Procare HR executives Brett Landrum and Paul Jarvis discuss the company’s acquisition of data-focused Clarent platform. The merger allows for advancement of the HRIS and workforce management solutions with a pathway to provide HR data to the senior living industry.

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Welcome to season seven 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, Sage, Hamilton CapTel, Service Master, The Bridge Group Construction and Solinity. And produced by Solinity Marketing.

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00:36 - 01:42
Lucas McCurdy

Welcome to Bridge the Gap podcast, the senior living podcast with Josh and Lucas. We've got a battle of CEOs on the show today. No, just kidding. But we do have some great friends and some movers and shakers, and it's going to be a great conversation about how two great entities have come together to help change the outcomes for senior housing, and we got two passionate leaders we want to welcome Brett Landrum of ProCare and Paul Jarvis of Clarent (Now Procare HR). Welcome back to the show, guys.

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01:04 - 01:09

Brett Landrum

Thanks. Appreciate you having us on – excited to dig in.

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1:09 - 1:21

Lucas McCurdy

Brett, we're going to start with you. Talk to us about how Procare and Clarent and this, kind of new merger, of, great leadership and great companies have come together.

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1:21 - 3:26

Brett Landrum

We actually had a client of ours that made the introduction to Paul and I, and I'll start with actually kind of the long term vision for Procare, that we've been running towards for the last number of years. And I think that should provide some clarity as to the why.

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Procare, the mission that we really describe ourselves as, is a mission based growth company. And so the vision that we've been running towards over the last nine years has been proving the thesis that incremental improvements in people and people related functions can translate to the main business outcomes of senior housing operators.

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So resident satisfaction, quality of care and ultimately financial performance. And we've positioned ourselves to have a strategy that's three layers. The first is comprehensive HR services that are optimized for senior housing – delivered consistently and predictably, scalable, etc.. The second layer is building and buying, highly value-additive services that really don't exist in the marketplace today that can, , really be the tip of the spear to drive those better, business outcomes for our operators.

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And then the third layer is data, and I would say I had in my head one thing and as Clarent and Paul and Henry have come in and they've challenged that thesis. And given that they know a lot more about senior living data technology and business intelligence, they have won that argument. But we're starting to develop a vision for how we can leverage data to inform our actions, better serve our clients, drive better outcomes, and also inform clients on what actions they can take to pull different levers and drive key outcomes in their organization.

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3:26 - 3:56

Josh Crisp

Well, Brett, our audience has come to know Procare, those that didn't already know. I mean, you guys have been grinding for nine plus years, as you mentioned. and we've also known Paul and his team for years in the industry. So, Paul, tell us something similar from your perspective, the why of Clarent, what you've learned through the years being in industry and serving clients and providers, and why this made sense for you guys as well?

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3:56 - 5:29

Paul Jarivs

It's funny. It all started when I missed a call from Brett, and he left a voicemail, and I actually kept the voicemail because it's a nice little souvenir now. But we've been at this for kind of five years, and what we did was business intelligence for senior living owners and operators. So we were pulling data out of financial and operational systems.

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We're looking at rent roll, CRM, payroll, and Chart of Accounts. So really everything with the dollar sign and what we were very good at was kind of what Brett alluded to, reporting the news side of the world. I could show you every number from every system for all time. Where we needed to go to the next level. How do we help our customers change the news, right?

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You hear a lot about actionable data. We were really good about the data part. We didn't really have the ability to do the actionable part. And that's because we were building a dashboard. We were putting numbers in front of people. So the more I talked to Brett, the organization that he's built for Procare has this really unique model where they have a lot of trust and a lot of really close touchpoints with their clients.

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When you talk again, the actionable data piece like the action may not live with the CFO, right? The action may live with a scheduler within a community with an executive director. And so it seemed like a really cool marriage of our expertise on the data and technology side. And their expertise in terms of the people that they've hired who know the industry, who work really closely on a day to day basis with their partners. So it made a lot of sense the more we got into it.

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5:29 - 6:11

Josh Crisp

So I'm curious. Give us a little behind the scenes of, action steps for the partnership. I mean, because you guys are great thought leaders in the space, great strong companies, lots of clients and so many opportunities, I imagine, on the whiteboard. No pun intended. You've got that whiteboard behind you. I'm sure there's going to be tons of great things rolling out.

