Expanding Your Business with a New Service Line ft. Crystal Littlejohn
Expanding a business with an additional service line can be both a thrilling and daunting prospect. In our latest episode of CareCraft we sat down with Crystal Littlejohn, the founder and certified geriatric care manager of Geriatric Resources, to learn from her journey of launching Thoughtful Engagement, a social engagement service for seniors.
The Genesis of Thoughtful Engagement
The concept of Thoughtful Engagement was rooted in Crystal’s extensive experience in geriatric care management. With over 25 years dedicated to healthcare for seniors, Crystal identified a growing need for social interaction among seniors, especially those isolated and lonely.
“I always knew the impact of isolation and loneliness,” Crystal remarks. “But around 2018, during consultations, I saw that what many clients needed wasn't care management but social engagement.”
This realization led to the birth of Thoughtful Engagement, a program personally tailored to reintegrate joyful activities, like baseball games or dance, into seniors’ lives.
Key Considerations for Launching a New Service Line
Crystal underscores the investment required for developing a second revenue stream. "If you are not invested, the investment will not succeed," she advises. Starting a new service requires the same dedication and resource allocation as your primary business line.
Define Your Concept: Begin by identifying a necessity in your current market that's not being met. Assemble a clear vision based on this need, just as Crystal pinpointed the social engagement gap for seniors.
Evaluate the Price Point: Assess the cost of delivering the service versus the amount clients are willing to pay. Early in their development, Crystal and her team carefully calculated a sustainable price point that ensured both service quality and profitability.
Identify the Right Talent: Initially focusing on master's-level professionals, Crystal realized effective engagement specialists were empathetic, responsible, and joyful individuals, proving that passion sometimes outweighs qualifications.
Manage Resources Wisely: Crystal adopted a part-time employment model, which provided flexibility and enabled steady growth without overburdening resources.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
Launching Thoughtful Engagement was not without hurdles. One unanticipated lesson was realizing that the excitement wasn't merely about devising activities but ensuring an authentic connection and meaningful interaction. As Crystal notes, “What looked like Thoughtful Engagement to us was not necessarily the same for someone else.”
Additionally, expanding the program to nine states entailed setting up a licensing model and bringing on new talent to handle business development, thereby ensuring sustainable growth.
Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Reflecting on her journey, Crystal offers insightful advice: “Don’t think, 'build it and they will come.'” It’s crucial to remain deeply committed and proactive. Adequate planning, customer satisfaction, and infrastructure readiness are imperative for success.
Entrepreneurs considering launching Thoughtful Engagement in their area can connect with Crystal by visiting thoughtfulengagement.org or emailing solutions@thoughtfulengagement.org for further consultation.
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Transcript
[00:00:04] Ariadne: Welcome to this episode of CareCraft presented by Panacea. I'm super excited for today's conversation, which is really about starting an additional line of service in your business. And I can't imagine a better guest than Crystal Littlejohn, who is the founder and certified geriatric care manager of Geriatric Resources, where she's been serving senior since 2009. With nearly 25 years of experience in assisted living, skilled nursing, memory care, hospice, and geriatric care management, Crystal is very well versed in the health care needs of seniors, and she's been dedicated to helping seniors and their families find the right resources and services. And to that end has actually started Thoughtful Engagement, which provides Social engagement services and has expanded that program to nine states.
So that's what we will be talking about today. Thank you so much for joining us, Crystal.
[00:00:57] Crystal: Well, thank you for having me. This is indeed a pleasure.
[00:01:00] Ariadne: Yeah, I'm very excited to get into today's topic. But maybe before we jump right into it, you can share a little bit about your experience as a founder of Geriatric Resources and, you know, specifically Thoughtful Engagement.
[00:01:14] Crystal: Absolutely. I need to give you a little bit of an essence of how my career in in the healthcare space happened. I have always been in service to seniors since I was certified as a nursing assistant in high school through a health occupations program. And I entered the skilled nursing setting.
I found my people. I believe that seniors have these beautifully rich and textured stories and they don't often get to tell them as the number of birthdays, you know rack up. So it was always intriguing to me to sit and talk with folks. And as you mentioned in my bio, The path was through various different service offerings within the senior space, but prior to becoming a geriatric care manager or an aging life care manager, as we are now called I was working as an assisted living operator here in Arizona, and what I was finding is there were so many people whose loved ones lived so geographically distant from them that there were spaces in which their needs weren't being met within the limitations of what you can do as a facility.
