Assisted Living Operator: Key Responsibilities and Daily Life
Oct 02, 2024
Let's explore the role of an assisted living home operator in healthcare and senior care. Running an assisted living facility involves more than just management; it enhances seniors' quality of life with daily care and support. Operators must balance healthcare regulations, staffing, and resident care with compassion, leadership, and business acumen.
In this blog post, we'll discuss the key tasks of an assisted living facility operator, including overseeing daily operations, managing staff, ensuring regulatory compliance, and creating a welcoming environment for residents. Whether you're considering a career in this field or are simply curious, join us to learn more about this essential profession.
Check out the video too:
Understanding the Operator's Role
An assisted living operator is distinct from an administrator. While an administrator must be licensed and often physically present at the facility, an operator can manage operations remotely. This flexibility allows you to oversee facilities without being tied to a specific location. For example, my facilities are in Colorado and Idaho, but I live in Utah and manage them remotely.
The Work Environment
As an operator, your work is primarily office-based, with tasks that can be completed remotely. Being separate from the facility prevents micromanagement and allows you to keep a larger view. Typically, you will visit each facility a few times each year to check that everything is going properly and that you maintain personal contact with the staff and residents.
Daily Responsibilities
In contrast to common belief, an operator's everyday responsibilities do not take up much time. You may spend 5 to 10 hours each week monitoring your facilities. The key to success is to deal with significant activities that require your attention while delegating the rest. A significant part of your job involves crisis management, which requires dealing with serious issues outside the facility administrator's scope. Regular meetings with your facility administrator are also essential for providing appropriate assistance and guidance.
In addition, you will be responsible for administrative tasks such as managing emails and phone calls, making agendas, and arranging meetings. Another important aspect of your work is establishing the vision and principles for your facilities, whether you want a family-oriented or business-oriented environment. Clear communication of your goal with your administrator ensures they understand how to achieve it effectively.
Setting goals and guidelines for operation from the beginning makes it easier to manage ongoing management. You also handle legal and insurance affairs, ensuring sufficient insurance coverage and addressing any possible legal difficulties. In addition, operators manage contracts, such as Medicaid agreements, and manage or delegate bookkeeping activities to maintain financial stability and compliance.
Delegation and Management
While the operator's duty includes a variety of responsibilities, appropriate delegation is important. If necessary, you might hire professionals to handle chores such as bookkeeping or legal issues. However, make sure not to overload your administrator or yourself. Balance is essential for keeping your facility running smoothly and preventing employee burnout. Delegating properly allows you to focus on higher-level strategic duties that are critical to the success of your assisted care facility.
Setting the Tone and Vision
As the operator, you have a vital role in defining the culture of your facilities. Communicating your vision clearly to your administrators helps them understand how to carry it out efficiently. Setting clear expectations from the start simplifies and improves long-term management. Your vision and leadership set the tone for the entire facility, resulting in an atmosphere that reflects your aims and values.
Legal and Contractual Responsibilities
Operators must manage various legal and contractual aspects of the company. This includes ensuring that all contracts, such as Medicaid agreements, are in place and monitoring insurance obligations. Furthermore, operators must be prepared to deal with legal difficulties, collaborating closely with attorneys and other professionals as necessary. This legal investigation ensures that your facilities follow regulatory criteria and maintain excellent levels of care.
Final Thoughts
Being an assisted living operator requires a balance of strategic leadership and hands-on management. By balancing delegating with direct engagement, creating clear goals, and maintaining a strong vision, you can secure your facilities' success and offer residents a high standard of care. Your leadership and strategic planning are key to building a successful, long-term assisted care business.
If you're interested in diving deeper into the assisted living business, make sure to download our free underwriting calculator and check our Business Plan Checklist to help you create a successful business plan for your assisted living facility.
Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:01
[Music] hi everybody i'm brandon gustafson i own and operate two assisted living facilities and i created this channel to help people like you learn the ins and outs of investing in assisted living welcome to assisted living investing last video we talked about the day in the life of an assisted living administrator what's it like to be an administrator what can you expect as you're kind of going through that process as an administrator and you can learn more about that in in that video
00:00:40
today we're going to get into you know the day in the life of an assisted living operator what's it like to be an operator of an assisted living facility i would consider myself an operator of of assisted living facilities i have that in my in my linkedin bio that i'm an operator uh you know that's kind of what i call myself when when i talk to people about owning uh assisted living i say i'm an owner operator of two assisted living facilities um so that's kind of the role that i see myself
00:01:07
playing but what do i do what does an operator do um so first off what's that work environment like for for you as an operator so unlike that assisted living facility administrator who is in the facility and is there um i i'm not i can be remote obviously my facilities are in colorado and in idaho and i live in utah i manage those remotely so you could work remotely as an administrator um and we talked about this in a previous video i'll link that up here but you as an operator don't need to be
00:01:40
licensed that your administrator needs to be licensed but the operator does not need to be a licensed professional i could just be a business manager or something like that you don't need to have that type of a certification and then most of the work that you're doing is going to be done in an office setting um so there's not going to be a lot of resident interaction or time at the facility unless that's something that you want you know if you wanted to have your office be at the facility as
00:02:06
the operator so that you're there you could do that um but you don't need to be in my opinion it's probably best that you're not there so that you're not getting in in everybody's way and and stepping on toes you're not micromanaging people you can be a step away and and have a better perspective on what's going on at the facility we visit each of our facilities in person two to four times a year uh just to make sure things that are you know things are running smoothly the physical
00:02:32
facility itself um we're doing some maintenance on it that things are good there and and you have everything get a little bit of face time with staff and with residents and and things like that but that's kind of the purpose that we play as as operators for our facilities so you don't need to be there every day you don't need to have an office there you're able to kind of do this remotely uh you can you know you don't have to spend a ton of time on it's not a full-time job by any means at all
00:02:58
but as as an operator especially of a small facility that's kind of what your work environment is going to look like but what's the daily work like right that's that's the big question what what do you do as an operator on a on a daily basis and really honestly there isn't much that you're doing on a consistent day-in day-out basis there's not something that that you always have to do i would say i put five to ten hours a week into operating our facilities so it's not it's not a huge
00:03:27
ask it's not a huge time commitment to to be an operator especially after you've completed the purchase you're able to get in and you know just kind of have a work on it when you can address things as they come up a lot of what you're doing though is is going to be big stuff big and important things that's why you're the operator that's why you're the owner so some of the things that you could expect to do is you know put out a lot of fires and handling things that come up that would
00:03:51
just take too much time for the facility administrator or that are beyond the scope of their work especially in us in a small facility the types of facilities that you're probably looking at you're going to hold regular meetings with your facility administrator to just see how things are going and you know what you could do to best support them in their role as the administrator i have a video that talks about how i operate my facility remotely and i'll link that up above so you can go and see how i do
00:04:20
that and what our meetings look like as we're talking with our facility administrator you're doing a lot of just kind of general office work so a lot of phone calls and emails and creating agendas and calendaring meetings and those types of things so it's very high level things taking care of things um you know from a higher level that's a lot of the the typical type of work that you're going to be doing as as an operator of assisted living and some of the other responsibilities that you're
00:04:48
going to have as as an operator are some of those higher level things that we've talked about um we talked about this in the last video uh setting that tone for the types of of the culture that you wanted that facility what what do you want that facility to be like uh is it family oriented is it business oriented uh how do you what do you want to feel like um and you are the one that are kind of you're the one that is creating that vision and then commuting that communicating that to the facility administrator so they
00:05:15
can then carry out that that um that vision for you um setting expectations for and and with the facility administrator so having conversations with them especially right at the very beginning you want to set those expectations about how you're going to communicate where you're going to store things you know how you're going to digitally store things what the facility looks like are you a medicaid facility are you a private paper facility what does that look like you're going to set some of those
00:05:45
expectations so that they don't come into a blind and that your conversations from that point on are just easy like oh hey how's this going because we already talked about we already set up the expectation um this is this is what we want to do so how many beds do we have full do we what do we need to do as far as staffing what what help do you need there and you're not having to keep going back and and reiterating a lot of those things because you set those expectations up front so you as the operator you want to
00:06:13
have that vision communicate that vision set the expectation and then move forward um with it from there you might be handling legal issues as they arise you know working with insurance or making sure the proper insurance is in place uh if something comes up um where you know you don't want to deal with legal issues but then sometimes they come up and that's okay and you just gotta have those conversations with people um conversations with attorneys making sure that things are in place and you know
00:06:41
just everything is working the way that it needs to be you'll be taught getting all those contracts in place so we've talked about that a lot in past videos so i'll link up here some videos around contracts uh like medicaid contracts that that we've talked about and what that process is is like you know you're in charge of all that as the operator bookkeeping um is another one that you might not think about but you're going to need to be a bookkeeper or have somebody do the bookkeeping for you but that's
00:07:09
something you want to be aware of now it's important to note that all of these things that i've talked about they can be offloaded you know they could you could give them to your administrator um you can give it to another professional you know in the case of bookkeeping you could hire a bookkeeper to to do a lot of that work for you if it's something that you don't want to do or you don't know how to do it you can offload it to somebody else i i would suggest you know we talked
00:07:32
about this a lot in our last video uh don't overburden yourself don't overburden your administrator with too many tasks you don't want them to get burned out especially in a fault in a small facility and you don't want to pay for something that you don't have the money to support you know like let's use that bookkeeper as an example they're not going to be that expensive but if you don't have the money to do it then you've got to figure out how to do it yourself
00:07:55
you want to be prudent with your funds you want to be prudent with your time and you want to make sure that you are not pushing too much onto your administrator you don't want them to get burned out you just want to keep everybody happy so you as the operator are really striking that balance setting those expectations creating that culture from a high level and letting it trickle down that is your responsibility as an operator as an owner that's what you need to do so make sure that you're just
00:08:20
kind of keeping that in mind as you go and you're working on getting into your facility and what it's going to look like those are the things that you need to be aware of and how you're going to be successful in our next video we're going to be talking about how to find and hire a facility administrator that's another huge question i get from people where do i go to find an administrator let me give you a few strategies around what that process is like and how you can find some really good leads to help you
00:08:47
find an administrator for your facility now that you understand the difference between that facility administrator and and uh the operator and kind of what those differences are i'll help you give you some resources that are going to help you find that administrator to learn more about investing in assisted living just make sure you visit me on my website assistedlivinginvesting.net and have other content out there i'll be able to i'll be getting something out there to set up some consulting calls here in the
00:09:16
near future and would love to have conversations with you on on the website so please visit me there assistedlivinginvesting.net and then connect with me on all my other social media platforms and remember it doesn't take a lot just a little keep making that progress just a little bit a little bit at a time and you'll be successful thanks for watching and have a great day [Music]
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