more challenging probably is California. It’s second to California. If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere because from there, it would be downhill. I didn’t mind jumping through all the hoops. It’s just trying to figure out how you check those boxes and yet still get your mission accomplished. I know other people that have figured out other creative ways. Whether they call themselves an online marketplace or whatnot, but I choose to do things the proper way, go through, and have everything buttoned up.
The proper channels in an innovative way, and you mentioned technology. Share with us a little bit more about how you use technology to do the matchmaking, the back-office part, and how that’s innovative in your industry.
It’s on so many fronts, and I’m not a tech person. Even just the ability for us to go fully remote during the pandemic. During pre-pandemic, I would have told you it would be impossible for me to have any internal staff outside of the New York area. Now, I know that that’s completely erroneous. No one else was supplying the software to match the clients and caregivers, so we wanted to be the eHarmony of clients and caregivers for the registry and home care space.
That’s where we started and we built that. The companies that we were using for payroll, scheduling, and communications were gobbled up by venture capital. One company was closed and condensed into the other, and customer service went downhill. I saw the writing on the wall and decided to lean into the opportunity and build those modules that we needed into our existing software.
It’s just about solving problems, identifying a need, seeing if there’s a solution out there. If not, then I went kicking and screaming into software development, but it’s taking off now. It’s an interesting endeavor. I’m running my registry two years now on it completely. Even if it didn’t sell, I know the money that I’m saving by using it myself pays for it.
Leveraging Technology to Enhance Screening and Vetting
This is phenomenal because this is not your area of expertise, and yet you jumped in at the deep end of the pool, I’m sure with help and partners and so on, to make it happen because you saw the need, and you created the solution for it. That’s part of the secret sauce in your business that you do see the needs, and then you figure out, how can we solve for this? How can we create a solution that is that triple win again? That’s what you’re talking about. Part of your technology, as I recall, even allows you to be unique in how you do your screening, vetting, and matchmaking. Say a little bit more about how the technology helps you to do some things that maybe others are not able to do to get such great matches.
Despite even like some of the regulations in Florida, they don’t want you matching on personalities, but we have to be realistic. If this person is in your home, doing personal care and living with you, you need to make sure that personalities match. This isn’t someone coming to wash your windows. This is someone who’s coming to personally be involved in one’s life, so make sure that match. We’ve come up with the most unusual matches. It’s always worth it. It’s always worth investing the time to make that match, even if it’s not the easiest to make.
These are very personal relationships that we’re facilitating, and software doesn’t eliminate anyone. We have over 500 caregivers in our roster and over 75 RNs. It constantly reshuffles them, so it re-ranks them according to the match. We never wanted to take the human element out of it. We do love technology. We’re leaning into AI, and so far, so good but we never wanted to take the human out of it because the schedulers or whoever it is, is always going to know some detail that the software doesn’t know. It’s important to work smart, not hard, but still have the human touch in it.
Let me ask this, what was it that prompted you to even start Holistic HomeCare? What did you see maybe that was broken in the industry at the time?
I had been doing caregiver placements through my mother’s care management practice. My mother is now a retired nurse. She was one of the founding members of the Aging Life Care Association. The first chapter was in New York in 1985. A group of women, mostly social workers and my mother was one of the few nurses that got together and formed this organization. I grew up managing my mother’s private practice as a nursing-based care management practice.
During those years, we would always screen caregivers for our clients to privately hire, because we saw that that was the best way for them. We had a lot of clients that were running almost medical homes, chronic care conditions, suctioning, and trach. Having highly skilled caregivers who are able to do those things was always important. After twenty years, I had amassed about 200 caregivers that I had just constantly rolling through and getting placed on cases. We would do their background check, and then we would open an ADP payroll account.
After my mother retired, I continued to run the practice a few years and was then looking to hand off some of the Manhattan cases to Anne Sansevero. She said, “Rick, what are you going to do after you wind down the practice?” I said, “I don’t know, Anne, but I’m ready for a break out of care management and getting the 3:00 AM calls that Mrs. Smith is going to the emergency room, and it’s time to get the power of attorney on the phone.”
My life had done that for twenty years, and was ready for a little bit of change. Anne knew I had 200 caregivers, and she said, “Why don’t we open a registry together?” I said, “That I’ll do,” because I was always ready to do it, I just needed a partner. I said, “Are you willing to do that?” She said, “Yes, because I can’t get good caregivers for my clients.” This is an opportunity for my clients, my business, and for her as well. That’s when we decided to join forces and officially kick off.
