Caring Transitions South Bay, with Heather Baker

0:01 Welcome to the Executorium podcast. I'm Bill Gross, your host. We get together every week and meet with various vendors available to help executors be more effective, productive, successful in the process to service the transitions and the assets. One of the things that comes with the process most commonly is stuff. Stuff that has to be removed, stuff that has to be sold, stuff that has to be dealt with. And then there's also, you know, other aspects related to this estate sale that anybody like me as professional gets involved with. And Caring Transitions is one that gets in a little deeper. Really excited to have today the proprietor of Caring Transitions in South Bay of Los Angeles County, Heather Baker. Heather, thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much, Bill. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. And I know you co-own this with your husband, Tim. How did you guys get into this business? Well, he was an inventor. He'd been an inventor for an importing company for about 27 years. And I had been a professional organizer. And as we aged, so did our parents. And we got a call one day from my mom saying she couldn't do it anymore. She had fallen down on the bus and gotten a breast cancer diagnosis in the same week. She had been the caregiver for my dad for about 10 years and she just couldn't do it anymore. So, we knew we had to move her to we actually have an ADU. We knew we planned to move them in there, but they weren't necessarily willing to go immediately. And when this happened, they suddenly became willing to come.

1:37 And we began the process of moving them from Leisure World in Orange County to basically Torrance. And my parents were hoarders. it took us six months going down there every weekend, eight hours a day, Monday and f, Saturday and Sunday, sometimes dragging one of our daughters to go through their stuff, decide what would fit in the ADU and get them moved into the ADU. And all the time we were think, we wish we could find somebody that would help us. We would pay thousands of dollars at this point because we were working full-time, raising two kids and exhausted and still had to do this. And there was nobody to be found. We couldn't find anyone to do this. So, a few years into their residency with us, Tim lost his job as an as a inventor and he started looking at franchises and he took a test on I think it's Entrepreneur magazine about which franchise would fit you and Caring Transitions was the first one on his list after he completed the test. And we looked at it, we said, "We have these skills. We know the needs there, right? We know what this does to families. Let's try it, right? And so, Caring Transition trains you very thoroughly and then you pass the certification and they keep we still are in contact with a coach every month to make sure we're on track. They're monitoring our financials to make sure we're not doing anything underhanded.

3:17 And it's just been a really good opportunity for us and also to know that we're really actually helping people. Nice. Well, let's do this just real quick. Kind of some housekeeping. This is the Executorium podcast. We get together every week and talk with vendors like Heather to help executors in the process. if you go to Executorium.com is the website and there's four key features there. There's the list of service providers. There is the government resources where you get documents and such and then some great information to learn articles and learning as well. If you click on the browse on the directory of the estates it will prompt you by county. If you put LA County and just put show you have all these different vendors that might be of assistance to you and one here is caring transitions and if you click on that it brings up their information. and they're located in the South Bay. And so this is a great resource for executors who wish to get services like Heather was in position. Who do I who's going to help me with this? here's a way of where to find out. So that said, you do offer a number of different services. I know when I go to your website, even within the kind of the physical space area, you offer relocation, downsizing, decluttering, estate sales, and home cleanups. Talk a little bit about what's the main problem when people call you. Obviously, there's a problem of some sort. What's the main problem they call you with and looking for help on?

4:43 Most of the time, in the South Bay, it has been is they want an estate sale or an auction. Someone has passed. the family comes in from wherever they have moved to because they find the cost of living here a little high. They come home, they look at mom's house, dad's house, and say, "Oh my god, I cannot do this by myself." Right. And they call us to sell things, to clean it out, get it ready for the Realtor®, make it so the Realtor® can come in, take their pictures, do their staging, repairs, whatever they need to do. And that that's our main thing that we're called for most frequently. But the company actually started moving seniors into assisted living or memory care facilities for families that didn't have time to do it for themselves or didn't have the capacity to do it for themselves. So before there's a need but somebody's out of the property is we get involved with the property but sometimes people call you hey mom get ready to move mom we're not sure where to go. you and you're able through a network. I think that's the key thing is caring transitions has a number of professionals. I think you have like a couple hundred franchises around the country about 380 right now.

