Home Delivered Services was written in response to requests from around the United States for information on a home services program called Club 24 Senior Living At Home®. Club 24 has been in operation for twelve years, serving seniors with home delivered meals, housekeeping, transportation, home companions, grocery shopping, home maintenance and a variety of other services. This critically acclaimed and award-winning program has been used as a model for numerous similar operations. The projected accelerated growth of this senior market will produce a huge need for more of these services.

Recognizing that there is a growing interest in serving the needs of an ever-increasing number of seniors, operating procedures and experience have been condensed and written in book form. Home Delivered Services: Building and Maintaining Your Program provides a "how to" approach to the replication of a home services program very much like Club 24 Senior Living At Home®. The text describes the necessary steps to help determine if such a program is right for you, how to promote and sell it and how to evaluate its progress. The book contains 45 forms, agreements and reports for the reader’s reference and adaptation.

This book is designed to save readers thousands of dollars, whether they decide to proceed with a program or not.

Michael C. Walker recently retired from active management after serving as Chief Executive of Seniorsfirst (Presbyterian Homes and Services of Genesee Valley, Inc.) and its predecessors for the past twenty-four years. Seniorsfirst is a full service provider of facilities, services and programs to the senior market in the greater Rochester, New York area. These include independent living, assisted living, home delivered services, adult day programs, home healthcare, nursing home care, including transitional and rehabilitative care, among others.

Mr. Walker was responsible for the design and implementation of an innovative program serving seniors in their own homes. The award-winning Club 24 Senior Living At Home® program has been replicated across the United States using this unique model.

Prior to his most recent employment, Mr. Walker served fifteen years for the predecessors of J.P. Morgan Chase Manhattan Bank in upstate New York as a Vice President in marketing and finance. During his banking career he wrote An Introduction to Bank Marketing Research, published by the Bank Marketing Association, Chicago, the first book of its kind in the banking industry. The book was later reprinted in Europe and translated into Spanish.

While Mr. Walker has retired from active management, he has not retired from working. He continues to be actively engaged as a marketing and management consultant to organizations and businesses in the senior market.

He is also the author of a recently published related book now available through 1^stBooks Library. Marketing to Seniors unveils a number of unique aspects of the senior market, including the introduction of the "extended senior customer" to account for the involvement of others in senior purchasing decisions. These include family, friends, advisors and healthcare professionals.

Contents

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Chapter Twelve. The Bottom Line

Marketing success, whether measured by sales results, market share, market penetration, or service delivery, is an indicator of program success, as well.

While measurements of success are important, none is more important to the continuation of your program than success at the bottom line. Whether you are a profit-making business or a not-for-profit organization, the operation will not be able to continue if revenues do not exceed expenses for any length of time. Working capital will dry up and the program will not be able to meet payroll or pay the bills. Profits, or net gains from operations in the case of not-for-profits, must be understood at the outset of the program and continue to be monitored in a timely manner.

A program budget will be required to provide the measurements necessary to evaluate the financial performance. In Chapter Two, Prescribed Steps A to Z, steps B, I, Q and R deal specifically with financial controls and projections.

For an on-going business, budget preparation and review are likely matters of fact, while a new business needs to put a high priority on the budget process at the outset. This can be a real challenge without historical reference. Some suggested sources of help might include the following:

• Seek professional help
• Ask business contacts for support
• Check out business reference sources at a library or the Internet
• Take a course – by class, self-study or on-line
• Contact a business trade association
• Ask your local banker

Whether a new business or a new service within an existing one, budgeting for home-delivered services will necessitate points of reference. In Table 5, a typical income and expense report is shown for a mature program, long after start-up costs have been offset.

In that these figures are from a live operation, it is important to realize that the results may not be typical of all other programs. There will be differences, but the relationship of income and expense within categories could be considered a reasonable representation. These results, while demonstrating a profitable operation, make it clear that this is not a high margin business. The labor-intensive nature of the program will keep profit margins lower than most for-profit companies and more in line with the not-for-profit sector.