Ep. 76: When to Hire On-Call Supervisors for After Hour and Weekend Calls

Miriam Allred (00:08):

I want to introduce John Bennett. He’s the CEO of Sunny Days In-home Care in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, John, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today!

John Bennett (00:19):

Hey, thanks a lot for having me. I’m excited to get on here and talk to you about home care and yeah, just really looking forward to the, to the discussion today.

Miriam Allred (00:28):

I, I know you have a lot to add before we kind of get started. Tell us a little bit about the start of your agency and how you’ve scaled the last few years and just kind of the broader scope of, of your organization today.

John Bennett (00:44):

Yeah, so our agency started back in 2011. My in-laws actually started our agency out of a, a need to focus on people and not money. My father-in-law worked for a skilled home health in, in home nursing agency and needed marketing and everything was just on money and they didn’t seem to really care about the people. And so he got out of that and he wanted to start an agency doing people say unskilled, I hate that term for what we do. I think it’s still scaled in a different way. But he wanted to start a non-medical home care agency and focus on the people. If you do a really good job with people, then the money will follow. So we started back in 2011 out of his house. He was the first caregiver. Also marketer recruiter, everything rolled into one, and then my mother-in-law started bookkeeping and doing kind of payroll and building and that type of thing on the backend and built that out from their house.

John Bennett (01:39):

And eventually got a small office space and we’ve continued to grow to the point now where we provide care for our, our main metric we track is hours of care per week. So we do just over 15,000 hours of care per week. And we, we break it down. We have a unique model with field managers that I know we’re gonna discuss here. It’s almost like kind of little individualized offices. So we do all those hours out of one office, but we really have kind of like 13, 13 small branches of what we do. So yeah, it’s our, our focus is on, you know, Western Pennsylvania is where we provide care at. And we really just try to do a great job of meeting the needs of our clients and finding ways to make our caregivers, you know, have a, a schedule that works for them and they’re happy with the client, so, so we can keep them and that’s our main focus. We still focus on people obviously like the run efficiently, so it’s still profitable, but our, our main focus is on people and meeting their needs. And that may sound cliche, but it’s, it’s worked really well for us over, over the past decade or so.

Miriam Allred (02:40):

Awesome. You say 15,000 hours a week nonchalant, but for many of you listening into this, you may be thinking, you know, I’m only doing 500 or maybe even a thousand hours per week. So John is definitely one of the larger agencies in the space and in Pennsylvania, but we have a lot to learn from him today. So thanks for that background. If I’m not mistaken, you were a football coach or are a football coach still.

John Bennett (03:05):

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I used to be a high school math teacher. I taught statistics and geometry and athletic director and football coach. I was a head coach with my role. Now I’m an assistant. I don’t have time to be a head coach. I wish data just doesn’t work. But I still, I still coach high school football. I really enjoy working with, with high school guys and kind of seeing these little freshmen come in and don’t really know what they’re doing, you know, what’s going on in the world and then seeing them graduate as, you know, 18 and ninth year old seniors that, you know, are gonna college or trade school or the military or whatever, and kind of have really matured kind of in front of my eyes. That’s, that’s like a really cool rewarding experience to see that. So, yeah, I love football too, but I really love kind of the mentorship of, of working with those guys.

Miriam Allred (03:51):

Cool. You’re a man of many talents. So let’s dive in here. This, this concept that we wanna talk about is something that your agency’s doing. It’s not monumental, but it’s impactful. And you have scaled this process and are seeing the success that it’s bringing. So we’re gonna talk about your employees that are on call supervisors that are managing incoming calls and questions after hours. And on weekends, let’s maybe start with your org chart just so that people can understand where you sit down to those on call supervisors.

John Bennett (04:26):

Yeah. So our org chart, the easiest way to think of our org chart is kind of underneath me. We have two, two real realms. We have shared services, which is all office billing, payroll, HR compliance that type of thing. And then we have everything that’s, front-facing we call field services in our field services, that’s everything related to recruiting and onboarding caregivers going out and doing marketing and doing client intakes and assessments and doing the scheduling and the ongoing monitoring with client visits and, and interact between clients and caregivers. That’s our field field operations. So we’ll focus on the field operations today since, since that’s what our call is about. So we have a director of operations and then underneath the director of operations, there are 13 field managers. The field managers responsibilities are kind of like a mini all in one office, the, for recruiting and onboarding new caregivers, they’re responsible for marketing and completing client assessments.

