Making the business case for the senior care space

You can read Mark's posts about that event here and here. I'm going to briefly talk about the HR marketplace crossover I witnessed at the event.

First of all, the show was a great learning experience for our team (and we happily created quite a buzz about our marketing and PR services). While conference attendance is dramatically down this year in the HR marketplace and will probably get worse, attendance was actually above expectations at the Aging in America conference – almost 4,000 attendees and over 100 exhibitors. The ASA and NCOA did a fantastic job.

The exhibit hall floor included well known national healthcare, senior care and related businesses (AstraZeneca, Philips Lifeline, ADT, Home Instead, Visiting Angels, etc.); non profits, associations and government agencies (AARP, Alzheimer's Foundation, CDC, etc.); and start-ups and smaller less established businesses. Many of the exhibitors were local or regional businesses from around the country (as opposed to selling nationally or globally).

In our experience in the space so far, most senior care / caregiving companies are local. One reason is that hands-on caregiving businesses can be difficult and expensive to scale. Another reason is that many senior care businesses on the exhibit floor were inspired by the founder's personal experience with caregiving (e.g., ShirlyBOARD and then SeniorCareMarketer).

In a previous post titled Are You an HR Supplier Targeting the Senior Care Market? Check Out This New eBook, Mark mentioned a few HR suppliers who are also targeting the senior care space. Interestingly these examples and others were absent from the Aging event (most likely due to the heavy social worker mix in the crowd).

But what I did find were a handful of companies I hadn't heard of that are targeting (or wanting to target) the HR market as well as senior care – Coventry Health Care, HeartMath, LiveAnew and NASW Press.

Absent were recruitment services or talent management of any kind, again most likely due to the attendee mix. (Earlier in the week I had tweeted with someone about the growth of online senior job boards.) Interestingly, yesterday there was a separate workshop sponsored by the NCOA titled "Mature Workers – Key to a Competitive Workforce" with featured speaker Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor. (He has a blog. Check it out.)

I didn't get a chance to attend since I left the day before, but here were some of the key focal points:

• Recruiting and retaining a 50+ workforce: strategies and returns
  
• Leading the multi-generational workforce: bridging the gaps through effective workplace coaching and mentoring
  
• Building a health care workforce
  
• Making the business case for mature workers
  

Are you making the business case for the senior care space?

Post by Kevin Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn)