Tod Petty:

Hi, my name is Tod Petty, and you have arrived at the Senior Housing Unfiltered podcast. This is the March 2021 episode, and I’m your host today. Each month, my team creates a monthly podcast to highlight the impact makers in the senior housing industry. Quite frankly, our goal is to influence the direction of an industry we believe is stuck in ancient cultures. We launched the podcast in 2020, and we’ve been conversing with all types of people since our inception. Each month, my team tracks down entrepreneurs, leaders, and other heroes from the senior housing world. We search the industry for the celebrities as well as the hidden gems.

Today, on the show, I sit down with Paul Griffin III, who is founder, president, and CEO of Griffin Living. Paul leads an award-winning real estate development firm specializing in innovative senior living communities. I’m excited about my interview with Paul today. Our topic, Rethinking Operator Relationships. We know, in the future, both owner and operator must partner to ensure the vision of each out of the ground senior housing community is fulfilled. The game has changed. The developer’s in-house disciplines must now connect with the operator’s programming to deliver best in class expertise in clinical sales and marketing and engagement programming.

We’re going to break all this down for you on today’s episode. I’ll be right back after the broadcast with some final comments. Let’s jump right into the program. Enjoy.

I think that’s why you’re so forward-thinking on your assisted living model, because you’re putting in components, even in assisted living, that allow people to either psychologically hold onto a belief that they’re not as needy or it allows them the opportunity to remain independent because you have washers and dryers in your suites, you have a kitchenette in your suite. They’re two room. They’re larger than the normal suites. It still allows for a person to have an independent feel and lifestyle versus a 300 square foot suite with no amenities, no kitchen amenities. You’re commingling the laundry down the hallway. It allows a person a different opportunity to participate in their care.

 

Paul Griffin:

I think that we feel that that’s an important attribute. I don’t know, at my house, there’s a gym. Do I use it? No. But, it’s there. I know it’s there. I feel good about it. I have a swimming pool and a big deck. Do I ever go out there? Hell, no. It gets too hot or too cold. I just don’t use it. But it’s there and I know it’s there. I think, psychologically, we have that aspect to our lives all the time. Maybe a fancy restaurant in the neighborhood. Maybe a museum or a library. Do I read? No. But the library’s there, that’s a good thing.

I think that, for our seniors, knowing there’s still a kitchen there and it works, you can use it, refrigerators, and all the cook tops, and washer, and all that stuff. The laundry room is there. I think the laundry facility was surprised me, but it makes perfect sense that we’ll send our caregivers in and do our residents’ laundry in their room for them, so that their laundry doesn’t actually go downstairs and get commingled in commercial washers. Not something I personally think about much, because my laundry goes to the local laundry and gets washed. I guess they do it separately than other people’s. I have no idea how they do it. I can see, if it’s something that feels like you’re in your apartment, and it’s self-contained, and I can go downstairs and have breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or go have a glass of wine, or a cup of coffee, or anything I want, and it’s there. It’s there, I can do what I want. You know what? I think that would be very nice, free, a little bit liberating.

 

Tod Petty:

I totally agree. Having been in this industry for a long time now and actually lived in assisted living, the single biggest problem, outside of the residents might not enjoy the food, is the laundry. Those washing machines eat socks. They eat clothes. You can’t find them. To have the client with the ability to do their own laundry, because a lot of them still can, they feel very independent.

 

Paul Griffin:

Sure. If they can, they should. I’m sorry, Tod, but you’re right. If they can, they should. If they can make their bed and they’re used to doing it, don’t take it away from them. You might think you’re actually helping them, but you’re not. You’re taking something else away. Losing socks and things, yeah, it happens already at my house. I supposed it’s a bigger situation, absolutely.

 

Tod Petty:

Exactly. We’re more tolerant with our own washers and dryers than we are in the community, though.

 

Paul Griffin:

I didn’t know, so washer and dryer is the big deal after quality of food.

 

Tod Petty:

We hear it. It’s probably the biggest complaint. Yes, because clothes get lost. They’re not supposed to be commingled. A lot of times they are. The other thing is your laundry goes missing for a week. You have limited control as an older client in a building. If it doesn’t come back, where is it? What you’ve done with your community by putting the washer and dryer into the resident’s room, it allows interaction with the caregiver while they’re in the room with the resident. If they’re not doing their own laundry, they’re in the resident’s room. They’re doing the laundry, and there’s more interaction. Programmatically, you’re creating more interaction, putting pressure on interaction, which is very important for the senior to thrive. I think it’s a game changer. Like you said, if you want to get into the infection control is we’re not commingling, there’s less infection, cross-contamination. In a post-COVID world, that’s all very important.

 

Paul Griffin:

Absolutely. I think the caregivers, and house cleaning staff, and all that, are major point of contact for people. I know, just here in my office, people walk in the door to ask questions. Our housekeeping staff here come in and visit me all the time, and I really enjoy the few minutes I can spend with them and talk to them about their families, and feel like I get to know them through the years. I think that everybody you come in contact with just becomes part of your society. In an apartment or a senior residence that we’re doing, I think all of that is going to come to play. I know loneliness in COVID’s been a huge issue, while the industry’s really tried to protect our own staff, for one thing, from getting sick from each other, and our senior citizens from getting sick. Infections or viruses are so deadly to them.

But then, the loneliness, I think we’ve done a great job as an industry. I haven’t heard a lot of general incidents of COVID outbreaking and creating great disasters, other than in New York. I think that’s a New York problem. I think the industry’s done well, but my gosh, the effect of the loneliness in this last year by taking our residents and not being able to have them come out, we don’t really understand the damage about that yet. We might not, because the generation may pass away without us really ever finding out. It’s not like they’re going to live on and 10 years tell us what it was like. Yeah, this idea of how we’re going to manage it. Yet, and Tod, we have to manage forward. I mean, the viruses were always here. COVID just put it in our face and said, “Guys, deal with this seriously.” We are, the industry is. But we have to, while we’re dealing with it, also how are we going to be able to deal with virus and still not bury our residents in a corner where no one can see them and they’re just lonely?

 

Tod Petty:

Well, Paul, I think you’re striking a chord there that it really, from the time I first met you four, five, years ago, just so resonated with me. Because, I’ve worked with a lot of different developers, a lot of different groups, to bring senior housing out of the ground. But when I began working with your group several years ago, you were on a quest to really make a difference in the resident’s life. I know you guys have beautiful buildings and just first class multifamily and senior housing projects. One of the things I noticed the quest you were on is you really wanted a different experience for the resident. You seem to have an understanding. I know this from Bebe, your VP of Healthcare and Wellness at your company. You seem to have an understanding of all the changes that are taking place. You know this was a health care play, a health care model. There has to be health care within the building. It can’t be secondary. It’s not commoditized. It can’t be ignored.

Whether it’s the Harvard Medical Research Board, whether it’s Harvard Medical, or even some of the most recent books on aging, I’m thinking Live Long Die Short, they’re all about that, one, we thought that we couldn’t really control aging, because it was genetic. Well, that’s not true. 75% to 80% of how we age, we can control. The things we thought were the biggest contributors to mortality are actually not. The single most contributor to whether you do well or not is relationships, social interaction, and connection with other people, with relationships. People that are denied that don’t do very well. I’ve been restraining from posting on LinkedIn really what the articles that are now coming out from people, very good reputation, very educated backgrounds, talking about, hey, we did mitigate some of this COVID-19 outbreak, but our seniors have suffered, because they’re not getting the interaction they need.

I thought we would talk a little bit about what you’re doing in your buildings to make sure they’re going to get the health care they want, to expand the health care offering as we’re able to age in place and the rules change, and also to make sure there’s engagement. We’ve looked at this and called it successful aging. We’ve come up with eight elements on our side. A lot of it really comes from the time I spent with you and your time figuring out what we needed to do in the buildings. I’d just like you to share some of your vision with the audience today, Paul.

 

Paul Griffin:

Yeah, I appreciate the question, Tod. I will say, Tod, and this is important, I mean, I’m learning every day from people like yourself, people that been in the industry and working with residents and staff. There’s new ideas. I think, in any industry, when we start to get myopic or start thinking we understand the issues and the answers, and been there, done that, kind of attitude, that’s when we fail. The demand and the needs, as well as the supply, are dynamic. They’re dynamic in every industry. They’re certainly dynamic in senior housing and senior lifestyles. We have the Silent Generation are certainly longer lived than the Greatest Generation, so that would be my mom and dad, or your mom and dad, our parents. We, the boomers, will be coming up. We’re healthier than our Silent Generation, our parents were. We’re going to live longer. Therefore, there will be more need for different housing solutions, different lifestyle solutions, for all of us.

Gosh, I mean, the demographics, 10,000 people a day now turning 76 years old as the boomers move in. That’s not even touching our senior housing solutions yet. They’re not even there. We’re an equilibrium in some markets. The Griffins are pushing into more urban kind of markets where it’s more difficult to get the housing approved and bring it in. There’s supply constrain and under supply, so we’ve got an angle. There’s other markets where it’s easier. Maybe, right now, the markets are being fully met with the supply that’s coming in. It’s a temporary thing. This industry is going to be hit by a tidal wave.

Tod, we keep reading Wall Street Journal and other articles, nursing’s dead, the industry’s over, people aren’t really ever going to use it, a bunch of nonsense. Skilled nursing, as a solution of what people would pay $180 a day for what their insurance companies would pay for, that was ending already because it wasn’t an economic solution to a problem. Assisted living is a more economic solution. Independent living and the 55-plus, or age restricted living, are economically well thought out, well driven, supply to the demand. They were growing and they’re still growing. COVID slowed everything down, but it didn’t slow the demand down. There isn’t a better solution.

I read these articles, so home health care so people can stay home. Well, let’s go back to the fundamentals that you were talking about, Tod. Home health care, I’m 90 years old, I’m at my daughter’s house. She’s 60. She’s working. My grandkids are raised and out of the house, or college and beyond, so I’m doing what all day long? I’m at the house by myself. They got a caregiver that comes in. Okay, caregiver comes in. They’re good or bad, or it depends on what day it is in that business. They change all the time. It’s not a steady staff. There’s no management of the staff. They come in and work. They have a management company maybe they report to, but really they hire somebody who they send into your house. The sickest people I’ve met, two deaths and one man that we work with here that you actually know was very ill in the hospital, all brought in by caregivers to their parents’ houses, not by assisted living centers.

Going forward with the home health care model, in the evening, the 60-year-old daughter is home. If she’s not a stay-at-home– if she’s a stay-at-home, maybe she has more energy– but if she’s working all day long, busy all day long, she’s coming home, home health care leaves, she’s home, she’s tired, husband’s coming home, he’s tired, how much great quality of life is there really? The morning, they’re up and leaving. It is a solution that a lot of people will pick, but it’s not the solution. We’re reading about this stuff, Tod, is that’s really the way things are going, and this conjugant care is over as an editorial stance that our major media has been taking through COVID. It’s not real.

Fact is, is you’re saying, we can deliver safer, more engaged emotionally and socially, better health care, which we will talk about. We can deliver better restaurant animated foods, animated meals, more activities outgoing at whatever level you happen to be living, and for less money. And it’s cheaper. There’s no way the economic model and the actual output is better with what we’re delivering. This industry is growing. I just get tired of reading a report or writing something that just is not based in reality. It’s just something to say.

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah, no, I totally agree. I’m hoping we can get the message out with this relevant content and others in the industry. Because, I totally agree with you on, first of all, probably in the past, seniors did everything they could do to stay at home, thinking they were independent. We know where all that leads. It leads to decline, ultimately, if they don’t have interaction. I’ve watched people fight to come into communities wanting that independence. Once they finally gave up, and came in, and had social interaction, they thrive. My own family, I’ve seen that.

What a lot of people don’t know either is that there is more oversight and licensure governance, that’s not all bad, we need some of that, in our communities than there are in home health. People in home health-

 

Paul Griffin:

Tod, just your staff and our staff, we have managers managing our caregivers. It’s not just send you out to somebody’s address. There are checks and balances all the way around, which if I’m a resident or 60-year-old daughter, I really do want to know. I maybe have a great caregiver right now and they could deliver it at my house and they could deliver it at this residential community, but I don’t know that that’ll always be my caregiver. I don’t know that that’ll be a caregiver that’s there on a moment’s notice all the way around the clock when I’m sick unexpectedly, or caregiver’s daughter’s having a baby or something and is gone, and now I got someone else that I don’t know. No one really manages until something bad happens and find out, “that was a lousy person.” I mean, all kinds of stuff.

Also, Tod, in the industry and at your company you guys are delivering, the industry really is delivering, the caregiver staff that’s going into the apartments and visiting with the residents and seeing how they are, checking certain vital signs depending on who they are at different times of the day, and more often depending on what their needs are, delivering medications as prescribed, rather than… We know that they’re licensed. We know they’re doing. We’re able to check them. In illnesses, I think the check to check up on somebody in the evening or at nighttime and say, “Oh my gosh, you’re running a temperature.” Maybe the resident just says, “I don’t feel well,” and, “Let’s just check that temperature. No, that’s really high. We’ll call our nurse or LVN, the nurse-

 

Tod Petty:

LNV, LPN, depending on where you’re [crosstalk 00:20:26].

 

Paul Griffin:

Yeah, if you call them. Yes. That person can come down and see them, and that way you’re not just either calling the ER or ambulance to take them to an ER just because. You’re not wondering, “Should I be calling…” You’re not calling the 60-year-old daughter saying, “Well, now you got a problem. Your mother’s running a temperature tonight.” You actually can bring the licensed nurse level in to have a look also, especially at night. You can then make a better decision. You can use your Zoom medicine to have a doctor if you need to look at it and weigh in on it before… I mean, a lot of steps you can go through to say, “Do we call an ambulance and put you through checking in in an ER?”

Frankly, you know people getting sick, the sickest I’ve been, the sickest I think I’ve ever been is sitting with my wife’s dad all night when he had pneumonia in an ER from an assisted living and picking something up in the ER. I was deathly ill. That’s just because you’re run down and you’re going through those. There’s just a lot of crap flying around in those buildings. And the expense. Frankly, just the expense of calling an ambulance at a drop of a hat. But then, you don’t want to not. You can’t put the caregiver person at a decision and say, “Well, if you don’t call an ambulance, this person gets really sick, it’s on you, on our company, but on you. If you do call them, you’re safe, but what you put your resident and their 60-year-old through is not fair.” I think we bring a lot by those checks and balances that we have and that your company really offers.

 

Tod Petty:

Well, and the way to do that, Paul, for the audience to fully understand, that without you dedicated to building a building with robust wifi-

 

Paul Griffin:

Yes, you have to.

 

Tod Petty:

If that doesn’t exist, we can’t do telehealth. And so, you just can put a building up and not have robust effective wifi. If you don’t program into your budgets your LVNs and your LPNs, like you guys do on your side, that are passing the meds, then you don’t have a qualified person to be able to do an assessment. If you do not have the resources to do a nurse on a stick or to do vitals, you can’t provide the health care professional with temperature and the things they need to know. Again, a lot of people feel a lot like, just build a beautiful building, don’t involve yourself in health care, and we’ll get by. It’s not going to work that way in the future. We have to be involved in providing the 24 hour oversight and connecting them with some help to mitigate the decline or the reversal of the resident.

 

Paul Griffin:

I think that the ability to really offer health management and care is just a huge part of the business. Bebe Reed, that has joined us, and knows you, I met Bebe with you many years ago now. She’s explained so much of this and how it actually… “So, tell me, Bebe, walk me through the evening. What is this really like. When you’re on the floor, what happens?” It’s nothing like we imagined as developers or even people living in our communities with our loved ones. It’s really the boots on the ground managing at night and other times when it’s not convenient and what our residents really need and what we put them through is a big part of what Bebe is explaining to us.

Bebe, from our staff, as a developer, working with Bebe, and then with Bebe working with you is important to us. Just like we want managers managing our health care and our kitchens, and all of that, we want you to manage that on-site active staff. We think you’re better at it than we are. We think that we can bring, if we can understand what we’re asking you to do and we can understand what we expect and what’s reasonable to expect, and then we can also be creative and say, “Hey Tod, got a new idea. Try this one in our building,” and have it make sense. Using Bebe, and ourselves, and our people, we’ve got a good formula for success.

If we tried to reach through and do it ourself and… Could we do it? I’m sure we could. But I don’t think we’d be as good as we can be about these important aspects, which is the caregiver and the life in the building, as we can working with our people who can do the real estate development, can think about the issues, and then be sure that we’ve put in all the infrastructure, and be sure we’ve put in the budget in managing the project that we could work with your group, and have you manage them, and really bring the level of service and care that we really think we’re looking for. It’s a good team approach, which I like.

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah, it’s very exciting, Paul. I mean, my 15 years, I was in home health. I have a respiratory therapy background. And so, the changes I’ve seen are really exciting to me to see the way senior housing has changed into beautiful buildings with robust amenities, hotel resort type atmosphere. And now, we’re finally going to put the health care that it probably needed, needed to move to. We’re going that way. We’re going to be able to put into and see a great model for the future customers. Well, I wanted to ask you, if you’d share a little with the audience, and I don’t know what you can share, but I wanted you to share a little bit about what you’re going to be putting in your buildings going forward. You have a beautiful building coming up in Simi Valley. You’re going to have stuff coming up in Georgia. I know you’ve been doing a lot of research on the technology. Can you talk a little bit about that?

