The senior care referral company A Place For Mom (APFM) is well known, particularly for its senior living placement services.
But as home care has become more in demand, APFM has followed suit. The company saw a 30% increase in families inquiring about home care services last year. In line with that was a 30% increase in revenue growth for its home care segment, according to APFM.
At the beginning of 2022, after a $175 million funding round, APFM leaders told Home Health Care News that home care was going to be a large part of their business moving forward.
Now, APFM is putting that money where its mouth is. Currently, APFM says it’s signing on up to 300-400 home care providers per month.
“The strategy itself is really focused around three main pillars,” James Thorman, general manager and VP of home care at APFM, told HHCN. “One is building a new experience for families, building a valuable set of products and offerings for agencies to help them grow their business, and then really partnering with agencies to actually help drive conversion and deliver growth.”
To deliver on those three pillars, APFM has had to build out its home care team. Thorman has been in his position for almost two years at this point.
Home care has become an integral part of APFM’s strategy.
“We’ve been on a journey over the last several years,” Tatyana Zlotsky, president and chief revenue officer at APFM, told HHCN. “We really approach everything through a customer-centric lens. What we heard a lot from our customers, and what we saw in our data, was that there was a growing need for home care. We had a home care presence, but it wasn’t very large. We really decided to get serious about serving these customers and figuring out exactly what different needs they had.”
In Q4 2022, APFM’s home care revenue was up 50% year over year, and Zlotsky said that this year should lead to 75% growth.
At least 15% of APFM’s clients who start home care services transition into senior living. Some families prefer senior living over the long term, and some prefer home care. But either way, there’s a nice synergy between the two that helps APFM organically grow each part of its business, Zlotsky explained.
Where home care providers come in
One of the challenges for APFM as it has built out its home care segment has been home care provider availability. The company needs enough quality referral partners in each market to satisfy its clients’ needs.
Being a referral partner with APFM comes with perks. In order to build out its home care provider network more effectively, it has created initiatives to help out those providers.
APFM provides professional caregivers to agencies to ease staffing constraints – the company said it referred almost 100,000 caregivers to agencies in 2022 alone. It also rewards home care agencies with a monetary bonus if they refer a senior that is ultimately placed in senior living.
The business blueprint for home care is similar to senior living placement, Zlotsky said, with subtle tweaks here and there.
“We use those best practices, with nuance, and apply them to home care,” she said. “We also do a ton of proprietary research and a lot of training for sales teams to really make them the best experts in an advisory service for this segment.”
APFM’s home care provider acquisition team now has about 17 people. Its customer support and success team, meanwhile, is up to about 15 people. Both are still growing.
“We feel like we can help [providers] really systematically grow both sides of the business – the caregivers and clients,” Thorman said. “We want to work with agencies that are looking to grow, but really looking to help families and deliver the right care in a way that upholds the APFM brand, too.”
Ultimately, the company wants to be a part of transforming senior care, and it sees that home care-to-senior living journey as a vital continuum to bridge.
Between both senior living and home care, APFM spends about $100 million on marketing annually.
“Our mission is to enable caregivers to make the best senior care decisions by providing them unbiased and personalized guidance,” Zlotsky said. “We really see home care as a critical proof point to us being able to realize that mission, because the more types of services and products we’re able to offer families to get through this difficult time, the better.”
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