How To Know When You'll Be Full (Before Running Out of Money) Day - 13

Stop guessing and start knowing. In this episode, I break down the exact math behind filling your senior living home.  I talking all the way down like from inquiries to visits to move-ins. 

You will learn the 3 R's of data-driven decisions that will help you predict your occupancy, identify your bottlenecks, and stop wasting time and money on marketing that doesn't work.

What you will learn:

The 3 R's of Data-Driven Decisions:

1. Reverse Engineer Your Goal – Work backwards from your move-in target to know exactly how many inquiries and visits you need each week
2. Recognize Your Bottlenecks – Identify where families are dropping off in your sales process (inquiry → visit → move-in)
3. Reallocate Your Resources – Stop wasting time on referral sources that aren't converting and focus on what actually works

KEY TAKEAWAY

Data will help you to save time, save money and will not waste your precious energy or diminish your confidence.  What gets measured gets improved.

TOOLS & RESOURCES MENTIONED

Deep Dive Discovery Live Cohort – My signature training program that includes:

• The Move-In Calculator (does the math for you)
• Dashboard & Tracking System
• Conversion Rate Benchmarks
• Step-by-step guidance on interpreting your data

Waitlist: startwithoccupancy.com
Launch Date: End of January 2026

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Transcript

Tiffany Updated voice: 0:00

Imagine this. It's December, 2014. I'll never forget it. I was a community sales director. Um, and what happened was on the first day of every month in corporate senior living, we have to submit what we are projecting for move-ins for that particular, for that month, whatever month it is. Well, my regional director would roll these numbers up to our dis, you know, our, from our district to, you know, our, our total region corporate and everything else. And this is how they come up with those projection of revenue earnings, right? So I projected seven, seven move-ins. I remember my regional calling me and like, Tiffany, are you sure? Seven in December, that's awfully high. That seems ambitious. I was so sure I had four families, four count them literally coming into sign, and one of them was a husband and wife in which they counted that as two move-ins. So I was like, ready? Ready? No doubt. Deposits were coming in. I mean, they were in hand move-ins, dates, scheduled assessments done. I figured I get about two more new inquiries and move-ins for the month. 'cause it is December. So with what I already had going, and two more, that would be an easy seven, right? Easy peasy. Week one, one of my Sure, sure, sure. Things. It was the couple, the husband had a medical emergency, hospitalized, moving, canceled until further nose, So that was two move-ins gone right there. Then came week two. Another family who I was working with who deposited, decided to move to Ohio to be closer to their daughter. At the last minute, poof, gone. I'm down by three move-ins. I'm thinking, Lord, what in the world is happening? Later on in week two, another family had a situation and canceled. So I'm going into the last week of December. It's like December 21st, Christmas week, and I have zero count them, zero move-ins. I project the seven, right? Remember I scrambled. I'm telling you that pressure that month was incredible. I called every family I could think of who was on the fence or thinking about it and, and trying to make decisions just to find out, you know, if it was a solid yes or no. Then once I found that out, I reached out to my referral partners to see who they were working with, such as a place for mom and um, senior advisors. Then I went out marketing for respite stay residents, a short term stay to at least get the move-ins and holiday discharges, things that happen around the holidays. 'cause something always happens around the holidays. Our team squeaked by with two move-ins that month. One was on the very last day of the month, two out of seven. I still to this day have heart palpitations thinking about that month and how crazy it was. But here's what I learned. Data is not gonna prevent disasters, right? You can have all the data and everything lined up in the world, but what does help you is to see them coming and to guide you. While you're making decisions. So while I wasn't able to recover fully because I knew my data and where I could get my other move ins, that is what helped guide my decisions going forward, and I was a lot more conservative. Data helps you to know where to focus and to prepare for when things go wrong. I'm Tiffany. Welcome to episode 13 of our 21 Days All Things Senior Living Marketing Series. Today we're talking about the metrics that matter and how to use them to make better decisions and not just better reports, Because at the end of the day, what gets measured gets improved. Let's dive in.

