Integral Senior Living CEO: We’re Using Game-Changing Business Intelligence, Workforce Efforts Paying Off

Integral Senior Living (ISL) has grown and evolved throughout the pandemic — and CEO Collette Gray said that is in part due to the company’s business intelligence platform.

The Carslbad, California-based operator kicked its business intelligence operations into high gear during the pandemic, and today it gives the company’s leaders insight into metrics such as length of stay, vaccination status or usage of agency labor.

Implementing it has given the Integral’s leaders much better visibility into the inner-workings of the company’s 113 communities. In fact, it is the operator’s “number-one” technology, according to Gray.

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“There’s so much data available, and it allows us to understand the company as a whole, who we are serving and how we’re serving them,” Gray said during a recent appearance on SHN+ TALKS. “Truly, our business intelligence has been a game-changer.”

The company is also adding a “robust” referral program for its associates by which they can recommend their friends for a job.

“It’s much less expensive to pay a referral,” Gray said. “And associate referrals, I will pay those all day long, because those are associates that are going to want to stay.”

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Integral is putting those functions to use as the company grows. The company recently opened a senior living community tied to the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma; and is planning to open a handful of other new developments this year.

We are pleased to share the recording and this transcript of the SHN+ TALKS conversation with SHN+ members. Read on to learn about:

  • How Integral is using its business intelligence and what impact it has had on operations
  • What the industry can do to expand the senior living labor pool
  • Integral’s growth plans and what Gray sees on the horizon for 2022

Tim Regan: I’m really glad to be talking to Collette because we’re talking during a time of growth and evolution for the company. I believe you guys have around 100 communities today. Without further ado, Collette, let’s just help set the stage for our conversation. Give me the state of play for Integral Senior Living right now. How are things going and what are you focused on?

Collette Gray: It is a pleasure to be here to talk about our industry and where ISL and how Solstice Senior Living has been over the past 17 months.

The state of the union of the company: We’re currently at 113 entities in 26 states. We have really seen growth during the pandemic. As you and I chat today, there’ll be some recurring themes at the end of the day, residents, people, they are still needing senior living. That is still, we are an option, all of us are an option. We have found that we have seen steady growth. At this point, we’re really focused because we have had such growth, we’re really focused on now making sure that we’re executing, and we are doing everything that we need to be doing to drive our culture for our associates and to make sure the very best service for our residents. Again, with that growth, you need to balance that with inspecting what you expect and making sure that we are delivering on all of those services.

Tim: I typically hear from operators that it’s this time of year when it’s the straightaway for occupancy growth. It’s like a bear. You pack on the pounds during the summer for the leaner months ahead. With that in mind, with Covid, I have also heard that sometimes normal seasonality has been disrupted. I think we saw that in the first two years at least of the pandemic. I wanted to check in on that. Has demand picked up in recent weeks or months? What are you seeing on the ground in terms of things like leads and move-ins right now?

Collette: I think when I look at our trends and I go back and see where we’ve been, where we’re going, the last 17 months have been really positive for both portfolios. We’ve seen positive net growth, we’ve seen strong lead volume, we’ve seen strong move-in volume. It’s been a very good past 17 months. The demand has been there. It’s just when we’ve gone through what we’ve recently gone through with the pandemic, it’s pivoting in how do we sell that demand? How do we change things? What do we need to do to do things differently and better? Again, we’ve seen great growth. March, April, May were really big months for us. June is projecting well also.

Typically, we do see seasonality. Right now, it’s really trending. We did have a little bit of a lull, I will say, [sound cut] January, February, but again, March, April, and May, positive trajectory, great growth months for both ISL and Solstice. So excited about that.

Tim: I wanted to drill down on some of the things that you were talking about. What is specifically working right now in sales and marketing, to drive leads and move-ins at ISL communities?

Collette: We have a fantastic partner that we work with, MP&F Communications, for our sales, marketing, analytics and metrics. They help all things marketing-related, and they have worked closely with our teams of both Integral Senior Living and Solstice Senior Living at really looking at crafting a true digital and print analysis and program and looking at what each community offers.

Again, with 113 communities, we don’t cookie-cutter things. Every community is its own unique, special community in its own special marketplace. Everybody wants and needs different things in these different markets. They have really helped us put together a digital campaign that works, and when we see that something isn’t working or we need to allocate dollars because we see something is really working, then we just go ahead and do that, lots of flexibility, pivoting.

