How can your agency create and achieve attainable goals for a successful 2025? Great question!
Every January, goals are set and resolutions are created. Plans are made and calendars get highlighted with expected completion dates.
Personal goals and resolutions are very different from those we set for businesses. And while personal resolutions often go by the wayside sometime during the year – or midway through January in some cases – keeping business goals on track is important for your bottom line.
January is also Financial Wellness Month. So let’s hit the ground running and discuss some ways to keep your business-setting goals on track so your home care agency can have a successful 2025.
Know your KPIs
The first step towards having a successful 2025 is knowing what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are. Let’s look at this in three phases.
Phase 1:
If you’ve never looked at KPIs before and have no clue where to begin, here are a handful to get you started:
- Total Revenue
- Total Expenses
- Margins
- Caregiver Turnover
- Key referral sources for both clients and caregivers
Home care agencies need to know what to track for their business and why it’s necessary to track these things. It’s all about what you want to achieve with your business.
Phase 2:
If you’re already tracking these specific KPIs, continue building on them. If you’ve already tackled all the KPIs you think you need to, it’s time to set goals to ensure you’re hitting your KPIs.
What do you want your agency to look like over the next year? What do you need to track to determine if you’ve achieved your goal or not?
Phase 3:
For agencies that have already tracked their KPIs and set their goals, it’s time to look at the trends for those KPIs over the past four years. Anything beyond four years is probably not going to be helpful in figuring out what a trend is and more importantly, why it trended that way.
Start asking some important questions, like:
- Did you change your software?
- Did you change any internal processes?
- Was there legislation in your state that changed how you’re allowed to do certain things within your agency?
- If you had higher caregiver turnover one year versus the next, was it because of something you did internally to affect that number?
- Is the job market in your area up or down?
It’s important to know these details to determine if you did something to affect the KPI or whether the outside environment affected it. Data without context is not helpful.
Goal Setting for a Successful 2025
What do you want your agency to look like at this time next year? What are your ideal goals?
Write down all your goals for 2025. Now, cross out everything but the top 3 because you only have so much time on your hands.
Looking at your top 3 goals, ask yourself what’s realistically achievable this year.
Growing 26% might be achievable for some businesses. Growing 3% might be achievable for others.
What you’re looking for is something that’s a little bit of a stretch. You have to work at it and put in some effort, but it’s not realistically unattainable.
If you’re looking at the trends over the past 2 years and your revenue has grown by 4% each year, an 11% goal does not make any sense. But setting it at 6% does. So use the data from your trends to determine what to set growth goals at.
Once you’ve set your goals, it’s time to determine which metrics will help you achieve them.
Now it’s time to talk to your team and let them know about your goals. Depending on the goals you choose, your team could play an instrumental role in helping you achieve them. Give your staff buy-in so they’ll be fully onboard with helping you have a successful 2025.
Community Building
What are ways you can improve things like:
- Your office culture
- Relationships with your office staff and caregivers
- The community around you
- Relationships with your peers and other agencies
- The community at large
- Are there any volunteer opportunities in your community?
This is about forging connections. The more connections you have in the industry and in your community, the more levers you have to pull when it comes to getting questions answered and seeing how other businesses are doing things.
Home care is very much a relationship business. The more relationships you have, the more successful your agency will be. Then you’ll have the ability and leverage to get help if you need it.
It’s highly beneficial to have a solid base in both the industry and in your community. We all want to live in a community that is close-knit, thoughtful, and helps each other out.
Rest
It might sound simple and cliche, but it’s important to rest. Don’t burn yourself out. Seriously. It’s going to feel like you’re not being productive, but you really are.
Resting is actually very productive because you can’t think creatively if you’re exhausted. With the industry changing as much as it is, you need to be able to think creatively about the direction you want to go with your agency, how you can expand it, how you can engage in the community more, etc.
To achieve this, rest is required. Get a good night’s sleep. Eat healthy food. Drink lots of water. Take some downtime, relax on the couch, or find a hobby, so you can force yourself not to think about work for a little while.
Celebrate Your Accomplishments
Especially in business climates, there’s a lot of focus on the old mantra “just keep going,” but it’s important to stop and celebrate when you’ve reached a goal. Look at where you are as an agency, where your staff and caregivers are, and be proud of the moment when you accomplish whatever it is you set out to do.
Make sure you let your staff know they’re appreciated as well, especially if you discussed your annual goals with them at the beginning of the year and they helped you achieve them. That’s an important milestone for the whole agency!
As you’re staring at the blank slate of the new year set before you, remember that a successful 2025 is possible if you know your KPIs, set attainable goals, build your community, rest and rejuvenate your mind, and celebrate your accomplishments.
Questions about how Rosemark can help you pull your data, evaluate your KPIs, and help you set up goals for the new year? Reach out to a member of our Customer Success Team today to schedule a chat.