Tiffany: 4:16

Uh huh. Welcome to Start With Occupancy, the podcast for senior living owners, operators, and sales professionals. /Hi, I'm Tiffany, marketing strategist and former corporate baddie who got tired of producing results for wall street and wanted to make a change on main street. /I provide quick tips, idea nuggets, and case studies to help you with proven sales, marketing, and business development strategies along with leadership concepts so that you can inspire change, impact lives, and improve outcomes for the aging, their families and your teams. /I'm committed to equipping you with the tools, the knowledge and resources that you need to excel in your business. /With experience working inside senior living companies, large and small, I've developed a deep passion for advocating for the aging adult and those who care for them, all while driving business growth. /So whether you're already in the senior care industry or maybe you would like to be, if your mission is to serve them, my mission is to serve you. /Join me as we unravel the strategies and tactics that drive success in your business while making a difference in someone's life. /The goal is to touch, guide, and impact the lives of 10 families per month! /Are you with me? It's time to be inspired, gain practical tips and own your future.

Tiffany Updated voice: 5:46

So here's the reality. Most smaller owners and operators are flying blind in their business when it comes to marketing and sales. And filling up their communities to be a hundred percent occupied. You're hustling. I know you are. I see you. I talk to you, but you don't know if your hustle is working. You don't know where the bottleneck is. You don't know if you need to have more inquiries or better follow up or improvement with your first impressions, or if you need to work on your, um, your. Visits, AKA tour and the processes. And when I'm asking you questions, you just don't know. And that's okay. That's what we're gonna talk about today. But I will say this, that when you don't know, you waste time, you waste money and you waste energy. And sometimes it also erodes your confidence, but data fixes that for you. Not the way you may think. In corporate, most people think of the data as the reporting and the accountability, and now somebody's gonna ask me uncomfortable questions and it's looking backwards at what happened, and then I have to answer for it. Senior living can be kind of toxic. I'm, I'm not gonna lie, but for me, I always helped my team to look at their data and determine their next steps. I used the data to empower them, not to bully them, I'm not talking about that type of data I'm gonna discuss how to use it to make those decisions and look forward instead of backwards on what you need to do next. Now before I overwhelm you with a bunch of metrics, let me give you a framework, because the goal isn't to track everything. You're not gonna track everything. You have too many hats to do all that, but it's to track the right things so that you can make the right decisions at the right time for what you need. Let me just say better decisions. Um, and so what I did is I broke this down for you guys into the three Rs of data-driven decisions. The first one we're going to talk about is reverse engineering. So to reverse engineer something is to work backwards from your goal. We're gonna pick out the goal and go backwards and find out what actions we need to do to achieve that goal. The second one is to recognize the R is, recognize the bottlenecks. Find where you're losing your people. What is the process? Where are they dropping through the cracks? The third one is to reallocate your resources. That's the third R, right? Spending your time and your money where it matters so that you can get the results that you're needing. I'm going to break down each one to help you understand how to look at the metrics and help you to make those decisions, Before I go into reverse engineering. Before I even start with that, let me define some lingo for you just to make sure that we're on the right page. Not that you don't already know this, but I wanna make sure that when I'm talking that we're, we're, we're talking the same language. So what is an inquiry? In the world of senior living and senior, you know, assisted living memory care, corporate wise, an inquiry is a caregiving family or a resident, or a referral from a professional partner that contacts you about a possible move in situation. That is an inquiry. Anyone who's like, Hey, I have someone, or Hey, I'm looking for myself, or, Hey, I have my mother. Those are all considered inquiries. A conversion rate is the percentage of something such as inquiries or a desired action, such as visits, a k, a tours, out of the total number of opportunities that you had available or was exposed to so that you can get the desired result or action that you're trying to achieve. The numbers tell you how effective you are in turning that potential. The number of total of opportunities into a result is the conversion rate. So I'm going to give you an example so that we can kind of. Put it in layman's terms, right? And don't judge me for my example. I know someone's gonna come up and say something. Just know that I love pizza. I'm from New York. I love pizza. Let's just say I have five pizzas delivered to my house at 6:00 PM daily. I can only eat one box of pizza per day, which is 20% of the total number of pizzas that's delivered outta the five 20% is one. I ask myself, how can I increase the number of pizzas that I can eat? Because you know, we like pepperoni and if I get them delivered in the morning. My aha moment, right? I can start eating pizza earlier. So instead of having them delivered at six o'clock at night, I can get them delivered at 8:00 AM and eat two and a half slices of pizza every one and a half hours just by grazing. And I can increase my pizza consumption, AKA, my eating conversion from 20%. To 40%. 