Senior Care Academy
Senior Care Academy is a podcast dedicated to providing valuable information and expert advice on navigating the world of senior care for both senior care providers, and families with aging parents. Hosted by industry professionals, each episode covers a wide range of topics including healthcare options, legal considerations, financial planning, and emotional support for caregivers. If you are a healthcare provider, have aging parents, or are a senior adult, this podcast is for you! Tune in to gain valuable insights and resources to help you make informed decisions and provide the best care for your loved ones.
Senior Care Academy
Balancing Family, Business, and Senior Care with Adam Benton
Ever wondered what it takes to transition from the fast-paced world of Wall Street to the heartfelt mission of senior care? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Adam Benton, founder of Stellar Senior Living, as he shares his remarkable journey, revealing how personal experiences and a deep-seated entrepreneurial spirit led him to create a compassionate and thriving senior living empire. Adam's story is rich with touching anecdotes, including the heartwarming tale of his son with Down Syndrome, portraying how family life has profoundly shaped his approach to enhancing the lives of the elderly.
Curious about the complexities of running a senior living business? Discover Adam's insights on the unique challenges and rewards of investing in assisted living, likening it to managing a multifaceted venture. He elaborates on the importance of aligning a large team with a unified mission and how Stellar Senior Living's vision has evolved to aim at improving the lives of 10,000 people by 2030. Adam also shares valuable strategies for ensuring high-quality care across multiple locations and the significance of fostering a sense of purpose among all team members.
Find out how Adam balances the demands of work, family, and leadership while scaling a rapidly growing business. Learn about the innovative Stellar Living Foundation initiatives, such as Milo's Creamery, which provides meaningful employment for adults with different abilities. Get a glimpse into the future of the assisted living industry and the diverse career opportunities it offers. Whether you're passionate about senior care or exploring new career paths, Adam Benton's experiences and wisdom will leave you inspired and informed.
Welcome to today's episode, where we're joined by a truly inspiring entrepreneur, Adam Benton, the founder of Stellar Senior Living. It was established in 2012 with his family. Stellar Senior Living has flourished under Adam's leadership, expanding to 34 locations in nine states and employing a dedicated team of 2,900 people. Adam's journey in the senior care industry is driven by a deep passion for enhancing the lives of the elderly, a commitment he solidified during his impactful tenure on the Utah Alzheimer's Association Board. There, he advocated for seniors affected by dementia, contributing significantly to raise awareness and supporting vital research. Today, Adam is here to share insights from his remarkable career, the challenges and triumphs of running a large-scale senior care senior living operation, and how he envisions the future of senior living. So let's dive in.
Speaker 2:All right, Caleb, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what is one of your favorite funny stories to tell people? It could be about your childhood Favorite funny stories Industry.
Speaker 2:Oh well, I have. I don't know if it's a favorite funny story. So I've got five kids right, so it's like 10 down to three, and we were expecting four. We were trying to have four kids and we were aiming for a girl. At the end we ended up with twin boys, so sort of overshot the mark and ended with five kids. But my middle child, his name is Milo Bond Benton, and we call him Bond because he's sort of a kid that bonds us all together. We didn't know until he was born, but he was born with Down Syndrome. He's just awesome and he's been just like the real glue that sort of holds us together as a family. A joke I always like to say is you know, hey, our middle child, he has a disability, he's left-handed, so everybody in our family is right-handed, but he's a left-handy, left-hander.
Speaker 2:And honestly that's the probably thing I'm worried most about him is just kind of going through life as a left-hander.
Speaker 1:So yeah, Anyway fun story about our family. So where did you grow up and then? How did that affect who you became? Because I think it's a unique type of person that pursues a career in helping seniors.
Speaker 2:So I was born in Texas, lived there until I was taken away against my will when I was seven and I moved to Southern California, I was in La Cunada, which is a suburb of Los Angeles, and I was there until I was about 15. And then I spent a couple years in Atlanta, georgia, and then I ended high school in Utah. So I spent a couple years in Utah and went to BYU studied finance. I spent two years on like a proselytizing mission for my church in Italy and then spent about four years on Wall Street, two years at business school at Columbia and then I just came back here, started this, and that was 12 years ago. So if you were carefully paying attention, that probably added up to 67. So that's been my history.