John Bennett (05:29):

They also are responsible for scheduling and then maintaining that ongoing relationship between themselves, the client and the caregiver. So that may sound like a lot. Our field managers typically manage anywhere from 600 to hours up to our largest one as an assistant. Now she’s at 2,800 hours. But a lot of them around a thousandish hours maybe thousand to 1200, I would say was kind of our average where, where they’re located at. So that’s kind of the model. And then with our field managers, we also have kind of working in conjunction with them after hours on the weekend are our on call supervisors. Our on call supervisors each will cover the phones and do a variety of things for them. But they work after hours from 5:00 PM until 8:00 AM in the next business day.

John Bennett (06:17):

And then 5:00 PM, Friday till 8:00 PM, 8:00 AM Monday and they handle, you know, a realm of a realm of responsibilities that we’ll talk about. So that’s, that’s kind of our, our setup, our, our field managers report to our director of operations and our on call supervisors. We actually just hired an on call manager to oversee them, but prior to that, they all we just hired her like two weeks ago. So that’s a new, a new thing we have. But prior to that, all of our onco supervisors reported to our director of operations as well, but they all worked in conjunction with different, with different field managers.

Miriam Allred (06:49):

Okay. So before we get into the finer details of the on-call supervisor and what that looks like, many agencies are using an answering service, and that’s fine. When you first started your agency and built out this structure, I’m assuming you considered an answering service. And why did you decide to go this route?

John Bennett (07:11):

Yeah, there’s a lot of answering services out there that are great. There’s a lot that aren’t so great. Our, our number one focus, and, and I go back to this and, and you’ll probably get sick of me saying it by the end of this is we’re focused on the people. And that was our focus through COVID, you know, a lot of crazy things happened during COVID and it’s like, Hey, I typically would call another agency or get online and see how, you know, how has anyone handled this look and see if somebody spoke about it. I don’t have, you know, on one of webinars or something. And with COVID, none of us had a blueprint for how to do any of those things. So we said, what’s best for the client. What’s best for the client’s needs. And what’s accommodating to the caregiver.

John Bennett (07:47):

And we felt that having somebody in house that knew these caregivers and knew these clients personally, was what was best for the client and what allowed us to be most accommodating to the caregiver. So that’s of the, the mindset that we use whenever we created this. And, and with a lot of situations that arise, we keep that as our focus, kind of our guiding light, if you will. And with this, we felt like having an outside answering service the answering service wouldn’t be as familiar with our clients, know their needs, know the little ins and outs of preferences that they have, as well as the caregivers knowing a flexibility and schedule that they have. And maybe a caregiver’s always willing to go in and fill in shifts except Saturday nights or her nights that she goes out on a date with her husband or Sunday afternoons, a caregiver. He really likes to go see his mother. So never call him during that time. But any other time, you know, it is great to call him for fill him. So we, we really believe that it it’s really proven to be true that an in house employee that’s handling these is able to, to better meet the needs of the client and better accommodate the caregiver.

Miriam Allred (08:48):

That’s great. I love that. So, to get into more depth on the position and the role you mentioned it briefly just like the scheduling. So the, the role of the field manager, and then the role of the on-call supervisor. Can you explain the scheduling and who’s answering the phone when, and what kind of like the reporting structure looks like between the supervisor and the field manager?

John Bennett (09:12):

Yeah. And that’s, that’s one of our keys is that reporting structure. So I’m a big believer that 90% of issues that occur in anything are communication issues. And when we first really started to roll this model out, like more in depth and to just have one person when we hired a second on call then it got complicated because we didn’t have have criteria in place for communication and requirements, but first girl was just amazing at her job. And she over-communicated. The second person, we had to put some policy and procedure in place in order to get her to do that. But essentially what happens is 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Our field managers are responsible for answering the phones, everything related to the schedule. And they take an hour lunch break whenever that is when it’s up to them, preference wise, whenever they want that at 5:00 PM until 8:00 AM the next day.

