the day-to-day care staff kind to my moth- er?” and “Does the executive director and the health and wellness director get back to us when we have a question or a concern?” If you’re good at those two things and your food is mediocre, 90% of people are going to be happy. If your food is five stars, but the staff is rude, there is high turnover and your executive director will not return a phone call, maybe 50% of the people in that sur- vey are going to be happy.


SLE: How would you characterize the challenge that senior living faces today with hiring and retaining executive directors? Hollister: Right now, there are a lot of people trying to scale in this business, and I think there is just too limited a pool of executive directors – we’re all fishing in the same pond, and we’re all trying to find the resume of someone who has already been a successful executive director for three to five years. The bottom line is I think we’ve got to broaden that and look outside of the people who’ve strictly run an assisted living community successfully and look at people who have done something else that can translate to this field. That’s the chal- lenge. We have to broaden the net, but it isn’t going to do any good if we don’t know how to identify the people who have the critical thinking skills, leadership skills, and empathy that we’re looking for – people we can train. We need more thorough assessment tools,


and the academic consultant we are work- ing with is working to develop a validated instrument that we can use to better select for executive directors. And then we can take those assessment tools and adapt them for health and wellness directors and other positions. Our idea is that we will use these tools to


hire executive directors and then have them come in for three to six months and spend time in the home office, visit different build- ings, and shadow other executive directors and then we will place them in a building as the executive director. We’ve got to give them the prestige of giving them a building.


We had an assistant director program, hir- ing young people out of school and we kept losing them because they would get trained and they would think they were ready and we wouldn’t think they were ready yet and they’d leave. So, it will be important for us to find candidates who are more mature and experienced and who will be ready to take on their own building. Our academic consultant was in HR with


a big agricultural company in California, and they kept having constant turnover. Then he used data analytics to create a more thorough assessment tool of team members, and he was able to transform that organization by hiring people who were a better fit for that company and that field. I’m excited about this, and I hope it helps


because it’s such a critical thing to help us do this business better. I’m excited about it and I think it could be an exciting thing for the industry if we’re right about it. And I'd like to figure out a way to share it with oth- er people and help them with these staffing challenges, too.


SLE: “Moneyball,” in part, is about identifying inefficiencies in the market. In that case, it’s about using data analytics to help to uncover baseball players who are undervalued. Do you see that as an apt comparison to your efforts? That book showed that the Oakland A’s had what they called a look that all the scouts were after in players. They wanted players who looked a certain way – who looked like a jock. And, so a guy who was pudgy and had great plate discipline, meaning he gets walked a lot, was being underappreciated and undervalued. And that was part of what they changed. I think the thing we’re undervaluing in senior living executive directors is the concept of grit. There are two types of general situations that you’re hiring an executive director for. One is sort of steady as she goes. In that case, this building is pretty full, it’s well-staffed, we’re not converting units to memory care or ex- panding the campus, so just don't screw it up. Coming out of COVID, though, most


operators don’t have many of those types of situations. We have some, but by and large, we need people who are movers. We need people who can go in and transform the culture on site, which has been in some instances broken, and get the occupancy from 70% – even as low as 50% – to full and that's a challenge that requires some grit.


SLE: Have you experienced any notable staffing “wins” recently in this challenging staffing climate? Hollister: I think we have been very suc- cessful over the last year getting nursing agencies out of the buildings. It’s not com- pletely eliminated and frankly, it might not ever be because you have nurses get sick or quit and all of a sudden you’ve got to call an agency to get through the weekend. If you look at our staffing, it tends to look like a tide chart where it kind of bunches up Tuesday to Thursday and then the prob- lems are mainly on the weekend. You get into this thing where you get really good employees who've been there, but they don't want to work on the weekend for a variety of reasons. So, you’ve got to figure out staff- ing patterns and new approaches to smooth that out. Overtime and inefficiency are the next big boulders we’re tackling. We haven’t ignored them, but the mantra of trying to get agencies out is what we've largely done over the last 12 months.


SLE: Are you seeing an increasing enthusiasm for data analytics in senior living and technology-based tools in general? Hollister: Absolutely. I think this industry has been rightly accused – and I say this as a self-reflective person who has been in this field for a long time – of being Luddites to a certain extent. We have not always been on the cutting edge of technology. I think some of that is frankly because of the case man- agement nature of the business and because of our clients, who require a lot of personal interaction. But we’re seeing more tools that are more usable and more effective for this industry. That’s going to be very powerful moving forward.


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