Caregiver registries play an important role in connecting caregivers to clients in need. Registry owners face unique challenges in maintaining compliance, developing business, and balancing all of these needs while working 40-ish hours.
How do you do all of this while maintaining your sanity?
Understanding and implementing processes that drive compliance and efficiency. Let’s dive into four specific areas that you can focus on in your business to make the most of your time and your team’s time without getting caught in regulatory pitfalls.
Audit your operations.
One of the hardest challenges in registry work is having a never-ending to-do list and not knowing where to start to make the most impact. Here are some ways that you can audit your operations to make sure that your team is making the best use of their time:
- Finetune operations—and standardize them. There are a lot of different ways to do most tasks and when you can find the right recipe, make sure you write it down. More importantly, make sure that the right way is adopted by your entire team (which also reduces decision fatigue). This makes sure that you are leading your team down the efficient path and sharing best practices along the way that make their lives easier.
- Evaluate your technology stack. Investing in the right registry management system and knowing how to use it effectively can be your team’s best weapon against time. Making sure that each team member knows how to navigate your system, run essential reports, and access key information can save countless hours of searching and back-and-forth emails.
- Stick to specific communications channels. How many ways does your team have of getting a hold of you? If it’s more than 2, you should look to consolidate. And how do new clients get in touch with your business? Put together a complete list of communications channels and work closely with your team to determine if any of those channels can be shut off or streamlined. Or, maybe there’s a better way for inquiries, for example. If you have a single phone number for new business, you may look into a chatbot for your website that can handle live inquiries to keep the prospect engaged.
Implementing one or more of these pieces can help your team feel more engaged and involved in your business, and empowered to make decisions.
Make work-life balance a priority.
Do you find yourself opening up your work laptop at night just to see how things are going? It’s easy to fall into this trap. Prioritizing self-care and a healthy work-life balance is crucial to your long-term success and well-being. Here are some ways you can do that:
- Delegate. Delegate. Delegate. Any task that you do for work should be documented and shared with other team members. Make sure that there is at least one other person on your team at all times who knows how to do each of these things, enough so that your registry can run without your physical presence every day.
- Set boundaries—and reinforce them. Share with your team what your working hours are, and don’t budge from them. Have a process in place for team members to manage new business calls, caregiver inquiries, billing and payments, and more.
- Schedule breaks into your workday. It can be easy to work straight through a day and not even realize what time it is. Instead, make sure that you schedule breaks into your core deep work time. Beyond that, make sure that you plot out and schedule your time off throughout the year too. You need time to recharge, and having the right systems in place, you don’t have to let work determine when you should and shouldn’t be there.
Building a business doesn’t have to come at the cost of all of your time and brainpower. Read on to learn more about how making strategic investments in yourself can pay off in your business.
Focus on building yourself as a part of building the business.
When you spend less time on day-to-day operations, you can dedicate more energy and time to setting the vision for your business that impact growth. This can include:
- Strategic thinking: Set aside time every week to review business goals against reports, review market trends, and plan for future growth.
- Pursue continuous learning opportunities: One of the best ways to grow is to be in rooms where you can learn from others. By attending webinars, enrolling in LinkedIn Learning courses, certifications, and other activities, you can take all of the learnings back to your team along with a fresh perspectives.
- Network and partnerships development: Business development doesn’t just mean clients anymore. When you can spend time networking with other people in your community and potential referral sources, you can grow your business from the inside out.
Building your business means building you, too.
Running a caregiver registry requires a delicate balance between creating connections while keeping compliance in the back of your mind. With these best practices, you can arm yourself and your team with the knowledge—and time—to achieve your growth goals.
Take some time to audit your operations from the top to the bottom. This will help you find ways to reduce time spent on manual work and increase the time that you spend working on the business (instead of in the business). With that time, money, and energy, you can make strategic investments in yourself that impact your bottom line.
How are you going to invest in your team’s efficiency and operations this year for explosive growth?
