Find Out the IDEAL Salary for Your Assisted Living Facility Administrator!

Transcript

00:00:00
Hey everybody. Uh, welcome to our lives today. Um, I'm Brandon Gustafson. I help beginners like you launch their assisted living business in the next 12 months. Excited to have you on our topic today. We're going to be talking about finding out what the ideal salary is for your assisted living administrator. Uh, so something that uh we had a comment on in our on on YouTube um a few weeks ago and so I wanted to make sure we were answering that so you understand exactly what how to figure this out uh and and

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make some some progress as you're trying to, you know, get things ready to go to to launch your launch your assisted living business and or if you already own the business so that you know what to expect when it comes to to paying people. Before we really dive into the topic, I want to remind you to go and grab the free business plan checklist to go go to assistedlivinginvesting.net/bp checklist. I've got it down right nope looked that way down there at the bottom of the screen. Um, and so make sure you

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go and grab that free resource uh to help you out in in writing in creating your business plan. Uh, it's one of the most important things that you're going to do if you're trying to get funding along your journey to to launching your assisted living business. So, with that said, let's go ahead and dive into our topic today. What is the ideal salary for your assisted living administrator? Um, and again, make sure you go grab that free business plan checklist, assisted livinginvesting.net/VP checklist. For

00:01:25
those of you that don't know me, my name is Brandon Gustafson. I own and operate two assisted living facilities. I've been doing this since 2020, and I do this out of state as well. I live in Utah and I operate in Colorado and in Idaho. So, uh, you can do this out of state if you are interested in doing that. I have secured over $1.5 million in SBA funding, uh, and understand that process and what it takes to do that. And I also have a masters in healthcare administration. I've worked in the

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healthcare industry, uh, for over a decade and have a lot of experience there and can share that with you. Um, and and how you get along with this. So, um, yeah, I wanted to get into this really specifically because wages are going to be the biggest, uh, expense that you have inside of your facility and your administrator is going to be the highest paid person. So, uh, you you want to really understand what this person is going to make and understand how you can um how how you can identify how much

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you're going to pay them. do the research for your specific area and make sure that you're not going to be um overpaying or underpaying them, that you're getting them a competitive salary so you know what to expect when you're doing your underwriting and uh just kind of know exactly what to expect as you kind of go through the entire process. So, let's talk about first number one the salary range. So salary range is um typically going to be if you you can do this research online, but

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between 50 and 150,000 like it is a huge uh a huge gap, right? That that's it's it's a big number right there. It's a $100,000 gap uh between it. What you're going to find uh when you do this uh especially if you do some research on places like um like salary.com or Indeed or something like that is you're going to get average salaries that are very specific to the high-end the the big box facilities um is what what people will call them. Um and typically um those facilities are going to pay more.

00:03:22
There's more residents. There's more staff to take care of. There's more families that you're dealing with. there's more responsibility um and and the impact of it will generate the owner more money and so you're going to pay somebody more for that. So when you look at salary ranges online you need to keep in mind that it is largely skewed towards that big box area. Those are the ones that an administrator is typically going to make a 100 plus thousand. So, very possible for an administrator, if

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you're an administrator trying to figure out what your your uh salary range is going to be, uh very possible to to get into that six figure range. Uh which is great. Um but for smaller residential facilities, and for those of you that are watching this, that's is largely who you are. Um those smaller residential facilities are typically going to be between like 50 and 80,000. Um that that's a little more typical. So you can see that range is 50 to 150, but the the the residential smaller residential,

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you're much closer to the the the smaller end of that that range being in that 50 to 80,000 rate. Um you also have to take into consideration that different states will have different ranges to deal with because of higher or lower cost of living. Um, and if it's a higher cost of living state, you're going to be higher on on those ranges as well. So, if you're in California, you're probably going to make somebody make more than somebody that's in Alabama. Uh, it's just more expensive to

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live in California than it is in Alabama. So, you want to to be looking at at the difference there. Where where does your state kind of fall into the continuum of of things here? How's that going to play out in in my wages? It wouldn't surprise me if you even saw um lower wages than the 50,000 in certain states just because of of where that's at. So, that's going to give you an idea of what the range is. So, you need to think to yourself, what kind of facility am I going to do? Where am I going to be

