NIC Chats Podcast with Gaurie Rodman

Introduction: (00:00)
Welcome to NIC Chats, ideas and inspiration from senior living leaders with host, Beth Mace, NIC's chief economist, and director of outreach. Get to know some of the people influencing senior living today and perhaps learn a thing or two from their experiences.

Beth Mace: (00:18)
Hello, and welcome to the NIC Chats podcast. My name is Beth Mace and I am the chief economist and director of the research and analytics team here at NIC. I am so happy that you can join us today. The focus of the NIC Chats podcast is talking to people that I find interesting with ideas that I think you'd like to hear. As you listen today I hope that you will find some humor, insights, inspiration, and hopefully what I call an a-ha moment when something pithy or insightful is said, and a light bulb may go off for you. Now, let me tell you a bit more about the NIC Map podcast series. Each podcast has a standard structure. First, I will tell you three statements about my guest and two are true; throughout the podcast you'll learn which is true and which is false.

Beth Mace: (01:08)
Second, there are three standard questions within each podcast for each speaker. The first is what's the largest challenge facing our industry? Second, what is one thing we can do to grow talent in our industry? And third, what is one innovative way or idea to strengthen our industry? Now, before I begin, I also want to let you know that NIC is having an in-person conference in November: November 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in Houston. And it will be one of our standard NIC fall conferences. So we hope that you will register and we'll see you there. Now, as they say on with the show. So I'm delighted that our fourth NIC Chats podcast is with Gaurie Rodman. Gaurie is the director of planning services at Aptura a direct supply company. Gaurie, thank you for joining us today.

Gaurie Rodman: (01:58)
Thanks Beth. I'm very excited to be here.

Beth Mace: (02:00)
Great. So as I mentioned, I have three statements about Gaurie. One is true and two are not. So these statements that we will reveal to you during the course of our discussion today are that Gaurie can speak three languages. That Gaurie has three host moms. And the third is that she went on tour with the Violent Femmes in concert. So stay tuned and we'll find out more, which of those is true. So Gaurie, you are the director of planning services at Aptura direct supply company. Can you tell our listeners about Aptura?

Gaurie Rodman: (02:33)
Sure. So to understand Aptura you have to first understand direct supply. So direct supply, many of you know, it, we are a product company focusing singularly on the seniors housing and now tangentially on the acute care world. We started off as a product business, employee owned 35 years in the making. It's an amazing place, our founder and CEO is Bob Hillis. When he founded the company one of the things he talked about was trying to work within one singular industry. So we're focused on seniors housing, and as we brought product to the marketplace, if clients asked us for support, one of the things they came to us with was needing support on the real estate side of it. How do we design, how do we position? What do we do? We have the product, but the product has to sit in a building. That was a genesis of Aptura. So Aptura has been around for about 20 plus years. And we do everything from planning through design and construction for the seniors housing industry. One of the things about direct supply and Aptura is we work in the product business. We work in the real estate piece of it. We don't finance projects and we don't operate seniors housing. It gives us a really interesting place to work from, and that's what Aptura does.

Beth Mace: (03:49)
And what about you? What do you do specifically at Aptura?

Gaurie Rodman: (03:52)
So me, I lead our strategic planning and kind of real estate solutions component of the projects. So I get engaged very early on with...and my clients, it's fascinating. It's operators, it's the funders. It's trying to figure out as we put capital into real estate and as real estate tries to adapt itself to the needs of the operators and the residents, how do we balance all of those pieces together and more so than any other industry in seniors housing? I believe that planning is essential because first of all, we don't have the luxury of making mistakes. We have to be adaptive. We need to meet current needs and future needs in order to balance all of those sometimes opposing and contradictory needs a plan is essential. So that's really my place. And more so now than ever, we have to also bring innovation and technology into the mix as we'll talk about as you move forward.

Beth Mace: (04:47)
So how did the pandemic affect your business or how do you think it's going to affect your business going forward?