'cause now I can eat two of the five essentially doubling my ability to eat pizza. Like, so I'll get, I'll get like two whole pizzas. You get the picture, you get the example. I know it's the craziest thing, but in the foodie world, like mine, it makes perfect sense. Here's the concept, if you know your conversion rate. And what those rates are, what you're trying to achieve. In that example, I was trying to eat more pizza. You can predict how many inquiries you need to have to reach your move in goal. For me, it was to eat two boxes instead of one. So let me give you a real life example. Let's say your goal is to get six move-ins this quarter, let's say for the next three months, and that will fill your home. You only need six more move-ins. Your conversion rate is 30% for the families who come in to visit your community, who actually moves in. Out of everyone who comes to visit AKA tours your community, 30% moves in. Let's do the math. So you have six move-ins that you're trying to achieve with 30% that converts. And so now if you're working backwards, that means that you need, 20 visits in order to get the six movements. You get it. You have six move-ins you're trying to achieve. You have a conversion rate of 30% that equals 20 visits in your community based on your conversions that will move in. Now let's work backwards one more time. Let's just say we'll keep the conversion rate the same. You're consistent 30%. So 30% of people who call in, who contacted you, those inquiries, either the resident, a family, a referral, they call to schedule a visit, your conversion rate is 30% of those who call in will actually come and visit. So now, if you know you need 20 visits. You divide that by 30%. You're going to get roughly 67 inquiries. So you need 67 inquiries to get 20 visits or tours into your community so that you can get six move-ins. You want six move-ins, you need 67 new inquiries over the next three months. Once you know that you can divide it by the number of weeks, and that will give you a weekly target of what you need to do action-wise or the results you need to have to come into your community so that you can see. Am I on track of getting the number of move-ins I need? You can track your weekly referrals, you can track your new caregiving families, you can track your new potential, um, residents that are contacting you, and you can track the number of visits, AKA tours that you're having per week. You need five to six, um, caregiving families contacting you per week, and you need to have at least one to two visits per week based on the example we did, So now you can monitor yourself. You can say at the end of the week, did I get five new people reaching out to me? Did I have at least one or two people visit my community? That is reverse engineering. You start with the goal, you work backwards to figure it out, and you work backwards then to now know what actions you may need to take today, every day, every week. And it really helps you work with your time management because you know what your conversion rates are. You know how many people you need to visit, you know how to keep in contact with people and how many people you need to contact it. I said a lot. So let's pause this episode right now. Just write down your move in goal. Put it in your notes app in your phone for this quarter, and you can say from January, February, March, or if you want to say, okay, this is my learning month. We're gonna do February, March and April. Either way, that's fine. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna work backwards from there on what you need to do this week and this could be any quarter of the year because this is what we would do number one, monthly. I did this monthly, every single month for I guess all for 13 years, 14 years before I went out on my own, and I still do this today. I need to know how many people am I reaching out to and talking to that's then going to have an appointment with me who's then going to, um, be, you know, my client. Um, how many websites am I able to do? And all of that comes into play still today because math doesn't lie. Let me tell you about a conversation I had with a new, um, newer, I will say a newer operator. They only own their community for a while. They bought it, already existing. They had residents, and now all of a sudden they had two, rooms available. So he called me frustrated because he felt like, the people that had come to visit, that there was something in their process of talking with families and why they didn't decide to move in. And he said to me, Tiffany, I need your help. We're having issues getting the people to decide to move in. I said, okay, well tell me about how many people have reached out to you in the last 30 days. 