65. Procare HR- Exploring HR Managed Services in Senior Living

In this episode of Raising Tech Podcast, host Amber Bardon sits down with Kasey Devine from Procare HR, a nationwide HR managed services firm specializing in senior living operators.

They discuss the origins, growth, and unique services of Procare HR, which include everything from scheduling and labor management to talent acquisition and payroll. They dive into the typical clients served, challenges faced in the industry, and the benefits of leveraging Procare HR's expertise. Kasey shares insights on overcoming fears associated with outsourcing and how ProCare HR supports organizations in fulfilling their mission.

For more information, visit ProcareHR.com or find Procare HR on LinkedIn.

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Transcript

Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon and today my guest is Kasey Devine. ProCare HR is a nationwide HR managed services firm that specializes in working with senior living operators across the acuity continuum, which is very similar to what we do here at Parasol Alliance on the technology side.

So Kasey, super excited to talk to you and learn more. Welcome to the show. 

Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's good to be with a business cousin, so to speak. So I appreciate you, you having me on. 

Yeah. We're all here to just help make the industry better and keep moving things forward. So ProCare HR is a new company to me.

So can you share with me and with our listeners tell us about what the company is, what you do, maybe a little bit about your history. 

Yeah, absolutely. Our founder, Brett, got us started about nine years ago, way up north in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And we found a niche early on serving folks in aging services, usually senior housing.

[00:01:00] And since then we've grown quite a bit. We're in 28 states and expanding from there. And really what we're up to is HR managed services. I know you mentioned that, but that can mean sometimes, especially for larger groups doing certain parts of the HR process. But we do have the ability to do basically everything from scheduling and labor management to talent acquisition.

Getting in there, getting our hands dirty and processing payroll and making sure you're compliant and all the different states. So it's been a fun thing. And like you said, we're really dedicated to this industry. 70 percent of our staff actually come from the senior living industry. So when someone works with us,

we're on the cutting edge of what's going on and making sure that we can support them to the best of our ability. 

Wow, that's really interesting to hear that you are doing something so similar to what we're doing. Can you tell me more about your typical client?

If a client is coming to you looking for your services, or if you're going out searching for a community that would be a good fit what would you be looking for? 

Yeah, I think [00:02:00] that's a really fair question. It. There's not really a difference between for profit or not for profit. I would say if it's a single community, it's usually on the bigger end of the CCRC front or something.

They typically have a hundred, 200 employees and up if they're going to be a large single site. So typically our clients are multi site operators and they are folks who come to us and they're understanding a couple of different things. Like number one, It is hard to go across state lines in the United States.

It's like operating in the EU. It's an entirely different country, almost from a labor perspective. And you want to make sure that you're buttoned up to be a good steward of the community, be a good steward of the resources. And so they want to make sure that's tight. The second thing, and this is the biggest thing is that.

Not a secret within senior housing margins are the margins. That's the first thing. And then the second thing, when you look at operating expenses, depending on the acuity level, somewhere between 40 and 60 to 65%, Of that is labor. [00:03:00] So if you can do a good job managing labor expense and then we're attracting and retaining really good talent.

You're going to have an advantage over other communities. And that's not from a cold hearted capitalist perspective, as much as it is, you're going to be providing better care and a better experience for your community. And so a lot of folks are seeing that. Yeah. We are seeing, I would say an emerging niche because of that within management companies, same thing.

Like they see an opportunity to support a community. Maybe that's not the area of expertise. We all know, I'm sure we could talk about it, what the workforce situation is these days, and they're just wanting to make sure that everything's as standardized, buttoned up and professionals possible. And so that's where we're starting to see a lot of success in helping folks.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what would be the challenges that you're seeing where someone might want to turn to your services? So are they having staffing challenges? Is it operational challenges, technology [00:04:00] challenges? Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

Absolutely. So I'll get the elephant in the room out of the way, but there is not a silver bullet to solve the workforce crisis.

I'm sorry. I wish we had it. We do make incremental improvements. I will say from attracting a talent, we do have some ways that we hunt that down in a little bit of a different way than you might expect. And so that's really usually geared toward frontline employees. From there, it's all about hR being separated into have to's and want to's.