Speaker 2:My father, who's actually one of my business partners, has a lot of experience in the space. He was an attorney by trade and then one of his clients was a skilled nursing operator. He was brought on to help as in-house counsel for that and then that launched his career into senior living. So I had a lot of exposure from an early age on the corporate level of seeing how senior living was owned and operated and how it operates and works. I was not growing up thinking I'd be in a family business, so that was new. I've always had an entrepreneurial streak and after business school we started talking about maybe starting this business together. And that's really where I started thinking hard about senior living and what we could do there. And quite frankly, I just coming from Wall Street and a finance background- I really didn't have a lot of exposure.
Speaker 1:How do you go from trading stocks not dealing with people, especially seniors, to jumping in and venturing into senior living?
Speaker 2:One of the quotes that we always say at Stellar is no margin, no mission Something that we have heard for a while. We did not come up with that. The main concept is you really need to have your financial house in order to be able to operate and take care of people. No mission and something that we have heard for a while. We did not come up with. That Main concept is you really need to have your financial house in order to be able to operate and take care of people. And so I came at it from that angle, and what I under appreciated when I first started was how impactful and purposeful this industry can be, and that's become apparent to me over and over, as I've just heard so many wonderful stories and been part of so many of them of how we can truly impact and privilege the people that we serve, and that's residents as well as employees. I'm amazed at about how many people it takes to make this business go. This is a human centered yes.
Speaker 1:If you think of all the 30 million or whatever businesses in the US, how many rarely get to above 50 employees. And then in assisted living you have to get hundreds or thousands to take care of your hundreds or thousands of residents. It's really unique to how many employees' lives are impacting.
Speaker 2:The true trick of the business you think about if you're the executive director at a community, right, so you're the executive director of a community that's got 130 units, for example, if you're full, you've got at least 130 residents and you got second occupants, so you're probably another 10% above that 140, 150 people. Those people have families, right, and so each one of those families sort of four to five people on top of that. So now you're talking another 500, 600 or so. And then you think about the employees, where you'll probably have about a hundred employees to operate a building like that. And then you think about the employees families and they're probably helping their kids and their spouses and significant others and all of a sudden you've got about a thousand people that, as an executive director, that are really looking to you for guidance and support and leadership and answers and everything related to being basically the mayor of a small town.
Speaker 2:And so it takes like a very unique person that can do that consistently, and it's one of the tricks of the business.
Speaker 1:Would you say that the executive director is one of the most key hires for an assisted living? Like, if they can nail the executive director is one of the most key hires for an assisted living? Like, if they can nail the executive director, then that executive director can be the mayor, like you said. And if you have a weak mayor kind of thing, or is there a different role that you would say is above that On the community level, obviously?
Speaker 2:No, on every level. It is the key role. The key role what we do at the corporate office, in terms of what we call here at our office. We call it the resource center because we are a resource to that community and that leader, and nothing can change an operation quicker than having the right leader in place. It's incredible at what they can accomplish and you would think, like, what can one person do? I just explained that there's a thousand people in this organization, but really it is incredible the power of one person that has the right authority to make the change. It's the key role.
Speaker 1:Is that something that, in the beginning, you approached it that way when you got your first stellar senior living place, or is that something that you've had to learn over the last 12 years? And is there any other ways that your senior living expectations have evolved over the last 12 years? And is there any other ways that your senior living expectations have evolved over the last 12 years?
Speaker 2:It becomes incredibly apparent right off the bat. But I was at a conference recently where I was talking to another operator and they were telling me they're trying to scale their business right, Trying to get to above 100 properties and they probably have 20 today. So they were saying, hey, what we're trying to figure out is how to reduce requirements of that key leader and through systems and processes and I mean it is. I couldn't believe that anyone was even thinking like that. We are so completely opposite of that in terms of how we think it's like there will be no process or system that you can replace that will be better than just that leader, but it's not uncommon, I mean.
Speaker 2:A common analogy that I use is if you just look at hamburger joints, for example, McDonald's versus your clear local, family owned burger joint. Those are both creating hamburgers, right, but they are very different in how they're operated and run and the quality is different. One is a much more valuable organization, but generally the quality is looked at as lower than one is just a lot more valuably locally and the quality is typically higher. And we want to be that. Second, we're not looking to be the McDonald's of senior living. We're looking to be something that is like a family owned and operated high quality meal. That's what we want to be, so we think that that is. Of course, you have to have the systems in place and processes, but it's people. It's people that you bring in.