Gaurie Rodman: (04:53)
Well a couple of different ways. So last year when the pandemic hit, as we all know, Bob Hillis says this all the time, direct supplies, we are successful when our operators are successful and we know how challenging last year was for the operators. So one of the things that as a company we did is we did three big things. Number one was we sat and listened to many operators across the industry, all segments of the industry, all different levels, the high-end operators to the affordable, moderate income to the middle-income and try to understand how we can help. We also have an international supply chain. So we quickly pivoted and brought and worked with our operators to get PPE over to our operators. That was one of the first big things we did. Second thing we did was recognize that there are going to be big challenges around the financial aspects of the industry: occupancy was dropping, cost of service rising,

Gaurie Rodman: (05:51)
So Bob Hillis and his daughter, Genevieve, who leads our government affairs work very closely with Washington DC to get the billions of dollars that came to the industry. It was the second thing we did. Internally for us what we did was Bob Hillis has also made a commitment to all of our owner partners, that we are not going to let anybody go. So as a company of over 1200 employees, we pivoted quickly to work remotely. We also kept everyone in place. We transitioned and worked in different segments of the company to support what our, what our clients needed. In Aptura in particular obviously many projects went on hold because we couldn't get into the buildings to do the work and capital needed to be deployed for other areas. Having said that we had a lot of clients who decided to spend the time and leverage the fact that we had designers who had capacity and availability and get documents and drawings completed so that when not if, when the market changes, they're ready to hit the market with approvals and bidding and starting the construction.

Gaurie Rodman: (06:54)
So that was really good. The other thing we did was we pulled together all of our designers, and we really started to say, as we're hearing more and more from our operators, this is a pivotal moment for the industry. And I actually think it's a pivotal moment in general that we absolutely need to figure out how our real estate could better support operations and the needs of our residents, right? Because our operators did yeoman services around the infrastructure they had, but our buildings can do a lot, lot better. And so we did a lot of research, a lot of studies, a lot of collaboration and work around trying to figure out how do we create environments that are better suited fundamentally to the needs and something like a pandemic. While COVID is going through it ebbs and flows, the idea of a contagion disease hitting a frail population is going to come up.

Beth Mace: (07:50)
So what would be one example of an idea that came out of that?

Gaurie Rodman: (07:53)
Oh my gosh. So one of the biggest ideas is the idea of taking these larger projects and breaking them into smaller component pieces. So creating kind of environments within environments, marrying the best of the household models with what we need as larger congregate model, because there's the economics that we have to balance, right? Like we talked about that before. So one of the things we've done is could we take a building that's 160 units and actually create ten sixteen unit households. And if those households, and when I talk households, it's not only around the care and the amenity spaces, but air quality, access to the outdoors, visitation rooms, like literally be able to break that building, imagine in a world like that, how much better it would have been for those residents based on where their frailties and their illnesses are and where their needs are, how we can work. And I think that in terms of an ongoing strategy, this entire fear of people coming into our industry around, I don't want to live with my hundred unknown best friends. Now we can break it into smaller households, right? Like we can be more creative as operators and providers to say let's build smaller communities that are much more tangible and approachable. So I think that was a really good idea that came from it.

Beth Mace: (09:11)
That's great. Thank you. So let me switch a little bit. So during this last year, increasingly we're hearing more about focus on ESG in DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, environmental, and social governance. So are you seeing any of that at Aptura or direct supply or even with your clients?

Gaurie Rodman: (09:30)
Absolutely. And at all levels. So with ESG we were very much ahead of that. So one of the things that, we did at direct supply is we developed a long list of all the products that currently meet ESG just on the product side of it. Right. And we actually have been working with a lot of the REITs sharing that information and those products, that's one component of it. Like, do we have the right products out there? One of the things that we also brought to market is NPBI, which is needle point bipolar ionization, which is a technology that ionizes the air and removes 99% of pathogens. We've done it. We actually believe in it so much across our campuses, all of our buildings we have NPBI. So we're starting to integrate that. When I talked about the researchwe did, ESG is inherently built into that.

Gaurie Rodman: (10:17)
The other side of it that we looked at is the entire financing model, right? Because when we talk about ESG and bringing them into buildings, there's a cost factor too, but there is a social cost factor to it that I think more and more funders are bringing options and strategies, like we talk about pace, right? Like different funding mechanisms. The interesting thing is, is senior housing rarely takes advantage of those kinds of funds. We're not an industry that particularly looks at TIF money

Beth Mace: (10:47)
TIF money is...

