Reducing agency and stabilizing turnover can be accomplished with a great culture. President and Chief Executive Officer at Sinceri Senior Living, Chris Belford, shares how their initiatives to create a “family-like” culture have resulted in high occupancy rates.
‍

This episode was recorded at the NIC Fall Conference.
‍

Produced by Solinity Marketing.
‍

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.
‍

Lucas 00:52

Welcome to Bridge The Gap podcast, the Senior Living podcast with Josh and Lucas here at the fall NIC Conference in Chicago 2023 and we've got a great guest on today. Welcome, Chris Belford, the CEO of Sinceri Senior Living. Welcome to the show.
‍

Chris 1:07

Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.
‍

Lucas 1:09

Glad to have you know you have the best radio voice of any guest that we've had on the show. I think that you should be the podcast guy.
‍

Chris 1:15

I got a head for radio, right? Basically what they say or a face for radio, is that how they say that? That's right.
‍

Lucas 1:20

No, it's such a great voice. It's an honor to have you on the show.
‍

Chris 1:23

Thank you.
‍

Lucas 1:24

I got a chance to spend time with you and your "family," meaning your company Sinceri, at your leadership retreat a couple of weeks ago. And I was really fascinated by all the conversations that I got to have and really the positivity that was coming out. I got to be a part of the round tables, eight to 10 people. And then we switched and it was a bunch of Executive Directors and I asked them, "What went right this year?" That was my question to them. And they had a lot of positive things to say. And one of the positive things that they said is, "You know what, occupancy is going up." And then they said, "We've been able to tackle our labor challenges in a way that we haven't before." And so I came away from that with a lot of great information and I wanted to pick your brain to get some insights of how you've created that culture. And then also to give our listeners maybe not so much secret sauce, but some of your recipes for success about 2023. And then what do you see for your organization in 24?
‍

Chris 2:22

So we were formerly JEA Senior living, JEA has been around the industry for 35 years and they did a lot of development on standalone memory care when Access Industries purchased them back in October of 2019. And I started in November of 2020. The discussions that I've had with the board was it's really time for rebranding. So what we did is we hired a branding company that came in and just interviewed like 3,000 people, both associated with residents of and family members and employees and vendors and things like that. And the bigger question for them was, "What does JEA mean to you?" And most of them, as a matter of fact, the majority of the answers were somewhere in the realm of it feels like family. So when we branded to Sinceri Senior Living, sincere is a familiar name, you know, we looked, I mean, believe me, going through a renaming of our company, I don't advise for anybody to do 'cause it is very difficult to do.
‍

Chris 3:22

And then it came down to the Sinceri brand, which was like family. So what we did is we understood our brand, we understood what appeals to people and therefore from a cultural perspective, we hire people that feel that same way, that feel like they're like family and that we want to treat people like that. So our employees, our resident, our resident family members, our vendors rather, we treat people like family. And I think that's what started the emphasis of the culture and the culture just continued to grow as it is. We love each other, we're trying to help each other out in this industry. It was a difficult time with Covid. From our perspective, developing that culture really started from “like family” and then just hiring people and reinforcing that tail tone and tenure to our employees and to our resident family members and things like that I think has really what's gotten us the culture we have today, which is beautiful.
‍

Josh 4:14

Culture is such a foundational part, which I believe has led to what I've heard some of your great successes on the labor front with all the challenges, also the occupancy front, seeing big improvements there. Share with our listeners some of the practical strategies that you guys have implemented. And what would you kind of attribute to your success on those two major fronts? Where are you seeing your biggest opportunities there where your culture has had an impact on that directly?
‍

Chris 4:41

It was a really difficult thing to do because staff agency, when they come into your building, they don't know your residents, they don't know the family members, they don't know their employees. And so they felt like strangers to us in some way. I know their hearts are in the right position, right? They wanted to come in and care for people, but they didn't know anybody. And so the direction in 2020 and 2021 was really how do I reduce staff agency and hire for our own? Think about an Executive Director and the day in and day out job and staffing shortages that they had. The last thing they could really do is just sit down and try and recruit people for them. And so what we did is we took regional recruiters and kind of plugged them in various geographic areas to cover the buildings and really what they would do is kind of mine for employees that were interested in coming into senior housing, they would do set up interviews for themselves.
‍

