Baby Boomers Causing Boom in Medical Staffing

I listened in on the weekly webinar from TempWorks Venture's VP of Sales, Jack Terrana today. The topic of conversation was medical staffing, and with the surge in medical staffing underwritings that have come across my desk as of late, I felt like I would share my two cents with you.

As the number of Americans aged 55 to 64 are continuously increasing--and expected to increase by 40% by 2014, we are seeing a major boom in new staffing agencies getting born to fill the need to take care of our baby boomers. Over the past several years, hospitals have been cutting their staff to bare-minimum levels, but home health care, medicare/medicaid deals, and the need for LPNs, RNs, and CNAs has skyrocketted. I wouldn't doubt that this niche market will start seeing some nice profits, as the demand for nursing staff is expected to be about 29% higher than the supply by 2020.

Now, before you hop on the gravy train and move your focus from light industrial and clerical to medical--or even jump on the bandwagon of creating a new medical staffing agency, there are some questions you need to ask yourself:

• How will I differentiate myself from everyone else who sees this trend? What makes me better than them?
• How will I maintain a healthy profit margin with the increase in competition that this niche market will be experiencing?
• How will I deal with the bureaucracy and red-tape of medicare, medicaid, and Veteran's Affairs contracts?
• Is my staffing software going to support the complexities of healthcare staffing and everything that goes with it?
• How will I pay healthcare professionals a professional wage while waiting for the notoriously slow government to pay me? Do I need payroll funding? Who do I use?
• How will I deal with healthcare accounts where the client is a private party, goes six feet under, and the estate doesn't feel like paying the bill?

If you have some good answers to those questions, medical staffing might be a nice little niche to start looking at. If you don't have about 1000 more questions like that answered on your business plan, then you aren't prepared for the risks, and it might be time to run the other way.

Have you started a medical staffing agency lately or re-focused your business to medical staffing? Let me know how it went for you!

Want more networking opportunities, shoot off an email to Jack Terrana (jack@tempworks.com) to get involved in his weekly webinar.