And the want to's are employee engagement and talent management, succession planning being a good steward of your resources, like understanding that, you're in the community, like that stuff. And usually what we find is. No matter how large the organization is, they almost never get to the want to.

And if they do it's limited because the have to stuff keeps bubbling up like one way or another, not making a political statement at all, but anytime anything changes for [00:05:00] more regulation, less regulation, clarifying regulation, that's now something that like, it takes time for people to understand and digest and become compliant with.

And so that gets bogged down. People are inherently messy. I am for sure. I've got a mustache and long hair. So as we look at that, it's like, all right people are knocking on the door cause they can't get to their W 2 or they're trying to get a loan and they need their pay stub or this payroll thing was messed up.

A lot of that is very risky. Like the haves to stuff in HR is very risky and it really only has It's low return and not really high reward except for the fact that you're expected to do it right. And so these folks are saying like, hey, Procare has a team of experts on relatively boring things for them, but like HR benefits, et cetera, that we want to make sure are done correctly.

Why that's not boring is because that's the stuff that provides the psychological security for an employee to come up and give their best in a day. And if you're worried about whether that direct deposit or [00:06:00] that check is going to hit on Friday, or if I have access to a earned wage access or whether or not that medical plan is actually going to work at my doctor, like all that stuff, you're definitely not a hundred percent at work.

And so that's where a lot of folks are starting to come to us being like, I'll give you the have to's so that we can get to the want to's. And I want you to support us with the want to '

s as well. 

Walk me through what does this look like for an organization that you work with? Do you have staff on site?

How do they contact you? What is onboarding look like? What does this look like from an initial implementation and transition perspective? And then how does it look on a day to day basis after that's complete? 

Absolutely. We don't know how or if we can support a group until we talk to them. So one thing to know is because we're so bespoke, Procare isn't a widget that you can just buy and you implement Procare.

We need to make sure that we're mutually a really good fit because the last thing we want is someone coming to [00:07:00] us and with expectations we can't fulfill or vice versa. So we go through a very in depth current state analysis upfront to make sure that we're aligned because you're very well aware on the it side, anytime you're outsourcing a business process, it's like you agree to get married and then you date.

And so we really want to make sure that we're at least like walking in the same direction first. Then from there we really hold their hand. So when it is necessary, we do come on site in certain scenarios. A lot of our business model is remote because people are on the go anyway.

And even if somebody is sitting in an office somewhere, it's. Chat, it's email, it's phone, it's asynchronous because of the nature of labor. And so we really try to meet each community, each operator's needs with where they're at. And the idea isn't that you partner with ProCare and you get a mountain of work.

The idea is you partner with ProCare and start transitioning that away. And we really take a lot of good time [00:08:00] to make sure it's set up right the first time. There's nothing that's going to start off a relationship in this business process outsourcing space worse than flubbing up something in an implementation because you're just raw together.

And so we do that and then we go from there. And then what that allows is once someone's on board, they can pick up a new community. Like that. It's just adding to an existing infrastructure, but I will say it's like that is always going to be changed using the marriage example.

It's I load the dishwasher this way. And I like to, cook our eggs this way. And you're trying to figure out the details of what that means. And even the things of what does staffing mean or what is recruitment mean or what is good, or how do we measure the success? So we figure out all of that.

Yeah, it's so interesting because we do the exact same thing. So we do a technology assessment and strategic plan to really assess that partnership and make sure it's a good fit. And I've done assessments where I've actually come in told the client that we're not the best solution for them so that's definitely an outcome because you do want to make sure that you [00:09:00] have that right partnership because we all want to work towards being successful towards the same goals and if you can, if you find out early on like your marriage analogy that there's just too many different things you don't see eye to eye on.

 No one is going to be successful in that scenario. So I think that makes a lot of sense. So tell me, yeah, tell me a little bit more about the benefits that your clients have from working with you. Can you give me some general ones and then if you have any specific use cases or stories you can share with us, that would be great.

Absolutely. This all sits on, I'm going to get a little bit technical to explain this on something that's called a co employment chassis or PEO professional employer organization. What that allows us to do is actually to share the risk of employment with the employer. And so business decisions are left on their plate.