John Bennett (10:01):

And like I said, 5:00 PM on Friday until 8:00 AM on Monday that field manager is off. They are not responsible for checking the schedule or answering the phone. So they forward their phone to an on call supervisor. And typically the way it works is our on supervisors usually handle around 3,500 to 5,000 hours. A lot of them are at about the 3,800 hour mark on a weekly basis. We usually have four on, at a time. So they’re answering the phone for three to four field managers at a time. And their responsibilities are answering phones, any, any type of phone call that came, that comes in and it could be somebody looking for care after hours, too. Right? A lot of people are calling at seven, eight o’clock at night. They get home from work. They’ve had dinner, maybe with a parent and they see the mom’s not doing so well.

John Bennett (10:49):

And when they go home, they call we that’s one of our advantages too. We have somebody that’s employed in the company. That’s able to take that call, provide basic information, collect information, and it’s not an answering services says, Hey, I’ll get you that the next day. So they do that. But one of the main things that we do once again, we go back to making sure our clients’ needs are met is they’re checking. We use clear carriers or scheduling service. They’re checking clear care every couple hours and seeing, are there any reds on a scheduler? Are there any, is there any issue where someone hasn’t clocked in yet or they forgot to clock out? They’re reaching out to that client, you know, confirming whether the caregiver was there or not what times they were there reaching out to the caregiver to see what’s going on.

John Bennett (11:28):

The, the communication point between if a caregiver calls, I’m sure everybody on calls experienced it, something happens. The shifts supposed to start at 8:00 PM and a caregiver can’t get oh, eight 30 because something happened, right. We don’t like that caregiver calling that client directly to deliver the bad news. We want the caregiver to kind of be the person who’s always having good news with with that client so that caregiver’s letting our on call, know our on call’s going in contacting that client, letting them know, smoothing it over as, as good as possible that, Hey, something came up caregiver, can’t be there until at eight 30. Maybe we bumped the schedule back half an hour later, or maybe we can’t for whatever reason. And it has to end at a certain time making sure that they’re okay for that half hour block, some care some clients we have are, you know, 24 7, or need somebody at least with them during that time period.

John Bennett (12:16):

And then changing clear care. So it reflects that so billing and payroll and compliance and everything else are, are okay. So they’re able to handle that after hours. They’re not doing any recruiting, any client intakes, anything like that. They can work from home work remotely, wherever they need to work from. But that’s, that’s what they’re doing as far as responsibility wise. So, and I can touch on kind of the communication as well. If you want me, do you want me to jump into that? Or you want me to, I guess maybe pause for some questions with the, with the responsibilities. First

Miriam Allred (12:45):

One that’s coming to mind is this, how do you pay the on-call supervisor? Because there that schedule is very flexible and they may get five calls in one hour and then one call in three hours. So it’s, it’s kind of all over the place. So how do you structure their pay for their shifts?

John Bennett (13:03):

Yeah, sure. So we pay our, our on-call supervisor as a salary. So the salary we pay them is typically we start them about 13,000 for their salary. And you’ll have to look and figure out like, if, depending on what state you’re in from a like a DLL standpoint with minimum wage and everything, how that works out, you know, to make sure you’re covered there. But that we’re covered here in Pennsylvania, essentially with that. And that’s, that’s the salary they get and they could have two calls. They could have 20 calls. We actually did an analysis once time. We had somebody saying they were getting an insane amount of calls and we pulled the phone records and, and they weren’t regularly. There’s a couple, sometimes there’s a crazy, everybody here knows all of a sudden, I don’t know, it’s like, there’s something in the water that your phone will blow up one afternoon or one evening and it won’t stop and it feels like the phone’s gonna overheat.

John Bennett (13:53):

So that does happen sometimes. But that’s how we pay them. And we actually have, have set it up too, where sometimes we’ll break it down. We’ll have somebody we think would be a great on-call supervisor, but they only want to do it on weekends. Or they only wanna do it during the week. So essentially our breakdown is if it’s during the week, they get 13,000 comes out to $400 a week. So if you break that down $250, if they do it five days during the week if they do the weekends, it’s $150 for the weekend, which comes out to the, the $400 for the week total. So that’s how we pay. And that’s how we’ve been doing it since we were small agency wise, smaller than we are now midsize is we’ve been paying that amount. And we feel like it’s a well worth of investment when you look at the cost of like answering services and that type of thing. It’s comparable to that and you have somebody in house that you can get to do all those other things that answering services, you know, will not do.

