Home Care Marketing & Sales Mastery by Approved Senior Network®

SCI Netcast: Kris Chana - ActivAgeCare.com - Innovative Senior Care

March 09, 2022 Valerie VanBooven RN BSN Season 3 Episode 163
Home Care Marketing & Sales Mastery by Approved Senior Network®
SCI Netcast: Kris Chana - ActivAgeCare.com - Innovative Senior Care
Show Notes Transcript

SCI Netcast: Kris Chana - ActivAgeCare.com - Innovative Senior Care

https://www.asnmarketingplan.com/163-kris-chana-activeage-care/

Email: kris@chelseaplacecare.com

Mission

Helping Seniors Live their Best Life!

Vision

Change the World by Helping Seniors Find Joy, Happiness and a Renewed Sense of Purpose. #NoSeniorLeftBehind

Purpose – “Our Why”

To Transform the Lives of:

– The seniors we care for

– The families who entrust us

– The team who makes it happen

Core Values

A.C.T.I.V 

A – Attentive

Always Pay Attention to the Details

 I – Innovative

Pursue Innovative Solutions, Introduce New Ideas & Make Improvements

C – Compassionate

No Matter What, Compassion Always Comes First

V – Value

Always Seek Ways to Add Value by Doing More than What is Expected

T –Teamwork

Build Trust and Work Together to Execute the Mission

 



Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

This is Valerie VanBooven with The Senior Care Industry Netcast, where leaders with three or more years of experience in the senior care market share their advice. So let's get to it. In a few sentences tell us who you are and what you do.

Kris Chana:

My name is Kris Chana, and I've been in senior care for about 10 years now. Originally in assisted living. Started in assisted living in 2011. My wife, Chelsea and I moved into our assisted living facility, lived there for three and a half years inside the facility. Don't know how I got so lucky that she was willing to go along that journey with me. We recently sold our assisted living facility last year in October of 2021. So been through that whole cycle of starting from scratch and kind of exiting and understanding that process. And then also in 2017, we started an adult daycare center. In 2018 we started our home care agency. So currently we have an adult daycare center, and we have a home care agency, private duty, and we are in the process of franchising and expanding our adult daycare center. So we currently have a location in Port Charlotte, and we have a location that we're opening up in Sarasota. That'll be our flagship and our HQ for our future adult daycare center.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Wow. Yeah. Okay. So back track a little bit here. If you all haven't seen Kris, his fabulous superstar stuff on LinkedIn or TikTok or YouTube or Facebook or any of the platforms that he's on, these folks are one of the best examples of how you can take a senior care business, we all are in it, we all know it's not super sexy and super hot and it's [inaudible 00:01:49], "Woohoo."

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Makes it fun, engaging, and it is just phenomenal. I mean, for the few videos that I've had time to watch, there's an entire panel of TVs on a wall that you guys put up [inaudible 00:02:08]. I mean, just incredible. So this is a great example of you guys just really diving into this industry and making it fun. And these seniors are so lucky to have you.

Kris Chana:

Well, and thank you, Valerie. I love what you're doing too. So I mean, I've definitely seen all your work and super appreciative of all the hard work that you're putting into this space as well. Because it takes, I truly believe ... My biggest fear, 20 years from now, is that we didn't inspire enough younger people to take care of this next generation. 


I feel like whatever I can do to create content that can at least maybe catch the eye of someone that might have considered another industry or another field, and maybe they get interested in this field because of something we might be doing or whatever.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

That's awesome. I mean, 20 years from now, you're way younger than me, but I'm going to be 70 and hopefully in great health. But we're raising and we are talking to the people in their 20s, in their 30s who are going to be the next generation of folks that are going to be charged with the care of millions of seniors and what to do with them. Hopefully we've set a great path. You've set a great path in adult day care. I mean, adult day centers used to have, just like everything, started out with a different kind of look and feel that maybe wasn't so much fun. I mean, those people had great hearts and are doing the right thing. But you've taken this to a level where it's so, and we'll put some pictures and your links to all your stuff so that people can see what you've done.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

It is truly amazing for these folks. So, yeah, you're right we need to inspire our younger generation.