You know, so I found that there was some major job creep where we were shopping for clothes for people after hours, and we were taking them to appointments, which in truth, we didn't have the bandwidth to do. But we saw an area, a desert, if you will, for some of our residents, and we tried to meet it.
And it was only then that these amazing people called care managers began to come into the building and really filled that void for the geographically distant family member. They were boots on the ground, if you will. And I was so intrigued by the work that I thought. I have trained my whole career to do exactly this work.
And so I researched the National Academy for Care Managers Certified. And I thought, I am going to study and take this test. So I did became, become certified and in 2009, I started Geriatric Resources because it was important to me that those individuals who lack local support for a variety of reasons had advocates in the healthcare space, someone who knew their story, who understood their needs and who could usher them through their healthcare with them in the lead and us providing a supporting role.
[00:04:02] Ariadne: That's awesome. And so in the beginning I guess what you say there was kind of one service you provided, which was that general like care management and care coordination.
[00:04:12] Crystal: That's correct. So really, when you look at an aging life care manager.
They do what an adult child might do if they have the time, if they live locally, if they knew the resources, and quite honestly, if their parents would listen to them, because many times the recommendations we give to these clients are the same as their adult children, say but you put a few letters behind your name and suddenly, you know, there's an understanding that we have some level of expertise and You know, people going to physicians appointments on their own, even myself, I have to sit and write a list of what it is that I hope to accomplish for my own health care.
And this is a generation who really has come up believing whatever the doctor says is what's correct or what's true or what's right. And they don't feel comfortable necessarily, and I don't want to say pushing back, but in, in coming to it with a curiosity to say, okay, you believe I need surgery and you've helped me understand the reasons why, but what if I choose not to, what can I anticipate? So really having that advocate there is very important.
[00:05:31] Ariadne: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of need for that advocacy. At what point did you start to notice the need for additional social engagement services?
[00:05:42] Crystal: I think in the back of my mind, I, I always knew it. There have been studies for as long as I've been in this industry of the impact of isolation and loneliness. But around 2018, it hit me. As I went to do consultations with folks for care management, it turned out that there was nothing within the realm of what we provided as care managers that they needed.
It was more so that they were lonely. And they have very few opportunities to share their stories. I heard stories of neighbors passing away, spouses passing away, the social network sort of slowly degrading for these folks, or they have People who were snowbirds, who were here in the winter and somewhere else in the summer that were for whatever reasons, health usually were not returning.
So these folks and their, their social sphere of influence, I could tell was a really important part of what they did. And it was happening. It was like the message kept coming at me. Meeting after meeting after meeting and I got back to the office one day and I was in a very emotional place about this beautiful lady that I had met who she and her husband loved baseball.
Absolutely loved baseball, but he was always the one to get online, purchase the tickets, understand the parking pass, know where to park, how to park, when to park and he drove. And so she had not been to a baseball game since her husband had died a few years prior. And for some reason it stuck with my heart.
I drove home thinking about it and then I began to sort of rewind all of the times in which that had happened over the last couple of years. So I had a care manager who had a particular talent and attention for details. And I said to her, I need your help. Here's my vision. Here's what I want to create.
A meaningful program that engages. those who are isolated or lonely in a meaningful way. And what I mean by that is I didn't want to take Scrabble to this person and hope they like Scrabble or Bingo to them and hope they like Bingo. I really wanted to do a comprehensive evaluation of their life that said, what were the happiest times in your life?
Who was around? What were you doing? You know, was it dancing? Was it music? Was it theater? Was it baseball? And then I want to bring that to life, and I want us to be that surrogate person in their lives with whom they partnered to get it all done. And so we set about doing exactly that, creating a program that we came to call Thoughtful Engagement, and over the next five months, we really decided what do we need to know, what do we need to understand, what are some of the statistics surrounding You know, is this as big a problem as we think it is?
And, you know, we reached out to some of our professional colleagues and said, do you know people who have this situation? And it didn't matter. Everyone from fiduciaries to financial planners. To attorneys were all telling us the same thing. You know, these people come to our office and they just want to talk.
Maybe they were dropping off a document, but then they're sitting at the front desk and telling these wonderful stories. And you want to listen to them and you want to help them, but nobody knows how. And so that's how we came about creating Thoughtful Engagement, which we actually launched the last day of February in 2019.
