Raising Tech

Amber Bardon: [00:00:00] Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon and today my guest is Maggie Seybold. She is the Vice President of Customer Insights at WelcomeHome. Welcome to the show, Maggie.

Maggie Seybold:

Thank you, Amber. I’m excited to be here.

Amber Bardon

So I’m sure all of our audience has heard of WelcomeHome before.

WelcomeHome is a little bit of a newer company. When they came on the market, I think they made a really big splash. I heard a rumor, I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard a rumor that Align Consolidated Enquire and Sherpa just to take on WelcomeHome because you’ve been such a big disruptor in the industry.

So for those of you who have not heard WelcomeHome, can you tell us a little bit about who you are?

Maggie Seybold: Sure. WelcomeHome is a senior living sales and marketing focused CRM solution. We’ve been around since 2019 when our co founders started bubbling around the idea of putting a new user friendly data backed CRM out into the space.

Since [00:01:00] then we have grown from a team of two to a team of almost 50 now, and starting out with our one or two early thought partner operator partners. We’re now well over 2000 communities on the platform. It’s been a really exciting journey. I think in terms of how WelcomeHome differentiates itself.

It’s a customer focused company. John, our co founder and Ryan from the start were focused on providing a solution to customers that was built by customers for customers. And spent almost a year and a half on the initial MVP of the product to get it right with some of our initial partners. And, since that time, They’ve looked for more new and innovative opportunities to serve customers.

Customer Insights is one of them. So I came on the team in 2022 as the data and analytics function for WelcomeHome. Our team has grown, but we’re here mostly to take all that data that sits beneath the CRM and find ways to serve it back to customers in ways to help them improve [00:02:00] their results, serve it to the industry to, put information and performance data out there.

It’s been a great journey, love this company, love the senior living space. It’s been a wild ride.

Amber Bardon: That’s fantastic. So give me a little more insight into what specific problems was WelcomeHome coming in to solve or what opportunities to WelcomeHome see in this space that they didn’t think was available already.

 Anyone who spends time in senior living sales and marketing will be familiar with the experience that sales director and the sales leadership goes through every day. The reality is senior living is a really tough job when you’re regardless of whether you’re thinking of the sales director doing that tactical work showing prospects around helping move them in or you’re thinking about the sales leadership.

Maggie Seybold: This is not residential buildings that have a relatively straightforward process. This sales process is unique and that it’s vulnerable. The time period varies enormously. There’s a ton of work that goes into each individual [00:03:00] relationship between a sales director and a prospect.

And frankly, it’s hard to keep track on all of that data. So hard that, the job was just made more difficult for a sales director on top of the additional emotional difficulty of selling senior living. So John and Ryan really went into this with the goal of taking all of that technical burden, taking all that redundant work and making it as easy as it can be for the sales director.

And then layering on top of that tools that make it easy for the leadership team to know what’s going on, identify opportunities and act on those opportunities in a way that is data backed and informed. They multi pronged issue to attack. But the journey to get there has been great.

And we’re very focused on. Even as we grow today, keeping our customers in the loop, even engaging with prospects on where do we need to improve what gaps exist in the product that we should be filling. And as like AI is an incredibly interesting space right now. We’re having active conversations about innovation in that space [00:04:00] too.

So it’s been an ongoing process and very customer informed.

Amber Bardon: Maggie, let’s pivot a little bit and talk about what’s going on in the industry, what’s going on in the space, what’s happening with sales today and senior living.

Can you tell me a little bit about what are some of the major trends that you’re seeing in the industry today, and maybe some of your biggest takeaways from the first quarter of this year?

Maggie Seybold: Sure. What I love about customer insights at WelcomeHome is we have an enormous amount of data to sift through and then work through trends and insights with our customers, as we all know, in the industry, COVID was an extremely challenging time.

And while COVID was meeting our shores in 2020 and 2021, there were some trends going on underneath the surface that we are still working on solving today. So things that come to mind. 1st, digital adoption as a sales outreach method for prospects exploded. We saw the outreach through digital leads expand massively and digital leads account for more than 80 percent of inbound today.

[00:05:00] That’s a very different sales process than working with referral partners like doctors or family and friends program. So there are many operators today that are still wrapping their heads around the appropriate strategy for dealing with different types of digital leads. An online website lead looks different than an aggregator lead and how do you, Manage those 2 different prospects.

That’s 1 huge impact that we’re still working through today. Another from coven. Is that we were stuck inside, so referral outreach took a backseat for 2 years and now we are as an industry relearning that muscle a bit and trying to. Be a little bit more efficient about it. Understand. Where should I be spending my time if I’m trying to decide between getting in touch with the 15 new online leads that have hit my inbox in the last half an hour or putting aside a four hour block to go get lunch with a couple different referral partners who may or may not have been productive in the past.

So really finding that balance on lead management is another huge [00:06:00] focus that we see in industry as well.

Amber Bardon: I’m curious with all these changes with COVID and some of the takeaways you just mentioned, how do you see the sales process changing and what are some opportunities for improvement? Sure. So

Maggie Seybold: in terms of how the sales process is changing, And I might be biased because I’m on the data side, but we are now seeing a much higher burden of proof on how sales directors make decisions on how they spend their time because that lead volume kicked back so aggressively after COVID

we were having such an influx of leads that it became more of a challenge to decide how to allocate your time to maximize the number of move ins that you’re getting in your specific community so that burden to make well informed choices, data backed choices has been a significant change in the sales process.

Not only is it focused on the lead management side of things, so really understanding how does an aggregator lead behave? How quickly do I need to get in touch with that [00:07:00] person? How many touches do I need to complete so they’re comfortable coming in for a tour, and I have the appropriate discovery to give them a successful experience.

Lead management is one thing. Activities and how we approach that nurturing process is another untapped area. We all know, I think, anecdotally, calls are better than emails, but how does text fit into all of this? Especially as baby boomers age in, not only are baby boomers more digitally capable, but their sons and daughters are. IPhone users, they have inboxes that probably have 17, 000 emails in them.

 It’s a new way and a new person that we’re trying to interact with. So those two changes have also had a meaningful impact on the sales process.

Amber Bardon: I think this emphasis on data and using data for driving decisions is a big upcoming trend in the industry. And I think it’s really long overdue.

And we’ve done a couple of podcast episodes on data analytics tools. Can we just talk a little bit more about how can you incorporate that in your day to day? How can that data that you’re gathering through WelcomeHome integrate with other [00:08:00] aspects of the business?

And how do you see this just changing the way sales is done in the future?

Maggie Seybold: lots of different audiences and lots of different use cases for data and senior living. Starting at the sales director use case, WelcomeHome has tools to almost automatically log many of the activities that are happening as you go through the sales process.

Having those data points that are stored and able to be used as a reference is critical for continuing to refine your sales process. If you’re seeing, for Mary, who inquired two weeks ago, I did two calls. She toured. We did an ED follow up, had another call, and then she moved in three months later.

Collecting that journey data helps us figure out how to respond to each additional journey. That’s only one example. Even looking at things like lead source historical performance, we see in our data that aggregator leads typically take More work to earn a move in make sense is they’re super competitive.

They’re evaluating a ton of [00:09:00] options. It takes more days, more time, more deliberate effort. And then on the back end, their length of stay is half of the stay of a friends and family referral, which again, makes sense that person has an emotional, a personal tie to the community, whereas an aggregator has evaluated seven options.

And if they’re not immediately satisfied, they can just go check out the neighboring community, right? So having that information at your fingertips plays a huge role in how you do your day to day, especially at the sales director side. Similarly, as we like think up the chain. Regionals, for example, looking over five to 10 communities, really hard to identify what sales director actions are productive and coach across the team without that data visibility.

We try and make that easy for regionals by servicing that data for them so they don’t have to dig 10 hours in the CRM just to find, this process works. This is what increases conversions. Similarly, for admins, senior living is in a state today where [00:10:00] admins have a complicated job.

They have to report up, they have to report across, they have to communicate down. And how do we communicate the decisions that we’re making? We do it with data. So once again. Being able to support our admins with having the data presentation ready to go. So they don’t have to pull raw CSVs down from the CRM. Come up with

a chart in Google slides, that was incredibly annoying to make and spend a valuable 5 hours of their day doing that when they could be thinking strategically about the direction of their company, all different examples of how we try and support our customers across levels, but data is pivotal in every single one of them.

Amber Bardon: We’re talking a lot about data from the perspective of the providers. How do you think these changes in data will impact the customers? The residents and family members that are looking for options out there, potential living situations.

How do you see that evolving and changing? And especially when it comes to things like more virtual interactions versus that in person that [00:11:00] we’re typically seeing right now?

Maggie Seybold: It’s an awesome question. And ultimately, At the end of the day, everyone in this industry is trying to create a positive experience for the prospect and for the resident.

And again, to your point, data here is an enormous asset, particularly as we think about the initial journey that prospect goes through, I’ve tried to replicate it. It’s not fun doing the Googling, trying to sift through all the options available, signing up for a place for mom, getting 16 texts and five calls a day.

That’s an incredibly challenging thing to navigate. Even if you put aside the vulnerable component of my loved one needs care and the emotional complexity that exists in just that interaction where data helps the most is it allows the sales directors and this prospect to know each other better. If a prospect is trying to get education on what kind of care they need, or what kind of care mom and dad needs.

It’s important for the sales director to know that the prospect or the [00:12:00] influencer is in that stage of their journey. So ultimately we can support them with what they need. If someone doesn’t understand their budget, for example, and whether or not, their option set matches what they’re able to afford.

Again, another way that we can support prospects through their journey and reduce, or at least mitigate a little bit, some of that pain around trying to understand. What do I need? How quickly do I need it? Ultimately, a sales director is creating a relationship with a prospect or an influencer.

So the more data we have about each other, the better we can communicate and form a relationship that will lead to productive outcomes for both. Ultimately, we want the sales director to be able to drive an efficient move in. Do it, in a very caring and thoughtful way. And for the prospect, we want them to get the care they need quickly.

And so being able to know more about each other helps quite a bit with that.

Amber Bardon: It’s going to be a whole new world in the next couple of years.

Maggie Seybold: Yeah, especially with the pace. Technology today is evolving so rapidly. There’s so [00:13:00] much opportunity, especially with AI coming in and changing as quickly as it is things like even, on the CRM side, we’re always saying it doesn’t exist in the CRM.