Speaker 1:That's so cool, kind of going back to the no margin, no mission, if you think about it, the upward spiral of being able to have a margin business. I think there's a lot of people, especially those that work with seniors, where they feel bad charging what they can. But the upward spiral is, if you charge more and you have a margin, you're able to go and find that elite talent and you're able to train the people and so you're able to create more value for them. And it's an upward spiral where it's a better experience and you're able to do more and you have that mission because you have a margin. But a lot of people in the industry they could be charging more and since they're not, they don't have a margin, so they don't have a mission. They get mediocre people, which is I like that a lot.
Speaker 2:Look, let's start by flipping that on its head. So we are often hired when something is not working well, right, so things aren't going well and you have the downward spiral, and what you tend to find is that communities start hey, occupancy drops, so I have to reduce payroll, I have to reduce expenses on food and I have to reduce these other expenses. And then they start saying I'm going to start reducing the maintenance on a unit turn and I'm going to start reducing on activities, and that just reduces the quality on everybody involved and it just sort of like bad care and bad services. We get bad care and bad services and just goes down and down and down, and so you flip down on this ad and you just go upward. Virtuous cycle is what you really want.
Speaker 2:And one of the challenges that you just highlighted is if you ask anybody, particularly if they're out of the industry, if you say, hey, I'm in senior living, you hear a lot of comments. One is oh, there's a lot of money in that and there's a lot of demographics. You're in a great business and what you realize is like one, we are stacking pennies, these are, we are, this is not. Yes, there's a lot of revenue that comes in, but we just talked about these hundred employees that we pay, you know.
Speaker 2:So it all kind of matches up. And the second thing is that when somebody moves in, you take like take assisted living, for example. You take like 15 bills that they might be paying and you reduce it down to one so that one bill starts looking expensive at $5,000, $6,000 a month, when in reality there's a reason why people move in is because there's a value proposition where you're getting more for your money than you'd get on your own. And if you just go in and spend even an hour and sit down and talk to residents that are living at the properties, what you'll find is that this is not a service for the elite or like the ultra wealthy.
Speaker 2:This is a middle of the road product for the average American. It's school teachers, police chief. These are people that have just worked hard and they've saved money and now they're in an assisted living and they see the value to it. So charging properly is incredibly important to be able to spread that savings to everybody and also spread the value to everybody. That's key to the business. If not, you're really doing disservice to your employees and to the residents that you're trying to serve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's very difficult to scale because you're not going to get the employees committed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can't, you won't scale, you're going to be a crappy operation.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting. How would you say your background in finance and on Wall Street has affected the way that you've approached senior living? When you were analyzing your very first deal, how did your finance come into it? Because it is a like said a lot of revenue in, but then you're like, oh, this revenue is going to payroll, so it definitely is a different. I would imagine analytics versus looking at publicly traded companies.
Speaker 2:There are two main conferences in the assisted living world. There is Argentum, which is the operator conference, and then there's NIC, the N-I-C, which is the investor related conference. And if you draw a Venn diagram, there's a very small group of people that attend both of those every year, and that is people like us, the operators, that on one end, have one foot in operations and on the other end, they have to figure out how to finance and create capital stacks to make this all work Right? So you have to be able to talk both languages and that's very interesting. You go to Argentum, the operating conference, and it's a lot of hugs, right, a lot of discussions around how we're really impacting the lives of people. And you go to the NIC conference, and it's just all deal-making and, like everybody might as well have a cigar in their hand, you know, and it's just very different.
Speaker 2:Now they are coming in and in the NIC conference and knowing that they're providing impact, but there's still a ton of math to do this right. Yeah, and that's not easy. I mean, if you think about if you and I were going to go invest in, let's say, a multifamily apartment complex that's one aspect of assisted living. If you and I were going to go and invest in a personal care, private duty business, which is what you own, that's one aspect of the business. And then if you and I were going to go and buy a Chili's restaurant, we could do that, and that's one aspect of the business. So when you buy assisted living, it's like taking all three of those and jamming them together into one business. There's some complexity there and if you don't know basic to intermediate finance like you're not going to go up, you're not going to work.
Speaker 1:So you need to know that to be able to care for people properly. Yeah, like I said, you have the food aspect, the actual care aspect and then the property management aspect pushed into one. How have you been able to ensure the high quality of care that you're able to provide and make sure that everybody's aligned on the mission? 2,900 people, it's very difficult. I feel like to try to have an aligned mission. So how have you been able to ensure high quality of care across all 34 locations? This is great.
