Operate Your Assisted Living Facility Remotely | Expert Tips
Jan 08, 2025
Running an assisted living facility remotely may seem like a big challenge, but with the right systems, a great team, and strong communication, it’s not just doable—it’s efficient! Whether your facility is across town or several states away, you can ensure everything runs smoothly while maintaining excellent care for your residents.
In this blog, I’ll share the strategies I use to successfully manage two out-of-state assisted living facilities. With one facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and another in Nampa, Idaho—both 6 to 12 hours away from my home in Utah—I’ve developed a plan that keeps things on track. Here’s how I make it work, and how you can too!
Check out the video, too:
1. Hire an Outstanding Administrator
Your administrator is the backbone of your facility. They manage the day-to-day operations, so hiring the right person is critical when running things remotely.
At my Colorado Springs facility, I inherited an amazing administrator, Kayla, during the purchase process. I interviewed her before taking ownership and knew immediately she was a great fit. Her commitment and leadership make my job much easier.
For my Nampa facility, I found Bri through the Healthcare Share Idaho Facebook page. After interviewing several candidates, Bri stood out as the best choice. Her ability to handle challenges and make sound decisions ensures the facility runs smoothly—even when I’m not there.
Tip: Don’t rush the hiring process. Take the time to find an administrator who shares your values and has strong leadership skills.
2. Establish Regular Communication
Weekly check-ins are the cornerstone of remote management. I use Google Meet for video calls with my administrators, but Zoom or Skype work just as well. These meetings keep us aligned on important topics like staffing, resident care, and facility needs.
Clear communication reassures my admins that I’m here to support them. I also let them know they can reach out anytime via text or phone for urgent issues. This open-door policy creates trust and ensures small problems don’t become big ones.
3. Create a Clear Meeting Agenda
Weekly meetings are most effective when they’re structured. I use a consistent agenda to cover key areas like:
- Staffing updates.
- Resident concerns.
- Maintenance needs.
- Upcoming events or regulatory changes.
Having a set agenda helps us stay organized and ensures nothing important gets overlooked. Plus, it creates space for tracking long-term projects, like licensing updates or building upgrades.
4. Conduct Regular Site Visits
While remote management is effective, nothing replaces an in-person visit. I aim to visit each facility every other month to check in with staff, interact with residents, and assess the property’s condition.
These visits help me build relationships with the team and stay connected to the day-to-day operations. When staff feel comfortable approaching me directly, it fosters a positive work environment.
Sometimes, I combine business with personal time by turning these trips into mini family getaways. Other times, I visit with my dad, who’s part of our ownership team. Working together on-site helps us tackle operational challenges as a team.
5. Balance Oversight and Trust
One unexpected benefit of remote management is that it forces me to avoid micromanaging. Because I’m not on-site daily, I trust my administrators to handle the details.
This approach gives them the freedom to lead effectively while allowing me to focus on the big picture—like planning for growth and improving care standards. The key is finding a balance between staying informed and giving your team the autonomy they need to succeed.
Final Thoughts
Running an assisted living facility remotely may seem daunting, but with the right people and processes, it’s absolutely possible. By hiring skilled administrators, communicating clearly, and trusting your team, you can manage your facility effectively—even from miles away.
If you’re already in the assisted living industry or considering starting a facility, focus on building a strong team and implementing reliable systems. Success lies in empowering your staff to handle day-to-day operations while you guide the overall vision.
With these strategies, you can confidently operate your assisted living facility remotely—and ensure it thrives no matter where you are!
If you’re ready to take the next step, download our Business Plan Checklist to ensure you have everything you need to write a solid business plan.