That’s another word I’m going to say a lot here. Lots of pivoting. We have the ability to take a look at when we have our digital spend and our print spend, and we actually look at the data and the metrics, and it tells the story. I’m a huge data person because I think data tells a great story of what’s working and what’s not working.

We look at communities that are getting a lot of leads. What are they doing? A lot of analysis goes into it to figure out what’s working and not working, shifting strategy to help drive those leads. I can say this, having worked with a couple of different companies in my 27 years, I think our sales training program is one of the very best out there, and the leaders that we have in place for Solstice and ISL, they just really help drive the sales process.

I think we can say sales is really everybody’s job, and it’s not just our sales directors, it’s our executive directors, it’s our department heads. It’s everybody buying into this and being a part of that. I know that we do that really well because it’s reflected in the growth that we are seeing.

Tim: You mentioned data a moment ago. What metrics are you interested in?

Collette: We are looking at where our leads are coming from. We’re tracking how long they’re spending on the website, where are they going into the website? We look at different zip codes that leads came from. We target our advertising to those specific markets. We look at, again, where are our leads coming from, and what are our conversion ratios? We do a lot with conversion ratios as well. We have averages in our company.

Tim: Got it. I also think it might be helpful to spell out the whole portfolio. I know that you have the Solstice Senior Living side of things. Before we get too deep into our discussion, I know that those communities are part of a JV between ISL and NHI. Do you have separate plans for that side of the company or is that just a branding difference?

Collette: Yes and no. Integral Senior Living, think of it as it’s just two different brands. I think that’s the best way to explain it. Integral Senior Living, we’ve been here. We’re celebrating our 20th anniversary, and have been in the business for a very long time. In 2017, we had the opportunity to work with NHI and the folks over there, and bring on this portfolio of 32 assets.

Solstice has its own dedicated platform. We’ve got our own COO with Steve Flynt. We’ve got our own senior vice president of sales and marketing with Cristy Ballard, but they have taken a lot of what we do with ISL, the programs, whether it be Elevate, which is our culinary program, Vibrant Life, which is our activities program, all of the programs that we have are core to that programming from ISL.

Our culture, that’s something that is incredibly important to us. They have taken our culture and implemented that in Solstice as well. It’s not cookie-cutter, but there are a lot of similarities, but it’s its own brand. Those are 32 communities, the remainder are within the Integral Senior Living portfolio. I know it gets kind of confusing, two different companies. They’re two different brands, but at the end of the day, we’re all, honestly, one big happy family.

Tim: I know that you guys do a decent amount of third-party management. I’ve talked with some operators during this pandemic who have told me that they’ve moved away from that because they wanted more control over their communities. I’m curious, what is your philosophy on making third-party management work these days, and why is that something that is still worth doing?

Collette: That is a great question, Tim. I know there’s been a lot of debate about different schools of thought, third-party management wanting skin in the game, and whatnot. At the end of the day, if you look at it, Sue Farrow started this company. She’s our owner and founder. She started this company in 2002 with one community, and here we are at 113, 20 years later.

It might not work for everybody, but it works for ISL, so the recipe works. We grew during the pandemic. Again, our third-party management recipe proved to work. At the end of the day, what truly separates us and makes us different is our people. That’s our different and better story. That is why I believe our third-party management recipe is successful. It works for us. Again, understand it doesn’t work for everybody, but it’s a niche that we have, that we have been successful with in the past 20 years, so we are going to continue to ride that out.

Tim: Great. I assume that you get a lot of calls for ISL to come in and manage communities. I am curious, when you get these calls, what makes a good third-party management opportunity in your eyes? I’m assuming you probably say no to a decent amount of deals as well. What kind of opportunities do you say no to?

Collette: We do. That was a twofold question. Let me first address how we look at third-party management when we get calls because we do. We get a lot of calls. Someone has a dream and a grandparent and a piece of land, and they want to do something special with it. We really look at it from the perspective of our ownership groups. We’ve got some great ownership groups that we work with.

How we approach it is, “Is this an ownership group that we want to continue to grow with?” That’s the first tranche if you will. Then we look at, are they going into a market that we believe there is more demand than there is supply, or if it’s not a new development, are they in a market where there is more demand than supply because there are some very oversaturated markets?