Speaker 2:So our vision you want to be able to set a quality of care across all 34 locations. This is great. So you know our vision right. You want to be able to set a 10-year vision right, something that's way out there and then have kind of a three-year target one year and then kind of quarterly stuff right to aim at and for a long time. Our goal is to have 50 properties that we have ownership in by 2030. And we did that because we looked at the top 100 operators and said who do we think we want to look like and do we think their quality is good? And we landed on.
Speaker 2:For us, we landed on the fact that we thought that kind of that 50 to 70 property range was a place where you could get your arms around it. You had enough scale that you could provide those services across the board, but at the same time, you'd still know everybody's name, right? Yeah, that kind of 50 to 70. So we had that mission for a while. Well, if you were the front desk at one of our properties, let's say Lincoln Court in Idaho Falls, yeah, that doesn't really apply to you, right? If you're a care coordinator at a memory care in Phoenix, that doesn't apply to you. So we have this aha moment where we said that's not really our vision. So we switched our vision about almost two years ago. So our vision today is that we want to improve the lives of 10,000 people by 2030. We want to improve the lives of 10,000 people by 2030. That is about 6,000 residents and about 4,000 employees.
Speaker 1:About 6,000 residents and about 4,000 employees. Now, when you boil that down, what does?
Speaker 2:that look like. That looks like about 50 properties, so it's about the same, but we had lost focus there for a little bit. What is our focus?
Speaker 2:It's the people, right, it's the people right at the center and we lost focus of that. So we've put that back at the center. And so now, if you're at the front desk and you want to set a goal for the next quarter, next year, next three years at Lincoln Court in Idaho Falls, and our vision as a company is to improve the lives of 10,000 people, you can personally set a goal to align to our goal and vision as a company. And everybody in our organization is encouraged to do that. And we ask everybody what's your part in 10,000? Is encouraged to do that, and we ask everybody what's your part in 10,000?
Speaker 2:And so that's how to answer your question as to how we've created alignment on scale.
Speaker 1:that's how we've done it, but it's taken a lot of iterations and I'm sure there'll be a lot more iterations as we move forward, but it's something that all the way down they can say I, the front desk person, can say a family member of a resident came in and I helped make their day or I got them a glass of water, something and I was able to improve their lives versus they could have. I like that a lot. It was driven on something that everybody can involve in. I think a lot of times as business owners, it's obviously the financial metric of, like we want 50 to 70 communities and yeah, that goes about two tiers down. You have, like the owners, the C-suite and maybe just under them.
Speaker 2:And everybody else is like.
Speaker 1:I'm only going to work at this one.
Speaker 2:that's down the road, you know, yeah, and quite frankly, that came because I was running new business development and that was frankly my goal.
Speaker 1:That's what.
Speaker 2:I have to walk in and do every day is try to grow the business, but that's not everybody's goal. So, yeah, if you're at the front desk and you can say, okay, how do I want to set for this year? What are my goals this quarter? Great, so, to improve the lives of 10,000 people. I want to make sure that if anyone's within 10 feet, I'm going to stand up and smile and try to greet them, right, right, like you're improving somebody's life by doing that. Or my goal is to to make sure that I try to answer calls in two rings. Right, and why does that improve lives? Because people are looking for answers and I can do that, you know. So we felt like that is just like if you've ever played golf and you swing and every once in a while you just hit something. You just find that perfect ping. It just felt right, right, it just we found the ping and it took us a little while to really slot into that but we feel like we found it.
Speaker 1:You guys posted recently, but for the listeners, what are the core values that drive stellar senior living and why did you choose those ones specifically?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So our core values service, inspiration, integrity and joy. There's four of them. And then at the bottom we say you know, our supreme goal is to do and be the best in all we undertake and to provide a stellar life for our residents, their families and our employees. And that's been from the beginning and how we chose. That is actually on our very first kind of all hands on summit, we brought everybody together into a conference room and we had everybody write on different post-it notes what they thought the value should be, and then we started grouping them together and then we kind of voted some up and down and we just kept boiling it, boiling it, boiling it. We came down to those four and those are. We haven't changed them since.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:For 12 years that's how we came up with that. Kept them solid.