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] guys it's brandon gustafson thanks for joining me again on assisted living investing i'm happy to have you back on the channel and today we're going to talk a little bit about how i operate things remotely i mentioned in the last video that i have facilities out of state that i live in utah i have a facility in colorado springs colorado hence the hat and i have another facility in nampa idaho so those are both six to 12 hours away from me driving i can fly there a little bit more quickly
00:00:44
but i wanted to give you an overview of what it's like to operate a facility remotely say is the biggest key to operating an assisted living facility remotely is having an excellent administrator at your facility our colorado springs facility we have uh just an awesome administrator her name is kayla she actually worked for the facility uh for the previous owners at this at our facility uh for several years actually and as we went through the acquisition process we were able to interview her have conversations with
00:01:13
her and we really liked talking to her we really liked what she had to bring to the facility and we wanted to keep her and so that was part of actually the negotiation process and kind of a part of the our due diligence and making sure that we had somebody that that we were comfortable with that was going to run the facility in idaho we found an awesome administrator it was not somebody that came with the facility but we found a great facebook group in idaho it's called healthcare share idaho
00:01:40
so shout out to to that facebook group that facebook group was able to introduce us to several uh potential administrators of our facility and i went through an interview process with several of them and we found one and she just does an awesome job as well she just knocks it out of the park i'm just amazed every time i get to talk to her her name is bree and brie and kayla in in our different facilities just do such an awesome job of administering the facility taking care of all the issues that
00:02:08
allows us to operate things remotely and be able to function the way that we do and without them we wouldn't be able to operate and they just do a fantastic job so that is the biggest key find an awesome administrator that's going to work for your facility that that knows the rules and the regulations knows how to set up policies and procedures knows how to interact with families and and can just take care of everything for you so that you are able to operate and let your facility function the way that it needs
00:02:38
to that's something that people ask me all the time how do you operate a facility remotely that's probably the biggest question that i get and the key is find an awesome administrator that that's really the key so usually after i i get that question and i answer find an awesome administrator the next question is well how do you how do you interact with that administrator what's what's that like what's that process like and i'm going to kind of give you a rundown of of what it looks like and
00:03:05
and how we have those interactions with our with our facility administrators so we do a weekly check-in with our administrators we do that virtually we do it through a google meet what we use for for all of our stuff you could use zoom you could there's so many different softwares out there for doing a video call but we we use google me and then i make sure that i make myself available and have set up an expectation with our administrators that they answer questions that i have for them relatively quickly
00:03:33
so we have that weekly check-in sometimes we do that bi-weekly just kind of depending on on how things are going at the facilities and just kind of have text conversations email conversations as one-off things come up it's very common that i'll get a get a text from one of my administrators saying hey do you have time for a quick call we'll jump on the phone for 10 15 minutes and take care of some kind of an issue that has come up and we're able to resolve those fairly quick so i would
00:04:00
say that's the the biggest thing weekly check-ins make sure that i'm available to to answer questions that come up and then setting an expectation that they be available as well to to answer questions that i have and to address issues as they come up and those are the three big key key items that i've found to being successful just having open communication making sure there's an expectation there and and having those regular touch points together the the next big question for you is is
00:04:29
going to be what do we cover in our meetings right i think that's probably the the big thing what what is it that you are talking about in your meetings and i'll put uh i'll put a template uh down below so that you can see that and and get an idea of what types of conversations we have in our meetings just as a resource for you and i'll kind of go through that here in just a second but the big things that we're talking about are staffing issues resident issues facility like physical
00:04:55
facility issues and then any other things that have come up um we've been dealing a lot with like medicaid items recently so that's a has been a standing agenda item for us uh that we get through things that come up and and then i kind of have a parking lot where things that we're kind of talking about kind of working on those things get put in the parking lot and from there we're able to just kind of work and further expand on on we're able to kind of work through and expand on on the different items that
00:05:25
come up and address those issues and work through them so those are kind of the main areas of our agenda and the types of things that we are covering on a weekly basis and making sure that us as an ownership group are aware of the things that are going on and that we're able to make sure that our administrators have everything that they need to function and be successful administrators the other big thing that we do is we we go and do site visits at our facilities so like i mentioned there about a six to 12 hour drive depending
00:05:53
on which facility we're going to um so it's it's um it's something that we plan i've done trips where it's just my my dad and i going as an ownership group where we go and have conversations with people and take care of things and it's more of a real business trip uh we get there and we just work on things and we've done things where we get to go and do it as a family where we can go and take a little bit of a vacation and but also get some work done that part is is
00:06:19
really fun that part's exciting that we get to be able to take advantage of those types of things what i plan on doing is uh having a visit to one of my facilities every other month so i'm hitting a facility six months out of the year and i'm going to each of the facilities about three times in a year three to four times is kind of what we want to do is get there have physical presence the facilities and so that our staff our administrator they know who we are there's there's some face time our residents
00:06:46
