Building "financial fitness" for the long haul: Six tips for

long-term

care and other senior living providers

Today’s senior living providers must ensure that their mission and vision for the future are built on a healthy financial plan and structure. Here are some things you should know to build just that.

America’s senior living industry includes a diverse range of organizations — from skilled and long-term-care providers to assisted living organizations, retirement communities, community health organizations, and more — all operating in an unusually complex, fast-changing environment.

Yet one thing they have in common is the need to plan effectively for the future. Is your organization ready? Whatever your vision for the years ahead, the single most important question your organization needs to answer is “Do we have a realistic financial plan and structures in place to support the vision?”

Related: Download our e-book, Building a Sustainable Vision Through ‘Financial Fitness’ in Today’s Senior Living Industry.

Here are six tips on how you can prepare to step toward the future with confidence:

1. Analyze your balance sheet. Look for key indicators of strengths and weaknesses. What available assets do you have? How leveraged are you? Is there a liquidity problem? It’s important to resolve these issues right now.
2. Analyze your working capital needs. Most organizations find that their current and projected working capital needs are a mix of good and bad news. Understanding these needs now is crucial to your future success.
3. Know your long-term cash flow needs. Knowledge is power. The difference between your cash flow needs today and your cash flow needs tomorrow can be a showstopper.
4. Assess your capital capacity and needs. How much capital do you need today to run basic operations? How much do you need for the goals set forth in the vision — expansion, adding services, etc.? All these factors need to be managed to “help the present reach the future.”
5. Assess how you stack up. Next, benchmark your key current and projected financial results against data for similar senior living organizations. (At BerryDunn, we have access to industry data and use our own proprietary database for this purpose.) If your results don’t look realistic, don’t press the “Go” button just yet.
6. Put it all together — and implement. Integrate the factors discussed above, identify the gaps, and fill them.

After that, it’s full steam ahead! To learn more, download our free white paper on Building a Sustainable Vision Through ‘Financial Fitness’ in Today’s Senior Living Industry or reach out anytime to our seasoned senior living professionals.