The Real Value of Rose Villa
| I have the opportunity and privilege of getting to be in front of a lot of smart people – seminar leaders, speakers, authors, very successful business people, thoughtful academics, just an amazing variety of wise and interesting folks. One recent topic was on business value. The speaker made the point that growing a business and creating value are not the same thing. You look at different variables depending on which target you are most focused on – and you can certainly do both, it’s just that one does not presuppose the other.For a publicly traded company, executives generally focus on their “market cap” which is a valuation measure (=how many shares outstanding x the market price of one share). In a privately held company, the first piece of information that usually is shared is the revenue number, which is about size. What is the really interesting point to me is to understand what is the transferable value in a company – which is HOW you got to your revenue number, rather than what that number might be specifically. I have been talking about this for a while, just not conceptualizing it in this way. When I talk about each department building its own leadership team with a very clear focus on hiring and retaining the right people, this creates value for Rose Villa as a whole, even if it may not immediately increase revenue (and might actually decrease net revenue in the short term). It is this sort of creation of value that Rose Villa will be the most focused on in the coming years, even as we complete Phase 1 and begin to plan and work on Phase 2 – good documentation of systems and processes, strong managers who are committed to the long term success of the company, building a community that doesn’t rest on one person’s shoulders, but in which the key values are shared and expressed on a daily basis by the majority of the staff and residents here.
When I think about how Rose Villa is already playing a part in destroying harmful and misleading stereotypes of senior living, it is obvious that creating value is the more important focus for us. Yes, it is critically important that we have a strong, diversified, and consistent revenue stream, but even as we gain market share, we are gaining mind share. We can model what a collaborative community can do when it approaches senior living as a partnership between staff and residents, when we explicitly recognize and understand what the tradeoffs are between increased revenue and increased quality of life, when we create a community that is devoted to supporting the independence and contribution of every single person who lives here. And while not everyone here can directly contribute to increased revenue or decreased expense, every single one of us is part of increasing the value of Rose Villa.