That’s another opportunity as a win-win, so to speak, that’s in more than one direction, the two of you coming together, having been out there separately, knowing of each other and interfacing, and now partnering together. Let’s talk about that a little bit. I know that business partners is not always perfect. You got to figure out like in marriage as husband and wife, how you’re going to make this thing work. Talk a little bit about that and a little bit about Anne’s role also with ALCA, the professional organization that your mother was very involved in, how she’s connected with that as well, and how that relates to what you do day-to-day.
I see an EIN, Employer Identification Number, for any business almost like a Social Security number for a child. It is a marriage. We are stewards of this young life that we need to cultivate and help mature. Anne and I are very different personalities. Anyone who meets us I think realizes that. It’s also one of our strengths that we are different. It was not always easy in communication and getting to figure out each other’s style, but I think it’s a good balance. Having different personalities makes the business itself stronger.
Anne has a thriving care management practice in Manhattan called Health Sense, where she has several nurses and a social worker under her. She will refer clients as appropriate. If a client has a policy that won’t reimburse for this model of home care, she refers to agency models, or she’ll refer to multiple. That’s one of the things about ALCA, Aging Life Care Association, the ethics and the standards of everything are very impressive. I haven’t seen another professional organization that has such dedication to professional ethics, which is refreshing, especially nowadays.
It’s good to have those ethics in place. The two of you have figured out how to divide the responsibility, so to speak. What are some examples of what Anne does versus what you do and how it all comes together?
I’m more involved in the day-to-day operations, and less and less over 2024, as we promoted our manager to our director of operations. I was able to step out of the day-to-day operations and more into running the business. Whatever the saying is, spending time developing the business instead of running the business. That and the software takes up most of my time. Anne is very busy with her care management practice, referring clients who may need services, her role with ALCA, and her other various endeavors.
It is important to work smart and not hard, but still have the human touch in it. Click To TweetOne way of thinking about it, I see Anne as if she’s down on the street level, so to speak, seeing what’s going on, who might need things, having the connections and the relationships with people in the industry to know where the referrals can come from, and so on. You’ve got your operations person in the middle, doing the day-to-day of running the business. You’re in more of a strategic oversight role. Looking at what the business needs in an overarching sense is what I’m hearing in how you describe that.
Building also those relationships. I did several conferences and 2 to 3 networking events a week. I don’t know what hat I’m ever wearing, whether I’m wearing my Holistic Home Care hat, the software hat, or the connector hat. Either one always turns out to be fruitful in one capacity or another, and they’re always good when they’re mixing.
It’s good to have a diversity of skills and abilities that you can bring to the process.
Even if the worst thing I do is connect someone, that’s still a wonderful thing.
That’s a skill, by the way, connecting people. I consider that a skill. When you’re building this business, and you mentioned having ten people and so on and so forth. It can be challenging sometimes to get the right people on the team. We talked about you and your co-founder and the two of you figuring out the best optics and ways to work together. What about getting your team together? What have you faced? What have you had to do in order to get the right people?
It’s been a learning process, and it’s definitely changed over the ten years as well. We’ve been very blessed with a good internal team, and I’ve been a part of the hiring of each and every one. I do feel that I am a good read on people. I did have an unfortunate experience of being ghosted by a young person who started and then disappeared, but that’s the trend now. I know I’m not alone in that but finding the right people, complimenting them and paying accolades when they do a good job, compensating them appropriately, and having good communication is critical.
My personal assistant was also our first employee. She’s been with us for years. She’s in her 70s and she works as many hours as I do. I can’t sing her accolades enough. I think finding the right people who can grow with you and who believe in the mission and vision and internalize it because then it’s no longer employer-employee. It’s a bigger mission.
It is like a partnership of sorts, and that values-mission fit is important to creating the right culture. We all run into people who we think fit but don’t. What experience have you had with maybe having to make some shifts? Maybe somebody wasn’t the right fit.
Even as the company grew, there’s sometimes resistance to growth. They say, “We’ve been doing it this way all this long,” and presenting the potential negatives from their perspective. If there’s ultimately just resistance, and that’s what we had in this one case. It seems our mission and vision have separated. It was just a very easy conversation. He said, “In all honesty, I want to go back to producing shows,” which is his former career. It’s fine. Everyone is in their time and place as it’s right and feels right. Sometimes it’s okay to also just separate. I think as long as people are in good communication about it so that it’s not that quiet quitting perspective, but just a dialogue of what your current interests.
