Solstice COO: Staffing is the Lynchpin of our Recent Momentum, Future Plans

It’s been an active year for Solstice Senior Living as the company has worked to build on its momentum from last year. All of it has hinged on staffing.

Recently, the company appointed a new chief growth officer, Cristy Ballard; made a variety of upper-level promotions and put a renewed focus on renovations since mid-2023. Solstice finished September at a 94% occupancy rate, which has provided steady revenue and helped give the company more ability to hire staffers and further develop its workforce, according to COO Steve Flynt.

“We’re highly occupied, growing margin and the capital partners are happy,” Flynt told Senior Housing News.

Advertisement

And there is more to come on that front. In the tail end of 2024, Solstice is gearing up for minor structural changes, and is in the process of adding in a new regional position to oversee communities in the northwest in an effort to bolster its leadership.

“Our graph looks very strong because we’re growing occupancy and we’re growing RevPOR,” Flynt said.

Early last year, Carlsbad, California-based Solstice underwent a big change when Integral Senior Living (ISL) joined an umbrella of “sister companies” led by Discovery Senior Living as part of a recapitalization from investment firms Lee Equity and Coastwood.

Advertisement

Today, Integral CEO Collette Gray still leads the company as CEO, and Solstice exists as a joint venture of ISL. The companies share high-level staffers in their financial and human resources departments.

Solstice has 32 communities spread across the country.

Regional staffing strategy part of ‘recipe for success’

Among Solstice’s focuses in 2024 has been to bolster regional teams in order to spread the burden of management across multiple leaders.

Solstice organizes communities by region, generally with 10 to 11 communities in each area. The company treats states like Washington and California as their own regions due to more complicated operations and regulations there.

The company’s portfolio includes communities spread across the continental U.S. and on both coasts. That makes its regional approach all the more important.

To help spread out the workload, Solstice employs one sales director per community, with additional sales optimization specialists managing lead flow. In the instance that an executive director position is open – which Flynt noted is a rarity – other specialists will fill in to help bridge the gap until the company hires another leader.

In September, the company named three employees to regional leadership positions: Nathan Mills, who was promoted to senior vice president of operations; Israel Regus, who became regional director of operations for the company’s western region; and Tasha Arlen, who ascended to the role of area director of operations.

“We did a little bit of a realignment to just make sure our spans of control are such that the communities are getting a lot of focus,” Flynt said. “I think that’s a recipe for success. We’re not spreading everyone too thin.”

‘Keeping the team together’

Looking ahead to 2025, Flynt said among his biggest goals is keeping the operator’s leadership and community worker teams intact and ready to pounce on new opportunities.

“We’ve made some mistakes along the way, but we’re at a point now where we’ve curated a playbook that works very well,” Flynt said. So, it’s more about keeping the team together and continuing to do what we’re doing.”

Solstice created additional workshops and training exercises for the company’s salespeople, and not just for those who are struggling. That is an approach that Flynt said helps push high performers “to a higher level.”

The operator also has helped its sales and operations teams work closer together and collaborate on a regular basis, something Flynt said has helped bolster occupancy growth.

Keeping employees content is a big part of the company’s way forward, he added. To improve employee satisfaction and turnover, the company holds frequent town hall meetings. The company also has a culture club, which hosts monthly meetings to keep employees “involved and engaged,” he added.

“It sounds like silly stuff, but show me a community that participates in a large way in culture … the correlation to good financial results is off the charts, and the retention of your associates will also be higher,” Flynt said. “Going hand in hand has been a very successful recipe for us.”

Those efforts have paid off in a variety of ways, and can be measured in the fact that nearly all Solstice employees, 96.9%, participated in a recent workforce survey, a number previously unseen at the company.

To keep its bench strong, Solstice creates career pathways to leadership roles for employees.

According to Flynt, the “secret sauce” at Solstice is its strong leaders and employees, and that will remain the case for the foreseeable future.

“I think this goes for any business … [if] you put a group of people together, give them the tools that they need to be successful and support them rather than micromanage them, they’re going to do great things,” he said. “I think that is also why we have great leadership retention. They get the opportunity to make decisions … and I think people like working in that environment.”

Companies featured in this article: