In this insightful interview on Franchise Marketing Radio, Caring Senior Service CEO Jeff Salter shares how the brand is transforming senior care with cutting-edge AI solutions designed to improve client outcomes and support franchisee success.
Jeff introduces tools like Kerry, an AI caregiving assistant that simplifies communication and care coordination, and Sensi AI, which uses in-home audio to detect emergencies like falls—saving lives and enhancing client safety. He also highlights Enkiscribe, a proprietary tool that analyzes every phone call for training and quality assurance, giving franchisees real-time insights into lead handling and customer service.
Throughout the interview, Jeff emphasizes the importance of integrating AI tools that truly support the business, improve operational efficiency, and empower staff—without replacing the human touch. Whether you’re a prospective franchisee or a franchise leader exploring the future of business ownership, Jeff’s approach offers a powerful model for how innovation and compassion can work hand in hand.
Listen to the full podcast episode at Franchise Marketing Radio.
Podcast Transcript
Rob Gandley:
Hi everybody, and welcome back to Franchise Marketing Radio, where we explore the dynamic world of franchise marketing, technology and business ownership. I’m your host, Rob Gandley, and today we have the pleasure of welcoming back to the show Jeff Salter. He’s the visionary founder and CEO of Caring Senior Service. With over three decades dedicated to enhancing senior care, Jeff has been at the forefront of integrating innovative technologies to ensure seniors can age safely and comfortably in their own homes. Since his last since our last conversation in early 2023, Caring Senior Service has made some remarkable strides, particularly in leveraging AI to revolutionize caregiving. So it’s a pleasure to have you back to the show. It’s definitely something near and dear to my heart to talk about AI and innovation, but also senior care. And how do we add those two together? That’s an interesting conversation. So welcome back to the show, Jeff. It’s good to have you.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk about this. I know that, you know, it’s not something people often put together as technology and seniors. Historically, it’s been something that has been fought against quite a bit. But as combination of things are happening, information technology is making things easier for people. And just the fact that seniors, the today’s seniors are a little bit more ready for technology to be part of that ongoing care continuum.
Rob Gandley:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You got to be have that little, little, little piece of willingness. But I think then you see this helps things. We don’t want to take away the relationship. Right. This is just enhancing it. So it’s actually pretty interesting. So before we dive into that sort of conversation, which I can’t wait to tell the audience a little bit again about the brand, about you, about where you’re headed. Uh, just so they understand where you’re coming from.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah, yeah. So our company is caring Senior Service, and what we do is we provide caregivers to a senior that wants to remain independent and avoid relocation to a nursing home or assisted living. They’ve made that choice. I’d like to stay home. They’re typically dealing with some sort of an ailment. Or maybe they’ve had a recent injury of some sort, and they need to bring someone in to help serve that ensure they’re safe at home. So we provide a caregiver anywhere from 4 hours to 24 hours a day to help ensure that they’re cared for properly. They’re getting good nutrition, their physical needs are met, they’re getting good hygiene, you know, help with baths, restroom assistance where necessary, errand running, everything that you and I would think of and take for granted that we do each and every day or each and every week, we have to go in and help a senior that may not be able to do those things. So our we have today, we have 59 locations across 20 states continue to keep growing as an organization. And one of the biggest challenges in the senior care business right now is how do you find enough caregivers to care for the needy population? A lot of people need care, but there’s not as many caregivers as there once was or people are choosing other careers.
Jeff Salter:
So we’re kind of in a constant battle of finding people. So for me, it’s always been a technology solution. I knew technology would augment the work that we do and figuring out how to make that happen. So as we continue to grow and expand, bringing on more owners, providing them the support that they need, we’re really trying to pay close attention to what technology is out there, and how does that get implemented into the day-to-day operations. And that’s where technology sometimes really doesn’t meet the business needs. It doesn’t integrate within the ongoing business flow and the business processes we have in place. And it’s solving problems that weren’t necessarily problems sometimes for business owners. And that’s a challenge that we really need to get right, because we have to serve so many more people and do that with as little of staff as possible.
Rob Gandley:
Right. It’s a key point that you just made. And the idea, the comment you made about whether or not you actually need it. Right. Like, is it creating the result that is actually needed? You know, and in the end, you have to keep that in mind. Why are we doing this? What is the why behind it? Um, and so let’s talk a little bit about that because I know that you’ve, you’ve definitely released some innovative tools and AI driven, um, resources for your franchisees to better serve your, your, your, clients and customers and things. So let’s just start with, um, and again I want to make sure I get all the names and the technologies right. But I want to start a little bit with your AI driven caregiving assistant. Right. I think there’s a name. Is it Kerry? Is that the name of the assistant? Okay.
Jeff Salter:
We’ve got. Yep. Kerry. Yep.
Rob Gandley:
Yeah. I was going to say real fast. So just help us understand that, because again, it goes back to what we were just talking about. Like, are we implementing something that’s helping everybody be more efficient and keep the relationship intact where we want it to be better? Not like we’re not talking to people or we’re confusing people or any of that. Talk, talk, talk to us about Kerry. And that’s an amazing achievement. So tell me more about that and how it works.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah. As we dive into this, it’s really important to think about any technology. And a lot right now with AI. But what we look at is we look at third party vendors, third party partners that might be providing some AI technology. We also look at in-house what technology we can develop on our on our own. So we we’ve approached both sides of that. One of those examples is Kerry Care. Uh, we were uh, we were approached last. Last. I guess it’s almost 18 months ago now by a man named Nazar that was developing some, um, I assistant, early stages, early development. And that’s something. Right now, things are moving so quickly. You talk about something that happened last year and it’s almost outdated. Thankfully, this technology has been able to keep up with what’s happening. Um, but but it basically at its core, it’s an, it’s an AI assistant that’s really designed for families. And it’s to help families coordinate communication between each other and third parties. So you can imagine that you’ve got a senior who has four, four children. All four children are trying to figure out how am I going to help mom? How do I help one 1st May live far away. 1st May live, you know, 30 minutes away. The other two might be local, if you will. And local can be a long way sometimes. In a lot of cases, especially in the sandwich generation, we got family members that have got other things going on.
