Seniors Housing Business is the magazine that helps you navigate the evolution of the seniors housing industry.
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62 www.seniorshousingbusiness.com Seniors Housing Business n February/March 2017 We orchestrate the people and processes of your construction project, making it easy for you to bring your vision to life. IT TAKES A VILLAGE. meyer-najem.com all the major disciplines. When an issue arises in a community — IT or culinary or maintenance, any area you can think of — we've got staff that can respond to that and provide service and counsel to our communities. We very much emphasize resi- dent and employee satisfaction. From an employee standpoint, we've been extremely success- ful with regard to retention. For full-time employees, our turnover is less than 13 percent annually. Industry-wide, that's an amazing number, and it's even better when you look just at our healthcare staff. Also, we are very focused on education and training. About 15 years ago we created a training school called Acts Corporate Uni- versity. Most corporate univer- sities are for the top 5 percent of an organization. We went another way. We wanted a university that served the 95 percent. The purpose is to provide training to our hourly employ- ees, to give them the opportu- nity to improve their skills and get promoted. That decision helped define what we feel is a very strong relationship with our employees, hence the low turnover rate. SHB: I also noticed that those approximately 8,000 units come from only 21 communities. What's the strategy behind having so many units in each community you own and operate? Vanderbeck: We don't see those numbers in a given community as huge, specifically when you com- pare it to other places with 1,200 independent living units. We've been repositioning com- munities, which in some cases meant reducing independent liv- ing so we could provide more privacy in the assisted living and skilled nursing environments. When we started in the 1970s and 1980s, semi-private and shared rooms were fine. That's not now. You want single, private spaces. To perform that repositioning, we might close an area down, move residents out, and then that build- ing is restructured for single, pri- vate suites. When you really establish a community through market and financial studies, you're looking at the effective size for seniors for that area. What's the penetra- tion rate? What's the ability to bring employees or residents? We've found that generally, a good number for us is something in the neighborhood of 250 to 300 independent living units, 60 to 90 skilled nursing beds and 30 to 60 assisted living units. SHB: You own and operate every community. Has that always been the case? What advantage do you see in fully owning and operating every community? Vanderbeck: People will some- times ask us, "Why don't you just manage the operations?" We feel there are great advantages to owning and operating. Certainly when you look at the repositioning efforts, they would've been highly difficult or impossible if we didn't fully own and operate. From an organizational stand- point, that's always been our model. The nice thing about being nonprofit and faith-based is that all our money goes back into the organization rather than to shareholders. SHB: Are there any acquisition or development plans in the works? What are the long-term goals for the company? Vanderbeck: As you can imag- ine, we hear from people quite a bit in that regard. There probably aren't too many weeks or months that someone doesn't say, "We've got a property we'd like you to look at." From our standpoint, we look again at our regions and see where we can support communi- ties and fill in underserved areas. When you look at it from that per- spective, there are opportunities in the mid-South. The Carolinas are a growing area of development. There are a num- ber of states we're not involved in, such as Tennessee and Virginia, so there are opportunities there as well. We're fairly dominant from a Pennsylvania and Florida stand- point, but I think there are other areas that could be filled in. Hav- ing said that, it doesn't mean we're necessarily pigeonholed into those environments. You look at each situation as a unique opportunity. Our board established defined criteria that it wants us to utilize when we evaluate opportunities for growth. There is a very for- malized due diligence process we go through. From A to Z, we're looking at a three- to six-month operation. SHB: Do you have a preference for acquisitions versus development? Vanderbeck: I don't know if preference is the word. When you As Acts CEO, J. Mark Vanderbeck, far right, enjoys interacting with residents frequently, as shown here at a resident donor event.