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at in this range? You want to do the research yourself. um cuz as much as I can tell you this is the range um this is a point in time and things can definitely change um over time and uh so you want to be aware and do your own research as as you get into it. Now let's talk about why that pay is going to differ. Why is there this low area that's 50,000 50 to 80,000 for a small residential facility and 100 plus thousand for a big box facility? And the reasons why you're going to see such a

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discrepancy in those is number one complexity. Uh bigger facilities um may end up having uh independent care and assisted living and memory care and nursing um all like in the same building. So there's it's there's more regulations that are involved when you start implementing other things uh and and serving multiple populations in inside of one building. Uh there's more paperwork as you have more residents. So you got to take care of of the paperwork for all of those residents and that can

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take a lot of time. Um you're going to have more residents, which means you're going to have more staff, which means you're going to have more problems. Um you're involving a lot more people when you have bigger facilities. And so when you're doing that and you're dealing with that many more personalities, the residents, the staff, the resident families, um that that come with that more problems. It's just inherent. It will happen just statistically it's going to happen. So you have to expect

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that. And when you're dealing with more, you're going to need to pay somebody more because otherwise they will leave. And they'll those big box people I I've talked to a lot of them. They actually like coming down to the smaller residential facilities because yeah, they're not getting paid quite as much, but man, there's a lot less headaches. It's just a lot easier to operate um and and run those businesses than it is a big box facility. And so that's something that that they will take into

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consideration. I I'm going to get paid less, but it's going be a whole lot easier um to to work with less staff and and less paperwork and than what I was dealing with at a big facility. Um with bigger facilities, you also have bigger budgets. So, there's more money available to pay. So, that's that's one. But also because there's bigger budgets and there's more people involved, those decisions that the the administrator is making uh that they're that they're working through and and

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trying to make for the business, they're more important financial decisions. They have they have a much bigger impact. So if uh you know if if there's there's just so much more that can go into that and and that can really impact the way that that the business is is functioning. Uh you see this this is why um big company CEOs make a whole lot more than your local nonprofit down the street or or a small business that uh has been in business for 10 10 years doing a little bit because the the scale

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of what's going on there. Um it's not quite as big. they're not going to impact quite as many people in those financial decisions. While important in the context of what they are doing is not that important compared to a big Fortune 100 company. Um, so you have to kind of take that into consideration. So that is why there's going to be a a difference. So for you of you that are doing this residential facility, I'm not telling you that what you're doing is not important and that the decisions you

00:08:47
make are not financially important because they are. like it has a huge impact on you and your well-being and your family and the facility, but uh com compared to to some big company, it it's it's on a much smaller scale. And so smaller residential facilities don't have the the capacity or the funds available to pay administrators large sums of money. And so that's what what you're going to see there. So this this benefits you um when when you're one of those small facilities. Now, let's talk about where

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you can hire these staff. So, um hiring staff is it can be difficult. It can be hard to find. When we first started out, um Facebook was actually great. I had had some really good stuff on side inside of the Facebook marketplace for posting jobs and and things like that. It was it was awesome. And they changed it um in the just in the past two or three years. And now it is like I don't like it. It's hard to find. There's a lot of rules and restrictions around what you can post and what you can ask

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people for and stuff like that. And so I don't use Facebook at all anymore. I I used to. It was how we primarily hired people in the past. We don't use it anymore. It's just a headache to use. So we use different job boards. Um I really like Indeed. Um that's where we've had a lot of success with with posting jobs and hiring people out of. Uh really easy uh tool to use. Um so Indeed is great. LinkedIn can be good. LinkedIn is probably going to be a little more specific to administrators. You're

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probably not going to use LinkedIn to hire your caregiving staff, but they will be on Indeed. Indeed can be a little bit of a catch-all. Um, and there's a lot of other options out there. Um, there are some industry specific job boards as well. So, MedBest and Argentum are are ones that you can look at. Um, what I have found you, we you've got those job boards, the industry specific job boards. Um, Indeed for smaller facilities is is probably the best spot for you to be if I'm being honest. I should look and see if I can

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find um some information on on that. If you're interested in learning more about Indeed, um, type in Indeed down below um because I I might be able to to I don't know, maybe get people a deal um on using Indeed or um potentially just like learning how to how to use it, how to post a job and things like that. Um, so if you're interested in that, type in Indeed down below. Um, another way that you can do this is just company career pages. So, put it on your website. Um, we have actually done this in the past