 

Paul Griffin:

Sure, Tod. I mean, we’re trying to reach out. Just as you said, Tod, the most important part is really is the care. I mean, we’ve got to have that first. One of my favorite buildings that I’ve ever been to was actually really inexpensive. It was Boca Raton. Husband and wife were pharmacists and they purchased it. They loved their residents. They were putting two residents per room so they could cut the price way down. I met their chef. Their chef was engaged with all of them, their activities. Look, it was all about the lifestyle. It wasn’t a fancy building, but it was great. This couple were really engaged and loved what they were doing. We were looking in Boca Raton about a big fancy building, or we’re out in Simi, and West Lake, Georgia. We’re talking big fancy buildings. That’s just the infrastructure, because we can develop it. It’s great. It’s a different segment. At the end of the day, it’s nice to have a site.

It’s like, look, for our families. You could raise your family in a beautiful suburban house, big, fancy looking thing, but it’s still about mom, and dad, and kids, all the issues we face. Family still better be family. It doesn’t care how big and fancy. Sometimes, the bigger and fancier the house, the less the family focuses on… Fancy’s not always better. I think it’s really the same thing for seniors. Yeah, we’d like to deliver the big and nice, and we can develop that infrastructure and manage costs so that that can be done at a reasonable price for our customers. The family, if you will, is still the caregiving and the restaurant. We really want animated foods. I want a great chef. We hired a couple of great chefs out here, they’ve run restaurants that we’ve liked, and talked them into come and work for us. “You don’t want to run the business side of a restaurant. It’s a pain in the neck. We’re good at business, you’re good at creative meals and what have you.” That’s a little different than the industry.

For an operator here, it’s a little different. They don’t think that way. I think we’re getting the eyebrows up. “Wait a minute. You want to do what?” We say, “Yeah, that’s really what we want to do.”

 

Tod Petty:

I know you demand excellence, so it’s what you expect. I know you have high expectations.

 

Paul Griffin:

Tod, I think we all have to push ourselves that way all the time. I really want you to push me all the time too about things that you see or ideas that Bebe has. If we all push each other, we’ll stay in front of the growing demand. Really, we, Tod, baby boomers aren’t going to accept what silent generation accepts in the way of lifestyle. They are much more to themselves. Boomers, we’ve been coddled all our lives. I’m middle of the boomer, believe me I know. We expect more and we demand more. As boomers move in, the world’s going to change. For you and I, we’re going to be in front of it, because we’re thinking about it before it happens. As it gets here, we’ll be relevant. Buildings we’re building now will be relevant then. The buildings we build then probably will be a lot more than they are today.

The guys that build for just enough for the Silent Generation that have been around for a few years, or even guys who are finishing today, those buildings may have some issues about being repurposed or having to be really discounted into cash cow positions in terms of the income coming through and be really much more value driven proposition than our buildings, which we’re hoping ours are value plus more amenities and more lifestyle amenity.

Tod, I think, in terms of our buildings and what we’re doing, just from real estate development from all of these years and the billions of dollars in projects that we’ve developed, architecturally we want to always walk into any building, whether it’s a house, an apartment, a hotel, in my office building, anywhere we want to do, we want to look up and out at light and space. You want to look in a building and feel like your breath goes in and you look out, and you feel good. It’s expansive. That is an architectural design. It is absolutely having to go into it and say, “What trade-offs I’m going to make to do it,” but it’s not really that difficult.

I find that it requires architects that are better about those thinking about what it’s like in the entry of any building. If you’re just building for, I have this much space for an entry, I have this much space for a greeting area, I’ve got this much for my grand activities room, I’ve got this much for my nursing, I can get all that in the same square footage, I can get it very efficiently done, but your heart doesn’t lift when you walk in the door. You’re just walking in a door. That is just architecturally something that we do to set ourselves apart. I know other architects and developers can and will do it. I know at hotels you can see the difference all the time. You know, when you walk into hotels, which one you go into and say, “God, that was just like, exciting, walking in the door,” and that one’s like, “Oh, it’s a hotel. Get my bags checked in.” That would be just an example, I think, that most people could relate to as you’re thinking about it.

We want to walk in our buildings and look out across the entry through the main activity rooms. I want the main activity rooms to be two and a half to three stories tall in the middle. I want to have two and a half to three stories worth of glass looking out the back into the tire width of the room, so you walk in and out. I want water, major fountains, in the courtyard areas in the middle of the buildings that everybody looks into. Certainly, from the front door, you look across the room out the back at fountains. Here, in California, I want you looking at giant lemons on the trees. I want you looking at big bougainvilleas, the pretty red flowers shifting around. I’m just trying to paint in your mind what you’re looking out at.

Main activity room, we really want to have activities going on, several, two or three at a time, art projects, whether it’s another presentation, Boy Scouts, or choir, or a historian or somebody. Want to have other there maybe quietly sitting running their mahjong or something. We want to make sure that there are right activities or right scale of… But that takes more money, as an operator, for us for activities. It’s not that much more, Tod, but we have to make a deliberate decision of, yeah, we’re going to spend the money to do it. We have to have the confidence that our customers are willing to pay slightly more to live, because we have those activities.

Our kitchen, really, I need a menu. I need people to order from a menu. I need them to have a selection. I need to have Sundays be a nice brunch with carving station kind of thing, or omelets, what have you, waffles. They need to have a Thursday night something, steak nights or something. On Tuesday, tacos. I need to have things happening. That is a commitment to restaurants, which is a major part of people. You said, you started, I said, “Look, food is one of the main areas, and laundry, and I’m throwing activities,” and we’re both assuming the health care is there. We are there with health care, so absolutely got to do all of them.

Tod, I think you do. When I met you, I was happy and wanted to work with you. We’re excited about this. We’re excited to have Bebe here, because she understands from the health care side. I understand menus. I eat well. That’s something I understand.

 

Tod Petty:

Well, your team understands technology too. You understand that when the client comes under your porte-cochere that there needs to be beautiful music playing to set the mood when they walk in. You understand aromatherapy has to be delivered, and you have to program for it. Music throughout the building. Like you said, natural sunlight is in the physiology of the residents creating vitamin K and D. All this creates the paradigm in a person’s mind. It translates into a great experience that I do believe, we both had talked about this, that people will pay slightly more for and that people will gravity toward a solution that will give them a better outcome.

 

Paul Griffin:

Tod, for the sound, we spent more money for the way that we put the sound delivery systems to different parts of the building. There are different sounds depending on where you are in building and what time of day it is. Some might be some soft music, some might be just outdoorsy birds chirping or something else. We don’t want you to ever quite put your finger on what you’re hearing, but just notice that you feel good. The aromatherapy went to the group that does the scent management for Four Seasons and Neiman Marcus. They’re very good at it. You go into those places, they put you in the right mood. Our scents, from outside the front door, is one outdoors. It might be citrus blossom or [inaudible 00:36:31] depending what season it is. Inside, as I walk in, it’s maybe a different, in fact it is a different, kind of a scent. If I’m back down where the residents are, it’s a little bit different again.

The sights, the light, the lighting. We high-end lighting consultant, and they use very different temperatures of lights depending on where you are. The clarity, I think of good lighting as just being crystal clear. It’s not yellow. It’s not white. It’s just crystal clear. It feels like daylight, but it’s not blasting your eyes. That wasn’t horrifically more, but it took some engineering dollars to figure it out. These guys do high-end offices and executive suites. They do hotels and what have you. It’s just a commitment to it. I think we just create the environment to walk through in the building.

That’s the one thing we can do as a developer is really deliver the infrastructure where you’re going to live and make it feel uplifting and positive, so that during the day…. The most positive thing you can have is nothing is particular bothering me. I’m not hot. I’m not cold. It’s not too bright in my eyes. It’s not too dim. The sounds here are soothing and engaging. The smells, I don’t know, but it just smells good. You can’t exactly put your finger on any one of them and say you notice any of them. If you notice any of those in our building, we did it wrong.

 

Tod Petty:

Right, yes.

 

Paul Griffin:

Yeah, it’s just how I feel. You just feel uplifted and positive. That positive feel should just be for everybody that comes in. Our staff, our 60-year-old daughters, our residents, everybody that comes in they should feel that way. I don’t know what it is, but I feel good when I’m there.

 

Tod Petty:

Absolutely.

 

Paul Griffin:

We’re working with another one, another consultant. I think this is going to be wild if we can get it to happen, Tod. We’ll see. It’s a group that does concert halls and museums, and high-end kind of places all around the world. I don’t know how they do it exactly. It’s projection, but that’s not exactly right. But, it’s like holograph, so you walk in and you think you’re looking at a koi pond, and it’s really just on the floor. You put your finger in it, and the water dips out in concentric circles. Or you’re looking at a… “Gosh, is that a waterfall coming off the bar right now? Did a fish just flop down there?” I mean, it’s just that kind of thing. They show me examples of how they do that stuff. I’m thinking, “That sounds pretty wild.”

That level of animation isn’t so much. I think it’s fun. But what I’m really looking for, for a senior building that I really think would be just awesome for the industry if we could start doing this, is to go in the pre-dining rooms, which we’re making a little bit larger in our buildings, an area just to gather before you’re eating, if could get in that area and they could turn that whole pre-dining area into, say, it’s Polynesian night, you could turn the pre-dining area into Waikiki Beach. You think you’re standing on sand. You’re looking at waves. You could go over and touch them if you want. You see palm trees waving, and you swear you’re there. If you could do that kind of thing, and that way we could just bring life.

You’re unable, as a resident, to be out as much as maybe you had been in your life. You remember, maybe you’ve never been to these places, but life is coming to you. We’re bringing it to you, and you feel like you’re having these experiences. That would just be awesome. That’d be great for our residents, and for staff, and for everybody.

 

Tod Petty:

Oh, absolutely.

 

Paul Griffin:

Again, we haven’t pulled it off yet. They’re telling me they can do it. It’s not ridiculously expensive. You have to commit to it. Boy, Tod, I’d love to see the industry start to shift in these kinds of directions. Some have other solutions better than ours, but this is where we’re looking and wanting to be relevant in this conversation. The winner, if we’re all good at this, and we’re all pushing each other, will be our customers, our residents.

 

Tod Petty:

Yes, I totally agree. I always say every community has a unique value proposition. The deal there is the members of that community have to figure out what they can deliver to an audience that will attract themselves to them. I love everything that we’re talking about. The more I read coming out of Harvard Medical Review and the more I understand that the lives that we live is governed by the thoughts that we think and the subconscious thoughts we’re not aware of, and everything we can deliver to a senior, whether it’s aromatherapy, digital signage, hologram experiences, all affect them subconscious, which affects their outlook and makes their lives more relevant. This is very powerful.

 

Paul Griffin:

I mean, Tod, for me and you… Sorry, Tod, I didn’t mean to step on you there. Yeah, for me and you it is too, though, Tod. Think about how we go through our day. Mostly, we’re at home having some dinner hopping in bed, or we’re in our office. They’re still our experiences enough to emotionally feel engaged enough that we’re happy. Our residents, same thing, only we’ve got to bring a little bit more of it to them.

 

Tod Petty:

Absolutely.

 

Paul Griffin:

Memory care, it’s a big issue. There is a doctor that was out here at UCLA. He’s a top researcher at it. I think he’s moved up into the Bay Area now, but he’s a top guy at this. I’ll get his book that I’ve been reading, I’ll send you a copy too. He’s saying, and I apologize, I don’t remember his name right at the moment, but I’m very intrigued, he’s saying that managing lifestyle issues even by the time we’re in our 70s can make a huge difference on your ability either to continue with the clarity that you have or even bring back a lot of clarity of your thought that you may be losing. I just think that is amazing. Because our hearts are working better, we’re not dropping over in our 40s and 50s of heart attacks, our cancers are being managed much better than they were, memory care’s the next one.

According to this doctor, anyway, there’s no silver bullet. It’s not one thing, but probably 10 things that we’re going to do. Everybody’s got a little different reason why they maybe succumb to more serious memory care. But it can be managed. If we could bring that to our buildings too, even starting with their families as people are thinking about assisted living, but maybe by the time they get into independent living, let’s bring those changes and maybe keep them clear for longer. Tod, what if we can keep people, instead of living for two to five years, if we could them to live from five to eight years, because we did a good job, and they were happy. They only will live longer if they are happy.

 

Tod Petty:

Yes. Well, I’d love to have another episode with you to talk about the Montessori dementia programming that you’re trying to put in your buildings. I think that would be a great topic. We could also bring in some of this research that’s being done to slow down the progression of dementia. There’s a lot of new breakthrough stuff coming. Paul, I’d like to do this before we go, would you just share a little bit, and we may put this at the beginning of the podcast, but I’d like you to share a little bit of how being successful in the multifamily space for all those years and how you transitioned to senior housing, what caused that quest? What led you into this? I’m so glad it did, what led you into the frontier of senior living?

 

Paul Griffin:

Well, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention, Tod. We were master planned communities for several generations. My father was doing hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and I picked it up about 40 years ago. Is that right? 20, yeah, 40 years ago. I came into it 40 years ago. I picked it up 30 years ago. Dad, bless him, was about my age now, and said, “Great, good to have you, son. Bye.” I can’t know it feels sometimes. Anyway, I enjoyed master planned communities, and the size and the scale of business. It was great. Being the size and volume that we were, dealt with great professionals in the company and in the industry. Deloitte, Price Water House, McKenzie, all those groups. It was great.

The recession in 2008, we were actually doing fairly well. It just kept getting worse, in 2010, ’11. By that time, there was no money to beg, borrow, or steal for capital for projects. [inaudible 00:45:46] projects are large enough to take a lot of cash. It’s a hoard of capital if you take for each one. There just wasn’t any around. I ended up in China. Chinese, I met such dear people. Truly, they’re kind, good, people. They gave me a billion dollar credit line, a billion 200 million actually. Credit line, let’s go into America, but start with seniors. We have a problem with seniors. We’d like to back you in development and care, because we have a problem here. We’d like to see the technology developed and bring it.

I spent a lot of time in China in different senior facilities around China, what they’re doing and their solutions, what we might be doing. They were pretty far ahead of us, actually. They’re just so much bigger. Everything they do, there’s so much of and they need so much more of everything. That did get us started with our first senior… It was a senior apartment project that we did just to stick our toe in the water. We won a gold medal for United States that year for the best project. That surprised us a little. First one going into seniors was fun. Did a speed dating for seniors night. [Torando 00:46:59] in our marketing group. I laughed. They had traffic backed up out to the boulevards, and police coming and having to stop traffic and close the thing down. I just died. It was a fun group of people. The big activities and rooms and all that, it got me really intrigued and it moved my passion.

The master planned family communities are great. I do like them. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older too, but I really started to pay more attention and visit big projects of independent living, and assisted living, and memory care, and all that stuff. Some of them had skilled nursing attached to it. It was really fun. To start to understand and see this was really fairly young industry actually. It’s been around for a bit, but as industries go in the US, it was fairly young and dynamic. Because the age cohorts were shifting over to the next group, which will now shift again into baby boomers, it made it even more exciting and interesting.

For me, it was really just reignited my passion to something new. That, Tod, really, it’s a development. I’ve built $10 or $12 billion in building myself in my career. It’s not that. We do a lot of it. We’ve done a lot of it. It really is my passion got to be about our residents and understanding their daughters or sons that are seeing to them and understanding the caregivers and the restaurants, and all the people. It’s like I found a whole new life in this, and I’m just loving it.

We offer, what we bring, Tod, may be real estate development. We get approvals, and we can get buildings built. That is a means to an end. But the end is really what you’re doing every day. I’m just privileged to be part of it now.

 

Tod Petty:

Well, Paul, this has been great. I mean, it just is so edifying to me to hear your vision and your passion. The operators need good developers that believe in more than the building. You definitely have a passion for the seniors and trying to make a difference in their lives. I know you’re trying to make a difference in our industry and not leave it the way you found it. And so, I appreciate that.

Wow, what a great conversation with Paul Griffin. If you want more information about Griffin Living and how they’re changing the industry and their current developments, you can simply go to griffin.com. I want to thank everyone for attending this month’s broadcast. Don’t miss April 2021. I have a special guest, and we’re going to be talking about a new model that’s emerging in the senior housing space. What a new model out of the ground is going to look like? It’s going to include a new pricing matrix, a new product offer, a new memory care program, pathogen mitigation, everything you could think of and dream about in a new model needed for our industry. I’ll see you next month. This is Tod Petty with Lloyd Jones, Senior Living Unfiltered. God speed.

Jimmy Carrion:

Welcome again to Senior Housing Unfiltered broadcast. I am excited about today because Tod is going to talk about the Leader’s Greatest Gift. Tod, you said it’s passion, it is commitment, but really it is passionate commitment that matters. I am really excited about this lesson for two reasons. One, Tod is going to add tremendous value to you on the podcast today. And secondly, we believe this program will speak to the leaders and members at a community level, providing leadership for their teams and services to their clients.

 

Tod Petty:

Hey, Jimmy. And hey, welcome to all the raving fans of Senior Housing Unfiltered. Jimmy, we were talking before the podcast about why we like college sports better than professional sports. And we realized it’s pretty simple, it’s because of the passion that’s experienced in the college sports and not always experienced in professional sports.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That is right, Tod. And you know what I have concluded? I think I pick passion over ability. I think I would rather watch someone a little less competent with a lot more passion.

 

Tod Petty:

So in full disclosure to our audience, Jimmy is setting this up, because in a moment we’re going to talk about a leader’s greatest gift to their people, their organization – and that’s passion and commitment. We’re going to put them together. So let me just flesh this out briefly with you. We’re going to talk a little bit about passion. We’re going to talk a little bit about commitment. And then we’re going to join them and marry them, and see why this combination happens to be the leader’s greatest gift.