It doesn’t mean that the people are bad people. They may have served their season in the business, let’s say. Maybe there’s something else that they’re more passionate about at this time. Perhaps there’s a better place for them to go. The business has changed. All of these things. We just change chairs and seats when that happens.
Remain respectful of and willing to see the good in the other person, even if they’ve moved on to something else. That’s critical. I mentioned earlier, Rick, that your company grew during the pandemic, when a lot of people were freaked out about it. Talk about that a little bit. What were some of the factors that enabled growth at such a difficult time?
It was a challenging time. Nothing prepared any of us for what was coming. I was just looking through my old cell phone pictures and saw a picture of March 25, 2020, where I had my desk and my chair on the roof of my car going home from my final day here in the office and figuring out how to navigate the changing climate. At one point, it was that caregivers needed IDs when there was a curfew. All of these curveballs. How do we go remote? How does the team function? How do we get people to cases? Most of the cases were transitioning to live-in. We didn’t want people traveling.
The lower amount of people in and out of a household was ideal. We pivoted. We did a lot of live-in. We worked with a financial coach, who helped us see, in live time that we needed to also adjust the rates for the live-in because that was a smaller segment of our business, and the margins were lower. We were losing the hourly, which was the better service line. We did a price change live real-time without having to look back at the quarter going, “What happened? Why did our profits drop?”
Having gurus in their sectors, being able to consult, has also been a part of the success. I think during the pandemic people did not want to be in a facility. Home care was the natural choice. People were not able to travel or be with their loved ones, or not necessarily able to relocate. That was just the growth in home care in general. We’ve had growth year after year. The pandemic certainly accelerated that, but we haven’t let off either.
I think as people call this the silver tsunami that’s coming, rumors that are, I think, by 2030, the population that’s going to be over 65. It’s tremendous. It’s important for those people that are doing quality care or services in general for this population, just be tried, true, and professional. There’s a lot of noise in the industry as all the Wall Street reports show, the demographics moving into this area. There’s a lot of venture capital and other motives moving into this sector. It’s important to identify those that are the true practitioners.
I want to get back to that in a second, but I want to ask you first about the other kinds of flexibility and agility you had to have during the pandemic. What are some of the things you’ve carried over into the post-pandemic world that you mentioned about even working remotely and how you didn’t even think that would be possible. Share a little bit about what you’ve learned about that and what you’re doing now that maybe you wouldn’t have done before and it’s working.
The fact that I didn’t think I could hire people outside of New York City. If they couldn’t get to my office daily, we could meet through Google Teams and Meets, a Google meeting. Our team meets daily and the Google chat going daily and constantly having video meetings. We do host times for our team to get together as well so that hat we do have in-person time, and it’s not completely lost. There is some balance that does need to exist. We use Monday.com as a custom CRM that we’ve built. There’s a lot of tools that and having good consultants available to help us devise this on the fly. It’s been a game changer.
I think if I remember correctly, you even have a tree office.
I do. During COVID, I worked the first twelve months in my garage, and then I spent sixteen months in a 30-foot camper trailer that I converted the front bedroom into an office. The town told me that they were going to fine me if I didn’t remove it. I started building a treehouse office. It’s 14×14. It’s got insulation, air conditioning, heat, and has a full bathroom shower. It’s a little bit more than difficult. It’s like a little house up in a tree.
That’s what I would call an executive treehouse office. The point is, you made it work. That’s what I’m highlighting. To create an office of that type so you could work remotely and get everything done is pretty creative and innovative as well. I just wanted to throw that in because I thought that was pretty cool.
It’s a neat story because it was making lemonade out of lemons. I had bought all the wood for the treehouse. For our first COVID Thanksgiving, it was going to be my outside little gazebo. My neighbor called the town, the same one who called on the camper, and they put a stop-work order. I had all this lumber, and this was early in COVID, so before lumber went very expensive. I took all the wood to where I have some property, and I built a treehouse office. At that point, lumber was through the roof, and I couldn’t afford probably all the lumber that I had already purchased at that point. I’m just trying to lean into positivity and making lemonade out of lemons sometimes.