It doesn’t exist at all. But at the end of the day, if we’re all honest with ourselves. Sales directors don’t want to fill out 15 to 25 fields about every prospect. So the more that we can take those calls, we can take those texts, we can auto populate the information that we need, and then provide suggestions on what to do and when making that job easier for a sales director is going to become a much more significant reality in the next few years.

A couple of months to a few years from now.

Amber Bardon: Yeah. And I think this really applies to all the enterprise applications that communities are using. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity just to optimize and be more efficient across the board. And a lot of software companies are not yet thinking that way.

So I think it’s really, refreshing to hear that WelcomeHome has built that into your tools.

Maggie Seybold: Particularly talking about AI and just [00:14:00] technology innovation in general, it can be really scary for senior living. And I think as you mentioned earlier, Amber, it has felt as if we’re behind for a long time.

And with this new wave of technology, there really shouldn’t be a fear that technology is going to replace a sales director or replace the role of a regional. In fact, it’ll be the regional that uses technology tools and data. The regional that uses AI is going to outperform peers that don’t.

As we, we develop these tools, it’s critical to the WelcomeHome team that we’re rolling out things that are going to be easily adopted. That we’re doing the upscale. So our users understand these tools and feel confident in their usage. And we build things that make sense that aren’t just shiny from a marketing standpoint.

We want to build things that actually work and create value. And so much of what we hear about in the technology space today is marketing. So being really thoughtful about partnering with our customers as we develop. The innovation at [00:15:00] WelcomeHome has been an enormous focus as well.

Amber Bardon: Maggie, are there any really specific tips, tricks, trends that you can share for people in the sales roles or for providers that you have come across using your system or using your data?

Maggie Seybold: There are plenty of very tactical tips and tricks and we should honestly get time and then another time and invite our customer, our VP of customer success, Emily, to come chat about this as well.

But there are so many tactical tools in WelcomeHome that make. An enormous difference in results, but when we think about things that apply to everybody, we’ve seen two major focus areas for our operators in terms of how they’re shifting their strategy on the sales director side for the past six or so months.

The 1st is on management of aggregator leads. So being more proactive about that partnership with aggregator partners. They send a lot of leads, not all of them convert. It makes all the sense in the world, but if we can better partner with our aggregator [00:16:00] touch points, we can work with them to say, these are the criteria that each prospect needs to meet.

They need to financially qualify. They need to be in this radius. Also only send me five a month. And then we’re going to do a retro on all five and how they performed to boost the conversions with those types of leads and have a better working relationship. It’s also worth noting as well, that not all communities Need all lead sources.

So taking a look at what lead sources make sense for my community context. I in a urban, highly competitive area where every aggregator lead that’s coming to me is evaluating 15 other options. That’s important context to keep in mind when you think about your inbound pipeline. Whereas if you’re the only memory care facility in 50 miles.

It’s good to get your name out there. So having more coming from an aggregator lead source starts to make a little bit more sense in that case. Lead management is 1 side. The other side is proactive strategy around activities and scoring prospects. When we [00:17:00] see those prospects come in, we know that every prospect has a different journey.

Every prospect has a different level of readiness to participate in the sales cycle. WelcomeHome has worked really hard over the past six months to update our scoring mechanisms and the product to base scoring, not only on what we know about a prospect, but how that prospect is working and engaging dynamically throughout the sales prospect process.

If you think about a typical independent living lead. That person could move in 30 days. That person could move in two years and their degree of involvement with us as a sales team will vary enormously. If you put yourself in the sales seat in that scenario, it’s really hard to know, should I call Mary or is she’s at home learning?

Is she communicating with her core influencers, we’ve updated scoring to make that process easier and make that allocation of time decision easier. So adoption of scoring is another huge tip and trick that we’ve been rolling out with our customers. And then, in terms of activities [00:18:00] planning again, anecdotally, we all know calls are.

Better than texts or emails, but it’s not just about the channel. It’s about the channel. It’s about the speed and it’s about the quality. So when we think about how particularly that 1st touch with the prospects, we want to have the most. Relationship centric conversation and outreach that we can. So getting the call done, getting the calls done within 20 minutes, making sure you’re prepped to talk about the right topics, given what you know about that prospect and what you can port in from your mark marketing automation, having that productive conversation, and then using that discovery to plan the tour in a way that is tailored to that specific prospect.

We have a planning activity and WelcomeHome. And in the data, we see that those that log planning time before a tour for more than half of their prospects. Average occupancy is at those communities is 93 percent versus the average, which is in the [00:19:00] eighties. Putting structures around how you approach the sales process is the future. It’s not random anymore.

Amber Bardon: I have definitely learned a lot on this podcast. Is there anything we haven’t talked about yet

you want to make sure our listeners know?

Maggie Seybold: I think now having been in this industry and working with customers for almost two years now, I think every time I work with a sales team or a sales leader on adopting data as part of their process, they’re surprised at how seamless it really is.

And so I would just say, as we go on this journey together, Lean on your vendors. We’re here to support you. We will get on the phone. We will walk through these tools. We will show you how to use them. And ultimately it is our product that you’re using and it’s our responsibility to make sure it’s well adopted and working for you.

So that would be my call to action. I know the data feels intimidating, but in today’s environment, adopting data is what separates the top performers from the bottom.

Amber Bardon: Data is definitely the future as we mentioned earlier. It’s just something we’re going to keep seeing more and more of.

 Our clients really [00:20:00] ask for this. So I think you’re in the right place for it.

Maggie Seybold: Thanks so much, Amber. This has been a great conversation.

Amber Bardon: Yeah. Maggie, can you tell us where

Maggie Seybold: can listeners find out more about WelcomeHome? Sure. So you can find us online, welcomehomesoftware.

com. We also do have a pretty active marketing team on LinkedIn as well. We’re consistently putting out data centric blog posts, interviews with our team members and customers, all actually really informative stuff and a fair amount of data backed benchmarks as well.

Amber Bardon: Thank you so much for joining me today.

Maggie Seybold: Thanks.

Amber Bardon: You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Amber Bardon: [00:00:00] Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon and today my guest is Maggie Seybold. She is the Vice President of Customer Insights at WelcomeHome. Welcome to the show, Maggie. 

Maggie Seybold:

Thank you, Amber. I'm excited to be here. 

Amber Bardon

So I'm sure all of our audience has heard of WelcomeHome before.

WelcomeHome is a little bit of a newer company. When they came on the market, I think they made a really big splash. I heard a rumor, I don't know if it's true, but I heard a rumor that Align Consolidated Enquire and Sherpa just to take on WelcomeHome because you've been such a big disruptor in the industry.

So for those of you who have not heard WelcomeHome, can you tell us a little bit about who you are? 

Maggie Seybold: Sure. WelcomeHome is a senior living sales and marketing focused CRM solution. We've been around since 2019 when our co founders started bubbling around the idea of putting a new user friendly data backed CRM out into the space.

Since [00:01:00] then we have grown from a team of two to a team of almost 50 now, and starting out with our one or two early thought partner operator partners. We're now well over 2000 communities on the platform. It's been a really exciting journey. I think in terms of how WelcomeHome differentiates itself.

It's a customer focused company. John, our co founder and Ryan from the start were focused on providing a solution to customers that was built by customers for customers. And spent almost a year and a half on the initial MVP of the product to get it right with some of our initial partners. And, since that time, They've looked for more new and innovative opportunities to serve customers.

Customer Insights is one of them. So I came on the team in 2022 as the data and analytics function for WelcomeHome. Our team has grown, but we're here mostly to take all that data that sits beneath the CRM and find ways to serve it back to customers in ways to help them improve [00:02:00] their results, serve it to the industry to, put information and performance data out there.

It's been a great journey, love this company, love the senior living space. It's been a wild ride. 

Amber Bardon: That's fantastic. So give me a little more insight into what specific problems was WelcomeHome coming in to solve or what opportunities to WelcomeHome see in this space that they didn't think was available already.

 Anyone who spends time in senior living sales and marketing will be familiar with the experience that sales director and the sales leadership goes through every day. The reality is senior living is a really tough job when you're regardless of whether you're thinking of the sales director doing that tactical work showing prospects around helping move them in or you're thinking about the sales leadership.

Maggie Seybold: This is not residential buildings that have a relatively straightforward process. This sales process is unique and that it's vulnerable. The time period varies enormously. There's a ton of work that goes into each individual [00:03:00] relationship between a sales director and a prospect.

And frankly, it's hard to keep track on all of that data. So hard that, the job was just made more difficult for a sales director on top of the additional emotional difficulty of selling senior living. So John and Ryan really went into this with the goal of taking all of that technical burden, taking all that redundant work and making it as easy as it can be for the sales director.

And then layering on top of that tools that make it easy for the leadership team to know what's going on, identify opportunities and act on those opportunities in a way that is data backed and informed. They multi pronged issue to attack. But the journey to get there has been great.

And we're very focused on. Even as we grow today, keeping our customers in the loop, even engaging with prospects on where do we need to improve what gaps exist in the product that we should be filling. And as like AI is an incredibly interesting space right now. We're having active conversations about innovation in that space [00:04:00] too.

So it's been an ongoing process and very customer informed. 

Amber Bardon: Maggie, let's pivot a little bit and talk about what's going on in the industry, what's going on in the space, what's happening with sales today and senior living.

Can you tell me a little bit about what are some of the major trends that you're seeing in the industry today, and maybe some of your biggest takeaways from the first quarter of this year? 

Maggie Seybold: Sure. What I love about customer insights at WelcomeHome is we have an enormous amount of data to sift through and then work through trends and insights with our customers, as we all know, in the industry, COVID was an extremely challenging time.

And while COVID was meeting our shores in 2020 and 2021, there were some trends going on underneath the surface that we are still working on solving today. So things that come to mind. 1st, digital adoption as a sales outreach method for prospects exploded. We saw the outreach through digital leads expand massively and digital leads account for more than 80 percent of inbound today.

[00:05:00] That's a very different sales process than working with referral partners like doctors or family and friends program. So there are many operators today that are still wrapping their heads around the appropriate strategy for dealing with different types of digital leads. An online website lead looks different than an aggregator lead and how do you, Manage those 2 different prospects.

