TOO MUCH PRESSURE, TOO LITTLE PLANNING

Everyone’s feeling the pain of today’s economy - and the senior housing industry is no exception. We had it very good for a very long time and now, executives don’t quite know how to cope with a situation where new residents aren’t just coming through the door – as a matter of fact, some are going out the door and back to their adult children’s homes, due to financial strains.

The fact is we may be used to competing with other communities – but we’re not used to competing with a depressed economy. It’s an entirely new situation and adapting to it has unfortunately been a frighteningly slow process.

And actually, adaptation hasn’t been the rule. Panic has been. Executives at some communities are looking at multi-million dollar losses – and they need to turn around those numbers fast. That kind of fear leads to two basic responses:

1) They slash rent prices- which is risky business and could haunt the bottom line even longer than the current recession.

2) They pour on the pressure to their marketing directors – without giving them any tools to help turn things around.

Number 2 is what I want to focus on in this blog. Let me say straight out, pure pressure doesn’t do anyone any good. Not the executives putting it on or the employees forced to put up with it. Without any kind of accompanying change in strategy or planning and no additional training or direction, a marketing director is left with only a lot of extra tension – and not productive tension.

I know many marketing directors at senior communities that are just plain freaking out – to the extent where they’re actually getting rashes from all the stress and strain. They’re good, talented people – but they have no idea how to produce more for their bosses!

The challenge is to adapt to these new times – to offer the vision and leadership to seek out new sales strategies and training – and to believe that things can be turned around. Yes, times are tough – but if we believe we can overcome them, we will.

Shannon Duncan, in her book, “Present Moment Awareness,” says, aside from the obvious laws of nature, we are only limited by our beliefs. “Beliefs,” she writes, “can be as real and insurmountable as the walls of a jail cell.” I happen to believe that is right on the money

For example, did you know that Albert Einstein, one of the greatest geniuses who ever walked the earth, was diagnosed as being “mildly retarded” as a child? What if he had held on to that belief? The only way he would have come up with “E=mc²” is if he had lined up his building blocks in that order.

If you or the leadership of your community holds to the belief that you can’t change the current climate and there’s no way to boost your occupancy rate, to me, that comes under the heading of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our training programs have turned around many, many communities – because they believed in our programs and implemented them effectively. They believed things could be better – and that belief didn’t act as a jail cell. It was more like a jail break that helped them see some daylight when it came to improving their bottom line.

So think about your community. Are you locked into the old way of doing things that just don’t work anymore? Or are you open to trying the new?

And can you really afford not to do anything?