As home care business owners, we all operate on systems that we’ve so eloquently built in order to achieve proper care for our clients. Once we’ve mastered those systems and our care units are running efficiently and effectively, we naturally start to think about how to scale to the next level. In this series, we explore the key components to scaling your home care business while maintaining the highest quality care, optimal efficiency, and meeting your financial goals.
Today, we focus on knowing your strengths and weaknesses… and using that knowledge to grow your business.
First, a reminder. The care of your clients always comes first. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses and how to navigate both efficiently, is essential to maintaining high-quality care.
We have been discussing setting boundaries and communication in this series, which may or may not be natural strengths but can be learned to meet the requirements of your role. Fortunately, we don’t have to be masters of all trades to be great directors. We just have to know our strengths and weaknesses and navigate the path that fills our needs with the right people in the right places.
Who Are You, Really?
Perhaps you’re thinking this is more than you bargained for in a blog post but stay with us. It’s important.
Knowing ourselves before we step into this role in the home care industry – or quickly figuring it out now that you’re here!- is critically important. Taking inventory of your passions, skills, and talents, and identifying the intersection of the three, is a pretty accurate assessment of your strengths.
Perhaps you love to create systems, you have a medical transcription background, and you are very good at recording and recalling client details… then you may be adept at overseeing the caregivers’ weekly reporting and visit summaries. Perhaps, however, you revile accounting, have never done payroll, and often find careless errors in your financial tasks. You are best to consider hiring a quality accountant to manage payroll.
Knowing ourselves means being honest about where we thrive, and where we feel ourselves slumping during any given task. There will be parts of your role that you do well, to which you have tangible skills to apply, and that fill you up and make you feel so grateful to do what you do. Run, do not walk- to own those tasks. The litmus test is: can someone else do this task with better efficiency because their intersection of passion, skill, and talent is better centered over that task? If the answer is yes, embrace it.
Part of being an excellent director is putting the agency’s needs above any team members’ egos, including your own. If after checking in with yourself, you believe you may be stubbornly insisting on executing in an area where the agency could benefit from someone else in that role, consider hiring for that position, or otherwise outsourcing. You cannot be the best version of you, which your clients and staff need until you are optimizing for your strengths and accounting for your weaknesses.
Being smart about where to invest our own time, and where to outsource, is the expert level of management. Take honest assessments, accept what comes from them, identify how to maximize the opportunity for agency to get the best of you, and get selective about your time. Getting to the next level is a function of making successive, great decisions just like this.
We will say it today, and over this series: there’s nothing easy about growth. You’re not alone if it feels challenging. But if you establish early on where your strengths and weaknesses are, and set in motion a plan to optimize for your strengths and fill in where you are weaker, you have laid a critical foundation for growth.
