Viva Senior Living Execs: ‘everything Has Changed’ With Arrival Of Boomers

Serving a new generation of older adults hinges on the senior living industry’s ability to give them what they want. But to get there, operators must first understand them.

In a nutshell, “everything has changed” with the arrival of the boomers, according to Viva Senior Living Chief Strategy Officer Heather Terhark. Unlike the generation prior to them, the boomers are bringing with them new ideas about living their golden years. Not only that, they are also bringing their tech like smart TVs, phones and other devices.

“We have to change how we’re strategically offering to consumers whose needs are changing,” Terhark said.

To push the industry forward, Viva Senior Living Chief Operating Officer Chris Metternich and Terhark believe providers, including Viva, must also think differently about the people who work in their communities, and perhaps more importantly, where they are looking for them. If the senior living industry hopes to expand for the boomers, operators will need many more workers in their buildings, which is why Viva recruits talent from outside industries and builds staffing pipelines with local schools.

“We want to give the opportunity to the leaders in our field to have the ability to be mobile and move within our company and have a force,” Metternich said during a recent recording of the SHN Transform podcast. “We want it to be really owned and operated by our leaders underneath, who are driving the business on a daily scale.”

Viva Senior Living surpassed 40 communities under management in 2025 thanks to an acquisition strategy that prioritized both independent living and high-acuity assisted living and memory care properties. To prepare for a future in which acuity continues to pressure operating models, Viva has prioritized clinical care coordination and care delivery as central parts of its operating model.

“We see the future and we’re embracing that future of the clinical necessities of our space,” Metternich said.

This, Metternich and Terhark said, has led Viva to align its staffing strategies to meet high acuity demands, something the pair believe the industry must do in order to capture the full scope of the demographic-driven demand led by the influx of baby boomers into the market.

In 2026, Viva leaders will work with newly acquired properties to integrate properties into the Viva operating model while also continuing to seek new management acquisitions and new, ground-up development.

To achieve smooth integration of the new properties, Viva leaders have embraced technology not only for operational efficiency but for transparency and engagement, setting clear expectations with community level leadership, Terhark said. Smooth integration of new properties into the fold requires transparency and buy-in from community staff as Viva implements new systems, sometimes bringing a property from an analog, paper-and-pen rhythm to be digital-first.

“We bring a lot of things in-house that these properties have never had in-house before,” Terhark said. “It changes how that community operates for the better.”

Listen to the latest Transform episode here.

Editor’s note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

On recent growth:

Chris: I love the fact that we did not rush our growth. We took our time to build our relationships. So when folks are seeing us grow—like this month, we’re growing another four properties—as we’re speaking right now, Austin, we actually onboarded as of last week, and we have two more coming on board. One will be in fiscal year ‘25, another will be in the early part of ‘26. That is all development of the relationships we’re building: who do we want to work with, what type of partners do we want to be with, do they see the landscape the same way we see it, and do we see it the same way they see it? And ultimately, what’s the vision?

I’ve had a very difficult year personally. My wife has been extremely ill all year, and it made me reflect a lot. And it’s weird, because I’ll be 50 this year. It makes me realize that the next 10 or 15 years of my life are very important. What am I thinking about? What do I want to do? That is important to me. So what we’re building here had to have an importance to me, and I really had to be much more reflective this year. Because I said to myself, oh my God, we’re human. What we do today is important for our future, but it does take us from our families, and it does have an impact on your whole life. So I took an assessment of that.

One of the things that we did last year, and we’re doing this year, was: not only do we want to grow and have great partners and develop the way we do, but what is the most important factor of our company? And I really had to wrestle with that. My piece of this was: I grew up in the field. Heather grew up in the field. Most of my team did. And we want to give the opportunity to the leaders in our field, from dining staff one up, to have the ability to be mobile and move within our company, and to have a force.

We want it to be really owned and operated by our leaders underneath, who are driving the business on a daily scale. Even our last event—the whole event is not a “Viva event.” The whole event is about our executives, our leaders at the facility level, growing as individuals. So we give a book every year to our folks. Everyone gets a reading opportunity to help develop themselves and their business. We question a lot in regards to their dreams and aspirations, and we hope to see them translate that at their facility levels, where they’re getting the opportunity to grow and develop. We want them to have the same opportunity.

We’re thinking about our brand growing, but we also see this industry growing. Exactly what I did see over the last 20 years of my career is we lost a lot of fabulous talent to other industries, folks that were wonderful clinical people, but sometimes had difficulty translating clinical to business. And now we’re starting to see that we can speak both sides of the language and get the returns we’re looking for on both sides: be strong clinicians, have a strong clinical product, while also resulting in a real strong bottom line. And if we can lift up our folks in that way, I think it makes us a stronger company.