Miriam Allred (14:46):

We had a good question come in from Chris. And I don’t think we covered this. What, how many hours are they working generally each week? She said, is this like a 40 hour per week role? Or about how many hours are they averaging weekly?

John Bennett (15:00):

Yeah. So typically during nights, like during week nights if you had to combine the amount of time that they’re like on the phone and answering calls, it’s usually an hour to two. Sometimes it can be less, but it’s usually somewhere in that one to two hour ballpark. And then on the weekends typically on the weekends, you’re looking anywhere what we’ve seen like on a, on a Saturday I would say on average, it’s probably around four hours. But you know, it’s, it can be more, it can be less but typically four hours a, so if you’re looking for a week kind of on the high side maybe 16 to 18 hours for the week. So if you do the math $400 a week, they’re making people are making around 20 bucks an hour. You know, when an average is out now granted you’re on call the entire time. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so that’s the inconvenience, right? While you’re getting $20 an hour and you can go do whatever is, you may get a five minute call now, and then 30 minutes from now, you get a 15 minute call. So you’re on call that entire time. But as far as actual hours work, I would say 20 or less per week, probably closer to 16 to 18 is what we’ve seen.

Miriam Allred (16:08):

Awesome. I know when you first brought this concept to me, I thought that would be the last job in the world that I want for myself <laugh>, but like we both know, and like you’ve experienced, there are people that this fits with that want this type of work and in these types of hours, talk to us about the demographic of most of these on call supervisors and their progression within you, your organization, because some of them have, you know, climbed a ladder and have gotten to this point.

John Bennett (16:39):

Yeah. So that’s a great question. So they most of our oncall supervisors that we have at this point are former caregivers that start out as caregiving. And some of them, they do maybe oncall on the week end, they caregiver during the week you know, and kind of mix that up. But that’s one of the things we like from a, from a, we like to promote from within. So a lot of times kind of our, our track for people is they do caregiving and then we have an on call position that comes available. We get applications for that. If people are really able to do well on on-call with a step, dealing with clients and caregivers is gonna be great with people right on the phone. And then a field manager position opens. We have out of our 13th field manager, I believe seven of them that we have right now.

John Bennett (17:27):

We’re formally on call supervised for that. So it’s really a really great track to kind of progress and grow and promote from within the company. And typically what we get for, for ONCA supervisors. It’s people that a lot of times they have children and they’re looking to have some kind of job. Maybe they have younger kids, a lot, lot of situations and they don’t wanna, you know, they can’t go into an office or anything like that. And most, most of their interactions are after their kids are asleep. Or maybe they are in an evening sound, but they’ve been with their kids during the day and they have a spouse that’s that’s home and able to handle the kids more in the evening. So it’s a really flexible position. And I see Daniel actually asked a question that’s kind of similar to this.

John Bennett (18:13):

Our on-call supervisors have an iPad and a phone and they do everything from their iPad. So like we have people that’ll go away to camp for the weekend. The one person we have her family has a place out on this lake. They have like a little camper on this lake to go to that every weekend. And as long as they’re able to get service we do have one person that we got a little hotspot for. But in general, everybody’s able to get some kind of cell service or wifi, wherever they’re at, and then they can perform their job from there. And typically the way, the way we have them do it is they’re checking this schedule kind of at five o’clock. They’re checking the schedule at eight o’clock. They check the schedule at 11 o’clock at night.

John Bennett (18:57):

That’s the latest we require ’em to check it and then they check it first thing in the morning. Sometime before eight o’clock before they turn the phone back over to the to the field manager. So there’s four required times that we have them check. And that’s worked out really well for us. Now we do have situations where we may have, you know, one of the on calls. There’s a lot of clients maybe that, that have their shifts end at 10 o’clock at night. So they may be checking around 10 15 to see if, if there’s been any late clock out. So if there’s a bunch of shifts starting at seven o’clock in the morning, you know, they’ll, they’ll check kind of closer to seven instead of it, closer to eight o’clock. So, so that’s kind of the setup and the flexibility.