Keep a company up and running even if you are not working in it by stepping out of the day-to-day operations. Click To TweetI think that’s a great success strategy. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about is that you mentioned a number of times that you had some consultants and advisors who came in to help you. We all know that no one does this work alone, especially because some of the consultants and advisors had areas of expertise that were different from yours. I know that you work with a good colleague of mine, Paul Meinardus, who was your business and financial coach. Tell us about that. What did Paul do? How did he help you achieve all of these stellar results?
One of the great things about this is we can tap people to be like a virtual CFO. You don’t need a CFO for 40 hours a week necessarily or maybe fifteen hours a week makes sense. That’s where Paul has come in. I call him our virtual CFO. He’s our business strategy advisor and as I said, that was during the pandemic. It was Paul who said, “If all your business is going live-in, we need to adjust rates.” He’s helped us with revenue modeling and identify attributes of the business that I didn’t think were possible. The cost of goods sold. We know our real margins now on each service line.
I had a friend of mine who was involved with Five Guys Burgers, and I used to see him as a manager on his laptop. You could see 500 large fries have been sold by 11:00, and 1,800 Pepsis or whatever, in live time. I feel like I’ve almost now got that live-time statistics on my business. It’s amazing to have that intricate knowledge and the pulse on the real true bottom line and all the moving parts of the business. Paul’s been instrumental in setting all of that up. We still meet with him continuously and look at all of our strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. We go over our SWOT and all of the critical success factors.
It sounds like in one of the benefits that you’ve derived from having a consultant like that, someone who’s an advisor, is they help you to think about things you wouldn’t think of on your own, so that there are greater possibilities for the business and greater ways to increase revenues that you wouldn’t have thought of, and maybe too late and where it would have cost you a lot. There’s also the part of speed of getting the information that you wouldn’t have. Also, making it streamlined so that you can manage and run the business in real time, see things coming before they hit, and avert disasters at the same time.
We don’t know what we don’t know. We’re experts in what we are experts in, and having the ability to tap experts. One of Paul’s colleagues at Wide Awake Business is Carrie Burggraf. She’s been helping us with sales coaching. I can’t even put words to the impact that it’s had. I’ve been working with her directly. She’s been the one who’s been helping me get out and push into all of that. I’m not a salesperson. I can educate and speak to this all day, but I don’t have the questions loaded in my mind. I don’t have necessarily all of the marketing stuff figured out, but she’s got it. She’s like Paul, willing to teach it and enjoys seeing people live it and do it.
It’s a huge difference for you, having those advisors and consultants around you who care about you and the business and want to see you be successful. If you could even imagine or guess, where do you think you would be without them?
We would not be here.
Those partnerships have made a difference to you being where you are now and enjoying the success that you’re enjoying. A lot of people are reluctant to consult an advisor, a coach, or a consultant along the way. What would you say to those business leaders out there, maybe to encourage them, the ones who haven’t experienced the value of real outside counsel?
I make introductions for Paul, Carrie, and other people on their team all the time. I almost see it as my duty to let other people know that they don’t have to do it all. There’s a home care agency owner in Manhattan that I’m good friends with. He does a great job. He has a great business, but he won’t let anyone in his office, except for him, speak with new clients. I get it. I understand the quality control need.
One of the things that I had to embrace was you just need to expect 80% of what you would do in your delegation. That’s enough. I’ve been fortunate to have it, and I know his team can do it. I want to role model for him and even help him stay accountable because I’ve had the help. I feel like it’s one of those things where it’s like, “This is possible. You can step out.”
I think it’s one of my greatest self-accomplishments, retrospectively. I didn’t even realize this but it wasn’t my intention, but, God forbid, if I get hit by a bus, the company is still up and running because I’ve stepped out of the day-to-day. Not everyone needs to speak to Rick. That’s something that I’m realizing that it’s neat.
That’s an important outcome, being able to have the business have longevity even beyond you. You’re facilitating succession. You’re facilitating the legacy, and that good work continues for the clients, both sets of clients that you’re talking about who benefit from your services. That’s an important outcome also in addition to everything else that we’ve been talking about. I hope that those who are reading out there will realize you can go farther, faster, and to better places sometimes when you get others with expertise to come in to partner with you, work with you, and help you see what you don’t see by yourself.