So for me, the reflective piece this year has been massive growth; absolutely excited, all planned. This is not like we just came in and somebody threw another set of properties at us every two months. No. We develop our relationships. We turned down a lot of properties throughout the last couple of years. It’s just all starting to mature.

But along with that, I wanted myself as a leader, and the rest of my folks around us, to mature with it. We need to understand that this is a business, but we can’t lose the fact that the most important factor of our business is our employees and our residents. And we need to develop both sides of that equation to be a really strong company that lasts in the future.

On new growth opportunities:

Heather: I’m so excited about what we were able to accomplish in 2025, and it came from a lot of planning, as Chris said. It came from a lot of dedication from all of our team members, and a lot of hard work.

My role was being involved from the ground up. I got to help evaluate, for our investors, whether a community or portfolio was a good investment to take on. Chris will tell you, and he’ll tell all of our investors, we turn down as many as we say yes to, because we never want our investors just to invest, to invest. We want it to be something that gives back to our employees, our residents, and our family members, and also makes an impact on the external community where that senior living community is.

So I got to be involved in all of that, or as Chris would call it, going out, kicking the tires, looking at it, doing mini-competitor market analysis, and some mystery shopping. But I also got into the granular, the strategy on market rates, and whether the programming, when we took on that community, was really where we should position it. Because we’re not positioning the community for what it is today. We’re positioning it for the next two, three, five, even 10 years, because our consumer has changed.

I’ve said this on a different podcast, but I really believe it. Everything has changed. They all have Wi-Fi, they all have computers, they all have subscriptions to Netflix. That old model of one computer in a library, I remember when you designed assisted living and put in little computer stations, that’s not something you do anymore. They’re coming with their smart TVs. They’re coming with technology. So we have to change how we’re strategically offering to consumers whose needs are changing.

And it’s been the most exciting year of my life. I’m so excited for what Viva is going to do in 2026 and 2027, because we know aging in place matters. People don’t want to move. And we know we can clinically bring so much to them that hasn’t traditionally been in assisted living.

How Viva selects future capital partners to support growth:

Chris: I think the toolbox that we offer to the investor is very different. I hope most management companies in our space are starting to look at it differently as well. As we begin to identify who is going to be the right fit, and Austin, I love when you’re talking, because we talk a lot and you’re passionate about our industry, we’re seeing funds flow into this industry that we didn’t see in years past. Folks are getting excited about the industry, and part of that is that we have to layer on the necessities of being able to analyze how to enter it.

It’s not the old way where you look at performance or a portfolio as a financial piece and say, “Yeah, these numbers look good, we believe the return will be this,” and that is it. When I say “kick the tires,” we do. And I have to tell you, I’m on a platform of talking about NIC MAP all day long, every day. I love what they’re doing. We talk with them a lot. We use their data like you would not believe. But we use it for directionality, not as the base of our decision. It puts us in a good place directionally. We can say to our investor, “Yes, we like where you’re thinking, we like the project you’re looking at.” But now it’s time for us to go kick the tires, and we go back to old school.

We go to the market. We secret shop. We look at different communities in that market to see what it really looks like. We fly there. We live there for a minute. We want to get a sense of, does this have some legs to it? And we do that in every market we go to.

So routinely, I can’t tell you how many times we get on with an investor and they’re excited for a property, it looks great on paper, and I get on the call and I’m like, “No, guys, no. Your runway is going to be this long. I don’t think this is the trajectory you were looking for for a property such as this. I think you’re looking for this.” You have to know what your investor is looking for. You have to know what their trajectory is.

I don’t think we’re in a market today where most are coming in with a short hold. Back in the past it was more like hold for three years. Now we’re seeing a longer-return thought process, and people are starting to focus on something that an operator like me loves. There’s value in the actual operation. What you do for the client is valuable, and ultimately what that bottom line is. It’s not just the property being evaluated at a higher value in 10 years. The value of the operation is what’s going to sustain the value for our industry, and in the last year you’re starting to see more focus there.

So the talk around HPPDs [hours per patient day] and technologies and all that, that was never in senior care before. That was in skilled, but not in senior care. Now we’re bringing that into the measure.

How Viva conducts integration of new properties:

Chris: The first step of our integration is always first recognizing what they’ve done well. When you purchase a property and you first walk in as a management company, the first thing many folks do is think we’re smarter than the individuals that are there. That’s completely wrong. You’re buying the property for a reason.

For us, and our investors, we tend to buy more stabilized properties with a good, strong future base. They’re cash flowing already, but a couple of tweaks and we’re going to be in a better place. So when I first come in, I recognize the leaders and I treat them as CEOs. We learn them up immediately, so our first thing is, let’s find out where they are and then bring them where they need to be. Some are phenomenal at reading financials. Some are more phenomenal at being clinicians. Some are great marketers. We take their strengths, we recognize the strength, and then we start to add in the toolbox that is going to be required of them to be a strong, standalone leader.