6:03 Yeah. And that's the other thing is a lot of people operate in this space. One thing about Caring Transitions, I've worked with several different in different locations is they're they're franchise, which I think means to me as consumer, there's certain standards they set. Just like you can go to any hamburger place and get a hamburger and fries and McDonald's, you're going to you know what you're going to get. Now, you may not want McDonald's, you may want something different. You can go elsewhere, but if you want McDonald's burger, it's going to be pretty much the same wherever you go. I think Caring Transitions does a real good job of keeping people to those levels. Talk a little bit about the professional standards. You mentioned you have coaching. What else do they require you to do or do they encourage you to do as standards in your business that might not if you were not involved with such an organization? Well, all of our employees are W-2s. We do not Let's stop there just one second. I think that's really overlooked that when you say that you don't just hire somebody and start paying them W2. You also have to put them through a payroll service and there's paperwork and there's training of some sort. There's Right. So talk about what's the difference when you hire W2 for you versus if you just to hire somebody by the hour. Well, our first stop is to give after the interview and we decide we like them, we do a background check and they know what's coming. they check for all kinds of things. We want to make sure that when we bring someone into your home or your client's home that they're not going to start pilfering stuff. They're not going to take pictures of possibly embarrassing stuff and post it on the internet. We want to make sure these are good quality people that you're going to feel safe with having handle your things or your parents' things. we also we do ongoing training wi with each individual. we train to gentle giant packing standards. so if we are packing for a move across country, you know that it's packed well enough that it will make it across the country.

8:00 Nice. we are CRTS certified, which is certified relocation and transition specialist. This is a category that is trains you how to relocate and transition as specifically a senior but also how to do things in an effective manner. How to set things up when you set up the new home so that there's if they need a wheelchair, there's going to be enough room between the furniture that the wheelchair will actually fit. things of that nature, right? very nice. Yeah, I think that's the thing and I'm not sure you even know the difference because I deal with the difference sometimes which is professional standards. It's not any one big thing. It's a lot of little things that are required when you work with an organization like Caring Transitions that they require of your business. So, now is your business primarily coming to you through consumer referral? Is it coming to you through business referrals or is it through like a network Caring Transitions? Is that the major source of your business? How does describe a little bit about where your business comes from? about 50% of our business comes from referral partners. like businesses usually Realtors®, estate attorneys, fiduciaries, senior living communities, people that work with seniors and they've people have actually heard of them so they go to them for the help that they need. But these people also know if you go to say an elder law attorney, they may know you need an estate sale or an online auction, but they're not going to be the ones to do it for you. They specialize in knowing who's going to do what and help them get your job done.

9:54 That's why you want professionals with a rolodex, right? And that's me. I'm not the person the caring transition. I work hard at being as I can be. But I do know there are people who do this stuff professionally and if you're gonna refer to somebody, my reputation is on the line. I want to go to somebody who's professional. Executorium is a collection of those kind of people and Heather Baker and Caring Transitions is one of those one of the people listed on the Executorium directory. So Heather really appreciate the site overview. Now if somebody's interested in talking to you Oops, I think we lost your camera there. Did I do that? I don't think so. I don't Oh, there audio. So, if somebody wanted to call, I know in the website we have down below Caring Transitions SBPV, South Bay, I imagine, would be a way to remember that. Caring Transitions South Bay. In the top right, I noticed there is a phone number somebody can call for some sort of console up front if they have questions as to what to do. That would be the place to go to. Yes, that number in the upper right hand corner. will get you to that's the good place for people to start. Okay. And my logo here is black. If you're looking for Yeah. So [phone number] is the number that's on top.

11:12 I'm sorry. Go ahead. Right. And if you're a referral partner, you can call my cell phone which is the number listed in the blue stripe. Oh, there you go. So referral partners, real estate agents and attorneys, people professionals and want to kind of maybe vet the information themselves personally, that's the number to call that's on the blue stripe down below. Heather, thank you so much for supporting Executorium. Thank you so much for your service in the business. I really appreciate the chance to meet with you today. Thank you, Bill. I truly appreciate it. And for the rest of you, this is the Executorium podcast. We do this every week. We introduce ourselves and talk to various vendors that help in this space for executors. and today it was a company that focuses on getting rid of the material in the property. but we also deal with estate planning attorneys, litigation attorneys, junk movers and such. So go on the podcast, you'll get more information, more opportunities to learn about how to be more effective. Executorium.com is the Executorium website. Love to have you there. As always, if I can help in any way, put a comment below, thumbs up, like this, subscribe, and as always, make today your