We don’t want to go into that. We don’t need to, if we don’t believe it’s something that can be successful with the ISL secret sauce that we can bring to it, then we don’t go into those markets. We really do a very thorough analysis of that. We do say no to opportunities because, again, we’re not looking to just grow and grow and be big.

We want to do it very systematically and where it makes sense to go into different markets. We have a very cool internal market penetration analysis. It was developed with the help of a geospatial engineer. Go figure that. He’s brilliant.

This tool has really been a successful, proven tool for us. Honestly, we are very transparent with our existing owners, potential owners. If we don’t think a community has the depth in the marketplace to be able to be successful, we turn them down, and we share why, but again, we want it to be, it needs to be successful for both parties.

Tim: That makes sense. You spoke a little bit earlier about culture and how that sets ISL apart. The people are what does that, and I know that you were recently at Argentum. You gave some great presentations there, and I caught one where you basically said, during the pandemic, it was okay to not have the answers and that showing things like vulnerability can actually help build culture.

What is your leadership style and how has it evolved during the last two years?

Collette: My leadership style? It has definitely taught me more patience, and I would say even more flexibility. I think I was very flexible before, but it’s really taught me that you have to be flexible. People interchangeably use the word ‘pivot.’ I look at it as flexibility. We’ve really had to figure out as we go along, and I am.

I’m very transparent in that we don’t have all the answers. We don’t know. When the pandemic first hit we didn’t know what we were doing. We learned as we went along. I became an expert in PPE procurement. I didn’t even know what that was all about, but I had to learn very quickly. We didn’t have a department doing it. We didn’t have a committee.

It was me doing it because I wanted to make sure that at the end of the day, our executive directors, who have the hardest job in the business, I wanted to make sure they had everything that they needed. I wanted to make sure they had things for our residents, for our associates. I was sourcing PPE, and it was stuck. The plane was stuck in China on a tarmac. I was doing things I didn’t even know I’d ever be doing, nor do I feel I ever want to do again.

Let’s just put that out there to the universe. We don’t need to have another pandemic. My job as the leader, Tim, honestly, was to help make things, I think, easier and keep that sense of calm and transparency. I had very frequent calls with all of our associates. We had a lot of communication with our owners, with our residents, with their family members. There were ongoing letters. We had websites set up, and our websites all had information about Covid.

It was really leading from a style of, I don’t want to say, over-communication, but almost over-communication because we wanted to make sure that people knew while we didn’t know what was happening in the world, their loved ones were taken care of, or they were taken care of, and our associates were taken care of. I look back at the beginning, again, we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

I was using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of our Covid cases. You can imagine how quickly I said, “Okay, this is bigger than a spreadsheet.” It was a hard time, and I look back, and I always want to take something positive out of things that happened. I think as an industry, it’s brought us closer together. I think as a family at ISL and Solstice, it’s brought us closer together.

It’s shown me that at the end of the day, we’re people taking care of residents, and that’s first and foremost. I look at how the industry is changing and making sure that we’re keeping up with the times and everything that we’re doing. Covid opened up our eyes to the times, and it helped with technology.

Tim: Right.

Collette: Who knew that was going to happen? You look at it, there were options to keep our residents engaged, our associates, our families we’re doing Zoom town halls. We were FaceTiming. At one of our communities, we had a granddaughter who wanted to get married with her grandmother there, but we had active cases. We didn’t have visitors, they weren’t allowed.

We made a wedding happen, and this is one that still touches me and gets me emotional. We’re in the business of changing lives. She had her wedding in front of her grandma’s window, and we had flowers, we had the whole canopy thing. There were chairs out front.

We changed her granddaughter’s life. We just changed so many lives. Who would’ve ever thought we’d be having weddings on a front lawn and we’d need visitation rooms? There was so much that was changing. The teams and I have to say that the team surrounded by– they continued to show up. They continued to look for different ways of doing things, and what we did before didn’t necessarily work now.

There was so much creativity. Again, I would never want to go through another pandemic, but if I take the positives out of it, the teamwork, the new ideas, the innovation that was just like nothing I’ve seen. Again, bringing the industry together was just– We were all working together collaboratively. We’re all competitors, but there’s enough business to go around for all of us. It was more about what we can do as an industry together to change lives and be there for our residents and our associates.

Tim: Yes. Well, thank you for sharing that story about the wedding. That’s touching. I can see why that would make you emotional.