What we teach our CEOs on day one is pretend your facility is sitting by itself and it doesn’t have a myriad of sister facilities that could support it. If you look at your business from that perspective, you treat it like it’s your own. I need to make sure my house is good at all times.

The second piece is the touch point you require. We met with the staff. We have large communication meetings with them, and we walk them through Viva so they’re not fearful. We want them to know what the future is going to be coming with us, and we allow them to interview us. We want them to know who we are, have a face, and know that we were employees in a building as well.

The last piece, about a month in, we make sure that we talk to the families. We will never, ever have the administrator speak for us. We come in, we give one point of contact with the family from us, and then we give it back to the administrator after that. We think we owe the families a few minutes of our time to answer questions about our organization, who we are, and what our thought processes are. Those three components are really, really important.

Then we roll in what I think is extremely important. Missouri is one that we’re talking about, so I’ll use it as an example. We want everyone to send in resumes for different positions. We create super positions, like a super [regional director of operations] RDO, super dining services, and so on. And we interview everyone. We don’t care who sends the resume in. We don’t care if they’ve never had experience in it. We want them to be interviewed, because everything we do is to give feedback to the people that are being interviewed.

One, they need to have comfort with us. Two, if I had that in my career, younger, where I had that much feedback about the direction I could have taken, that would have been great. So that’s our initial conversation, please send a resume. If you’re not selected now, it’s not because you’re not good at what you’re doing. We will tell you what you need to get there. Let us explain what the education will be, because we want to empower you to reach the goals you want to be. I don’t want you to just be a dreamer. I want them to think about and be able to execute a future plan. Now the second piece, which I think is so exciting right now, is that to be a strong executing CEO, you need to have your data at your fingertips. So we want to create an app. Our landing page is very simple. It reads like a financial. It’s a simple single digit in each category, and it just goes red and black. That’s it. Number, red, black. If they want to go deeper into the number, they can.

The way I’m organizing the app is that it starts with census, ends with EBITDA, and all the levers in the middle have red and black. So when the operator wakes up in the morning, they look at their phone and they’re able to see if everything’s black, we’re in a good place. They use that as the center point for their morning meetings.

I want my clients to have it as well. I want to be a completely transparent operator with my client. They open it up, they see it, reds and blacks too. The greatest part is they’re not waiting for a P and L [statement] at the end of the month. We are all running within an active P and L. I want to be in real time making real time decisions and actively attacking figures before the numbers are hardened up in a profit and loss [statement].

Everyone always says we look like a hotel. It’s not. It’s very different. With clinical, we’re going to have clinical conditions that go on in the building and other things that get in the way of the building functioning at the highest levels. This data set allows me to communicate to my investors in real time, and allows me to speak to my operators in real time, to talk about what interventions we can get ahead of in regards to anything that’s impacting them. It really makes them think like CEOs. Everyone’s thinking with data. And then we built a script around this language so everyone’s speaking the same set of questions.

Heather: Many of them have never been taught that mindset, that I’m running a small business right here from start to finish, and I’m in control of everything. So we’re teaching them how to be chief marketing officers. We’re teaching them how to be involved in understanding those numbers that lead to that profit and loss, and the app.

What it does is it enriches the business, because people buy in when you say you don’t have to do it cookie cutter. You’ve talked to us so many times, Austin, we’re not cookie cutter in any of our buildings. We don’t use the same brochures. We don’t use the same strategy of programming.

Our rates are geared to that community they live in. They start to embrace it. They come back to you with ideas like, what can we do technology wise? You see very high social media usage from our communities because they embrace that, whereas before it may have been controlled by an outside source. So we bring a lot of things integration wise in house that they never had in house before. It changes how that community operates for the better.

On Viva’s 2026 staffing priorities:

Chris: It’s the future of our business, developing new staffing models and being able to attract folks to our industry. Let me start with this. We have zero agency in our whole company. We have 40 facilities. We picked up a new facility in the last two months that has agency, so 39 have zero, and one has agency.

One of the first things we do is talk about staffing opportunities. I told you, Austin, I’m very boring. I ask the same series of questions to everybody in different categories, and staffing is one of them. The first thing I say is, I’d like to see your staffing line, front to back, daytime to nighttime. I want to understand it. Tell me how many open positions you have. Normally, I get crickets. How many open positions do you have? Crickets. “We have to look into that.” Well, how do you know you need to use agency if you don’t know how many openings you have? And let me second that question, where are the openings?

