Intro Voiceover: If your marketing efforts are not bringing in the leads that you need to grow, then today's guest, Gabrielle Pumpian, can tell you why. This is a masterclass in referral source marketing. Enjoy.

Podcast Intro Voiceover: Welcome to the Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars podcast. If you provide services to keep older or disabled people living at home, then this podcast is for you. Now, here's your host, Ken Accardi.

Ken Accardi: Hi, and welcome to the next installment of Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars. I have somebody who I've just really met in the last few weeks through LinkedIn, and we had mutual contacts and otherwise. Her name is Gabrielle Pumpian. First of all, am I pronouncing that pretty well?

Gabrielle Pumpian: You got it.

Ken Accardi: Okay, I got the thumbs up there. And we're going to talk about how to really manage home care sales. And with that, you know, Gabrielle, we're just meeting each other. I've learned a lot of things about you, but why not tell everybody who might not have met you yet a little bit about yourself?

Gabrielle Pumpian: Thanks, Ken. I'm honored to be here. I'm excited to be on a new podcast. It's definitely something that I enjoy doing, so thanks for the invitation.

Yes, I have been in the home care industry for almost 20 years in the San Diego market here in Southern California. And I've mostly spent, I would say 80% of my career has been in sales and business development. I did dabble in operations running a home care company that was attached to a home health and a hospice agency. And that gave me great learning into day-to-day operations and understanding the internal roles.

My passion really lies with supporting families, networking with referral sources and professionals in the community that may not know enough about home care, and then working collaboratively with teams to deliver excellent service.

I'm also a sandwich generation caregiver myself, so I have firsthand experience. Both my parents live about a thousand miles away. Unfortunately, they both have chronic illnesses, and I'm an only child raising a young daughter. So I'm in it, and I think that my perspective is something that I lean into instead of away from that vulnerability to help connect with people in the community, as well as agencies and people that I work with today in my consulting company supporting business development and sales growth in the private-pay market around the country.

Ken Accardi: I love it. What a great explanation, and thank you for everything you're doing, and for everything you've done for your family as well. It's pretty hard, but what I love from the start is that you really have the right background—having done home care, having done home care sales, now doing the consulting, and having the experience yourself. That is great.

So, I guess as I did my research on you, I found that you are... you know, maybe not, "Oh yeah, all you need to do is track your leads and did they close," and things like that. You know, you're really taking it to the next level. So I guess, you know, I kind of feel like you're rethinking the sales seat. And you mentioned that the home care industry overuses the term "marketer." Why do you feel that mindset needs to change, and what should owners look for instead of just having the generic home care marketer?

Gabrielle Pumpian: Great. Yeah, very common question. I think you know this: I don't love the term "marketer" because I don't think it really defines what the role should be or is, and how it's impacting in the community. When I think about marketing, I think about awareness, branding, kind of getting the name out there, creating a buzz around your company. And that's all very important, but it's very different than building relationships to drive sustainable growth, and to care for people, and to provide work for caregivers who are these incredible employees that really deserve a livelihood that can support their own families and their own growth in their careers.

So I see business development as the primary definer of this role, because it's all about building trust, building relationships, and becoming a community leader—and not just someone who stops by and drops off some brochures. Because when you're trusted, what you do is you become that person people rely on to help solve problems.

When people are calling to understand and inquire about home care services, there's typically a problem either bubbling up and they want to be proactive to solve it, or they're in that crisis moment.

Ken Accardi: Yeah, perfect. So you don't want to be just a brochure dropper-offer and bring doughnuts every once in a while, or sponsor the lunch for whatever program they're having. It really comes down to you becoming that trusted advisor in the community. And it's not the buzz—I mean, the buzz is nice, but the relationships is where you really make a difference.

So, I guess one thing that I did notice that you said on another podcast is that it's kind of like a 12 to 18-month ramp, and of course that's going to be really scary for people. I listened to a podcast recently on Miriam's podcast, it was with a guy who has some software for managing home care sales—I think it was called 52 Weeks. And he was saying that if somebody comes to him and says, "Hey, I really got to turn this around in the next 60 days," he says, "Go do it yourself. Just go work on it. We can't really help you," because he talks about really being at least three months before somebody could get traction.