Gaurie Rodman: (10:48)
Tax incremental financing, the government kind of subsidy funding. I actually believe, especially to meet the middle market need, we have to be far more creative. Historically. I have done a lot of work with leveraging all of those because we have to find ways to reduce the cost of capital and to be able to bring capital in to cover some of the ad-ons per se, that actually have huge social consequences, but come at a cost.

Beth Mace: (11:14)
So, let me switch. In 2019, so you and I have known each other for a pretty long time and in 2019, you and I were on a panel discussing the then released results on NIC's forgotten middle study, which estimated that the size of the middle income seniors market would double by the year 2029 to more than 14 million persons. The research concluded that more than half of this group would not have the financial resources for seniors housing and showed that this group would have significant care and mobility needs. So what are your thoughts on servicing this underserved market, especially in the context of what you were just talking about in terms of ESG?

Gaurie Rodman: (11:49)
Oh my gosh. So lots of thoughts about that. I think that the solution for middle-market is multi-layered and I think it begins with actually looking at where we place our product and what our product is. Right?I don't think the middle market--we have squeezed in every different way, assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing, to try to bring costs out of that, to make it more affordable, but we keep trying to do it with the same operating model, the same piece of real estate. Right? I think that fundamentally has to change. And I do think one of the good consequences of what we went through in 2020 is that we're more adaptive to change.

Beth Mace: (12:31)
More agile...

Gaurie Rodman: (12:32)
More agile, right? Like we recognize, and our consumer is on board with us. So part of the struggle, and I think we kind of forget about this is that we keep looking internally to ourselves as an industry saying, how do we change?

Gaurie Rodman: (12:44)
How do we change? But the conversation has to change amongst our potential residents and their adult children also. I think 2020 changed that conversation. So with the middle market, the idea of a product that's somewhat different. I keep envisioning technology enabled real estate environments that are almost like apartment buildings that can do the monitoring of somebody's safety and security and their connection to clinical needs in an environment that can take on a lot of that, taking out a little bit of the staffing challenges we have and the staffing costs that we have. And creating environments where somebody has the ability to age in place. At Aptura when we look at planning for seniors housing, we look at it under three pathways. Number one is a clinical pathway, right? Like for every resident, as you're getting frailer and older, the clinical pathways is a really important thing.

Gaurie Rodman: (13:43)
That's a need, right? Like it's not a want, it is a need.

Beth Mace: (13:48)
You have to have that.

Gaurie Rodman: (13:49)
You have to have that, right. So what is that clinical pathway and how do we engage it? Innovation technology, real estate location, real estate partnerships, all play a huge role in that. The second pathway is health and wellness. So once you're in a community, how does that environment be the best environment for you to be healthy? And I'm only talking about the health component. So this is where ESG and the idea of healthy buildings, natural light, good ventilation, connectivity to, access to, amenities, spaces, easily. All of that is under the health and wellness pathway. The third pathway is lifestyle and social engagement: again, location, technology, those connectivities, and the right people at the right spot. So how do we leverage; we know we're coming into a precipice around staffing, right? We're already beginning to see it coming out of this. Today, what is it? For every potential senior resident there are seven caregivers out in the marketplace. By 2030, that drops down to what,, four to one, right? So the need doesn't change. The number is growing. So what is the intervention? And I think one of the biggest interventions is technology enabled environments.

Beth Mace: (15:02)
And can you do that in a cost-effective way that would service the forgotten middle?

Gaurie Rodman: (15:05)
I think you can, as long as the technologies and innovations you bring to the marketplace are totally closely tied to operating model. You can't have one or the other and technology can't be just like hanging a piece of artwork. It's gotta be an integrated technology that leverages expertise. So, one example, I'm going to sort of pull one out: SafelyYou. We've talked about that, right? So they are a technology that has visual cameras on residents, watches falls, right? It is fundamentally a simple thing with AI behind it, the beauty of it...

Beth Mace: (15:41)
AI being artificial intelligence.

Gaurie Rodman: (15:44)
Artificial intelligence, thank you. Is that it is backed up by a group of experts--technology allows us to monitor the event quickly, get that information, but it gets into the hands of somebody that knows what they're talking about. That gets to the operations team. The operation intervention is done not only to deal with that issue, but to systemically change how we serve that particular resident. So the outcomes are phenomenal, right? So here's the middle-market thing. If the outcomes are that we reduced falls by 40%, if we've decreasedER admits by almost 80% and we've increased length of stay by nine months. Now we're talking about something that significantly impacts cost to serve, which begins to translate into what we can serve the middle market.