I’ll give you an example. I’m on a call with the building we just took on, and they were using agency heavily. First thing that goes on the call is, “Oh, we overstaff in the daytime,” because the census is declining in the building. Long story short, by the time we got done with the call, one day later my RDO and the administrator call me and tell me, “Oh my God, we never needed to have agency.” They took their morning staff, shifted them, then looked at all the new hires they had in the last two to three weeks, and all the holes were filled. No one took the time to look at the problem first.

So I’m a big believer that if you want to become sophisticated in your career, we can’t just look at a piece of paper, see an issue, and fire, put it out. We need to ask a lot of questions, because there are different ways to look at something before you act.

The second piece of the puzzle when it comes to staffing is usually the biggest one I hear. “I have no staff. I think I’m going to have to raise all salaries because we’re not able to attract anyone. By the way, I’m not against market rate adjustments.

So what we do is develop a plan. First is, what are we doing to outreach, to attract the employee? Then, what do we do to retain the employee? If you’ve never worked in memory care before and you’re coming in as a dietary employee, we should probably train you for a couple days so you know what you’re going to see. You may have never worked with somebody who has cognitive issues. You’re serving a dish and they’re not responding the same way, and that can throw you off. We want to make sure we don’t lose an employee because they are fearful once they start.

Once we ask these questions, this is the reason why we don’t have agency, because we know what our problem is. We know where. We know the weight of which we need to have in a building. And every building has a different HPPD. Anybody putting an HPPD across the spectrum, that’s not true. It depends on the acuity levels in the building and exactly what their needs are. You have a base state regulation, but the true need of the building is what we have to get to, and then we staff that. And once I know that, it’s not as hard as everybody thinks it is.

Heather: I think Chris really hit on it when he talked about bringing people from outside other industries. How many times do we hear from people, our Uber drivers, that they got laid off, and when you say health care to them, they don’t understand. They don’t understand how to care for folks, to Chris’s point. But they also don’t understand the benefits, the joy of being in a community, how employees become like families to these residents, and the reward you get by being in senior living.

It continues to be a goal into 2026 of how we bring people from other industries. The great thing about our model is when you bring people in from other industries and how they’ve done things, there’s a lot we can learn in health care, because health care can sometimes be in its own bubble. When you hear about things that Amazon has done because they used to work for Amazon, we can learn and grow.

So that’s a big focus, not just for Viva, but for many of us across the industry, how to attract more people into our industry. We all know the population growth. You hear about our Viva growth. If we don’t bring employees from other industries in, we’re not going to be successful. So it’s a big strategy to continue to work.

On new development for Viva’s growth:

Chris: I’m a selfish operator. I like to develop what’s easy to work in, and I love when an investor is coming in and they’re excited about projects. They’re in an area looking to build, and the biggest thing I see wrong 85% of the time is they either build the wrong size, the wrong makeup of a property, or they don’t truly understand the market they’re trying to build in. And then when they do understand the market, they don’t build the property that’s going to sustain that market for the long term.

So one of the things we wanted to do was help guide folks through that process, down to the drawing phase of the property, and then ultimately take it right through the lease-up period and stabilization. It’s nice, because you develop a really strong partnership with the investor from the ground up, talking through what we think are the weedier sections.

And I’ll tell you, for us as an organization, it’s a very large amount of my time. The development piece means I have to go to land use board meetings, meet with architects, have legal calls. There’s a lot that goes into these projects. For instance, we’re demoing a property in the next two months, and just preparing for that demolition is a lot of talk time to get yourself prepared.

But look, our industry is in need of more property. We all see the growth. Two things stand out in my mind. One is the population coming, the bow wave coming into senior communities, and we just don’t have enough unit space.

Heather: What new development or redevelopment gives us the opportunity to do is focus on a couple specific areas, and memory care is one of them. Folks want that continuum of care and the ability to age in place that we talk about a lot. But there are different levels of memory care, and what that memory care looks like. New development and redevelopment give you an opportunity you didn’t see as much in the past in assisted living and memory care. You can have more than one neighborhood, and it can serve different levels of acuity and different types of needs. That’s something we do in all of our new development, because we know, unfortunately, Alzheimer’s and dementia are part of that growing population.

The other component is we know consumers want more space. That 250 to 300 square foot studio is not appealing. Today’s consumers, those one bedrooms are extremely important to them. New development gives us the opportunity to look at efficiency and ways to still give them space, but configure it in a way that makes sense for the building and what the building is worth.

So there are trends that come back to the strategy you get to do when you redevelop or do new development, to meet back to that conversation we had about what the consumer wants.

The post Viva Senior Living Execs: ‘Everything Has Changed’ With Arrival of Boomers appeared first on Senior Housing News.