[00:09:54] Ariadne: That's an incredible journey from taking that idea to then actually executing it, where there are things that you thought in that process were going to be part of Thoughtful Engagement that then you, you know, as you were having all these conversations and doing all this research really reevaluated what the program ended up ultimately being.
[00:10:15] Crystal: Absolutely. I'll tell you one thing in particular is that we bought a number of games and crafts and things that we would have in the event that the person didn't know what brought them joy. Because a lot of times our clients are so focused on the doctor's appointments and being warm, dry, and fed and not falling.
And it's all health care related that they haven't thought about. What would you do if you could do anything today, but. What we thought a gap that we thought we were going to have to fill never needed to be filled. They had plenty of ideas as to what it would look like and so that little box of tricks that we purchased for the program never will really.
It was necessary on a small scale, but never in the way in which we intended it and that the other thing that we found out as we were, starting to implement the program that what looked like Thoughtful Engagement to us was not necessarily consistent with what was Thoughtful Engagement for somebody else.
So I'll give you an example. We had a client that we were searching and searching and searching. You know, we had wonderful conversations with her. We spent great time with her. But we were trying to find the. thing. You know, where do we start off with her? And it turns out the thing was the discussion. The thing was her telling her story.
And we got in touch with an organization called Life Journey Books. And we ended up creating this book about her. Because what she really wanted to do was leave her legacy to tell somebody that she mattered in this world and, and so creating this book and being able to give it out to her family as her legacy project was really one of the most beautiful things that we have done.
The other thing that we found is that There were some projects that sounded too big at the time that ended up not being. We had a client by the name of Frank who is all over our website. He and his partner Diane are, are our biggest advocates and are very public in their support to us. And he was in the early stages of dementia and wanted to be on a horse.
He had been on a horse since he was five years old and it was an important part of his growing up years. And so we found this wonderful ranch that had these very specialized wranglers who had talents with helping individuals who had autism or developmental disability. And we explained our ask, you know, what we were hoping to accomplish for Frank.
And they, they said, We can absolutely do that. So Frank trail road with our Thoughtful Engagement specialist for the next two and a half years until it truly did become unsafe to do so. You know, we did have to get a waiver from his physician and a waiver from his family being that high off the ground.
You know, we had to be realistic about the risks, but the value proposition and the reward to him was so valuable and the stories that she told of how we improved her life by bringing this program. She was his touchstone and he spent the majority of his days, if he could not make visual sight of her, where are you?
Where are you? What are you doing? What am I supposed to be doing? Where are we going? And so our time with him afforded her time to play bunko with her friends and to schedule her doctors. You know, all of the things that caregivers neglect for themselves when caring for someone else. I feel like all of those issues really played a role in helping us to self correct. Every time we believed it was something, it became something greater.
[00:14:35] Ariadne: Now those are some beautiful stories. So when, you know, obviously a lot of thought got put into the program and designing it and making sure you're ready to go from day one. How did you actually balance those resources when it was launched between your existing business and this new service?
Was it the same staff members that were doing Thoughtful Engagement and care management?
[00:15:01] Crystal: That is a terrific question. I think the most important thing that I could tell to anybody who is bringing in any other line of business is that if you are not invested, the investment will not succeed. So, We kicked it off thoroughly educating our staff as to what it looks like and what Thoughtful Engagement is and how it can benefit our clients.
And their only role in this was to recognize, identify, and promote during the regular course of business. So we didn't add to what they were already doing except for recognizing this is another way that we can help people. So, Daniella and I, the Thoughtful Engagement specialists who helped me develop the program, we were the ones that had to invest 100 percent of ourselves.
And we started with the people we already knew, who already trusted our services, who already understood our value proposition and how we mean to be valuable in every bit of work that we do. And we basically said, Can we have 15 minutes of your time and we really had to prepare ourselves to describe the essence and the beauty and the value of this program in just 15 minutes of their time.
And to this very day, our Thoughtful Engagement specialists are really the ones who are promoting the program. Why? Because they love what they have the opportunity to do, and nobody tells the story better than that. Now, I am out there, you know, promoting as well, but they're attending the vendor fairs and talking to people at facilities when we're visiting clients there, because our Thoughtful Engagement and our care management folks are in every possible setting that you can imagine within the health care sphere. So they're in assisted livings, independent living. Continuing care retirement communities, skilled nursing facilities, adult care homes, they're everywhere because despite the fact that these communities especially provide a vast, textured, rich programs, there will still be people who aren't joiners.