They’re raising kids trying to deal with these challenges. So, Kerry is basically an AI system that kind of gets in the middle and coordinates all of the communications between family members initially. So if the son is able to make a doctor’s appointment, take mom to the doctor’s appointment. Um, mom can message Kerry rather than having to do a group chat where she messaged everybody, you know, and the son that lives miles away is in that group chat. He can never actually do anything. He’s always. It might be nice, he knows what’s going on, but it doesn’t really help. So, Kerry steps in and Kerry is intelligent enough to know who is where and what they can help with. So, if I’m in town taking care of mom and I can do driving, but you’re in town, but you can only go by when in the evening times. Kerry is intelligent enough to know that if mom needs a doctor’s appointment, it’s going to contact me and let me know. It doesn’t let you know because you’re not in the loop necessarily. It’s not important. Doesn’t let our other sibling that’s many, many miles away know because they wouldn’t be able to help. So, it’s in one way it’s real simple in that sense. But it gets, it gets and does so much more. And what we looked at is like, well, if it can do that for families, how can we leverage that same kind of concept and technology to augment our team members? So, you can imagine right now, today, it’s it’s a process of scheduling.
You know, any location has 30 caregivers, 40 clients. We’re trying to manage a schedule across all those people. So, Kerry is able to help me as a care manager, manage my pool of caregivers, communicate with them, and also communicate with all the family members involved. So, it’s just a man in the middle that’s able to be intelligent enough and has enough context, knows what’s going on to carry out a conversation with each of those people as if they’re the only ones involved in the loop and it’s really, really innovative and it’s really driving wanted for a business owner. It means my costs are driven down. So now where I normally would have to add additional staff to manage more and more caregivers. Now I can do that with fewer people, and they can do it in a way which they’re not pulling their hair out. It’s not adding stress. It’s not saying I’m not going to add staff because I want you to work harder. It’s saying, I’m going to put technology in place that’s going to help you communicate with caregivers more efficiently and more succinctly, in which the client experiences better, the caregiver experience better, and the staff experience is better. And when you get all three of those, that’s just a winning combination with technology.
Rob Gandley:
Wow. So tell me just real quick to kind of picture it a little, uh, how does the tool work? Is it a, uh, interface you log into like ChatGPT where you chat with it and it coordinates things for you. How does that look and feel? How does it work?
Jeff Salter:
Important thing for Kerry Care was to make sure that it was using an interface that the majority of people were comfortable with. Majority of people are comfortable with SMS, texting and maybe using the WhatsApp texting capability. It’s the same thing as really texting, just a different platform. So ,it’s its primary mode of communication is through text messaging back and forth. Keep them. Keep them short and succinct. But that’s something that everybody can use. So, you don’t have to download an app. You don’t have to log in, create a user account, go through all that process. It’s just simply once it has your phone number, it can start communicating with you as part of the care circle. So that makes it really simple for people to use.
Rob Gandley:
Wow, that is great, I love it, I love it. SMS is definitely the channel and boy we’re feeling it now in the regulatory environment with getting numbers approved, right? It’s hard to do that now, but man, it’s the perfect way to communicate with people because we all open almost 100% of our texts and are very used to using it all day, every day. So, what a brilliant way to approach it. Uh, so I want to keep going here because you have more you have more of these tools, and I don’t I don’t want to I want to kind of try to flow, but I wanted to look into okay. So, there’s another tool though that you’re looking at called sensei AI or working with me. Tell us a little bit of how these now how does that complement further or does it at all? Maybe it’s a separate tool, but tell us a little more how that AI tool is helping enhance care outcomes as well.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah, it’s worth noting because I know that you got a lot of business owners listening to this, this broadcast, and you got a lot of people going into business. It’s worth noting that it is a challenge for companies right now, especially because we do have so many new technologies that are merging, and we’re all trying to use them so it can get you can get a little bit lost on what’s one thing to do versus another one. Everything ends in AI and it’s it’s like, what is that tool specifically do? And we’re in this mode right now where everyone is developing single purpose tools, which I think is an important route to go, and making sure that those tools just work for your business. So also about we’ve been with working with sensei for almost two years now and with Sensi. What’s unique about that? That organization is what we’re able to do is provide augmented care in a client’s home. So what we’re doing is we’re able to go into a home, we install a couple of devices, and these are audio devices. And what these devices do is locally they record sound and they process that sound and what they’re looking for. It’s looking for care related type of situations. So you can imagine if someone were to fall. That makes a very distinct type of sound. It makes a situational, um, environmental situational sound that the AI picks up on and then goes, wait a second, I think I heard a sound that, combined with other things in the home, help it understand that a fall might have just occurred.
