Dushyanth Biyyala never expected to work in senior living while studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I was in the undergrad business school program at Kenan-Flagler, and it was all finance, all day,” he says. “Actually, my first job out of Carolina was investment banking.”
But after three years, Biyyala tired of spending his days at a desk staring at Excel spreadsheets. More than that, as someone working in corporate M&A and capital raising, he felt a bit removed from the tangible impact of his work. “When you're in high-level finance, everything is just numbers on a spreadsheet. You do the deal at such a high level, but that has impacts and ripple effects all the way to the ground,” he says. “It's easy to find synergies in combining two companies or acquiring a property in Excel, but in practice what that typically meant was people got let go.”
So, Biyyala took a job at the Maxwell Group in Charlotte, North Carolina, and began helping to manage 15 senior living communities with over 3,200 units. Rather than just moving numbers on spreadsheets all day, he walked through the communities, speaking with community leadership, caregivers, residents, and their families to understand the best ways to make the communities thrive. There were still difficult financial decisions to make as an operator, but he made sure to be an active leader, always valuing hands-on experience. “When you're working at an operating company and you're in the weeds, you're seeing the impacts of everyone's care. Once you're actually there and you physically see it, you understand why someone may be asking for another employee to be on a certain shift or why we need to increase the food PRD for this upcoming year,” he says. “It makes things so much more real.”
More than that, the work felt important. That made each day’s work meaningful for Biyyala. “Seniors housing is very much a people business,” he says. “It's not just analytical decisions you're making around staff and residents; it's people's loved ones that you're caring for.”
After a little over five years at the Maxwell Group, Biyyala caught wind of an innovative startup in the space called Sage. He’d just moved out to Brooklyn with his wife and saw that their HQ was just a few subway stops away. So, he reached out to Sage CEO and Cofounder Raj Mehra and Mehra invited him out for coffee. Quickly, it became clear that Biyyala’s deep expertise in senior living operations would be a valuable addition to the Sage team. “Personally, I was a bit hesitant to be in a more sales role, but I actually don't even see it as sales,” Biyyala says. “I see it more as coming in and consulting on issues that I have experienced myself. I want to help my peers understand what's going on and show why I think the solution we have can help solve some of their pain points.” He chose to join Sage because it was the tool he wished he had while managing his 15 communities at Maxwell Group.
So, why is Biyyala so bullish on Sage? What made him leave a job he loved to join an upstart company? First, he tells me how game-changing Sage can be by tracking and actualizing unplanned care events, like helping residents with ADLs such as using the bathroom, basic housekeeping items like making beds, or even just finding misplaced items such as a remote. “These seemingly basic actions have never been documented well, but it's these unplanned care events that are typically the biggest determinants of someone's health changing,” he says. “We're trying to help operators identify that early on and in real-time, and then make sure that that resident is in the right care setting and getting the appropriate care they need.”
The other thing that’s so exciting for Biyyala is being able to share a tool he, as an operator, wished he’d had. “On the operational finance side, we now have good, reliable data around who on shift is actually picking up the most alerts, and what's their average claim time,” he says. For operators, the challenge of ascertaining which caregivers were most valuable through anecdotal conversations now has an analytic measure. “Now we have a way to actually identify and make sure those that are doing the best work are being recognized for it. Because in today's environment, when the labor pool is so tough, it's mission critical to ensure you retain your best staff members.”
Biyyala has thought deeply about the future of caregiving. To his mind, the new demographic moving into senior living will demand high-tech solutions like Sage to be present in their communities — aka their new homes. Communities built in the 90s and 2000s were designed for the Greatest Generation; Boomers, who’ve lived for years with smartphones, and their children who were raised on the internet, will choose a community equipped with modern technology. “To stay relevant in the future, senior living communities really need to get in tune with the latest technologies; just changing the carpet color or adding a rec room is not going to appease the new consumer,” he says. “What's going to resonate with the new consumer is technologically savvy communities. As a family member, when I put my loved one in this community, am I putting them in a place where I know I'll be connected to them?”
He tells operators that Sage should be a selling point for their community. If he was still managing his 15 communities, he’d tell family members: “You should find confidence in moving your loved one here, because we're going to be delivering care empowered by the latest technology. We’ll keep track of every care event, planned and unplanned, and we'll be able to be very transparent with you about their health and their changing needs.”
For the last 10 months, Biyyala has worked to help spread the word about Sage, the next-gen senior living operations tool. And, of course, he knows the difference it can make for operators — he was one.