But for you guys, what is top of mind right now, like one, 2 or 3, like what is going to happen first for client and industry through this kind of mega partnership coming together?

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6:06 - 9:12

Paul Jarvis

Yeah. So I joined Procare along with my business partner Henry. He's really the technical genius behind a lot of what we did. And so the first thing that we're looking at is Procare has a very large client base where they do a lot of different things for folks. Right? They're doing payroll benefits, workers comp.

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They're helping in some cases with scheduling, with talent acquisition. There's a lot of stuff to look at. To kind of break it into a couple different categories. One of the first places to look at is how we can give our clients a very clear picture of the value that we're providing, so that they can see  we set out together as a partnership to move this number from here to here and move this number from here to here.

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Have we made progress on that in the last few months? And I think that that is always a challenge when it comes to data. This is a complicated business, particularly when you look at the labor side, you have people coming in and out. You may be acquiring new properties, different organizations, dining services, culinary departments.

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Like there's just a lot to chew through. So that's the first step is like, can we prove the value that we're providing is what we believe it to be and what we hear from clients? Can we get a number for them to be excited about? The next piece, and this is where I think the Procare model is really unique, is that we've developed and we're building more of these kind of unique industry specific services that go on top of data.

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and this gets again, to that actionable data piece is there's a product that we're already in market called schedule A, which is for labor management. And it's a really cool idea because, for example, we used to have a client show a number on a dashboard that was the percentage of overtime by the community. And we would show that to CFOs and VP of FTE.

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The real decision maker on that is a scheduler at the community level, right? It's not the person who was looking at our dashboard. And so the magic of what we're doing with these services is it's showing people the right number, like a very small set of data, and then working very closely with the right person to make sure that the action actually gets taken to rebalance the schedule in a way that works for the employees and works for the budget.

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And so it's been an interesting process coming from a Clarent where it was like more is more, like, let's get all the data, let's do everything to be more narrow. Let's give people specific views of data, then match them up with the right person to procure and the right person at their organization to actually drive action.

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And then let's measure it, and let's just do that over and over again. So there's a labor management piece. There's a talent acquisition piece. We're looking at some other really important sides of workforce management. So talking about retention – things like that. And that's what's really cool for me is going again from instead of just trying to pull as much data as you possibly can, let's really drive change.

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And that sometimes requires looking at a much narrower review of data and saying goodbye to the dashboard and hello to maybe more, more manual, traditional kind of look at a report, meet with the right person, follow up on it. But you tie all that together in a way that's really powerful. a great, great example of this.

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9:12 - 11:34

Brett Landrum

A great example of this, that was kind of my aha moment, was when we started brainstorming around what do we do now? Where do we take this? What's the first step? Was this is kind of, not an HR example, what's your average rent rate? And if I'm a CEO and I look at my average rent rate and I say, wow, like I got a problem here, I'm much lower across the board than I should be. That, whether I look at that every week or every month, that's a really big, meaty thing to action across my entire organization. And it's like for me to go action that, and when we see this in our business too, when we look at these KPIs, there's the, okay, it's not where I want it to be.

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What do I do now? How do I action it? And where do I find the resourcing and the organizational energy to go action it. And so I like to use the rent example. Okay. Now I have to do analysis on every single resident and the different markets I'm in. And it's this really big strategic shift. And frankly, we as an operator probably have a bunch of other initiatives going on.

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And so then we have to put it in the queue. And by the time we get to it and action it and start seeing that number change – maybe we're a couple of quarters from now and versus it's that like if we get 1% better a day, what happens at the end of the year? And I think that's the philosophy that Paul and Henry are really driving within Procare is what are the incremental actions we can do to impact that every single day? With the right stakeholders so that when the the CEO or the executive team looks at their data set around

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how they measure the success of the business. You're making those gains every day versus having to look at it once a month and say, oh, it's not where we want to be. Now it's this big strategic shift. And how do we manage it? How do we act? So it's this concept of kind of micro actions every single day to get incrementally better, so that when we get to the time that we're looking at the really important business metrics they’re where we want them to be.