That’s an important point. I’m glad that you mentioned those people from Wide Awake Business who made a difference in your experience. You were talking about the kinds of people that are coming into the home care industry now because they can see that this can be a profitable business. However, they may not have the same values in place. They may be more wired toward, let’s say, shareholder value and a venture capital situation or whatever. Talk a little bit about who these other players are. I don’t mean by name, but the kinds of players that are in the marketplace and how you are different from what they do.
The Benefits of a Boutique Concierge
There’s a lot of big players. There are national franchises and chains. We are more of a mom-and-pop shop, a boutique, and concierge-type of service. There are excellent franchises. There are excellent models. The gentleman I was mentioning in Manhattan has a great outfit. He came from Wall Street. He retired out of Wall Street and wanted to start a business. We’ve come from all different backgrounds. For several people, it was a family situation, whether a nurse or whatever. It’s an interesting mix of who comes to the industry.
It sounds like there’s more than one way to do a great job coming to the industry. Not everyone who does it differently is necessarily doing it poorly.
To tell you, we get phone calls where people say, “We’re happy you answered your phones.” That’s how my barometer is showing me the volume of places that are opening quality that they’re not even answering their phones. To identify who the quality people are, make sure you can get an owner or manager on the phone, and understand their mission and vision. Did they just buy a franchise? Have they been in this industry for a long time?
I think those things will be very evident once you get someone on the phone who’s willing to have a conversation. If not, that’s probably indicative of what quality you can expect. We all can agree that when you can get the owner of the business on the phone. You’re going to have a very different experience than if you have a regional manager or something else. Having local boots on the ground, where you can check references and make sure that their passion and empathy is matching your values.
To your families, the ones who work with you and the caregivers, what would you say is the reason that they prefer to work with your company? What do you do to educate your clients? We all know that educating our clients is important. How do you handle educating them? Why do they prefer your organization versus some of the others?
It’s the choice and control that they have in choosing who the caregiver is and what those tasks are and understanding that we then do the full service to make sure that all the administrative burden is eased. A lot of places you hear of a caregiver shortage, where people don’t have caregivers. That’s not one of the items that affects us. We have a waiting list of caregivers to onboard and register with us because they know they’re coming to larger wages, better-paying jobs, and positions that will be typically much longer than a typical agency relationship.
I think all of those components, especially if there are tasks, chronic care tasks that a licensed agency aide would not be allowed to do, or they want someone as a high-level companion who can speak French. We had the former president of the World Bank as a client, and we were able to match them with someone who had their finance degree and create a meaningful connection. This guy was very type A and didn’t want to speak to anyone unless there was some common knowledge on these advanced notions. Those are the reasons that people come and work with us. It’s to have that personalized, thoughtful match, and supported relationship.
I think that’s one of the benefits and beauties of a boutique firm, it allows you to be nimble like that and to customize and personalize the service. Not just one-size-fits-all, and some people don’t want that. They want something that’s customized to their loved one and their situation. That’s certainly a good reason to come to your organization. Rick, how can people reach you? How can they reach you if they want to access the services? Maybe they’re in New York. How could they reach you if they would like to have you speak anywhere, perhaps on best practices in home care?
The phone number for the office is (646) 240-4888. My email is Rick@HolisticHomecareAssociates.com. We also have our Facebook page, and I’m happy to do any speaking engagements and always speak to best practices on employing caregivers or anything to do with home care. I’m happy to always connect people if our registry isn’t the right option. It’s been my duty to make sure that I connect people with the right option. As long as the client is served, then we’ve done our job.
Collaboration happens at the top. Competition happens at the bottom. Click To TweetThat’s phenomenal. I know that people know if they call you, they will get a good connection if you can’t help them. I’ve already seen that part of how you operate. You’re an excellent connector, so I can speak about that. Rick, what additional words of wisdom would you like to leave for my audience of corporate executive business leaders? Most of them are not in home care. They may be in completely different industries, and yet everything that you and I have been talking about does apply to every business out there. What else would you like to share with them?
To quote Blue Ocean, “I don’t remember the author, collaboration happens at the top, and competition happens at the bottom.” I think that’s my word of wisdom.
What I love is basically everything you’ve built has been built through high level collaborations and collaborations at every level. That’s an important concept for people to realize and to remember. I don’t even like using the term competitive advantage because what I believe people have is creative advantage. You’re going to do something, Rick, because of who you are.
