Senior living bootcamp graduates, Toby Bhatnagar, General Manager of Business Development at Kiwi Hospitality, and Chase Caples, Marketing Operations Specialist at Solinity Marketing, discuss the impact of living and working for a full week at a memory care community as part of Senior Living Bootcamp. They share how the hands-on leadership training changed their perspective of the industry.

‍

Learn more about how to participate in Senior Living Bootcamp.

‍

Become a BTG sponsor.

Listen to more episodes here.

Welcome to season six of Bridge The Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. Powered by sponsors Accushield, Aline, NIC MAP Vision, ProCare HR, Hamilton CapTel, Service Master, Patriot Angels, The Bridge Group Construction and Solinity. And produced by Solinity Marketing.

‍

Josh 00:50

Welcome to Bridge The Gap podcast, this senior living podcast with Josh. And today I have some very special guests in the studio, and virtually I have Chase Caples, which many of you may know. Chase is part of the Solinity Marketing team. So he's been at our VIP Ignite events and working many times behind the scenes to make everything that you see at Bridge The Gap Possible. And I also have a very special friend and guest, Toby, and I'm going to try not to mess this up, Toby, and you correct me, but, Bhatnagar, is that correct?

‍

Toby 1:27

You got it. You got it right. Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

‍

Josh 1:29

Perfect. So Toby is the General Manager of Business Development at Kiwi Hospitality, and I had the pleasure of connecting with Toby, guess it's been a couple years ago now at a VIP Ignite event in Nashville.

‍

Josh 1:45

A very special time together meeting and networking, and we created a friendship and so couldn't be happier to have Chase and Toby on the show today. My co-host Lucas, is not with us today, so wishing him the best, but we'll be seeing him on our next episode. But today's topic is a very special one near and dear to my heart, and both of you guys have had the opportunity to kind of share in this experience with me. And so we're going to talk about that a little bit for our listeners. I want to set up the conversation. So the topic is on leadership and training for senior living. For our listeners, to give you a little bit of context, one of the things that I have been passionate about in my almost 20 years in senior living is developing leaders, recruiting new talent to the industry, and then making sure when the talent arrives to the industry, that they have a great understanding of actually what happens at ground level that is at the communities.

‍

Josh 2:46

Not only how the team members go about their day and all the different positions and, what they encounter, but also from the resident's perspective. And I'll tell you why this has shaped kind of who I am in the industry, and everything ultimately that I've ever created as it relates to communities and teams. When I first came to the industry, I really knew absolutely nothing about it. Had never even heard of senior living until I arrived in it. And at that time, I was really a marketing consultant. And I remember the great mentor that I had, had the foresight to say, Josh, yes, we can send you to administrator certification training, we can send you to marketing training, and we can do all these different certifications that are wonderful, but if you don't know what it's like to live and work in a community, you'll never be able to fully connect the dots.

‍

Josh 3:40

What I was able to do is actually live for quite a while in a community, and I will tell you, I learned some amazing things. And I learned some things too that when I decided maybe that I would have an opportunity to have an impact on design and team build and policies and procedures and things that I wanted to see done better. So it wasn't just all that people were telling me what I should do, it was me observing. And I can remember one of the first things that I was exposed to is, I was in a senior living community in actually just like a resident's apartment. They had it set up just like a resident would. And I remember the caregivers coming in at night to check on me, which was great. And I remember hearing that all down in the halls and them talking to each other.

‍

Josh 4:31

And I thought, how does anybody get sleep around here? And I remember that informed some of the feedback that I had for the community is like, Hey, let's not assume that all of our residents are deaf. Let's actually be hospitable and make this a great even sleeping experience for them. And so there's so many little things you can learn and take away, and I can't wait for our audience to hear both of your experiences. So that's kind of the segue. We had the opportunity to recently launch and start a program called the Senior Living Bootcamp. And both of you all had an opportunity to live and work in a memory care community. Just so happened to be, Remember Me Senior Care in Cleveland. And I would love for you all to kind of unpack a little bit of the why behind what brought you to the industry and then why it was important for you to attend a program like this. And so, Chase, you're right here in studio, so maybe I'll start with you and kind of share a little bit about your background and why this was important to you.

‍

Chase 5:43

I've only been, like you said, you were new, you knew nothing about senior living when you came in, and that was me. I've only been in the industry for about a year and a half now, and so I really didn't know. I'd never been inside of a community. And so getting this experience was like, you can work in an office all day, but you don't really understand what is at the heart of this industry. So it was really an awesome experience getting to go to the senior living bootcamp. Like I had said before, I was clueless about senior living, barely even knew that was an industry. And now I see that there's an entire community of people and there's so much that goes on inside each community. It's really amazing.

‍

Josh 6:25

And your role as really a partner to the industry is what I would call it, helping lead marketing efforts for a lot of communities. Also a lot of business partners that have products or services that they provide to the industry. How has that impacted what you do on a daily basis?