Kris Chana:

I know when we first started, even in assisted living, I remember going to a lot of the smaller residential ALFs and just kind of being kind of just depressed like, "This is the environment?" But again, you had a very hardworking individual that had their heart in the right place that started 20 years ago and they just grew up in a different time period. 


So what I noticed is we [are] were entering this new time period where a lot of the baby boomers were making decisions on behalf of their parents and they had a higher expectation of what type of care they wanted for their loved one. So we had to create an environment that matched that expectation. So I feel like we've done that in kind of all of our environments, but I do feel like the future is going to heavily rely on that.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Sure. Well, give us a little ... So for people who've never seen any of your videos or never met you or talked to you, give us kind of a overview, just a picture of what it's like when they come to your adult day center. Just give us some kind of overview.

Kris Chana:

Yeah. I mean, so we've recently rebranded. So I'm in this really kind of this weird state of we used to say it this way, and now we have our new rebranding. Because we're formally Chelsea Place, which I named after my wife. We're transitioning now into a brand called Active Age. 

Active Age is all about keeping everyone active and healthy and just really embracing the active side of maybe these later years. But when someone comes to our adult daycare center, the idea we want them to have is it's a fun and engaging "day-cation," for seniors. So ideally you're dropping your mom or your dad off at our place and they're going on a day-cation for the day. They enter our adult daycare center and they're greeted by a friendly person at the front desk and they kind of think of you're boarding a sea plane and you're going to ride Paradise Airways into some Caribbean island somewhere where you're going to spend your day and have just a great time and have fun.

Kris Chana:

So you enter our building and we kind of have this really tropic ... It's like a Margaritaville meets 1960s' retro vibe, merge those two together. 

We basically have fun and engaging activities all day long from the time that someone gets there at 8:00 AM, to the time they leave at 5:00 PM. It's just nonstop, probably 20 plus different things that we're doing all throughout the day. Usually that's changing every 30 minutes to every hour. We have a lunch, we have catered kind of snacks in the afternoon. We have live music every day. So it's a super active place.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Nice. Nice. What if the person ... So do the seniors that go there, do they have to be super active or can they be a less active person and have [crosstalk 00:07:03]-

Kris Chana:

So it's not that they're coming in with all this hype. They're coming and we're creating an environment that kind of helps produce that activity. Right? So we have a lot of people that come in wheelchairs, we have a lot of people that are in their kind of moderate to late stages of Alzheimer's and dementia, or even Parkinson's disease. So a lot of times we're creating an environment which is fun and engaging and active throughout the day. But it's not that like ... It relies heavily on our team to create that environment.

Kris Chana:

So we might have one person, our activity director, who's kind of leading the way. At the end of the day, we look at her as our entertainer. She's the one that's entertaining from the time that someone gets there to the time that someone leaves. But then we have multiple activity directors that are kind of working subgroups. So they're typically working with one to six people at a time to engage those six people and engage these six people while ... If we're doing chair exercises, we might have one person leading the activity in the front of the room, but then we might have one person in front of each of these six or eight people helping engage them with those chair exercises.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Gotcha. So everybody's working to their capability, or they're having fun based on what they can understand?

Kris Chana:

Exactly. It's like with live music every day, we might have 25% of our population, or 30% of our population dancing and actually up there holding each other dancing or dancing with one of our staff members. But then you might have the rest of the group kind of surrounding them tapping their feet or clapping their hands, or participating in it and maybe singing, but maybe not actually dancing.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Gotcha. Gotcha. I mean, that's awesome. You've taken into consideration all the different abilities and all the different mental abilities, physical abilities, and everybody has their options there. So that's cool. Yeah. It looks like an amazing place. I want to staycation there.

Kris Chana:

Exactly. I know, our new place is going to have pina coladas served all day. So we're going to have a pina colada machine just plugged in.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Oh wow. That sounds great.