Your partner, Anne, is going to do something because of who she is. When you create your business, it has its unique pieces based on your gifts, talents, and skills. No one else is going to be able to do it quite like you because you are your own unique selves that you bring to the business. I call that creative advantage. You don’t need to compete with anyone, so to speak. Show up with all of your glory and gifts.
Half of life is just showing up. You get 50% credit for showing up.
It makes a huge difference. I want to thank you so much for our time and for all of the wonderful nuggets of wisdom that you have shared with my community. Thank you for being here.
I thank you, Dr. Karen.
Importance of Righteousness, Mercy, and Others’ Interests
We’re going to close out our segment with a few Bible verses that I think are relevant to what Rick and I have been talking about. First, I’ll start with the First Covenant, which is in Proverbs 21:21. It says, “He who follows righteousness and mercy finds life, righteousness, and honor.” The second reading is from Philippians 2:3-4, out of the New Covenant. It reads as follows, “Let nothing be done through selfish ambition and conceit, but in lowliness of mind, let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests but also for the interests of others.”
I think what we’ve heard here is a picture that Rick has painted of what it’s like to look out for the interests of multiple stakeholders, the win-win-win, looking out for the caregivers, the families, and for the business and those who work in the business with Rick. That’s certainly a part of it. It’s not like you don’t count yourself in, you do, yourself and others. That’s an important piece of it.
As a result, this business is alive. It’s a living organism, and it has honor. You’ve got the picture. You’ve seen it played out here. Rick has described it in an excellent way. I hope that you too out there who are reading will build a business that has mercy baked into it, righteousness and honor, and where you’re paying attention to the interests of others as well as yourself. We’ll see you in the next episode.
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I’m here with Jos Snoep, who is the CEO and President of the Bible League. The Bible League is a ministry that provides Bibles and instructional materials in the Word of God, as well as trains teachers in their local language and culture to share the Word of God and to disciple people. Jos, tell us a little bit about the impact of the Bible League. What’s going on out there?
I met this lady. Her name was Nimia. Nimia was born in 1949. She became a Christian in 2002. We were able to invite her to one of our trainings. At the end of that meeting, she stood up and shared her testimony. She said, “This is the first time I received a Bible of my own. I’m equipped to share the Word of God with others.” I thought to myself at that point, “That’s why we are the Bible League. That’s why God called us to be in ministry, to serve people like that and to equip them with the right materials and with the Word of God.”
Thank you so much, Jos, for sharing that story. What I want to let everyone know is you can be a part of this movement as well. You can go to BibleLeague.org to find out more about the ministry and also to donate to the ministry. There are lots more stories like the one that Jos just shared about lives that are changed and impacted for God through Jesus Christ.
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I’m here with Terence Chatmon, the President and CEO of the nonprofit organization Victorious Family. They are committed to family discipleship and transformation. Thank you for being here, Terence. Tell us about your big goal, what it is that you’re going for at Victorious Family.
By 2030, we see reaching 9.2 million families here in the US.
That is wonderful. You’re reaching these families because you want to see children grow up and truly continue their faith in Christ. Tell us about one of your resources, Do Your Children Believe?, the book you’ve written.
Ephesians 6:4 says, “Fathers, don’t exasperate your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” We’re just being faithful to that calling. In order to do that, we train coaches, provide workshops and content to train parents on how to disciple their children.
That is phenomenal. How can people find out more about the ministry, the other tools and resources you have available? How can they donate to support the ministry?
One of those tools is Do Your Children Believe, a book that we’ve published through Thomas Nelson, and you can find that at VictoriousFamily.org.
There you have it. You want your family to be victorious? Go to VictoriousFamily.org.
Important Links
- Rick Gang on LinkedIn
- Holistic HomeCare Associates
- Anne Sansevero on LinkedIn
- Aging Life Care Association
- Health Sense
- Monday
- Paul Meinardus on LinkedIn
- Wide Awake Business
- Rick@HolisticHomecareAssociates.com
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
- Bible League
- Victorious Family
- Do Your Children Believe?: Becoming Intentional About Your Family’s Faith and Spiritual Legacy
- Thomas Nelson
About Rick Gang
Rick Gang BA is a skilled home care professional with nearly 30 years of experience managing home care. As CEO and co-founder of Holistic HomeCare Associates, Rick has a deep understanding of the home care landscape. He and his team take great pride in ensuring that clients receive the very best home care experience through rigorous caregiver screening and matching and enhancing and simplifying the employment process.
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