Bryan McCaleb is the President of Sagora Senior Living, an organization focused on serving residents, meeting their needs, and exceeding their wants with exceptional residential alternatives for seniors. Through the Changemakers series, McCaleb shares insight into his organization’s team member-focused mantra and how it has enabled Sagora to scale in a competitive senior housing landscape. He also discusses the success Sagora has had with promoting internal team members and putting the right people in place to optimize the efficiency of each team.
As you think back on your career in senior living, what changes have you driven that you’re especially proud of?
Our company has always made a difference through creating. The term “Resident first” may be a cliché in our industry, but it is not a cliché at Sagora, where we have a motto “Resident First, Team focused and Quality centered.” We’ve worked hard over the last six years to create a team member-first environment. If the team member is our focus, they can take the care focus from us. From my seat, it really makes a difference. When they’re happy to be there and they feel appreciated, every aspect of their service is better.
We’re working harder than ever to help team members feel important and valued in our communities, and giving them time with residents is one of the best ways to accomplish that. The residents show appreciation to them as we do, but resident interaction is critical right now.
The first thing we did was hire an associate engagement specialist for the company. Her focus is to help us find opportunities in our operation and our culture. Together, we put a program in place that allowed us to develop fun community visits for the corporate team.
I’m extremely proud of the number of people we’ve been able to promote since we started this program. One of the things we are looking to do in the coming year is create a leadership training role to help members grow within our company or transfer to other communities whenever they need something.
How do you think you’ve changed as a leader over the course of your career?
I started in this company as a sales director. From sales director, to executive director, to CEO and president, a lot has happened in between. My leadership has changed significantly with each lesson and experience during that time.
Do you think of yourself as a Changemaker? And are you excited about change even when there is a lot at stake?
That’s not a term I ever thought about until today, but change has never scared me. It never has, because change is ripe with opportunity. When you’re in management and operations in any industry, there are problems daily. If there weren’t new challenges every day, then management wouldn’t be necessary. Our job as leaders is to make sure that we’re moving the company forward at all times.
Do you feel the industry is changing fast enough to keep up with the times?
I think there are a lot of new ideas to meet resident needs. The problem I think we’re seeing is the ideas are coming at a price point that a lot of people won’t be able to afford. We’ve developed newer communities and acquired older communities, and acquisitions offer sustainable programs for generations to come.
Although it may not be a community that everyone wants to move into, it still provides an affordable option for a lot of people. Does it hit every bit of affordability? No, it doesn’t. It hits a greater affordability than anything we can put on the ground starting with construction today. We are trying to open the marketplace to a broader group of people that we can serve.
Talk about a time when you tried to execute a change and things didn’t go according to plan. How did you pivot and what did you learn as a leader?
Change is inevitable, so having the right people working together toward the same goal makes that change more manageable. I’ve made some of the worst mistakes by putting the wrong people in the wrong place. The change was going to happen either way. I selected candidates I was comfortable with, or that I already had on my team instead of finding the right person for that niche.
How do you think about timing so that you can innovate without getting too far ahead of the market that a new idea doesn’t work?
Challenges occur more in new developments than in acquisitions. You have to stay ahead of the game by asking the right questions and understanding the modern consumer. You stay ahead by making sure you have different options and opportunities. If you wait for the resident to define their needs and desires, you might miss something they didn’t know they needed in the first place
Changemakers tend to be risk-takers, do you agree with that statement? How would you describe your own appetite for risk?
If you’re going to make a change, you’re going to take a risk because it’s out of the norm. It’s risky going from 11 communities to 57. Having the mindset to strategically grow with a foundation that doesn’t change has been key to my success. I took all of the risk, but in going from 120 employees to 3,700, there’s a lot of faith that people place in you to keep moving forward.
There’s risk in the financing, there’s risk in developments, there’s risk in everything. If it is something that I don’t believe in, it’s even riskier. I believe in what we do. It takes a lot of the risk value out for me because I believe we’re good at what we’re doing and have room to improve. I’ve been asked about how large our organization plans to get, but there are plenty of examples of companies that have potentially grown too fast. The answer I always give is that there will be a time when growth starts to compromise what we do. When that happens, we’ll know it’s time to stop. I don’t know if that’s 58 or 78 communities, but as long as our focus stays where it should be, growth is going to continue to happen.
What are some pieces of advice for managing resistance to change in an organization?
For us, it’s more people-oriented. Hiring vice presidents to help you grow won’t help you grow. Can it? Sure, it can be a part of the formula, but the formula should be a clear understanding of who you are, what you want to accomplish and how to get the people you need to realize that vision. At our size, some companies have twice as many vice presidents and corporate team members as us.
Maybe we’re doing it wrong, empowering the right people to do their job and lead their department is the foundation on which we’ve built our organization. A foundation is more than one person. It’s more than two or three people. It’s a group of people who know, “We’re going to start here, but we’re going to end up there.”
What do you see as the role of technology in making change, and are there any particular technologies you’re most excited about?
I think that’s an interesting question because pre-COVID, there were already some technology trends around resident engagement. We had a couple in place, but COVID forced the use of a lot of platforms providing digital communication and digital accountability from an outward place.
Residents, families, team members and entire companies had to get really comfortable with technology overnight, and everybody did over time. The acceptance level is going to create an opportunity to move forward faster.
The use of FaceTime in a lot of different ways, from family visits to emergency calls, has increased throughout our company, for sure. The more conveniences we bring — and most of the conveniences are starting to come through the digital world — the more we can appeal to residents and their families.e.
How can the senior living industry drive more diversity, equity and inclusion?
We have an incredibly diverse workforce. Everyone can be better at this. As a company, we are focused on making sure our corporate teams and staff reflect that. From our corporate diversity committee to the multitude of other measures, we’re not just leading a single workforce, we’re taking the whole workforce with us.