Kris Chana:

It might be non-alcoholic but it's still, it's creating the vibe, creating the atmosphere.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

That's right. There you go. All right well tell me, I got to ask everybody this question, what is the best thing about serving aging adults? You've been doing this in so many different capacities. What is the best thing?

Kris Chana:

So I think the one thing, the reason why I got so excited about adult day care and what we're doing with that space, is simply the fact that I feel like we give people a reason to wake up in the morning. We give people a sense of purpose and we give them almost this kind of fulfilling, meaningful life that they may not otherwise have. 


So to be able to create an environment that they're excited to wake up in the morning and come to, they cannot wait to come and see their friends and be a part of this environment, to me there's nothing that gives me greater joy than that. I mean, those stories of someone that before their loved one would have a hard time waking them up in the morning, getting them ready for the day and now they're up ready, they got the themselves dressed. They're sitting at the breakfast table ready to go at 6:00 AM before their loved one's even gotten up because they just can't wait to come for that day.

Kris Chana:

So I don't know, I always think about that person, or even myself at 90 years old losing all my friends, losing all my ... I'm no longer running these businesses. I no longer have this sense of purpose. What does my life look like at that age if I don't have ... My kids aren't around anymore, my grandkids they're kind of growing up and doing their own thing. What does my life look like anymore? What's the purpose of life? What's the reason to live? To be able to give someone that reason again, to give them that purpose, there's nothing more fulfilling than that to me.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

That's so great. Yeah, the fact that they're so excited to come and see all their friends, and that's really the whole socialization thing. Getting back to that, and I know Florida's been wide open since the pandemic and everything, but getting everybody back to that importance of being around other humans and laughing and having a good time and dancing, whether it's in your chair or standing up, I mean-

Kris Chana:

Right.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

So important in lives.

Kris Chana:

Yeah. Even though Florida was open for a large majority of the time, I know what we noticed is that the population itself was still scared and was still kind of standoffish. So there was a period of time where people were still not coming to the center as much. But what happened was is their families, what we noticed is that the families that kind of held off longer got to a point where they realized that the lack of socialization had such an impact on their loved one that they're like, "Okay, we need to get mom back. Regardless of how we feel about this, this is actually becoming worse now." So it was interesting to see that because people were starting to bring their loved back later on at different stages when they realized that mom had declined so much or dad had declined so much just simply because of the fact that they had not been social in a while.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

I would agree. Yeah, I think you'd see that clearly too in nursing homes. I always tell the story, my dad was in a nursing home for two years his wife pulled him out about eight months into the pandemic and we did everything we could do, all the FaceTimes, all the birthday stuff, outside the window, parades, whatever. It just wasn't enough. So she pulled him out and told me, "Hey, we're just going to go for it. We're just going to try." So he's been thriving, he's been doing great. He was definitely in decline, and this is not an old man. He has vascular dementia, he's in the 70s, but he was going whoosh. I mean, you could just tell there was no reason to get up. There's no reason to get out of bed. For what? For me [inaudible 00:13:10].

Kris Chana:

That's the thing is, me and you, we have that purpose right? We're operating in our purposes. So it's hard for us sometimes, people that might be in that purpose or maybe they have kids, or maybe they're doing, something is kind of giving them that sense of purpose or that reason to get up for the day. So it's kind of hard to imagine life without that.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yes.

Kris Chana:

If you haven't actually experienced that for yourself, you almost have to kind of put yourself in those shoes to really understand how detrimental that could be to someone.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It was so obvious. Anybody who's had a loved one in a nursing home that is unable to visit or had been, you can see it clearly the effect it had on so many. All right, so let me ask you this question.

Kris Chana:

Yeah.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

I would imagine that in all this, from assisted living through today and going into this franchising adventure-

Kris Chana:

It is an adventure.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

It is an adventure, I'm sure. What leaders and organizations have really had an impact on you? Maybe it's a local organization or a national one or someone that you thought, Man, these folks do a great job."

