Working IN or ON Your Home Care Agency Business?

Do you need to get out more?

Home care agency business owners and operators do need to get out more (hey, running a home care agency takes a lot of time, right?), but that’s not what I’m talking about this time.

What I’m talking about is getting out of the daily minutia and taking a step back so you can spend some time working on your business instead of in your business. Working “in” the business or working “on” the business may sound like a purely semantic difference, but it’s actually a very important distinction that can have a significant effect on whether your business stagnates or thrives.

So what IS the difference?

IN Your Home Care Agency Business

Working IN your home care agency business means being in the trenches, immersed in managing day-to-day operations. It means making sure that person is in that place at that time, making sure that email gets answered promptly, making sure that angry client gets the proper attention, making sure payroll gets run on time, etc. Don’t get me wrong, those kinds of things are very important and need to get done, but if you’re spending all your time making sure all the individual gears are moving, you’re never going to see the whole factory. You are the foreman after all…

ON Your Home Care Agency Business

Working ON your home care agency business means taking a step back and putting some attention on what your business actually is looking at the whole picture and what you would like it to become. It means looking at the infrastructure that’s already in place and considering whether it’s still the best approach. It means nailing down those nebulous organization-level issues that nag at functionality and productivity and thinking outside the box. It means coming up with those creative solutions. like taking the time to create reports from your home care software to uncover those important numbers to analyze your business.

It sounds obvious laid out on paper (or screen as the case may be), but a surprising number of home care agency business owners and their leadership teams never find the time to really engage in this kind of thought work.

Why don’t agency owners engage in these practices?

Because home care agency business owners, like others business owners, are trying to find the time rather than make the time. There will always be something that seems more urgent in the moment, that’s the nature of the beast. The trick is to recognize the long term importance of this kind of strategic thinking and prioritize it. It’s not enough to just file it next to “start working out” in that vague “I’ll do it soon” section in the back of your mind. You have to actually schedule the time to do it, just like you would an important meeting or conference call. Otherwise, odds are you will put it off indefinitely. So get it on your calendar and commit to it! You’ll thank yourself later.