Residential care homes outnumber big box communities many times over in the majority of cities across America. However, we lack substantial attention from the healthcare or medical community in general. For example, if you call a long term care insurance company in your area and asked them for a referral for your mother. Chances are they’ll refer you to the usual places, Brookdale, Sunrise, and Atria.
Why is this? How can an industry dominate the market in numbers but yet be mostly ignored in the marketplace? Could the answer be our industry is so fixated on being thought of as “small?” Does our industry have such a strong aversion to the word “big” that it hurts our ability to grow and compete?
This kind of thinking destroyed Kodak, a camera company powerhouse in the 1990s. Kodak’s downfall was their love, devotion, and obsession with film. Their addiction to only focus on film led them to ignore the importance of digital. It’s a matter of record that Kodak developed the first digital camera but felt that consumers wouldn’t be interested in a camera that didn’t use film.
Will the Residential Care Home industry share the same fate as Kodak because we are obsessed with proudly touting how “small” we are? Is being big always negative? Can you be big and still give great care? Is there a happy medium?
Would healthcare providers contract with a group of homes and recognize them like they were a big corporation? If our industry had a “Brookdale” brand with hundreds of small care homes, would they land the big healthcare contracts that the large providers do today? One new group of care homes did just that recently by landing a deal with a healthcare plan with over 1.2 million senior-aged members.
“The Residential Care Home Industry lacks the branding that large providers have, but scaling can occur with many homes under one brand to achieve the same outcome,” states Chuck Bongiovanni, Co-Founder, and CEO of Majestic Residences Franchise Systems, LLC. “There is so much opportunity for residential care homes to get major contracts and compete with the big boxes, but it won’t happen if we continue to take so much pride in being small. It’s possible to be huge together but small individually still.”
Bongiovanni spent eighteen of the last twenty-two months contracting with healthcare plans, long term care insurance companies, workers’s comp, catastrophic care firms, PPO’s, HMO’s and ACO’s for a portfolio of companies owned by a large private equity firm to see firsthand this opportunity. He estimates that Majestic Residences will have agreements with most large healthcare players within the next twelve months.
The important lesson is that maybe the age of being “small” can still exist if it’s balanced with a large organization’s branding. Nature has shown us how easy large trees can overshadow small saplings until there comes a time where sunlight never hits their leaves.
About Majestic Residences
Majestic Residences is a residential care home franchise consisting of current residential care homes and new upstarts operating under a franchise model. All homes are independently owned and operated sharing operating, marketing, and branding systems. Current residential care homes can register for a webinar to receive more information about Majestic Residences by CLICKING HERE