Kris Chana:

For sure. I feel like it's been a mixture of both, certain organizations that I look up to. Other organizations that I've been a part of. I think when I first started out even being a part of, say, FALA. The Florida Assisted Living Association. The person that I went through core training with, Alberta Granger, she was kind of like my mentor in the very, very beginning. The person that kind of inspired me to start our assisted living facility, this guy, Greg. He had a small six bed ALF that was up in the [inaudible 00:14:54] area. He was like, my go-to. Back in the day when I had thought about, what am I going to do for dinner tonight for Sarah, my first resident? When I was like freaking out because I had burnt whatever was on the menu for that night and I was cook at the time. So I was like, "Oh no, what am I supposed to do?" He's like, "Just relax, just remember it is just hanging out with your own grandparents. Does she like pizza? Can we order something in?"

Kris Chana:

I'm like, "Okay, can I do that?" He's like, "Yeah, just like ..." So just when I was nervous about all the state stuff. So people even like Pascal with ALF Boss who's just always there to answer questions about licensing and things like that. Then people I look up to now and even aspire to now on LinkedIn. I don't know if you follow James Lee at all? He's someone kind of in the senior living space. But just his leadership abilities, the way he talks about leadership is kind of a way that to me, I feel like there's a lot of alignment there. So he's been kind of someone to lean into when it comes to leading your teams. Especially when you're think about leading a team of caregivers, of people that are maybe venturing into this field for the first time and they're unfamiliar with it. You're dealing with this, it's not just a retail environment where we're talking about boxes and clothes and things that have no feelings.

Kris Chana:

We're in a service based industry where we have human lives that are at kind of at stake. And it's like, "Are we making an impact on their life or not?" So how do I lead my teams at that level? How do I help them grow and help them advance and help them see opportunity for themselves in the future? So things like that. I would say other organizations even with, what is it? Bridge the Gap. Just the group of people that they've brought together for kind of just information and insight, I lean on that heavily. Because the sad part is that I feel like the adult daycare space doesn't have a lot of guidance. There's not a large association. There's not a lot of people thought leaders to look up to. So I'm kind of relying at the mercy of other people in the senior living or the home care space to kind of be my guide.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

But you're leading the way. So I mean, if anybody had ... I swear to you [inaudible 00:17:25] that you've done, they're going to be like, "Whoo, we're way behind." You don't have to do everything, but just the positive and the vibe and the fun. I know every moment is not what you see on video, but just the overall happiness of that facility, and I don't know if facilities the way to say it, but yeah and the overall happiness of your clients is an amazing leadership role to take with senior care. It doesn't matter if it's at ... You can have fun at home, you can have fun in an assisted living facility. You can have fun in an adult day center.

Kris Chana:

I think the biggest thing, so sometimes, I will say from having the experience of all three. I think the adult daycare does kind of bring out the best of all three. Because at the end of the day when someone's coming to us, our main focus that day is to make sure they're having fun.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yes.

Kris Chana:

When they're coming to us for the day, if they're not feeling well, they're probably not coming that day. They're probably going to stay home. Right? 

So the adult daycare does bring out the best of everyone. So it brings up the best of your team, it brings up the best of your members. Because for the most part, everyone's coming there for this great time, right?

Kris Chana:

Where in assisted living, we have all sorts of other problems. You got overnight issues, you got behavioral problems, you got medication issues, you got staffing issues, you got all these other things that's happening. There's a lot more go going on. Same with home care. You got staffing problems, you can't recruit enough people, you got wage issues. There's always stuff happening. A shortage of people that can work in the field because you need a one to one ratio there. So it's not that all of these fields are just always happy all the time. It's just that there is a lot about the adult daycare that does bring the best of senior care from it just because of the structure of the day is more focused on just having fun.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Do you find that your staff stays, the retention is easier at the adult day center?

Kris Chana:

I mean, 100 times, yeah. Just because all you got to do is have fun. That's what we joke all the time, because when my assisted living, or my home care agency would be having issues when it came to staffing, especially during the whole COVID crisis. You'd have multiple people out with COVID and then everyone working overtime and they're stressed out and it's just like, "Oh my God. This is a lot on everyone." I would say that, at least with the adult day care, that environment just produces a much happier work environment. Whereas there's just certain ... And the thing is for the most part is all the stress ends at 6:00 PM.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah, that's true. Everybody goes home.

