AEC Living CEO Keeps It All In The Family

Lauren Zimmerman Cook never thought she’d go into the family business, but she owed her parents two years of her time after they paid for her to get a master’s degree.

“I told them I would come back for two years and I would work for them. That was my payment to them for putting me through school,” said Zimmerman Cook, CEO of AEC Living, a group of senior living communities and a Medicare-approved rehabilitation agency in Alameda, California. Soon enough though, she started cherishing the connections with many of the patients she met.

“There was this one woman that I would walk out of my office, and she saw me, she goes, ‘You know, just seeing your smile makes my day better.’ She was 94, in a wheelchair…but that human connection kept me going.”

After the two years were finished, her parents said she could leave, so she didn’t have to stay in a job that essentially required her to be focused 24/7—since this is people’s everyday lives. Zimmerman went off and received her law degree at Tulane, but the human connection made her want to stay at AEC Living in the family business. So along with her brother Stephen Zimmerman, she enrolled in the USC gerontology program, to better understand the social science part of caregiving.

Over time, Zimmerman Cook began training to take over her father’s job as the CEO of the company. She took on a number of responsibilities across the organization, worked on a major project with him to get a hands-on approach at knowledge transfer, and eventually slid into the top spot. The 24/7 aspect doesn’t bother her for two reasons a) she’s patient care and b) there’s not a CEO out there working a regular 9-to-5 job anyway, she notes.

Plus, she doesn’t have to leave her family behind, they are all involved with the company: her brother as chief operating officer, her mom is in charge of the nurses, and her dad acts as a consultant when she needs him. Zimmerman Cook spoke to Chief Executive about the challenges of the healthcare industry, recruiting talent in a competitive landscape, and more. Below are excerpts from the conversation.

Healthcare has been notorious for being a slow industry in terms of innovation. What are some of the ways that AEC Living is trying to buck that trend and be innovative?

It’s a really hard balance for healthcare, right? We’re caring for people, and there’s a lot of that human touch part of what we do at AEC Living. But, the larger we grow, the more we realize that we have to have information at your fingertips wherever you’re at because the people who are making the decisions might not be right at the patient side about the larger decisions. So, we have a system where actually every single caregiver has an electronic device and they record the stuff that they do with the residents. And that way, the nurses can get all that live data to see what’s going on. And that has really helped with our care planning. The caregivers who give care, they are documenting their care on a system which feeds into our medical record system.

It’s the little things too. Traditionally, you sign in to the facilities with a piece of paper. We have gone to an electronic sign in system, which prints tags out. So, for the safety of everybody, people know who’s there. But also [we take] two pictures of the person when they sign in, so that if something happens, we know what people look like who have come into the building. It feeds us data like if someone…if residents aren’t getting any visitors, it can tell us. So, we make sure that we are making sure they are getting more visitors. So, we’re trying to use software and that kind of stuff to increase our ability to give care.

What are the biggest challenges AEC Living faces on a day-to-day basis?

For sure, staffing. There are just not enough people in our industry. Nursing is hard, but we’re actually really lucky. A lot of the nurses have been here a long time. We have other people who have been here a long time…but [hiring] new people is hard. This isn’t really a sexy job. It’s hard to recruit people. I mean, to go Peet’s Coffee or Starbucks, and they have actual ads of like how great it would be to work for them. That’s kind of how the industry has changed just for hiring in general, is that you advertise for your staff just as much as you do for your clients. Being in the Bay Area is part of it, too. You know, we have a really tight [job] market.

The other thing is a caregiver is a really special person. So, it’s not like I can just fill the seat. Someone who handle what we do every day and see how amazing it is, is really a special person. And when you find that person, they stick. Right? But it’s just finding that person. Because, we deal with people at the end of their lives a lot of times or going through transitions. And so, it takes a special person who can understand that what a blessing it can be to…that you’re really providing a great service to somebody. And so, people who thrive on that, on the service side, they really do really well in the business. But you’ve got to find those people. Our staff policy is that every single person in this company is a care giver. So, what I’m looking for when I hire somebody, is that you’re a caregiver. That you understand that what we do is we care for people and their families. Because I can train people to do all different kinds of jobs, but I can’t train you to have that understanding of the importance of caring.

So, it’s even harder. And we have also a whole other layer of really tight government oversight in that we have to get…everybody has to have fingerprint clearance before they can work with us. They have to have 40 hours of education before they can be on the floor with the residents. So, we have a really high entry point as well. Like, it costs a lot of money— every single employee that I hire because I got 40 hours of training with them, plus those fingerprints.

What advice do you have for your fellow CEOs?

The biggest lesson I learned was…and it was actually like something that I learned because someone said it to me. And they said, “Your job has turned from doing the day-to-day work to really being the visionary.” Right? And sharing that vision with the employees and with the community. And that was really a hard thing because I love to be at my computer and do [accounting work] and that kind of thing. [I had to realize] how my staff and how the community sees me is not as the worker that I used to be. That it’s really important that I have that background but that I had to let a lot of that go in order to do my job well. And my job is to have that vision and teach my managers to do their job because I can’t…we are continuing to grow. I can’t [lead that growth] if I’m doing the day-to-day work. It was a really big thing for me. It’s like my job is really to teach others what it means to be in our business. To teach them a culture of what we want this business to be.

I think the inspiration is a really big part of our job, as a CEO. You have to set the culture for your company. I spend a lot of time setting what I think our culture is and then living by that culture. So, I have set these four pillars of what I think our business is about and then I have to make sure that I’m living by those four pillars. As a CEO, you have to practice what you preach.

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