Miriam Allred (00:01)
Welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. On this show, I put high growth home care agencies under the microscope to see what works, what doesn't, and why. Through this podcast, the guests will be sharing strategies and formulas that drove their success, so you'll be able to listen, learn, and build the winning formula for your own success. In the lab, you are the scientist.
Today in the lab, I'm joined by Kelly Adams, the owner of Beyond Home Care based in Alexander City, Alabama. Kelly, I've been looking forward to this conversation and now we're here. So thank you so much for being here.
Kelly Adams (00:40)
thank you so much for having me.
Miriam Allred (00:42.865)
I said this to you before we got on, but I've always been impressed by you. We don't know each other super well, but the few occasions that we've talked or bumped into each other at conferences, you've always stood out to me. And so when I was putting together the list of early guests, you kept coming to mind. So I'm really glad that you've made time and are willing to join me.
Kelly Adams (01:01)
Absolutely. You're way too kind, Miriam. I have, no, just, you know, I have always admired your, I mean, you're, you're young, and you've done so much to this point. And, man, I wish I could go back and tell my younger self, like, you know, just stick with it.
Miriam Allred (01:26)
I've got all these role models like you in home care. I don't know if you've seen what I've been posting on LinkedIn, but it's like there's all these entrepreneurs that I'm surrounded by all the time. And then I didn't expect it for myself, but I got the itch and I've got again, all these examples to look to. So you're one of those and you're still young and we'll talk about what you're up to because boy, do you have a lot ahead of you as well. So that's the exciting part. So today we're going to be discussing
Kelly Adams (01:42)
I love it.
Miriam Allred (01:55)
One of your skills and one of the areas that you've built the success of your business on, which is how to become an authority for aging in your market. So before we get into the topic, I want to give you a couple of minutes to talk about Beyond Home Care's origin story and you are the owner. And so I want you to weave in your own personal background and your own personal story so people can get a taste of both you and your business. So let's start there.
Kelly Adams (02:23)
Okay, so Beyond Home Care, I started in 2017. A little background about me, I grew up with an awesome role model of my aunt Patty, and she used to take me with her to the nursing home. I was like eight or nine, and she moved from Tennessee down to Alabama because I was the only niece, nephew, anybody. And so she moved down and...
Yeah. I mean, her background was recreational therapy. And so she would take me with her to the Alzheimer's unit of the nursing home. And, I would go to summer camps for recreational therapy. And when she started an in-home care agency, I did everything from answering phones to marketing to staffing, you know, and everything in between. So I kind of grew up in and around older people and thought that,
thought that was normal and then as an adult realized that no, that's not a lot of people do that. But I just found a lot of value in learning from our older generation. I met some really cool people. so, fast forward, I went to college and got my degree and then my husband is family practice and his specialty is rural medicine.
And so we moved to this little bitty town in Alabama that I was not going to be able to use my public relations degree in. And I'd had three babies at that at that point. And, you know, I'm a I'm a very faithful person. And so through just a lot of discernment, I really just kind of felt like the Lord was calling me to work with seniors. And there wasn't.
a lot of opportunity for people to age in place in this small town. Usually in rural towns, you you're not going to find big franchises. And so, you know, I just kind of leaned into that on a whim and a prayer. And my aunt had passed away by then. Unfortunately, she's been gone for, gosh, she's been gone almost 12 years now. And, but I took everything she taught me and started a home care agency, completely from the ground up. I'm an independent. No franchise in a underserved area of Alabama and if anybody knows anything about Alabama it's a very unregulated state so we call it the wild wild west here.
Miriam Allred (05:08)
I'm glad you mentioned that because to be totally honest, I don't know very many home care businesses in Alabama. I don't hear of them that often. I'm like, wait, there are seniors there, there are people there, there has to be businesses there, but Alabama just feels like it's kind of its own, which is really interesting. So it's good to hear you kind of confirm that.
Kelly Adams (05:24)
It is. Oh, yeah, it is. It is. We we do. We call it the wild wild west. It is a completely unregulated and some people might say, oh, that's really great. And to a degree it is. But there are definitely some some downfalls to it, too. So so, yeah, that's how I kind of got started in this in this place. I was. It's funny because.