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with Facebook where we create a Facebook ad that pushes people that's for our job that pushes people to our website to apply. Now, our application process, I don't pay somebody to to handle all of it. So, it's it's very I don't it could be a lot better is what I'll say. Um there there are ways to do that, but there's software that that can help you out in in doing that uh and and building that out. If you are one single small assisted living facility, I don't think

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you should do it. Um I I I think it's probably too big of a hassle. But if you have a large facility or you have multiple facilities and you're hiring a lot of people, I think it's worth having a career site on your on your web page where you can point people to and they can apply and you can look at their applications. So, um, that's something I think is worth looking into. It's just, um, is it the right time for you? Do you want to spend the resources on it or not? Because realistically, um, you put

00:12:17
it on there, uh, unless you're pushing people to it with ads or something like that, uh, or you have this big presence where people know who you are, they're not going to find you. And so I you don't I I would just suggest that if you don't have the time or the resources to really build that out, it's probably not worth it. Um but once you get to a point where you're big enough and you have enough notoriety, at that point it probably makes sense to to put something on your website so you can accept

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applications. And the fourth one that I want to point out is networking. Um networking is key inside of assisted living just in general. It's how you're going to get residents uh in your facility. It's how you're going to uh get those referrals and things like that. But the same thing goes with uh getting people uh in for for your staff. So, this could be going to career fairs, going to like local high schools even that um to like CNA type classes or the community college and doing some

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networking and getting your name out there to those groups of people where you have professionals or people that want to get into the world of caregiving. um whether in some capacity and presenting you as an opportunity for them to to start working uh in in this field and getting experience. That's another really great way to do it. Uh something that we have had on our road map um in the past. We just haven't had the capacity to do it. But as we look to expand our operations is something that

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I would love to do. I love getting involved in those types of places and and building relationships. I've done a lot of that um in my professional career u with community development and and management and um internships and things like that and I it's a great a great way to get incredible talent in at at lower costs um that can help you out. Now for an administrator um that might not be the best for caregiving. I think it's a an excellent fit. Uh when it comes to administrative staff, your your facility

00:14:14
administrator cannot recommend Indeed highly enough. I think it's a great uh great tool for you to use and a lot of the type of people that you want to hire are going to be looking on Indeed. Um that's the reality of of this industry. If you are aware of other ones though, um type them in down below. I would love to hear what other um resources, what other platforms, job boards are you aware of that you've used in the past or that people are talking about? Um and and tell me. I'd love to check them out.

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Um, next thing is the information you need when you're hiring, when you are when you put that job uh position out there. Uh, what do you need to get from from the individual who's applying? Number one, you want to get a resume. Um, you you need to look at that. What's their their historic uh, you know, job performance been? Have they been sticking around at places for a long time? Have they been jumping from job to job? Like, what does that look like? Um, you want to make sure they have their

00:15:10
administrator license. You can hire somebody without an administrator license, but they should be working towards it. And you want to check with the state on how that's going to to play out for your facility. Um, so it's something that you need to be kind of careful with. I personally would suggest that you hire somebody that already has the administrator license. It's just a lot easier. It's so much more smooth to hire a person like that. Just it makes makes your life a lot easier. They can

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just jump in. you don't have to worry about trying to figure other extra things out because you're busy. Uh you already have enough headaches. You don't need to try to balance that and and figure it out. So, highly recommend getting somebody with an administrator license in place already and references. You want them to provide you with references and I highly encourage you to call those references. Um that's how you're going to to get to know them a little bit better. Their job, past job

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performance, uh what people like and don't like about them. Um, preferably those are not family members or friends. Um, if you're an administrator and you are watching this on what you should be doing, um, do not put your family and friends as references. Put professional contacts. This is why you never burn bridges. Um, you want to have good people that can give you references about the qual quality of person that you are, the quality of work that you do, and how reliable you are. Um, so um,

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if you get references, make sure you call them. If you don't have references, ask for them and and again, make sure you call them. It's going to be something that's going to benefit you quite a bit as you're trying to hire this position. Um, next I want to talk about questions to ask. And I think I'm going to I've done a video on this in the past where I kind of go through the process of what we do when we hire. I'm going to just focus on the questions to ask today because I've I've got a little

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bit of a hard stop here at the end. I want to make sure I've got some time for your questions at the end. Um but the questions that you should be asking are um so what are some of the difficult situations that um that people have been in? Um you know what are they what are they experiencing? What's uh what's going on? What's what's been hard for them? Um you know what what have they experienced as they uh as they're trying to you know just run the business? What difficult situations have they handled

