A recent and encouraging trend in the home-based scare space has been the use of EMS workers as fill-ins when there are staff shortages.

When these workers are able to fill in these gaps in home health and home care, they report back higher job satisfaction as a result.

So it makes sense, then, that Bob Blevins – the founder of multiple home health agencies and president of a significantly growing provider network – began his professional career as a fireman. While working in that job, he was constantly taking seniors to the hospital.

“There had to be a batter way,” he thought. Blevins found out there was after he started his first home health agency in Kansas City, Kansas, back in the early 2000s.

After he sold that agency, Blevins felt the need to stay in that line of work, however he could. So he bought another home health agency in Tucson, Arizona – more than 1,000 miles away from his home – in order to comply with his non-compete while also continuing to help seniors.

Recruiting and retaining staff was obviously a challenge from the outset in the Arizona location, but over time, things stabilized.

“It was hard for me to get on site to really communicate the vision of what the company is, what propels us and really spend time with the staff members,” Blevins told Home Health Care News. “I believe, as an owner, you have to pour into your staff’s lives. You have to be connected to them, so they feel like they’re a big part of something bigger than just themselves. So that was a huge challenge for me, but I did travel to Arizona a lot and ultimately overcome that. And that made us successful in that market.”

Since then, Blevins has created a budding home health business that is expanding nationwide.

“I bought an agency 1,000 miles away and just began to build it up,” he said. “And from there, I bought another one. And then once my non-compete was up here in Kansas City, I opened up under a whole new name brand and just continued that growth.”

The parent company is Sacred Heart Health, but the brand name is Faith Home Health & Hospice. The company most recently acquired CARE At Home in Iowa; it is also is in the process of closing on deals in Nebraska and Kansas as well.

Overall, Faith Home Health & Hospice has six total locations with both home health and hospice arms. Its home health census is currently at about 1,000, but it hopes to grow that considerably, both organically and acquisitively, in the near term.

“We have a lot of opportunity with the latest two agencies that we’ve acquired to actually drive those censuses up,” Blevins said. “Most of our offices that we’ve had for a year or more have an average daily census of about 200. CARE At Home had about 18 patients when we took it over, and we will work very diligently to get that census up closer to 200 within a year. That’s our goal.”

Though the first agency that came was a product of Arizona, the goal moving forward will be to build out the company’s footprint in the Midwest, Blevins said.

His acquisition strategy is also a little different than other providers’, especially the larger ones. As opposed to exclusively purchasing successful, well-managed agencies, Blevins takes in providers that may have taken a turn for the worse for one reason or another.

“For whatever reason, God typically brings along broken agencies for me,” he said. “I’ve got a really good executive team and transition team that really understands the [ins and outs] of the Medicare system. So we typically find the smaller, broken agency and get busy fixing it. That’s kind of our strategy.”

Because Faith Home Health & Hospice has come across a lot of broken agencies – and because it has a full back-office team housed in Kansas City – the process of finding operational issues has become easier.

In addition to fixing operational inefficiencies, the company also brings along a marketing team to help out with those efforts in the area where they’re making an acquisition.

“We find that it’s just a better fit for us,” Blevins said. “We have purchased one agency that was a well-oiled machine, and have done very well with it. But it just seems that the ones that we capitalize on the most are the ones that are kind of smaller and broken, where we can identify what’s wrong with it and work to fix that issue. And then quickly turn them into profitable agencies. We just seem to get a little better return on our investment that way.”

Growing as a regional provider

CARE at Home Iowa specifically sold its home health assets to Faith Home Health & Hospice. The Austin, Texas-based Agenda Health was the sell-side advisor in the deal, and financial terms of it were not disclosed.

But Iowa made sense for a provider looking to grow across the Midwest. And from CARE At Home’s perspective, it felt comfortable selling to a company like Faith Home Health & Hospice, Alex Veach, the director of operations at Agenda Health, told HHCN.

“I think that it was about a number of factors for [CARE At Home],” Veach said. “I think that we’re in a labor market where it’s getting increasingly hard for sellers to scale. … Obviously, the dollars and cents are extremely important, but the personal fit and the cultural fit – being able to say, ‘Okay, I can see my employees working for this person and succeeding under this person,’ is also huge in any deal.”

As of now, that dynamic is working to Faith Home Health & Hospice’s advantage.

Blevins said that multiple parties have approached him to give outside money to fuel more expedited growth, but that isn’t something he is yet comfortable with.

“I’ve had multiple companies approach me about wanting to give us capital so we can acquire faster, and acquire bigger agencies,” he said. “I’m not at a point where I want to do that. Currently, it’s a family-owned business. I’m the owner of it. My sister is a business partner of mine. And nobody tells us what to do but us. … So, I don’t foresee us taking any capital from anybody else.”