Kris Chana:

Yeah, everyone goes home. But as soon as the vans are in, I have no more stress. Then all I got to do is worry about home care. I used to have to worry about the assisted living too. But it's just, there is those levels of stress on a 24/7 job that where I think in the adult daycare it produces a better work environment, plus everyone's working together. So unlike assisted living, you might have first shift, second shift, third shift. And those shifts sometimes would kind of have beef with each other. Then with home care you have this separation from your team in the field to their team in the office. So how to bridge those gaps, if you can bridge those gaps I think you can create really tight bonds. But it takes a lot of intentional effort.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Do you guys pick people up at their house?

Kris Chana:

We do. Yep. So we provide-

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Do you go in and get a ... I mean, if a family wants you to go in and get them or get them dressed, I mean, how far do you go to get people to you?

Kris Chana:

So I mean, ideally they have gotten them ready for the day. But we'll come to that front door, help that person walk out. The hard part is, I would love for it if our team could go and get everyone ready and stuff like that, but it's just the sheer time like of-

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Oh yeah.

Kris Chana:

Because we're not just picking up one person at a time, we're picking up a route. So we don't want people to be stuck on the bus for more than an hour. So ideally we're coming in, we're helping that person maybe from their front door, walking them to the van, helping them get in, get their walker maybe in the back or however they might need to get loaded and make sure that's all done safely. The same thing on the way home, we're walking them back to the front door. Depends on are they going home alone? Is there a loved one there? Just depends on the situation. But it's not like Uber like, "All right, see you."

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. But I guess your home care agency potentially could help on either end of that, if needed?

Kris Chana:

For sure. And we actually do that a lot. We definitely have a handful of clients that we have someone from home care that comes in the morning, gets that person up for the day, gets them ready, helps them with the shower maybe, gets them at least the breakfast started. So by the time transportation's coming around, they're good to go. So we've had that too where we've done it way or where our home care team's even just transported them to our adult daycare at that point.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Nice, nice. Well, that's great. Gosh, you guys are doing such a great job. What piece of advice would you give, you've already given a lot of great advice, but what piece of advice would you give to other senior care providers out there?

Kris Chana:

I think just a true assessment of where someone's heart is. Being able to kind of be self aware enough of if I'm coming into this space for the first time and I've never been in senior care, what are my reasons why? Is there a family member? But never forgetting that why. Always holding on to that why during those hard times, because the why is why we're here. If we forget the why, then I feel like it's hard to overcome those difficult times. And those difficult times you can then be easily frustrated and you can lose that momentum. You can lose the cultural identity that maybe you've created in your company if you forget the reason why you're there.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah, absolutely. I think you have to have a why and, "It's all about this. It's all about your-"

Kris Chana:

Yeah.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

It's not easy.

Kris Chana:

And the why can never be, in healthcare or at least in the care world, it can never be financial. If you were in an insurance or if you're in financial services it could be that like. I'm saying it could be that. But at the end of the day your why has to be pure. Because I feel like it's so easy to see past that in this space.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Absolutely.

Kris Chana:

I really feel like this is the one of those unique spaces where if you focus on the why the money is just a byproduct of that. If I just do the right things and if I think about how would I want my own loved one taken care of. If I just focus on that and I do that stuff well, then the business and the mechanics of it, as long as the systems are set up right, that'll just work itself out.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Absolutely. You're totally right about that. The more you give the more will come back to you. Totally. Absolutely.

Kris Chana:

Like yesterday we had, I don't know last week or something, we had one of our girls, she was cleaning for home care. Right? She was cleaning one of our client's house and she accidentally threw away something that the lady had ordered. Which I guess they were kind of setting apart like, "Okay, this goes back to Amazon. This is trash, this is whatever." So one of those things accidentally got thrown out. And she was a little upset about it. So we were like, all right, so we replaced the item for her. She gave us a printout of what it was and it was like ... My admin, Jamie, was like, "Hey, should we replace it? What do we do?"