Collette: Yes, I think about that picture with the hand, and it’s heartwarming, and that’s what we do. I share with our owners a lot. This is a human business. We don’t work with widgets, we work with people. That’s one of the heartwarming stories.

Tim: You are a champion of women in leadership in senior living. As I look across the rest of the industry, I think it’s clear that there’s more work to be done. What would you like to see the rest of the industry do to make leadership more diverse? Do you think the industry is changing fast enough?

Collette: I do. Let me say why I think it is. Yes, I am passionate about women in senior living. I look back, and I think of when I first joined the Argentum board. There were four women in that room back in 2016, and the board is now made up of over 40% women, and this isn’t a men-versus-women issue. This is, how do we bring more women into the industry?

How do we elevate them to more C-suite types of positions because when you look at it, the majority of our associates in senior living are women? The majority of the residents were women. When you look at it, we have a different perspective. Again, it’s not men versus women, it’s all of us together. I did a chat last week on women in leadership.

Two of my mentors are Sue Farrow and Vicki Clark, but my third mentor, who was incredibly important in my development and my growth, is Bill Pettit with Merrill Gardens. I wouldn’t be where I am without Bill, so it’s all of us working together to help lift women up. How do we go about doing that? How can other men be a part of that? We’ve got our Women in Leadership Committee, and we are now adding men to the Women in Leadership Committee.

I think that speaks to it’s not women versus men, it’s all of us working together, lifting one another up, and then at the end of the day, doing great things together, but women need a seat at the table, and it’s using our voice and being a part of that conversation.

Tim: Absolutely. Thank you for your passion. We just held an event in Orlando, actually, just yesterday, DISHED and WELLNESS. And one of the big topics is the need to educate consumers on what senior living is. I think that that is always a challenge. I’ve heard that the pandemic has just made that more urgent. How do you think the senior living industry should be working to do that, to educate people on what this all is and why they might need it?

Collette: First and foremost, we need to educate folks that we’re not skilled nursing, we are senior living. As an industry, I see that we could do a better job, I think. This is something that we all need to work on, focusing on, truly, the holistic care that a senior living community can provide a resident. When you look at it, where residents can come to live vibrantly. It’s not a place, it’s not a home where you put someone.

We got that stigma as an industry. Even when I came back in ’96, it was “Well, you’re one of those homes.” We are a home, but we are a home within a home if you will. We’re not skilled nursing. We are a home like you would have with family, with friends, with activities. It’s almost like a vacation, I guess, would be the best way to describe it, Tim. You look at it, it’s a place where you have a lot of lifestyle options. You have a lot of different things to do. You’re getting your needs met, whether it’s a need from a culinary perspective and meals or you need assistance with transportation. It’s a place where you can come, you can live your life, you have care, and you can transition into a level of care if you need it.

We can focus on living life to the fullest. I think that’s an area where our industry can continue to refine that and share that, that you can come into senior living, live a vibrant– and truly live life to its fullest. There’s also that wellness component. How do we keep the mind, the body, the spiritual, and how do we keep it all well?.

Tim: I want to switch topics again to bring in the event in Orlando. One of the things on people’s minds right now is all of the cool technology out there that you can use in the senior living community. I have seen a lot of cool technology. I know that you have also seen cool technology, you mentioned the market analysis tool earlier. What other technology are you seeing out there that’s catching your attention? What do you think is really cool?

Collette: There’s a couple of things. Business intelligence — we did not have this intelligence before, that has been a game-changer for us. We implemented BI during the pandemic, and from a technology standpoint, I can look high level at how many residents do we have, what is the average length of stay, vaccination status, temp labor usage, all the key metrics, how many women we have working in our communities, there’s so much data available and it allows us to understand the company as a whole and who we are serving and how we’re serving.

Truly, our business intelligence has been a game-changer because everyone has access to that. Our executive directors have access to that. I wish when I was an executive director, I had something as cool as this because it really lets you know. You’re running your community, you’re running your business, and it allows you to understand all the different parts and pieces that go into running your business. Business intelligence, I’m going to say that’s number one for us from a technology standpoint.

We are also looking into a company that assists with staffing challenges from the perspective that there are online schedules. You can post open shifts. People can pick up on open shifts, it will show who should be next in line based on the number of hours they’ve worked and whether or not they’re going to go into overtime, look at wages, and who you should be calling next. It tracks agency spend. It even goes as far as I think of Yelp where you can review the agency staff that’s working in the building. You can actually rate the agency staff.