‍

Chase 6:41

You think about target audience is a big thing, in marketing, and so you actually get to meet the people in the community and the families. And I had a really unique experience, day one when I moved in another resident was moving in as well. And so I actually got to sit in on a move-in meeting and get to see what went on there, what they talked about, what were some of the questions that they asked. And so coming back and applying that to marketing, now I know I have a better picture of maybe who we're writing to or like who we're writing about. So it really just gave me a clear picture of who the people are in the community.

‍

Josh 7:17

That's right. Well, that's hugely impactful, I'm sure, to everything you do. So, Toby, give us a little bit of background on you what you're doing and why this is important to you and what your experience was like.

‍

Toby 7:29

It was once in a lifetime opportunity I got thanks to you. Like you mentioned in the beginning that it was an opportunity to meet you a couple years ago in a conference and we built up a little bit of friendship there. My journey started with the hospitality industry two decades ago, working in the industry for so long, and getting through all that, that's a long story short, COVID made a bit of a stop to everything. It made me think about what am I doing with my career? What am I doing with my life? Thanks to one of my mentors we came across the senior living industry and my first thing was a big question mark, what are we talking about here? I mean, we always thought about either hospitals or institutions or daycare kind of establishments.

‍

Toby 8:13

But I started looking deep into it, and as I got more and more into it, my whole prospect changed about what is this industry it’s so beautiful. I'm doing hospitality, why can’t I engage my own career, my experience to help and make my career more purposeful. For the last three years, I have been educating myself, trying to find venues to get into this industry, to know where I can go and how I can make some changes. That's where I got a chance to talk to you because I came across your newsletter about bootcamp, and I think one of your colleagues was already in there. Audrey had an experience, and I just looked at her interview, it was mind-blowing, and I said, “I need to get hold of Josh.” I need to get into this because every theoretical side you need to have a practical experience.

‍

Toby 9:06

And that is where I think what you are doing is phenomenal. If I take you back two decades when I started my career, I had six months of industrial training in my industry that makes or breaks you, that tells you, okay, is this meant for me or not meant for me? And I think what you have put out there right now with the Senior Living Bootcamp is that you understand you are living with the residents. You are spending an entire 12 to 14 hours a day with the caregivers, the admin team, the families coming in and out. And I was just sitting there and I was like, “what in the world am I doing?” I mean this is beautiful. And what I have taken away from it is I can tell you that I will never forget. Coming to the senior living industry side of it, currently, the company that I'm working with, we came with the purpose of redoing our existing property which was a hotel into an independent market, independent single living. We are 70% almost complete with the project. And our goal is to put out there a similar kind of experience that people can afford.

‍

Josh 10:11

I'm very excited not only to have had you attend bootcamp, but what that will mean to inform decisions that you and your leadership team make and how exciting a community opening right around the corner. I know our listeners are going to want to follow along and see that also to be able to follow along on what Chase is doing. But one of the things that I think is really important about this is, while it's only a week, which some people may think, “oh my gosh, I don't know if I could stay in a community for an entire week.” It is a time investment, but during that week, you guys got to work with a different kind of division or department each day. Is that kind of correct?

‍

Toby 10:55

My first day when I reached there in the evening at five o'clock, Tracy, the owner, was very kind enough to give me a couple of hours of his time being on a very busy schedule. I used that opportunity that day to meet the community, meet all the caregivers around the community, and introduce myself. The next week that started off my first day was in a maintenance department, and the next day I was in the marketing team, and the following day I was with the caregivers. And as I progressed, I was working with different departments just to get exposure to that, which was brilliant.

‍

Chase 11:28

It was the same experience. I don't know if we had the same exact schedule day to day, but I started out, I got there early Monday morning and met up with the administrative team, and marketing team and shadowed them throughout the day, clinical maintenance dietary, everything.

‍

Josh 11:43

One of the things, and our listeners are probably picking up on this, we have an expert from the hospitality industry developing a community. You have an expert in marketing who serves the industry through marketing content creation, automation, and all that. Both need and want the experience. And I can tell you, speaking to college campuses, high schools throughout the years, so many people, we've talked about this on this show, and you guys have probably heard this, so many people either don't know what senior living is, or they think they might know, and they have some public perception, which is actually very much most of the time inaccurate to what senior living is. So part of the idea is it's very difficult for someone that doesn't know anything about senior living to be like, “oh, well yeah, I'm going to go pursue a career in senior living when they really have no exposure.”

‍

Josh 12:42

And they could go and do an administrator training, they could go do dining and culinary. There are a lot of different, very specific positional types of training out there. But one of the things that I would love to see explode in our industry is not only Solinity Leadership but other programs get developed or partnerships with this platform that we're building out to have communities literally, imagine this, if there was a community, all different types of senior living communities, your independent, your active adult, your assisted living, your memory care, all your specialties. But if there was a bootcamp program in every town where if any person was ever interested in wanting to know about senior living, what it was like to live, or what it was like to work, if there was a community near them that they could go stay in for a week and provide their services and get that feedback, how quickly we could begin to change the perception of senior living.

