A practitioner describes how to successfully enter and scale in a crowded sober living home market by focusing on quality, filling geographic gaps, and building relationships with county departments. The speaker recounts opening multiple homes rapidly (five in one year), becoming a preferred provider for county referrals, and arguing there is still room to stand out despite 120+ existing homes.
And I wouldn't necessarily be afraid of an area that has a lot of sober living homes already. What that actually means is there is a huge demand and you could actually get in and stand out and kind of become the go to in that area, let's say if there isn't a high quality home or a company that's running multiple properties at scale and has a similar experience. And for example, when I started my homes, there are a lot of properties. I found out from our county, there's over 120 homes you could choose from in our area. But as we started, we started five in one year. And after the third one, some county departments decided, hey, you're giving us exactly what we asked for. You're opening homes where we said that we needed them and you're doing a great job. And so we want to make you our first phone call. And so we literally got all of the calls, even though there are so many homes, like my first three, and then eventually my first five or six ended up being the first phone call for a lot of these different county departments. So there's room, there's the ability to stand out because usually these are very like separated, disparate, like not well run homes. And so if you can come in and build a relationship, show that you're different, show that you have great outcomes, you can actually take from all of the demand that's there and have it just in your house.