John Bennett (19:35):

It’s great. It’s really flexible. I’ve, I’ve done oncall before as well just to kind of get a sense of, of what it’s like. And I’ve done a couple different couple different weekends. I’ve never done it during weeknights, but I’ve done it during weekends. And there’s a couple weekends where I only almost for got that. I had to answer the phone and there was a couple other weekends where I answered the phone a lot. And, and generally our rule of thumbs cause people do call, right. We have shifts that end at one o’clock in the morning, two o’clock in the morning. There are calls and issues late at night like that. And we ask our on call, you know, when that happens. Typically we don’t have them answer the phone at one o’clock or two O’ in the morning.

John Bennett (20:13):

And our clients know our caregivers know they leave a voicemail, our on call will wake up, listen to that voicemail. They they’re required to have their phone on listen to that voicemail. And if it’s something pressing that they need to address at the time they collect themselves. So they can say they’re not, not sound groggy or anything like that on the phone. And then they call whoever needed to and resolve that situation. Doesn’t happen a lot that we get like super dire pressing calls in the middle of the night between 11 and seven, but there are, there are some that do occur. And a lot of times it’s something that happened that they need to reach out to in the morning. And they can do that first thing in the morning, reach out and make the call then. But they are, they are required if it is, you know, we kind of have a set of criteria. If it is something major, they do answer it, you know, during that 11 P to 7:00 AM time.

Miriam Allred (20:58):

Yeah. I’m glad you asked Daniel’s question. That was a really good question. And you’re kind of touching on it now and, and this may be an obvious question, but what are probably the top three to five, most common reasons that you’re getting these calls after hours or on weekends

John Bennett (21:14):

Caregivers calling off our caregivers aren’t allowed to text off, they have to call off. So caregiver call offs and then we, one of our main things is we make sure we get those shifts covered, even if it’s priority care. And I will put this and make, make sure state this, our on-call supervisors are not allowed to go in and care when they are scheduled as on-call supervisors. Cause if they’re in caregiving to fill in a shift, then they can’t properly be an on-call supervisor. So I know some people have like on-call caregivers that go in. If there’s an issue are on call, supervisors are not allowed to care while they’re on, on call on the clock. So that’s one caregiver call offs. Two is caregivers not showing up to a shift where they show up later, whatever, and the client’s calling, Hey, what’s going on?

John Bennett (21:59):

You know, what, what are the issues? You know, what can we do? Why is nobody here? Is the second one. And then the third one typically is that there’s some kind of, of conflict going on where it’s, whether it’s an incident like the, the caregiver cut their finger making, making dinner or the client, the client’s backs hurting after doing a pivot transfer from a wheelchair or a toilet or something, it’s, it’s some kind of incident. And we have a form that they fill out an incident report that goes to our direct of ops, you know, to anybody that that’s doing compliance for us, that type of thing. So those are the three main issues that we see now we do get the, we do get people calling at 1130 at night. Hey, I got a different bank.

John Bennett (22:41):

I wanna switch my direct deposit. And we say, Hey, just call during business hours. We we’ve tried to, you know, curtail those calls for the sake of our on-call sanity, but we still get people that call, we’ve got people call at four o’clock in the morning and ask her, we have a client that called at four o’clock. We called a lot, she was up very early and she wanted know her schedule for like the next week. But she would call at four o’clock in the morning and ask that. So, so we get some random things like that, but yeah, the other three are kind of the main, the main three.

Miriam Allred (23:09):

I’m sure everyone here can relate and can, could probably share a dozen of stories of calls that have come in at weird hours. And that’s just part of the business and part of, you know, the structure of our organizations. I know we touched on this a little bit. Lynn Lynn is just asking a little bit more about salary for field managers, anything that you wanna share there that you’re comfortable with? Yeah,

John Bennett (23:31):

Yeah. I’m, I’m fine sharing that. So our field managers their base salary is, is 36,000. And then the way we have it set up is once, once they hit 600 hours a week, mark that’s considered a field manager, we actually have another position that I haven’t mentioned called a case manager. And it’s somebody that will get on board kind of as, as we grow and we kind of break off the territory. We, we put the, put the line there as if it’s 600 hours or more. We can get a full time field manager there if it’s less than 600 hours, but at least 300, we hire what we call a case manager. That case manager is a field manager with a much smaller caseload, and then they can care. The idea is that they do management 20 hours a week and they care 20 hours a week to help bring in a additional income for themselves while they’re attempting to grow, to get to that 600 hour mark.

John Bennett (24:23):

So we have case managers, but our field manager 600 hours a week, they start at 36,000. Once they get to 800 hours a week, then every hundred hours on top of that, that they’re managing, they get an additional $50 a week. We call it tier pay. So 800 to 8 99 is an extra 50 a week. If you’re at 900 to 9 99, then it’s an extra hundred dollars a week. So you can do the math on that. If you’re anywhere from 900 to nine $9,900 a week, an extra five grand a year. So now all persons at 41,000 and we found that it works really well for us because we’re not paying anybody extra unless the money is there for, you know, for them to be paid and it’s an incentive for them to grow, right? They are gonna get paid more for being able to take on more, really well for us. You know, with that setup and then director of ops, I mean, we’ve, we’ve had director operations, you’re looking at anywhere from like a 60 to 80 range, typically somewhere in there for a director of operations, we’ve had numerous ones and they’ve all kind of been in that vicinity. So, and our film managers, Kristen, our film managers do sketch. They are in charge of schedule creating the schedule and maintaining it during business hours.

Miriam Allred (25:32):

I I’m glad she asked that, cuz I was gonna ask that too. It sounds like your field managers play a role that is typically broken up at other agencies. You know, they’re kind of all encompassing and doing a lot of different jobs. Let’s talk a little bit about your live forward. You all use clear care, talk about that live dashboard and just who owns what and how everything comes together there.

John Bennett (25:55):

So they’re looking at the live view of our schedule essentially where you have that Excel grid, where you’re looking at, you have all the clients down one side, the days of the week across the top and all the little cells are the caregivers in their shifts. Our field old managers are checking out constantly. They’ll go in and, and do an interview with a caregiver or multiple caregivers. And when they get back to their car, they’re pulling up their iPad and they’re checking that and they’re making a call before they go, you know, do whatever’s next that day. If there’s an issue with the schedule we live off of the live view of the schedule when I think we’ve pride ourselves on is shift coverage. Making sure that we cover what we’re supposed to. I mean, we, we view it and I heard this on another webinar.

John Bennett (26:36):

This idea is not coming from me, but whenever you go and you meet the family and you complete that intake or assessment or, or whatever term you use for it, and you say, yes, we will be there Monday, Wednesday, Friday 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM and Saturday from 5:00 PM, until midnight, you essentially are signing a contract with that family. I know you’re signing a paper contract, but you’re assigning a verbal agreement with that family committing to be there during those times. So plea your care enables us to very quickly identify if a caregiver is not there. When we said we were gonna be there and then we can take action. Maybe they forgot to clock in cuz your client’s on the phone with their sister from Seattle. Maybe the caregiver has a flat tire for the fifth time in the past couple months or whatever it may be.

John Bennett (27:20):

And she’s gonna be there soon or maybe you have to find some else to fill in and the caregivers, a no call nohow. It’s really important to us that we make sure that that client gets their care needs met. And so that live view on the schedule. And like I said, that’s our, our on call are checking out as well. Like the hours that I had mentioned before sometimes in between a little bit too, if needed that’s, that’s kind of what we live off of and pride ourselves on. That’s like if you say what’s the most important tech technology your company uses, it’s the live view and clear care. So we know down to the minute up to date what’s going on with, with our clients and caregivers.

Kristen (27:51):

Hi, this is Kristen. Hi Kristen. Hi, thank you for doing this. I did have a question and I don’t know if it’s inappropriate to ask and I totally am okay if you say no, but some as we look a lot, you mentioned every 600 hours is a chance to add a new FTE to your office doing 15,000 hours a week, which we’re nowhere close to here. But do you have a formula that you use for how many schedulers you should have scheduling? Like how many number, what number of hours per week? Do you have a suggestion for that? Yeah, I have, I hear all kinds of different things.

John Bennett (28:27):

How I’ll put this out there as well. We started doing M and a too last year and we have two smaller agencies right now that we acquired one does last week did, did 587 hours. And the other one we acquired did just under 800. So it’s taking me back a little bit to, to where we were previously, but it’s, it’s good because I’m like, all right, this is what we’re gonna implement. And I have to make sure that it makes sense, you know, for those agencies as well. So let me answer something that you may think of later, but I’m gonna answer it now. So you don’t have to think ask this question later, regards to that with those smaller entities, we have started those with purely a weekend on call. The person in charge of scheduling is handling scheduling from Monday morning at 8:00 AM until Friday at 5:00 PM.

