A Note from the VP, Jim Greatorex: November 2024

Published in Home Modifications on November 26, 2024

By Jim Greatorex, VP, VGM Live at Home

We are getting close to wrapping up another year in the home access industry, and another solid growth year was had! We believe that that the industry grew at approximately 8%. We also saw that while many had growth, it did not come without challenges.

For VGM Live at Home, 2024 has been a year of investing in the future growth of our members and the industry as a whole. In this note, we will share with you brief insights into the following:

Welcome Cindi Petito to the team.
Learn about our year-end webinar sharing survey results and intro of Cindi Petito.
Review the Building Opportunities Summit.
Introduce Huntington Bank!
Share our views and activity for 2025.

Welcome Cindi Petito!

We are excited to welcome Cindi Petito to our team! She will develop and lead a clinical network that will benefit VGM Live at Home and share leadership responsibilities in the division. Cindi has 29 years of experience as an occupational therapist and has been involved in home access for 20 years. She has authored and presented many educational courses in home access and complex rehab and is a nationally known, respected voice in the clinical, home access, and CRT markets. She currently is working to co-write and develop a clinical network for both Live at Home and U.S. Rehab and is a key component of our new certified education course coming this May.

Survey Results Are In!

If you participated in our survey, you must have been wondering when the results would be shared. The answer is on Dec. 17 at 10 a.m. CT on a special year-end webinar. You will learn several key performance indicators (KPIs) including:

Average revenue per employee
What product categories are the most highly utilized
Revenue breakout by payer
Where marketing dollars are spent
Showroom insights
Average revenue per project

Also in this webinar, we will introduce Cindi Petito and discuss her projects and role at VGM Live at Home. Cindi and I will also review what we added to the program in 2024 and what exciting projects are coming in 2025. We will also share our view on the path ahead for home access and where we see lots of great new opportunities and technologies that will help professionalize the industry, bring scalability, and open new doors for an influx of clinical referrals.

If you want to be in the know of what’s happening in the industry (and here at Live at Home), then mark your calendar for Dec. 17 at 10 a.m. CT!

Building Opportunities Summit Review

The Building Opportunities Summit from Nov. 7-9 was an impactful experience! We had great speakers and an amazing group of home access leaders and partners from all over the country. The conference provided insights into new technology coming into the industry, how to use AI, and messaging to seniors. We had an amazing lesson on how to provide handrails successfully and how big the need is for them. We also had three great panel discussions on utilizing social media, how to leverage a home access showroom, and what it looks like to have connectivity between home access professional and clinical specialists. There were eight new vendors exhibiting and two new consultants on hand. Our breakout sessions were also a big hit as attendees got to choose from seven different subjects from 20 categories. We were busy!

What was most impactful for me was the engagement level of everyone involved. It’s the one event of the year where you can be in a classroom or at lunch, dinner, or just the hotel bar and hang with others who do the same thing you do. We love how attendees take advantage of every waking moment to network with peers. Everybody wants to share and learn, and we all want to make the industry better.

Stay tuned as we will be announcing the venue and dates for next year’s conference in January. If you want to engage with like-minded awesome people, spend some time working ON instead of IN your business, and support your industry, you have no other choice then to attend next year’s summit!

Welcome Huntington Bank

Huntington Bank joined VGM in the late summer of 2024. Huntington is offering a robust menu of services with a personal touch. They value personal relationships just like VGM does, and check out all their services:

Nationwide SBA Lender
Business Mergers and Acquisitions
Start-up and Franchise Financing
Partner/Employee Buyouts
Equipment Financing
Owner Occupied Real Estate
Debt Consolidation
Full-Service Banking Relationships for SBA clients

Go to the members-only portal on the Live at Home website to learn more.

The Path Ahead

2025 promises to be the year where the industry will take another step forward in evolving. Live at Home is in a partnership with Cor Freedom in Michigan that will provide the industry with an apprenticeship program for valued field techs. We can’t scale the industry if we have a revolving door with our field tech staff. Investing in a program that can provide a career path for techs will help recruit people to the industry and help retain them after the hire. We are planning a webinar on this new program in late January to show how members can bring it to their company and get it approved by your state. Please watch for an announcement on this important opportunity.

In collaboration with Cor Freedom, we will also have a new comprehensive education platform for both home access professionals and clinical home access specialists. This course will show the full evaluation of a home from both perspectives and then show results as we completely transform the home into an environment for both mobility challenged family members and seniors. For our industry to evolve, we need to fully integrate in with the needs for a successful homecare environment, understand the needs and outcomes that the medical community needs, and make the home environment provide those outcomes. This has been a 2.5-year project, and we expect to have the course ready to go in May or June at the latest.

We also will be launching a new technology partner who will provide a service that will educate consumers and their families, the medical community, and potentially payers and states on the risks of mobility challenged people in their homes and what can be done to resolve them. We believe it can be a game changer in more ways than can be stated in the newsletter. This also will be a first quarter project that we will be highly engaged in and will provide full details very soon!

If you can fit it in your schedule, please join us for our webinar on Dec. 17 at 10 a.m. CT. We will provide commentary on all the above and share with you why we see 2025 as the next pivotal year for our industry's evolution.

We sincerely thank you for your membership with us, and we greatly admire and appreciate the meaningful service you provide your clients. May you and your team have a memorable Thanksgiving holiday.

Looking forward!

Jim Greatorex
Vice President
VGM Live at Home

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