That's 1 huge impact that we're still working through today. Another from coven. Is that we were stuck inside, so referral outreach took a backseat for 2 years and now we are as an industry relearning that muscle a bit and trying to. Be a little bit more efficient about it. Understand. Where should I be spending my time if I'm trying to decide between getting in touch with the 15 new online leads that have hit my inbox in the last half an hour or putting aside a four hour block to go get lunch with a couple different referral partners who may or may not have been productive in the past.

So really finding that balance on lead management is another huge [00:06:00] focus that we see in industry as well. 

Amber Bardon: I'm curious with all these changes with COVID and some of the takeaways you just mentioned, how do you see the sales process changing and what are some opportunities for improvement? Sure. So 

Maggie Seybold: in terms of how the sales process is changing, And I might be biased because I'm on the data side, but we are now seeing a much higher burden of proof on how sales directors make decisions on how they spend their time because that lead volume kicked back so aggressively after COVID

we were having such an influx of leads that it became more of a challenge to decide how to allocate your time to maximize the number of move ins that you're getting in your specific community so that burden to make well informed choices, data backed choices has been a significant change in the sales process.

Not only is it focused on the lead management side of things, so really understanding how does an aggregator lead behave? How quickly do I need to get in touch with that [00:07:00] person? How many touches do I need to complete so they're comfortable coming in for a tour, and I have the appropriate discovery to give them a successful experience.

Lead management is one thing. Activities and how we approach that nurturing process is another untapped area. We all know, I think, anecdotally, calls are better than emails, but how does text fit into all of this? Especially as baby boomers age in, not only are baby boomers more digitally capable, but their sons and daughters are. IPhone users, they have inboxes that probably have 17, 000 emails in them.

 It's a new way and a new person that we're trying to interact with. So those two changes have also had a meaningful impact on the sales process. 

Amber Bardon: I think this emphasis on data and using data for driving decisions is a big upcoming trend in the industry. And I think it's really long overdue.

And we've done a couple of podcast episodes on data analytics tools. Can we just talk a little bit more about how can you incorporate that in your day to day? How can that data that you're gathering through WelcomeHome integrate with other [00:08:00] aspects of the business?

And how do you see this just changing the way sales is done in the future? 

Maggie Seybold: lots of different audiences and lots of different use cases for data and senior living. Starting at the sales director use case, WelcomeHome has tools to almost automatically log many of the activities that are happening as you go through the sales process.

Having those data points that are stored and able to be used as a reference is critical for continuing to refine your sales process. If you're seeing, for Mary, who inquired two weeks ago, I did two calls. She toured. We did an ED follow up, had another call, and then she moved in three months later.

Collecting that journey data helps us figure out how to respond to each additional journey. That's only one example. Even looking at things like lead source historical performance, we see in our data that aggregator leads typically take More work to earn a move in make sense is they're super competitive.

They're evaluating a ton of [00:09:00] options. It takes more days, more time, more deliberate effort. And then on the back end, their length of stay is half of the stay of a friends and family referral, which again, makes sense that person has an emotional, a personal tie to the community, whereas an aggregator has evaluated seven options.

And if they're not immediately satisfied, they can just go check out the neighboring community, right? So having that information at your fingertips plays a huge role in how you do your day to day, especially at the sales director side. Similarly, as we like think up the chain. Regionals, for example, looking over five to 10 communities, really hard to identify what sales director actions are productive and coach across the team without that data visibility.

We try and make that easy for regionals by servicing that data for them so they don't have to dig 10 hours in the CRM just to find, this process works. This is what increases conversions. Similarly, for admins, senior living is in a state today where [00:10:00] admins have a complicated job.

They have to report up, they have to report across, they have to communicate down. And how do we communicate the decisions that we're making? We do it with data. So once again. Being able to support our admins with having the data presentation ready to go. So they don't have to pull raw CSVs down from the CRM. Come up with

a chart in Google slides, that was incredibly annoying to make and spend a valuable 5 hours of their day doing that when they could be thinking strategically about the direction of their company, all different examples of how we try and support our customers across levels, but data is pivotal in every single one of them.

Amber Bardon: We're talking a lot about data from the perspective of the providers. How do you think these changes in data will impact the customers? The residents and family members that are looking for options out there, potential living situations.

How do you see that evolving and changing? And especially when it comes to things like more virtual interactions versus that in person that [00:11:00] we're typically seeing right now? 

Maggie Seybold: It's an awesome question. And ultimately, At the end of the day, everyone in this industry is trying to create a positive experience for the prospect and for the resident.

And again, to your point, data here is an enormous asset, particularly as we think about the initial journey that prospect goes through, I've tried to replicate it. It's not fun doing the Googling, trying to sift through all the options available, signing up for a place for mom, getting 16 texts and five calls a day.

That's an incredibly challenging thing to navigate. Even if you put aside the vulnerable component of my loved one needs care and the emotional complexity that exists in just that interaction where data helps the most is it allows the sales directors and this prospect to know each other better. If a prospect is trying to get education on what kind of care they need, or what kind of care mom and dad needs.

It's important for the sales director to know that the prospect or the [00:12:00] influencer is in that stage of their journey. So ultimately we can support them with what they need. If someone doesn't understand their budget, for example, and whether or not, their option set matches what they're able to afford.

Again, another way that we can support prospects through their journey and reduce, or at least mitigate a little bit, some of that pain around trying to understand. What do I need? How quickly do I need it? Ultimately, a sales director is creating a relationship with a prospect or an influencer.

So the more data we have about each other, the better we can communicate and form a relationship that will lead to productive outcomes for both. Ultimately, we want the sales director to be able to drive an efficient move in. Do it, in a very caring and thoughtful way. And for the prospect, we want them to get the care they need quickly.

And so being able to know more about each other helps quite a bit with that. 

Amber Bardon: It's going to be a whole new world in the next couple of years. 

Maggie Seybold: Yeah, especially with the pace. Technology today is evolving so rapidly. There's so [00:13:00] much opportunity, especially with AI coming in and changing as quickly as it is things like even, on the CRM side, we're always saying it doesn't exist in the CRM.

It doesn't exist at all. But at the end of the day, if we're all honest with ourselves. Sales directors don't want to fill out 15 to 25 fields about every prospect. So the more that we can take those calls, we can take those texts, we can auto populate the information that we need, and then provide suggestions on what to do and when making that job easier for a sales director is going to become a much more significant reality in the next few years.

A couple of months to a few years from now. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah. And I think this really applies to all the enterprise applications that communities are using. So I think there's a lot of opportunity just to optimize and be more efficient across the board. And a lot of software companies are not yet thinking that way.

So I think it's really, refreshing to hear that WelcomeHome has built that into your tools. 

Maggie Seybold: Particularly talking about AI and just [00:14:00] technology innovation in general, it can be really scary for senior living. And I think as you mentioned earlier, Amber, it has felt as if we're behind for a long time.

And with this new wave of technology, there really shouldn't be a fear that technology is going to replace a sales director or replace the role of a regional. In fact, it'll be the regional that uses technology tools and data. The regional that uses AI is going to outperform peers that don't.

As we, we develop these tools, it's critical to the WelcomeHome team that we're rolling out things that are going to be easily adopted. That we're doing the upscale. So our users understand these tools and feel confident in their usage. And we build things that make sense that aren't just shiny from a marketing standpoint.

We want to build things that actually work and create value. And so much of what we hear about in the technology space today is marketing. So being really thoughtful about partnering with our customers as we develop. The innovation at [00:15:00] WelcomeHome has been an enormous focus as well. 

Amber Bardon: Maggie, are there any really specific tips, tricks, trends that you can share for people in the sales roles or for providers that you have come across using your system or using your data? 

Maggie Seybold: There are plenty of very tactical tips and tricks and we should honestly get time and then another time and invite our customer, our VP of customer success, Emily, to come chat about this as well.

But there are so many tactical tools in WelcomeHome that make. An enormous difference in results, but when we think about things that apply to everybody, we've seen two major focus areas for our operators in terms of how they're shifting their strategy on the sales director side for the past six or so months.

The 1st is on management of aggregator leads. So being more proactive about that partnership with aggregator partners. They send a lot of leads, not all of them convert. It makes all the sense in the world, but if we can better partner with our aggregator [00:16:00] touch points, we can work with them to say, these are the criteria that each prospect needs to meet.

They need to financially qualify. They need to be in this radius. Also only send me five a month. And then we're going to do a retro on all five and how they performed to boost the conversions with those types of leads and have a better working relationship. It's also worth noting as well, that not all communities Need all lead sources.

So taking a look at what lead sources make sense for my community context. I in a urban, highly competitive area where every aggregator lead that's coming to me is evaluating 15 other options. That's important context to keep in mind when you think about your inbound pipeline. Whereas if you're the only memory care facility in 50 miles.

It's good to get your name out there. So having more coming from an aggregator lead source starts to make a little bit more sense in that case. Lead management is 1 side. The other side is proactive strategy around activities and scoring prospects. When we [00:17:00] see those prospects come in, we know that every prospect has a different journey.

Every prospect has a different level of readiness to participate in the sales cycle. WelcomeHome has worked really hard over the past six months to update our scoring mechanisms and the product to base scoring, not only on what we know about a prospect, but how that prospect is working and engaging dynamically throughout the sales prospect process.

If you think about a typical independent living lead. That person could move in 30 days. That person could move in two years and their degree of involvement with us as a sales team will vary enormously. If you put yourself in the sales seat in that scenario, it's really hard to know, should I call Mary or is she's at home learning?

Is she communicating with her core influencers, we've updated scoring to make that process easier and make that allocation of time decision easier. So adoption of scoring is another huge tip and trick that we've been rolling out with our customers. And then, in terms of activities [00:18:00] planning again, anecdotally, we all know calls are.

Better than texts or emails, but it's not just about the channel. It's about the channel. It's about the speed and it's about the quality. So when we think about how particularly that 1st touch with the prospects, we want to have the most. Relationship centric conversation and outreach that we can. So getting the call done, getting the calls done within 20 minutes, making sure you're prepped to talk about the right topics, given what you know about that prospect and what you can port in from your mark marketing automation, having that productive conversation, and then using that discovery to plan the tour in a way that is tailored to that specific prospect.