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with family uh and with residents and with staff? like what's what's going on there and what's that like? Um, you want to understand how do they handle resident families. Uh, so there's there's three three groups of people that every administrator is going to to deal with and you as the owner operator are going to deal with this as well. There's the staff. Staffing is hard. It's really hard. There's the residents. Residents can be hard, but generally they're just like they're great. Like I

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love our residents. The third one is families. And families are really hard. Um, they have very strong opinions about the type of care that and rightfully so about the type of care that should be provided to their loved one. And if something doesn't feel right, they will let you know and they can get verbal about it and uh verbally excited about it is is a nice way to say it. And so you you're going to be dealing with it. So ask how do you handle resident families? How do you when you bring them

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in? um what's that process like when there's an issue? What's the process like? How do you handle those conversations? What do you do if something goes bad? Are how are you communi communicating that to the family? Um all of those things you want to understand how they interact with families is very very important. Um number three here is dealing with staff turnover. Staff turnover happens. It staffing is hard in assisted living. And so you have to be aware that there's going to be a lot of staff turnover. How

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comfortable are they hiring people? uh how comfortable are they posting a job and and using a tool whatever tool you want like is it Indeed or something else how used to those tools are they and how can they progress with it. So you want to ask them those things and another really important one is what are their feelings around covering extra shifts. So your administrator, they have to do the administrative work, but they are also kind of the person that ensures that all of the the shifts are filled

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that somebody's there. And if if a shift is not filled, they're the ones that are backing if back filling in and taking care of those uh taking care of those shifts. And so you want to make sure that they're okay with that. They they might not like it and that's totally fine. Totally fine if an administrator doesn't like it and that like very normal. but are they willing to cover those shifts and make sure that there is 100% coverage all the time in the facility uh with your residents. Um and

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so you want to make sure that that's that that you're getting a a good satisfactory answer uh to that question as well when you're when you're hiring people. So those are the types of things that that I would suggest that you ask. uh when we when I go through this process um of when I go through this process of of hiring staff I because it's my dad and I generally what will happen is I I create the job board uh the job position I receive the application I look at the resume if it's

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a good fit I do a phone call with them just me and them and and ask them maybe one or two of these questions get a feel for them what their goals are uh give them a little background on us and then if I feel good about that we move them to a second interview where it's my dad and I and We pepper them with a bunch of questions uh including these plus some other ones and we really want to see how they handle these different types of situations and then if we like them that's when we're going to move forward

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in hiring with them. Now if you need some help and some guidance as you're trying to to launch your assisted living business want to invite you to to join ALI Basics. Um, ALI basics uh is our is a community that is designed to help you, you know, get an extra level of support as you're trying to launch your assisted living business. So, in here we have monthly member onlyly Q&A calls. You get priority answers on these lives that we do. Uh, some resources, webinar recordings, library of Q&A recordings,

00:21:06
and an active community with some weekly tips and tricks tips and tricks. Um, some go get your questions answered by me when you have them. Get timely answers to your questions. I'm in there every day and do some peer-to-p peer networking. So, go check out assistedl livinginvesting.net/basics uh to to do that. And so, you have questions like what we're talking about here uh with um you know around hiring and things like that rather than waiting for me to get to it on a YouTube video in in two three four months. Um you can

00:21:36
get direct access to me and get answers to your questions right in the moment when you need it so you can continue making progress. Would love to see you inside of ALI basics. It's it's a fun community and and fun to to help people along their path and and and launching their assisted living business. So, with that, I wanted to open it up for questions. I know we've got a few people um here with us on the live. Um I do have a uh thing that I've got to hop off on to here in just a few minutes. But,

00:22:03
um while you're typing in your questions, I want to remind you to um like the video, subscribe, ring the bell, get notified every time we put out content like this. Uh we do our lives on Tuesdays, put out content on Thursdays. I just did recorded a bunch of con uh bunch of videos um that are going to be coming up today. So my voice is a little bit shot. Uh the these recording days are exhausting for me, but uh I I love doing it. So type in your questions down below. Um and uh we'll get to those.

