3 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting In Assisted Living
By Gene Guarino
I’m going to suggest three things to you, and if you do them, you can experience tremendous success in Residential Assisted Living.
Number 1: Learn from others.
Learn from other people’s challenges, successes, and failures. Learn from other people’s mistakes whenever possible. Learn from somebody who’s actually doing what you are trying to do, not from people that just talk about it. When I share with you on RAL it is from my hard earned experience. Learning from my experience is a lot easier than learning it all on your own. Listening carefully when I say “here’s what I did that worked” and “here’s what I did that didn’t work,” If you do listen and learn from other people’s experience you would be very smart to take advantage of that knowledge and experience.
The most expensive lessons in life come from the experience that we gain when we say, I will do it myself. Many times we end up saying “I wish I knew that before I started.” You may be thinking that you’ll be saving yourself some money in the short term, but if you save yourself weeks or months or years that will be much more valuable than the small amount you may save in the short term. Saving time is even more valuable than saving money.
Experience is the result of taking action. Good or bad, lesson learned or lesson ignored, the result is experience. The experience we gain may show us what to avoid, or how to better respond to a specific challenge. If you’ve decided to learn from others whenever possible to help you avoid some of the negative experiences, that is well worth the effort. Simply learning from somebody who’s done it before, who has faced it before and is willing and able to show you how to do it in advance, can save you from having to experience the mistakes that you could have avoided. It is always best to learn from other people’s experience whenever possible.
Number 2: Have systems in place.
When you have a business, you typically have standard operating procedures, SOPs. In Residential Assisted Living, the SOPs are commonly known as “policies and procedures.” It covers everything from bringing somebody into the home, medication management, menus, scheduling of the caregivers, record keeping and everything in between. Even checking a resident out of the home.
All of those policies and procedures are laid out clearly and are the guide for a smoothly running home. It is the systems for everything, “if this… then that.” It could be things like, if there’s a storm that causes the house to be uninhabitable, what is the system in place to be able to move the residents to another home? Where do they go? How do we get them there? What happens if the electricity goes out and the food in the refrigerator goes bad? Is there backup food and water? The policies and procedures and the standard operating procedures are the systems that we have in place to operate this business.
Number 3: Have a backup plan.
The third one is to have backup plans. If we have a system we can see what is going right, but when something doesn’t go right what’s the backup plan? What’s the plan B and C and D? We’re going to have a plan, “here’s what we do” in every situation. If this doesn’t work, then this is what we do next. How are we going to do this if we can’t get it done that way? If you have systems in place and you have the backup redundancy, you can pretty much handle anything that comes your way in Residential Assisted Living or virtually anything that you do.
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Gene Guarino
Founder/CEO
Residential Assisted Living Academy™
Gene is the President, CEO & Founder of RALAcademy.com. Gene has over 30 years experience in real estate investing and business. Today, Gene is focused on just one thing… investing in the mega-trend of senior assisted housing. He has trained thousands of investors/entrepreneurs throughout the United States how to invest in and operate residential assisted living homes. For over 25 years he has been educating people on the strategies of successful investing, business and self-employment. He now specializes in helping others take advantage of this mega-trend opportunity.