We have a planning activity and WelcomeHome. And in the data, we see that those that log planning time before a tour for more than half of their prospects. Average occupancy is at those communities is 93 percent versus the average, which is in the [00:19:00] eighties. Putting structures around how you approach the sales process is the future. It's not random anymore. 

Amber Bardon: I have definitely learned a lot on this podcast. Is there anything we haven't talked about yet

you want to make sure our listeners know? 

Maggie Seybold: I think now having been in this industry and working with customers for almost two years now, I think every time I work with a sales team or a sales leader on adopting data as part of their process, they're surprised at how seamless it really is.

And so I would just say, as we go on this journey together, Lean on your vendors. We're here to support you. We will get on the phone. We will walk through these tools. We will show you how to use them. And ultimately it is our product that you're using and it's our responsibility to make sure it's well adopted and working for you.

So that would be my call to action. I know the data feels intimidating, but in today's environment, adopting data is what separates the top performers from the bottom. 

Amber Bardon: Data is definitely the future as we mentioned earlier. It's just something we're going to keep seeing more and more of.

 Our clients really [00:20:00] ask for this. So I think you're in the right place for it. 

Maggie Seybold: Thanks so much, Amber. This has been a great conversation. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah. Maggie, can you tell us where 

Maggie Seybold: can listeners find out more about WelcomeHome? Sure. So you can find us online, welcomehomesoftware.

com. We also do have a pretty active marketing team on LinkedIn as well. We're consistently putting out data centric blog posts, interviews with our team members and customers, all actually really informative stuff and a fair amount of data backed benchmarks as well. 

Amber Bardon: Thank you so much for joining me today. 

Maggie Seybold: Thanks. 

Amber Bardon: You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Amanda Knapp: Today. We have a very special episode for you. I'm Amanda Knapp and I am the marketing coordinator at Parasol Alliance. If you didn't already know, we offer many different educational materials, white papers, blogs, case studies. We also have a thought leadership webinar series where we spend an hour with four industry experts who share technology solutions for the senior living industry.

Recently, we published a white paper on how to solve staffing issues with technology. And we have Kati Jones today, our Director of Client Relationships,here to tell l us more about it. Thanks for being on the show today, Kati. 

Kati, what is the main purpose of this white paper? And what are the essential points to remember? 

Kati Jones: Staffing challenges have been an ongoing issue in the senior living industry. While staffing has improved post pandemic, staffing still remains a big challenge for most [00:01:00] aging services communities. For the staffing challenges white paper, we surveyed over 5, 600 end users from the senior living communities.

We have the pleasure of serving to better understand the staffing challenges They're experiencing and the unique methods they're using to tackle their own staffing obstacles by sharing this data and its technology solutions featured in the white paper. We hope to help senior living communities reduce or even eliminate staffing challenges at their communities. 

Amanda Knapp: What positions did you find were the most difficult to hire for and what were the recruiting challenges that the communities were facing?

Kati Jones: Of the communities we serve and surveyed, 44 percent reported they have the most difficulty hiring CNAs for their communities. And then trailing close behind that, 31 percent of the communities reported nurses were the most challenging hire for them. Over half of [00:02:00] these aging services providers stated recruiting as the biggest staffing challenge they have at their senior living community.

 47% of these communities stated finding qualified candidates was the biggest recruiting challenge for them and also not having enough people available to fill those positions was the second most common recruiting challenge reported.

Amanda Knapp: Wow, that's some interesting data. What recruiting methods were the communities using? 

Kati Jones: So indeed was used by more than half of the communities with job fairs and applicant tracking systems being used by less than a quarter of the communities.

 Direct hiring was the preferred method use when it came to filling these positions. But some communities did use other supplemental hiring methods. Staffing agencies were used in a third of the communities and only 6 [00:03:00] percent of these communities stated they used employee referrals as a method for hiring, which is interesting because there are many communities who.

have referral based programs that they can use to hire. Of the communities using employee referrals as a hiring method, more than half were offering a referral bonus.

31 percent offered sign on bonuses and 13 percent offered loyalty bonuses. 

Amanda Knapp: Yeah, I was also shocked when I heard the only 6 percent of the communities stated that they were using employee referrals because I always felt like that was such a huge resource.

Can you dive more into the community's turnover rates and if they were using any sort of retention and engagement strategy? 

Kati Jones: Almost half of the community stated that they had a turnover rate between 60 and 70 percent, while almost 25 percent said that they have a turnover rate of more than [00:04:00] 81 percent.

So, As you can see, turnover is very high in these communities and some communities, um, do perform exit interviews when their staff members leave and they found that compensation was the number one reason for more than half of the staff leaving. Almost a 3rd of the communities reported using spirit days as a unique employee retention and engagement strategy.

But a majority of these communities did not have any sort of employee retention or engagement strategy. As far as the employee engagement tools they were using, almost all of the communities were using surveys to gain feedback from their staff. And only 12 percent of the communities are currently using a workforce management system.

Amanda Knapp: When you were conducting the surveys, did you find any unique [00:05:00] approaches that people were using to overcome the staffing obstacles? 

Kati Jones: The communities that had a retention rate of over 70 percent had a lot of similarities.

They all offered recruiting incentives, more than half offered sign on bonuses. All communities increased their wages by more than 2 percent across the board, 2 3rds of the communities were using an engagement tool and many were using an employee engagement app that was designed specifically for senior living. 

Amanda Knapp: Wow, that's really interesting. We recently featured an employee engagement app on another Raising Tech podcast episode, and they mentioned that senior living communities using their app actually increase their retention by 31%. Can you talk specifically about how technology is helping with the recruiting and staffing solutions?

Kati Jones: Currently there is a recruiting app available that will automatically post on job boards and social [00:06:00] media when positions become available, it will also send automatic updates and reminders to keep the applicants engaged and even perform automatic background checks

for potential candidates. There is also an app available that offers behavioral assessments for potential candidates and a private database for employees to save the applicants information for future job openings. Another app available that's mentioned in the white paper is like an Uber for senior living communities.

In that, pre qualified candidates can pick up open shifts on a as needed basis. This comes in handy for call ins and reducing the amount of overtime for staff to help avoid staff burnout. 

Amanda Knapp: Are there any other ways that technology is helping with staff burnout?

Because I know that is huge in the industry right now. 

Kati Jones: Yeah, absolutely. There is a wellness monitoring [00:07:00] technology that uses biosensors to actually track a resident's daily health. These solutions include wearables and innovative, if you can believe it or not, toilet technology that detects irregularities and it alerts the senior living communities medical team when these changes and residents health have happened. So this actually catches infections before the resident.

Gets worse, and it saves time for the resident when it comes to recovery. A big one that we're hearing from every angle in senior living is robots.

So dining robots have been known to give staff more one on one time with residents. That actually improves employee engagement and helps with staff burnout because those robots are able to do the menial tasks. That way the staff can spend more time communicating with the residents and bonding with them.

And we know that [00:08:00] greater experiences with those residents have a better outlook for the entire senior living community. We also found that dining robots have allowed some senior living communities to cut about two full time positions. This is significant in helping reduce the strain that is caused by employed staff when You either can't fill open positions in the dining area or say you have someone that's out sick.

We also found research that cleaning robots like vacuum and floor scrubbing robots actually clean the baseboards can save up to 10 hours per day in housekeeping. And the good thing about that is you don't have to worry about robots calling in sick. 

Amanda Knapp: Wow. I wish I had a robot to clean my baseboards in my house.

Is there anything else we haven't discussed that you would like to add today? 

Kati Jones: Yeah. So many communities are faced with high turnover rates [00:09:00] and burnout staff and technology can really help alleviate These issues in every way, leaving the residents and staff happier and all together a better community. 

Amanda Knapp: I couldn't agree more.

Thanks for joining us today. 

Kati Jones: Thank you. Amanda. 

Amanda Knapp: You can check out our white paper for more information and learn about the different solutions that we mentioned today. To hear more top technology trends in senior living, you can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast.

com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoyed Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. As always, thank you for listening.

Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. Today, our guest is Mary Greer from Engrain.

Engrain’s suite of tech products is improving the sales process of senior living communities with innovation, integration, accessibility, and they have the results to prove it. Communities all over the country are using TouchTour, TouchTour for iPad and Sitemap, not only to showcase amenities and lifestyle, but to convert prospective residents to residents.

Mary, welcome to the show.

Hi, thank you for having me.

So Mary, tell me everything about you. Where were you before you came to Engrain? How did you come to Engrain? What’s your role there?

 I came over to the Engrain team in 2016. I had been a client for many years and both the multifamily sector and also in senior living.

So having utilized the products over the years, it was a smooth transition to come over to the Engrain team. And when I did part of my experience in the past was in senior [00:01:00] living and being very passionate about this market, I felt that we had a tremendous amount of growth opportunities that we could add more value into the senior living market.

So we’ve expanded and grown over the last almost 8 years serve close to 600 communities. we work with some of the top providers and consultants within the industry. Some of our clients include LCS, Graystone and Greenbrier are wonderful advocates of ours.

We work with Sunrise Senior and Atria and many others that put their trust in us to provide some really wonderful technology sales solutions for their teams.

Congratulations. It’s a lot of growth.

So high level explain what is Engrain? How does it work? Give us all the details on that.

So the Engrain umbrella encompasses interactive solutions and what we call data visualization tools. In layman’s terms we have a couple of different products here. It’s our TouchTour solution, which ultimately was probably the 1st that drove heavily into the senior living market, given the focus on that in person sales experience within the communities TouchTours and interactive touch screen, sales enablement tool that lives in discovery rooms and sales centers.

And it gives a counselor essentially everything they need at their fingertips to paint a picture of lifestyle within a community, give everyone all of the aspects of what sets them apart and makes them special and take them through the full discovery journey in identifying the best option for that perspective, resident, or in many cases, it’s an adult child

that’s helping a family member with this choice. And so we help with TouchTour and narrowing down that search to find the right home and create a sense of urgency as well as they’re working through this decision and making sure that, yes, it’s a big decision for them, but helping them.

In feeling confident in that decision that it is the right move for them. So that’s our TouchTour solution. We have it in an iPad format as well for a wonderful walking tour compliment. I always say it replaces that big binder of floor plans. If they’re walking a community that can have everything that TouchTour offers essentially in the palm of their hands.