Now, typically in a fall situation, you have someone that if they have a medical alert device like a wristwatch or a pendant. They might be able to press it, but one of the downfalls of those devices is that it requires user intervention. User has to take an action. And too often when a fall occurs, someone could get knocked out. They simply are unconscious. They could hurt themselves in a way in which they’re no longer able to use that hand to push the device. But what they typically can do is they can make sounds, and by listening for sounds, that means if they fall and we hear some groaning, maybe, or oh my gosh, I just fell. Those are sounds that the system is able to detect. And then giving us an alert that the fall might have happened. And then we can go into action so we can call the client if they don’t pick up the phone after we’ve detected a fall. Well, now we’re a little bit more concerned. Now we can get in our car. We can drive out there to, to assess the situation in person. Um, but we’re also able to listen to what actually happened through a short audio clip. It only records a short audio clip. And so if in that audio we can tell something serious happened, then we can just call 911 on the client’s behalf and get someone out there that’s ready to help that client immediately. Um, all of this is done, though, through the AI, able to take that audio sound and determine what happened.
And it goes like so much further than that. And the good thing is, it’s not Big Brother. We’re not recording and listening to sound. I don’t have, uh, access to any sound in that house at all. Only the AI has access to it. I only am aware of something that it detected. So, it’s not like a video camera. A lot of people want to put video cameras in the home, and there’s a lot of cool things you can do with video, like we’ve all got security cameras, but the problem with video is then it always has to be monitoring and looking, and then people can tap into that and it feels a little bit invasive into my privacy. So, a lot of seniors really don’t want video technology at all. Audio technology is much different. It’s not as invasive and people are much more receptive to it. What we’re finding right now. So that’s something that’s been a big, big help. And frankly, it’s saving lives. We’ve saved a number of lives just by learning that a fall happened. We had a client that fell, had a head injury, and they were actually bleeding pretty, pretty seriously. We got there. We got we got 911 dialed in and we got them to the house. We were told that had we not intervened, it was highly likely that patient would have passed away. So that’s where just it’s amazing that it can do that kind of stuff.
Rob Gandley:
We had someone on the show not long ago, one of, uh, a couple, uh, your franchisees, and they were telling a story. Same thing. I wasn’t sure if it was the same tool, but I just know it was. It saved a life, and I. So you’re doing this routinely. So, my question is, how innovative is this right now? I’m sure in time this would be very standard. But for companies that do what you do, I’m sure many of them aren’t doing this yet. I mean, I feel like, my goodness, it should absolutely be there, right? You know, if it was my mom or dad. But anyway, what are your thoughts on that? Is this still pretty early or are you still pretty out in front doing these things, or is this starting to catch hold to be kind of standard?
Jeff Salter:
Yeah. You know I’d like to that’s a that’s a challenge for any company, any franchisor, any franchisee, anyone in in any industry is like how do you get at the forefront of technology? Not on quite the bleeding edge necessarily, but how do you how do you get it early enough to where you can be a first mover? Um, a lot of us can’t develop technology ourselves though, caring. We’re doing a lot of development of these technologies. But with sensei, they’re the only ones using audio to do this kind of detection. Everyone else is focused on the video side of things or user input side of things. Motion sensor is also something people are using. There’s some interesting things happening there, but what sensei is very innovative in the fact that their processing of that data, All the data points that come in, they’re able to really do some amazing things with alerting us to what might be happening with that client so we can intervene. But it’s a third-party technology that all companies can work with. But the key thing is as an investment, there’s a cost involved in these technologies.
It’s an additional cost that you have to figure out how to earn money on. And that’s where most of this technology today is having is having resistance is people aren’t sure. It’s really cool. It does amazing stuff. But how does it return an investment in such a way that it makes sense for me to do? For us, it was really easy. If I avoid a client passing, I keep them on service and that’s important. So for me and it’s saving lives, so it makes it a no brainer. Why would I not use this type of technology? But it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re the only ones that have it. There are other companies that are using it, trying to use it. I just think it’s like anything, we all have the same access to everything. It’s how you implement the tool to make it more to your advantage than somebody else. And that’s the same with anything we’ve got today. And that’s the same with AI. How do you use it in your workflows and your business processes that give you a competitive advantage?
Rob Gandley:
Exactly. Yeah. You have to look at both. I mean, you have to do the business side, especially in a business model where you are helping others in such a profound way. But you still have to look at the dollars and cents, right. The basic blocking and tackling. Is it paying off? Can I sustain it? Can I afford it? How would I monetize it? That sort of thing. But that’s all for the betterment of making your clients experience better, right? And in your world, you’re helping people in a very direct way, which is a good feeling. But you’re right. You got to think about it. It’s like, yeah, we’re help a lot of people, but we’ll lose a lot of money and maybe that can’t work right away. You know, you do what you can, right? So let’s keep going because I think you have you have some other tools. But I also want to just ask the first tool we talked about Kerry. Uh, now, if that fall occurred and was detected with Sensi would carry come into for helping with some streamline of communication, deploying people, notifying people. Is that sort of or would that not necessarily be helpful? Or is that now a helpful way now to further the communication after something like that, or do they work together in other words? Yeah.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. If you think about the process and that’s what that’s what you really I think um, and again, I encourage people, business owners to think about the process and what has to happen for everything that you do, and then think about where, where these eyes can augment things or where this technology can augment. So you can imagine I’ve just gotten an alert that a client has potentially had a fall. I’m in scramble mode to figure out what I need to do next, and in that process, I probably want to let some people know I might need to let some other team members know what’s going on. I might need to let the family know what’s going on. Imagine if I’m doing that process right now without any advanced technology, because, you know, my phone is a technology, but if I would have to stop what I was doing, I’d have to get the client’s phone number, get her family’s phone number, and then I’d have to call that family member. And then I have to relate the situation to them. I’ve got to start taking time, right? It’s going to take time to do that. I then got a call, and am I the one going to go out there or am I a team member? Go out there and if I’m going out there, what about the other things that I had to do? I know there’s an emergency situation. I can drop everything, but do I do I drop all the work that was done that puts me behind now.
