Onelife Ceo Writes Book On Community Turnarounds In Effort To Help Other Operators

Not many operators can say they wrote the book on handling turnarounds. Onelife Senior Living CEO Dan Williams can.

Williams recently wrote and published “The Turnaround Blueprint: Transforming Senior Living Communities from Struggling to Spectacular.” He drew from his personal experience over the course of his career, particularly with the lack of support materials when he was getting started.

The book covers a full community turnaround, from identifying common causes of distress to implementing financial triages and strategic renovations and remodels. Williams wrote the book to fulfill a need for a field manual in senior living.

“We’ve got company manuals, but those don’t really tell the story of how you’re going to go in and make this building successful,” Williams told Senior Housing News. “There’s tons of books on leadership … They’re written by professors, and they’re a lot of theory, but they don’t give you concrete steps.”

While the book doesn’t contain “all new ideas,” it’s built from notes and advice gathered over the years and presented with actionable steps that have worked for Williams and Onelife.

“I wanted to do this for a long time,” he said.

The project wasn’t completed alone. Williams used AI to help organize his notes and hired two editors throughout the process, one with a background in ghost writing. The objective from the start was to keep the book from feeling “corporate” to make it more approachable for people coming up within the industry that may not have corporate backgrounds.

“We build these $50 million beautiful communities, and we hand the keys over to someone who started as a caregiver to run this business. That’s just our industry,” Williams said.

Keeping it personal

Each chapter in Williams’ book begins with an example pulled from personal experience and is meant to showcase various aspects that are leading to the turnaround being necessary in the first place, along with steps he took to address immediate fixes.

Williams wants to assist professionals at all levels from top-level CEOs to new executive directors and frontline staff within communities. He sees a book like his as sorely needed given the industry’s ongoing evolution.

“There’s a lot of people retiring in our industry that have been in a long time,” Williams said. “Pretty soon, we’re going to have to start developing … and there’s going to be a lot of old product.”

Williams also wanted to share what he learned throughout his career in senior living, where he has held just about every position possible within a community when it comes to operations.

“It comes from a perspective where I moved into a community. I lived there. I cooked breakfast if the cook didn’t show up,” he said. “I can see it from all different kinds of perspectives of what an excellent community run should be. The insights come from all those positions together in what we’ve done along the way.”

The book is written with actionable steps for readers. Nearly every chapter concludes with an action item checklist that community leaders can track, such as reviewing the past 20 Google reviews and categorizing complaints to identify patterns, or identifying three early warning signs that might not show up on a formal report.

In addition to what’s in the book, Williams has created a website with additional forms that readers can download and implement, such as an industry intelligence toolkit and employee surveys.

The idea is to guide readers through the turnaround process and be able to make a positive impact, Williams said.

Listening and learning

According to Williams, listening and learning are the two most important skills to develop for community turnarounds.

“When you go in, you’ve got to listen and learn. You can’t go in putting all these systems and corporate wants you to put in,” Williams said. “You want to find a mentor.”

From there, Williams suggests correcting community culture at the local level rather than relying on corporate programming, filling leadership gaps and leaning in with honesty to every stakeholder within the community, including staff and residents so they understand the reality of the community’s standing.

Additionally, it’s important for community leaders to execute on their changes.

“You’ve got to do it relentlessly all the time,” Williams said.

It’s also important for operators to recognize when a community can’t be turned around. From Williams’ own experience, there are times he has spent around three months in a community before determining that it couldn’t be turned around, and recommended that it be repositioned instead.

From his time in that particular community, it was best determined the building itself would have been better suited toward behavioral health rather than assisted living and memory care simply because of the community’s layout and amenities.

“I hope they’ll find something useful in there,” Williams said. “Nobody’s going to do everything you say in there … but I hope somebody can read something and help improve their community and the resident experience.”

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