And then we offer interactive community maps. That’s our site map product, which is a solution that is designed to add a community map to any website. These can also be utilized on site by on site sales team members, and it’s a component of our TouchTour product as well. But the site map is ultimately, a great way to give a prospective resident some context, some additional context on the website as to the community or the campus as a whole. So where are the amenities that they would participate in? What homes are available that they would be interested in exploring and ultimately getting them to schedule that appointment and come in the door.

So it’s great for that empowerment for perspective residents and their families to do a little bit of digging, which they want to do ahead of visiting the community and giving them enough of a taste to entice them to come in. So with that product, we are able to explore whatever level of transparency our clients are comfortable with. Some show inventory on the map, so they will show everything that’s available or reserved and even pricing details while others maybe tease information and don’t necessarily show the inventory or they may not show any pricing detail and they want that

customer to engage with a counselor before exposing that. So that’s something that we can work through with each community and identify what the best representation of them would be within the sitemap.

That sounds really interesting. I know that’s something a lot of our clients have asked for us. It’s really great to know there’s a product out there. So Mary, I think when it comes to senior living sales and marketing, we’ve seen so much change in the way this is handled. We’ve gone from a lot of referral based and just being in the community to really this huge shift. A lot of sales and marketing is a lot more website based and SEO and driven more by possibly the families.

And I think this has been a slow shift for the industry in a lot of ways. A lot of communities still rely on relationships. So from your perspective, what would you say over the last five to 10 years? How have you and Engrain see this technology evolve as it relates to the sales and marketing process?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think that a big shift happened ultimately one that we don’t like to think fondly of in other ways the shift with everything as it relates to COVID. I think that was a big impact on the communities in general, and the mindset of this exploring of more technology and more innovative ways that they can sell that

extend outside of sitting at that table and having that in depth conversation within the community. I think that it was forced upon communities to have to go outside the box of the traditional way of And in doing so I think communities were really tested in that. They had to see what was out there.

And I will say that clients that had already taken that step towards technology and were using our solutions were able to pivot easier because they already had the TouchTour, for instance, which could be shared via zoom. So they were then hosting zoom meetings and remote consultations with perspective residents.

They didn’t see as much of a halt in many cases. We’re serving new developments or expansion projects where they are under a very specific deadline to hit those conversion goals. And fortunately, they didn’t have to pause in many ways that other communities did because they weren’t necessarily prepared or didn’t have the tools to be able to consult remotely.

So I think a lot of it shifted with that and ultimately hasn’t really changed a lot. We see a lot of communities still hosting a lot of remote meetings, having family members in all different areas of the country. You have to be To accommodate the needs and not expect someone to fly in for a visit.

I think technology has shifted a lot because of those reasons. And then from our perspective, if you had asked me 5 or 6 years ago about transparency and our interactive maps on the website, for instance, I would have said. Clients are very hesitant. Our clients don’t feel comfortable in putting on the website any pricing details, especially not their inventory.

They’re even hesitant to show floor plans sometimes. I would have said that 5 years ago. Today, we are seeing a massive shift in this mindset of everyone understanding that today’s consumer, seniors included in that, they expect transparency. They expect immediate gratification and being able to get the information that they want and need.

Anytime they want it and whether, an adult child is using her few minutes at the end of the night to watch Netflix and search for a place for her mom. She should be able to find out the information she needs without necessarily calling a sales counselor during business hours when she doesn’t have time to step away.

And a senior in that regard also wants to. Dig in and do their research themselves and they’re getting more comfortable being online and going website to website and I’m hearing from industry leaders that they are seeing a significant increase in qualified leads and activity when they expose a bit more.

And they’re seeing far less bounce rates when people are frustrated by not getting the information that they’re looking for when they need it. So that, I think, is the biggest shift here is going more flexible in the touring and discovery conversation process, but then also that exposure of more information online earlier.

COVID definitely had a major impact with that. But like you said, this goes back to even further than that as communities make that transition from in person tours and having that in person relationship. So like you’re saying, where you can browse and buy anything on the internet these days and Engrain seems like a really vital tool to help with that transition.

Tell me a little bit about how does Engrain work with the other sales and marketing technology out there such as CRMs and I’m really interested actually to know do you also integrate with resident engagement apps because I’m thinking about that as you’re talking lot of resident engagement apps are used for prospects or maybe some of the way finding with the map.

So can you talk a little bit about that?

 We want to partner with anyone who will partner with us. Ultimately, we play nicely in the sandbox with everyone. So we encourage vendor partnership in terms of content sharing is 1 good way that many communities are investing in a lot of virtual content, like virtual tours and even in, of course expansions or new developments they’re engaging with wonderful renders that are creating these conceptual images and videos.

That’s a perfect compliment for our software because we ultimately can add all of that into our experiences. And so that collaboration is wonderful. For communities that are making that investment we can utilize that even having rendered views from the apartments, goes the long way when you’re trying to paint the vision of someone’s life in a community that doesn’t exist yet.

It’s not tangible. So that’s something we would encourage is, we would love to work with those providers to enhance our product, of course, and the customer experience, and then CRM integrations. We work with the majority of the major CRMs within the industry. So from an inventory management perspective, it makes it really seamless for on site teams because there’s no extra step for them.

We can integrate with WelcomeHome and Align, Yardi. Even Salesforce integrations have been possible in the past. So we’re willing to connect those dots through integrations to really make it a wonderful and seamless process. We also have an exciting feature in our TouchTour product that allows the sales counselor to actually take a reservation right from the screen.

So it holds that apartment off the market. It creates excitement, of course, when they decide on that apartment, they’re able to commit to it right there allows them to take a little bit more ownership. I think of the decision and then we, of course, again, true up with that CRM to make sure their inventory

all connected. And that main source of truth is the CRM. In terms of resident engagement apps, we again are very open to collaborating with different vendors and different providers in the industry. We see a lot of CTAs. Also utilized or a call to action buttons on our sitemap product that would call out that chatbot would call out whatever that communication that they’re initially having there, even integrating something like HeartLegacy, where you’ve got that communication back and forth, we’re more than happy to partner and champion those relationships.

That sounds really great. So if a community is interested in implementing and Engrain, what do they need to know? What type of technology do they have to have in place? What are the prerequisites? What would they need to do to get set up with the system?

Sure. So first of all, they need to contact us for a demo, because we would definitely want to take them through all of the different nuances of the product.

But in terms of getting it set up. The most important things are we need some kind of level plan map. So we create, we can stylize them. We can make them look pretty, but we need some kind of either architectural files, something that shows where the communities are located. Because that’s the most important part of what we do here is that mapping visualization piece to show where each home lives, and then the floor plans that are attributed to that home.

We can make them look nice and stylized and add additional context for amenities and things like that. And then we would need the floor plans, of course, that reside in those homes. And then any extra content is gravy, right? As I mentioned, if we have virtual content views from the windows, finish packages.

All of that can be utilized to only enhance the products more and help with that visualization of each home and what sets it apart. And then in the TouchTour solution, we often want to speak to really that provider, who they are, what makes them special, what Is really a major component of someone moving into a community is understanding what type of service and care they’re going to experience.

So [00:15:00] we also play very heavily on that as a big portion of the TouchTour experience and setting the stage for expectations that future resident would have moving into the community. Photos, videos, all of that can be added for extra. And we even focus on the surrounding area. So local points of interest can be highlighted too.

So you can literally dive into all aspects of that property and the attributes.

Yeah, that’s such a great idea, especially if it’s a family member who lives in a different area and they’re not that familiar. I can see how that would be really helpful. So Mary, earlier we spoke about where have we been coming from, how things have changed in the past five to 10 years.

Now I really want to get your insight on what does the future hold? Where do you see the industry going in the next five to 10 years as it relates to sales and marketing?

Sure I think we’re going to definitely stay on the tech train. I think that nothing about that is going to change. If anything, it’s just going to grow.

Their communities are already adding more technology across all aspects of their communities and their campuses from robots delivering drinks to, of course, interaction and resident engagement with technology as well, and communicating with those family members. I don’t think that that is

going to go away. If anything, it is going to just grow more and, we’re going to continue on our end to build in features and update our solutions to make sure we are. Ahead of the curve of anything that we anticipate a counselor might need in their conversation that a resident or future resident may want in their search as they’re utilizing our solutions.

I think that it’s just trying to stay ahead of the expectations that are coming our way because we have the boomers. That are coming strong and we have to make sure that the communities are prepared for that as they’re considering the experience that they have from the moment they engage with their website.

All the way through the end of their time, really within a community, and they need to think about how they can impact their life and make things easier and technology. While we put up a fight, sometimes, you It’s intended to do that. So I think that we’re just going to see more and more growth there.

As we will with everyone’s life, right? We’re very spoiled right now, but we’re going to get even more spoiled as time goes on.

Yeah. Along those lines, do you imagine a time in which someone in another part of the country could actually make a deposit and select their apartment using your technology without ever speaking to somebody at the site.

In fact, they do it all day, every day right now in multifamily. So the multifamily market is ultimately where senior will go at some point, not anytime soon. It’s not going to be an immediate thing and it won’t be all aspects of senior living for a while, but active adult and 55 plus. They are basically compare them to, of course, your 20-30 somethings again, they’re wanting fast, efficient, easy to use.

So I don’t think that there is anything stopping an active adult or 55 plus potential resident from going online and leasing online today. I really don’t. We work with providers. Graystar is 1 of the leading providers in that 55 plus market. We work with Sparrow. We work with many others that are already

opening that door for them to go ahead and apply. We have integrations with application and CRMs right now in the multifamily space where to your point, they just go on, they pick their apartment, they don’t talk to a soul, they find what they’re looking for, and then they drive their moving truck on up in a few weeks.

So I definitely think that is on the horizon, depending on the segment of the senior market, it’ll come sooner rather than later, but it’s definitely going to come at some point in the future for everyone.

I imagine that is a little bit scary for some of our listeners who really like that personal touch

having come from the industry, it’s scary for me too.

Because my favorite thing was sitting across from the perspective resident. I loved that conversation and that discovery. And I do think it is an intimate conversation. So that said, I tread lightly saying that will come eventually, but people still want the personal touch, and that’s not going to change in the senior space at all.

We can still have a personal touch, but incorporate technology. So I was still able to have an in depth discovery, connect with people, but have my screen there to support me. It didn’t do my job for me. It was just there to tap and touch through photos and let them touch it and let them move around the images and add their furniture to their floor plan.