And what if this was turns out to be a false alert? I might still need to go out there to verify if it’s a false alert. And that again, means that the work that I was supposed to do falls behind. Well, what Kerry does is I’m able to text Kerry and say, “Kerry, I just found out with from a client” — and I could tell Kerry what client it is — “Mrs. Jones has fallen. Can you let the family know and contact my other care manager to have them come back into the office and Kerry will take care of all the communications.” I don’t have to look up a number. She doesn’t have to look up a number. She calls those people. She can do voice calling pretty soon, but right now it’s text based. But that’s the other feature that’s coming is voice calling. So, it’s actually communicating in real time using some of the tools that are available now. And so I can just go get what, get what I need to do. And I can just tell I can communicate with one person and it will then communicate to all the people that it needs to communicate to. So that’s where it’s kind of they are linked together in that sense. One tool is augmenting something that’s part of that business process.
Rob Gandley:
Yeah, I love it, I love it, I love this because eventually it’s a bunch of AI agents throughout your business, augmenting many things, becoming you become something different while you’re still the same brand, but you’re capable of doing more. And that’s the beauty.
Jeff Salter:
Because I need to be there to be able to assess the situation. I need to be there to maybe help that client get off the ground. If it’s not a serious fall, I need to be there to assure them that they’re okay. That’s where I can’t handle that. You know you need a human. But if now all my other tasks that would have burdened me or stressed me out can be offloaded to augmented technologies, then that’s a boon for everybody.
Rob Gandley:
I’m just laughing because I think of myself throughout my life and just most of the stresses in life had to do with like communication, trying to get through all the tech, like I started in the 90s when tech started to emerge as a as a useful tool and a way to live. And no matter which way you sliced it, it was challenging over the years, but now I feels like I can go back to just talking. I can just delegate. I could just communicate and things will get ripple and get done. And it’s not so much button clicking and figuring out right of tools. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, very cool stuff. So, let’s keep going on this AI tool because you’ve been busy with innovation. So, I think I have one more question here. Um, and I want you to kind of fill in any gaps I missed. But there’s another tool called Enkiscribe. Is that correct? And I believe this if I said it right. But it’s another tool I think that kind of analyzes calls. So tell me a little bit of what that’s doing and how that’s fitting into this ecosystem here that you’ve built.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah. Enkiscribe is designed to help business small business owners. What we it’s important I describe the problem to describe what the technology does. So what we have is a small business is we have people that answer the phone. I hire 3 to 4 staff members in each location. A franchisee might have 3 to 4 people in their location. And the nature of the way that our businesses work, they’re small businesses. So the phone rings. Whoever’s in the office, whoever’s on call, picks the phone up and answers the phone call. They just that’s the way it works. All hands on deck. It’s a small business. We’re scrappy. Got to make things happen. We don’t have receptionists. We don’t have a call center. We don’t have a team of people waiting for that new client call to happen. What we found was that oftentimes people in that mode pick the phone up and they don’t properly handle a new client call as well as we’d like them to. And to get people better. We do tons of training. We teach everyone how to properly handle a new client call, how to walk them through a problem statement, understand what their situation is, make sure that they, um, uh, detail how we can help their situation. Give them pricing everything that that that you would typically want to see in a perfect customer service call, especially for a new client. But inevitably, the end staff member doesn’t do as good as we would hope they would do with the training that we put into them.
And that’s okay, because they’re busy. They’re dealing with a scheduling issue in our business. And the phone rings and they’re frustrated with scheduling, and they pick the phone up hastily and say, yeah, thanks for calling my business. What can I do for you? And that person starts going, and then they don’t properly stop what they’re doing and engage in that call. And to find out first who’s not doing it well is a massive process. Like you could record phone calls. Well, if you record phone calls now, you got to listen to every phone call to find the ones that you want to. Then grade, if you will. And grading a phone call is a miserable experience. You got to listen to it all the way through, rewind it, listen to it again, rewind it, listen to it again. And then you got a grade A paper, and then you got to have a meeting with that person and you got to say, hey, uh, Joe, uh, I just got to listen. I just listened to one of your calls, and I got to tell you, we’re not too happy with what happened here. Here’s the areas I need to see improvement on. Then you got to train that person. Let me tell you what you should have done on the call. And now you got to start all over, because now you got to wait for the next call.
In our business, we get 3 to 10 calls a week about new service. So it’s not a lot of at bats. You don’t get a lot of opportunities even to improve. So it’s a high risk, high reward type of business process that we said there’s got to be a better way to do this. We’ve got to be a way we can coach people up, that we can help them identify where their where their blind spots are. And we developed this technology called Enkiscribe, in which we record every single call that comes into the business. We transcribe every single call. That’s common technology. Every phone system probably has something like that. But what we specialize in is we take that call and really look for some very specific things, what type of caller it was. We look for what the general issue was that they were calling about, and we provide a summary. Now, again, that’s not super special in its own right, except for the way that we display the information is really intuitive, easy to follow. But where things get really magical is what we provide. If it’s a new client call, we identify that as a new potential client. And then we have a little a little feature in which you can grade yourself. And when you click that grade yourself button, what you get is an email that says, here’s how you did on that call. Here’s where you here’s what you were supposed to do. Here’s the ten things our business.