That’s something I’m very excited about, and then I would say the last one is there’s a lot of conversation out there in different products for monitoring residents when they’re in their apartments to see what they’re helping with, and it’s not fall prevention. We can’t prevent falls, but helping understand fall risks, and if they might happen, being able to address them more quickly. There’s a lot of– and I’m sure you’ve seen this, Tim, a lot of technology out there that’s doing that now, so I’m interested to see where that goes.

Tim: One of the things I didn’t hear in there was robotics. What do you make of the robotics trend? Is that useful or do you still see that as a novelty?

Collette: I don’t mean to offend anyone on the call who is using it or any company out there who has them. I personally am not a fan. I think we are people serving people, and that human element is still needed in everything that we do. Even if it’s a housekeeper going into a residence apartment, they’re engaging with them. They’re having a conversation with them. They’re not just cleaning the resident’s apartment. The building service director is coming in and fixing something. They’re engaging with that resident. There is still that human element and that engagement piece that you just can’t get yet with a robot.

Tim: I’ve heard many operators say exactly that and many operators echo those thoughts.

Collette: I think there’s ways that we can look at how we can be more efficient and streamline operations, but using a robot, I’d rather look in other areas than that.

Tim: I actually had a very interesting discussion at DISHED. We were talking about the possibility of whether community chefs would ever be replaced by robots. Going back to that human touchpoint, I think that makes sense.

Collette: Oh my gosh. We’re hiring people out of hotels and restaurants where they can come and have some normal hours and they can still be creative with the menus, but they’re not dealing with the crazy restaurant hours. I don’t see us ever having a robot instead of one of our amazing chefs.

Tim: Staffing, obviously, is a huge challenge for senior living operators. First, I just want to ask, what challenges are you seeing in staffing, but also what is working to recruit people?

Collette: When you look back, if we had talked about this, I’ll say a year and a half ago, “agency” has always been a bad word. Now, agency is something that some of our communities just have to use because of where they’re at in the marketplace. I will say that staffing is specific to having an issue in a specific market. It’s specific markets that there are still labor shortages and we are still using agency usage.

When I look again, I look at trends and different metrics. When I look at where we were at last year and I see where we’re at now and where we have come from since January, we’re seeing a steady decline. That leads me to believe that we are on the right road to eliminating or even further reducing agency usage because it’s hard.

I mean, again, agency, we need them because we need someone to help fill the shifts. At the end of the day, we want our people in there because they’re the ones that know the residents. If you have different people coming in every day, it’s unsettling, and I mean, it would be for me, so I get it. Really trying to figure out how we deal with the staffing issue that all of us have right now. This is not unique to us, it’s not even unique to our industry, so how do we address that?

We’ve done a couple of things. Everybody paid hero pay, so we all did that. That was great, but now we need to look at, “Okay, what are wages, what do we need to be doing with wages?” We are so far gone from minimum wage. I mean, we’re paying things now in communities $19, $20 an hour for someone that we used to pay $11 for. So, things have shifted.

Our HR team has been incredible. They’ve been working on wage grids, what is happening in each individual market, and what do we need to be doing from a shifting wages perspective. We’ve done that, we’ve needed to shift some wages, we’ve gotten very creative with our scheduling. There’s flex time, there’s part-time, there’s what shifts do you want to work and people help fill them in. It’s been unique in every single community as to what we’ve had to do.

The one thing that we have continued with is our associate referral plan in our program. We shouldn’t say “plan,” but “program” — associates want to work with people that they like, and people that are friends with them. If you look at surveys with associates, what do they want? Yes, they want pay, but they want to have a friend at work, so why not incentivize our associates to bring in like-minded people who want to come to work every day and pay them for it?

We are in the process of implementing, and it’s happened in a part of our portfolio, but a very robust referral program for our associates and really incentivizing them to bring their friends or someone that they know that they like to work with. You’ve now got a referral from someone. You’ve now got someone who has a friend at work, and you’re incentivizing for them to stay.