Like it was fun and it was engaging for them and I didn’t lose that connection. When you spread floor plans across your table, you may lose a connection, but I didn’t. I had them put their furniture in it. So it’s a different way of looking at it again. It’s not scary. It’s good.

Yeah, I agree. I think it’s exciting at the same time for sure to think about how we can improve the process and capture a market that we can’t today because of needing that personal connection.

So definitely something to look forward to and see how that evolves. I know. Mary, is there anything that you haven’t told us yet about Engrain that you think our listeners should know?

I think that we offer these tools that I’ve talked about today are really those sales enablement tools.

They’re the ones that are more prospect facing that are strictly to the sales side of things. We also offer data visualization from an asset management perspective as well. So if someone were to explore our website in more detail, you would see that we can also take data and put it into a map format to provide great context.

As to really anything you would want to factor in location into a property kind of visualization tools. So where is occupancy higher? Where is it lower? What views? Maybe are we missing? Should we have an amenity premium on that 1? because those are all leased up very fast, or they’ve sold very quickly.

So we can provide really great data insights within our visualization tools that far extend beyond the in person or digital world of the prospect journey, but also aiding those on site or asset managers and those kind of coaching and managing their teams to help facilitate all of that and fill up the buildings faster, of course, is always our goal or keep them occupied, retain that occupancy.

 Thank you so much for coming on our podcast. And please let our listeners know, where can they find you? Where can they get more information?

Yeah, you can visit our website at Engrain.com. That’s E N G R A I N dot com. It’s not bread. So if you find a bread website, that’s not us. We’re data visualization. So, you can look at Engrain.Com and there are demo links scheduled on there. You can also reach out directly to me if you’d like, and I can facilitate that conversation.

So Mary@Engrain.Com and you’ll reach me and I can connect you and schedule a call to talk through individual needs and what someone might be interested in exploring with us.

Mary, thank you so much for joining. It was so nice to meet you. And for those of you who did not catch our last thought leadership series, it’s also on YouTube and you can hear more from Mary on that as well.

Thank you so much for having me today.

You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Barden. And today my guest is Jeff McSpadden. Jeff is the co founder and CEO at Composure, which is an evidence based digital audio company that delivers custom soundscapes for senior living communities to improve sleep and drive health outcomes for older adults living with dementia.

Thanks Jeff, I am so excited to have you on the podcast today. As we were chatting a little bit before we started recording, we've had a couple of other entrepreneurs in the space. You've done some other things with environmental around lights and flooring. And I think sound and the impact sound can have, I'm really interested to learn about today.

So welcome to the show. 

Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Good to meet you and glad we can dive in. 

So tell me a little bit more about your story. So you're an entrepreneur and you have a background as a musician. So tell me about the journey that led you to  starting composure and where you're at today.

Jeff McSpadden: Yeah before I'll go in reverse order a little bit, just before starting the company I worked for about 15 plus years as a composer writing original music for film, TV and advertising. And there's a kind of an interesting phenomenon that generally gets taken for granted when you're watching a movie or TV show, and it's that sound element is actually doing quite a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of engaging you emotionally queuing you in lots of different ways that are all very purposeful to the story.

Sound is a very powerful force. It changes our reality. It influences how we behave and how we feel. And to me, I got really interested in how we can leverage that power outside of the realm of entertainment and take it into the realm of health care.

And that really was the genesis of me wanting to start a company in this space and really see how we can impact some real change. Prior to that, I worked as a performing musician for a number of years. I'm a recovering trumpeter. That was my full time thing for quite a while starting at the age of 16.

But the thing about playing on stage is understanding how connecting with people through music is really done and the difference between playing at somebody or performing music at someone and getting them involved and if they are involved, all of a sudden, the entire room just elevates.

The entire venue, it goes from an ordinary setting to an extraordinary experience. So it's a really powerful force that I've learned a lot about and I just live and breathe and everything that comes through the ears, if you will.

Amber Bardon: Tell me a little bit more about how did you take that experience and that knowledge and connect it to healthcare and then specifically senior living.

Jeff McSpadden: It's funny. I think one of the first things I started really examining is This concept of what I did in  media, which was essentially film scoring, right? if you understand the concept, it's creating purposefully and intentionally creating music experiences to support a storyline or to tell the, the the parts of a story that aren't being done on screen and and by actors and the concept of scoring a story Felt like it could also make the leap into functionality in our lives.

Like, how could we score certain experiences in our life? Solving for chronic sleep issues amongst a population living with Alzheimer's and dementia. There's a lot of challenges there. If the thesis was, if we could properly kind of score that experience from awareness of bedtime all the way to waking up refreshed in the morning we might be on to something, right?

And we wanted to give that a try and actually approached it through a clinical research trial first that that came out with some pretty inspiring results.

Amber Bardon: So let's talk a little bit more about how does this work? So how do you take sound and incorporate it into a resident at a senior communities routine. And then what is the impact that you've seen music have? 

Jeff McSpadden: Yeah. There's kind of two parts to how it's done, and I think that's what kind of makes Composure and our offering with our service SoundBlanket very unique is that we haven't just focused on one side of it.

It's both. And what I mean by that is in one side of it, there's the content, there's the actual audio and our sound sequences that we've created. And then on the other side, it's how it gets delivered. How do you operationalize that, with full understanding of all the needs, opportunities and challenges within these care environments, because frankly, we discovered very early on that if you just create another app you're already sunk because staff are too busy  and it's not what they're trained on and relying on a caregiver to remember to use a new thing to aid in the care is you're a bit behind the eight ball already. It was really about first understanding, do we have a good sense of what the content should be? To drive change to actually help people sleep better. And if they slept better, what are the other outcomes? We'll see from that. And so we can talk more about that side of it.

But then once we had that fairly well understood, it was okay. Now, how do you get this to benefit residents in these congregate living settings. So what we've devised is a turnkey system called SoundBlanket, where we install networked speakers, one speaker per bed in these residences.

And we can remotely manage all of those speakers anywhere in the world. And generally, we're right now we're at sort of the 1 of this service, right? If you will, which means we're [00:06:00] relying on time triggers to deploy sounds at the right time. And then some other couple easy settings that can be set up right on when we on board a new community which makes it a very personalized experience for each resident.

Amber Bardon: Tell me a little bit more about the music. Is it custom created? What does it sound like? Can you describe it for me? 

Jeff McSpadden: Yeah so in the entire sequence that SoundBlanket is comprised of there's only about 20, 23 minutes that is actually just music. The rest of the sequence, which actually is up to 8 hours long

is a frequency noise response approach, which I'll talk about in a second, but specifically about the music. It is all custom. We take my pedigree as a composer into consideration here. And a few other composers that we brought in early on to help us construct these.

We've developed proprietary musical sequences that play at the beginning of each evening around bedtime. And this musical part of the sequence is doing two things really well. One, it's used as a gentle environmental cue for bedtime with a few repeat exposures, people start to say, 

oh, I hear this. It's very soothing. It's very calming. And I'm ready to start getting into bed and then it over a 20 minute period we're leveraging the power of music to help calm or relax or activate our sort of rest response. If you want to speak in more clinical terms, right?

 To take a step back for a second, if people consider what sound does to our physiological systems and our neurological systems, it's really fascinating. If we listen to an unexpected, harsh, startling sound. It generally makes you jump, your pupils dilate, your heart starts to race, you get flooded with serotonin, the sort of, stress hormone.

Jeff McSpadden: And some  of that is great. That's what's helped us survive as human beings for thousands and thousands of years. It's part of our survival mechanism. But if you flood your system of that too often, it can have some negative impact on your physical health, right? But the opposite is also true with sound.

So if you're exposed to very soothing, relaxing sounds, it actually triggers that rest and digest side of the equation. So you get into a more calmed state you get those endorphins and the pleasure hormones as they call it, right? And it's a very powerful thing. So what we decided early on was we were going to create this musical

introduction to our sequence to leverage what works really well you provide a very calming, relaxing experience to trigger that rest response. You can help people decrease their level of anxiety depression. There's a lot of things that kind of prevent us from falling asleep.

And then once that is done, and our residents are starting to drift off to sleep. That's when music starts to  become less effective. Because our ears and our brains are always listening and when we are listening to music as we're starting to drift to sleep and are asleep, it actually synchronizes our brain to the rhythm and changes and variations in the music.

So it's not a full resting brain state. What we're trying to do is leverage sound to do the best it can for the various stages of sleep. So music's a great introduction. Then once the listener is drifting off to sleep, we switch over very gradually dovetail into what's called pink noise.

This is that frequency response I was talking about before, and we've actually developed a variation on pink noise with a couple sort of secret sauce elements there that we've studied and found to be very effective. But pink noise at its basis has been known to do two things really good.

 It's a frequency that actually older adults hear fairly well, considering [00:10:00] the older adult hearing profile. Generally, we lose some of the high frequencies. The T's the S's all the sort of very high things that we hear. We aren't able to pick those up as easily. So pink noise fits in that sort of warmer middle to low range. It fits their hearing profile really well. And it's also been well understood, not just in our research, but other published research that it can go a long way in inducing deep way of sleep better, higher quality rest and adding a 3rd benefit there, it acts as a sound masking environmental element. So what I mean by that is, in congregate living and in hospital settings, the number 1 reason for sleep disturbance is environmental noise. People doing their job in the middle of the night.

Other residents up and about needing care. These things will arouse the brain and our response system and wake us out of our sleep. By employing pink noise at the right volume for that resident's room, we can actually take away a lot of the distracting qualities of those intermittent noises through the night.

Great for sleep. Great for your ears for being exposed to for a long period of time and goes a long way and taking all that interrupted sleep elements out of the environment. 

Amber Bardon: I was just woken up the other night by snow plows. I was staying at one of our communities in Montana and they were snow plowing the road at midnight and woke me up. Not sure how that went over with the residents either.

Jeff, I know that Composure has had some published research in memory care. Can you talk a little bit about what did you find out from that research? What have you learned? I 

Jeff McSpadden: think the number one most surprising thing we learned was exactly how impactful better sleep is on the quality of life for people living with dementia.