But then I've heard you say that it's really a 12 to 18-month ramp for people to become very effective. And you've talked about why that's so realistic. Maybe you could reiterate on some of that, but also: How can owners properly integrate a support rep so you're there for the long game, but how do you get them to be as productive as possible in their first couple of months?

Gabrielle Pumpian: Yeah, such a great question. And yeah, that may have been a controversial statement or something that a lot of owners don't love to hear. But after living in this role and working alongside very successful teams, and seeing the constant turnover of sales people and business developers that we see on an average basis, I do believe—and I can hold firm to that—12 to 18-month window.

It's not to say you're not going to get any outcome or ROI by hiring someone before then. But to get the foundational business to come in and those foundational relationships to be strong enough to constantly feed the agency with the right-fit clients—the ideal client—it takes time.

Because you think about personally: Are you going to trust someone with your own loved one, or a referral that could make or break your reputation, with someone that you don't know very well? Our services are out-of-pocket normally, or usually, especially in the companies I've worked with. They're very expensive. So now you have the dynamics of financial, you have privacy, you have intimacy of people coming in your home. Home care is a really, really big buying decision, and I don't think that that should be taken lightly. It's not like we're out there selling photocopiers or printers. But even if you are purchasing something for your home like an appliance—I mean this is kind of off the rails—but like you're buying a refrigerator, you're going to want to do your research and understand your options before you just go in and purchase something.

So that's all to say that home care sales is very similar; it takes time. And I think what is difficult for owners is that they often are hiring people maybe that they think are going to be a good fit, and they're interviewing and thinking about the role as transactional. In my experience, it may come to that down the line, but at the beginning, it's not. It's all about relationship building.

So to answer your question of what can they do: Finding someone that has the character that it takes to be a really good representative out in the field. What I believe is that person needs to feel like this agency is like their own business. If you have the mindset of "where I'm representing is my own company," what does that look like? I want to know every single person who's working in that company, and I want to understand their role.

So taking the time, which could take weeks, to have the new salesperson sit next to the staffing manager and help them cover shifts, learn what they're doing, who they are, why do they work here—they could go work for 20 other companies, but yet they're here. And you're building understanding of that person so that you can go talk about them out in the field.

Same thing with a care coordinator, same thing with a recruiter. When I joined Home Care Assistance before it became The Key back in 2017, I want to say, my director, she said, "Gabby, I don't want you out in the field until you know every single person in this office. You know their role, you know their 'why', and you understand what their day-to-day looks like." And I was like, "Hold on, aren't I supposed to be out in the field?" And she asked me to make time every single week—it wasn't the whole week, a couple hours a week—to sit with every single staff member.

And that is one example of just investing in your people, in your agency, so that you can go out there and talk about them. What I realized was that most of my conversations when I was selling to my referral sources, or explaining about what makes our agency unique, what I was doing was I was talking about my people. I was talking about my teammates and my colleagues, and that's what differentiated us versus what we do or our features and benefits.

So I believe that it takes time to get to know your team, you need to get to know your caregivers, you need to understand the whole journey. Because when you're sitting in front of a family and they're saying, "I need 24/7 care and I'm willing to invest $30,000 a month to work with you," they deserve to know the whole process front and back if they have questions around that, and you better be able to be well-versed in sharing that. So if you don't even know your processes internally, how are you supposed to be out there creating authentic relationships and getting people to buy your services?

Those are just a couple examples. But I'm very passionate about slowing the process down, leaders making sure that their sales people are educated, that they understand the historical data: Where have we been successful? Where have we not?

That comes with tracking: How well is your company tracking where the business is coming in? Can the salesperson make some recommendations to say, "I'd love to know monthly how many patients we work with, or clients we work with, that have cancer so that I can go to the cancer center and I can say confidently, '30% of our business are taking care of people with cancer'?" I'm just making numbers up here, but you know what I'm trying to say.

If the business development rep can't specifically give examples and paint the picture of who the ideal client is to the referral partner, how in the world are they going to expect to get a referral?

