Sunrise Senior Living has a new vision statement.
After taking the CEO role in 2021, Jack Callison embarked on a listening tour of Sunrise communities. Early on, Callison said he saw the company’s strong institutional culture and the quality of care being provided by Sunrise frontline staff through being a premium price point operator with skill in higher acuity care.
At Senior Housing News’ BUILD event in Chicago on Wednesday, Callison publicly announced the new vision statement:
“We rallied around a new vision for Sunrise, which is to ‘create a preferred lifestyle for enjoying a longer, healthier, happier life.’ It’s a big aspirational goal that doesn’t happen overnight, but that’s the new vision for the organization that we’re all pretty excited about.”
Sunrise Senior Living operates 257 communities and is the sixth largest provider in the U.S.
A ‘new vision’ emerges
A foundational aspect of Callison’s new vision for Sunrise is introspection, and understanding the changing tastes, demands and needs of both today and tomorrow’s residents. Senior living residents aren’t happy with merely having a place to live — they also want to feel purpose, according to Callison.
“They’re looking for experiences and the ability to contribute and volunteer and continue learning and growing,” Callison said.
He believes the industry has an opportunity to change how residents’ adult children see the industry. Right now, they might feel guilty about leaving a parent in senior living. But Callison sees an opportunity in the not-too-distant future to change one feeling to another. In other words, to turn senior living communities into a “preferred” place to live.
“Imagine a world where the adult daughter is feeling envious and jealous of Mom’s life,” Callison said. “She’s jealous that she’s not old enough yet to transition to a senior living community, and she no longer feels that sense of guilt.”
Another key factor in reshaping Sunrise’s vision was transforming the prospect of senior living to where it’s “not just a final destination, but a holistic experience,” Callison said.
Achieving that goal will require measuring the lifestyle and health benefits of living within Sunrise communities. That is why Callison is also laser-focused on data collection, an effort that took center-stage during the pandemic as communities saw firsthand the impact of loneliness and isolation on residents.
“We’re all inherently social people,” Callison said. “I firmly believe that over time we can demonstrate empirically through data that you live longer, healthier and happier lives by living in a Sunrise community.”
Callison said the shift in Sunrise’s vision was inspired and informed by a white paper from Stanford University’s Center on Longevity, which calls on the industry and society at large to shift to a mindset that supports and celebrates aging and older adults.
Callison has pushed Sunrise communities to find what invigorates residents, and help them achieve that. For example, he shared the story of a resident who was a former college professor and wanted to give lectures; and another from a resident who discovered her talent as a painter after being encouraged to take a painting class.
“Those are simple examples of finding that inner-spark where people grow and thrive as human beings well into their 80s, 90s and into 100 and beyond,” Callison noted.
Off of that experience development, Callison added that lifestyle and wellness will be the “nucleus of what’s different” in senior living.
Putting the vision to work
Callison is executing on his vision through a variety of projects underway at Sunrise.
The new vision is exemplified within Sunrise’s community Sunrise at East 56th Street in the heart of New York City Manhattan. The project, which opened in 2021, is a 151-unit luxury community in the heart of New York City that regularly creates unique, bespoke experiences for residents, including through partnerships with institutions such as the Juilliard School and Waldorf Astoria.
Health care services at the community are also a key component of improving resident wellbeing, with care being brought into the community so a resident can avoid going to an emergency room or hospital.
These practices are being implemented in other Sunrise communities as well.
The operator is preparing to open a new community in McLean, Virginia, with a dedicated wellness center for residents that includes space for activities and lifestyle programming in addition to dedicated space for a wellness nurse.
And that is a feature that could end up in future communities, he said.
“There are some pilots that we’re running with different payers where they are experts at bringing additional services,” Callison said. “That can be in the form of primary care, it can be in the form of mental health, it can be in the form of physical therapy … We need to be able to provide an environment where they have access to the support and the services they need.”
Sunrise is also participating in pilot programs with outside agencies to offer behavioral health services in communities.
“We can partner with those individuals who can provide those types of services in the privacy of their own home,” Callison said.
He is also focused on identifying operational areas that could better promote wellness and experiences.
“Everything we are talking about is really much more about experiences for individuals and less about the product itself,” Callison said.
Changes coming out of the pandemic to Sunrise developments include building larger resident units, identifying common area space “in the context of wellness,” and how Sunrise can create a “flexible space” that can be repurposed, he added.
Some operators take the perspective that residents want the finer things in life, from swimming pools to chandeliers. But to Callison, residents have more specific and personal goals, desires and expectations — and it’s up to operators to ask discover what these are through surveys and interviews.
For example, a resident might not always want a five-star dinner with a white tablecloth. Sometimes, they just want a hot dog with all the fixings. He related an anecdote about diners at an exclusive restaurant who commented that their trip to the Big Apple was complete except that they had not eaten a typical New York City hot dog. Overhearing this, a worker at the restaurant went down the street, bought a hot dog, asked the chef to plate it, and presented it to the customers, saying that their experience now was complete.
This is the sort of attention to customers that senior living providers need to demonstrate, Callison said. And this can be done to meet and exceed expectations at any price point.
“It’s not about the helicopters, the caviar or the wine. It’s about making personal connections,” Callison said. “We can do that every single day in our business.”
He added: “Whether it’s a bocce ball court, whether it’s wine, let’s just be humble about it and actually go do that research and have those conversations with residents.”
Callison added that means providing care that’s “cloaked in hospitality and lifestyle.” To get there, he stressed Sunrise must lean into providing “activities of experience.”
Looking ahead to 2023, Callison foresees more challenges for staffing in the short term, both regarding the availability of workers and cost inflation. But he also is optimistic that next year will be better than 2022 in that regard. Already, he said he has seen net hiring increase at Sunrise communities.
And he is bullish on improvements in net operating income and margin, particularly given the pricing power that Sunrise — like other senior living providers — has been able to exercise.
Callison called Sunrise a “bold industry leader” in being proactive on rate increases, implementing earlier-than-usual rate increases for residents due to inflationary pressures.
“The practice that we simply took was just one of honesty and transparency with our residents,” Callison said.
That was softened by a 9% increase in the Social Security cost of living adjustment announced earlier this year.
He also sees plenty of opportunities to grow, and “whether that’s development, whether that’s acquisitions, whether that’s third party management … access to capital that’s always going to be there.”
Beyond that, Callison said that Sunrise will continue thoughtfully growing and evolving over the next four decades. To achieve that, the company will need a strong workforce.
“There are too many organizations who grow too far too fast and they don’t have the proper culture, infrastructure and talent in place,” he said. “For us, it all comes back to talent.”
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