So let’s talk about passion first. Jimmy, let me give you and the audience some statements about passion. So number one, followers need passionate leaders. It is a need for those who follow to have a leader who has passion in his or her life. Now get this, I love this. People are instructed by reason, but they are inspired by passion. I’m going to say that one more time. This is so important. People are instructed and directed by reason, but they are inspired by passion. The listeners of our podcast and raving fans of our social media content, they’re all passionate leaders, or they wouldn’t be listening to us. And that’s why they’re listening to us and wanting to grow. So real important.

Now point number two, passion is the birthplace of all dreams. You could say it another way, Jimmy. Passion is the incubator of all dreams. Your dreams that you have, of your life, what you want to accomplish, where you want to go. It comes from one place. You track it back. It comes from your passion. It’s an internal thing. It’s inside you. No passion? No dreams. I challenge you, if someone has no passion, they probably don’t have any dreams. So we have to help them get passion. So think about this and let it soak in. Where does a dream become birthed? It’s from your passion.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Wow, Tod. You’re always saying passion turns the dreamer into a doer. When I see a person that has a dream and never accomplished anything, you know what? I know they do not have the fuel in their car. They are not going anywhere, because the fuel is passion. It is passion that causes you to get up, sacrifice, and pay the price and do what others are unwilling to do. That’s great, right there. What others are unwilling to do. It is passion that almost always separates the person who accomplishes something from the one who doesn’t. It is the birthplace of the dream.

 

Tod Petty:

Right on, Jimmy. That’s good.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Now remind me, Tod, there is a quote that our chairman said all last year during the pandemic and I have it on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite remember it.

 

Tod Petty:

On passion?

 

Jimmy Carrion:

On passion, yes.

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah. Hold on a second. I’ve got it on my phone here. I file everything. So yes. So he said passion is an internal motivation to keep us going when the external rewards drop out of sight. He was talking about 2020 and talking about the pandemic. He said, when you can’t see the goal, then passion keeps you going. It kind of reminded me, when I first heard it, of the instrument rated pilot, right? Because an instrument rated pilot, to be instrument rated, has to get in the plane so that when he cannot see, he can just run that plane by the controls in the airplane and land the plane safely and get to the destination. And when you can’t see the big picture because of a pandemic, your passion will continue to fuel you and keep you going in a time of distress.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And as you can tell, we have a lot of passion and can talk about passionate in our podcasts for hours. But Tod, we need to now take a moment and talk about the commitment portion.

 

Tod Petty:

Yes, commitment. So let me say this first, before we get into the commitment, Jimmy. You remember, and to share this with the audience, you remember when we were at an intersection in downtown Columbia, South Carolina last year, I think it was November of 2020. And we were touring a variety of communities. It was a portfolio of communities that were for sale that we were looking at. And we were in Columbia, South Carolina, and we were sitting there and we noticed while we’re standing at the intersection, there was a homeless man, I guess he was homeless. A homeless guy, not dressed certainly very well. And there was a group of people yelling at him because he was crossing the street in the middle of downtown Columbia with a “no crossing” lamp flashing. And they’re like, “what an idiot,” they were saying to this guy. “Get out of the road.” What are you doing going down across the road, obviously there’s a “no crossing” lamp.

And so we were sitting there chatting and admiring beautiful Columbia, South Carolina. And then there was a different group and they were all crossing the street and we noticed the lamp is flashing “no crossing.” The difference is that there’s this well-dressed man, he’s in an Armani suit, he’s got a Rolex watch, you could see the Montblanc pen in his pocket. And he was crossing with the same “no crossing” lamp flashing. But now I guess it was okay to cross the road because they were all crossing and following the guy. It just shows you how different things influence people. How fickle human beings are. And they’re not really committed to anything.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Absolutely. I remember watching this, Tod, and I remember we saw this and we both kind of just laughed and commented on how true this is to human nature. Most people lack commitment, energy, and just follow what the crowd is doing. Just like at a sporting event, right?

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah, we were talking about it earlier as well. You and I both talked about being at sporting events. I’ve been at speaker events. I’ve been at churches where we’re lined up to go inside the building and one door is open. And everybody’s in this long line to get in and there’s 10 doors, only one door opening, everybody’s waiting. And the other nine doors are open. They’re not open. Someone just has to go and open them. But the crowd is following the person in front of them with no passion, just drones doing what the other person doing, having no idea if it’s right or wrong.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

And most people just wait until another person takes the leadership and opens the other door. And then what happens? They just follow them, too.

 

Tod Petty:

Right? And what’s the worst scenario? You go up and the door’s locked and then you get back in line. But you know, I admire that guy or that lady because they have passion.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Absolutely.

 

Tod Petty:

Let’s talk now about commitment. Let me read you a paragraph from a book of Michaelangelo. This is great. Whose career as a sculptor and a painter was not handed to him on a silver platter. He had to earn it. So listen to these words, let me read this. “Although he (meaning Michaelangelo) possessed great talent, his accomplishments and fame came only after he invested himself to the point of physical exhaustion.” Now, remember we’re talking about commitment. Passion is great. It’s a great elixir. But you’ve got to have commitment. “Michaelangelo spent years laying flat on his back, from a scaffold, painting, when he was painting the Sistine Chapel. By the time he completed this magnificent project, he was virtually blind from the paint that had dripped into his eyes.”

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That’s amazing. Now that’s commitment.

 

Tod Petty:

And because of that, Michaelangelo was willing to invest himself. His creations have been admired for now more than four centuries. This is a great example of a leader with commitment and passion, having this combination to accomplish what he did. This is the greatest gift a leader can possess to give others.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That’s a good point. Let me just circle back to what you just said. Commitment with passion. So both must be linked together, correct?

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah. Jimmy. Here’s why I link them together. Commitment without passion is focus without fuel. Let me say that again. Commitment without passion is focus without fuel. Isn’t that true?

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That’s so true.

 

Tod Petty:

And passion without any commitment is a heart without a backbone. Don’t you see you have to have both? Commitment and passion will allow you to become a leader. Both of them. Why? Because commitment with passion has influence value. Standing alone by themselves, there’s some value, but there’s leadership value when you combine the two. Now we teach in our organization and when we’re on the road and we’re with other groups, borrowing it from John Maxwell, who’s the greatest leadership management consultant in the world, in my mind. Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less. And everything rises and falls on leadership.

If we want to increase our influence, we have to only increase our passion. Passionate people influence us. Think about that. Passionate people draw us to them. I’m drawn to people that are smart, but not as much as passionate people. Passionate people influence us, we’re drawn to them. I have known people with passion who had views I didn’t even agree with. But I sensed myself drawn to them, something inside of me, emotionally drawn to them because I loved their conviction. I loved their passion. I loved their fire. I loved their belief in what they were saying. I loved that emotional quality that drew them to me magnetically.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah, so why is passionate commitment a leader’s greatest gift? What makes a leader full of passion and full of commitment a great gift to society and a great gift for the people he or she leads?

 

Tod Petty:

Okay, here we go. So number one, passionate commitment is the foundation of every great movement, every great organization, every great trend, every great political movement. It’s all about passionate commitment. There’s a gentleman I’ve studied in the past, going back to my college days, who said this, Isaac Burl once said, nothing of weight or worth can be achieved with half a mind, a faint heart and with a lame endeavor. How many of you know people coming to your mind as we’re speaking of this? Half of a mind, a faint heart and a lame endeavor. Do you think of them accomplishing anything? Changing any of them? Being the catalyst for change? Passionate commitment is an absolute foundation for every great movement. You’ve never found a movement begin, an organization begin, without it.

So number two, I would say passionate commitment is the making also of every great leader. That’s why we must possess it. That’s why we have to nurture it and find ways like we’re speaking of today of how we can get it. How are you going to get it in 2021, after going through 2020? When 2020 tried to beat it out of you? What I’m trying to say is that this is the ingredient of making a great man, a great woman, a great organization, a great industry, a great movement. You don’t create organizations with apathy. You do not build a great people with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Passionate commitment, you see in it the lives of every great leader.

What does passionate commitment do for you? It’s very simple. When you have it inside you and you face a problem, the first emotion, thought, reality you feel about, is how can I fix it? Passionate commitment you see it in the lives of every great leader. What does passionate commitment do for you? What does it do inside of you? It’s very simple. When you have it inside of you and you have a problem you face, you ask yourself how can I fix it? When you don’t have it and you face a problem. You’re asking, how can I get out of it?

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That’s good. And you know, I must confess to the audience and Tod, we’ve talked very openly about this. We did not have this passion when we were younger. We bummed around, hung out with our friends, went to parties.

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah. And still got good grades. You’re right, we didn’t have passionate commitment. But we’ve talked about this and not sure where it happened, but somewhere down the line, we went through a process internally in our growth process and a realization that we need to change. If I’m going to be successful. If I want to grow. If I want to make a difference in other people’s lives. I want to bring value to them. I want to be a good husband, a good leader for my team. I want to go where other people are not going. I want to change up an industry stuck in ancient cultures. And I came to a place that we knew, both of us, at some point we had to make passionate commitment part of our lives. So today that passion fills us with fire. It fills our minds with resolve, commitment, and we’re going to make a difference in people’s lives. We’re going to serve them. And we’re going to lead this industry out from the past. Many cases stuck in ancient cultures.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Absolutely. And I think once I started to immerse myself and started reading books about great leaders, podcasts, articles, and I saw this quality. I just realized I needed passionate commitment in my life and I was just cured.

 

Tod Petty:

Yes. And that’s why we want to help people. We want to stay cured and we want to help people get for cured. I’m not trying to be mystical about this, but the bottom line is, whatever you want to call this, what we’re identifying as passion and commitment. When this quality gets in your life, it begins to get in the lives of others. It’s contagious. It rubs off on them. So I know there’s some listeners in this podcast might be saying, well, you know, I’m just easy going. I’m not really engaged about anything in life. And yes, we’re trying to get you cured. I want you to know you can get cured too. The happiest person in life they love what they’re doing. And they love it so much and keep doing it, that it becomes their passion. The happiest person in life is the one who believes in what they’re doing and they keep doing it until it becomes a commitment in their life. And then that commitment of passion and commitment over spills to others and leads them to great places they would otherwise have not gone.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Man, Tod, Senior Housing Unfiltered is on fire.

 

Tod Petty:

Listen, the message we want to get out to all of our friends and fans and partners and team members and future clients is that it’s not 2020 that is defining us. It’s not the current conditions in senior housing or in the real estate industry. It’s none of that. What conditions us is the future conditions, because what we commit ourselves to determines who we are. What we think about, we will become, more than anything that has ever happened to us yesterday or the day before or the past. It is what we commit to in the future that changes us. Not the past.

I want to ask a simple question to myself, to Jimmy, and to those that are listening to us. What are your commitments? Where are you going in 2021? What are you going to be? You show me somebody who has not decided yet and I’ll show you someone who has no identity, no personality and no direction. Jimmy, Lloyd Jones, you and I are committed to going. We are passionate about bringing value to other people and making a difference in their lives. And we’re committed to growing in new areas of opportunity in 2021.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Thank you everyone for joining us today. Next month, we have a very special guest. I can’t tell you who it is, but you will thoroughly enjoy it. And Tod, can you tell us a little bit about what we have coming up?

 

Tod Petty:

We’re going to talk about, we’re launching, what we’re calling Successful Aging. This is luxury healthcare that really I haven’t seen before. We believe it’s time for healthcare to take its preeminent spot in the future of senior housing. It’s been marginalized. It’s been commoditized. It’s taken a second place and we reaped the consequences of it in senior housing, not being prepared to take care of residents in the middle of a pandemic.

So there’s components to this that we’re launching here with all of our partners. And we’re going to have a guest on that is doing some remarkable things that I would say is one of the architects of this Successful Aging module we’re going to introduce. And of course, Chris Finlay gets great credit for it. I’ve been working with our chairman for a year, he’s been thinking about this, dreaming about it, and being passionate about it and is committed to it. In spite of everything, committed to it, over the last two years. So we’ll let you know next on LinkedIn, who it’s going to be, and we look forward to hearing you next time on Senior Housing Unfiltered. Thank you. God speed.

Jimmy Carrion:

Welcome again to Senior Housing Unfiltered broadcast. I am excited about today because Tod is going to talk about the Leader’s Greatest Gift. Tod, you said it’s passion, it is commitment, but really it is passionate commitment that matters. I am really excited about this lesson for two reasons. One, Tod is going to add tremendous value to you on the podcast today. And secondly, we believe this program will speak to the leaders and members at a community level, providing leadership for their teams and services to their clients.

 

Tod Petty:

Hey, Jimmy. And hey, welcome to all the raving fans of Senior Housing Unfiltered. Jimmy, we were talking before the podcast about why we like college sports better than professional sports. And we realized it’s pretty simple, it’s because of the passion that’s experienced in the college sports and not always experienced in professional sports.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That is right, Tod. And you know what I have concluded? I think I pick passion over ability. I think I would rather watch someone a little less competent with a lot more passion.

 

Tod Petty:

So in full disclosure to our audience, Jimmy is setting this up, because in a moment we’re going to talk about a leader’s greatest gift to their people, their organization – and that’s passion and commitment. We’re going to put them together. So let me just flesh this out briefly with you. We’re going to talk a little bit about passion. We’re going to talk a little bit about commitment. And then we’re going to join them and marry them, and see why this combination happens to be the leader’s greatest gift.

So let’s talk about passion first. Jimmy, let me give you and the audience some statements about passion. So number one, followers need passionate leaders. It is a need for those who follow to have a leader who has passion in his or her life. Now get this, I love this. People are instructed by reason, but they are inspired by passion. I’m going to say that one more time. This is so important. People are instructed and directed by reason, but they are inspired by passion. The listeners of our podcast and raving fans of our social media content, they’re all passionate leaders, or they wouldn’t be listening to us. And that’s why they’re listening to us and wanting to grow. So real important.

Now point number two, passion is the birthplace of all dreams. You could say it another way, Jimmy. Passion is the incubator of all dreams. Your dreams that you have, of your life, what you want to accomplish, where you want to go. It comes from one place. You track it back. It comes from your passion. It’s an internal thing. It’s inside you. No passion? No dreams. I challenge you, if someone has no passion, they probably don’t have any dreams. So we have to help them get passion. So think about this and let it soak in. Where does a dream become birthed? It’s from your passion.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Wow, Tod. You’re always saying passion turns the dreamer into a doer. When I see a person that has a dream and never accomplished anything, you know what? I know they do not have the fuel in their car. They are not going anywhere, because the fuel is passion. It is passion that causes you to get up, sacrifice, and pay the price and do what others are unwilling to do. That’s great, right there. What others are unwilling to do. It is passion that almost always separates the person who accomplishes something from the one who doesn’t. It is the birthplace of the dream.

 

Tod Petty:

Right on, Jimmy. That’s good.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Now remind me, Tod, there is a quote that our chairman said all last year during the pandemic and I have it on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite remember it.

 

Tod Petty:

On passion?

 

Jimmy Carrion:

On passion, yes.

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah. Hold on a second. I’ve got it on my phone here. I file everything. So yes. So he said passion is an internal motivation to keep us going when the external rewards drop out of sight. He was talking about 2020 and talking about the pandemic. He said, when you can’t see the goal, then passion keeps you going. It kind of reminded me, when I first heard it, of the instrument rated pilot, right? Because an instrument rated pilot, to be instrument rated, has to get in the plane so that when he cannot see, he can just run that plane by the controls in the airplane and land the plane safely and get to the destination. And when you can’t see the big picture because of a pandemic, your passion will continue to fuel you and keep you going in a time of distress.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And as you can tell, we have a lot of passion and can talk about passionate in our podcasts for hours. But Tod, we need to now take a moment and talk about the commitment portion.

 

Tod Petty:

Yes, commitment. So let me say this first, before we get into the commitment, Jimmy. You remember, and to share this with the audience, you remember when we were at an intersection in downtown Columbia, South Carolina last year, I think it was November of 2020. And we were touring a variety of communities. It was a portfolio of communities that were for sale that we were looking at. And we were in Columbia, South Carolina, and we were sitting there and we noticed while we’re standing at the intersection, there was a homeless man, I guess he was homeless. A homeless guy, not dressed certainly very well. And there was a group of people yelling at him because he was crossing the street in the middle of downtown Columbia with a “no crossing” lamp flashing. And they’re like, “what an idiot,” they were saying to this guy. “Get out of the road.” What are you doing going down across the road, obviously there’s a “no crossing” lamp.

And so we were sitting there chatting and admiring beautiful Columbia, South Carolina. And then there was a different group and they were all crossing the street and we noticed the lamp is flashing “no crossing.” The difference is that there’s this well-dressed man, he’s in an Armani suit, he’s got a Rolex watch, you could see the Montblanc pen in his pocket. And he was crossing with the same “no crossing” lamp flashing. But now I guess it was okay to cross the road because they were all crossing and following the guy. It just shows you how different things influence people. How fickle human beings are. And they’re not really committed to anything.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Absolutely. I remember watching this, Tod, and I remember we saw this and we both kind of just laughed and commented on how true this is to human nature. Most people lack commitment, energy, and just follow what the crowd is doing. Just like at a sporting event, right?

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah, we were talking about it earlier as well. You and I both talked about being at sporting events. I’ve been at speaker events. I’ve been at churches where we’re lined up to go inside the building and one door is open. And everybody’s in this long line to get in and there’s 10 doors, only one door opening, everybody’s waiting. And the other nine doors are open. They’re not open. Someone just has to go and open them. But the crowd is following the person in front of them with no passion, just drones doing what the other person doing, having no idea if it’s right or wrong.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

And most people just wait until another person takes the leadership and opens the other door. And then what happens? They just follow them, too.

 

Tod Petty:

Right? And what’s the worst scenario? You go up and the door’s locked and then you get back in line. But you know, I admire that guy or that lady because they have passion.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Absolutely.

 

Tod Petty:

Let’s talk now about commitment. Let me read you a paragraph from a book of Michaelangelo. This is great. Whose career as a sculptor and a painter was not handed to him on a silver platter. He had to earn it. So listen to these words, let me read this. “Although he (meaning Michaelangelo) possessed great talent, his accomplishments and fame came only after he invested himself to the point of physical exhaustion.” Now, remember we’re talking about commitment. Passion is great. It’s a great elixir. But you’ve got to have commitment. “Michaelangelo spent years laying flat on his back, from a scaffold, painting, when he was painting the Sistine Chapel. By the time he completed this magnificent project, he was virtually blind from the paint that had dripped into his eyes.”

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That’s amazing. Now that’s commitment.

 

Tod Petty:

And because of that, Michaelangelo was willing to invest himself. His creations have been admired for now more than four centuries. This is a great example of a leader with commitment and passion, having this combination to accomplish what he did. This is the greatest gift a leader can possess to give others.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That’s a good point. Let me just circle back to what you just said. Commitment with passion. So both must be linked together, correct?

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah. Jimmy. Here’s why I link them together. Commitment without passion is focus without fuel. Let me say that again. Commitment without passion is focus without fuel. Isn’t that true?

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That’s so true.

 

Tod Petty:

And passion without any commitment is a heart without a backbone. Don’t you see you have to have both? Commitment and passion will allow you to become a leader. Both of them. Why? Because commitment with passion has influence value. Standing alone by themselves, there’s some value, but there’s leadership value when you combine the two. Now we teach in our organization and when we’re on the road and we’re with other groups, borrowing it from John Maxwell, who’s the greatest leadership management consultant in the world, in my mind. Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less. And everything rises and falls on leadership.

If we want to increase our influence, we have to only increase our passion. Passionate people influence us. Think about that. Passionate people draw us to them. I’m drawn to people that are smart, but not as much as passionate people. Passionate people influence us, we’re drawn to them. I have known people with passion who had views I didn’t even agree with. But I sensed myself drawn to them, something inside of me, emotionally drawn to them because I loved their conviction. I loved their passion. I loved their fire. I loved their belief in what they were saying. I loved that emotional quality that drew them to me magnetically.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah, so why is passionate commitment a leader’s greatest gift? What makes a leader full of passion and full of commitment a great gift to society and a great gift for the people he or she leads?

 

Tod Petty:

Okay, here we go. So number one, passionate commitment is the foundation of every great movement, every great organization, every great trend, every great political movement. It’s all about passionate commitment. There’s a gentleman I’ve studied in the past, going back to my college days, who said this, Isaac Burl once said, nothing of weight or worth can be achieved with half a mind, a faint heart and with a lame endeavor. How many of you know people coming to your mind as we’re speaking of this? Half of a mind, a faint heart and a lame endeavor. Do you think of them accomplishing anything? Changing any of them? Being the catalyst for change? Passionate commitment is an absolute foundation for every great movement. You’ve never found a movement begin, an organization begin, without it.

So number two, I would say passionate commitment is the making also of every great leader. That’s why we must possess it. That’s why we have to nurture it and find ways like we’re speaking of today of how we can get it. How are you going to get it in 2021, after going through 2020? When 2020 tried to beat it out of you? What I’m trying to say is that this is the ingredient of making a great man, a great woman, a great organization, a great industry, a great movement. You don’t create organizations with apathy. You do not build a great people with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Passionate commitment, you see in it the lives of every great leader.

What does passionate commitment do for you? It’s very simple. When you have it inside you and you face a problem, the first emotion, thought, reality you feel about, is how can I fix it? Passionate commitment you see it in the lives of every great leader. What does passionate commitment do for you? What does it do inside of you? It’s very simple. When you have it inside of you and you have a problem you face, you ask yourself how can I fix it? When you don’t have it and you face a problem. You’re asking, how can I get out of it?

 

Jimmy Carrion:

That’s good. And you know, I must confess to the audience and Tod, we’ve talked very openly about this. We did not have this passion when we were younger. We bummed around, hung out with our friends, went to parties.

 

Tod Petty:

Yeah. And still got good grades. You’re right, we didn’t have passionate commitment. But we’ve talked about this and not sure where it happened, but somewhere down the line, we went through a process internally in our growth process and a realization that we need to change. If I’m going to be successful. If I want to grow. If I want to make a difference in other people’s lives. I want to bring value to them. I want to be a good husband, a good leader for my team. I want to go where other people are not going. I want to change up an industry stuck in ancient cultures. And I came to a place that we knew, both of us, at some point we had to make passionate commitment part of our lives. So today that passion fills us with fire. It fills our minds with resolve, commitment, and we’re going to make a difference in people’s lives. We’re going to serve them. And we’re going to lead this industry out from the past. Many cases stuck in ancient cultures.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Absolutely. And I think once I started to immerse myself and started reading books about great leaders, podcasts, articles, and I saw this quality. I just realized I needed passionate commitment in my life and I was just cured.

 

Tod Petty:

Yes. And that’s why we want to help people. We want to stay cured and we want to help people get for cured. I’m not trying to be mystical about this, but the bottom line is, whatever you want to call this, what we’re identifying as passion and commitment. When this quality gets in your life, it begins to get in the lives of others. It’s contagious. It rubs off on them. So I know there’s some listeners in this podcast might be saying, well, you know, I’m just easy going. I’m not really engaged about anything in life. And yes, we’re trying to get you cured. I want you to know you can get cured too. The happiest person in life they love what they’re doing. And they love it so much and keep doing it, that it becomes their passion. The happiest person in life is the one who believes in what they’re doing and they keep doing it until it becomes a commitment in their life. And then that commitment of passion and commitment over spills to others and leads them to great places they would otherwise have not gone.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Man, Tod, Senior Housing Unfiltered is on fire.

 

Tod Petty:

Listen, the message we want to get out to all of our friends and fans and partners and team members and future clients is that it’s not 2020 that is defining us. It’s not the current conditions in senior housing or in the real estate industry. It’s none of that. What conditions us is the future conditions, because what we commit ourselves to determines who we are. What we think about, we will become, more than anything that has ever happened to us yesterday or the day before or the past. It is what we commit to in the future that changes us. Not the past.

I want to ask a simple question to myself, to Jimmy, and to those that are listening to us. What are your commitments? Where are you going in 2021? What are you going to be? You show me somebody who has not decided yet and I’ll show you someone who has no identity, no personality and no direction. Jimmy, Lloyd Jones, you and I are committed to going. We are passionate about bringing value to other people and making a difference in their lives. And we’re committed to growing in new areas of opportunity in 2021.

 

Jimmy Carrion:

Thank you everyone for joining us today. Next month, we have a very special guest. I can’t tell you who it is, but you will thoroughly enjoy it. And Tod, can you tell us a little bit about what we have coming up?

 

Tod Petty:

We’re going to talk about, we’re launching, what we’re calling Successful Aging. This is luxury healthcare that really I haven’t seen before. We believe it’s time for healthcare to take its preeminent spot in the future of senior housing. It’s been marginalized. It’s been commoditized. It’s taken a second place and we reaped the consequences of it in senior housing, not being prepared to take care of residents in the middle of a pandemic.

So there’s components to this that we’re launching here with all of our partners. And we’re going to have a guest on that is doing some remarkable things that I would say is one of the architects of this Successful Aging module we’re going to introduce. And of course, Chris Finlay gets great credit for it. I’ve been working with our chairman for a year, he’s been thinking about this, dreaming about it, and being passionate about it and is committed to it. In spite of everything, committed to it, over the last two years. So we’ll let you know next on LinkedIn, who it’s going to be, and we look forward to hearing you next time on Senior Housing Unfiltered. Thank you. God speed.

Tod Petty:
Hi, this is Tod Petty with Senior Housing Unfiltered. Welcome to the program today, which is Episode Three: The Design Charrette, envisioning new senior living. Today, there’s three goals that we want to achieve as we discuss with Melissa Banko. One, hesitation will never get you the answer you want. Number two, action will give you more discoveries than hesitation, and start moving, action will come to you. You’ve got to get moving. Ladies and gentlemen and friends from around senior housing globe, we’re so grateful to Melissa Banko. She’s taking the time to pour into us her visionary design for the new housing product ready to be discovered. It’s my privilege, Melissa, to introduce to you our mentor and friend Melissa Banko, with Banko Design.

Melissa Banko:
Hello, hello, thank you, Tod, and members of our beloved Senior Housing Unfiltered podcast, I am honored that you would set time apart to hang out with me on this program and be with me to learn a little bit more about what Banko is doing as we work together to better this industry and prepare for changes coming to senior housing in 2020.

Tod Petty:
Thank you, Melissa. Melissa and I are broadcasting from The Future Site at Banko Design, somewhere in Atlanta.

Melissa Banko:
Somewhere.

Tod Petty:
So, we were blindfolded and escorted to the undisclosed location, because apparently, it’s secret knowledge, which will soon be revealed by Melissa at the appropriate time. She said I cannot do it yet.

Melissa Banko:
Yes. We’ve leaked a little bit, but we’re super excited about a new space for the studio and the warehouse of Banko Design, not too far from where we are now, but we’ve been really blessed this year to continue to grow, and that meant outgrowing our current space.

Tod Petty:
How could you be expanding? You’ve got all this office space you’re going to be moving into. We were met by all your team when we walked in. I mean, it’s busy. It’s like two days before Thanksgiving. What is going on here?

Melissa Banko:
Listen, what sets Banko apart is definitely this team. We have had a busy year despite the craziness of COVID and what the world’s been dealing with in 2020. We’ve stayed really true to our roots here this year and continued to grind down, chase work and just pump out really good work with our really awesome clients, and we’ve seen an influx of clients, we’ve seen an influx of talent. We’ve scooped up talent from other verticals that haven’t been as busy this year, which has been a huge blessing.

Tod Petty:
Great. We’re going to be talking in a moment about becoming a person of action in response to changes that are occurring in our industry. So, we have an incredible vital lesson for all of us. Action is where transformation really happens in your life and my life. So, stay with us. You are our friends and we’ll prepare you for what is going to happen in 2021. Our goal is to bring some value to you in exchange for your time today, and we appreciate you joining us on this podcast. We’re proud of our team members who are making this podcast possible. We have minced ourselves in the fourth quarter at Lloyd Jones with the future of senior housing. One of the most important leadership lessons to understand is we do what we need to do, not what we necessarily want to do.

Tod Petty:
I mean, there’s things I don’t want to do every day, but I know I need to do them. In the midst of an unpredictable pandemic, regardless of how negative it can be at times, we must keep doing what we need to do to prepare for the future, regardless of how we feel, because the future is coming, it’s going to be different and we must prepare for it. So, we’re going to share this lesson with you. I hope we do a good job. We normally do a good job at communicating. We’re going to give it our best shot. Let’s go forward. Our podcast is titled, The Design Charrette: Envisioning New Senior Living with Melissa Banko.

Melissa, you know what that is?

Melissa Banko:
I do. I do. What the audience doesn’t realize is we’re actually going to sing for an entire hour.

Tod Petty:
Yes. That’s-

Melissa Banko:
That’s you, actually. Isn’t that right?

Tod Petty:
I’m a humble man, so I can’t play anymore. We’ll tune into Melissa’s website and you can figure out what that was about.

Melissa Banko:
Yeah. Tune into the telethon next year.

Tod Petty:
The telethon.

Melissa Banko:
And we’ll send a link to our debut as a singing duo, our first.

Tod Petty:
Our first hit record. It’s going to be great.

Melissa Banko:
Yeah.

Tod Petty:
Colonel Joshua Chamberlain has a great code I want to give you. He said, “My future is immediate. I will grasp it with both hands and carry it with running feet.” That is a very important statement. Let me read it again. “The future is immediate, is now, I will grasp it with both hands and I’ll carry it with my running feet. When I’m faced with the choice of doing nothing or doing something, I will always choose to act.” Wow, I love that fact. When I’m really faced with the choice of doing nothing or doing something, we always must do something. The bottom line thesis is this. If you do not have all the answers, move anyway. How many times do we hesitate because we do not have the answers? Action, we have to take action. There’s no traction without action, and action is a part of traction. And Melissa’s going to tell us today how they’ve taken action to prepare for the future. Melissa Banko, welcome.

Melissa, you’ve been preparing for 2021 this entire year. Every time we’ve measured, you are doing something, you’re creating something, you’re getting ready. I’m watching the design, the product change before my eyes, and you’re ready. You’re active. Share with us a little bit about what you’re doing. What are you getting ready for? I want to know, secret knowledge.

Melissa Banko:
I agree with all of what you’re saying and that there’s goodness in action. Even after this year, we had projects going hold. We had projects that needed to be pushed off because they were renovation work. 2020 was a year where we were thrown things that we didn’t anticipate, but we kept moving. We grinded down as a team. We had hard conversations about how to do that. We were strategic. We knew that we wanted to continue to stay in the verticals that we were, and we wanted to continue to stay successful in those verticals, and we put a plan in motion. We took on an amazing studio in Minnesota so that we could expand our services within senior living. That team has been a wonderful asset to us in taking on more skilled nursing so that we have skilled nursing all the way up through luxury product. We’ve expanded staff. We’ve continued to work with clients and push projects along. So, we’ve been busy. We’ve been busy.

Tod Petty:
Excellent. Excellent. We’re going to find out today how you’ve been preparing to meet this new product change, this new shift that’s taken place. What does senior housing look like in 2021? What does new product look like? What’s the product for the middle market? What are we seeing before our eyes? We look forward to speaking with you about that today.

Melissa Banko:
There is a misperception maybe about what an interior designer in general does. Yes, we get to play with all the pretty things, beautiful finishes and specifying lighting, and we get to draw all day and just roll around in paint chips. But the reality is, yes, that is an amazing part of what we do. But our value add is really in the programming and the space planning and the understanding what a building really needs. So, in reacting to what you’re saying about expectations of who we’re designing for, not all buildings are meant to be equal, and you have to have an understanding on the front end about who your target demographic is, and who you are designing those buildings for.

Tod Petty:
You’re saying, Melissa, are you saying that buildings were designed without the end user in mind?

Melissa Banko:
I am saying that there has been a boom in our industry before the baby boom ever got to it. Yes, the baby boom generation is going to ask for different things, but again, we can’t lump that generation. We can’t lump all seniors into the same category. They have different needs.

Tod Petty:
All baby boomers were not created equal.

Melissa Banko:
Created equal. They need different things. The care level within this age bracket that we’re designing for, they need different things, they need different levels of care. We can’t just assume that all of these buildings can have the same things and work for everyone. The other reality is you do have to peel back the financial part of it, and you need to bring in your consultants to peel that back with you so that we are planning and designing an appropriate building, not only based on what your residents need, but where you need to fall in the market. Listen, we have designed a lot of really great buildings that are all over the spectrum as far as, again, level of care where they fall in resident fee, and what the financial play is there. Yes, there is a smaller portion that are asking for this luxury product.

Melissa Banko:
So, we are having lots of conversations in the industry, is how do we serve the rest of that demographic? How do we design really great buildings that make sense from a performer level, but are also giving the care that is absolutely needed in these buildings. There has been this shift to almost out of design each other, who can make it bigger, or who can make it better, or who can make it higher end. We want to be strategic about who we’re working with, because at the core, it needs to be about the care. It needs to be about the service that is within these buildings long after we exit. Again, there’s a value play with a designer who understands the senior living space so that we can help you map out programmatically what the space needs to do so that it can support the staff that is there to take care of the residents.

Tod Petty:
Yeah, that’s a great point, because we’re seeing right now very beautiful communities that are stalled in lease up, and the price point is so high that people are not willing to pay the price for the extra amenities.

Melissa Banko:
Right. We are not saying, by any means, that you can’t have really great design and care in the same model. Banko has built a business on it. We can have good looking buildings that fit and check all the boxes, but also support the care side. There’s a way to do both. You can have really great design at any budget. We can have different rates and different room sizes and different levels of care, and you can still have really lovely, coordinated design as a whole that also support the program. We begged profusely to bring in ops early, bring me the ops team, let me dissect what it is that they need because every ops group is also different. We are a consultant that is brought on to support that. Again, there isn’t this secret formula that a great interior designer in the senior living space just pulls out every single project and just starts going through the manual.

You have to really dive in, you have to listen to what your operations team needs. You have to listen to what their expectations are, who they want to attract, and you are responsible, as a designer, to support that, to design around what that operations team, what that development team really needs. Because again, anybody can come in and slap up tile and hang lights. It’s all of the little things that go behind those specifications that make a building successful, and it’s a lot less about what you’re looking at when you’re looking at Instagram photos, which listen, we love that because we do that really well. But again, there’s a support on the backend, because again, we exit. We turn over a building, and we want to come back a year later, two years later, three years later and hear that we have been able to serve seniors here. It’s been really successful. The buildings have wrapped our residents, and it feels like home.

That’s definitely part of why we design in this space.