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11:34 - 11:50

Josh Crisp

So Brett, would it be fair to say that if you looked at traditional PEO services and even the services that Procare has traditionally offered, is this just making those services better, or is this giving you the ability to actually expand those services?

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11:50-13:20

Brett Landrum

I would say it's both. Paul and Henry and I talked a lot over the last few weeks and they have a lot of conviction that there's a lot of low hanging fruit to actually make the traditional HR model that we're delivering much better, clearer, for our clients, and our investors as well.

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But then there's also additional product development that we're anticipating doing with, , with the program. And I mean, look, Procare, we're a tech-enabled service company. What we're really good at is delivering comprehensive HR services, developing new products that are tech-enabled services around the needs of senior housing.

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But traditionally what we're really good at is finding great technology, building the team to configure it, and deploy it within our clients. What we have not traditionally been good at is anything that requires development or deep data analysis. I have described us as, we were really technologically incompetent, really, and kind of poor and really both with Clarent and in some moves that they've made and we've been making in conjunction with. It's really exciting because like there's a light switch and we just went from like technology poor to technology rich overnight. And that's something that we're really, really excited about.

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13:20 - 14:18

Josh Crisp

Well, Paul, I think you were touching on this and saying it in such an eloquent way, it probably went over my head a little bit. But I mean data out there for years, our industry has really started, I would say, at least throwing around the use of that term. Right. And I would say collecting a lot of data, but, where I'm not sure we've done great yet. There's definitely a lot of room for improvement. Like, what do you do with that data? What does it mean? And how do you turn that into actionable items? And I think that's what you were speaking to. So, I mean, what do you think? Like for example, for existing PEO clients or people that are thinking like maybe on the fence about do I need a PEO solution? What do you think is going to be the main advantage of this partnership for clients and prospective clients? Now that you guys are together?

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14:18 - 16:26

Paul Jarvis

I think you get access to a lot of expertise. And you get access to a lot of not just expertise in the sense of here's a book go read it. Like people who will help you, who will teach you to fish, who will hold your hand and make sure that you actually get there. And again, I think you kind of hit on it, Josh, like the evolution of data is first, are you capturing it like, have you migrated from spreadsheets to using some kind of software where it now exists in a computer somewhere? Then it's bringing it all together, then it's actually doing something within each of those that is a pretty significant organizational leap on its own. And I think what we can really help people with is providing kind of I would honestly use discipline is the right word, like one of my mentors. So I used to work at a company called Palantir for seven years. It did data analysis for the fortune 500 and the US government. It's now like a big publicly traded company.

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But one of my mentors there used to say, we're never going to build a dashboard without a meeting. Like, I'm never going to put numbers up unless we're actually going to look at it and we're all going to agree about what we're going to do with it. And I think that that's a lot of what we can provide now is this kind of full service experience, 

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Brett said. There are tech enabled services companies. I want Clarent, as part of Procare, to be a services enabled tech company. If you think of it that way, like we build the dashboard, they help provide the meeting. And when I say the meeting, it's someone who understands the industry who probably did that job before, right? Like the lady who runs the schedule A program that I alluded to earlier, she was a scheduler.

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So she really, really gets it. And then they're going to help you actually do it. And the most important thing is seeing the follow through. Right. Like the reason everybody goes to the gym is because you see the weights go up and you see your body improve, like you see the motivation, you see the feedback loop. That's why we're so obsessed with being able to measure the data because it's motivating and it reinforces the action that you want to take in the right direction.

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Or it tells you, hey, this isn't working right. Like I've invested all this time on this one thing. It's not getting results. I got to do something else. So that's where I see the value for potential clients is we will not just bring you the data, we'll bring you the discipline. We'll bring you the practice to actually get there, and we'll help you see the results.

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16:26 - 17:52

Josh Crisp

Well, that makes a lot of sense. And I think a lot of people probably naively, maybe just ignorance and not meaning that disrespectfully – I'm putting myself in this category – when you think of PEO services, you're thinking it's in this little box. Right. And it's probably for small mom and pop companies up to a certain level of company. But I mean, everything that you guys are describing, the depth and breadth of services, I mean, this is relevant for all organizations. And whether you're a huge company that struggles with being quick to deliver on strategy and action and execute all the way down to, hey, maybe I am a smaller regional operator and I just don't have the bandwidth to do all these things, and I need more maybe than what a traditional PEO service option would offer. Because I'm going to have my hand held a little bit more and have the accountability and boots on the ground power to help me roll out and understand what my data means. But I don't have all the resources to help make effective change in my organization.