Ken Accardi: Yeah, that's incredible. And I love everything that you broke down there. So it's really about all these different roles. The schedulers and how they're wrangling, probably the recruiting staff—spending a lot of time with the recruiters and what they're looking for, and what the vision and the values are. Whether it's people with cancer, or people with forms of memory loss, dementia, Alzheimer's, and so on. The more that you know, that really takes it out there.

And then we talked about that discussion with the family. Those numbers that you've given—they are what they are, right? I have a buddy who lives right next door to me, his mom sadly passed earlier in the year, but for the last years he's been paying $400,000 a year for her to have 24-hour care. This is not a cheap date in a lot of cases.

And I love that... you know, I kind of am going to lead into the next question here is really about cultivating referral sources. But I love in your last answer, it really came down to understanding what it's like to go through home care from the perspective of caregivers, care coordinators, schedulers, people who are recruiting, maybe people who are billing and do accounts management, and then also knowing about the census and all those kinds of things.

Based on a lot of what I've learned about you, it's all about having these, let's say non-traditional high-net-worth networks of referral sources that you're going out to. How do you view referral sources that might be different than your garden-variety private-duty home care agency?

Gabrielle Pumpian: Yeah. So this is a subject that I love coaching and consulting my clients on, and just sharing with the greater community because I don't know a single agency that hasn't said, "My marketplace is not saturated." Everybody believes that their marketplace is saturated with competitors. Maybe in Alaska it's not, I don't know. But everywhere in the lower 48, it is. It's very saturated. It's a growing industry, a lot of people are getting into this, they see the opportunity.

In San Diego County, at one point it was like 400 private agencies, including franchises, in San Diego County. If my excuse of why I'm not growing my business or why I'm not getting referrals is because there's so many competitors out there, I would really encourage that business developer and the owner or the leader of the company to take a step back and say, "Okay, if we are finding that we're one of five at every assessment, I'm waiting outside the hospital room door in a row with my competitors, maybe there is other places where I could find right-fit clients."

Just to backtrack a second: I think what happens is we see healthcare accounts like skilled nursing facilities, hospice agencies, home health companies, and hospitals as kind of the bread and butter for home care. But that's where we also see all of our competitors.

So I coach: If you're going to have a top-20 strategic account plan, have five of those top-20 accounts be healthcare accounts. That leaves 15 other accounts or other types of professionals and relationships that you can go build to be open.

And then you probably ask: How am I going to fill those other 15 spots? Well, if you've identified who your ideal client is, you kind of need to work backward to say, "All right, let's use a current client as a great example."

We have Mr. Jones. He's on service 80 hours a week of care. He's been on service for a year. His family is lovely, his home is lovely, our caregivers have been consistent there. It is like top-grade, Grade-A client. Let's take Mr. Jones, and let's work his ecosystem.

He has a primary care physician. He has a neurologist because he has Parkinson's disease. He also has a fiduciary because he's not married and he has someone who's in charge of managing his finances. He also has an estate planning attorney who has set up powers of attorney that we communicate with in order to get paid and to make healthcare decisions that are in his ecosystem. He also has maybe a geriatric care manager who comes in and does medication management twice a month because our caregivers aren't allowed to touch the medication. She also takes him to his physician appointments because our caregivers aren't really doing that and taking notes, because he has Parkinson's and some cognitive impairment. I'm just painting the picture.

So now I've identified five or six other professionals that support Mr. Jones that I can go after. And every single one of those professionals falls into a different type of referral channel that you can build business with.

The kicker is: They all have clients who can afford care, need it long-term, and their goal is to bring in support so they can stay in their home and not move into assisted living or memory care ideally.

A lot of times people are like, "Well, where else am I going to get business from if I'm not going to the SNFs every day?" And I would say: You can do an audit of your own clients first of all. And second of all, there are a lot of people in the country who are professionals that need experts in caregiving and aging services to support their work with their clients—like wealth advisors, right? If a wealth advisor is managing a portfolio of $10 million for one of their clients, and now that client has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and that wealth manager knows, "Okay, we need to now start allocating or figuring out how we're going to reallocate investments to pay $20,000 a month for care," I can do that in my job, but who's going to provide the care?