Tod Petty:
Maybe we should pivot on that and talk about what is needed to be known about older adults in the variety of groups they are. Anywhere from, we talk about 55+ all the way up to skilled nursing, but 55 to 85, and what their special needs are, because to your point, not only in design, but we see operationally people have entered the space, particularly younger people that are very smart people. Quite frankly, I think this is pretty simple and this is going to be a cake walk. Now they’re dealing with management of older adults and their needs in that, and they fail. They’re failing, and companies built upon even purely 100% service delivery of hospitality services, when they, not emphasizing health care, they’re struggling as well. Let’s maybe talk a little bit about how design plays into that, of the servicing of an older adult.

Melissa Banko:
Yeah. Again, I think it’s the mashup and how you perfectly blend the health care need, the care need to really great design so that our residents do feel comfortable. They don’t feel like they’re in an institution. They don’t feel like this is where they’ve “had to go.” They don’t feel like they’re old. They want to feel vibrant, they want to feel like they still have purpose, they want to feel like where they are living and where they are, somewhere that folks want to come and visit. Again, there’s a way to do that. Can we make sure that meds are given on time and are easily accessible, but also locked up in safe when they need to be? Do I have access to snacks and meals and all of the great F&D things when I want it to, like I would at my home? How do we monitor that?

Do I have someone who is going to love me, lay hands on me and make me feel loved throughout the day? Again, you didn’t hear anything about lighting, or color, palette, or any of that. Now there’s a way that we building can support that. Again, it’s layout, it’s understanding how an operations team staffs a building and what that looks like. Are we taking care of our staff with space planning so they have the spaces that they need to be successful? Then there are of course design driven things. Are we making sure that the lighting that we are designing highlights our design and all of the prettiness, but is it also the correct light level for our seniors? Is it the correct light level for our staff? Sometimes that’s different. Are we taking appropriate finishes so that we can make sure that we are providing slip resistant finishes?

Are we providing materials that can easily be cleanable and wipeable and sanitized, and over time, it’s not going to look like they were cleaned and sanitized and wiped down a million times. Banko Design’s very “resimercially”, and that word comes up a lot with us, and I feel like we should coin it. We feel like we want to make sure that these communities do feel like home. It’s a residence. Residents live here. So, how do we provide the residential allure with the commercial needs? And again, supporting the care component.

Tod Petty:
Tell me what happens in the process, because I’ve noticed, if you can go out to Texas where there’s a very strong life safety component to bring these buildings out of the ground, and you don’t have an option on light levels. I mean, light levels are being measured in every area of the building and it’s a minimum requirement. So, there’s really a lot of adequate lighting in most Texas buildings. Then you can come out through the Georgia side and you go into buildings and you’re wondering where the lights went. Obviously, someone is designing the building to minimum, a minimum standard that doesn’t require all those lights, but in Texas, they are upping their game because they have a higher minimum to achieve.

But both communities come out and both are functioning. What happens in the disconnect there? Is that because architects are trained to meet the minimum standard from a cost savings standpoint? Which requires a design firm such as yours to come in and say, hey, we have to up our lights, even though the minimum is X, because we have seniors that can’t see, we have memory care residents that can’t see three feet in front of them, and they mistakenly see things for what they’re not and can get confused and exacerbate their emotions. Is that something you regularly had input in?

Melissa Banko:
Absolutely.

Tod Petty:
Are you successful when you have that input?

Melissa Banko:
I think so. It’s a team effort. You’ve got a whole team of consultants that are working on these buildings. We love that collaboration with architecture and MEP, and structural and landscape and all the wonderful consultants that it takes to create a holistic community. So, absolutely your interior designer is going to weigh in on what those light levels … what a jurisdiction is telling you that you have to have for code compliancy might be different from what your interior designer and your architect are telling you is right and good for your vertical. Our light levels and our light color temperature does look different in the senior living vertical than it does when we’re designing traditional multifamily or hospitality.

Again, it’s not just about light level, it’s also about color temperature and how that affects our seniors, and the way that they see things that is different from how a 20 something or a 30 something is seeing things. That does play into a lot of the other things we do with color palette and variation in tone and contrast and all of those things. I could talk all day about materials and what that looks like and how we’re weighing in on all of those things, flooring, transitions, and slip resistancy, and anti-microbial materials, and what cabinet heights are the best. All of those things are the little things, again, that one probably doesn’t notice, but you do notice when you’re comfortable. You do notice when it feels right.

Tod Petty:
So, you’re not consciously aware of it, but subconsciously something is registering.

Melissa Banko:
That’s what we hope our users are saying. Maybe I don’t know why it feels, but you know when you’re attracted to something because it’s good looking, because it’s aesthetically pleasing to you.

Tod Petty:
It feels good.

Melissa Banko:
But when the design is right, all those heights are right, and the way you’re interacting with a space, when that feels right, we don’t want you to necessarily notice that it’s designed well. Those are the little again, nuances and the tricks of the trade with the experience that you’ve learned being in a certain market. That’s, again, what we bring to the table.

Tod Petty:
That’s really interesting. I remember my mom, I helped her last year into assisted living after my father passed away. I took her to a resort building thinking that she’d like it. She went in, it was a grand hall, and she went in and had the bistro, and it was very beautiful building. It looked very much like a Ritz-Carlton. I’m thinking of the one at Lake Oconee over in Greensboro. She went in there and she said, “Tod, I don’t want this. I don’t want to spend your inheritance on this.”

Melissa Banko:
Did she know why she didn’t want to be there? It didn’t feel right?

Tod Petty:
Yeah, didn’t feel right. She said, “I don’t like this. I don’t want to spend the money.” I said, “Mom, it’s the same amount of money as the one we saw earlier.” I’ll talk about that in a minute. She said, “I don’t feel good with this. I’m not comfortable with this.”

Melissa Banko:
But doesn’t that prove the point that not all buildings are going to check all the boxes for every single resident?

Tod Petty:
Absolutely. That’s what she-

Melissa Banko:
That’s okay. We have buildings that are going to feel right to some and not to others, but the ethos behind what we’re doing has to be right and good.

Tod Petty:
Right. She said, this is a young person community. It wasn’t assisted living. So, she chose a smaller community, small footprint, very home-like. She said, that’s where I coined the term, she said, “Tod, this feels like it wraps its arms around me and makes me feel very comfortable.” Paying the same amount of money in a different place without the grandiose. I see a lot of people share that. That’s registering with either that demographic group from a different time, or it’s resonating with someone that’s older, that it’s no longer a priority.

Melissa Banko:
Okay. But take the age out of it. Scale is a big part of what a designer does and plans out. Regardless of whether you’re 30 or you’re 80, scale still applies. Just because you’ve got 30 foot ceilings doesn’t mean it’s right and good. Just because the grand hall is bigger than the one down the street… it does not make it right and good. You do want, again, regardless of age scale. It needs to be planned appropriately. Again, that’s one of those things that maybe folks don’t think, oh, a designer is breaking that down. Yes, we’re absolutely doing that. We’re dressing a building appropriately and we’re also breaking downscale so that it does feel comfortable when you’re in it, and that was pre-COVID. Everything could be open. Again, depending on your residence and depending on what you want to bring to market, that’s also going to play into what at a developer or an ops team or ownership team tells us that their wish list is of what they want to bring to the market and who they see their target and demographic being.

Tod Petty:
That brings up another question I just thought about. Do you have conversations about the staffing of a building?

Melissa Banko:
Yes.

Tod Petty:
Because one of the things that, again, that we’re seeing as occupancy is suppressed. We’ve lost 20%, pretty much in an AL memory care over the last six months through attrition with the inability to move anybody in. So, revenues drop, lease up was stalled. We’re 10% below occupancy stabilization.

Melissa Banko:
CapEx couldn’t be spent, renovations couldn’t be done.

Tod Petty:
Right. The greatest need was staffing, to take care of the residents, but because of the cost associated with the building, the demand from investors, not, I don’t know all of them, but generally speaking, was to cut costs, and the single most costly line item is labor. That’s where the cost was cut in order to support a building that was highly, I don’t even want to use the word amenitized, but it was highly designed for a wow factor.

Melissa Banko:
Well, and to be full.

Tod Petty:
And to be full, but if the staffing doesn’t support the levels of care that the resident needs, you’re not going to keep people in the building. Actually, we’re seeing that people come in, they walk by the building, they love the building, they stay. The care doesn’t match the building. The care is lacking. There’s not enough staff take care of the residents. They exit, they move out, and they go down the road. Having experienced that and say, it was great place. I was attracted to it. It was great, but I didn’t receive the care that I needed.

Melissa Banko:
Sure. I get that. Speaking to staff with any business infrastructure, time is money, right? It’s the same here at being a service driven company. Time is money, and you want to talk about efficiency and you want to make sure that what you’re planning makes sense from a staffing perspective. That’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about programming and space planning. So, here’s where we serve meals. Okay, let’s talk about what that travel path is and how we’re getting food to dining room A, and then to dining room B and to dining room and C, and let’s talk about, when we do need to give meds, what does that look like? So, I’ve got care stations, and are they in the right location? Tell me how many staff members we have. Doing that, what does that look like?

Let’s talk about reception and then admin suite and where those people need to be, so that they are placed in the building where it makes sense. We’ve got activity directors, and we’ve got all sorts of additional care staff. You’ve got laundry. That’s a whole other, maybe not sexy part of the design process. You’re talking about, what does that look like? Are we taking laundry from rooms? Are we bringing that to master laundry space, or is there a laundry in the rooms? Mail, what does mail look like? Do we have mail being brought to a central location and we have a staff member that’s handing that out? Is there a parcel area? Is there a place … So, you have to talk about those day to day activities, and what’s going to happen inside the building day to day so that we can help you plan to be efficient because then you could get away with, I don’t know how to say that better, with a slimmer staff, so that what they’re doing day to day is efficient.

Tod Petty:
An efficient staff.

Melissa Banko:
Then also, let’s talk about longevity of keeping that staff. So, you have staff in there and they learn the process, and here’s what the day-to-day looks like. Are we taking care of our staff members? Do they have a space where they can go and they can chart, or they can complete their daily activities that maybe aren’t resident facing? Are we giving them the flexibility with office space? Are we giving them the flexibility with that downtime again, with where it’s not a resident facing? Because if we don’t take care of the staff, the staff doesn’t take care of the resident. So, we’re designing buildings, obviously for our residents first and foremost, but we’re also designing buildings for the staff that’s going to be in them.

Tod Petty:
When you’re speaking, Melissa, this is interesting, when you’re speaking with new people to the industry, there are some of these sacred cows that have been around for 20 years, that I think people think are brilliant because it saves money, and people are attracted to saving money. I think of some of these sacred cows, one is, well, we really don’t need a break space for the employees because they need to be working with the residents. So, when they take their break, they can take it with them in the dining room.

Melissa Banko:
Sure, but you know what’s more expensive though? Turnover.

Tod Petty:
Well, not only turnover, but a DOL (Department of Labor) audit the finds that you didn’t give them space that hour that you deducted their pay, and therefore you owe them the money for the last one year, plus all the employees. That’s a regulation that needs to be factored in. Turnover is significant because residents in the building like consistency. When there’s constant turnover, their emotions become exacerbated and stressed.

Melissa Banko:
Right. You and I, we sort of just talking back and forth and sort of talking about this topic today, and really two things came to mind for us, and that was that you and I were of like-mind about things that maybe were working in the industry and things we’d like to see improve in the industry. I get asked all the time, why do you want to be in the senior living space? Why do you enjoy designing in that vertical so much? I’ve said, and we’re starting to see that turn a little bit, but we as a company saw an opportunity again, to provide really great design, but also help operations group and development groups to plan a little bit more on the front end, so that, not only their buildings can be efficient in the long-run, but also the process to get that design is more efficient, over-communicating on the front end about what that design process looks like, talking about budgets upfront, having really candid conversations about who we’re designing for, and really doing some strategic planning on the front end, which we have found makes better buildings in the long-run.

Melissa Banko:
We enjoy it because I think that, in having those conversations, we’re building better buildings, but also, being able to take the pretty side of it and applying it on top of that. Because again, it goes back to that mashup, you can have both. You can have a really well-planned out building that’s taking care of the residents that it needs to take care of, but it can also feel really pretty, and it can feel nice to be in, and there’s a way to do that.

Tod Petty:
Yeah, no doubt. I think, when you have operations involved in the very beginning, even if the operational desires do not prevail, at least everyone at the table understands what we’re giving up. If the code doesn’t include maybe a clean and dirty, or a clean and soiled utility area, and we’re just going to have one area where we’re going to have it mixed, and operations is saying we really need separate spaces for infection control, or for ease of labor. And we said, we just don’t have the room. We’re not going to do it, we’re all going to combine it. Then we all can say, okay, but we all understand, once we’re open the challenges this is going to bring to the operation side. If we all say yes, amen, we all agree the challenge it’s going to make and we all have buy-in, versus making that decision without operations, then you hand the building over to them.

Tod Petty:
Everybody leaves, the GC leaves, the developers are just like checking in once a month, and our operation is trying to deliver what the client is really paying for, which is service and care in the building that will not necessarily promote it, and there’s a lot of stress.

Melissa Banko:
Right, and then you’ve got moving around of spaces or trying to make spaces work that were designed for another purpose, and that doesn’t make sense, and it certainly doesn’t show well. So, it’s trying to mitigate that on the front end.

Tod Petty:
You’ve seen operational groups go crazy, I believe when they start to move spaces around what they think is good.

Melissa Banko:
Oh, makes us go crazy.

Tod Petty:
I really love it too, when they’re just kind of let go and like, hey, we’re going to remodel this room, so you guys go out and find a contractor and put whatever you want in it.

Melissa Banko:
Right. Well, I think that what successful groups have figured out is that there has to be a level of flexibility. If we didn’t learn all that as a whole in 2020, as you have to pivot and you have to be flexible, no one is saying that the new model is to strip out all the amenities. We want those amenities to be there if it makes sense for the demographic that we’re targeting for that certain buildings. No one’s saying, I’m not saying strip them out. I’m saying, be smart about it and hire an interior designer that can walk you through how to do that. We’ve referenced, the bistro has become a joke, I feel like in our space is like, everyone’s got the bistro, everyone’s got the movie theater, everyone’s got the arts and crafts room.

Melissa Banko:
To some degree, you do want to have those spaces programmatically, but can we design spaces that are a little flexible so that you’re not maybe taking on more square footage. You’ve got spaces that are going to turn over. I think that this year specifically has taught us that, that will be essential, and the grandiose spaces that we were designing in ’19 and ’18 probably will be relooked at. Again, why is a resident going to come to a community? They’re going to come to a community because they are getting something from the community that they can not get at home. If we provide a space that feels comfortable, it feels “resimercial”, the arms have been wrapped around, how do we make sure that again, we’re providing things that they need? It’s that care component, it’s the purpose, it’s engagement, it’s socialization, and we can provide all those things through really great amenities, but let’s be strategic about it.

Melissa Banko:
Let’s make sure that as a whole, the project makes sense. I’m not again, not talking just about the care or the design part, but financially. If you have a good interior designer who’s going to have those tough conversations with you about how to spend the money right, let’s have that conversation.

Tod Petty:
Well, if you can reduce your square footage and that results in a drop in the residents’ rent, that’s going to be very important moving forward.

Melissa Banko:
That’s designing to the middle market, which there is a void in the market, is designing for the middle market. So, how do we do that? Again, that’s not like, hey, listen, you’re a middle market. You don’t get the bistro, you don’t get the theater. That’s not what anybody’s saying. We’re saying let’s be smart about how to plan it right so it makes sense for that project type.

Tod Petty:
Right. Well, so I kind of look at what Hyatt Place has done. It may be a good example of where we’re going. Because if you go stay at a Hyatt Place, you walk into the front, then you’re greeted by the concierge, by the desk manager, and you check in. By the way, right next to it, you want a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, and you go sit down and then she moves over there and serves you your glass of wine, and you can have your pizza. Then, oh, well, I needed a ride to the airport. One of the desk parts jumps in the van, they take you to the airport. It’s all centrally located. You have this nice space where people are all around and you’re not having to go down to the right to the restaurant and then further down to the right to the bistro, and further down to the right to the business center. It’s all conserving space, bringing people together and having still a good deliverable.

Melissa Banko:
Right. Banko, as a firm, we are in three verticals. So, senior living, traditional multifamily, and hospitality, and there is some beauty in being in all three of those, because we can take lessons learned from those other project types and integrate them into what we’re doing in senior living. Because again, even across the board with those… good design is good design. Now, you need someone who’s going to really coach you through the senior space, because there are nuances of that. But yes, you’re talking about a hospitality model, and the hospitality model is centralized amenities for efficiency, and what we just talked about, which is staffing. The other great thing about that hospitality model is that I don’t have seniors that are schlepping to lots of other areas of the building.

So, it’s also breaking down how they use that building, what their track is and folding that into how staff is tracking too. I agree with you. There’s flexibility in those spaces. You still have all of those amenities, you still have all of that service. It’s planned out so that there’s some flexibility.

Tod Petty:
It’s almost a dichotomy. You have to create, we’re talking about two different tracks that have to be blended into one building. So, we’re talking about potentially rooms changing to be comfortable for the resident. One bedrooms, maybe washers and dryers come into the room, maybe kitchen that’s come into the room, which we’re seeing kitchenettes going into hotels, extended stays at about $2,500 a room and being repositioned as multifamily. But you bring those in so that you can quarantine if you need to. That’s important. But at the same time, we know from the pandemic, we’re dealing with a lot of depression, we’re dealing with a lot of disconnect, and it should be no surprise, if you read the book Live Long, Die Short, which is a great book, it talks about the number one contribution to death is lack of connection.

Melissa Banko:
Absolutely.

