How To Make Sober Living Homes Profitable From Day 1

Now, the second thing I would do is really determine my business model. And what different revenue streams are you going to go after? Are you going to be focused primarily on private pay with people paying out of their own pocket? Maybe they're getting Social Security, if they're getting a scholarship or a stipend or something from a different local nonprofit or organization, but they're paying you directly, it's totally possible. It can work. I had a lot of that when I first started. In fact, I have a student in Indiana who has eight homes now, literally all of them private pay. And it's working great. So you can do that. What I chose to do is I started working with more local organizations that had grant funds to specifically house people with substance use disorder. And what that allowed us to do was again, build these relationships, receive referrals from these organizations who are already meeting with who we want to house. And they would then pay us directly, either through a check at the beginning of the month or through a direct deposit at the end of the month for the people that we housed. And they could usually pay a little bit more than the individuals could pay out of pocket. And so either way can work. And in fact, what might be better for you is having a mix and diversifying your revenue stream so that you're not reliant on any one organization or chasing down individuals who may or may not have gotten a job and gotten paid and done what they were supposed to do that day. And so you can can actually use all of these different funding sources that would be a preference, or at least have multiple organizations so that you're sure you're going to get paid and be able to cover the bills every single month, no matter what. Again, without being reliant on something that might go away or might run into some budget issues or whatever and prevent you from being able to be profitable from day one.