"Oh yeah, I know Gabby. She came in and provided some information about her service, and she followed up with me, and she keeps sending me these articles every month. And I never read them, but she stays top of mind. I'm going to call her and see if this would be a good fit for her." Boom. Now I have a client who can afford me, is going to need care long-term, and it's going to be a high-hour case.

That was a lot, but I just wanted to paint the picture through an example of how to think differently about where you can get your business from. But the first thing to do is identify what your ideal client looks like. And if you think your ideal client is a three-day SNF patient discharging home and is refusing care, but the SNF social worker says you have to have it, and then you go provide three days of care and then they say, "I'm done"—nobody's going to be able to grow their agency like that.

Ken Accardi: Yeah. No, incredible. And it's interesting because one of the things I did to grow up myself, because I'm a geek, I'm not somebody who's been a provider like you, is I went to, for example, the Steve the Hurricane Boot Camp. And I learned so much. He talks about the "N.E.E.D." clients, right? They have a need, and they have the budget, and all these kinds of things.

And he also does spend a lot of time talking about building those relationships with the healthcare system, right? So who's discharging? There's a compelling need there because they need to get people out of the hospital, they need to get them out of the skilled nursing center, and all that kind of thing. They need to clear those beds, they have less staff on the weekends. But that's where everybody else is in line.

And so here, you're saying who's supporting them? I guess now it's Aging Life Care services as opposed to geriatric care management, but there's those types of management folks, there's the financial planners, there's all these other kinds of things.

It's interesting. I have a friend who was actually on the podcast early because her mom had just passed, and she had such a great experience with her caregiver and her caregiving agency that she just wanted to come and tell her story. But in her real life, she's created this company that's called Problem Solved. What she does is she helps people with all these things—it could be they got scammed out of some money, or a building contractor messed them up.

And what she's found is that there's a lot of people who go to lawyers for things that lawyers just don't have much of a legal case [for], but that she can... She's just one of these people, she was a great sales person in her career, and she's somebody who can just call the head of the car dealership and get things worked out, and make it a way where that car dealership leader wants to turn that into a customer service experience for himself.

So I know that she in the Boston area goes to this group called The Provisors. And The Provisors have all these lawyers. And everybody's like, "Oh my gosh, you have to meet Nancy, because she could take some of these things off your case [load] that you're not really able to help with anyway." Just a totally different example of understanding your ideal customer profile and who they hang out with. That's a great thing that you're telling us here.

Gabrielle Pumpian: Exactly. Can I just add to that for a second? One, I love that you mentioned Provisors. I was a member of Provisors for five years. And it completely transformed, one, my confidence in these arenas with these professionals wearing suits, and MBAs and PhDs and all this that I wasn't really familiar with because I had spent the majority of my earlier time in healthcare accounts.

Provisors is a national organization, and it's a wonderful place to kind of get your feet wet and start to build credibility within yourself. And the beauty is, is there are barely any aging experts in Provisors. There's a ton of attorneys, a ton of financial people, a ton of accounting people, CPAs.

What I would do is—every meeting you have an opportunity to stand up and give a little elevator pitch or introduce yourself, which also as a sales and business developer, you've got to do that. You've got to be able to stand up in a room full of people and say who you are and what you do. And what I learned to do was I just told a story. And somehow related it to a legal or a financial situation, because you have to be able to speak to your audience.

So I love that you brought up Provisors. And I would just give a couple tips really quick for expanding yourself or your business outside of the healthcare arena:

One is show up where the people are. Join groups like Provisors. Look at the Aging Life Care Association website and see if there's a local regional chapter that you can get involved in. They're always looking for corporate sponsors. My old companies, we were a corporate sponsor. I was a part of the local educational steering committee here in San Diego. I helped plan conferences, I helped organize events. What it did was every month or twice a month, I would be one-on-one in a meeting with these other Aging Life Care managers. So I was building a relationship by showing up and supporting their organization and meeting them where they are. You can do that with financial planning organizations and associations, there's an estate planning council. Doing a little bit of research and meeting people in their own networking professional spaces, and showing up and building your confidence to be able to do that.

Secondly is investing in the relationship on a continual basis. A lot of these times these professionals—you can't just drop in and say hello. You can't just drop in and bring them coffee. But what they do do consistently is they eat lunch. Unlike us in home care, we rarely eat lunch, right? We're in our cars, we're going to see clients. Legal and financial professionals eat lunch. So why don't you book a lunch once a month or once a quarter and have a one-on-one intimate conversation with them? They often will say yes. Same with Aging Life Care managers. That allows you an opportunity to learn about their business, understand their challenges, and then looking for ways to support them and integrate them into your day-to-day.

And then thirdly is with Aging Life Care managers or geriatric care managers, which happened to be my number one referral source at my old companies—on average about $5 million a year in business coming from GCMs specifically in my territory—is I would collaborate with them. Instead of me always coming to them or me wanting to go meet their team, I would set up a consistent cadence of having an Aging Life Care manager actually come into my office and do a client review or a case review with my team.

And allow them to offer their insights, which sometimes uncovered opportunities to make a referral back to them, and also gave them an opportunity to better understand our business and where we get stuck sometimes, and how to better collaborate. And you let them shine. And they love that because they're able to feel like they're giving back also in a way. And you can pay them for that time. You can pay them their rate: once a month, 200 bucks an hour. But you're inviting them to come in, and again, it's a way to deepen the conversation.

And then lastly, with a lot of these Aging Life Care manager referral sources and some other ones: your internal team—so not just you as the sales and business developer or the owner—your internal team needs to know them and also invest in them. What we would do is we would set up systems. If we got a referral from this specific Aging Life Care manager, my staffing team had a system of communication to them, my care coordination team had a system of communication to them. The recruiter knew how to recruit specifically certain types of caregivers. We'd pay them a [different rate]. There was an entire system per referral source for those ones that were very nuanced, but also very, very fruitful.

So it's not just you carrying the relationship. You have to get your entire team involved, because if you leave one day or you want to go on vacation, you can't have that pressure of it all resting on you as the sales and business developer. I highly recommend building some internal systems around some of those unique referral accounts that may have higher expectations than a skilled nursing social worker.

Ken Accardi: Yeah, perfect. And I love when we start with a little bit of an outline and then we just end up trading stories. So I have one back for you, which is that before we lived in Boston, we lived in a very nice suburb called Wellesley, Massachusetts. It's like Wellesley College is there, a pretty affluent town. And I was the head of the deacons at the Wellesley Village Church. Kathy Musser was the person who did all of the outreach for families in need, right, and all those kinds of things.

Kathy knew the people at Spaulding rehab, and she knew all the people at North Hill and all the different continuing care retirement life facilities and all those kinds of things. And I bet that Kathy would have loved to have been taken out to lunch by somebody who was recruiting for house works or whatever every once in a while. Again, I think it's just a nice story about thinking of an atypical person who nobody else is calling on and nobody else has the relationship with. I bet that that would be a situation where you could get a lot of referrals from it.

Now, taking referrals in a totally different direction: One thing I heard about you talking about is how you recommend that home care agencies refer out to other home care agencies. So that's a little bit maybe untraditional. Everybody's thinking about incoming leads, but you said, "Hey, you should send out a couple referrals to the community every couple weeks yourself." Where did that idea come from?

Gabrielle Pumpian: Yeah, great question. Just to clarify: Referring out to other home care companies when it makes sense, absolutely. Again, it's going back to your ideal client and not saying yes just because you're trying to hit a number or a metric, but really analyzing and kind of slowing down the process in how you're taking on cases.

What was really transformational for us, especially when I co-founded a brand new company in San Diego after I left The Key, we decided at the very beginning: How are we supposed to get business as a brand new company without giving business out?

On our weekly team meetings, we actually used referrals out as a KPI metric that we held ourselves accountable to as a team. And I really spearheaded that accountability with everybody else and myself, because that's how you develop relationships. You have to be willing to give almost first before you should expect anything to be received. And I think a lot of people kind of forget that.

It's been really interesting to see. With my old company, when we were down a week and nobody had referred out, we would talk about it: "Well, have we not asked our caregivers if they need more support with any of their clients? Has anybody reported a fall that we could maybe make a recommendation or a referral to a home health partner? Has anyone had a significant decline and they're not eating as much and they're not as active, maybe it's time to potentially discuss hospice, and who do we know that we could refer out to?"