We're not making hire and fire decisions. We're not telling them what to do, or we're not to do from that perspective. What it allows us to do is to co employ for benefits administration. So why you would care. Your [00:10:00] organization has a different risk profile than the organization down the street because of how we work.

Negotiation is different. I just shared a article on LinkedIn. I forgot who wrote it, so I won't shout them out, but insurance costs are going through the roof. That's not something that's a secret. And so would you rather shop for insurance as 100 or 1000 or 2000 employee group or a 20, 000 plus employee group.

It's like shopping at Costco for these things. I don't want like all 20 bottles of shampoo, but I do want the per unit cost of that shampoo when I just need the two, we basically allow you to do that with insurances and other business products that you need for your back office. So that's some stuff that's helpful because the Idea?

Is anyone listening to this is oh, yeah, that sounds interesting in I, in a perfect world, why wouldn't you do that? It's because it's it's not free because we have to make sure that we can provide good service, and then it's up to us to figure out how can we provide a return on investment.

There's a bunch of different levers that we do to do that, but that's also why [00:11:00] a lot of folks really are happy with us and stay for a long time. Cause it's, there's very sensitive parts of the business and then the employee life cycle that sit with us, they're trusting us to no end and we do a good job with it and we try to communicate as much as we can.

So our team is really dedicated. If you meet anyone else from ProCare, you're going to see someone who's equally passionate about the space and about helping people. And there's a reason we're not serving manufacturing companies or tech startups. Like we're all in on, on senior care. And I think that in itself is unique.

Yeah. So tell me a little bit about how do you leverage that expertise and the wide network and how many different organizations you're working with? So how do you leverage that into best practices new ideas, innovation, and bring that back to the clients that you work with. 

So if you ran an HR or even an it department in your own community, no matter how big of an employer you are, you have one perspective.

Like you only [00:12:00] see what you see. 

and maybe some of the stuff that you gather at conferences, if you go to the right places, but there's always going to be something else that somebody out there is doing from an innovation perspective that you're not privy to, or you're not privy to as fast as you could be.

So the first thing as far as best practices is like you said, we serve dozens of employers in 28 different States. And so the idea is if you come to us looking to improve Employee satisfaction or reduce overtime or comply with X, Y, Z, new law, like by the time it makes it to us, we've already worked through that dozens of times.

And we also have access without having to give up privacy to a lot of different ideas of how this thing called employment. So like best practice wise why I would shy away from giving a specific example is because it's so unique and it's so personal, what we do find is no matter what, there is a measurable per occupied unit per year, cost reduction of working with a model like ours.

And you'd see the [00:13:00] same thing when, if you were to partner with tech and it is because we do this professionally and our success is 100 percent dependent on us remaining employed. And there is no wiggle room there because of that. And because we're doing it on a variable cost model, instead of a fixed cost model, that makes it just inherently like you can go up, you can go down, not that we want to talk about down, but like COVID happened, right?

And now you're always going to be right sized to it. So the best practices are always going to be crowdsourced with people who are actually doing this 100 percent of the time. That is their only job. Meaning that when you go to them, they're, if they don't have the answer, they have a lot of resources that wouldn't necessarily be easily available to someone who's building it in house.

Yeah. That, again, it's so similar to what we do as well. A lot of the a lot of our clients, they've had one IT person or two IT people and they're generally, really great people are really knowledgeable, but [00:14:00] like you said, they're, they only know what they know. And when you can switch to a service like yours or a service like ours, you get advantage, you get the advantage of just having access to so many more resources and just a much broader knowledge base and best practice sharing.

So it's just so interesting how similar our business models are. 

Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, we're cousins and to, to that point, I want to call this out. Like that model is smart and it's not a good fit for everybody. Like not everybody will want to do that. Not everybody should do that. But in the cases where it makes sense mutually between a parasol and a community or a pro care in a community, it is so cool to see the impact of it.

