Hire Your First Director: The Essential 90‑Day Playbook for New Home Care CEOs

Many founders know they need to hire, but not who, when, or how — and hiring wrong costs time, money, and momentum. This episode uses Scott McKenzie’s experience across HCAB’s 531+ licensed agency launches to prescribe a single reproducible hire: the first Operations/Client‑Services Director. You’ll get a one‑page job definition, a structured interview scorecard, realistic compensation bands ($55,000–$85,000 depending on state market and scope), an onboarding budget ($3,000–$6,000) and the four 90‑day KPIs that show whether the hire is working: client intake velocity, private‑pay revenue growth, caregiver fill rate and billing turnaround. Claire maps essential state compliance checkpoints (example: administrator/manager qualification differences in Texas and Ohio) and Sophia covers the founder mindset shifts that make delegation possible. No hype — just the exact decisions HCAB sees separate agencies that scale from those that stall.