Referring out is really important. And being able to say no to clients that aren't ideal, that could go to another company—whether it's a price-point issue, whether it's an hourly minimum issue, or it's a geographic issue—not stretching yourself thin, because typically the outcome is going to be negative. You're going to see more churn, and that's going to lead to issues in the business.

I really believe that learning as a team how to talk about when we do say no to a lead or a client referral, why, and what do we do about it? Because everyone I know in home care wants to always help. That's why we're in this industry, we want to help people. And so just saying, "Oh no, you can't afford us, okay bye, good luck"—nobody wants to do that in this industry.

Ken Accardi: Sure.

Gabrielle Pumpian: But if you don't have two or three other relationships that you trust, that you would even send your own family to other home care companies that do something differently, then you're going to be that person saying no. So I definitely recommend—it's part of the work, right? It's part of this 12 to 18 months is developing power partners.

I teach this with a lot of my clients: evaluating every category of people in professions and services that your clients and families may need. Do you have two people per category, or two companies per category that you would refer to that would become your power partners? That also includes other home care companies.

Ken Accardi: Yeah, perfect. Other home care companies, and then referring to the people who are referring to you. If a family could benefit from having an Aging Life Care coach that's not a service that you provide, or somebody could benefit from even a handyman, or any of these kinds of referrals out, you never know what's going to come back and benefit your agency and do the best thing by the client. I love it.

Gabrielle Pumpian: And I really learned that in COVID. It was the first time in my career when I was working from home and it was just chaos. One, our business grew significantly in COVID, which I know a lot of home care companies experience that. And two, a lot of my new business came from other home care companies. And I gave out business left and right too, because we all had to collaborate to be successful. "Oh, you don't have a caregiver in North County? Do you have a caregiver in North County? Yes, I do. Okay, I really would love to not lose this opportunity, but please can you help this family?"

What COVID did was really break down a lot of those barriers that I feel like our competitive nature in this industry had up. And now I don't see other home care businesses as competitors. I would like to see more collaboration across companies of large and small sizes, because the other thing that I love about this industry is the leadership and the owners are always wanting to learn from other people. And many of them are also willing to share what's working well.

When you're in an industry that doesn't really have a ton of standards or regulation—companies like Home Care Pulse, now Activated Insights, that does create some of that benchmarking is helpful—we don't really have much else. I fully believe if you can be involved with your competitors in your community to be more collaborative, you are going to be more successful.

Ken Accardi: Yeah, it's interesting. There's a guy, his name is Cameron Nasser. He ran an agency in the Bay Area that was called NuevaCare.

Gabrielle Pumpian: Okay.

Ken Accardi: And he actually, I think he was in one of these national magazines as one of the fastest growing companies ever. When I first spoke to him—he's been on the podcast—he talked about having this peer group of other home care leaders, and that was like one of the biggest things that really helped them grow, helped him differentiate, and all that kind of thing. So I love that.

Just a couple things you said in there had to do with metrics. And I think that you're right that Activated Insights, we all can't wait for the report to come out and we look at it. It's tracking, "Hey, are you tracking your leads and are you seeing them go through?" And then we listened to that podcast about the 52 Weeks guy, and he was all about, "Is your marketer having 30 meetings in a week?" and that kind of thing.

I know I was speaking to you, and you feel like you even take yours beyond. It's not even just about having the meetings. What are some of your key metrics that you're pushing?

Gabrielle Pumpian: Yeah. This is a great question. In this last year, as I've been doing my own business and working with different agencies, it's becoming more and more clear to me that some of the struggle and frustration that I hear from other home care owners and leaders is: One, they have no visibility or very limited visibility into the activities that their reps are doing. They have trouble getting them to document, to put in their calls into their CRM. And then when they don't see results, they are constantly questioning it. And then it puts them in an uncomfortable situation: Do you let somebody go? Do you put them on a PIP?

So to answer your question: I believe that while the lagging indicators—the results of the effort, the revenue, the starts of care, the number of leads—all of that is important, it actually is not as important as the leading indicators that show the effort, the quality, and the activity that that business developer is doing in order to create the results.