Chris 5:32

They would talk to these employees to see if they were interested. They'd get 'em to the buildings. In the old days before any of this happened, it was really ED, you're responsible for recruiting, you just recruit. And nowadays we recognize that we had to advance that and take some of the load off that heavy recruiting off of the Executive Director. So they really just didn't have enough time at dealing with everything they had to deal with. So that was one of our biggest successes there was to actually hire these recruiters that would go out and just constantly recruit, hire first 90 days is when you get most of your turnover in your communities. So what we were able to do is we'd have, working with the recruiters and the community teams, would have our recruiters call the new employee every week, "How are you doing? Are you getting the training that you need? What is it that you like? What is it that you don't like about working?" And try and find solutions for that employee so that they feel connected to the building and eventually was really successful for us as reducing that turnover. The recruiters are still recruiting, we still have 'em employed, we're not hiring as many as we used to. We'll constantly be interviewing, but we haven't, we don't need to hire as many as we did when we had agency.
‍

Josh 6:42

So reducing agency, stabilizing your turnover, obviously just those two things alone have huge positive impacts for so many different areas. Specifically impact the culture, quality of care, those sort of things. And I'm assuming that in turn kind of helps feed into more effort, more time to help with the occupancy front and those marketing efforts. So it sounds like you're trending in the positive direction there. What have been the big initiatives to gain occupancy?
‍

Chris 7:11

I mean this sincerely, but what we've really been able to do is kind of have that culture that we talked about it originally, which is "like family" culture. Employees feel engaged now too, where they're actually part of the marketing process or the sales process. Reward employees if they just introduce themselves to a new perspective to kind of lower the inhibitions that people have moving in their mom into a community. So they would get to know the prospective resident that may move in or the prospective family member depending on the acuity side. So they'd be engaged as well. That along with our culture and reduction of turnover as has really gotten us to where we are today. And I'm happy to say that we're well beyond where we were pre-Covid. Our occupancy levels are much higher than they were prior to that.
‍

Lucas 7:58

That's a big deal.
‍

Chris 7:59

It's huge.
‍

Josh 7:59

It is a huge deal and a great example for our industry. Lucas, as a partner to the communities, you have even shared with me even off this podcast of how you were able to see and feel that culture come through at just one of their public events.
‍

Lucas 8:15

I'm afforded the opportunity to go and visit so many different communities all across the southeast and I get to see different cultures. Many times I'm there because there is something that needs to be improved. And that may be not just the physical plant or the building, there might be a value add, something is happening, there's transition in staff, there's transition, there's, there's a lot going on there. And so I get to kind of be a part of this. I just really enjoyed name-dropping Rachel on your staff. Our whole team really enjoys working with Rachel. It's always unique to find somebody who has a very good skillset for what they're challenged to do and then also pair that with a passion for wanting positive results for older adults. And when all of those things come together and you're able to build partners and teams and culture around that, it really works. And I got to experience that with you and your team.
‍

Chris 9:08

Yeah, I appreciate that. Rachel's fantastic. You're right. She's been working for JEA for quite some time. One of the things that we like to practice in the C-Suite at Sinceri as well as at the senior management level, but we call it collaborative team management. It's a term that I brought with me when I worked for Emeritus and Grainger Cobb and Justin Hutchins. We don't silo our positions. IT has an opinion about what accounting does and what sales do and all those types of things. So we're collaborating as a senior management team, bringing in new perspectives and different viewpoints too of solution is vital. It allows your team to kind of buy off on the solution so that everybody's working towards the same goal. And Rachel was really welcoming of that. Spread ourselves out and we really talk about the solutions that we have at Sinceri.
‍

Josh 9:54

Well, culture and collaboration prepare you greatly for all the challenges that senior living faces. 2024, as you're looking into that year ahead, what are some initiatives that are ahead of you guys that you're going to tackle?
‍

Chris 10:08

We're going to continue to grow as an organization. We're looking at new partnerships with various equity partners and things like that so that we actually grow our existing, right now we're at 73 communities. I would suspect by the end of next year we'll be closer to a hundred. Bringing in new relationships I think is important for us as a community. At the community level, it's really a focus on margin. We have a ways to go and we want to continue to grow on operating margin. So that's definitely one of the aspects that we'll look at.
‍

Josh 10:38

Well, very exciting times. Busy, busy NIC here and we appreciate you taking time for us. Obviously, Lucas is a huge mega fan, being able to meet so many of your Executive Directors. Appreciate you taking the time. Lucas, we need to connect our audience to the folks who don't already follow these guys.
‍

Lucas 10:54

That's right, that's right. For our audience, you know about our show notes, we're going to connect with Sinceri and Chris' team. They are active on LinkedIn. I see the company's posts showcasing some of the successes that y'all are improving on as you continue to grow. And then we'll also ask our listeners to go to btgvoice.com. You can connect to all of our content there and stay in touch with us on LinkedIn as well. Chris, thank you for your time today here at NIC.
‍

Chris 11:17

My pleasure. Thank you guys. I appreciate it.
‍

Lucas 11:20

And thanks to all of our listeners for listening to another great episode of Bridge The Gap.
‍

11:24

Thanks for listening to Bridge The Gap 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.