We look at a 90-day perspective, a six-month perspective, a one-year perspective. Not only is it recruiting, it’s helping on the recruiting front, it’s also helping on the retention front. That has been something that again we’ve been testing out and it’s something that it’s much– and it’s much less expensive to pay a referral, and associate referrals — I will pay those all day long, because those are associates that are going to want to stay. The cost of turnover, the cost of having to advertise, the cost of agency, it’s much easier to pay a referral bonus and have people work with people they want to work with.

Tim: I actually want to go back to something that you’d mentioned during the question about technology, again, to head off a question we might get. Are you sharing the name of the company that you’re working with that helps you on the agency side, is that something you can share with us?

Collette: Not yet because we’re still in negotiation, so not yet. Once it’s signed, absolutely, I’m happy to share that. It’s pretty slick, and I think data tells a story. When you look at it, it’s not just numbers. It’s what the data tells you. If you don’t do something with it, then it’s useless. If we’ve got people that are doing reports just for the sake of doing reports and nobody’s reading them, stop doing the reports. Let’s look at things and work smarter, not harder. We’re looking at things. We’re assessing the data and then we’re making decisions based on that. I’m a big proponent of that. That’s my little data geek speak.

Tim: Something that I also have heard at conferences but also just over the past couple of years is the real need to expand the number of workers in the senior living industry. I believe it was Tana Gall who said at Argentum that we needed to stop trading workers. How do you think the industry can help bring more workers in from the outside?

Collette: Her quote is, “Stop swapping workers.” First of all, I love me some Tana. Tana and I are good friends. We talk– again, we’re competitors, but we have the same mission, and we’re passionate about what it is that we’re doing. Tana and I have had a discussion about this, and I will say overall, we all agree about this. We need new talent. We need to draw talent into our industry and help create an environment that they want to come work here.

Looking at this from a couple of different angles, I shared internally what we’re doing as a company. As an industry, I know CALA, California Assisted Living Association is working hard on workforce development, as is Argentum.

They are also working, there’s a VP of workforce development. That’s where we’ve gotten now. That’s where we’re at. As an industry, it’s drawing people in. The Women in Leadership committee that I chair, we are looking at workforce development. How do we get people into this industry versus falling into this industry? I fell into this industry 27 years ago. I wouldn’t want to do anything else. This is what I am passionate about, but how do we get new people into this industry?

We should be recruiting out of hospitality, out of restaurants, where they are burned out. They’re wanting something different and fulfilling, and they get that in senior living.

You apply this to nurses, and I speak from experience, I have a daughter who just graduated the University of Nevada, Reno, public health, she’s going for her nursing degree. When you ask her what she wants to do, one would hope, given what her mom does, she would say, “I want to work in senior living.” No, she wants to work in labor and delivery or the emergency room because that is fun. I don’t know that it’s fun. I guess it depends on your perspective, but it’s sexy. It’s cool. There’s a lot of energy. There’s a lot going on.

That made me actually stop and think. We’re going and targeting a lot of universities. If my daughter is like a lot of people out there, perhaps we need to be looking at nurses or care staff that’s maybe burned out in that kind of environment and drawing them into the industry. It made me think, maybe we need to share where we’re looking to recruit from a little bit because I realized she doesn’t want to come into this industry. As long as she’s been alive, this is all I’ve done. We’re missing the mark and she knows how much I love my job. Then we’re missing the mark somewhere as an industry.

It really got me thinking about a different way, maybe some of these nursing schools, I just think there’s a different way maybe to approach this, but we’ve got to do something better as an industry to attract talent without just falling into it. I think we’ve made great strides, but we’re not there yet.

Tim: Where do you see staffing trending this year? Do you foresee any of the challenges getting easier or, God forbid, getting harder in the next 6 to 12 months?

Collette: No, not getting harder. I do see that it’s going to get better. Again, if I look at the metrics and I look at trending, it’s trending in the right direction. We are using less agency. We are seeing lower turnover. We’re looking at 2023 — we’re still recovering, and it’s going to be a long recovery, but we’re moving in the right direction.

We’re seeing continued growth, not only when I look at the number of communities we have, which it’s never about a number, we’ve never set out to be the biggest. We want to be the best. I know that sounds cliche, but that’s what we want. When I look at our growth from where we were at, where we are now, and I look at what we’re doing overall from a staffing perspective, I think that that can relate to everybody, that we are seeing, as an industry, an upward tick in new development. We’re seeing occupancy growth. It’s not just us. There’s a lot of companies that are growing right now with occupancy.