Who don't want to be part of a group playing bingo. Whose aspirations don't include group activities. Who would prefer to be engaged in a one on one way. And so as we approach those activities directors with full acknowledgment that they're doing everything humanly possible to try to meet the needs of everybody, there are going to be those individuals that just don't.
[00:17:53] Ariadne: That makes sense. So really, you know, in those early days for you in particular, like 100 percent of your focus was on Thoughtful Engagement and getting that off the ground. Is that correct?
[00:18:04] Crystal: Yes, and you know, I wouldn't. Okay, let me back up. I wouldn't say 100 percent of my time because we were ramping up the program and we were, we were very, very careful that our infrastructure was going to be ready to accommodate whatever, you know, came on for us.
So we wanted to be forward thinking in terms of saying time to hire a new 1 time to hire a new 1 time to hire a new 1 and so we were very, very. We were very cautious and careful about making sure that there were no service failures because we were over promising and under delivering. So we were very deliberate in the way that we marketed and we hired and we trained and that's part of what we do for the individuals who are now using Thoughtful Engagement to help coach them through each step of the process.
[00:18:56] Ariadne: And so what metrics or benchmarks did you set out for yourself to determine if Thoughtful Engagement was successful?
[00:19:06] Crystal: So I think our biggest first project was to figure out what price point will we come in at for this program? And that took a lot. It took us figuring out what would the profile of the person we hired for the position look like?
What might be the, the, the, the pay rate that we would need to? What would we need to look at in terms of how we accounted for at least revenue because we do have to keep the lights on and we do have to, to make a business. And then we thought about saying, okay. 10 hours a week this week.
Then we increased it 20 hours a week next week, you know, and so we were really, because there was nothing in our research that could show us someone having done this particular thing, we really had to be kind of the pilot and tracking that information as to what it would look like. So it was, it was probably not as graceful a process as we laid it out as I would have liked because there were a lot of unknowns that we had to figure out. Now there were some estimates that we were able to make with, you know, the difference between say the caregiver group that was on one end of the spectrum and the care manager group that was at one end of the spectrum and then figuring out within that Where does this fall in terms of the professional degrees or aptitude or those kinds of things that we were looking for?
And I'll tell you another surprise finding was that in the beginning we were looking for a master's levels individuals we were, we had our standards of exactly what we were looking for in the hiring process. And I will say that a couple of our Thoughtful Engagement. Individuals are master's level, but we're looking for something very different when we look across the country at what makes this position successful.
Someone who can operate with autonomy. Somebody who exudes joy and has great planning and someone who has an overall responsibility to the people they serve, meaning safe practices and all the things that we teach in the onboarding. So we went from thinking we need this master's level person to realizing we have some associates level persons, and I'm even looking at someone who has a high school diploma.
But she has All the yummy things that we're looking for in having the right person for this position. So I, I really say to everybody, look for the compassion and skillset and the sense of responsibility and the rest will come.
[00:22:09] Ariadne: That's a great call out of lessons you've learned in terms of the profile that you thought you needed versus who's ended up being really successful in it. I guess let's get into some of the financial. So you talked about how you were trying to assess what you should charge and setting some goals for yourself in terms of hours that you sold. What did it end up actually generating for your business?
[00:22:33] Crystal: So in our first year we netted 67, 000 on that
It is improved by at least 10 percent year over year, with the exception of COVID. This year, as we plan, I'm going to ask more of myself, because we know more. We have utilized, over the last two years, a part time model, which I think works much better than a full time model.
And what I mean by that is when you're an employer, the anxiety of having someone full time on your staff, wanting to be able to ramp them up to full time employment right away, being concerned about the administrative time it takes you to get the billable time, and all of those other factors can be a stressor that's a distraction from, you know, really growing the business and promoting it.
And so we have gone to a part time model and there's a few reasons for that. We tend to get individuals who want to work because it's only on a part time basis. They oftentimes have flexibility in their schedules. Oftentimes, we have a mature, more mature, responsible worker when we do that, and I think all together, it's something that has worked for us because we've been able to continually be hiring and not, you know, Have those spikes, you know, peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys.