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And it sounds like this is going to be a perfect blend of both of your worlds to better equip all operators out there, whether they're a huge company or a small company. I mean, I may be kind of misinterpreting that, but that sounds like what it means to me. Brett, would you agree.

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17:52 - 20:14

Brett Landrum

100%? Yeah. I think an important point that really highlights what got Eric and I, my business partner, and Paul and Henry really excited about this marriage is for the last nine years, I've had this vision in my head that I don't want to be a PEO. Like if you look at what the goal of most PEOs they're going it's to deliver shareholder value, stamp out more PEO clients, have great retention and good client satisfaction. And the vision for Procare is we want to turn the industry on its head and improve the industry holistically by the work that we're doing. And that really spans far outside of PEO. We use a PEO contract, but the breadth and depth and scope of our services that we have today and we'll continue to build, is going to be much, much broader and deeper than a traditional PEO.

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We happen to use the PEO contract because we get efficiencies and economic buying power that ultimately go back to our clients in the form of more competitive pricing. We do use the PEO contract, but we don't don't consider ourselves a PEO. We consider ourselves comprehensive H.R. partner and business advisor for senior care operators. And the vision is, we want to give our operators an unfair advantage in the marketplace because of all the work and all the services that we're providing, we can have a demonstrable impact on quality of care, residents satisfaction and financial results that we can measure and prove.

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Like when I think about what success for Procare will look like in 15 or 20 years, it's not that we're a $1 billion company, we do X amount of revenue, and we serve this many employees. It’s do we have copycats? Are other operators having to evolve and change because of the work that we're doing in partnership with our clients? And that's the like that's the rallying cry. That's the thing. That's the mission that really is getting our team excited about the future and about this marriage.

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20:14 - 21:06

Josh Crisp

Well, Lucas, what an awesome mission. And we talk about this industry so much. And it is all about – if any industry is about people – it's this industry. Not only the residents and their families and all these partners that join us in our community to provide that care, but it really starts with the team and those teams out there. It’s so exciting to have two great guys that have two great companies that have seen the strength of being better together. To use Brett's term, to help turn the industry upside down on its head.  And so we need that change. So thankful for you guys. And, Lucas. I know this is a special, special time. And we're glad that we're able to talk about this on Bridge the Gap Network.

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21:06 - 22:29

Lucas McCurdy

That's right. I think it's the definition of bridging the gap.  Brett, everything that you just said reminds me of our first conversation. It's probably almost a year ago now. Hearing you say these things and wanting to set these goals and now seeing it actually happen is really fun to watch. I've been at this for 15 years in the industry, and Josh has been in the industry longer, and I've seen the evolution of different things along the way.

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I guess maybe a knock on the industry or a criticism is that the industry has been slow to adopt technology. And over the years I've kind of seen that where it's like buildings don't have Wi-Fi yet, but I feel like there has been a massive acceleration in the senior housing space over the last maybe two, three years or so, where it is really entering the cutting edge, comparatively to other verticals.

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And, I think that you two gentlemen are on that cutting edge, maybe even bleeding edge of moving these technologies and these mergers forward. And it sounds like this kind of suite of services is a great next step as a part of the larger mission for both of your companies. And it's exciting to hear it was exciting to listen to myself and appreciate all of your hard work.

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22:30

Paul Jarvis

Thank you. 

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22:30

Brett Landrum

Yeah. Thank you. We're excited about it.

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22:31 - 22:56

Lucas McCurdy

Well, good. Well, Paul, Brett, thanks for being on the show today. And to all our listeners, if you want to connect with Paul and Brett and follow this journey or have some questions, go down to your show notes and hit those links and you can find out more. Go to BTGvoice.com. Listen to this episode and so much more. Connect with us on social media. Hit us up on LinkedIn, be a part of the conversation and thanks for listening to another great episode of Bridge the Gap.

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