“Unleash Your Agency: Three Keys to Home Care Success in 2025”

As we step into 2025, I’m reminded of a pivotal moment in my entrepreneurial journey that taught me the power of agency. In 2020, I sold my majority stake in Home Care Pulse (now Activated Insights), a leading provider of satisfaction measurement, training, and benchmarking for the home care industry, just before COVID-19 reshaped our world.

While the timing seemed perfect initially, the company’s value skyrocketed 18 months later when it sold to private equity for a significantly higher amount. At first, this reality crushed me, and my “Mustang Mind” took over with irrational, pessimistic thoughts.

However, this experience taught me a profound lesson about agency — our ability to choose how we frame our past, present, and future. Instead of viewing the sale as a missed opportunity, I chose to see it as a steppingstone that led me to new ventures, including pursuing my Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology and developing the Breakaway365 framework that’s helping home care entrepreneurs like you 10x their business and their life.

As home care leaders, your agency — particularly the three key components of self-efficacy, optimism, and imagination — will be crucial to your success in 2025. Let’s explore each component and how it applies to your home care business:

Self-Efficacy: “I believe I can accomplish a specific goal”

Self-efficacy is your belief that you have the skills and abilities to produce a positive outcome. In home care, this means believing you can:

• Build and maintain an exceptional team of caregivers

• Create systems that ensure consistent, high-quality care

• Navigate the evolving healthcare landscape

• Scale your business while maintaining service excellence

Reflection Questions:

• When faced with staffing challenges, do you believe you can find innovative solutions?

• How confident are you in your ability to create positive changes in your organization?

• What specific goals do you believe you can accomplish in 2025?

Optimism: “I believe I can accomplish this goal far into the future”

As entrepreneurs, we must view challenges as temporary rather than permanent, specific rather than pervasive, and external rather than personal. For example, we all experience setbacks in our home care business, such as losing a large paying client. Recently one of the home care agencies I work with lost a very large billing client, attributing nearly 20% of their total revenue. She had 2 care professionals, at the same time, around the clock.

However, rather than looking at the loss of this client as permanent, they have chosen to find gratitude in the opportunity to care for her for so long and have already begun the process of replacing the loss in billable hours. This is what we call in positive psychology, an optimistic explanatory style. Instead of seeing this as a permanent setback, they viewed it as temporary, specific and external. If they hadn’t, their home care business would grow pessimistic in its approach to growth.

Reflection Questions:

• When a caregiver leaves unexpectedly, do you see it as a temporary challenge or a sign of deeper issues?

• How do you frame regulatory changes — as opportunities for improvement or insurmountable obstacles?

• What narrative are you telling yourself about your ability to succeed long-term in-home care?

Imagination: “I believe I can accomplish many goals”

Imagination allows us to envision possibilities beyond our current reality. In home care, this means:

• Envisioning new ways to deliver exceptional care

• Creating innovative training programs

• Developing unique solutions to industry challenges

• Building a culture that attracts and retains top talent

Reflection Questions:

• What possibilities do you see for your agency that others might miss?

• How could technology transform your care delivery in the next five years?

• What would your agency look like if you had unlimited resources?

The Path Forward

Remember, agency isn’t just about the choices we make today — it’s about how we frame our past experiences and envision our future. As I learned through my own experience selling my company, the story we tell ourselves shapes our reality and influences our potential.

In 2025, your agency will be crucial in:

• Building resilient teams that can adapt to industry changes

• Creating innovative solutions to the caregiver shortage

• Developing new approaches to quality care delivery

• Fostering a culture where both caregivers and clients thrive

Your ability to harness these three components of agency — self-efficacy, optimism, and imagination — will directly impact your success in creating positive cultures and delivering exceptional care. As I often say, the Good Life you desire is your responsibility to create. Make 2025 the year you fully embrace your agency and create the home care business you’ve always imagined.

Here’s to your success in 2025!