For home care agencies and HHA training programs
Caregiver turnover runs about 75% a year across the industry. RetainReady catches the drift early with a 30-second weekly check-in in English and Spanish, shows you who is at risk and why, and turns the whole thing into the report your funder already asks for.
Built by the workforce director who held turnover at 30% for 13 years
Move the sliders. Most agencies have never seen this number written down.
Cut turnover by 15 points and you keep $46,800 a year, before you count the referrals you stop turning away.
Turnover benchmark: Activated Insights 2025 Benchmarking Report (75% median, 2024 data). Replacement cost range of roughly $2,600 to $5,000 per caregiver is drawn from published home care industry benchmarking. Your real number depends on wage, wraparound, and how long the seat sits open.
The problem
It just never shows up on the P&L under its own name. It hides inside overtime, recruiting spend, coordinator hours, and the cases you quietly stopped accepting.
Recruit, screen, onboard, train, orient, and lose. Industry benchmarking puts replacement at roughly $2,600 to $5,000 per caregiver. At 75% turnover, a 120-person agency runs that cycle 90 times a year.
When you cannot staff a case, you decline revenue you already earned the right to. Turning away referrals also quietly teaches your referral sources to call someone else first.
For training programs and Caregiver Flex awardees, retention is not a nice metric. It is the outcome the next funding cycle is scored on. No clean data, no strong renewal conversation.
Why it keeps happening
Almost every tool an agency already owns reports on the past. Retention is won or lost in the 90 days before someone stops showing up.
"We do exit interviews."
An exit interview is a receipt. It tells you why someone left, after the seat is already empty and the case is already at risk.
"We just need to recruit harder."
Faster hiring fills the seat and refills it in 90 days. Published industry benchmarking consistently finds that most caregiver departures happen inside the first 100 days, so recruiting volume just feeds the same door it came through.
"Payroll already tells us who left."
It does. It will never tell you who is drifting, who stopped picking up hours, who feels invisible on their case, or who is one bad week from taking the job down the street.
"We will hire another HR person."
That adds cost and headcount without adding visibility. The signal problem does not get solved by another person reading the same lagging reports.
How it works
Your caregivers answer a text. Your program manager reads a dashboard. Your funder gets a report. That is the whole loop.
Three questions land by text with every trainee and caregiver, in English or Spanish, whichever they chose. No app to download, no login to forget, no portal to train anyone on.
Your dashboard shows the live cohort: engagement, 30 / 60 / 90 / 180-day retention, placement status, and a flag on the people whose answers have started to slide. You intervene while it is still a conversation.
Export retention and completion data already shaped for DOH, WIOA, Caregiver Flex and ESD reporting. The renewal narrative stops being a scramble and starts being a pull from a system.
The track record
RetainReady productizes the operating model Lamont Spence built and ran as Workforce Development Director at Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, one of the most studied home care employers in the country.
These outcomes were produced at CHCA under Lamont Spence's direction over 13+ years. RetainReady is the system that made them repeatable. Industry turnover median of 75% is from the Activated Insights 2025 Benchmarking Report, reflecting 2024 data.
The person behind the numbers
Retention was never a mystery to us. It was a set of things we did every week, on purpose, and measured. RetainReady is that discipline turned into a system somebody else can run.
Lamont Spence spent more than 13 years as Workforce Development Director at Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, building and running the training, supervision, and check-in practices behind the retention numbers above. He now advises home care agencies, HHA training schools, and DOH-funded workforce programs through Spence Consultants, LLC.
You will not be handed off. The diagnostic, the implementation, and the monthly review are run by the person who built the method.
Lamont SpenceFounder, Spence Consultants, LLC · Mount Vernon, NY
The math, shown openly
No black box. Here is the arithmetic, with every assumption on the table so you can swap in your own numbers.
Assumptions: 120 caregivers, replacement cost held at the conservative end of the published $2,600 to $5,000 range, and no value assigned to declined referrals, overtime, or client churn. At $5,000 replacement cost the same 15-point move is worth $90,000. Your numbers will differ. That is exactly what the diagnostic is for.
Two ways in
Track A
Your scoreboard is margin, staffed cases, and how many referrals you can say yes to.
Track B
Your scoreboard is completion, placement, and the renewal you have to earn on paper.
Where to start
The first engagement is a fixed-fee diagnostic. You get a defensible retention baseline and a plan whether or not you ever license the software.
Fixed fee · [ADD PRICE]
A structured review of your retention data, onboarding, and supervision practice. You leave with your true turnover cost, the three points in the first 100 days where you are losing people, and a prioritized fix list.
Book the diagnosticProject · [ADD PRICE]
Implementation of the weekly bilingual pulse, the program manager dashboard, and reporting exports configured to the funders you actually answer to. Staff trained, cadence installed, baseline locked.
Talk through scopeMonthly · [ADD PRICE]
Monthly review of the retention data with your leadership team, intervention design for flagged cohorts, and preparation support ahead of funder reporting deadlines and renewals.
Check availabilityBefore you ask
They will not answer a long one. This is three questions, by text, in the language they picked, and it takes about thirty seconds. Response rate is the whole product, so the check-in is designed around the caregiver's day, not around what is convenient to report on.
Keep them. Those systems record what already happened. RetainReady sits alongside them and answers a different question: which specific people are drifting right now, and what is driving it. It is a warning layer, not a replacement.
Workforce signals only. Check-in responses, engagement, training completion, and retention milestones for your staff and trainees. RetainReady does not collect patient information or clinical records.
The diagnostic gives you a baseline and a fix list inside the engagement itself. Once check-ins are running, the first meaningful risk signals show up within a few weeks, because the pulse is weekly rather than quarterly.
Start the conversation
We walk through your program model, your reporting requirements, and what the first 90 days would look like. If RetainReady is not the right fit, we will say so in the call and point you somewhere better.
Prefer to read first? Ask for The First 100 Days Retention Audit, the twelve questions we work through before quoting any engagement. Choose it in the form and it comes straight to your inbox.
Spence Consultants, LLC · Mount Vernon, NY · info@spenceconsultants.com
No obligation, and nothing gets sent to your staff.