Tod Petty:
Once there’s a lack of connection, there’s a lack of socialization, there’s lack of purpose and relevancy. There’s just nothing to live for. It doesn’t matter how pure your water is, it doesn’t matter how clean the air is. It doesn’t even matter if you’re hydrated and your medicines are being taken. You have no connection, you really lack of purpose. So, we can’t just assume we can minimize the common area spaces, quarantine, and keep people safe and that we’re going to have a good outcome. We have to blend the two together.

Melissa Banko:
Absolutely. We’ve gotten that call from a lot of our owners and operators, is okay, so we need to break down these large rooms, right? It’s like, yes, and there is a way to do that without completely redesigning your building. Let’s look at a safe way to socialize so that we don’t say to our seniors, okay, crazy virus going around and so everyone stay in your room until further notice, because it is. It’s taking a toll on our seniors. I’m not even referencing the virus. How can we make sure that they still are getting the love and care and attention that they need, which again, defaults back to why we’re in healthcare. It’s a healthcare model. We want to make sure that they are taken care of and they have all the things that they need, but we can’t just put them in rooms and assume that they’re going to be fine.

Tod Petty:
Right, and pat ourselves on the back and say-

Melissa Banko:
We kept them safe.

Tod Petty:
What an awesome job we’ve done. Then, if we do a great job, no one has COVID-19.

Melissa Banko:
But doesn’t that go back into the whole planning? Maybe we’re not eating in the dining room all at the same time, it’s staged dining. How is the building going to support that? How’s the staff going to support that. Maybe it’s not movie time all at the same time, maybe we’ve got groups that sign up and you’ve got a couple in there at a safe distance. I think, again, there’s a way to do it, there’s a way to pivot, there’s a way to have those conversations, but we want to make sure that our seniors are still getting to see other seniors. We want them to see their families. We want them to interact with staff. We want our staff to be safe.

Tod Petty:
Well, a reduction in the building footprint with amenities being consolidated, but still given, but the space lesson, that will create less debt service as a cost of sales, and with less debt service, and that was dollars freed up, you can actually add staff to really deliver the care you need to deliver. I think people would be willing to pay the same rents they’re paying, but maybe in a smaller venue with good technology and good amenities, rather than a place that’s very grandiose, that’s costing a lot of money on rent and maybe a reduction in the care delivery because of that.

Melissa Banko:
Right. I get that. We get asked all the time, especially in this last year of sort of, what does that look like if new building’s moving forward in ’21? I don’t think it’s dramatically different from what we were doing. As far as asking the same questions and doing the same research. I don’t want to be over-reactive to 2020.

Tod Petty:
Some of that’s going on.

Melissa Banko:
Some of that is, and that’s dollars too, that we’re going to retrofit buildings and-

Tod Petty:
UV lighting, air handling, removing the air three or four more times an hour than we had in the past.

Melissa Banko:
Listen, no one’s saying not do it, but do it smart, make sure you’ve done all the research and that you’re building is going to support those things. Yeah. What do we see as things in ’21? What do we see that we think is going to work, and what are we going to do about it? How are we going to lead effort in that? Good question?

Tod Petty:
Good question.

Melissa Banko:
I think renovation and repurpose and spending some love and some time on buildings that are already existing is going to be a big trend in ’21. I mean, obviously there was funds that weren’t spent in ’20. There are a lot of developers and operations teams that think they’re designing luxury and they’re not.

Tod Petty:
Right.

Melissa Banko:
That’s a big-

Tod Petty:
Well, they think they’re programming five-star dining and they’re not. They believe it is.

Melissa Banko:
So, there’s a disconnect there.

Tod Petty:
Is a big disconnect. There is a disconnect.

Melissa Banko:
But I will say-

Tod Petty:
This is not Ritz-Carlton. What we call resort is not Ritz-Carlton.

Melissa Banko:
Well, and there is a space for that. The reality is, is it’s just a very tiny portion. Again, as business people, we see that there’s still a void. I want to help be the design group that can say, yes, listen, we have luxury product on the market right now, and she’s stunning, but there are ways to also have really good looking mid-market products. There is. There’s a way to do that, and there’s a way to make the numbers work. Because we hear that a lot. Oh, that we can’t make the numbers work. It’s either got to be grit and you’ve got no money for finishes at all, or it’s got to be here. There’s a way to do here. Let me do here. Let me do the middle. Regardless of where you are, luxury to here, I think the biggest trend that you’re going to see in ’21 is just health and wellness overall.

Melissa Banko:
I think that you’re going to see a focus on fitness, I think you’re going to see a focus on PT and OT, I think you’re going to see a focus on spending more dollars for cleaner food, I think you’re going to see a focus on that F&D component altogether, I think you’re going to see a focus on mental health, because we’re all going to need to rebound from 2020. Regardless of whether you have luxury and you have a five star fitness center and spa, or you have a middle market product, or below, there still has to be a focus on wellness. I think that, that’s what we’re going to get a lot of requests for, and if we don’t, we will be pushing that agenda. You can talk to doctors all over this country that can talk about COVID all day long, but all of them will tell you that some of your best defense, whether you are 30 or you are 80, is being healthy and having a strong immune system and be mentally well enough to potentially fight something off.

Tod Petty:
Right. It’s really-

Melissa Banko:
Or, a pre-existing condition. I’m not a doctor. I’m not going to get into that.

Tod Petty:
Yeah. It’s not rocket science, right?

Melissa Banko:
Just take care of yourself.

Tod Petty:
I mean, Harvard Medical Review, it’s hydration, it’s nutrition, it’s movement. It’s positive psychology.

Melissa Banko:
And it’s engagement with other humans.

Tod Petty:
Right, socialization.

Melissa Banko:
So, how do we create the space that’s going to support staff to be able to give that to residents?

Tod Petty:
To your point, that’s going to be needed in every one of the models we just talked about.

Melissa Banko:
Every single one.

Tod Petty:
Skilled nursing.

Melissa Banko:
Every single one.

Tod Petty:
Assisted living memory care, independent living, 55 active adult.

Melissa Banko:
Health and wellness is the new way.

Tod Petty:
Right. Actually, that’s confirmed early in the year before the pandemic, it began to bubble up at National Investment Center, it began to bubble up at the American Senior Housing Association.

Melissa Banko:
There’s a spotlight.

Tod Petty:
It is. It is about, if you’re not ready to run a wellness and health care community, then you’re in the wrong space. If you think this is all about hospitality, you’re going to be in trouble because the future is healthcare.

Melissa Banko:
You’re right.

Tod Petty:
With that, Jimmy, I think we’re going to have to leave. I’ve been drinking from a fire hose with Melissa Banko.

Melissa Banko:
Because we don’t talk well. I don’t know how we-

Tod Petty:
We just run on and on. Thank you, Melissa, this was great today.

Melissa Banko:
Thank you for coming and hanging out.

Tod Petty:
We appreciate your-

Melissa Banko:
And talking all things senior living.

Tod Petty:
Yeah, awesome. Thank you.

____________________________________

Tod Petty (00:22):

Hi, it’s Friday, October 30th, 2020. And you are about to enter the No Sales Zone. I want to welcome you to Senior Housing Unfiltered. I am Tod Petty, your host, along with Jimmy Carrion, my podcast associated business partner. We are here again, highlighting another impact maker this month, and a thought leader, making a difference in the senior housing industry, Jimmy.

Jimmy Carrion (00:44):

Yes, absolutely. Welcome to today’s broadcast. We are conversing with all types of people, entrepreneurs, leaders, activists, and other heroes from the senior housing world. Today, our guest is a hidden gem who has driven innovation and technology for over a decade. And in many ways, is responsible for the technology emerging in existing and new buildings all over the USA. Matt Haywood with Tazergy will join us sharing his dreams, experiences, and passion over the last decade in senior housing. But first, let us discuss where we are in the industry in a COVID-19 world and what we can expect in the next few months.

Tod Petty (01:23):

Wow, Jimmy, that’s great. Over the past several months, as we’ve all negotiated and navigated our way through this pandemic, one thing has become exceedingly clear. If you’re going to survive, you must adapt. Let me say that again. This is important. If you’re going to survive, you must adapt. It doesn’t take long Jimmy, if you’re in leadership to learn this principle through truism or a lesson, but decades come and go and some leaders have forgotten how to adapt.

Jimmy Carrion (02:00):

Absolutely. I spoken to many industry leaders and some feel like they have reached the end of the road, achieved all they want to or needed to achieve. And they suddenly find themselves having to relearn old lessons. Only this time, the lessons are going to cost them a lot more.

Tod Petty (02:15):

Yeah, that’s certainly been the case for leaders this year. This year leaders have been caught flat-footed in the face of COVID-19. Their lack of growth and development suddenly on display for everyone to see, whether it’s through bad decisions or a lack of leadership support. Times like the past few months revealed the truth that leaders who stop learning, they stop leading. I’m going to say that again, too. I like that. This is very important for the audience to understand and myself to understand every day: when we stop learning, we stop leading. So since my entrance in senior housing in 2000, I have been passionate about speaking about leadership deficit and how we need to raise up more and better leaders to create a better industry and world. So, we’ve shared this message in many different platforms in the past. And our enterprise has seen tremendous responses, but our voice alone will not be enough to turn the tide. Now with everything that has happened in 2020, the world itself seems to be calling out for everyone to step up to the plate and lead the way. It’s going to take everybody.

Jimmy Carrion (03:23):

It’s definitely gonna take everybody. Our team has worked diligently to bring this podcast and speaking events and leadership material to your home or office, laptop, phone, iPad. There’s all kinds of things. You can listen to now.

Tod Petty (03:35):

That’s a lot of devices.

Jimmy Carrion (03:38):

Absolutely. This is the year it’s critical for more leaders to invest in themselves and developing the leaders around them. We are convinced that 2021 will probably be the year that leaders of all stripes will answer the world’s calling to lead.

Tod Petty (03:51):

So it’s a dichotomy, but ironically enough, the global crises is revealing unending opportunities for each of us to answer the world’s call to be likable change agents, right? For the good. And senior housing will echo and amplify this call moving forward.

Jimmy Carrion (04:07):

Yeah. And I’m incredibly excited about the feature interviews coming up, as well as some behind the scenes conversations with some thought leaders outside of our industry. Tod, you have always said we should look outside of our own industry for new, fresh, bold ideas.

Tod Petty (04:23):

Yeah, I just want to take a moment here and look at this. Think about this question, where are big ideas born from? Are they inside the industry? Is it, is it right around us? I really believe that if you want to transform your business and our industry, we must look outside the industry for new ideas and we’ll be talking about three simple strategies, common to big ideas in a future podcast. So we’ll just take a brief look at those- one is violating industry norms. We started talking about that last week, appealing to the industry malcontents. I really liked that line, because people are just malcontent about average. There’s an enemy out there called average that must be defeated and we want to appeal to those people that want to defeat it. And we want to be true leaders, not just an alternate in the world today. So Jimmy, the best businesses are always about something in addition to making money. Oh, we just lost a lot of people. Oh, look at that. I mean, that’s the reality. I mean, it’s great to make money. Money fuels the engine of development, but there’s gotta be something more than just making money. At least in the minds of the patrons, besides services we offer, great businesses tend to be about something… You know, a grand idea. A mission, positioning, philosophy… One thing that everybody can hook into. You do not want to miss the episode coming up where we talk about this. And Jimmy, you cannot miss that episode because you have to record it. You have to be there.

Jimmy Carrion (06:01):

That is absolutely right. And I wouldn’t want to miss it, and I can’t repeat this enough, but you know, we want our audience to understand we’re doing this because we want to add value to you and see you grow in leadership and really make a difference in the industry that sometimes is stuck in ancient cultures. This is the year that you need to invest in your leadership and in the development of leaders around you. The world has shown us the desperate need for good values and good character to stand up and show the way forward.

New Speaker (06:29):

Yeah. In 2020, you know, since March, we can no longer expect to move forward by staying where we are- doing nothing, waiting for something to change. So I’m inviting our audiences to join us each month in the no selling zone and become a leader who will change the senior housing world.

Tod Petty (06:48):

The world is calling and we are answering the call by bringing the best leadership development material available wherever you are. All you need to do is visit our webpage, Senior Housing Unfiltered, or you can search for us in the Apple Podcasts app, download Senior Housing Unfiltered and secure your seat at the table.

Jimmy Carrion (07:08):

Absolutely. And just to add to that, not just Apple podcasts, but Spotify and I Heart Radio and LinkedIn and everywhere else where you listen to your podcasts, you can find us there. Well, Tod, it’s time to get started. We have a lot to talk about. I want to introduce Matt Haywood with Tazergy. Matt. Thanks for coming. Thanks for joining us. Welcome.

Matt Haywood (07:29):

Thank you for having me.

Jimmy Carrion (07:30):

So uh, tell us a little bit about yourself. So the people here can learn a little bit about you.

Matt Haywood (07:36):

Let’s see. I guess I am an entrepreneur. I’m passionate about my family my faith and relationships. I’m definitely passionate about my company and, and certainly the industry that we are privileged to serve in.

Jimmy Carrion (07:56):

That’s fantastic. Well, we’re happy to have you, and I know before we started here, we were discussing some topics. So Todd, I want you to bring it up and see what you have.

New Speaker (08:08):

Yeah, Jimmy. So the topic today is: “disruption must take place for innovation to have space”. And I, before we started the podcast, Matt, I was thinking about an article back from Senior Housing News back in September 24, 2014. I have it right here, right here: “Texas developer sees competitive edge and super high tech community,” Super high tech. And that was Katy, Texas. And we had partnered together. I had, I garnished some funds and we created a low voltage budget or secret stash, the secret stash. And we implemented technology that Senior Housing Hews would later say it was the most technologically advanced building that had been built. And we deployed technology that had not been available before. And I credit you. I know you don’t, but I credit you with the architect of that entire experience. And I wanted to talk about, you know, how we went from 2008 sitting at NIC, listening to the powers that be, talk about this thing called wifi and how a couple people were putting it in their buildings. But that was really ridiculous because no one would use it and older people didn’t need it. We might put it in the lobby for those to log in, but they saw no need for it. And you know, we’ve said to be competitive, we have to put this in. The world’s changing. We put this technology in, and then it just exploded with people, you know, putting it in their buildings as well. We all, we really got credit for being the innovators with the message because we did it. And we were just talking about this thing that was coming.

Matt Haywood (09:50):

Right.

New Speaker (09:50):

And that’s, that’s how it works. You talk about, you know, what the next wave is and you can own the message. And so we had that building and then everybody followed and now we’re here in 2020 and innovation is changing again. And some people are kind of stuck doing the same thing, and it’s changing. I thought we could have a conversation about that today.

Matt Haywood (10:09):

Great. The title that you introduced, as far as the disruption must occur, right? In order for innovation to have space, I think everybody can see the 2020 that that is a truth, right? I mean, look at the adoption of video conferencing, of working from home. Call centers. People in, in, across the globe, people were working from home. I was on tech support calls hearing roosters in the background.

New Speaker (10:49):

[Laughter]

Matt Haywood (10:49):

You know, dogs, too. Yeah. You know, and, and varying quality of, of conversations. But I always asked them, like, did you ever, in your wildest dreams, ever think you’d be working from home? The answer is always no. Right. So I just…

Tod Petty (11:08):

Yeah, good point. So entrepreneurs were saying that I don’t like this idea of working from home. Cause people will not be productive.

Matt Haywood (11:14):

I can’t control it. It’s going to be out of control. If I let people…

New Speaker (11:17):

People won’t work.

Matt Haywood (11:17):

Correct.

Tod Petty (11:19):

We talked to developers even, like, can we get conference rooms for the staff to come in and have remote meetings with them to help guide operations? And it was like, no, no, we’ve got to be there. We’ve got to be right in front of them to make sure things happen. And they were opposed to it. I mean, people were, were still gravitating toward bigger and larger offices and congregating together and creating corporate environments where they could direct the care and the monitoring of services. That’s all changed.

Matt Haywood (11:48):

For sure. Yeah. No, I mean, you, can’t, can’t go a community, you know, essential employees going into a community. If you need to go in you know, there’s, there’s testing and PPE that needs to be worn. And, and rightfully so, you know, so, technology has been the, the thing, the go-to that this industry has, to overuse the word, “pivoted”, right? So how many times do we hear the word pivoted this year? We’re going to pivot. Okay. some of us it’s, it’s how we operated. We operated off of this technology, you know, this, this is now an opportunity. A space has now been created because of this disruption for people to adopt, you know, and so what is, we talk about new normal and new things. It’s like, well, I don’t know a new normal. Change is the only constant, right?

Matt Haywood (12:44):

So, so how can we embrace learn, grow, get behind our teams, connect with technology, connect through technology, and really make our teams, the people that we work with, make their lives better and, and ultimately make the lives of our residents better? You know, isn’t, isn’t that what senior living is about, right? It’s, it’s creating a resident experience that the resident is, is engaged, wakes up happy, healthy. The families are, are, are happy. You know, we’ve got engaged team members. I, you know, utopia, my glass is half full all the time, but that’s, that’s, that’s my perspective of why do technology. Do technology to help drive connection.

New Speaker (13:30):

Right. So that’s interesting because in order to really do that, though if we look at the last few years, there seems to be the herd is rushed toward adopting cool and sexy technology in the building.

Matt Haywood (13:44):

If you build it, they will come.

New Speaker (13:45):

They will come. And it’s the newest and latest really almost like, gadget. Let’s put a variety of things that have been put in the buildings and six months later, right. They’re outdated.

Matt Haywood (13:54):

Yeah. So were not used or forgotten.