John Bennett (29:19):

So that’s the way that’s gonna go until we get to a thousand hours per week. Once we get to a thousand hours total per week, then the at oncall is gonna become a, a what we call a full-time oncall. And they’ll be taking all after hours and weekends. So that’s the way we break down. When we, when we do oncall essentially kind of a thousand hours there, we will not get another oncall until we’re at least 3000 hours there. We view an on call is able to handle kind of up to 3000 with the experience and kind of stuff we have here. Usually we try to push it closer to 3,500. I think it’s really important if anybody on this call, right? We’re all kind of in that director, owner or CEO or whatever it is, you have to balance what makes sense financially for your company with what’s best for the people.

John Bennett (30:08):

I try to maybe tend to push people to not to their breaking point, but maybe where their car starts shaking a little bit capacity wise, where I’m like, okay, like that person’s gonna need some help or, or they’re gonna car start to stress out their, and they need to stress out over work. Cuz there’s a lot of things in life that are more important than work. So that’s kind of how we do that. Usually a thousand of where we would start somebody full time and then 35, 3, 3050 500 looking to get another oncall supervisor with our field managers, with regards to scheduling we do it based off of the, the ability of that field manager. So general rule found, like I said, 600 hours is when we start a full-time field manager, we have found that most of our managers with our, with our model that we have set up and you can see what we do.

John Bennett (30:54):

Our field managers do a lot of different things, right? Kind of an all in one type person they can handle on average 1200 to 1500 hours before we start to see a, a decline in the quality of their work. And at that time we need to determine essentially, is that person maxed out or do they need additional training? Or we had one who’s not in the norm get to about 2200 hours before we start to see issues. She’s still good at what she does. We’ve got her an assistant and now she’s almost at 3000 hours. And the assistant took a good chunk of her job responsibility, excuse me, off of her. So for us, it’s, it’s kind of that thousand to 1200 hour mark 12 to 1500 hour month, I guess if you will, right around 1200 that we look to get somebody else.

John Bennett (31:43):

<Affirmative> now strictly scheduling though. Most of the interactions I’ve had with, with other colleagues, they looked at having people schedule somewhere around 2,500 to 4,000 hours. If they’re only doing scheduling before they look at getting another scheduler, we don’t do that type of exact setup with the scheduler. But I’ve had multiple agencies that I’ve spoken with who have the more traditional model that most people have. They’re like 2,500 to 4,000 hours of care per week is typically what they give to each scheduler. And once again, any interaction I’ve had with them, it’s if that person can handle 4,000 great and hopefully there’s pay incentives for them, but if 2,500 they’re really good, but anything above 2,500, not so much, you know, then you gotta kind of look for somebody else. So I hope that answers your question. So that’s, that’s been my experience in, in talking with others as well.

Kristen (32:36):

Thank you very much.

Miriam Allred (32:37):

John’s a wealth of knowledge, everyone. So if you’ve got questions, keep them coming while we have him. Daniel asked a, a good question, kind of two questions here. His first question was when you first started, what did the big picture look like? Were you at a thousand to 3000 hours? I know your in-law started the agency. Yep. And I don’t know what your organic growth of, but go ahead.

John Bennett (33:01):

Yeah, yeah. Ija so, yeah, so we hired our first on call manager when we were at about 2000 hours. And that person did that up until we got to just under 4,000 hours and then we hired another on call supervisor at that point. So our still manager Essent got every weekend off. Once she got to about a thousand and my father-in-law at the time took the phones on the weekend. And once we got just about that 2000 mark is when we hired our first full full-time on-call supervisor. So that’s, that’s when we first deemed a need, our film manager was really great at her job. And she was getting burnt out because she never had a break. And then she get weekend break, but Monday to Friday by Friday she just was, was, was smoked.