 If you know this population well, first of all, over 70 percent of people living with this degenerative disease experience regular sleep issues. as we all can attest to in our own lives, when you don't sleep well, you don't perform your best the next day. Now, imagine that in the context of already having lowered coping thresholds, lowered cognition as the disease progresses, you start to become nonverbal.

There's a lot of things that just add complexity to your day. So what we found was by focusing in on improving sleep, we saw a number of behavioral outcomes during the day improve. And I think that was what kind of gave us the big aha moment. It seems like a nice thing to improve somebody's quality of sleep.

Isn't that nice and cozy? And, you feel good. But actually where the rubber hits the road in a health care context is that if you improve a person's sleep, you actually give them a cognitive boost. The next day, you actually give them a physical performance boost. The next day, meaning potential for less falls, we saw increase in appetite  and eating performance.

We saw all the activities of daily living start to improve, like bathing and dressing and, eating and all of those essentials. And what we were most proud of is we ended up having two statistically significant outcomes in this study. By contrast, this is just anecdotal, but a lot of file pharma companies that go out and do research on their new drugs and so forth never reached statistical significance.

So we're really excited about these outcomes. And what those 2 were a major reduction in daytime drowsiness. So that makes sense, right? We're actually impacting the quality of sleep at night. So you feel less drowsy during the day. But what it really means, if you unpack that is they're more alert, oriented and engaged during the day.

Let's say a community has invested heavily in their activities program, and they've got a lot of enrichment going on through the day. But if you've got a population that is just exhausted and would rather take a nap every time they sit  in a chair. Then, how good is that? So we found that, better sleep at night lets them take advantage of a full quality of life during the day.

There's also another part of that I think McKnight's published an article last April about a relevance between excessive daytime napping and early end of life care considerations. So there's a deterioration that comes from excessive daytime napping. So we're excited about that measure being so drastically improved. But the next 1 that we hit statistical significance on had to do with cooperation with care. This is a big one for staff, right? And staff burnout ratios and those kinds of things, right? If you can improve the sort of relationship and the moments of caregiving in a memory care context that's huge, you're seeing less aggression, you're seeing less expressions of unmet needs or behaviors as some people call them, right?

Yeah. But when we looked at the data, it actually was interesting. What it said was, the people who in our study that [00:15:00] got the best rest And that saw the most improvements in their sleep were more likely to not accept care because they were feeling more independent.

They were feeling more able. They were feeling like I understand what you're asking me to do. I'll do it. I got it from here and that was really exciting. It's interesting to know how these cognitive boosts and cognitive reserves that sleek afford you express themselves.

And then we saw improvements and falls. The setting where we did our study was a very high performing setting, both on the resident side and the staff side during our study. So there was a very low incident count of falls to begin with but even within that, we saw a lowering in falls during our study.

 It was a small one site study. And we're excited for the results we got. And we're looking towards other additional opportunities, expand our understanding with another broader study. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah, it makes complete sense. We've all suffered from sleep deprivation and we all know intuitively that we don't perform at our best and we have  brain fog and things like that, but I'm sure that's really exciting to you to see the actual scientific data back that up.

And let you actually see the impact that you're having on community. So if a senior living community is interested in working with composure, what do they need to know. 

Jeff McSpadden: That prioritizing sleep for your residents is a vital part of fall prevention strategy or a prevention care strategy just in general.

 We've talked to a lot of people in the space and what we've generally found is when you talk about sleep and where the sort of downstream negative impacts are. And when we say what are you doing about it? It falls in three buckets.

One is medications, and everybody winces a little bit when they talk about it, because we all know that's not a great approach. And so reducing that medication use is something that people seem to be very interested in. The other thing is Remote patient monitoring which I think is an amazing  advancement in technology.

 It really enables staff to stay more alert and aware of situations. But I don't see it yet being a super effective prevention technology. It's more of a detection and analytics. And then there's the kind of You know, do it yourself approach, which is, we know our residents really well, we know their personal preferences.

We know that certain things work for, Helen as opposed to John. But even those things are kind of staff intensive resource intensive sometimes. And, what works 1 night might not work another. So it's a hit or miss. So working with us, we found that we can be a really needed relief in the market because we've devised a system that not only deploys sound, which it does no harm.

There is no side effects. There are no downsides. There have been very little evidence of, what do you call like a negative response to what we're doing. And we're doing it and deploying it in a sort of technological way that  we're not overburdening staff. The staff don't have to do anything.

It's a basically kind of a set it and forget it proposition. And it only gets better. With the regularity of the time schedule per resident for getting these sounds at night. And regular repeat exposure over time, it actually reinforces the benefits. So we've been trying to make it as easy to deploy and set up and use on a regular basis.

Amber Bardon: I really learned a lot from this conversation. So I'm really glad that we found each other and we're able to get you on the show and talk about composure. And I learned a lot of interesting information today. Where can our listeners find out more? 

Jeff McSpadden: Visit our website.

It's Composure.Care. And I'm on LinkedIn. Composure is also on LinkedIn. If you want to find me there. And actually one thing I'm really excited about coming up is I've been invited to pitch at the senior living 100 conference at the end of March.

They're doing their very first shark tank like pitch session. Composure will be one of six companies invited to be there. So if anyone in your audience Plans on being at the conference.  Come check us out Sunday, March 24th. 

Awesome. Good luck to you.

Thank you. I'm excited and thank you for inviting me on. This has been great. I'm really intrigued by what Parasol is doing and the much needed benefits. I know one thing I didn't really talk about earlier is the tech. Sort of infrastructure that we look to align within our client base.

It's not strenuous what we need, but there are certain sort of baseline requirements and I'm super glad you guys are out there helping people understand the importance of those things. 

Amber Bardon: Really, we're here to help build that infrastructure and backbone so that innovators and entrepreneurs like yourself and others out there can bring this technology to communities. 

Jeff McSpadden: Yeah, I definitely think, you guys recognize as well as we do that COVID changed what's a priority in senior living. This sort of boon in recognizing technology is a very useful thing. A very empowering thing for these caregivers and environments. It's a really exciting time right now. 

Amber Bardon: It is an exciting time. And I said that in other episodes and I'll continue to say that I think senior living technology is the most exciting technology industry right now because there's so much change coming.

 Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. 

Jeff McSpadden: Thank you, Amber. I'm glad we could get together. 

Amber Bardon: You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast.com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening. 

Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Barden. And today my guest is Jeff McSpadden. Jeff is the co founder and CEO at Composure, which is an evidence based digital audio company that delivers custom soundscapes for senior living communities to improve sleep and drive health outcomes for older adults living with dementia.

Thanks Jeff, I am so excited to have you on the podcast today. As we were chatting a little bit before we started recording, we've had a couple of other entrepreneurs in the space. You've done some other things with environmental around lights and flooring. And I think sound and the impact sound can have, I'm really interested to learn about today.

So welcome to the show. 

Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Good to meet you and glad we can dive in. 

So tell me a little bit more about your story. So you're an entrepreneur and you have a background as a musician. So tell me about the journey that led you to  starting composure and where you're at today.

Jeff McSpadden: Yeah before I'll go in reverse order a little bit, just before starting the company I worked for about 15 plus years as a composer writing original music for film, TV and advertising. And there's a kind of an interesting phenomenon that generally gets taken for granted when you're watching a movie or TV show, and it's that sound element is actually doing quite a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of engaging you emotionally queuing you in lots of different ways that are all very purposeful to the story.

Sound is a very powerful force. It changes our reality. It influences how we behave and how we feel. And to me, I got really interested in how we can leverage that power outside of the realm of entertainment and take it into the realm of health care.

And that really was the genesis of me wanting to start a company in this space and really see how we can impact some real change. Prior to that, I worked as a performing musician for a number of years. I'm a recovering trumpeter. That was my full time thing for quite a while starting at the age of 16.

But the thing about playing on stage is understanding how connecting with people through music is really done and the difference between playing at somebody or performing music at someone and getting them involved and if they are involved, all of a sudden, the entire room just elevates.

The entire venue, it goes from an ordinary setting to an extraordinary experience. So it's a really powerful force that I've learned a lot about and I just live and breathe and everything that comes through the ears, if you will.

Amber Bardon: Tell me a little bit more about how did you take that experience and that knowledge and connect it to healthcare and then specifically senior living.

Jeff McSpadden: It's funny. I think one of the first things I started really examining is This concept of what I did in  media, which was essentially film scoring, right? if you understand the concept, it's creating purposefully and intentionally creating music experiences to support a storyline or to tell the, the the parts of a story that aren't being done on screen and and by actors and the concept of scoring a story Felt like it could also make the leap into functionality in our lives.

Like, how could we score certain experiences in our life? Solving for chronic sleep issues amongst a population living with Alzheimer's and dementia. There's a lot of challenges there. If the thesis was, if we could properly kind of score that experience from awareness of bedtime all the way to waking up refreshed in the morning we might be on to something, right?

And we wanted to give that a try and actually approached it through a clinical research trial first that that came out with some pretty inspiring results.

Amber Bardon: So let's talk a little bit more about how does this work? So how do you take sound and incorporate it into a resident at a senior communities routine. And then what is the impact that you've seen music have? 

Jeff McSpadden: Yeah. There's kind of two parts to how it's done, and I think that's what kind of makes Composure and our offering with our service SoundBlanket very unique is that we haven't just focused on one side of it.

It's both. And what I mean by that is in one side of it, there's the content, there's the actual audio and our sound sequences that we've created. And then on the other side, it's how it gets delivered. How do you operationalize that, with full understanding of all the needs, opportunities and challenges within these care environments, because frankly, we discovered very early on that if you just create another app you're already sunk because staff are too busy  and it's not what they're trained on and relying on a caregiver to remember to use a new thing to aid in the care is you're a bit behind the eight ball already. It was really about first understanding, do we have a good sense of what the content should be? To drive change to actually help people sleep better. And if they slept better, what are the other outcomes? We'll see from that. And so we can talk more about that side of it.

But then once we had that fairly well understood, it was okay. Now, how do you get this to benefit residents in these congregate living settings. So what we've devised is a turnkey system called SoundBlanket, where we install networked speakers, one speaker per bed in these residences.

And we can remotely manage all of those speakers anywhere in the world. And generally, we're right now we're at sort of the 1 of this service, right? If you will, which means we're [00:06:00] relying on time triggers to deploy sounds at the right time. And then some other couple easy settings that can be set up right on when we on board a new community which makes it a very personalized experience for each resident.