Speaker 1:I feel like most companies don't have that clarity of vision, and that's probably why you guys such clarity on mission. This is a little bit switching gears, but how do you balance 34 communities, 2,900 employees and also have a personal life, especially with your son that is left-handed? How do you balance all of that to be able to still be the husband and father that you want to be?
Speaker 2:That is a good question you could see how in your life that you want to be. That is a good question. You could see how in your life I look at. You know I'm pretty passionate on a few different areas. One is my business is stellar. I'm very passionate about this. I'm also really passionate about my family and then I'm passionate about my faith. So those are things that, with that passion, take time, but it's sometimes.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing is that everybody in this world does different things, but we all have the exact same time in the day, same time. So with Stellar, the biggest thing is that there's no way to be able to scale. You mean you have to have a high level of trust with your team, that people can do various aspects of the job and that you don't have to be checking on the work and micromanaging all the time, and so it's empowering people that with a high level of trust and accountability. So we have some systems in place that we do very consistently to be able to build that trust, and what that is is just consistency and time. If you've ever heard of like, that's one example or definition of trust is just consistency and time.
Speaker 2:So we show up every day, we work on stuff. But that means that I'm going to show up and try my part, and then we're going to have a clarity of vision and then everybody on the team knows what their roles are and that we know that. They know that they can do it, that they've got the job. So once you can do that, you can delegate properly and then scale, which means that I don't have to be making all the decisions. In fact, I think it's a disservice if we start creating bottlenecks like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we're fairly decentralized in that way and once you do that, then you can then create a little bit more time to focus on other areas, which is things that might be important to you personally or with any sort of like spiritual or religious practice that you have, and then your family, and oftentimes, if those things can get totally out of whack. Now I think there is a misnomer where people think that you hear it work-life balance and you think that's in a 24-hour period, and that's actually not the case. Things kind of ebb and flow in seasons, but you want to make sure that you're trying to track in the right spot between those seasons. So there might be times where you're getting a deal done, you're trying to get something started or get that flywheel going, where it will suck a little bit more time at work until you build that team of trust and accountability, and then, once you get that in place, then you can lean more time where you're focusing on your family, or there might be some issues there, or you might have a specific requirement or commitment at church. That's going to take a little bit more time.
Speaker 2:As an example, so I have two other partners it's me, my dad, and my brother-in-law my brother-in-law right now is asked to basically run a mission for our church in Argentina or not, in Argentina, in Seattle. That was three years. He's been there for two years, so his commitment to work is basically zero and that's okay. That's okay. He's got support from me and from my father and he trusts us and we trust him and at some point I'm going to turn those favor back in and, you know, say, hey, remember that time you left for three years. So there are times and seasons for everything, yeah. But I think the real trick is just letting go and trusting other people.
Speaker 1:How long do you feel it took on your 12 year journey to get to the point where you have a leadership team in place where you can kind of let go and make up some of the time that? I know early on all the decisions do kind of flow through you until you get to some sort of critical mass. And then part two is how did you develop that leadership team? Were you super lucky and just hired well, or were you able to develop them, and what are some best practices to developing leadership?
Speaker 2:So, as anybody knows who started, when I started with Stellar, we were in a Regis office building with no revenue and no employees none. So that's step one. So you're showing up every day just trying to figure it out, and the advantage to that is that you get to wear a lot of hats and solve a lot of problems. And we started by taking over four properties where we found them to buy, but we didn't have the cash to buy it. So we hired our public real estate investment trust, bought the properties and then turned them around and leased them back to us.
Speaker 2:So, let's say, the properties made a million dollars a year, our lease payment was a million dollars a year, so we didn't put any money in, but we were also making no money. It just netted out to zero. So then our job was to come in every day and operate the buildings and try to improve the margin by increasing occupancy, increasing rent, managing expenses, create some cash flow to be able to actually get this business to grow. So one thing I'm really proud of is that we started Stellar with no money. We never put a dollar into it.
Speaker 1:Wow Right A lot of times, yeah, so because of that it gave me the opportunity to.
Speaker 2:There's nobody to delegate anything to and you just kind of have to pick and choose what you can focus on. So, as we've grown over a 12 year period, you can imagine there's people who have been with us for the whole time, the whole 12 years. Our chief operating officer started as our bookkeeper, right. So the dude, he's awesome and this did not happen over time. So your first question is like what did you do at the beginning? You just kind of do everything and you sort of deal with it. I also didn't have five kids at the time. I had no kids.