It’s customized for every business type. Here’s what we were supposed to do. And here’s how you did on each one of those segments. Along with that, not just a grade, but keys to improve. So we’re training on every single call they get. They see where they could have asked some different questions. They could have dived a little deeper. They could have explained our services a little better. But at the end, no manager had to spend time doing any work. The AI is augmenting the process by giving that person the immediate feedback. And this happens in under a minute after the hang the phone call up. They get that the ability to run that report and know exactly how they did on top of that. Advantage of the business owner is right now, I’ll tell you, is every person on this call that’s a business owner today in the service business, they only know about inquiry calls or new service calls to their business. Probably about 50% of the time. Our data shows that only about 50% of all calls actually get recorded, because what’s happening is people are self-determining if this is a hot lead or a cold lead. And unfortunately, they’re not equipped with how to turn a cold lead into a hot lead. So they don’t even record in whatever system businesses are using. That call would never even got recorded. So basically it never happened. And it’s a huge, huge miss.
Rob Gandley:
Right. Yeah. And I, I know what you mean by that. So like some conversations are sort of turn the corner like they’re, they’re saying things that you could maybe ask a follow up question and bring them back to, you know. Hey, wait a minute. They might need your help. You shouldn’t dismiss that too quick. Gotcha. No. It’s a very powerful tool. And you’re right. It kind of overcomes all the barriers, the difficulty of with the time investment. But also, I think people would learn much more openly. They wouldn’t be so feel so judged by it or critiqued right by their by their supervisor. Just real quick, I can tweak it and I get better at it. You feel.
Jeff Salter:
Better. It’s huge. It’s huge. Yeah. And I like to tell people when I’m talking about scribe that it’s a technology we developed for in-house, but then we turned it into its own company. And today I am the only CEO of any decently sized home care franchise that can tell you every single day how many actual calls for service happened across the entire organization. No one else has that kind of insight that I’ve got, because 100% of our locations are using this technology, and I know I’m not. I’m not Big brother. I’m not reading about every one of them. But I can tell you exactly how many potential service calls we had every single day. Nobody else knows that anybody else would have to guess only on stuff that got recorded. So how do you know if your marketing campaigns are working? Well, I can tell you how many actual calls we got for service based upon our marketing campaigns, in a way that no one else can do.
Rob Gandley:
I think I’m interested. We might have to talk. Yeah, that is a that is a thing that is. Well, it’s just always kind of been there as a acceptable reality. Like, you know, you record calls, but you got to listen to them and you’re not going to know much unless you listen to them. And that’s a lot of work and no one listens to them like you, you’d have to hire someone to do that and then do the work of segmenting everything and say, well, that was a call. That wasn’t that, man.
Jeff Salter:
It’s almost it all for you.
Rob Gandley:
Yeah, right. But now you got you take it. I, you put it into a use case, something that’s game changing. And you’re right that for home services, brands of all kinds, uh, that get those inbound calls. You don’t, you know, you just don’t know what they’re about. They could be about a lot of things. Be able to identify that quickly and adjust and improve. Woo! All right. We’ll talk more. But that’s really powerful. So that was something that you guys you built internally 100%. Or you use a third-party tool and then customized it. Or how did that what was that.
Jeff Salter:
On this one is I developed it 100% on my own on nights and weekends. I decided this was a problem I was going to solve. I wanted to learn a lot about AI during the process, and so I just dove in deep. I taught myself programing at a level I hadn’t, I didn’t know, um, I learned everything I could about AI, technology, how it works, how prompting works, how processes work, back end. I had to learn a lot to do it, but in the end it was like it was it was well worth it. You know, we’ve started up a whole new company helping other companies achieve the same thing. And I’m at the point in my career to where I kind of I want to give back. I want my brand to grow. Caring is going to continue to grow. We want to see more franchise owners come on board. We want to serve more seniors across America. But I also know that I need everyone to be as good as they can. And if I can help develop some technology that can be used by others in that process, then I want to make sure that’s something that I can give back to people.
Rob Gandley:
That’s beautiful, I love it. And from what you described, I think you landed on something very important. So cool. Uh, so let’s talk a little bit about, uh, you know, so we kind of went through the, the I before I leave, I, um, I wanted to kind of ask you. So you’ve done these things, you’ve the custom, uh, and then working with some third parties and, and then and then getting it to a place where you can implement it, and then you’ve got to get the franchisees on board to understand and implement properly. So you’ve done this probably for give or take. Let’s say it’s two years I’ve talked to you. It’s been a little over two years since we talked. So you’ve been at it and so tell me, looking back now, was there anything you didn’t anticipate any challenges in getting things done or rolling them out. Yes, these things work. Amazing. They do amazing things. But what were some of the hidden challenges you. Found trying to roll this out as a franchise leader?
Jeff Salter:
Well, I think that it’s still people, right? And the end of the day, I mean, I can create information all day long for people that are to consume, but still the people have to be able to, to use it, and it has to be really easy for them to use. And as much as I think it might be easy on my side, we have to learn, okay, that wasn’t the outcome we expected. So we need to we need to modify things. But what’s been I say that caring senior service is a little bit more set up than other organizations, because I myself am a change freak, if you will. I don’t mind change one bit. I know that things are going to change. I know my business needs to change. We have no sacred cows, so everything is up for change as far as we’re concerned. And I’ve tried to lead with that, which can be tough for other people around me because they’re like, wait, I just learned the last process and now we have a new process. I’m like, yeah, unfortunately, you know, things are moving fast, and with AI it’s even moving faster. So we’ve set our company up, though, to be prepared for change.
