Fortunately, there are many ways – and not just one or two – that we can structure, run, and apply our CAPS business. Using our training, expertise, and experience we can build upon what we have been doing to continue offering the types of services we have become known for, or we can branch off into a new direction. There is plenty of room for various approaches.
The CAPS training provides a framework, a core competency, from which to build a way to deliver our services. Based on any professional training, licenses, or designations we have, apart from our CAPS coursework, we can use this to develop a delivery system for our business model. This includes any background we might have in interior design, architecture, occupational or physical therapy, nursing, construction, durable medical equipment, assistive technology, or other related businesses to what we want to do with our CAPS training.
Helping people stay in their homes as they age is such a rewarding, and yet encompassing, experience. We can structure our approach to involve people in their thirties, essentially just starting out in life – with or without a family they are beginning, and continue on through other stages of life. We can work with mature families with kids in high school or college, empty-nester couples or single parents in their forties and fifties with no children at home or ones there just occasionally, retiree or pre-retiree individuals or couples, and into what traditionally is viewed as senior citizens (a target that is moving upward from the early or mid-sixties to the seventies or eighties). We can choose to work with people at any stage of life, whether they are incurring any physical limitations or not that impact their activities of daily living or their coming and going.
Rather than looking at people and where they are in life and any needs they might have, we can view this secondarily to the structures in which they live. We can target the dwellings and the physical improvements they might require because of their age or method of construction to help them be more serviceable, accessible, and visitable to whomever is occupying them.
Thus, we have two approaches, and a third if they are combined. We can choose to focus on the individual and their particular needs, look at the dwelling space and how it can be improved, or treat both of them as they occur, figuring that the physical requirements of the individuals might be affected or impacted by the physical restraints or parameters of the homes in which they are living.
To begin offering our services, we can design assessment and evaluation services to help pinpoint what type of work needs to be done inside a dwelling to make it more suitable for the inhabitants. That might be the extent of our business, and there certainly is plenty of this type of work that is necessary. It can be done by working with the homeowners directly or by going through a third party such as a referring medical professional, an insurance agent or adjuster, an attorney, a contractor, or a concerned family member. It can be a standalone assessment that informs the homeowner of the status of their home or as a prelude to getting improvements done. We can be involved in working with a contractor to complete those improvements, or the homeowner can get this done on their own, depending on strategic relationships we have established and the urgency of the pending work.
As contractors or handymen, we can actually initiate the improvements. This can be through a referral, through business we find on our own, or from previous clients that we have completed other types of work for in the past.
Regardless of our professional specialty, we can collaborate with other professionals to form a team approach for accomplishing comprehensive improvements for a client that would include a medical needs assessment, an evaluation of the living space, a design component, and construction.
There are so many ways that we can structure and offer our services as CAPS-trained professionals because the need is so great. So people are not going to be interested in doing anything right now – the classic procrastinators – but others will. Regardless of how we structure our offerings and whether we do them on our own or as part of referral network or strategic team, we can keep quite busy.