Pros
There mission to help families who need assistance with their elderly parents is a great mission. I was able to help families and provided the families with great resources for help that I had learned on my own. The communities that worked with in my area were wonderful to work with.
Cons
I left a good job making good money with the hopes of working from home and well prepared to work hard to build my business and prepared to put in 45-50 hours a week not the 60-70 hours that it really took to do this job correctly. Unfortunately this was not enough for this company. Between calling families and the communities you worked with you were to make 500-600 calls a month, on top of going out and trying to build relationships with the communities and trying to get professional referrals. They expected 50% of your business to come from professional referrals. This was impossible to build as the company also controlled how much you were aloud out of the office. They did provide internet leads but out of 160 leads I received a month 70% were people coming to A Place For Mom web site and looking for job opportunities at the communities. Of course when you received this lead the only information you received was the persons name, phone number and email address. You were to spend 10 days trying to reach this person before you could close the lead. What a waste of time. If you did not call on your internet leads within 2-3 hours they were removed from your box. By my 10th month with the company my minimum goal was 5 move ins. This was an easy goal if you were able to build professional referrals. But if you were not allowed out of the office you could not build those referrals and you relied on your internet leads. Also not all moves counted toward your goals. If the family could not afford $1500.00 or more a month to support the cost of an private pay community you really had no communities to refer these families to and therefore they were referred to Council on Aging. If a family could afford these costs then you could help them, but they had to move into a private pay community and not a community that accepted Medicaid. So if you moved a family into a nursing home or a community that accepted Medicaid your move in did not count towards your goals. So in reality they really were not helping all families, I joined this company to help families not be selective on who I was going to help. You did earn a base pay of $10.00 an hour plus commissions providing the family moved into a private pay community. This commission could range from 15% to 47% based on the first months rent. The company also made a percentage on the first months rent as well. However, when you received commission from a private pay move in a percentage of your commission was taken away from you to repay the base salary you were racking up. In order to get out of the hole you would have to average 6-7 move ins per month and this simply was not the case when you were first starting out and especially in this economy. So once your draw balance reached a certain point the company saw no value in keeping you and you were released even though the company did make alot of money on the families you moved into a private pay communities. The company's turn over rate is 70%, what does that tell you?