So 

yeah, absolutely. And I will say, we've had some clients that we've been in touch with for years and that it person has retired or left and that's when they decide to make the change. And you actually talked about earlier, just. Doing that initial assessment and marriage assessment, partnership assessment is really just so critical and you never know, then you're [00:15:00] available and you're re you're ready to be that partner when they need you.

Absolutely. So I'm sure you, you face some fear and challenges with making a change like this the same as we do. So let's talk about maybe some like myth busters. So what do you think are some perceptions about, moving to an outsource model that just aren't true? 

I've been I'm glad you asked that.

MythBusters for this our employees are going to think that something's wrong with the organization. It, the quality of the service isn't going to be as good, or the response time isn't gonna be there. There's absolutely no way that you're gonna know our organization well enough, insert person who was in the seat before the retirement or whatever else it was.

That has to be expensive and we can't afford it. What am I missing? I feel like you, you probably hear the same things. 

Is our quality of service going to go down if we don't have in house would be another one. 

They're just not true though.

 That's why I like to start at the fundamental, like why what is outsourcing? [00:16:00] And some organizations are like proud that they don't outsource anything. And that is actually fundamentally not true for literally any organization. Like, all right, so you built a power plant on site and you're generating electricity and you've connected to your own satellites and space for internet, like you get the points, like even for, if you have in house IT or HR, you're still outsourcing something in the form of tools to enable those people. Cause neither of those functions are possible with pen and paper at all nowadays. So you're already doing that. It's just a matter of the economics of it and what you want to spend time on. My argument to all of this is to look at the mission of why we're doing this.

Like, why are you. An executive director, a CEO, a president, whoever CFO at a senior living organization, as opposed to a law firm. It's you have to care about the mission, but like that's the whole reason you do that on the for profit or non for profit side. [00:17:00] And if you care about the mission that has to come first.

So then you're thinking about what is our actual purpose of being in existence. It's to, to serve Folks as they're aging, okay, is doing HR this way that we've been doing it for the last 10 or 15 or 20 years does that get in the way of or support, does it actually, how much of it has to do with that mission somewhat, maybe not so much is the actual how, or is the end result of your it process, like supporting the mission?

Yes. You have to have that work in order to support the mission, but your mission isn't to be the best ever HR department or the best ever it department. And it shouldn't be, it should be good enough to support the mission. And that's that. So it's as long as that's getting done and as long as it's not in a cross prohibitive way, that's fine.

The, how it's do you really even understand how your HR director, your it director is actually doing their [00:18:00] job on a day to day basis? Probably not. Cause you're not an HR director or it director. So it's okay. Just open up to see that there is another way of looking at things. And I promise just considering it, the world will not explode and it's okay.

You can always say no. 

Yeah, I really love what you said about supporting the mission. A lot of times, the way I talk about is supporting the business, which is essentially to support the mission is that, H.

R. I. T. billing, find these are all support services to enable the organizations to provide the care and take care of the residents at the end of the day. And, exactly what you said is you want to have the most professional and the most supportive Possible resources to do that to continue to enable, like you said, continuation of the business continuation of the mission.

And I think that a lot of times there can almost be like some fear or just unknown. Like you said what exactly does my HR director do every day? Technology is so complicated. People really don't understand what goes into it. And I think there is this fear like we've got this guy.

He just takes care of everything. We don't really know what he [00:19:00] does. Drilling down into what our technology assessment goes into exactly what's going on at every level of technology written out so it's very clear and transparent.

And I think a lot of it people try to have that transparency and communication but they don't necessarily have the skill set to translate from technical to. The business, and it probably is something similar on the HR side. So again, just reiterating what you're saying is to have professionalized services that can translate and clarify exactly what this department does for your business to help you just to continue to be the best you can be.

If you look at almost any other industry in the entire country, they are outsourcing business processes and they have for years and if you talk to any of the executives there, they will point to the yeah, Fact that they are doing that as a large marker of their success.

Yeah, I love it. It's, this has been such a great conversation, getting to learn more about your business and especially about how we align. So [00:20:00] Kasey, thank you so much for coming on and where can our listeners find you for more information?

Yeah, thank you. So ProCare HR. com or find ProCare on LinkedIn.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. It was great to meet you today.