New Speaker (13:57):

They were not used, they can’t be adopted. The staff doesn’t have time or whatever the case may be. So, you know, one of the things, I think, is going to be very important, moving forward is to have a, an infrastructure that allows the deployment of wifi throughout the entire campus.

Matt Haywood (14:17):

For sure.

New Speaker (14:17):

Overcoming any restrictions that would stop it and having significant bandwidth. So whatever technology we put in the buildings can be deployed, we can rip it out and put something new in. And particularly, I think it’s important with independent living and active adult, these new communities that are gonna come up to serve a younger generation that’s not needing a higher level of care, so they can bring in medical technology to age in place without having to go to, necessarily, a medical model with all of the devices and opportunities coming out with telehealth, the delivery of medication. So, that means budgeting and wifi is going to have to be very robust in the communities moving forward,

Matt Haywood (15:04):

Connectivity is crucial. Stable, reliable connectivity is even more crucial. You know, not all wifi is created equal. It’s essential to, when you’re talking about strategy, it’s important to partner with the right people, not only internally, but externally, right? As an operator, I think that one of the challenges that I see. It’s a friction point. When do you hire and own the internal talent? Where do you outsource, to rely on somebody outside? You know, the risk as well. I need them internal because then I can control them. And it’s, it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting paradigm because, can you really control an employee any more than you can control a partner?

Jimmy Carrion (15:53):

And let me bring it back to Wi-Fi, right? Because I remember, you know, in growing up and your grandparents, Oh, no, we’re not going to use Facebook. They’re not going to use this technology. They’re not going to want an iPad. And I, you can’t take away the iPad from my grandparents. Right?

Matt Haywood (16:08):

They’re probably like a two or three device.

Jimmy Carrion (16:10):

Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, what’s, so everyone can understand the importance, because I know development in the past this, you know, we’ll get wifi in the common areas. That’s all we need. We don’t need it in the rooms. Why would we need it in the rooms?

Matt Haywood (16:26):

Right.

Jimmy Carrion (16:26):

I’m just wasting money. So what, if you can go into detail a little bit about the importance and what it affects when you don’t have wifi. And the advantages of having wifi in the rooms and throughout the entire building.

Matt Haywood (16:40):

Right. Todd referred back to, you know, 2008 at a conference, right? Where we used the term wifi. And I think back in the industry, it’s like, oh, we have wifi. Right? And that, how do you know, like what, what flavor of wifi do you have the good, the bad, or the ugly, you know? And it’s like, well, I, I just need you to come. Can you just sign, move in? And I’ve got wifi. That’s, that’s what I’ve got. You know, it was that crucial thing. There’s, there’s a whole lot that goes into wifi. It’s science, it’s physics, it’s wavelengths. Right? So when I say all, not all wifi is, is created equal, it isn’t. The other thing about wifi is that can you, as an operator, limit the number of wireless devices that are within range of your community? Like, can you, can you turn devices off or can you tell people to turn their wifi off? Or can you tell them to leave? Or can you tell, you know, your, your team members that are coming in, “Hey, when you come into community, turn your cell phones off and don’t have wifi on.” You can’t.

Jimmy Carrion (17:46):

Right.

Matt Haywood (17:46):

So there’s, so your wifi has to perform and respond to all the devices that are within range of it, regardless of whether devices are connected. Does that make sense? That’s kind of the rub for wifi. We’ve probably all been in coffee shops where you’re sitting there and you’re like, signal, I got five bars and you might say, “well, your bandwidth sucks.” Or your throughput. Right. Like, I can’t do what I need to, it, it actually might be that the engine that’s driving, that AP can’t respond to the number of requests because it just can’t handle the data that’s coming through. So to your question about what do you need in a community to say wifi there or connectivity, you have IOT, you have RTLS. Some RTLS uses wifi.

Tod Petty (18:35):

So, real time location services?

Matt Haywood (18:39):

Right.

Tod Petty (18:39):

And we’re gonna talk about that. How it relates to COVID-19 and contact tracing for before we end this podcast?

Jimmy Carrion (18:47):

Absolutely. We’ll bring it back around.

Matt Haywood (18:50):

Yes. In order for those things to work, you need to have a, I’d say, an ecosystem, a homogenous ecosystem. You can’t say, Oh, we’ve got, if you want to name one cable provider, like Xfinity, you drive around, you see all the Xfinity wifi hotspots. Well, if you were to just put a bunch of Xfinity hotspots cable modems in there, it’s not one ecosystem that you can wander down your hallway and not drop a phone call, right? It is not an enterprise-grade network where you can connect various devices and get data.

Tod Petty (19:25):

And it might not hand off as you move from one location to the next.

Matt Haywood (19:27):

If you want to sit and stream, it’s great. If you want to be connected on a phone call, talking with a resident’s family, as you get off the elevator and walk down the corridor to go visit a resident on the third floor, you can’t rely upon a publiccarrier-grade network to be your enterprise dependency.

Tod Petty (19:56):

Yeah, that makes total sense, Matt. And I think in the minds of developers entrepreneurs, as they were trying to create a property, a community, in senior housing, they looked at the devices that were going to be functioning, just that, to determine what they needed, and in an effort to cut costs, just addressed those things.

Matt Haywood (20:18):

Right.

Tod Petty (20:18):

And when you went beyond those things, the bandwidth was not sufficient. The coverage was not sufficient to allow the community to evolve. And so the world we’re in now is, we have people successfully aging. There’s going to be this bifurcation of who’s going where, right? So AL memory care residents will be higher acuity levels. They’ll, they’ll need more care. They’ll go there. And anybody underneath that is going to want to go to a place to avoid that. If they are not that sick and they’re going to need to, in order to successfully age, they’re going to want to be able to be in their rooms and stream Netflix. They’re going to want to do telehealth, now that’s becoming readily available, in their rooms. Not even a suite. Talk to their families. If they need medication, the pharmacy can come in, put a machine on the wall that will deliver meds based on the time, because it’s tied to the wifi.

Jimmy Carrion (21:16):

Right. Or it’s at the front desk, or at the front door.

Tod Petty (21:21):

Yes. Yes. So just having it in, in the common areas and it is no longer going to be adequate for a person to successfully age. And we have to, we have to ready for that. Is that a fair statement?

Matt Haywood (21:33):

Oh, for sure. I mean, there’s, there’s platforms that are out there that just can’t exist without an enterprise-grade network. The data has to flow, right? It has to be one network in order to get from point A to point B within your community and then to get out to the internet, you know, and it has to be dependable and reliable. It can’t be the kind of thing that you’re asking your executive director or your maintenance director to go run and power site and something. It’s not going to work by buying a bunch of wireless access point routers and plugging them in, right. Intentionality, right? As an operator, you, you need reliable, dependable, consistent wifi connectivity as a foundational building block.

Tod Petty (22:22):

So, can you help the audience and Jimmy and I understand where the disconnect is because we’re seeing many people getting into this space. A lot of them do not have healthcare backgrounds, but they are able to build beautiful buildings, which is important. And so they come into this space and when they begin to program the community so that it’s able to function, this is something that’s overlooked in the development process. Why is that I can go into buildings, we’re visiting buildings now we’re looking at acquiring, there’s all of a sudden, a lot for sale. It’s interesting. They’re two and three years old. And when we walk in the building, the tech, the technology does not meet the demand of the devices.

Matt Haywood (23:11):

Yeah. I tend to I mean, we are Senior Housing Unfiltered, I tend to see an operator, and in my recommendation, an operator needs to know what they want, what they need in order to deliver that care. And if you need connectivity, then you need connectivity and you need to be able to communicate if there’s certain systems, technologies that you, as an operator, know you need in order to deliver the care that your capital partner is expecting you to care that you’re going to be, then you need to say, I need this. And you don’t. And you need to say without passion, pride, or prejudice, like, this is what we need. And you’re not, you’re not blowing their dollars. You know, you’re actually preserving their dollars because you’re saying, listen, you hired me to run this place to lease it up, to stabilize, to deliver great care.

Matt Haywood (24:07):

These are the systems. These are the platforms that I have determined. And if you want to have a conversation with me about the manner in which I’m doing, and the method, then let’s do that. But let’s not do that at the development table, while we’re trying to get this building out of the ground and with all due respect, please, please don’t VE those components out of my ability to deliver care.

Tod Petty (24:28):

Right. And when you say “VE”…

Matt Haywood (24:30):

Value engineering.

Tod Petty (24:32):

You’re talking about value engineering, thank you.

Jimmy Carrion (24:35):

Let me dig a little deeper in here. It’s the lack of knowing what kind of wifi and technology that they need, would you say it’s just a lack of programming and that these developments just live in an Excel sheet and they don’t have thought process behind the healthcare and the programming in the model of actually operating these buildings? And it’s just another building that returns an X amount of numbers?

Matt Haywood (25:01):

No, it’s a fantastic question. And I’d say the simple answer is, yes. One of the ways that we help transcend or sidestep that, or partner with a developer, is to say, listen, we can give you a budget for what a network or wifi would cost you. To put in so that they can give, you know, I call it, let’s paint the ball field. Let’s give them the ballpark. So they know approximately the size of what needs to be invested. And if they choke and what it’s like on that number, then we talk about it, right. It’s better there than going in, sharpening a pencil and pouring a whole bunch of effort into building this bill of materials and engineering, this beautiful thing. And then them say, why can’t I just go to Best Buy? I mean, Radio Shack doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why it’s still things around. But, you know, can’t, I just go buy that stuff and put it in, you know? Yes. But do you want it to work? They don’t care because they’re not running it. They’re turning to the operator. You know? So that’s, so what we’ve said is help you with the budget so that we’re trying to get them out of being the shopper, right. Trying to ’cause they, they feel that their job is to, to buy, to spend the dollars wisely, right? So they try to become a buyer of technology, but that’s not their gifting. Right. In order to buy it, you’ve got a network that has to be engineered, right? You can’t just, if you want to go price shop a network, what you need to do is hire somebody to engineer your system, and now let’s go price it. No different than a building.

Matt Haywood (26:37):

You go hire an architect, you put together a set of plans and specs, and then you, you might send it out to the street and go get a few GCs, get some numbers back. But our network and wifi, it’s different. It’s like, Hey, go get somebody. Oh, well, let’s take theirs. And to send it over there, how you give me a number for that one? Well, why is there a different than this? Well, that’s a different manufacturer. Do you know the difference between the manufacturer? Who were you going to trust to help you make a decision on a foundational building block of what you, as an operator, what your residents need and expect? I think you’ve, you’ve been at operators before where the residents complain, the staff complains, connectivity is sub sub par.

Tod Petty (27:19):

Well, exactly. So what if what you just described has not happened, and we’re looking at cost driving the entire solution, then there’s a win, right? When we get the lowest cost solution, the problem is once you open up and you’re taking care of residents, your care staff can’t log onto the wifi in order to provide medication and document through an electronic health record. And when they move down the hallway, there’s not an adequate handoff to the wireless access point.

Matt Haywood (27:52):

So they park their med cart, run down to the elevator, deliver meds.

Tod Petty (27:55):

Now we have a COVID 19 pandemic.

Matt Haywood (27:59):

You don’t pay them hourly, right?

Tod Petty (28:00):

Of course not, it’s just a small salary.

New Speaker (28:05):

[Laughter].

Tod Petty (28:05):

So they get frustrated. Then you have clients in there, even in the common area that are trying to log onto your wifi. Assuming it’s quality like a hotel, they can’t log in, or they log in, and they’re logged in, but then when you test the speed, it doesn’t even register because there’s no bandwidth, right? So that’s frustrating. A telephone service is cut off because their voice over internet protocol, the wifi is not servicing them logging into the wifi via cell phones. But then this connectivity problem there. I’ve even been to, believe it or not, I’ve been in communities kind of like our mission statement that we talked on the wall that no one knew about, I’ve been in communities where they were passing out a Netflix login to 80 residents and they all couldn’t log in and they didn’t know why. And they didn’t even realize, of course, that everybody has limited numbers. Correct?

Matt Haywood (28:58):

It’s the same thing with your wifi key. Here’s your business, here’s your business network key handed to your executive director and all the department heads. And if a resident’s family walks in, Oh, the guest doesn’t work. Oh, here, try this key.

Tod Petty (29:10):

That’s right. But value engineering Matt, is not going to work, moving forward with a healthcare model. And I remember this year being at both the National Investment Center conference year prior, and also at ASHA. And there was a big announcement that the, the keynote messages were all about. Look, if you can’t run a healthcare model, then you’re going to be in trouble. It sucked the oxygen out of the room. Because most people coming in are not used to running a healthcare models.

Matt Haywood (29:42):

No, it’s resort.

Tod Petty (29:43):

It’s resort, resort, resort.

Matt Haywood (29:44):

Touchy, feely.

Tod Petty (29:45):

Yeah. So healthcare has been marginalized and it’s been commoditized and “Oh, anybody can do that.” We’re all about, you know, resort living. Now, the pandemic hits and we need response to this pandemic, this pathogen. We need to know how to quarantine residents. They need to be able to contact their loved ones through tablets. And no one’s prepared. And no one knows what to do because they’re trying to run a resort. And now it’s really a disadvantage.

Matt Haywood (30:17):

Disinformation. Disinformation, that actually works today.

Tod Petty (30:21):

It’s a disadvantage. So they’re not, they weren’t ready. They’re not ready. And they can’t, they can’t deliver. What’s being promised in the future is going to demand electronic health records, electronic medical records, a robust wifi for, for everything we’re talking about.

Matt Haywood (30:46):

I mean, you typically only have one resident at a community, right?

Tod Petty (30:50):

[Laughter.]

Tod Petty (30:50):

Well, we are seeing some communities like that. [Laughter.]

Matt Haywood (30:54):

That might be a good opportunity for a sale.

Tod Petty (30:57):

But I think the average is about 80% right now.

Matt Haywood (30:59):

So if you have 80%, would you say you’ve got your small communities, you’ve got your medium and your large communities, right?

Tod Petty (31:06):

Correct.

Matt Haywood (31:06):

And typically we’re multi-dwelling, multifamily, multi-housing, right? Like that’s, that’s what senior living is a member of. Right. That’s what our model is. So the challenge when it comes to network is you can’t put one device out and expect one device to serve all of your team, your residents. Right. You’ve got to have, you’ve got, if you’ve got 80 beds, you’ve got 80 rooms, you’ve got 80 doors, you’ve got ADP tax, you’ve got ADT stats, you know, you might need 80 Wi-Fi APs.

Tod Petty (31:43):

Right. Right,

Matt Haywood (31:44):

So, to walk in and think, well, you can, you can deliver a community with 80 doorknobs and 80 of the other stuff and say, well, we’re just going to do with two, is two APs good? Will that suffice? And then wonder why, you know, care and tracking, you can’t get it. You can’t, you can’t expect your operator to function better when they’re not equipped with the tools. And so that’s why we try to, to partner with our operators and help them make sure that they’re clear on defining what their strategy is, how they’re going to go after it and build this foundational building block. Right. And to realize that what we, where we are today and where you want to get to tomorrow is important, but we’re gonna, we’re gonna start. You might not be able to put 80 enterprise grade wifi access points out tomorrow because we only have one resident and you have 80 beds. So we’re going to start with one because we’re going to, we’re going to grow into it. So there’s a way to get phased. But again, what’s the goal? How do you want to get there? And let’s, and let’s pursue that.

Tod Petty (32:50):

Yeah. One of the things I really liked about you, Matt, and going back to our Katy building was you’ve always been very modality neutral. So, so you’ve not had a, you’ve not been in love necessarily with one particular piece of equipment. And we were able to have these design charrettes and technology where we invited several RFID door lock companies in and let them display the features and benefits of their product along with the developer and who was going to be the executive director and who was going to manage it. And we all had this design charette, and we looked at RFID, we looked at RTLS, we looked at video surveillance. We looked at what kind of music was going to be. And everybody got involved with signage, digital signage. And it’s like, Hey, whatever you want, we can deliver. And that’s really important on any project, because it could be a middle-market project that has the same features, but maybe not as the same depth and robustness.

Matt Haywood (33:52):

I think the volume’s turned down a little bit, you know? Right. Yeah, for sure.

Tod Petty (33:56):

And, and so those are the kind of, that’s the kind of education, though, that needs to take place with everybody involved in a project to make it successful.

Matt Haywood (34:03):

Absolutely. You know, if the developer is going to call all the shots right, then, then they, they hand over this, this building, you know, an inanimate object that an operator then makes it a home, right. You’re moving residents, you’re moving teams in there. And all of a sudden, now these systems, those are the expensive dollars, is what we say, right? The cheap dollars are your loan dollars, you know, get, get the stuff you need in behind the walls, get the core stuff that you really need so that you can, that you can start building, filling that, that community up and really, and really making it run. And even if you are, we are moving to a less resort style and a more healthcare model, it doesn’t mean that we can throw away the lessons that we learned from resort-style or still give those, those amenities. Right. As soon as we can go back into the communities, you know, we are going to be able to relate and sit with people and go back and say, Hey, come on into our community. You know, that’s one of the conversations we’ve had about how do you, how do you create flex spaces? You know, technology can, can open the door for that so that you’re not designing a static space.

Tod Petty (35:20):

Do you mind if we segue into that? I think that would be an interesting topic for our audience. So we we’ve seen over the lastI don’t know, five or six years, maybe even eight, the creation of resort properties. And there was this kind of common strategy to create a, we’re going to go to the common area of the grand hall and to the right, we have a movie theater, and to the left, we have a salon. And then to the left next, we have a fitness room. And then next to that, we have an art studio and it was fairly innovative, but that’s, that’s somewhat, almost dated now, right?