So we’ve trained our people say, hey, this is the way we do things now, but it may change tomorrow and be ready for that. So the change mindset I think is ingrained, but not everyone’s always on board with the change mindset. So it’s still something that is tough for some folks, especially our newest team members that come on board. They’re used to working with a company that things were always done like this. Nothing ever changed. And to be for us, they’re like, wait, wait a second. I just went through training last week and you taught me to do it like this. And now there’s this new thing we’re doing and it’s going to be completely different. Like, yeah, that’s the pace it works at here. We want to stay ahead of the game. We try to be mindful of, you know, too much change can be too disruptive and no one can keep up with that. So we try and balance that out. I would rather error on the disruptive side than I would on the static and stay the same side though. So that’s what I try and keep that into our culture.
Rob Gandley:
Yeah. And that’s very important. It’s the way you frame that into your culture, because I think it’s just reality of what we’re living with right now. I think the, um, you know, and you probably know this too, uh, this the speed of change is, is not only faster but will continue to accelerate. So if that can even make sense, I don’t I mean, whether everything makes it to us, like right now, I believe the capabilities are way past what we see, like in the labs and things at these big providers that are building out the technology. But it’s still we all, as business owners, have to have a plan for rapid change and innovation. That has to be a process. And you just have to expect it and not be too intimidated by it. And sometimes in those evolutionary steps, you’re not looking for perfection. But I think the point is what you can get in that is so transformative that you can’t not do it right. So you almost have to. The old way might have been to go a little slower. Don’t constantly disrupt and be careful. The new way has to be what you’re saying.
I mean, if it’s not, if you’re not seeing it now, you will see it this year. By the end of this year into next year, the speed again will leap up and you’ll start to feel it. Then you’re starting to say, wait, this guy, you know, hearing this podcast, they’re probably thinking, oh my goodness, we haven’t even thought about these things, right? And then that’ll be more like in a year. Like everybody you’ll feel that way. So anyway yeah good good advice on that. Um, wanted to circle back then something sort of that encompasses you and your brand. And, uh, it’s a lot about awareness, right? About about around senior care and and the way people communicate about it. And, uh, it is still something that a lot of people keep to themselves. And so you’ve done a lot to create awareness. And I think you have something called the Close the Gap senior care movement. And I just wanted to kind of circle back to that and get some updates from you and kind of see where that’s at and what that’s about.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah. I think we maybe talked about it last time. Um, you know, in 2021, I went on this journey, uh, visited every single one of our locations, rode a bicycle across the country for months on the road 9500 miles. And it was to launch our movement to close the gap in senior care. So our goal was to raise awareness to the needs of seniors in local communities, um, to help bring other people involved in senior care, either becoming business owners in senior care, um, becoming actual care deliverers, you know, uh, home health aides, nurses, doctors, anyone involved. I really want to see more people get involved. But focusing attention on the senior population and then on technology, I wanted to really try to inspire people that technology can really be a powerful mover in the senior care space. If we have enough people thinking about the problems and coming up with innovative solutions. So the bike ride let us raise some money and some funds. We started a nonprofit to close the gap in senior care, and right now our main initiative still is installing grab bars for seniors. So we’re doing free installations for seniors that are that have needs in the communities we serve today. And we’re putting two grab bars in their bathroom area because that’s the number one place seniors fall and have an injury. And it’s the leading cause of injury related death among seniors is a fall in bathroom is like 80% of all falls happen in the bathroom. So we’re just trying to really focus on that one.
We’ve had to cobble together partners across the country for doing the installation work. So we’re right now we’re working on the creating the premier place that people can go that need a grab bar installed, which it seems like pretty basic, right? You think a grab bar in a bathroom? How hard can that be? It seems like a pretty good, easy handyman job. Well, turns out to get it done right. It’s really, really hard. Uh, for one, finding someone that will actually show up to your house to do it, finding someone to do it with at an affordable price, and finding someone that will do it in the right way is is actually more difficult than I would have thought it was myself. Uh, and so we’re working to build a list and to put together a network that covers the entire nation so that any senior that needs to get a grab bar installed and they want to pay for it, they can find, um, on our website, they’ll be able to go to our website hopefully by the end of this year and find a provider that that says, I’ll, I’ll prioritize the grab bar installation if you end up using their service. So that’s part of what we’re trying to do that through the through the close the gap in senior care nonprofit and really elevate that that responsibility to those to those, uh, you know, people that are that are doing home modifications and work for seniors.
Rob Gandley:
Yeah. And there’s, there’s quite a few franchise brands that probably fit that description. Right. Yeah.
Jeff Salter:
We’re working with a number of them right now. Yep. Yeah. That’s the problem is, is it’s a patchwork right now. There’s no one covers everywhere. So we’re having to and this has been unique because I’m a franchise or I’m speaking to other franchisors in a in a semi related business. But their home modification franchise and they don’t always they’re competitive with some of the other people. I’m trying to get them to come together for a common cause and say, look guys, I, I don’t I know you’re competitive, but let’s try to solve this problem as a group because it only helps us all. Every franchisee wants to serve their community, no matter what the business is that they do. Close gap and senior care is a good way for them to serve their local community, no matter what brand they are.
Rob Gandley:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That’s beautiful. Well, I hope that that continues to evolve and be very, very easy for folks in the future to take advantage of. And that’s a it’s a great it’s a great it’s a great gift to offer the community. And I think everybody involved should look at it that way. And I think if you give more, you’ll get more. Don’t worry. It’ll work out.
Jeff Salter:
So it should be that way for all of us.
Rob Gandley:
It should be that way. Right? Anyway. Okay. So I love your technology brain. So I wanted to kind of just say, you know, before we wrap things up, I wanted to ask you, looking ahead a little bit. So I know you’re probably got a lot going on here and it’s working well. And I know that takes your focus, but I know the other part of you is like, okay, what’s coming, what’s coming, what’s coming and what can I do? What can I do? Is there some things you would want to share with where you see some things evolving for senior care technologically, that you really hope that you can do more with here in the coming year or two?
