2016 Dynamic Dozen No. 3: Haven Healthcare LLC

SBJ: What has the company’s growth enabled you to do?
John Ray: It allowed us to double our market. We started out in seven counties and expanded into 13. We also expanded our services. We started out providing outpatient rehab, then home health. Now, we are providing facility contracting where we manage rehab for skilled nursing facilities. We have just recently this year brought on hospice service. We literally just got certified 30 days ago. The process took about a year. The total cost was a little over half-a-million dollars.

SBJ: Is your fast growth sustainable?
Ray: We have actually purposely slowed our growth in order to bring on our new lines of business without diminishing quality of other services. We probably could have increased our caseload another 20 percent easily. Had we done that, we probably wouldn’t have been able to maintain the quality of service in this area. It’s a very competitive area.

SBJ: Is there such a thing as growing too fast?
Ray: We have quality checks to see if we are following through with what we say and able to maintain the quality of customer service. As we started pushing the envelope with growth, we figured out a ratio of patients ideal to quality, so we started capping our caseload.

We’ve staffed it so that we run 100 patients in home health. As we grow and start to add more staff, then we can allow that to grow a little more. Our biggest concern is if we don’t make it possible for our employees to do good quality work, then there is no point in pursuing our growth. It defeats the purpose. If they get disgruntled because we’re pushing them too hard, that doesn’t help the patient.

SBJ: Have your goals changed as business has taken off?
Ray: We would love to further build our relationship with the hospitals in the area. Because we can manage rehab departments, we can really help some of those facilities if they want a company that can come in and take over and run the rehab department for them. We don’t allow any crossover between the different lines of business. For instance, you manage rehab departments within skilled nursing facilities. Those employees are not allowed to talk about our other lines of business. As a business partner, we have been careful to make sure there is no conflict of interest.

SBJ: Where do you see the company headed in the next five years?
Ray: Our goal in the next 3-5 years is to move that cap number gradually to expand into all the territories and still maintain that high quality. The biggest fear we have is that as we grow, there are a lot of layers between the leaders and their patients; our biggest fear is that we’ll start to water down the quality if we don’t stay connected to our frontline employees and our patients. I would really like to see about 200 home health patients, 50 hospice patients 20-25 facility contracts and a very robust outpatient program.