‍

Josh 13:49

And not only that, I have to believe probably, like I've heard from you guys, that the experiences, many people would fall in love with the industry, fall in love with the teams and the passion and the purpose, and then fall in love with those residents. And how much it means when you can lay your head down at night and know that the work you're putting in is impacting someone's life and their family positively. And I believe if we can do that as an industry, we're going to help change the perception. And that's good for all of us. And I couldn't be more excited for you all. So the takeaway I think for the audience and for us today is we need to do more of this. Whether it's you as the listener in your programs and your community starting this and being part of it, whether it's getting on board with what Solinity Leadership is doing in partnering, or opening up your community, we make this super easy for you, it's a pretty automated process, and these guys walk away, you guys both, walked away with a LinkedIn certification badge, didn't you? That's pretty cool, right?

‍

Toby 14:52

That is pretty cool. Thank you for, yeah, I mean, I got a star on my LinkedIn profile and I got so many hits after that and a lot of my colleagues were asking me, “What is a bootcamp?” And I can tell you right now, I have a few of my colleagues who are quite interested in going into the bootcamp as well.

‍

Josh 15:09

Well, that's very good. And it's exciting because one of the things that we hope that this program does is not only showcase to the individual, the experience that they're going to take away and what they'll learn and those moments, but also to showcase their talent. Because like you said Toby, when you put that badge on your LinkedIn, it means something. And people know, oh my gosh, this person not only is a pro, but they've actually lived and worked in a community. So especially for someone without a lot of experience who wants to really make a statement, it's a great opportunity for that. I would say also we want to, and there's a whole curriculum around showcasing what these awesome communities are doing. And I've said that for years. We don't have enough positive stories in the mainstream media that tell people the amazing love stories of the workers and the residents that happen in these communities. That's the story that needs to be told. So partnership with Solinity Leadership, create your own program, we can show you how to add more programs. Very excited. So for our listeners, maybe either one of you could share one of your favorite moments, your favorite takeaways, or maybe your favorite experience, whether that was funny, whether that was meaningful to you or hopefully not traumatic. I know you guys experienced a lot all at once, but Chase, do you have anything that comes to mind?

‍

Chase 16:36

As far as the spectrum of emotions I experienced that week it was all over the place. There were a lot of really heartwarming moments and a lot of like, fun, funny, humorous moments, but for one, just activities was probably one of my favorite parts with the residents. Hitting the balloon around with some pool noodles. And that's what I did for about an hour one day. And it was incredibly memorable. And then we had moments where there was this one resident, you had dinner together every night all of us in the house had dinner together every night, and she would offer to pray for the meal and all the residents around the table. That was an incredibly heartwarming moment for me. So got to experience all of it. I mean, there were tears, there were happy tears and there was everything. So everything in between.

‍

Josh 17:19

Just hearing some of the stories that I've heard that was meaningful to you, and I know it was also meaningful to the team members and residents that you took time out of a very busy schedule to spend with them and, and share with them as well. So Toby, anything come to mind from your experience?

‍

Toby 17:34

Chase said, every day there was something that you could hold back with you forever, I can say that. One of the most beautiful experience that I had was I was in house number three. I was serving dinner with the residents that day. And this old couple, her husband who's 92 years of age, he drives down there every day. He would walk in and it was such a beautiful feature that they would share a plate together. Every resident would just be sitting around the table and would be admiring that. Even the caregivers know that John is going to be there today with Carolyn and have dinner with her. And I asked them, “why they share one plate?” The caregiver told me that back in the day they struggled with money a lot and they used to feed all the kids first and they used to always share a plate together. And even today, even after so many years, they still do the same thing. And that was just amazing. It did bring tears to my eyes at that time.

‍

Josh 18:35

That is hard. Those kind of heartfelt moments and those kind of stories are hard to illustrate to someone unless you can experience it. And how thankful I am for you guys sacrificing time away from your jobs, your families, and your friends, traveling out of town to go be part of this specific community's bootcamp, and investing to not only make yourself but your teams and your communities better. That's what it's all about in senior living. So for our listeners, I hope this has been just a good sampling of one of the great programs that are out there in senior living. And I know as you are listening to these heartfelt stories and moments, for those of you that are in the communities, you know that these moments, these magical love moments happen every single day all over our industry and all types of communities. We need to be sharing that.

‍

Josh 19:33

We need to be experiencing that. We need to bring new people into the industry and expose them to that. So I hope that you will find out more. I hope you will follow Chase's adventures, Toby's Adventures, follow Kiwi Hospitality's new community that's being built. I hope you'll consider partnering with the program and investing in the future of our industry. We're going to connect you to these guys. We're going to connect you to the Solinity Leadership platform if you'd like to know more. As always, everything about this episode and our show notes can be found at btgvoice.com. Make sure I give a shout-out to my co-host who is not with us today. I know you're missing his voice because it's like butter. Thank you for hanging with me today. This is Josh signing off with another great episode of Bridge The Gap.

‍

20:28

Thanks for listening to Bridge the Gap, a podcast with Josh and Lucas. Connect with the BTG network team and use your voice to influence the industry by connecting with us at btgvoice.com.