Obviously, on the expense side, we have eroded our margins somewhat because while we’ve seen increased occupancy, we have increased expense by way of staffing, which we’re speaking of now, food costs, and all those different types of things. As an industry, I think at the end of the day, what this has shown is that because we have all continued to grow, there’s still a need for senior living. We just need to find the people that want to come help serve our seniors and change lives. It’s better, but we’re not there yet.

Tim: Enough on staffing, we have eight minutes left. I want us to talk specifically about the features of ISL and Solstice. What is your strategy for growth this year? What are you working on? What are we going to see next out of you guys?

Collette: Well, we opened a community yesterday in Norman, Oklahoma, Sooners Station, and that was a successful opening. We moved in 12 residents yesterday, changing lives. We have three more communities that we’re opening this year, new development-wise. One in Reno, Nevada, one in Georgia, and one in Newport Beach. Can’t wait to see the new developments happening, which, again, speaks to the fact that there’s a need for senior living and the communities that we have opened by and large have outperformed pro formas.

My look for the future is very positive because people need us. When I look at the year that we’ve had and what might we see out of us next, I really appreciate all of the growth that we’ve had, and going back to what I said earlier now, it’s just fine-tuning everything and making sure we’re delivering on all the programs on all of the services, making sure that our associates are passionate about what they’re doing, what they bring to the table, what they get to be a part of on a daily basis.

For me right now, what I’m really focused on and I will continue to be focused on is ensuring we have happy associates because I’m a firm believer that if you have happy associates, they in turn are going to create happy residents, which creates a healthy bottom line, but it starts with our associates. Really developing and not just developing but continuing to fine-tune the culture that we have. That’s a big focus for me because that is going to drive results.

Tim: I also want to ask you about how you see the trajectory of this ongoing senior housing recovery. How do you think the next 12 months are going to go, what are you preparing for, and what’s your outlook?

Collette: Next 12 months, I think we will continue the recovery that we’ve been seeing. I believe that we’re going to continue to see growth, not only from a new development standpoint, with more new developments occurring, but growth in our occupancy. I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet, with staffing, we continue to work on it, but it will be, I believe, into 2023, by the time that corrects a bit.

I don’t use the word “normal” anymore, because our world was turned upside down. I think we don’t even know what normal is. If there’s a new normal, and we need to adjust and pivot and get there quickly because if we don’t, we will become obsolete, and we certainly don’t want that. I see continued growth from a census standpoint, and I see us really focusing on the people aspect of the business because that’s what’s going to help drive all of those other things.

Tim: What keeps you up at night, and what excites you?

Collette: Staffing keeps me up at night. The frivolous lawsuits that come about which, fortunately, knock on wood, we have not seen a ton, but I know that they are out there, and from a legal perspective, that scares me. I would say, those are the two big things that keep me up at night.

On a daily basis, honestly, and again, I know it sounds kind of cliche, but changing lives, I am so passionate about the fact that we have the ability to change lives, every single day, and when you look at bringing people into this industry, where else can you go where you can change lives like this? That’s powerful, it makes me want to come to work every day, it makes it helps drive me because we’re doing really, really good work as an industry, and at ISL and Solstice, and I do want to come to work every day because of that ability to change lives, and it’s not just for the residents, it’s for our associates as well for them to have a better experience. That is what, honestly, I’m most excited about, just seeing our industry continue to grow and thrive and be able to be there for our residents, who need us.

Tim: We have a little bit over a minute left. I think we have time for one more question. I have heard a lot in the last two years about how a rising tide lifts all boats, the industry sinks or swims together. Other operators are watching right now, what advice would you have for them to, lift all those boats?

Collette: Lifting the boats. Hire the attitude, train the talent. Got people probably inside our organizations that have the attitude, or people that are looking to come into our companies that have the attitude, let’s train the talent because if you have the attitude, you’re more likely to– again, it’s a people business. I think, from a hiring perspective as well, hire people around you that are going to– hire the best because I think when you do hire the best, and I believe I have the best, which– it allows me to know the job is being done right. The work that they’re doing, it’s the right work. I would also say we work really hard, so work hard, but play hard as well.

Tim: Well, those are great words to end on. We are out of time today, but, Collette, I know that we could discuss further.

Collette: Oh my gosh, we can go on and on.

Tim: Thank you, Collette Gray, for coming on.

Collette: You’re welcome. Thanks, everybody.

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