Beth Mace: (16:26)
It's a win win win all the way across the board. Okay. So let me switch subjects a little bit. I want to talk a little bit more about you for a moment. So tell us a little bit about your career path and any lessons that you've learned that you may want to share with our listeners. What obstacles did you have to overcome to become in the position that you're in today?

Gaurie Rodman: (16:47)
God, that's a very long-winded conversation. So I'm kind of an odd duck. I'm kind of a global citizen. I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin my first 10 years, because both my parents came here in the sixties as Fulbright scholars to do their masters and PhDs. I then went back to Sri Lanka, which is where I'm from and did middle school, high school and college there. I studied architecture and structural engineering of all things. In 1990 in the middle of a war, I turned up in Milwaukee because my family had lived here and had friends here. So I have these host moms, they're friends of my mom and dad's and I turned up in Milwaukee with two suitcases and $20 cash. That's all the government would allow my parents to give me to come here and I didn't fall flat on my face.

Gaurie Rodman: (17:35)
I just did great. I ended up completing my undergraduate in architecture and then did architecture and urban planning. One of the things about me is that I have a really good sense of who I am and what drives me. I'm also, I have a very entrepreneurial spirit. So when I graduated from college and started my first job as an architect, I did a lot of historic preservation work and architectural work, but I also realized that I wanted something more. So I ended up actually investing in buying my own student housing portfolio. So I went from zero to 50 units at about three to four years. And then after that started my own real estate development company with my, this is with my now ex husband. We did, info, sustainable, moderate income housing in partnership. We did the first public green subdivision in the city of Milwaukee. And I also, in order for me to do that, we also, I also joined the Milwaukee school of engineering faculty. So I taught there for 10 years while I was working in consulting, planning, consulting, as well as doing my real estate.

Beth Mace: (18:45)
So that's pretty busy and you have two children. You have some children, we're not going to tell exactly how many. So how do you balance that? I think you and I have talked about, we were talking in prepping for this call and it was really interesting how you figured out how to balance this all in your life.

Gaurie Rodman: (19:01)
So a couple things like again, and this kind of goes to the inclusion and diversity thing, because I also, I firmly believe that... we've been having lots of conversations in direct supply about I N D M R , I and D council. I'm at the women's initiative network. I.

Beth Mace: (19:17)
I and D is...

Gaurie Rodman: (19:18)
Inclusion and diversity. And then also on the women's initiative network, which I led a couple of years ago, and now I'm part of the executive team for direct supply. And one of the things that we also always found about, and I'm a huge proponent of is the notion of authenticity. So when we talk about how I navigated all of the crazy busy life and my children and all of their extracurricular activities, while having my own company I'm working is that I had a really good sense of what are priorities to me.

Gaurie Rodman: (19:49)
You know, once I decided to have children, that was a huge priority to me. At the same time, I had spent a lot of time made a lot of sacrifices to become who I am professionally. And what I also realized is that sometimes when we talk about balance and being like an even keel, everything has too many compromises in that, and I'm not a very compromising person, so no, I'm not... like I expect and demand a lot from everybody including myself. So what I found is is that at times I had to pivot based on what needed me more, whether it was my children, my career, or whatever other thing I was engaged in. And so it was more like a teeter-totter. So at certain times my kids could go on kind of autopilot. Things are good. And then sometimes I had to intervene, same thing with my career. I also leapt, like I never was fearful about leaping off and going to something. So when I ended up at direct supply, for me, the idea that the skill set of architecture planning and having done real estate development, that financial piece of it in a, such a purpose driven industry was just beautiful. And that's why I find so much passion around this industry.

Beth Mace: (21:02)
So, so I would say I had promised our listeners that we'd have like an aha moment. So one of the ones would be the balance. So the idea that you prioritize the different times to be able to do it all well, but you can sort of hyper-focus on something at a given time and sort of leverage that. So I think that's really important. And then also you're in a purpose industry. Right. So that sort of empowers you and sort of reinvigorates you. Can you talk about that a little bit.