00:22:33
There was a question inside of our ALI Basics community that I wanted to hit on. Um it was around um attorneys. So I've I've talked about this previously. Um, but when it comes to setting up an entity correctly, the question um was um any referrals for an attorney and would that be a business attorney or something else? And the answer to that is um I would highly suggest that you do work with an attorney when you're setting up your entities. You can do it on Legal Zoom. Um, absolutely certainly possible,

00:23:03
but there's a lot of complexity that goes into assisted living and the way you want to set up your businesses with the real estate and and the business itself and protection and and and all the things that go into that. And I'm not an attorney, so don't take anything that I say as advice other than to tell you to go and talk to an attorney. Um, and yeah, uh, and to answer the question that was in our community there, uh, there are two attorneys that I'm aware of that I think are really good. One is

00:23:31
the one that I work with. They're KKOS. Um, their main office is here in Utah, but they have offices in Idaho, Arizona, and I think at least one other state. Um, but they work nationwide. And, uh, you can look them up online. Mark Kohler, Mark J. Polar is one of the lead attorneys. He does a lot of stuff. I was actually just listening to a podcast on on him earlier about just how to set up entities and understand how that works. Um, I've been I've submitted questions on his podcast in the past as well, uh,

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and have gotten answers that are specific to assisted living. You're probably going to have a hard time finding them because it's been a few years. Um, but he knows what he's talking about and they've helped us out. So, KKOS is one. The other one is Anderson Associates. Um Clint Coons is kind of the main guy there that he talks about assisted living. He has videos on YouTube that are about that. And so I would highly encourage you if you're in that kind of phase of of trying to

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figure out um which how you're going to set things up from a legal standpoint, I would check them out um and they can help you out. So Clint Coons at Anderson Associates um is is who you want to be looking at there. They, I believe, are based in Tennessee, I want to say. Um, somewhere over on the east coastish area, um, in the southwest, I believe. So, that's or southeast. Um, got my directions all mixed up, but that's that's another one that I would tell you to to go in and and look at as as you're

00:25:00
trying to figure out how you should be setting up that entity um, as as you move things along. So, um, okay. So with that, we got a a thing in here, midlife escapade. Um, let's see. Can I show you? Um, right there. So you have already fil filed your biz on legal zoom under LLC. Should I have re should I have structured the business differently? So I'm not an attorney. So that's number one. Um, number So yes, this is not legal advice. Um, what I would say is I think it's good to have a conversation

00:25:41
with an attorney. Having it set up on Legal Zoom, I think is fine, but um, you you need to when you have an entity um, to make sure you don't that you keep the corporate veil in place. You need to make sure that you are maintaining business minutes like meeting annual minutes and and doing everything and treating things correctly. I also suggest that you work with an accountant so you keep finances in the right place and everything is kind of set up the way that it needs to to be set up. And if

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you're working and you have the real estate and you have the business, I personally have entities that one is holds the real estate, one holds the the business entity. So that they are completely separate entities. There's some tax benefits to that, but more so it's liability protection. Um, so you can set it up on Legal Zoom, but you have to also take into consideration there's there's a lot more that goes into that. Um, when you're working with a system of there's it's it's complex.

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you're working with a lot of different people and you're caring for people and so that can lead to we live in a latigious society and so that can lead to potential for um I don't know people to sue you and so you want to make sure that you do everything that you can um to protect yourself and protect your assets. So you set it up on Legal Zoom that's great. I think it's probably worth having a conversation with an attorney to make sure it is set up correctly and that you know um that you

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have that you are just confident that that it's set up correctly. Doesn't mean you're going to have to change anything. It just gives you that level of extra level of confidence is is what I would say as you're trying to do it. So yeah, you're welcome. Um okay, I've got to hop off. Um I want to thank everybody for being here with me. Um and hope this information was helpful to you. Um, thanks for watching. Go grab the free business plan checklist at assisted living.net/bp checklist and go check out

00:27:43
um, ALI basics as well. Would love to help you out and and get make sure you get the answers to your questions as you're going through um, as you're going through things. Does residential assisted living sound interesting to you, but you don't know how to get started? At assisted living investing, I'm here to help beginners like you launch their assisted living business in the next 12 months. I love helping and coaching people. It's one of my favorite things to do. Uh, go check out

00:28:03
assistedlivinginvesting.net. it and see what I can do to help you out. And remember, it doesn't take a lot, just a little bit. Just keep going step by step by step. And I promise you, if you do and you're consistent and persistent, you're going to be successful. Thanks for watching and have a great day.