Meet Our CSA Spotlight, Carrie Roberts |
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Carrie Roberts, CSA
Universal Senior Living
Life takes some interesting twists and turns, so my journey into wanting to serve seniors has been an interesting one.
When I was 13, I remember my mom getting a frantic phone call from my Tutu (Hawaiian for grandmother). Through breathless, hysterical, frenzied speech she proceeded to tell my mom that my Tutu Kane (Hawaiian for grandfather) had just committed suicide, jumping from the rooftop of their assisted living building to his death eight stories below.
My grandfather had been a very smart, stoic, self-sufficient man who had been slowly losing his battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Obviously no one will ever truly know what was going through his mind on that fateful night, but it’s my belief that in a moment of lucidity, or perhaps insanity, he decided that it was easier for him to take his own life than to lose himself to the disease.
Shock, sadness, grief, confusion, denial, anger, disbelief, helplessness, sorrow, guilt … those were the range of emotions that my grandmother and my mom grappled with for many months after my grandfather’s death. And these are the same range of emotions that millions and millions of families struggle with on a daily basis for a variety of different reasons associated with aging.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen how the enormous emotional strain of a crisis can tear families apart at a time when they most need to come together. Without a plan in place, many seniors and their families will continue to suffer needlessly.
That’s where the idea of creating www.UniversalSeniorLiving.com came in to play.
With 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 every day for the next 20 years and with 83 percent of caregivers being related to the care recipient, I knew that many families would need a “hand to hold” through the aging process. I wanted to help them put a plan into place.
The Universal Senior Living team created a site that is unique in that it integrates a large provider network (currently over 50,000 providers in 20+ industries, all related to senior care needs) with a content-rich Resource Library consisting of over 1,500 articles, videos, and expert advice offerings. This combination creates a powerful resource to captivate and educate users.
We believe we’ve created the first site of its kind aimed at helping seniors and their families navigate and plan for the future by providing a complete, comprehensive, and easy-to-navigate website. Instead of browsing hundreds of other sites and trying to piece together information, or flipping through volumes of print trying to find service providers, we have created a site that centralizes resources for users. Find information on assisted living, applying for Medicare, caregiver stress, or a multitude of other senior-related topics. The site, www.UniversalSeniorLiving.com, now contains massive amounts of information (over 9,000 pages already indexed by Google), yet is designed to be very easy to navigate and is user friendly. The site is a free resource for CSAs, seniors, and their families to use.
Someone recently asked me why, as an online company and not a brick-and-mortar business, did we decide to join SCSA. It’s quite simple really. We fell in love with the SCSA organization from the get-go because we found an organization whose values and beliefs about seniors, service, and ethics mirror our own. And we fell in love with our fellow CSA classmates and peers because in them we have found a group of amazing individuals who are more passionate and committed to seniors and their families and to making a real difference, than anyone else on the planet. It’s an association that we are extremely proud to have.
Because, in addition to being enthusiastic about helping seniors and their families, we are also passionate about helping other small business owners (SCSA’s members in particular) grow their businesses. We are in the process of building a marketing division of Universal Senior Living that will focus exclusively on helping senior service providers get in front of their target markets. It doesn’t help to be an expert at something if people can’t find you!
Whether a senior service business is focused on housing, legal, medical, financial, etc., we can create stunning, high-end (yet affordable), robust, easy-to-use/update websites and can also help businesses “get found” by setting up and managing their local search marketing campaigns – something many small business owners don’t have the time or the inclination to learn or manage on their own. And we will launch the program by focusing our efforts on supporting our peers who are CSAs.
We are currently offering all of our fellow CSAs a free listing in the www.UniversalSeniorLiving.com directory. I encourage CSAs to contact me directly at Carrie.Roberts@usl.com or to use the “Contact Us” form on the site, and I can help set up the free listing.
I would also encourage CSAs to use the www.UniversalSeniorLiving.com site as a resource for their own clients. While CSAs are each experts in their given field, they may not have all of the answers relating to challenges outside their field of expertise, so we can be the resource to help them fill in the gaps.
Our goal for 2012 is to help 10 million seniors and their families. Some people have said that we could never accomplish that in just one year. We say it’s just a start … especially with our CSA comrades at our side.
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