For example, really looking at: Yes, maybe you want to have 30 meetings a week, but of those meetings—and I think he broke this down as like you want to have X amount of face-to-face, and maybe some networking, and this and that—to me, I would take it a step deeper. I would want to see if I was an owner, and I would want to coach and train my reps to do this, is: What was a takeaway you had from that conversation? What was a challenge that they brought up to you? What was a pain point? And then how did you either offer to solve it, or what did you say as a way to follow up with them with an opportunity to solve it, or to circle back?

It's not just about ticking off the box and having the meeting with that influencer, that referral partner. It's actually understanding and developing intentional value-based activity from the meeting that will lead to results down the line.

You can also track things like: How many new relationships are you opening in a month? What does your referral channel mix look like? Are you heavy this month in assisted living because there's all these activities going on and you want to be a part of that? But does that mean that you're not really having super quality conversations because you're just participating in these activities?

Really digging deep into what are some of those leading indicators to produce the return on the investment from the activity in the field.

Ken Accardi: Perfect. All right, I love that. Well, hey, time flies when we're having fun, and we're actually in the home stretch. So I'd love for you to tell people just a little bit about Trail Angel Partners and a little bit of your Pacific Crest Trail story as well, and where did all this come from?

Gabrielle Pumpian: Yeah. Trail Angel Partners, the name of my consulting company—it doesn't say home care, it doesn't say sales—but it's a beautiful metaphor to the experience I had in 2013 when my husband and I, newly married, decided to hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail, which is one contiguous trail that goes from the border here with Mexico all the way up to the Canadian border and just beyond. It's a 2,600-plus-mile hike, and it took us five months.

We had planned as best as we could. We had our packs, we had our gear, you have to send yourself food sometimes, you have to manage your water, you need to know where your water sources are. So there was some logistical planning that if I relate it as a metaphor to business, there's some congruencies.

The thing that I believe got us to the end was none of that. It was the unexpected support—it was unexpected until I knew it was coming—of these people who you call "Trail Angels" that come out to a spot on the trail, usually at a road crossing or they hike in a few miles, and they support long-distance hikers. They put out a cooler full of cold beer and soda in the middle of the desert. There's a chair there that has a back to it, which is like such a luxury. They give you a ride into town and let you stay in their backyard and give you a hot shower and a home-cooked meal. They provide things that you need in order to continue on.

They're not hiking your hike for you. They're not telling you exactly what to do. But they're taking your situation and they're able to support you when you need it as somebody who is vulnerable enough to say, "I would really like a ride," or, "I would really like a hot shower."

I see myself in that light as a guide to my clients—someone who's had a lot of lived experience in this very difficult position of business development and sales, someone who's had a lot of success in private-pay. Alongside, like I shared earlier, I couldn't have done any of it, I wouldn't have been so successful if I hadn't invested in my teams and my people.

I see my role as kind of a guide, as a trail angel for my clients. I'm not here to tell you what to do, but I'm here to support you along the way and offer you tools and guidance.

Ken Accardi: Perfect. Well, I'm sure that a lot of people listening to this are going to say, "Wow, I could really use some Gabrielle in my life," and that they can learn more from you and your services. How would they get in touch with you and Trail Angel Partners for some next steps?

Gabrielle Pumpian: Yeah. LinkedIn is the best way. I actually don't have a website, as I'm just a one-woman show, so I have limited capacity. But I love LinkedIn. We met through LinkedIn, so it's clearly a way to connect with people. So please find me on LinkedIn, it's just my full name. Trail Angel Partners also has a LinkedIn page that I will start posting through that.

And then my email is just my full name at gmail.com: gabriellepumpian@gmail.com.

Ken Accardi: Perfect. I'll spell that out for you, so it's G-A-B-R-I-E-L-L-E Pumpian, P-U-M-P-I-A-N, @gmail.com. I got that right?

Gabrielle Pumpian: You got it. Yep.

Ken Accardi: Perfect. All right, well thank you so much for having been on Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars today, and we wish you the best.

Gabrielle Pumpian: Thank you, Ken.

Podcast Outro Voiceover: Thanks for joining us today on the Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars podcast, produced by Ankota. You can listen to back episodes by visiting 4homecareheroes.com. That's the number 4, then the words homecareheroes.com.