kind of know who we are so that in the event that something comes up they're familiar with us they're comfortable talking to us and we can resolve issues a little bit more easily that way and it keeps us a little more familiar with what's going on in the facility uh what types like the physical facility what's going on there what issues we might need to address and uh how we can get those types of things fixed i'd actually say that operating things remotely is probably helpful to me uh i'm not a
00:07:14
micromanager per se but i i do feel like if it was just down the street i could get there in 20 minutes i would probably be all over it and wanting to be there and trying to control it a little too much just because it's it's so new to me it's exciting i love working on it and i think i would probably be a little overbearing to our facility administrators so being able to be a little bit you know step back from from the facility from the day-to-day everything that's going on gives me a good perspective on how to
00:07:44
address some of those issues and help things as they come up and help our administrators address those things from a from a perspective where where i feel like i should be as an administrator a little bit higher up a little bit more stepped back and out of the weeds of those types of conversations things that just happen on a on a daily basis at a facility right so this is the tutorial of the agenda that i wanted to just share with you again i'll make sure i have this as a link down below so you can go ahead and look at it
00:08:13
i'm going to go through this agenda template for you this is we use for our meetings with our administrator and the types of things that we go through as we're having our our weekly meetings our weekly check-in i just made this this is just a version that i have i kind of created this as a template for me and it allows me to go in and make it but it also you know it's kind of personalized so it has our facility name there be well assisted living has our color scheme and things like that which is kind of fun and
00:08:41
you can go ahead and make changes to that relatively easy if you want comment down below and i can do a video on how to go in and customize like a google doc or and help you kind of build something like that but uh i'm just gonna go through this at a high level today first thing is you know this is our the name of the facility you could just you know type that in and call it whatever you need it to be this is the type of meeting that we're doing so uh right here you're seeing that it's a google meet
00:09:11
like that and for this one you can see this is a this is a google meet if we're doing something in person i'd put in you know where we're meeting at which facility which location on site kind of a thing i put the date in here i put the time in here so i can put those types of things on there so you can see you know when it is and then you can reference it and make it work for you i put in here a list of the attendees so in here i just did me you us just so that i can see who's on there
00:09:39
and then if somebody ends up not being on there i'll i'll generally go ahead and cross them out so if i you can just like put a strike through on the on the name of the person that's not there so how i handle it when people aren't there i strike them out so i can keep them on the agenda because typically we have the same people in there and i want to know if they were there or not you could also just delete them whatever works for you is what you can do there getting into the meat of the agenda
00:10:03
what i do here is i have the person so you know me or you whoever's going to be talking whoever's going to be going over that piece of the agenda they're assigned to that thing then i have just a quick call to order these are discussion topics so call to order uh if there are any special topics i'm listing it out there giving some contextual notes any staffing updates or issues any resident updates or issues any facility needs physical facility needs and then as i we're talking about things
00:10:38
um i or my dad we'll go in here and we'll start typing in the notes i usually in this notes section is where i'll kind of have a little bit more of a set agenda i'll do a like a legit line item that says we're going to talk about this particular staff member we're trying to hire people so give me an update on that and then my bullet points are the notes of what happens you can organize it however you want that's kind of how i organize it but it's worked for us and then down
00:11:07
here in the parking lot i've got things like you know if we're planning a site visit and it's something that i want to make sure i have notes in or i'm just having like a personal session with me um and i'm just typing up some notes about things that i need to to put on our site visit agenda or things that i want to make sure i cover while i'm doing the site visit i'm putting it in there it might be something that we're having a conversation with the administrator
00:11:30
about things that that i need to be aware of when i come to the site visit i'm putting those things in the parking lot just as we're having conversations and then you know website is another thing that we're we're working on building our website you can go go look at it bewellassistedliving.com um and it's still a little bit of a work in progress but i'd love some feedback on that so go ahead and check that out uh but we'll i'll take notes on there you know who's
00:11:53
working on the website what are we doing on that what needs do i have and the parking lot is really just kind of there to allow us to have a conversation and build a few more things in there i'm gonna make a copy of this and give it to you guys as a resource you can go ahead and download it make a copy for yourself and and you can work through it that way it's just an awesome resource a great way for you to have those conversations and make sure that you're operating your facility the way it needs to be operated
00:12:19
so make sure you grab that and uh yeah thanks so i hope that tutorial um is is helpful to you i i'm gonna put that again like i mentioned down as a resource here um below so you can go and download it yourself it's just a google doc so you'll be able to get in there make a copy of it and use the template for yourself you and your team can can have something to build off of and work with and and run your facility operate your facility the way that you would like to just a reminder make sure you like
00:12:50
comment and subscribe to my videos let me know what you want to see so that i can make content that works for you that is answering questions that you have i want to have some really good interaction here and i'm excited to see what types of questions you come up with so that i can help you out and be a good resource for you as as you go down your journey to invest in assisted living thanks for watching assisted living investing i'm excited to continue our relationship again make sure you like comment and subscribe
00:13:18
and i'll see you next time [Music]
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