John Bennett (33:51):

So then we got that full time person in place and that, that really helped then. And then to answer the second part of that question, now these are good questions. So our, our onco supervisors, they reach out to general population. We don’t necessarily have designated fill caregivers. However we, we tag, we probably have too many tags in clear care. We tag people like crazy. And we do have tags for people that will filter it by, we use care, find on it, which is really great, but a lot of times our on-call and this is one of the benefits to having it in house. Our on-call know our caregivers really well. We have caregivers tagged fill in caregiver. And those are the caregivers that we’re typically calling first that we know are usually game to fill in they’re game to get paid overtime.

John Bennett (34:41):

You know, if it’s gonna put them into overtime, some people love that they’ll work as many hours as let them cuz they love the overtime pay. Obviously we try to minimize that cuz the margins aren’t great whenever we have to do that, but obviously everybody on end, sometimes you have to in order to keep, keep the client safe and meet their care needs. We call a general population, but we filter it down with care finder and we also will photo it down by just looking at people that have those tags for fill in caregiver. That’s all a tag is it’s not fancy, just let fill in caregiver. And we, we run a report with that and eventually our on call. They know it really well. So like for instance, we just had an on call that unfortunately we had to let go.

John Bennett (35:20):

We haven’t had to do that for a while. But she was terminated on Friday and the reason for termination was she was not responding to people in a timely manner. She would have clients call her at seven o’clock at night and she would not get back to them until maybe the next night. And it was leading into a lot of calls the next day to our field managers who they shouldn’t have been dealing with that call the on-call should have been dealing with that call. We put her on an improvement plan. It just didn’t work out. So I had to hire somebody else. We actually had four caregivers apply for the job which we were excited about once again in-house we interviewed them, we had two of them that it worked great, but one could only do weekends. The other one didn’t really want to do weekends.

John Bennett (36:01):

So it works out well that we match them together kind of one dose, the weekdays, the other does the weekends. So they’re actually getting trained this week until they know the client and caregivers really well, they’ll be using the, the tags because the tags are it’s at a seat, come up there. It saves you from wasting a ton of time, right? We also tag caregivers do not call for filling. There’s some caregivers who will work their assigned schedule and they will get mad at you and maybe leave your company if you call ’em for fillings. So we tag do not call for fillings and they know out as well. So, and all the other attacks too allergic to puts that type of thing. Once again, knowing the clients and caregivers really well, we know our client’s got nine cats and she’s a crazy old cat lady. And we have caregivers who are tagged, allergic to cats or allergic to pets. We don’t wanna send them in there. So tags are super beneficial for us.

Miriam Allred (36:51):

Great questions, Daniel. Thanks for asking those with that being said. I think we’ll cap here, John. Thank you so much for your time and thank you you for being willing to share so much information today.

John Bennett (37:00):

Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Yeah. Reach out if anybody has any questions I’ll warn you, if you’re asking me questions, I’m probably gonna pick your brain too. Cuz you probably have some really good knowledge that I’m not aware of. But yeah, reach out any other questions you can think of Maryam. I did wanna add, I was just trying to run through my head real quick. As you were saying that at what issues we experience with oncall and one of the things I just wanted to note real really quickly is the transition period. Like 5:00 PM. When the field managers turn the phones over to our oncall supervisors there, we had some debates before. Well what if what if a shift turns red at 4 45, right? And the field manager can’t resolve that shift before they’re turning the phone over at five o’clock and what we’ve done here essentially is anything that occurs before that five o’clock cutoff is the responsibility of the field manager that, that shows up on clear care, anything that occurs after, if it’s a five O clock clock out and they don’t clock out and they forget to then it’s, then it’s on call and it’s the same thing in the morning.

John Bennett (38:06):

So we had to put a delineation there because there was kind of a, well they’re supposed to do it and they they’re supposed to do it. During that transition period. So we had to kind of put a hard stop there and set the responsibilities once again, communication. Right. we had to communicate very literally who was responsible for what, during that, that, that transition time and that resolved a lot of, a lot of headaches that we had. So I think that that’s worth noting as well. So, but otherwise I really appreciate you having me on the call and yeah, these are great questions too, that everybody asked those. So I, I appreciate the question.

Miriam Allred (38:35):

Absolutely good information till the very end. Glad you added that in cuz I’m sure that’s an issue that, that you see often. So thanks everyone for joining us live today. Happy rest of your Tuesday. And we’ll look forward to seeing you on more of these calls in the future. Thanks everyone.