Brandon Ribar is the CEO of Sonida Senior Living, one of the nation’s largest senior living providers. Ribar has been in senior living for over 20 years and was instrumental in planning Sonida’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ribar strives to improve his communities while also providing quality care to residents.
In this changemakers interview, Ribar reveals his growth strategies for Sonida, how he values diversity, and how he employs feedback from his employees and residents.
How have you changed as a leader since starting in the senior housing industry?
It has been more than 20 years now since I’ve been in the senior living industry. When I was younger, I was more on the investment side of the world. I thought of the senior living industry more in terms of the demographics or what investors see as appealing about the industry.
As my career has developed, and especially in the last 15 years when I’ve been more on the people side of the world, I recognized that the entire industry, success, and positive outcomes for residents are based on the people that run the communities. It is truly a very operationally intensive business, and that success or the lack thereof in this is all driven by how well you get people in the communities to make a difference in lives and with employees. My mindset and my approach definitely shifted from a little bit more of an objective or a technical view to the fact that you only achieve great things with incredible people in your company.
We at Senior Housing News think of you as a changemaker, but do you see yourself that way, and are you always excited to drive change?
I am. I love change, but I don’t like change for change’s sake. I like thinking about the why around what it is that we’re trying to achieve. I also make sure I’m okay with feeling uncomfortable. When companies and organizations get comfortable or complacent, they don’t push as hard. They don’t think about what they can be or what they can provide for their customers.
I think you don’t change for change’s sake, but you continue to evolve, and you never get comfortable.
In what ways do you think that you’re a changemaker?
I put culture first and believe that Sonida is going to be successful only based on whether or not we have the best people working with us at Sonida. I continuously push not only the industry, but our company to bring people into the industry and to elevate people from within who really want to push hard to deliver that change.
Where I’ve really pushed hard for change is in the types of people that we surround ourselves with, but also how hard we push to be something that’s special and differentiated in senior living. That’s what I love to bring to the discussions that we have and to not accept that what we do today is anywhere near good enough. We have to be better and better every day.
Could you talk about a change that you’ve made in the senior living area and why you made that change?
Earlier in my career, I had times and examples where I thought that technology was the difference maker in some form or fashion of operations. I didn’t take the time to understand how it was going to impact our field leadership.
I always think about and work with the teams that are really delivering the care and services to our residents when we’re thinking about using all these interesting and modern ways to run our business and bringing those into the company. If you’re going to make change and if you have a vision around building something that is special and differentiated, you can’t get ahead of yourself. You need to make sure that the people that are using it love it, and then ultimately that they want it to be successful.
What are some ways that you think that senior living needs to change in the next five years?
The big ones are how quickly we can get our message into the minds of our customers and their loved ones. How do we continue to use all the capabilities of technology to share all the interesting and exciting experiences that people have in senior living at an earlier stage?Senior living has forever had a reputational challenge, which is that people don’t understand it very well and they wait a long time to learn more about it.
We as an industry over the next five years have to continue to share our great stories so that there’s less convincing around making that decision to use senior living services. The other incredibly important place that we need to change is how we run our business in terms of labor and how we create stability in our workforces and ensure that people want to come and work in senior living.
As you look across the rest of the senior living industry, do you think it’s changing fast enough to keep up with the times?
No, I don’t. One of the reasons behind that is that industries and companies that have massive amounts of resources, they throw billions of dollars into how they’re going to serve the needs of people as they get older. We don’t have those levels of resources. We have to be even more aggressive on how we adjust to the changing demands of our consumers and the changing expectations of our workforce and our employees.
We have to thoughtfully take risks around the changing of our operating model and how we get information to our residents. We have to be more thoughtful in pushing hard to be a little bit different than we have been today. Not thinking of ourselves as necessarily just a senior living apartment, but truly an experience that people want to be a part of.
Can you talk about a time when you try to execute a change and things didn’t go according to plan? How did you pivot and what did you learn as a leader?
I’ll go back to making decisions that I fundamentally believe were good ones but skipping the step of ensuring that the people that were really responsible for the day-to-day execution were involved in that development. I pivoted by immediately ensuring that it had nothing to do with me being the generator of the idea.
It was really their idea. I was simply a conduit that brought to them options to think about. When people really feel like it’s their idea and their model that’s changing, then they will go full speed ahead. They’ll be excited about it.
Changemakers tend to be risk takers. Do you agree with that statement? How do you describe your own appetite for risk?
I think that is a correct statement. Anytime you’re bringing new things into the fold and anytime that you have to move quickly, there’s a degree of risk that something won’t work the way you think it’s going to work. The old adage of failing first is something that I think a lot of changemakers have to be good at because not all the things that we’re going to try are going to be effective.
You have to manage your risk by understanding who’s going to be impacted and ensuring that they are really bought into what’s changing.
Can you talk about how you see the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the industry and what you’re doing to drive change in this regard?
We have an incredibly high percentage of our employee base who come from diverse backgrounds. We have people from all countries. We have folks of all different ages and backgrounds that comprise the majority of our workforce. Creating and offering them specific programs where they can connect with others that have similar backgrounds and share their voices is really important to us.
Creating mechanisms to bring people together that are from diverse backgrounds is a really great way to help people feel comfortable, whether it’s for our team members, our employees, or our residents.
Every time we have the opportunity to bring diversity, not just in demographics, but also diversity of thought into the company is really important because not only do you need diverse backgrounds, but you need people with diverse opinions and perspectives on how to be successful and build a great team. That’s what builds a culture that we’re all really proud of.
Use a movie, book, or TV show title to describe the year ahead for the senior living industry in 2024.
“Moneyball.” It is all about how you have to recognize when you are under-resourced as an industry. As I mentioned, we’re going up against other very large players that are getting into the senior space. We’ve got to be agile. We’ve got to think differently. That movie was all about taking a totally different approach as opposed to just relying on what you knew and what you were comfortable with.
Choose one artist, scientist, thinker, entrepreneur, or other person living or dead to help change the senior living industry for the better. In only a few words, who are you choosing and why?
Steve Jobs is somebody who saw beyond what people thought that they needed, and he created products and services that people gravitated to because they were something they hadn’t thought about. That level of innovator who just has an ability to understand the customer and to develop things beyond what the customer thinks they need, that is senior living.
Another person is Taylor Swift. If Taylor Swift did her concerts and her songs from senior living communities and told people about how cool of an experience it was with residents and sang all day about senior living, we’d get pretty good exposure and build our reputation that way. Jobs innovates, and then Swift’s going to sell it for us.