Speaker 1:You start that way.
Speaker 2:But then the second thing is like well, yeah, there's no way you can build a team overnight. No one's ever done it. You look at any professional sports. They're constantly trading and sort of figuring that out. We're the same way.
Speaker 2:We say that we are a family business with family values, but that we put the best team on the field, and what that means is that we want professional players. We are not a little league baseball team, we are a professional team and we're going to act like it. So we want to make sure that we're showing up every day, and that also means that you'll know that if you work at Stellar, you're not going to have crazy uncle Joe sitting next to you, because he's my uncle. You're just not going to have that. We want to make sure that we're doing our best in that front and in turn, that hits our mission, which is improving the lives of 10,000 people, and we're not going to sacrifice that by putting B or C players on the field. Now you cannot go to Walmart and buy that off the shelf. You have to build that on your own. If you walk, like a conference floor and you see all the booths, there's all sorts of systems and different services, but there is no service that just gives you a team. It doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:You have to build it it so it's part of the business I like that a lot and I think it's a good comparison where nobody gets well. Obviously, the fans don't love it, but when a professional athlete gets traded, it's not like, oh, how could you? He was been here for forever. And it's like, no, we want to win games. And for stellar it's like no, we want to win games. And for Stellar it's we want to help and affect the lives of 10,000 people by 2030. It's like we need people that can compete in essence to do that. We're not going to sacrifice just because we've had a player here and they're retiring next season. It's like we need to help.
Speaker 2:All analogies kind of fall apart or metaphors in metaphors.
Speaker 2:It works to a level right but one of the advantages that we have that like a basketball team doesn't have is that they have a limit to basically five people on the court and 10 people type of thing. We have no limit. As we grow, we can continue to build that team, and so we just actually use something called the keeper test. We picked this up from Netflix and here's how it goes.
Speaker 2:It's that we tell people is that if somebody on your team comes to you today and says, hey, I'm thinking about taking another job, if you, as the manager, aren't thinking that you want to fight hard for that person, they're probably shouldn't. They probably shouldn't be on your team to begin with. Like everybody on your team, you should be willing to fight hard to keep, and if it's, it's just a nice gut check to say have I truly built what I think is the best team on the field to ultimately serve our residents? So we call that the keeper test. We teach it over and over again and it's easy, said it's hard to do, but man does. It create a lot of value when you do it properly.
Speaker 1:I like that a lot. A different variation of that is that I've heard is if somebody came in and paid all of your employees to go on a six month vacation, which ones of them would you enthusiastically hire back after those six months? So is it? You're like I could live without.
Speaker 2:Yeah, these are great thought experiments just to help you keep in check, because you can become very complacent in the team as long as you just show up and it's kind of working. And it's like going back to the sports analogy kind of working isn't good, it's not good and we want to be like. We just like in sports. Being a professional means that you are hired and paid to do the role. So at Stellar we have a professional team, a group of people that are hired and paid to basically fulfill different roles and responsibilities as employees. So you know everybody's showing up to be a professional. So that's, you want to treat them like professionals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that a lot. There's so many things already that I'm going to apply to what I'm doing. To what I'm doing Well, you posted recently on LinkedIn. I want to talk a little bit more just about industry in general, but about bureaucratic challenges in the senior living space. Okay, if they try to stop us, they're going to go to hell.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have it right here. Is this what?
Speaker 1:you're talking about, Even on my desk this one. Yeah.
Speaker 2:If anyone tries to stop us, they're going to go to hell. If anyone tries to stop us, they're going to go to hell. If anyone tries to stop us, they're going to go to hell. Okay, there is context to this, so this isn't on everything, but I'll tell you the context here. Yeah, and I didn't even realize I'd said this, and then one of my my team members printed this up and put it at my desk. So we have a foundation at Stellar. It's called the Stellar Living Foundation and as part of it, we've started. Actually, our first property is in Denver, where we built in like an ice cream shop at the front that's open to the public and it's called Milo's Creamery, so that's based after my son right His name is Milo.
Speaker 2:So it's Milo's Creamery, and our goal is to hire, basically, adults with different abilities to run the creamery, and it might be a couple days a week, but we think it's just a win, win, win. It's like the employees win, they get this experience, the residents win because they get to ice cream and they get to these relationships with the employees, and then the community wins. We think it's just awesome.