Jeff Salter:
You know, right now, I think a lot of my focus is more on how do we make the delivery of senior care from the people that own and operate senior related businesses. How do we make their job easier? How do we make them more effective? For me, it’s like, um, I’m just coming off of a long weekend of actually doing a ton of new, innovative programing. I’ll tell you about a product, but it’s related to where I’m going. And, and that’s we’re going to see this rise of agents continue to, to accelerate. I think, um, where that ends up, I’m not entirely sure because it does start to seem a little fragmented because there’s an agents or there there’s new technology that’s allowing what’s called a single agent to use multiple agents, and the ability to get those agents to be smart and do what you want them to do is becoming simpler, actually. Um, so you’re going to see this kind of rise happening. Like this weekend. I spent my time building out one of our business processes to get new business is we go out to we go out to marketing, we do referral based marketing. Maybe I’m going to go to a home health company and let them know about my service, and want them to send any clients that need senior care in my direction. Well, that business process is fraught with all kinds of management problems. How do I manage a salesperson? And if you can make it easier for the salesperson, then that’s a win.
But if you need to make it easier on the manager, then that’s a win. So we’re working right now. I spent the weekend working on agents that help that salesperson get really good. When they’re about to go in to visit somebody about what they should talk about. Things like summarizing all my past visits, being able to pull in my marketing playbook, be able to pull in any information that that the that I was trained on. You know, we’ve all seen the perfect sales rep, right? The guy that knows everything, you say something, he can quickly rattle off the exactly how the product solves that problem or does this well. You know, those people are rare and far between. And so what we’re trying to do is how can I augment anyone to have as much knowledge when they’re about to go in to that, that sales call as possible? And we’ve got some really cool stuff I just developed over the weekend. It’s not yet a product for us internally yet, but it’s real close and but it’s just an example of an agent that’s helping that one job with kind of a it’s with multiple tasks of that job. You know, if I got to send an email, I want to make sure that email is not just a just from my memory, but it can also incorporate other aspects of that relationship building that I’ve done.
And if I’ve got 500 relationships in San Antonio that I’m working on, how do I remember everything? I can’t remember what I did last week personally, so I need something to augment that. And this kind of technology helps write an email to a referral source that pulling the data from our database, because that’s where everything’s kind of keyed on. How do I use my data effectively, not analyze the data? I’m not I think that’s important, but I’m not focused on analyzing data because that’s what I think a lot of people talk about. But I’m like, how do I use that data in something that makes me look better, sound better, be better? You know, and so that’s the kind of things I’m working on. So this is stuff that I was doing over the weekend was exciting because I got to play with these agents and really give them some superpowers. And, and early stage is like, wow, this is where things are going. And I think you’re going to see a lot more of that for, for businesses. But it’s right now a highly specific to an individual business. It’s tough to do at scale across multiple businesses, even though there’s some great products out there in the franchising world, there’s some fantastic businesses doing similar stuff, but it’s still kind of pricey right now for people to do.
Rob Gandley:
Yeah, that’s what I’m finding. I think it’s yeah, it’s a little bit everywhere right now. It’s definitely the wild west of the of the phase we’re in. Um, and I don’t know when we’ll settle, but it’s going to be an interesting journey the next couple, two, three years. But you’re right about the idea of agents and teams and, well, this is the transformation that that is being talked about at a at 100,000 foot view of. Yeah. Well, if everything gets replaced someday, whatever that might be. Like what we used to do, uh, it is in the form of these agents that slowly take over. But again, we always say is it’s here to augment what we do, to give us the ability to do it better, to give us more time back, to reinvest it in different ways. That’s good for our friends, family, customers, everything that’s I. But it’s all sort of the tip of the spear of these agents that are going to slowly make this transition for us, uh, so we can hopefully spend more time with each other in relationship.
Jeff Salter:
Absolutely. Yeah. I was I was just, um, playing with something, uh, this last week also that was like, you know, I want to do some research. And not only did it do all the research for me, but it spun up its own website that that delivered to me in a way, like, like, wait a minute. It just gave me a full website with all the research. It just did and all the research was correct, and now I can easily navigate through it all as if I had gone to a website that was custom built just for my research. That was just amazing stuff. I mean, like, wow, that’s nuts.
Rob Gandley:
I know, and it’s, uh, you and I are in the same path here. We’re amazing. Amazing ourselves wondering, okay, when is this going to be in the mainstream? But it’s like, you see it, you’re like, oh my goodness. Once everybody else starts to see the same thing, then it starts to transform. But you’re right. I think of that all the time. I have those moments where I’m like, oh my goodness, I could do. But there’s not enough time in the day to kind of contain all these ideas right now because of because it’s so new. But it is amazing what I is accomplishing and moving very quickly. As they said early on, this is the dumbest it will ever be. I remember in 2022 talking about that or 2023 or yeah, early on like after ChatGPT got released. But it is it is true to form. It has gotten far better in the short time and again that speed will pick up. So looking forward to what that will mean. But love the way you’re thinking about it, because it has to be about our business, our vision, our customer. What is it? How can we help them right now? And then it will evolve.
But so so before we close the conversation. It’s been great having you here. Amazing insights. I think anyone should listen to this more than once if you’re wondering about AI and how to implement it. Um, but any final tips or advice for anyone that might be navigating? I guess from a couple perspectives. One is if they’re searching for a business opportunity or franchise opportunity at this point, how does AI play into that? Like, that’s probably an important consideration to think about. Well, how is this brand handling that? What’s their vision? And then and then so how what would be a tip for someone looking for a business to kind of look for. And then if you are a leader in a franchise brand, anything you want to leave for them and how you’ve been navigating through this, which really this past conversation has been a clinic on that. But maybe this leaves someone with, uh, if they just didn’t get started yet, they. Where do they start? Uh, but anyway, what would you like to leave with the audience?
