Case Study
How Garcia Services cut its weekly administrative hours by 20%, leveraging time to attract new clients and deliver care
About Garcia Services, LLC
Garcia Services, LLC started providing services to its first client in March 2023. It has grown to serving 15 Twin Cities-based clients with a focus on delivering housing consultation, transition, and stabilization committed to serving its clients with integrity, empathy, and dignity.
Challenge
After working for other home and community-based services (HCBS) agencies, Lisa Garcia, CEO and founder of Garcia Services, LLC, knew she was ready to strike out on her own, tapping into her passions for recovery, people and numbers.
“I didn’t like how they were working with their clients. And I thought why wouldn’t I do this for myself?
She knew she needed an easy-to-use, fully integrated and all-in-one platform for managing her agency billing, compliance, client documentation and operations.
She also knew she needed superior customer support and an affordable plan that would grow with her as her client base grew.
Garcia had previously used two other HCBS operations and billing platforms, but they were not user friendly or affordable. Before Pavillio, a common practice was to use Google Documents to track billing and service agreement details then manually submit billing, which was highly manual and required hours of time.
The other platforms also lacked the customer service she knew she needed to quickly resolve issues to streamline billing to the Minnesota Department of Human Services and Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) without disruptions to serving clients.
Solution
Garcia spoke with other Minnesota-based community services agencies and conducted extensive online research.
She turned to Pavillio, liked what she saw for its ease-of-use, pricing and support, and signed up for the Free Plan for Start Ups to get started.
Garcia said she loves that Pavillio is Minnesota based and that the Support team has been instrumental in helping her – quickly. Especially with the new in-Pavillio Support request feature, it is now even faster and easier to get help.
“Most of my days are spent taking care of clients, so I will do my administrative and operational work, like billing at night,” said Garcia. “Often, I will submit a Support request directly in Pavillio and then have an answer to my questions first thing in the morning.”
Garcia also appreciates and uses the direct faxing feature – something other platforms lack.
“I think I made every mistake you could make,” said Garcia. “I worked in inventory control and then customer service before recovery so I’m okay with making mistakes. I just need to know how to fix them.”
Garcia sees it is her time to make a difference.
“Surround yourself with the people who do things like you like do and everything falls into place as it should, just like the support I get from Pavillio.”
What advice would Garcia offer to other agency founders in the process of starting up or looking to grow with adding more clients?
1. Every conversation is a meaningful one – someone else may need that information you are passing along.
2. Be true to your word – people can read the truth pretty easily so honor your word even if you have to say no. Be honest. People will appreciate it.
3. Every failure is a learning – I’ve made every mistake possible from DHS to Pavillio to MCOs, but every mistake is a learning opportunity.
“I would want them to know Pavillio gives you a chance to see them for who they are. When they offer you the platform at no charge for the first five clients, you get a chance to really test drive it, which also helps you think about how you need to manage your operations to enable you to focus on caring for clients,” said Garcia.