Speaker 2:And the challenging thing is that we're a regulated industry. We've got a lot of regulations when you operate in assisted living, and so you run into a lot of red tape in trying to hire anybody, let alone somebody with a disability. So at the end of that meeting we were just spending an hour struggling trying to figure out are they 1099 workers, are they W2 employees, do they get employed by the foundation or do they get employed by the actual operating company and what are the issues with that. And I just stepped up and, like you know, we just got way too in the weeds. So I just said, look, let's just try our best, and then if anyone tries to stop us, they're going to go to hell, because we're trying to do good here and we're just running into paperwork issues.
Speaker 2:So that's the context that it was in, but anyway. I forgot.
Speaker 1:I said that it I forgot, I said that it got it got framed up and then here it is on my desk, you know, in a frame.
Speaker 1:So that's the story, yeah, and the good news is, though, like in real context is like if the government tries to stop you, like when you're trying to do something good and you're confronted with opposition, there's a good chance you're able to work through it right like just start doing the good, because if you were like it's so much easier to get caught by red tape before you do anything versus like look at these 15 people with different abilities that we've been able to help and how it's impacted the residents and the community, you're really gonna stop that versus trying to get it all approved up front I'm sure if we run into an issue, somebody's gonna see what we're trying to accomplish and then just say, hey, you didn't quite do this right, you got to get it all approved up front.
Speaker 2:I'm sure if we run into an issue, somebody is going to see what we're trying to accomplish and then just say, hey, you didn't quite do this right, you got to do it this way. Yeah, I hope so, but you know, it's just like anything Everything looks easier from the outside until you start trying to do it, and then you just realize how much stuff you got to do to even just get this first step forward. And and that's where we're at at this. But I think this is generally going to be an awesome deal once we get it up and going.
Speaker 1:I think so too. I think it's really cool and unique because the impact that it's going to have, like I said, on the residents, on the employees, whether they're 1099 or W2, and the community. We have a few more minutes, there's a few more questions kind of industry all around. What are some of those misconceptions about? You covered one, how people think you have to be super affluent to live in an assisted living but you don't have to. Are there any other fallacies about the industry that you've had to overcome to fill your buildings? And then, are there unique ways that you've been able to kind of overcome that?
Speaker 2:to tell the story right, yeah, I think the first fallacy is just that when people think senior living, they think old, kind of dark, maybe smells like urine, Right, that's the. That's a lot of what people think Like, don't send me there, Um. But if you've ever toured an assisted living today, you know that's not the case at all. It's like it's the difference between stepping on a cruise ship from 1995 to stepping on a cruise ship in 2024. It is it's like anybody who walks into an assisted living today where it's newly built is will say I want to live here. So that's one sort of misconception that I think a lot of people have about the industry. The second one is is this it's it's just that there's a wave of baby boomers that are aging, and if you think about the story of baby boomers, it goes like this After World War II, everybody came back and they started having kids 1945, right. So take that one 1945.
Speaker 2:The second data point is that our average age in assisted living is 86. So if you just take I'm going to do the math here If you take 1945 and then you add 86, that gets you to 2031. Okay, so that's that's kind of the front edge of baby boomers when they show up and you'd have this big, big push. Well, we're at 2020. So you're saying that's still sort of six or seven years out. Well, that's actually a fallacy. If you look at birth rates, they actually started picking up before world war two started, in about 1937. So if you just pull up birth rates in the United States and show a graph, it actually for the last decade and like the twenties and thirties, is declining, and then after the great depression is when birth rates actually started picking up, which is at the end of the silent generation, not the baby boomers. So you're going, okay, well, let's just take that.
Speaker 2:So 1937, all right, 37, and then you add 86 years, which is our average age. That's the year, right, that's yeah, last year, Okay. So that year starts and it goes for 20 years straight. So it's a 20-year trend. It's just going to keep going. We're at the very front edge. As you know, people need services at different times, so there's a bell curve around that. But you can, and a lot's happened between 1937 and today in terms of immigration and length of life and when people actually look for services, as well as the utilization rate, but in general, those still concepts still apply, which is that growth is today. The fallacy is 1945. That's not the date.
