Why Promoting from Within Boosts Success in Assisted Living
Feb 04, 2025
Running a successful assisted living facility isn’t just about providing excellent care to residents—it’s also about building a strong, motivated team. One of the best ways to do this is by promoting from within.
When you give your current employees opportunities to grow, it boosts morale, strengthens your workplace culture, and even improves your bottom line. Let’s dive into why internal promotions are so impactful and how you can make them a key part of your staffing strategy.
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Why Promoting from Within Matters
1. Retaining Your Best Talent
Staff turnover is a big challenge in assisted living, with 96% of facilities reporting difficulties finding and keeping employees. When your team sees real opportunities for growth, they’re more likely to stick around. This loyalty saves you the time and money spent on hiring and training new staff.
2. Enhancing Job Satisfaction
Taking on new responsibilities can energize employees and make them feel more connected to your facility. Moving a caregiver into roles like house manager or activities director helps them grow professionally and stay engaged.
Even a small raise—like 50 cents to a dollar per hour—can motivate team members without stretching your budget. Plus, employees who feel valued are more likely to go above and beyond in their roles.
3. Strengthening Your Facility’s Culture
At BeeWell Assisted Living, our motto is “Together, we’re home.” This isn’t just a slogan; it’s a mindset. By promoting from within, we ensure that our leadership team reflects our core values, creating a family-like atmosphere for residents and staff alike.
When employees see their coworkers advance, it reinforces the idea that hard work and dedication are recognized and rewarded. This creates a positive, motivated workplace culture.
How to Identify Staff Ready for Promotion
Promotions should be intentional, not random. Here’s how to identify the right candidates:
Regular Check-Ins
Start with weekly check-ins between you and your administrator. These conversations can highlight team members who show readiness for more responsibility.
Evaluate Skills and Potential
Look for employees who excel in their current roles and show leadership potential. For example, a caregiver transitioning to a house manager role should not only provide excellent care but also have strong organizational skills.
Provide Training Opportunities
Prepare your team for growth by offering training. Whether it’s leadership workshops or job-shadowing opportunities, giving your employees the tools they need will ensure a smooth transition into their new roles.
The Cost-Effectiveness of Internal Promotions
Hiring new employees is expensive. You have to post job ads, spend time interviewing candidates, and train new hires—costs that add up quickly.
On the other hand, promoting from within saves money and time. These employees already know your systems and values, so the learning curve is shorter. Plus, internal promotions reinforce your company culture, creating a more cohesive team.
Preparing Your Business for Growth
If you’re planning to grow your assisted living facility, promoting from within is one of the smartest moves you can make.
Building a Leadership Pipeline
As you expand—whether opening a new facility or increasing capacity—you’ll need strong leaders. Promoting trusted employees creates a solid foundation for growth, ensuring that your standards and culture are maintained.
Scaling with Confidence
Experienced team members who’ve worked their way up understand the nuances of your business. They can step into leadership roles with confidence, helping you scale successfully.
Final Thoughts
Promoting from within is a win-win for your assisted living facility. It builds loyalty, boosts job satisfaction, and saves money while creating a team that’s aligned with your vision and values.
Whether you’re just starting or planning to expand, investing in your current team is one of the best ways to ensure long-term success. When your employees grow, so does your business—and that benefits everyone, especially your residents.
Thinking of starting your own assisted living business? Download our free Business Plan Checklist to ensure your business plan covers all the critical areas needed for success. This comprehensive guide will help you navigate the complexities of starting and growing your assisted living business.
Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00
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 [Music] in our last video we talked about how do i set up how did i set up my organizational chart and how do i run things and so if you want to know how i've done things go ahead and watch that video and let me know your feedback how do you how do you do it for your facility let
00:00:42
me know today we're going to be talking a little bit about promoting staff within your organizational structure in assisted living and we've talked a little bit about that in our past videos the last last few videos but i really wanted to get into kind of what that process looks like and why you do it and some of those reasons so the reason number one um is to retain staff the big question that i get is how do i retain staff you know that's it's really hard and in this world where
00:01:12
finding staff is extremely difficult i'm recording this near the end of 2021 and retaining staff is key we're finding it extremely difficult um to to just find and hire staff i saw a report actually through the idaho um chapter 4 hca which is the listed living optional organization that said that i think it was 96 of all assisted living facilities right now are short staffed so it's not a problem that just i'm dealing with it's something that every single person is dealing with and that's going to bounce
00:01:45
back it's going to be fine but it's a difficult thing that we're dealing with right now it's something to be aware of so retaining staff is it's it's key um if you're going to be successful you need to retain your staff and in order to do that you want to build a structure where you can promote from within and if you do that it's just going to be extremely helpful um having some of these positions you know like a house manager that we talked about activities director
00:02:10
where you can give your staff more responsibilities it's going to help incentivize them to be more active in the business and also have a little more satisfaction in their work and you know as they continue to gain more responsibility um it's going to allow you to pay them a little bit more um really and i know people look at this and they're like oh my gosh i have to pay them a little bit more it's not a lot when you do the math on how much extra you're paying them it's it's
00:02:35
really not going to hurt your bottom line um it's going to be fine so don't get too caught up you're not giving them you know a double hourly rate it's more of a you know here's an extra 50 cents an hour here's an extra dollar an hour or something like that it's kind of how you're going to structure that and you want to take that into consideration in your own structure in your own business but you're not doubling their hourly rate you're giving them incremental increases
00:03:01
and it's not going to kill your bottom line so giving the giving your staff regular incremental increases is just going to help with that retention and it's going to help out with their job satisfaction as well so how do you know when to promote um this is a topic that uh we often bring up in our weekly calls with our facility administrator which i'll link in in a video above on how we have those conversations and what those conversations are like in our meetings with our facility administrator
00:03:35
but we talk about our different staff members there and get a feel from our administrators how our staff how our caregivers are performing we ask questions like how do you think they would do with more responsibility or do you think that they would do as an administrator in the future um this is so we can start training them up as we look to scale our business and things like that asking can they handle the extra workload that is going to be required of them as a house manager or an activities coordinator um and what do we you know
00:04:07
are they able to hand that handle that and are they going to be able to still do their duties as a caregiver and helping out with the residents that they need to do at the facility we really don't want to throw too much on their plate but we're happy to give people the opportunity to grow within the business with us we want to retain staff we want to build a family um with our staff that's this is how we we want to do things our our facilities be well assisted living our slogan is together we're home and we
00:04:35
mean that for our residents and for our staff we really want it to be a big family and try to develop that relationship there is is the goal that we have with our facilities the next one is scaling your business i've talked about this a few times already but one big reason that you would want to promote from within it's important for you if you're trying to scale your business if you want to add another facility or you want um to retain your administrator and and give that person more responsibility being
00:05:06
able to scale the business um and have more facilities is going to be important and then you want to train up the staff so you have good staff that kind of know the culture of your business and things like that it's just it makes sense so and it's far easier to retain your staff and promote them than it is to try to find and hire new staff it it's also far less expensive like it's easier and it's less expensive to keep them in place i mean we use ads on indeed and things like that when we're trying to find new
00:05:35
new staff and that costs money and then when we bring them in we've got to train them and maybe they need to get their q map or um they need to get you know like a food handlers or or something like that depending on what the state requirements are for your caregivers you might have to pay for some of those training and some of that is you know just like you want to do that as as an owner as a business owner and operator and so you kind of swallow the pill and and do those things and so it costs some money to to bring in new
00:06:03
staff and so the more that you're able to retain people and train them up the better off you're going to be now if you're also planning to add facilities in the future or get a larger facility you'll want to spend more time investing in the training of your employees so that you can have people who are already familiar with how you work so you can maintain the culture that you're trying to build which we've also talked about in a previous video and you want to try to do that all of
00:06:27
your facilities and how you're going to build that culture and why it's important to have that culture in place in our next video we're gonna start getting into um you know business banking account and financing um i think that's another big question that people have uh as i've talked to people is how do i do this and and banking and financing and all that it can be scary i get it but it's really not that complicated so we're going to start getting into that a little bit help you
00:06:52
understand the process kind of walk you through how to have conversations with banks and how to set up your financing which tools you can use and different things like that so we'll get into that in in our next video and and remember if you want to learn more about investing in assisted living make sure you visit me on assistedlivinginvesting.net for other content and setting up consulting calls with me and also please follow me on all my other social media platforms we'd love to have conversations with you over there and
00:07:19
remember it doesn't take a lot just a little bit just keep making progress step by step by step if you keep making that progress you will be successful [Music]
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