Gaurie Rodman: (21:27)
Yeah. and so I do this with my children and with a lot of the women and menI mentor also is the idea of when you find something that you're really passionate about, you find that it's not a job anymore. Right? It's, it's my passion and the job flows out of it. And I think that for all of us, as we navigate all our differences and who we are, it becomes a lot easier when we are very self-aware of what drives us and what's important to us. So to me, I think with I and D with inclusion and diversity, and especially in our industry, right, where we really are not very colorful, that's one way of saying it, right? How do we embrace more people that feel comfortable coming in and not feeling like they're left out? Like, I look at how I do it, and it's because I'm very comfortable in my skin. So it is a little bit intimidating sometimes. I mean, it's intimidating walking into a NIC conference because it's a lot of people that are very homogenous, but if you know who you are and you stand where you are, I think you can navigate all of those pieces.

Beth Mace: (22:30)
So one of my standard questions I ask speakers on the NIC podcasts are what is one way to grow talent in our sector? So let's talk about that for a second. So, based on what you've just said how do we infiltrate that and get more people involved in our sector?

Gaurie Rodman: (22:44)
I think we have to, and I, a couple years ago at Argentum, we had the chief marketing officer, I think for Coca-Cola and now he runs Airbnb talking, and he was talking about how you market an industry. And we don't do a great job marketing our industry. In fact, we took a huge hit obviously last year, but we try to keep talking about, come to us, wear this, wear that, but we don't talk about the heart and soul of it. And he talked about how do you bring Coca-Cola, a sugary drink and make it be about like, be the best life that you can. So I think we have to change the dialogue around what we bring to the marketplace, the value we bring around creating quality of life. And I think when we do that, one of the advantages we have is the next generation of potential staff that we have, or employees that are coming to us are going to be driven by the need for purposeful work.

Gaurie Rodman: (23:38)
If nothing else, senior housing is purposeful work, right? The mundane, if we can take the mundane out by bringing in innovation technology, into our environments, and we give people the opportunity to actually have meaningful relationships with our seniors. I think that begins to attract more people to it. Actually, we were just in Milwaukee, with the UWM and a couple of our other partners, architects and operators, and the university were launching something called the Living WEll Institute. And the idea is how do we infiltrate into colleges and universities and reframe what senior housing and our industry is. We have to start there, that's our employee pool, right.

Beth Mace: (24:20)
So if people wanted to find out more about that, they could look at...

Gaurie Rodman: (24:24)
Living Well Institute in the school of architecture and urban planning at UWM.

Beth Mace: (24:27)
Great. So I want to go back, at the beginning we talked about three statements, two are true, and I think I've given away a few of the hints here, but, is this a true or false that you have three children.

Gaurie Rodman: (24:41)
That's false. I actually have only two boys.

Beth Mace: (24:43)
Okay. True or false. You speak three languages.

Gaurie Rodman: (24:46)
I speak two languages. Ah, okay.

Beth Mace: (24:48)
So now we'll wait for a minute to hear about the other ones. Actually though, let me go to that one. So you talked about having host moms when you came over from Sri Lanka and that helped you when you came over with what twenty-five dollars in your wallet. So how many host moms do you have? Do you have three or four?

Gaurie Rodman: (25:02)
I have three host moms. And these are friends of my mother's, they're all in their eighties and with my mother and these three, I have this kind of tribe of craziest behind me. Right. And so to me, they're kind of my touchstone and they have been a huge part of my life. And part of it is because they're the ones that taught me about being uncompromising about what I need to get out of life, because each of them, including my mother have just lived spectacular lives. So one of them she was married, had children, but really decided, wanted to do stuff with, environment. So the other one humanistic psychologist, the other one, a poet, right. They've always lived this kind of very engaged life.

Beth Mace: (25:47)
So those are big influences in your life. So that's really interesting. So you had your had your own biological family, but you also had these other significant women in your life. That's great. So what do you think was one of the bigger challenges facing our industry? So we talked about talent and then we'd learned about how you were inspired to sort of grow into the woman that you've become. So what would be another industry challenge facing our facing our sector in addition to the labor and the shortages that we've talked about?