Jeff Salter:
Yeah, I think the, the end of the day, when you’re evaluating different businesses that you’re considering is not just don’t just listen to the hype of what they say technology is doing or going to do, but really investigate how are they actually implementing that technology? What’s the end result of those implementations? Are they just doing beta testing or is it baked into the way that they operate right now? That’ll give you some insight into how innovative they really are. And I think it’s very important right now. Any brand you’re looking at that they are being innovative. And if they’re not, how are they going to keep up with this this rapid pace of things that are happening. And it’s not going to be always forward facing. It’s going to be back of house stuff oftentimes. And that’s what you got to dig into deeper, because that’s not always on the surface. So you got to really understand what is happening. And as I, as I talk about like how from a leadership standpoint, you know, and an ownership standpoint is how are you building that culture in your own teams to make sure that they are prepared to not just be adopting the newest technologies, but we need we need as business owners, we need our own people to be those foragers.
And they’re out there looking for the new technologies and thinking, how can I make this better? But we have to support them and ensure them that as they I’m finding that people are eliminating the job I hired them to do today. They’re eliminating the work that they were hired for, and I’ve got to make sure they all feel safe in that process. I’m you’re not going to work yourself out of a job here. You’re going to be potentially repurposed, if you will, or you’re going to we’re going to find some other work you can do that’s more valuable to the organization. But by all means, I don’t want anyone doing a mundane job that is able to be done by some augmentation through some artificial intelligence, or just streamlining the process. You know, so many different things that can be done. So, you know, encourage your team to be very innovative, look for new, new things that can change the way they work. But then be sure you’re supportive of them to let them know that anything that they eliminate in their job, you’re not going to start talking about their job getting eliminated.
Rob Gandley:
Yeah, that is a very, very interesting and a perfect perspective of every leader needs to hear like you’re right where leaders need to be. Because this is a big question that will come about in the coming years, because opportunities will be right in front of us where we can make these adjustments. It should never be that we’re just replacing people because this should be serving humanity. It’s about making humanity better. It’s about all of a sudden we have cars to use instead of horse and buggy. How will that change our business? But we have a thousand of those instead of just one thing. We gotta, you know. But it needs to make everybody better. Not. Not make them afraid of. Hey, I’m going to work hard and then get rid of me, you know, or whatever that.
Jeff Salter:
Exactly.
Rob Gandley:
But that. But they’re also holding back. I guess that’s the real message is don’t hold back because of this fear that I should just sit and wait. Right. It’s almost like you sit and wait because you don’t you don’t want to give people that impression, but at the same time, you’ve got to take a proactive stance and say it’s not about replacement, it’s about augmentation and evolving the brand. We’re still the same brand. We just want to continue to raise the level of service.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah, anything I do to put people more time with clients, more time with caregivers at the business operational level, more times the clients, more times with caregivers. If I can do more of that, then that’s. That’s only because, look, we all like spending time with people. Um, yeah, a majority of us do. I mean, there’s some people that like the hermits out there in the world, but for most of us, we like to spend around time with people. Let’s let the technology help give us more of that time. And that’s what we stay focused on.
Rob Gandley:
Exactly. And I think that’s a simple way to look at it. I think you got to ask yourself, I mean, we could all work a little less and spend more time on family and other pursuits. But, you know, if 100% of our less time was focused on each other, that’d be okay. In other words, we’re just we’ll have 100% more time to hang out with each other and let I do all the things we struggle with the last 50 years as this world evolved and we had to serve each other through, you know what I mean? We created this world to serve each other.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Gandley:
But it’s beautiful. All right, well, listen, I again, I love your insights. You really made me think today. Um, I love I love your balancing of passion for technology with empathy and serving seniors the right way. And this could be done with any brand. It’s the right thought process, though. You could have applied it to any brand and said, we’re going to keep the integrity. But I think it’s particularly challenging in relationship driven brands like this one. So I think it’s probably a little scary for some of the leaders in the senior care space to say, well, how would we use all this? But all of it just came back to you’re serving your franchisees and they’re serving their clients better and employees better. So beautiful. Absolutely. I appreciate your insights today. It’s great having you on the show, and I absolutely hope to have you back soon.
Jeff Salter:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it, and I look forward to our next conversation to see where things are going to be when that when that time comes.
Rob Gandley:
Absolutely. I’m glad you said that. Well, definitely. We might have to check in pretty regularly, maybe once a quarter or something. I don’t know if two years or three years. It’s definitely too long. We’ll definitely do a little more, but good stuff.
Jeff Salter:
Thanks.
Rob Gandley:
I love what you’re doing. And, uh, and so I just want to thank the guests, uh, or the, um, thank the audience for tuning in. And if you get value, please, uh, go ahead and share, uh, the story and the episode. And before we shut things down, please share the website and any other ways they can get in touch with your brand and any questions they might have. Yeah.
Jeff Salter:
It’s caringseniorservice.com is our website and that’s the easiest way to find out about our company. I can be found on LinkedIn: Jeffrey Salter. I think there’s a number that goes behind that. Forgive me for not remembering my exact handle there. Jeff@ caring.com, if anyone wants to email me, I’m happy to hear from them. That’s beautiful.
Rob Gandley:
Thank you so much. Thanks again and bye for now.