Kris Chana:

I'm like, "We don't have a protocol for this situation, but we'll have one now." But at the end of the day I was like if we threw it out and the caregiver ... It wasn't a questionable thing. The caregiver was like, "Yeah, I accidentally threw that out, I did not mean to." I was like, "Okay, we'll take care of it. We'll replace it. We're going to do right by her." You know what I mean?

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Those are the kinds of ... I mean and everybody's human, accidents happen. Of course you're going to give them their $20 or $30 thing or whatever it was back to them.

Kris Chana:

Yeah.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

I mean, of course, you're going to do that. Yeah, that's definitely where you make a decision in your heart, that's the right thing to do for versus, "No."

Kris Chana:

Well, but I think sometimes we've seen so many, and I've experienced that in different areas of business as being a customer of different companies where it's like, you get nickeled and dimed on certain things. It feels so like, "Gosh." Just, I don't know. You could charge me way more and I wouldn't even know as long as you took care of me as a customer.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yes.

Kris Chana:

When you start nickling and diming me on stuff, just it makes me ... I hate that feeling.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

You see people's colors when they start doing that stuff. So absolutely, it's all about your heart. Now, my last question is, supposed to be a fun one, it sounds like every day is kind of [inaudible 00:26:29] where you are. Tell us how you like to celebrate with your staff. And this could be anything, somebody is caregiver of the month or somebody has done a great job or whatever. Some celebration. How do you guys celebrate?

Kris Chana:

So for our caregiver of the month, a way we like to do it, so we'll actually have someone come to the home office. So that always, they get a little nervous.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. Yeah.

Kris Chana:

Because we'll be like, "All right, come on this day at this time." They'll come and they don't really know why. But when they come into the room we have a confetti cannon and we'll launch the confetti cannon and confetti goes all over the room. Then it's usually like, at that point in time we kind of like, "Congratulations." We will thank that person for being our, we can call them our ... So we have our WOW awards and then we have our Allstar of the month.

Kris Chana:

So we'll have our Allstar of the month. The Allstar of the month is that person that just always kind of stands out, follows all of our core values and is just kind of one of those people that you would hope that anyone else would identify. They have all the attributes of someone that makes, for all those good qualities for our team. So then we'll give them an award, which kind of is a little placard thing. We'll give them a $50 check or whatever. Then we'll usually have lunch that day, or we'll have some sort of meal that day we'll celebrate with them.

Kris Chana:

So if we can get them to the home office that's the best way we like to kind of-

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

That's awesome-

Kris Chana:

Celebrate. We're working on some different things. I feel like that's one thing, when it comes to home care especially, is trying to find unique ways to bridge the gap between the team in the field and the team in the office and make them feel more part of the whole company.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Yeah. Yeah. It's when they're kind of solo it's hard to get everybody to come together a little bit more. But yeah, absolutely. I think what you're doing sounds great and having people come to the office to celebrate is the way to the way to go, if you can get them there. But you just got to get them there.

Kris Chana:

Exactly. Exactly. Sometimes the daycare, we might go to them. It depends on if it's home care, someone wins from home care if someone wins from the adult daycare. But yeah, no, it's cool when someone from home care can come and then we sit down and have lunch together with everyone and really kind of just make ... It's like in those moments you can build those genuine relationships and spend that genuine time with people.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

That's a retention builder for sure. They want to stay part of the family.

Kris Chana:

Yeah.

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN:

Well I want to thank you for taking this time out of your day to share what you're doing with us. It's amazing. We'll make sure that a lot of your things, we'll post with this podcast, with the Netcast links and some things that people can view to see what a great example you're setting forth in the adult day center space. Do this again with us when you have your next facility open or your next location, as you grow come back and do this some more because I think we're going to see a lot of cool stuff.

Kris Chana:

No, I appreciate it, Valerie. Thank you for everything you're doing too, it's awesome. And it's exciting to be around other forward thinkers in the senior care space.