Gaurie Rodman: (26:15)
I think the biggest challenge is going to be balancing the economics of our industry, because everything that we talked about, the labor challenges, the added need, the cost of construction, the cost to serve. What we have today, we have to break that process and reassemble it in a way that makes financial sense. And I think that that's going to be a challenge. I think that we are...I'm a little bit afraid that we're slipping back into our norms. I think we were at a place where coming out of 2020, we were ready to embrace transformational change, not incremental change. I think our challenge is that we are, as an industry, we have to start looking at transformational change, how we operate, what the value coming out of that for every component piece of it is, how we look at what we do.

Gaurie Rodman: (27:08)
I think that all has to shift. I don't think we can be everything to everybody. So like, if you look at a senior living community today, they do everything internally within those walls. I think that that has to be turned inside out. We have to have more partnerships. Our residents are going to be more used to having on-call services. How do we accommodate all of that and still add value to the proposition and actually all be viable businesses, right? From our funders that own our buildings, our operators that operate our building to our outside partners and our residents and their families. So I think, I think the challenge is going to be the ability to completely transform ourselves.

Beth Mace: (27:46)
So that's the big challenge. And we've talked a lot about some of the innovative ideas that you at Aptura are putting forth. Is there any single innovative idea that you want to share with our audience that we haven't talked about yet?

Gaurie Rodman: (27:59)
I do think that one of the big innovations is our way of thinking about what we're going to do, not just about a simple technology. I think if we can start looking at innovation from a different lens, starting from what do we do today? Like, again, it's going to that authentic self and what as an operator, as an industry are we doing? And then how do we then start wrapping innovation around every component of it, from the funding to the location, to the building, to the technology in the building to how does the building become a caregiver? What does that mean to operations? So I think innovation, about our internal innovation, we keep wanting the outside world to innovate for us, right?

Gaurie Rodman: (28:51)
Like, let's start innovating inside ourselves. We have a really strong platform as operators, yeoman services. I mean look at what this industry did this last year. Right. Absolutely amazing. Well, let's, let's look at that and own that. Like, I can't tell you how many people I talk to that just don't see their value. It's the same thing. It's always like we have an inferiority complex. We are a little apologetic for being senior housing operators. I'm like, enough of that. Right. And let's start looking at it a lot more strongly and we know what we need to do. And we know where our pinch points are. Let's leverage that to drive innovation from the inside out.

Beth Mace: (29:27)
That's great, thank you. So I do have one more question for you. So in the three statements we've talked about, so we've concluded you have two children, you speak two languages, you have three host moms, plus your mom. Did you actually go on a tour with the Violent Femmes, in concert?

Gaurie Rodman: (29:43)
I did!

Beth Mace: (29:43)
You did! Tell us about that for a minute. That's that's a little bit out of the box.

Gaurie Rodman: (29:47)
Oh yeah. So if anyone knows me, I'm one of those people that if there's an opportunity I jump. Like if anyone says they want to do something crazy, I will find a way to go do it. Second of all, I love food and I love feeding people. So it just so happens in a very random way Violent Femmes started in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a friend of mine bumped into the lead bass guitarist in the band, Brian Ritchie turns out his wife is from Sri Lanka. Of course I had to become her best friend. Turns out our younger sisters went to high school together in Sri Lanka. So instantaneous. And we would just hang out together. And one time they were like, oh, you guys should come on tour with us. And I'm like, sure!

Beth Mace: (30:28)
So where'd you go?

Gaurie Rodman: (30:30)
Well, he was saying go to Kansas. I'm like, I don't think so. So we went to Spain and did four concerts and I get to say I got to live the rockstar lifestyle.

Beth Mace: (30:41)
Wow, that's awesome. That's, that's great. You know, we had Bob Kramer on NIC chats a while ago and he had a little bit of a rockstar influences in his life too. So there you go.

Gaurie Rodman: (30:51)
I think it's a personality thing. Like people that just want to do crazy stuff, that's outside the norm.

Beth Mace: (30:56)
That's great. So thanks so much for taking time today to participate in our NIC chat podcast. And I really appreciate it and I hope our audience enjoyed it. And you know, you're so authentic and real, and you've done such amazing things in your life so far, so continue to do so... so I really appreciate your time.

Gaurie Rodman: (31:16)
Thank you so much Beth and I am all signed up for the fall conference. So I'm very excited to see all my friends in person.

Beth Mace: (31:21)
That sounds great. All right. Thanks very much. Thank you.