Now we can just keep hiring and hiring and hiring, which has been a real success for us as well.
[00:24:21] Ariadne: That's incredible. Obviously You have some financial goals that you've set for yourself for your own personal business. But I know that you've expanded the program out to nine states as well.
So what are your thoughts in terms of how you will continue expanding this model?
[00:24:38] Crystal: So this year I have brought on a, an incredible woman by the name of Jana Maisy, whose focus and employment history has been really a large part about business development. And I realized that my bandwidth in 2020, we had a couple of my professional colleagues, one in Birmingham, Alabama, one in San Diego that said, we don't want to recreate this wheel.
We really love to use this program. And with that, I was like, okay, well, I don't I don't really know how to do that yet. And I hired an attorney who helped us put together a structure for licensing this program to other people to use across the country. And so I was peddling as fast as I can, you know, sort of running both businesses and it was very organically growing through word of mouth and through the successes of the people who were having the business and I realized, you know, it's time to stop resting on your laurels.
It's time for you to really actually do something that is, is actively. Seeking out people rather than waiting for that to happen. And as somebody who has been a business leader for a number of years, I'm embarrassed to say that that's truly how it happened. But I think that we can be, this is a vulnerable space.
I, I share my mistakes with others, so they don't repeat them. I wish I had brought Jana on much earlier. In the time that we have been together, we have really looked at what are our offerings, what does our website look like for members, how can we make that better, how can we reach out to people who don't already know what Thoughtful Engagement is, both consumers and potential business owners.
And so this year we are in the process now, we're working on, okay, now that we've done all of these fabulous things, What's this going to look like for our strategic plan and our budget for the next two or three years? And that's kind of in the space that we are right now.
[00:26:51] Ariadne: That's awesome. It definitely seems like it's been a success story so far, and I'm sure many more successes are in the future for Thoughtful Engagement.
I guess just more broadly, what is the practical advice you'd offer to other business owners that are considering launching a second service line from your own experiences?
[00:27:11] Crystal: The most important thing that I can say is don't think, build it and they will come. With the same tenacity and investment you placed in your initial line of business that brought you to your current level of success, this is no different.
It is truly like starting another business within your business. And so if people think no matter what that that additional service line you offer will just sell itself because it's you then you won't be successful. You must come into this saying, every ounce of energy that I have, I will put towards Making sure that this gets off the ground properly and that we maintain an infrastructure and a level of customer satisfaction that we know is necessary in any service industry.
So for those who think you can just bring it on and then hope it takes care of itself, it will never do that. So if you feel like you don't have the bandwidth, or if you feel like your business doesn't have the infrastructure to do what's necessary to add another business, work on that first. Get yourself ready.
If not you, who will be that one in your organization who will take this project with both hands and make sure that your proper implementation is in place? It's, it's vital. Even with an already developed program, you have to make it work in your neighborhood with your people that you know, right?
[00:28:52] Ariadne: Exactly. You definitely still have to do the work to get the first customers. That's awesome advice. Is there any advice or for people that are interested maybe in considering launching Thoughtful Engagement in their area? How should they get connected with you to learn more?
[00:29:10] Crystal: Absolutely. I would highly encourage them to seek out thoughtfulengagement.org or solutions@thoughtfulengagement.org is our email address. And I would be happy to set up a consultation. With myself or Jana to just talk about it even more broadly. If a person has an idea in their head of something that they truly believe is needed in their geographic area, because let's face it.
Every state does better at some things than others. Every municipality does better at some things than others. If you think there is a nugget worth pursuing, do your research. If not you, who? You know don't be afraid of it. I was afraid of it for a long time. I was just going to keep it in my business and stay small and that kind of thing.
And then I thought, what about all of those yummy people across the country who could really benefit for some from social interaction in a meaningful way? And I am really doing my small part in making that happen across the country. So don't hesitate. If you think it's worth it, it probably is.
[00:30:31] Ariadne: Awesome words to end on. I will include the links and the podcast description as well for anyone that is listening and they want to reach out and learn more. And thank you so much for joining us today, Crystal. It's been an awesome discussion and really wish you the best as you continue to grow Thoughtful Engagement.
[00:30:50] Crystal: Thank you so much for addressing such truly significant and important topic to those of us who are out here just doing the best we can. So I really appreciate you.