Amber Bardon: Tell me a little bit more about the music. Is it custom created? What does it sound like? Can you describe it for me? 

Jeff McSpadden: Yeah so in the entire sequence that SoundBlanket is comprised of there's only about 20, 23 minutes that is actually just music. The rest of the sequence, which actually is up to 8 hours long

is a frequency noise response approach, which I'll talk about in a second, but specifically about the music. It is all custom. We take my pedigree as a composer into consideration here. And a few other composers that we brought in early on to help us construct these.

We've developed proprietary musical sequences that play at the beginning of each evening around bedtime. And this musical part of the sequence is doing two things really well. One, it's used as a gentle environmental cue for bedtime with a few repeat exposures, people start to say, 

oh, I hear this. It's very soothing. It's very calming. And I'm ready to start getting into bed and then it over a 20 minute period we're leveraging the power of music to help calm or relax or activate our sort of rest response. If you want to speak in more clinical terms, right?

 To take a step back for a second, if people consider what sound does to our physiological systems and our neurological systems, it's really fascinating. If we listen to an unexpected, harsh, startling sound. It generally makes you jump, your pupils dilate, your heart starts to race, you get flooded with serotonin, the sort of, stress hormone.

Jeff McSpadden: And some  of that is great. That's what's helped us survive as human beings for thousands and thousands of years. It's part of our survival mechanism. But if you flood your system of that too often, it can have some negative impact on your physical health, right? But the opposite is also true with sound.

So if you're exposed to very soothing, relaxing sounds, it actually triggers that rest and digest side of the equation. So you get into a more calmed state you get those endorphins and the pleasure hormones as they call it, right? And it's a very powerful thing. So what we decided early on was we were going to create this musical

introduction to our sequence to leverage what works really well you provide a very calming, relaxing experience to trigger that rest response. You can help people decrease their level of anxiety depression. There's a lot of things that kind of prevent us from falling asleep.

And then once that is done, and our residents are starting to drift off to sleep. That's when music starts to  become less effective. Because our ears and our brains are always listening and when we are listening to music as we're starting to drift to sleep and are asleep, it actually synchronizes our brain to the rhythm and changes and variations in the music.

So it's not a full resting brain state. What we're trying to do is leverage sound to do the best it can for the various stages of sleep. So music's a great introduction. Then once the listener is drifting off to sleep, we switch over very gradually dovetail into what's called pink noise.

This is that frequency response I was talking about before, and we've actually developed a variation on pink noise with a couple sort of secret sauce elements there that we've studied and found to be very effective. But pink noise at its basis has been known to do two things really good.

 It's a frequency that actually older adults hear fairly well, considering [00:10:00] the older adult hearing profile. Generally, we lose some of the high frequencies. The T's the S's all the sort of very high things that we hear. We aren't able to pick those up as easily. So pink noise fits in that sort of warmer middle to low range. It fits their hearing profile really well. And it's also been well understood, not just in our research, but other published research that it can go a long way in inducing deep way of sleep better, higher quality rest and adding a 3rd benefit there, it acts as a sound masking environmental element. So what I mean by that is, in congregate living and in hospital settings, the number 1 reason for sleep disturbance is environmental noise. People doing their job in the middle of the night.

Other residents up and about needing care. These things will arouse the brain and our response system and wake us out of our sleep. By employing pink noise at the right volume for that resident's room, we can actually take away a lot of the distracting qualities of those intermittent noises through the night.

Great for sleep. Great for your ears for being exposed to for a long period of time and goes a long way and taking all that interrupted sleep elements out of the environment. 

Amber Bardon: I was just woken up the other night by snow plows. I was staying at one of our communities in Montana and they were snow plowing the road at midnight and woke me up. Not sure how that went over with the residents either.

Jeff, I know that Composure has had some published research in memory care. Can you talk a little bit about what did you find out from that research? What have you learned? I 

Jeff McSpadden: think the number one most surprising thing we learned was exactly how impactful better sleep is on the quality of life for people living with dementia.

 If you know this population well, first of all, over 70 percent of people living with this degenerative disease experience regular sleep issues. as we all can attest to in our own lives, when you don't sleep well, you don't perform your best the next day. Now, imagine that in the context of already having lowered coping thresholds, lowered cognition as the disease progresses, you start to become nonverbal.

There's a lot of things that just add complexity to your day. So what we found was by focusing in on improving sleep, we saw a number of behavioral outcomes during the day improve. And I think that was what kind of gave us the big aha moment. It seems like a nice thing to improve somebody's quality of sleep.

Isn't that nice and cozy? And, you feel good. But actually where the rubber hits the road in a health care context is that if you improve a person's sleep, you actually give them a cognitive boost. The next day, you actually give them a physical performance boost. The next day, meaning potential for less falls, we saw increase in appetite  and eating performance.

We saw all the activities of daily living start to improve, like bathing and dressing and, eating and all of those essentials. And what we were most proud of is we ended up having two statistically significant outcomes in this study. By contrast, this is just anecdotal, but a lot of file pharma companies that go out and do research on their new drugs and so forth never reached statistical significance.

So we're really excited about these outcomes. And what those 2 were a major reduction in daytime drowsiness. So that makes sense, right? We're actually impacting the quality of sleep at night. So you feel less drowsy during the day. But what it really means, if you unpack that is they're more alert, oriented and engaged during the day.

Let's say a community has invested heavily in their activities program, and they've got a lot of enrichment going on through the day. But if you've got a population that is just exhausted and would rather take a nap every time they sit  in a chair. Then, how good is that? So we found that, better sleep at night lets them take advantage of a full quality of life during the day.

There's also another part of that I think McKnight's published an article last April about a relevance between excessive daytime napping and early end of life care considerations. So there's a deterioration that comes from excessive daytime napping. So we're excited about that measure being so drastically improved. But the next 1 that we hit statistical significance on had to do with cooperation with care. This is a big one for staff, right? And staff burnout ratios and those kinds of things, right? If you can improve the sort of relationship and the moments of caregiving in a memory care context that's huge, you're seeing less aggression, you're seeing less expressions of unmet needs or behaviors as some people call them, right?

Yeah. But when we looked at the data, it actually was interesting. What it said was, the people who in our study that [00:15:00] got the best rest And that saw the most improvements in their sleep were more likely to not accept care because they were feeling more independent.

They were feeling more able. They were feeling like I understand what you're asking me to do. I'll do it. I got it from here and that was really exciting. It's interesting to know how these cognitive boosts and cognitive reserves that sleek afford you express themselves.

And then we saw improvements and falls. The setting where we did our study was a very high performing setting, both on the resident side and the staff side during our study. So there was a very low incident count of falls to begin with but even within that, we saw a lowering in falls during our study.

 It was a small one site study. And we're excited for the results we got. And we're looking towards other additional opportunities, expand our understanding with another broader study. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah, it makes complete sense. We've all suffered from sleep deprivation and we all know intuitively that we don't perform at our best and we have  brain fog and things like that, but I'm sure that's really exciting to you to see the actual scientific data back that up.

And let you actually see the impact that you're having on community. So if a senior living community is interested in working with composure, what do they need to know. 

Jeff McSpadden: That prioritizing sleep for your residents is a vital part of fall prevention strategy or a prevention care strategy just in general.

 We've talked to a lot of people in the space and what we've generally found is when you talk about sleep and where the sort of downstream negative impacts are. And when we say what are you doing about it? It falls in three buckets.

One is medications, and everybody winces a little bit when they talk about it, because we all know that's not a great approach. And so reducing that medication use is something that people seem to be very interested in. The other thing is Remote patient monitoring which I think is an amazing  advancement in technology.

 It really enables staff to stay more alert and aware of situations. But I don't see it yet being a super effective prevention technology. It's more of a detection and analytics. And then there's the kind of You know, do it yourself approach, which is, we know our residents really well, we know their personal preferences.

We know that certain things work for, Helen as opposed to John. But even those things are kind of staff intensive resource intensive sometimes. And, what works 1 night might not work another. So it's a hit or miss. So working with us, we found that we can be a really needed relief in the market because we've devised a system that not only deploys sound, which it does no harm.

There is no side effects. There are no downsides. There have been very little evidence of, what do you call like a negative response to what we're doing. And we're doing it and deploying it in a sort of technological way that  we're not overburdening staff. The staff don't have to do anything.

It's a basically kind of a set it and forget it proposition. And it only gets better. With the regularity of the time schedule per resident for getting these sounds at night. And regular repeat exposure over time, it actually reinforces the benefits. So we've been trying to make it as easy to deploy and set up and use on a regular basis.

Amber Bardon: I really learned a lot from this conversation. So I'm really glad that we found each other and we're able to get you on the show and talk about composure. And I learned a lot of interesting information today. Where can our listeners find out more? 

Jeff McSpadden: Visit our website.

It's Composure.Care. And I'm on LinkedIn. Composure is also on LinkedIn. If you want to find me there. And actually one thing I'm really excited about coming up is I've been invited to pitch at the senior living 100 conference at the end of March.

They're doing their very first shark tank like pitch session. Composure will be one of six companies invited to be there. So if anyone in your audience Plans on being at the conference.  Come check us out Sunday, March 24th. 

Awesome. Good luck to you.

Thank you. I'm excited and thank you for inviting me on. This has been great. I'm really intrigued by what Parasol is doing and the much needed benefits. I know one thing I didn't really talk about earlier is the tech. Sort of infrastructure that we look to align within our client base.

It's not strenuous what we need, but there are certain sort of baseline requirements and I'm super glad you guys are out there helping people understand the importance of those things. 

Amber Bardon: Really, we're here to help build that infrastructure and backbone so that innovators and entrepreneurs like yourself and others out there can bring this technology to communities. 

Jeff McSpadden: Yeah, I definitely think, you guys recognize as well as we do that COVID changed what's a priority in senior living. This sort of boon in recognizing technology is a very useful thing. A very empowering thing for these caregivers and environments. It's a really exciting time right now. 

Amber Bardon: It is an exciting time. And I said that in other episodes and I'll continue to say that I think senior living technology is the most exciting technology industry right now because there's so much change coming.

 Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. 

Jeff McSpadden: Thank you, Amber. I'm glad we could get together. 

Amber Bardon: You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast.com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.