Speaker 1:It's actually way sooner than that. Everybody's waiting until 2030 or 2031 for the growth to start happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting, and so I guess, what do you think holds for the next 20 years of assisted living? Like technology advancements to growth and then, after that boom and once it starts to kind of fall? I guess, what things do you see on the horizon that you're excited about, apart from the growing market?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a few things. One, the innovation. So we are not the quick early adopters of innovation and oftentimes we look to a few other industries like hospitality to see like what they're doing in the innovation or healthcare, but I will say that I can't think of anything that will completely replace senior living. I think there's a socialization aspect to it that will never really go away, so that congregate living is going to stay that's my prediction, but that you'll see a lot of phenomenal technologies help support that community to be better, and we try to be early adopters of that within reason, and so that's something I'm pretty excited about. Second thing I'm excited about is just on the workforce front. We are now starting to see people exit college considering senior living as a career.
Speaker 1:That was just I had had a kid not a kid, he's in college or just exiting and he was a sales development rep at a software company. And he reached out to me and he's like I really want to get into sales and marketing at senior living. And I was like, totally yeah, I. It kind of took me by surprise and he wanted me to try to connect him to somebody. I think that's the first time that I was actively heard somebody actively looking to try to break into the industry in sales and marketing. A lot of times it happens a little bit more naturally yeah, where it's like a second job to hear about it through a friend or a relative.
Speaker 2:That's new, and I'm excited to see the quality of talent that will join the workforce because the demand is there. So that's something over the next 20 years I'm really excited about, and I think that will just drive interest and innovation that we haven't seen so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, people being excited about it and not being like oh yeah like you said, my uncle or my second cousin's brother's aunt was like yeah, very common now.
Speaker 2:That's the story now and that will be changing. That people will come with degrees related to senior living. That's my guess.
Speaker 1:That's very exciting. That's, like you said, where you get the innovation. What are you excited about for Stellar's future in the next few years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Stellar's future. We're on track with our vision and that's exciting. I feel like we always say that we're like a 12-year-old startup. We still feel like we're learning things and growing and innovating, and that's exciting. And I want to make sure that by the time we hit 2030 and that we're improving lives of 10,000 people at a single time, that we still have that innovative spirit about us and that we're thinking about the most up-to-date way with the resources that we have to take care of seniors. And that's what really drives me today, honestly.
Speaker 1:If somebody's interested, whether it's a senior care provider that's listening to this and they have a referral, or an adult child, or even the senior themselves, who should reach out, kind of who's your ideal resident? And then how do they reach out to Stellar? Do they just go to your website?
Speaker 2:So if you want to reach out to me, just ping me on LinkedIn. That's the easiest way. I don't check my messages every day, but I am on there and so that's easy to find me on LinkedIn. For Stellar, it's StellarLivingcom and we're in the Intermountain West right. So Pacific Northwest Rocky Mountain regions. So Pacific Northwest Rocky Mountain regions. We would love to talk to you about employment opportunities as well as a chance to live with us. We'd love to take that shot.
Speaker 1:The last question is what advice do you have for the up and coming generation of new employment looking to get into assisted living, to make it so that way it's the most successful and exciting career that they can have?
Speaker 2:So one thing is that you don't actually have to be in health care to be in senior living, and I'm a good example of that. I'm on the finance side and, since we are covering basically every aspect of somebody's life, there is something for everybody in senior living. You're interested in food, dietary stuff. There's a thing for you Activities. You're interested in marketing, advertising, sales. Something for you there Maintenance, development, real estate, right, finance. You know you can go into HR, employees and training and everything leadership, anything that you can think of that you could study where you have a real passion for you can apply to senior living. And what's nice about that is you take that knowledge, that knowledge base that you have. Let's say that you went for organizational behavior and you want to get into hr as an example. Well, you can take that knowledge and then apply it to something that's just packed with purpose, which is senior living, and I promise you that you'll have a phenomenal career if you put those two together I love that it was more broad.
Speaker 1:It wasn't like, if you're trying to get into senior living, it's like if you're getting into your career, consider applying that to senior living. It's an awesome mission to help seniors and all of their family and just everybody the 10,000 people that you guys are going for. So I love that. Adam, we are out of time. I appreciate you coming on. I've really enjoyed chatting, and then I have quite a few things that I want to apply to my business my personal care business, so I know that other people will get a lot out of this too. It's been awesome.
Speaker 2:You got it. Thanks, Caleb.
Speaker 1:Thanks for your time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course.