FURNITURE & INTERIORS
Interior Investment
Gaius Owen, group business consultant for Anterior, NHG’s specialist healthcare interior design consultancy, makes the case for spending on style to boost your care home business.
Creating and maintaining the right interior environment – one that meets the high expectations of today’s discerning residents – is an ongoing challenge. While considering the bigger picture, you must ensure changes to your home’s interior maximise both your patients’ wellbeing and your profitability.
Before you even consider what your return on investment could look like you need to understand the marketplace in which you operate, as well as the key demographics of your current and future customers.
Working with a specialist consultant can help address these issues from the outset by putting in place a tailored return on investment management plan. Before any solutions can be put forward you therefore need to work collaboratively with your consultant to determine the basics.
Next comes the actual diagnostic process to drill down into your vision, mission and corporate goals. Taking the time to determine what you are trying to achieve with the project will reap rewards further down the line. If you had a blank canvas, what would be the best possible outcome? Ask yourself, what has and hasn’t worked well in the past, and what are the key issues you encounter time and time again?
Only by truly understanding your business and key concerns can you
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and your consultant start to move forward with a tangible solution that delivers maximum return on investment, while staying true to your company’s ethos.
Using this process we were able to assist a care home operator who was losing essential revenue, as each time they needed to refurbish a room they were having to wait almost eight weeks for the delivery of furniture. To ensure that rooms were unoccupied for a minimal amount of time, we were able to guarantee delivery of a full bedroom fit-out within 7 to 10 days.
Using our Stock 7 furniture range the solution delivered a practical and aesthetically pleasing environment. Not only did this solve the issue of lost revenue, it also addressed a number of market issues including compliance, cost control, supply chain control and product quality. Significantly, the client has reported an estimated saving in excess of £1 million pounds.
Even clients with limited budgets can experience a good return on investment when the approach ties into their ethos as well as their commercial goals. Most recently we worked with a charity that was looking to furnish a 33-bedroom extension. However, the client didn’t have the funds to fit-out all the bedrooms in one go so they were
fitting them out in batches of eight bedrooms at a time.
It soon became apparent that the limited funds were going to have a serious impact on the charity’s bottom line. With careful thought as to the type of service user they were providing for and setting out clear goals as to the experience they were trying to deliver, the charity was able to create a completely new care experience for the service user.
Investing in a luxurious solid oak range of furniture and quality furnishings enabled the charity to immediately increase bedroom fees by £50 per week, resulting in overall additional revenues of £400 per week. Using this additional cash flow they were then able to complete the second stage of the refurbishment 3 months earlier than scheduled, with the entire fit-out completed a whole 12 months early.
Within a short period of time the charity had not only completed the entire fit-out, but it was also able to benefit from an additional annual income of £85,000.
There’s never been a better time to ask yourself what you could, or even should, change to increase your return on investment. Whether it’s a single bed or a total fit-out solution, even the smallest of changes can reap rewards.
www.nh-group.co.uk/ care-environments
www.tomorrowscare.co.uk
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