'cause that's my basic questions. Well, how, what's your flow? Like, where, where is it at? And he's like, I don't know, maybe two or three. And I said, well, how did they hear about you? Because in my mind I'm like, well, the two or three, if we know that they're sending them from this place, we can go there and get more. Right? But he didn't know. And I said, well, how many visited your community? He didn't know. I said, well, are you tracking this? And he's was silent. He's like, well, I'm pretty sure we should. He wasn't, and I get it. He's small, he's independent. He didn't have to worry about this before. He's new. He's wearing 10 different hats. But here's the problem. He needed two move-ins. He was only getting maybe two or three inquiries a month, and then on top of that he was like, well, we're full. Well, we're full. He wasn't building a, what we call in the, in any organization, a pipeline. He wasn't building a database. He wasn't building a contact list so that if something should happen, he has people to call. And I said, if you need two move-ins, you need to increase the number of families contacting you and to visit you in order to increase the volume of families you have an opportunity for potential residents, and you also need to know where people are sending referrals from because maybe the people that you're getting or who's coming to visit you that are being sent, we're never qualified in the beginning, so we have to also do that. I had to break it to him. You don't have a sales problem, you have a marketing problem. And that's when his whole focus shifted and we got down to the nitty gritty and we were able to leverage his wife being a nurse, some of her old contacts, some of the messaging, all of that stuff, and stop him from worrying about his follow up and the sales process and start focused on getting more people, and then he was able to move forward. That is the power of reverse engineering. It tells you where you should be focused on. I said a lot, but I want to make sure that you're breathing all of that in and that you understand where I'm coming from and how this can apply in your community and in what you're doing, even as you're opening up a new one. So in my deep dive discovery live cohort training that I'm doing, I give you the actual calculator that does this math for you. Um, you plug in your goal, you plug in the conversion rate, and we can use standard conversion rates. In the beginning, your conversion rate might be really low. It might only be 10% because you're new. And that happens. And, I understand that. The calculator will tell you exactly how many inquiries, visits, and follow ups you need. Now, what you need to do is start tracking a little bit of it. You know, not as another thing to do, but to help you to know what to do next. Even how you get people to come visit your community and who refers you. Because if you're getting all your referrals from one place and they're giving you one consistently, even if it's only one a month, you wanna go deeper there. All right, get so fired up. The second R is recognizing your bottlenecks. Once you know your numbers, you can see where people are dropping off because then you can start managing the processes that you have and the journey of the customer. There are only three places typically that you're going to lose people. Maybe technically four, but there's three. One is from the inquiry, when they first reach out to you to the time that they visit you. they calling you, but they don't come in. And that was the first metric, like in senior living that we look at how many calls are you getting and how many out of those calls that people are contacting, you are actually coming in to see your community. And then the second one is the visit to move in, meaning out of all the people who come in to visit your community. but then they don't move in They don't sign on the dotted line. Um, one of the other metrics I used to look at myself is how many will come and visit and then go ahead and schedule an assessment and you know, so then that was something else, right? If they were, if you're in assisted living as opposed to a, an independent living. So the visit to the move-in, they're visiting, but they don't move in So now do I have 10 people come and visit? But out of those 10, only two sign up. That's 20%. And then the people who's coming in, all the people who contact you and then don't move in, you know, that is what we call a pipeline. So all these people reached out to you, but they don't even, they kind of go ghost. And so that is another bottleneck that you might have, is why are they going ghost from the very beginning that you're not even able to reach them Each bottleneck has a different solution. For the last one, that could be your follow-up process. Like, could I do something better in my follow-up that I was never even able to reach out to them? Let's just say inquiry to visit problem you. They're calling you, but they're not coming in to visit. That means something's happening in that first call that they are not, um, deciding to even come and visit you. You wanna look at maybe day one of the series where we talk about response time. Um, maybe day two, where we talk about discovery. If you go back to that, it's going over, what should you be talking about on the phone when you're talking to a prospective resident? If you have a visit to move in problem, maybe it's the visit process day three, preparing for the visit on the series. We talk about that. Day four talk about listening and, and finding out what their real root issues are. Um, day seven of the series talks about culture and the activities of the community. So what do they feel once they come in? Um, all of that could be a part of the solving of that particular problem. If it is a true pipeline problem, meaning that they've called, but you're not able to reach them and they're going ghost, maybe you have to fix your follow up. Maybe your follow up from day 11 is what needs to happen. Think about the last five families that you've worked with. Where did you lose them? Do a self-analysis. Think about it. Did they come and visit? Did they visit but not move in? Did they go ghost on you during the follow-up process? That is your bottleneck. That is where you need to really focus in and see what you can do to fix that. And what are some of the solutions? So the third R is to reallocate your resources. This is where data protects you. It protects your time and your money. At the end of the day, this is where the rubber meets the road, you only have limited number of time and you have a limited number of dollars, right? And so when you're able to protect those through the data, you're actually going to save more and get better results from what you're spending, whether it's your time or your money. I once watched a sales director spend like 80% of her time. I will say with a particular skilled nursing rehab facility, she, um, would go there all the time, knew the social worker. They had great rapport. This particular, we call it SNF in the industry, but skilled nursing facility that has rehab, had 90 long-term beds, and only 20 rehab beds. She loved the social worker. But she wasn't getting referrals and couldn't understand why. And so when I looked into it, looked at the numbers and I saw that the facilities monthly discharges per month is considerably lower. I asked what was the makeup of the long term and the short term? How many was really rehabbing and how many wasn't? And then we looked at another place that wasn't too far. They had 40 long-term residents lived there and 60 that was only rehab beds, right? So they had 40 long-term 60 rehab beds. And I told her, you should be spending 80% of your time over there. And 20% of your time with the person you have the rapport with. She shifted her focus, worked on her messaging, and worked on developing that relationship, and because of it, she received three referrals in the next 30 days. That's what data does. It shows you where to spend your time and your money for marketing. So your quick win for this week. Let's just track one metric. That's all I'm asking you to do. Um, pick the one that matters most to your current goal after you start evaluating where am I short here? What's, what's going on? If you need more inquiries so that you can have more visits, track where your inquiries are coming from. If you need more visits, track where your people that you're talking to and how you can increase your rate for them to come in. If you need more move-ins, then track your visit to move-ins, So that you can see, okay, those people who visited me, how many of them are deciding that I'm the right choice for them? Just focus on one metric, track it for 21 days and see what it tells you. Now if you're thinking Tiffany. I wanna track all of this. This is great. Or Tiffany, oh my god, this is a lot. One of the two. I just don't wanna overwhelm you, but I also don't want you to overwhelm yourself. So this is what we do in the Deep Dive Discovery Live cohort, right? Because I'm giving you the dashboard, the calculator, the tracking system. A system that tells you exactly what to do next. Interpreting the data is really what it boils down to. And this particular training launches soon. Um, so stay tuned for the details when the site goes live. In the meantime, what I'd like for you guys to do is to go to start with occupancy.com. And if you look at it and it says, um, deep dive discovery, there should be a wait list page where you can actually go on the wait list and the date is on there too. Um, it's gonna be at the end of this month, but even if you don't join me for the cohort. Track the one metric this week. This week starts looking and saying, how many phone calls did I have coming to my community for new people who wants to know about senior living? And if you're full, you should still find out how immediate it is and in terms of the need, um, or if they're just in the beginning of their journey. Because that person who's in the beginning of their journey, it may be eight months before they're ready to move in anyway. So don't always say like, we're full. Um, that's a no-no. That's a whole nother podcast episode. But we don't, we wanna make sure that we don't do that. So let's recap. What we covered today is the three Rs, right? To make data-driven decisions that's going to help you become full. You wanna work backwards from your goal, right? You remember the example, six move-ins. You gotta have 20 visits for 20 visits. You have to have 67 inquiries, right? That's what we talked about. The second thing is to recognize where your bottlenecks are. Where are people not flowing through your, the journey where they're getting caught up. And then the third thing is to reallocate your resource of time and your money into the things that is going to get you the referrals. You can check out what your conversion rate is on those things. So again, data shows you where to focus. You just have to learn how to interpret it and then to make decisions that is going to give you the right course of action to get you the results that you need. I'm asking you to track one metric for 21 days. It should be easy 'cause it's 21 day series that we're doing. So just say 21 days. That gives you three weeks. Just one, just track one. And, and, and see where that leads you. And then let me know. Let me know how it goes. So before I let you go, remember this. Data doesn't prevent disasters. I learned that such the hard way in December of 2014. But what data does is helps you see the problems coming and it helps you to know where to focus when things go wrong. So stop flying blind, start tracking and start making decisions based on what the numbers are actually telling you. Until next time, you guys, I'm here to inspire change, impact lives, and improve outcomes. I'll see you in the next episode.