You know, after being a stay at home mom for five years and supporting my husband's career, I had my third child and so my oldest was three. My middle was 18 months and I had a newborn and I was like, man, I, you know, I'm going to start a business because that makes a lot of sense. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And my the best part, Miriam, is that I, you know, talked to my husband about it he was like,
Miriam Allred (06:07)
Three under four. Three under four. Okay, let's start a business.
Kelly Adams (06:18)
I mean, yeah, I think you should do it. And I said, well, you know, my concern is that things are going to change in our lives. And he was like, I don't think anything's going to change that much.
Miriam Allred (06:29)
We were talking about that before. So much change, so much growth, so much unknown, but that's part of what makes this so exciting. So you started the business, talk about your business model, talk about payers, about service lines, give us kind of a taste of the structure of your business.
Kelly Adams (06:49)
Yes, so we are primarily private pay, long term care insurance and VA. Took me three years to get credentialing for the VA, but yay, we're part of the CCN network. Yeah, and so no Medicaid. know, Medicare will get into hopefully soon with guide, but. But yeah, for the primary payer sources, it's it's tough here. It's tough when it's.
private pay for the structure of the business. We are what I would call a team led agency. And you know, if you've been in home care long enough to know that it's a roller coaster, the more people you have at the top in administration and management, I mean, it really does chip away at your margins. And so I learned
through amazing mentors and I joined this really cool coaching program, you know, not too far in and realized, hey, like I could put some structures into place and this thing could do its, you know, it could work without a lot of overhead and without a lot of management. So what that looked like was growing my team and so my...
current Director of Operations has been with us for six years. She started as a caregiver, worked her way up and is amazing. And everyone who's part of my leadership team has started as a caregiver. And we've used that to mentor and develop them into more. So yeah, mean it's...
I'm not a huge agency. I'm not, you know, a five million dollar, I'm small and scrappy. That's what I like to tell people, small and scrappy.
Miriam Allred (08:52)
Small and scrappy, but intentional. You know, very intentional. I think some people may hear that and think like, small and scrappy, but you've been in business for eight years, but no, very intentional. We were talking about this. You know.
Kelly Adams (09:03)
Yeah, no, you have to be intentional. Yes. I mean, in every role, every process does more than one thing. You know, it just has to, especially if you are small. mean, I think that we've talked before about it's almost harder to be a small agency than it is to be a large because I mean, you really do have to keep your margins tight. You have to make sure that your people know what they're doing. There's not a whole lot of room for error or, you know, having a bad caregiver.
And so our processes are tight. Our structure is good. The average caregiver has been with us for at least two years, if not more. I have caregivers who have been with us for six, seven years. And you just don't see that in our industry. Turnover is super low for us. You know, but we're really good at what we do. And we do that. We're not your typical home care agency.
You know, I think that that's the other part of it is being in a small town, you have to do more than just one little thing, right? So we've learned that over the years and that's kind of part of being an independent too. That's the fun of being an entrepreneur. can do, you know, you can see how it's done and then change it to do it the way you think it should be done.
Miriam Allred (10:21)
So it sounds like you've been hands off for a little while now. I'm just curious how long has it been since you've been pretty, pretty removed from like day to day operations.
Kelly Adams (10:32)
Yeah, so I have been out of day-to-day operations for probably the last two years. Now I still am involved. When I stepped out of daily operations, it was stepping out of the office on a day-to-day basis. I still handled some of our marketing stuff and I still did payroll back then. But over the last year, I've stepped out a lot more.
I am involved in like a day in a monthly meeting. Kirsten calls when she needs me or when, you know, she needs to bounce something off of me or, know, for the most part, my team knows what to do and they do it really well. Which is good because, know, I, life happens, right? And so in all of this, I got to become the other side of what I teach and my dad has all summers and so.
Knowing that and knowing the trajectory we made the decision to move mom and dad to our area So that happened last fall. I had some health issues that came up and you know, mean again life happens and so You have to be able to adapt and it so it anyway it it was good because had the business relied solely on me That would have been a problem.