Matt Haywood (35:55):

It’s also expensive.

Tod Petty (35:57):

It is expensive and quite frequently, those, those rooms do not get used. And so, you know, we talked several years ago that we saw a day coming, which is probably already here, where you’d have somewhat like a Hyatt Place experience, where you walk in the door, you get checked in at concierge desk, you go over, have a pizza and a beer. Then, they serve you the pizza and the beer. You need a ride to the airport, so the concierge jumps in and takes you to the airport. And that’s kind of what we’re seeing in space conservation now. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Matt Haywood (36:29):

Yeah. Certainly the projects, we love innovating, you know, so disruption, innovation, or we’re talking about space, you know, so the, the spaces in senior living we walk into these communities and you see these, these dead spaces. It’s very rarely, I walk in and see that a theater is occupied, except for movie night. So if you’re going to design a building and you’re going to have a theater, and you’re going to dump, let’s say on a good day, maybe 10 grand, just into maybe some technology. And then, I don’t know, are you building a community that’s a hundred bucks a square to build, or is it 250 bucks a square? So is, is the, you know, are we talking about a 200 square foot room, or we’re talking about a 600 square foot room, and that’s how much money you spent to build out this, this space that literally is used maybe once a week, I think we can do better. You know? And I think that the technology today, we’ve seen a huge push for video, you know, how do you get a resident and remote family engaged? You know, how do you get your remote teams engaged? And so certainly in order to design those spaces at a new construction project, it’s not something that we can just walk in and say, Hey, this solution works, all you have to do is plug it in and we’re good.

Tod Petty (37:43):

Or I just call you, or I even call Best Buy Geek Squad, to come in.

Matt Haywood (37:50):

You just buy, you, go grab one widget off the shelf. You walk in your community, plug it in. It’s done. Right. I mean, Alexa is not just like plug it in. You’ve got to step through some things just to set it. Right. You’re talking about an assembly, right? In, in your, in your space, you might have a display. You’re going to have a microphone, your video, you’re going to have internet. You’re going to have a computer, you know, and you’re going to need it to work. I mean, we’re sitting here in a room with a microphone and we all needed to be within range of the microphone. Right. Microphone matters.

Tod Petty (38:19):

Yeah. I hope it works. It was a special microphone, too, so that it can pick up all of us at the same time.

Tod Petty (38:29):

Jimmy’s going to click a picture of this and put it on the website so everybody can see our cool microphone.

Jimmy Carrion (38:32):

Yeah.

Tod Petty (38:32):

Second podcast. We able to upgrade, someone, donated us a good microphone.

Matt Haywood (38:37):

We had very silent drones flying around the three 60 panoramic of this whole thing. In order to innovate, it’s also not one-sided, right?, So in order to create flexible spaces that don’t fall flat, when a community opens, it can’t just simply sit on the shoulders of an architect and a developer. Right. It’s gotta be somebody who’s an operator that actually has some, some understanding of what this community is going to look like and operate like.

Tod Petty (39:04):

You’re right. Because every community is unique. And every community should have a unique value proposition. Something it offers that no one else potentially excels in.

Matt Haywood (39:13):

You hear it all the time. Like, you know that sometimes, as a developer shopping for an operator, they’re shopping for the right operator to run their buildings. Is that the right fee? Or is that the right operator that’s going to lease it up? Is that the right operator that’s just going to make them profitable so they can set it and forget it? You know, what is the right?

Tod Petty (39:33):

Well, it should be synergy, like-mindedness, a similar vision.

Matt Haywood (39:38):

One would think. It might just be money.

Tod Petty (39:41):

Well, there are some people that make decisions just on money, for sure.

Matt Haywood (39:47):

Some people prioritize money more than others. And that’s fine. You just need to know where on the spectrum it falls, but we’re talking about care, right. We’re talking about residents, like in order for a community to make it, we have to deliver care. We have to have people, we have to have stuff that works. And I think that’s what, that’s what the pandemic is, has made a lot of operators realize is like, “Oh man. Yeah. I knew that what we had, wasn’t good. And now we have to live with what’s not good because I can’t make it work in the midst of a pandemic.”

Jimmy Carrion (40:26):

That’s a very good comment, because, the pandemic and COVID definitely brought it to the front, but we have to remember that that’s not the only virus that’s been around. And we have to work and be better. And that brings to the point on wifi. Right. And I come from hotels. So wifi to me is, you know, I’m going to get the upgrade in every room, if you want the fast Wi-Fi. All that needs to work is computers. And people might look at it and say, “Oh, okay, great. Enough wifi for the computers to work and the cell phones to work and the phones to work.” But especially because you brought up the point of care and I want to get into a really good, really important topic, which is the wearables and RTLS- real-time location services- and how that doesn’t work if you don’t have wifi throughout the building. Your wearable doesn’t magically just pick up Xfinity out of somewhere and it just starts working. So, you know, Tod and Matt, if you guys want to get a little bit, you know, as an operator and, really just the value of having these wearables and video surveillance, door locks, contactless door locks. And just as simple as that, you know, to get wifi to work.

Matt Haywood (41:39):

For sure. We’ve worked with a few operators that were early adopters of RTLS. And one of the great things, what’s one of the pros, well, you could walk to the front desk and with the proverbial question is like, Hey, I’m here to see my mom, my dad. Right. Do you know where they are?

Tod Petty (41:59):

No. Somewhere in the building.

Jimmy Carrion (41:59):

How big’s your building? Don’t worry, they’re inside!

Matt Haywood (41:59):

So that’s, that’s begins the hunt, right? So simply, you can just type in their name. So with RTLS, we’re talking about you don’t need your resident to actively push a button or anything. RTLS is going to be a passive, it’s going to report and say, Oh, you know, as long as you’re wearing a device, a wearable, a pendant or watch or something, it’s going to report that device’s location within your wifi environment. And we say wifi, RTLS might use wifi. It might use some other, you know, Bluetooth, low energy. Some use a different wireless made by another, another company. So again, RTLS doesn’t necessarily mean wifi, but just to make sure that we’re clear, that was a benefit, right. Was just out of the gate, you can tell the visitor who’s coming in, where, where the resident is in your community. That’s a service that you can deliver. And that’s, that is hotel like, right. You walk in like, “Oh, I just provided service in a timely manner. We didn’t take very long. And now that person can go find them. They’re upstairs on the second floor in the activity room.”

Matt Haywood (43:26):

Thank you very much. Right now we’re in pandemic. And we talk about what else can we do with this system? You know, some of these devices needed to be developed because battery life is important. Right. And that’s, that’s the other key, right? Like a wearables gotta be powered, right. It’s gotta be online in order to be able to be detected. Otherwise it’s useless.

Tod Petty (43:45):

We had a client we’ve talked with the other day helping. And they had a, a nurse that worked in the community that worked at another community. She came into the community was exposed to a resident. She ended up testing positive for COVID. She was with one resident and there was concern that, okay, how far did this spread? And so, in what we’ve been talking about, putting in our buildings in the future is the ability with RTLS to go back and find out where the individual…

Matt Haywood (44:19):

Like a breadcrumb trail.

Tod Petty (44:19):

Exactly. Contract tracing.

Matt Haywood (44:23):

Where your staff went, where the resident went. Right. It’s correct.

Tod Petty (44:25):

So we can adequately test for that as well. And I remember we were on the cutting edge, I guess, of putting passive motion sensors in 2014, right? Because we realized that if we had these motion sensors installed and it was gathering data of how many times the resident got up at night, where did they go? They went to the bathroom. How long they were in the bathroom, how frequently they’re in the bathroom. If we could gather those analytics, then we could at least know, “Hey, they’re up all night, they’re sleep deprived. Maybe they’re not having exacerbation of dementia. Maybe they’re so sleep deprived and they need an ambien versus some more medication to control their dementia,” or may, maybe there’s other issues that we could suggest the doctor to look at. And those that was the original technology that RTLS would deliver on now as well.

Matt Haywood (45:24):

Correct. All of that is, Tod. That the piece that is like critically important, all this is possible. It’s not that difficult. It’s not like it’s Star Trek technology that’s far off. I hear operators talk frequently risk. If you’ve got the data and you don’t do something with that data, you are now at risk. So instead of going at risk, I see operators don’t go at risk.

Tod Petty (45:57):

Well, we don’t know where mom is at. Then we can’t be accountable for it. We don’t have a device to know where she’s at.

Matt Haywood (46:03):

So therefore, right. So, so, you know, in order for things to change, we have to kind of change everybody’s perspective, too. Right. So if we’re going to expect an operator to take risk for us and deliver care and do what we can’t. We can’t care for mom. That’s why they’re there. So then kind of trust you to do that. And I’ve got to get behind you. Right? We’ve got to get behind the operators. We’ve got to empower them. We’ve got to, we’ve got to help them solve this. And we’ve got to understand that they’re human too. And that we want them to take the risk, to try and put together something that ultimately delivers better outcomes. Right. Instead of, “Oh, you had that data available and didn’t do anything?” Well, my attorney is going to call you.”

Tod Petty (46:50):

Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Haywood (46:51):

You know what I mean? Instead of like, maybe the question is like, how do we help that operator? Make sure it’s ops. Right. Operational. And it’s not easy. How often do you close your communities?

Tod Petty (47:05):

Never.

Matt Haywood (47:11):

I mean, they’re close. And you brought up a good point. In senior living, this isn’t the first pandemic that a community has experienced. Scabies, other, you know, flu, and diarrhea, like, like things tear through the community. And so, communities, operators are used to responding to shut downs, lock downs.

Tod Petty (47:39):

Quarantines. It’s hard to control.

Matt Haywood (47:39):

It’s part of the nature.

Tod Petty (47:45):

The good ones will have health care protocol in place, right?

Matt Haywood (47:48):

Yeah. I mean, I’ve been in senior living since ’99 in various capacities, mostly technology and into construction. But I’ve seen it, too. You know, where our corporate has to go into a community because it shut down because of scabies. I was like, “What’s scabies?” So if we can, through technology, help deliver that, that, that I think helps, helps an operator. But we also have to have to answer the question of how do we lower that risk concern, right? Like, I don’t want to go do this because if I have the data and I do nothing about it, or I didn’t respond in time now, now I’m liable. You know?

Jimmy Carrion (48:29):

Absolutely. I think it’s the operator’s responsibility to take that responsibility. We are responsible for the residents. And we see a lot of times where, you know, you’d put in the programming and you know, it happened, we know, we have to be responsible for that. And we just yeah, we just need to take charge.

Matt Haywood (48:52):

I agree. The vendors need to be part of that too. Like, you know, we talked about why can’t you just go to Best Buy and buy it? Because it’s not just something you just put in. We talked about engineering, you talked about designing and it’s not a finish line.

Matt Haywood (49:07):

It’s a starting line. You put in wifi, you put in these systems, it’s a start, right. You were using clipboards yesterday. You’re using electronic medical records today. You expect amazing. Well, why don’t we have the good data? We’ll because we just started getting the data in, you know, in a few months, we’re going to start to do that. So who’s massaging the data and making sure that you’re garbage in garbage out.

Tod Petty (49:31):

And this is the same process the hospitals went through 10 years ago when they adopted electronic health platforms as well. They had the same challenges.

Matt Haywood (49:38):

Correct. And you know, the hospitality, the hotel industry had the same sort of wifi challenge that senior living does. The hotel industry had the same problem with electronic locking is like, no, like how many, how many hotels do you go to these days, where you get a mechanical key.

Matt Haywood (49:51):

I think it’s just, when you go to the motel and you’re driving across the U.S. Did you get a square metal key that like cuts a hole through your pocket. Right. But on apps now it’s on your phone, correct? Yeah. I can just put an app on there, but senior living in order to accomplish that, there’s an operation side to it. Right. And that’s something that a vendor has to, has to be part of the equation. It’s not just a set it, forget it, walk away. And the same thing for an operator. Right. Because you’ve got people in your communities that are going to be running this and it’s got to work and you can’t have to have a special degree. So they’re just, it’s a partnership really, to help solve this. And I don’t want anybody to think, it’s like, well, if you buy the right access point, you’re good. It isn’t.

Tod Petty (50:34):

It can make a difference though.

Matt Haywood (50:36):

[Laughs.] For sure. But, remember, one can’t serve, you know, all 80 rooms. It’s just not going to reach, unless you’re got a community of mice and it’s very small, compact place.

Tod Petty (50:47):

I think we have time for one more example. Do we, Jimmy? You’re watching the clock.

Jimmy Carrion (50:52):

Yeah. I think we’re going to need, like, six more podcasts.

Tod Petty (50:55):

We’re going to have to do a continuation here.

Jimmy Carrion (51:00):

We’ll treat everyone to a mid month podcast. Let Matt talk freely, but yes, yes, let’s get one more topic in.

Tod Petty (51:13):

So I thought about our topic: disruption must take place for innovation to have a space. And so I remember prior to the pandemic, trying to suggesting that potentially increasing the bandwidth and the wifi so that it included the resident’s room for various reasons, but one particular reason so that we could power tablets, right. That older adults can have. Maybe we gave it to them when they came in the community. So they could be in continual contact with their families. And you know, this is risk mitigation on one hand because the state of Texas was allowing, it allows now, nanny cams. So residents, families can come in and with the residents’ permission where they can put a camera in the room and they can monitor all that’s going on and other states are moving toward adopting this. So if, if we actually had the ability to have a wifi, I mean, excuse me, a tablet, where the residents could talk with their families, then this would be one more way to connect with them, get their eyes on them.

Tod Petty (52:22):

And you know, some people might say, “Oh, I don’t, I don’t want to cause more confusion or more contact. We want to kind of control that.” I disagree with that. Quite frankly. I think it’s transparent. You’re going to deal with issues anyway. So, but the feedback I got was that, wow, they can’t use the tablets kind of reminds me of 20 2008. Oh, the elder adults can’t use the tablets. They don’t know how. They’re not going to use it. The family is going to want to come in. And so now we have disruption. Pandemic mandated shutdown in the communities, the families can’t come down. And, and so how do we fix that? Oh, great idea. Let’s get a tablet.

Jimmy Carrion (53:02):

Yeah.

Tod Petty (53:05):

See if the resident can use Facetime, can they use Skype? And so the adoption was much quicker in the midst of the disruption than it ever was prior to it, when people objected to it and thought it was less personal.

Matt Haywood (53:19):

I have staff using their own devices. Like that’s who we have serving in the communities. Right. They’re solving the problem as long as they have cell or wifi, they can do it. We’re bringing it to some place that they have connectivity.

Tod Petty (53:37):

My mom went from a Jitterbug when she was like, “This is really complicated. I don’t know this stuff. I’ll never be able to handle it.” So she liked the Jitterbug ’cause all those commercials, but once she was quarantined and we got her a smartphone and made it simple for her, we could FaceTime her any time. And that connection, even though remote and through virtual, still made a difference.

Jimmy Carrion (54:03):

It’s all about education. It’s all about educating.

Matt Haywood (54:04):

I, you know, the, the joke about the pastor’s wife, right? Blowing kisses to the pastor, it’s like, you know, keep it simple, stupid, right? That’s the KISS analogy. KISS. And that’s what we have to keep in mind when it comes to technology is that we are mindful of who’s going to be using the technology because the key is it’s got to be used if it isn’t used, there’s no point in putting it in. Right. Which is, which kind of goes back to our, like, if you build it, they will come. Well, that was, that was the resort. Like, we’ve got wifi, come on. Right. Well, we have connectivity. Right. And we have the care. Yeah. So you can come here and connect and we’ll provide care and we’ve got you. Right. And, and that’s, that’s what it needs to be. In my perspective.

Tod Petty (54:56):

There’s a great point.

Jimmy Carrion (54:58):

Matt, Tod, I think we could go for hours. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna have to..

Matt Haywood (55:03):

If we have enough snacks, we can do it.

Jimmy Carrion (55:06):

But I think this has been great.

Tod Petty (55:06):

This has been great. I appreciate it. Always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us.

Matt Haywood (55:11):

Thank you for having me

New Speaker (55:11):

Listen to our podcast when it comes out and we will talk to you soon.

Tod Petty (55:18):

Yeah. You guys please stay safe and we’ll have Matt back in the very near future to talk about some other unfiltered topics. Thank you guys.

 

 

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MIAMI, FL— Lloyd Jones Senior Living, the senior housing management arm of Lloyd Jones LLC, launched its podcast series, Senior Housing Unfiltered, on September 30, 2020. The podcast, cohosted by Tod Petty, executive vice president, and Jimmy Carrion, vice president of business development, was created to foster authentic conversations about the unique challenges the senior housing industry faces.

Topics will range from how to bridge the gap between corporate leadership and onsite teams to how disruption is needed within the industry’s current development, operations, and marketing models, and more, with one common theme: innovation.
“Our goal with Senior Housing Unfiltered is to present innovative solutions for owners, operators, and professionals in the senior housing field,” said Petty. “We plan to bring value to listeners by sharing the practical ways that our industry’s brightest thought leaders make an impact.”

Senior Housing Unfiltered is planned to publish new episodes monthly. The podcast is currently available for free listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other streaming services. To contact the hosts about becoming a podcast guest or potential sponsor, contact Tod Petty at tpetty@lloydjonesseniorliving.com.

About Lloyd Jones LLC

Lloyd Jones, LLC is a real estate investment and development firm with 40 years in the industry under the continuous direction of Chairman/CEO, Christopher Finlay. Based in Miami, the firm has divisions in multifamily investment, development, management, and senior living. Its investment partners include institutions, private investors, and its own principals.
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