Changemakers: Tim Gary, CEO, Galerie Living

Tim Gary is the CEO of Galerie Living.

Gary began his first senior living project nearly 30 years ago in 1996. Since then, he has continued to innovate. While Gary has his eye on growth and revenue, his main goal is to provide top care to residents and make sure his staff are satisfied with the work they do.

In this Changemakers interview, Gary discusses how Galerie looks to offer a different kind of lifestyle in its senior living communities, his plans for catering to the demand of the incoming boomer generation and the significance of communication, both internally and externally. 

From where you are now and looking back at your career, how do you think you’ve changed as a leader?

Over the years I’ve become more confident in what I’m hearing from the customer and interpreting what the customer’s asking for and converting that into a product that they want or need. There’s this tough balance of understanding needs and wants in our industry, but gaining the confidence of listening to a customer and then being able to interpret that into the right product is very important.

Do you see yourself as being a changemaker? Are you always excited to drive change?

I thrive off of change. That’s what motivates me every day to go do this. If I was just building another product tomorrow that was the same as the product yesterday, it would get boring pretty quick for me. I enjoy the creative side along with the need-based side and really understanding what improves lifestyle for people.

In what areas do you think you are a change maker?

I’ve started viewing senior housing as a lifestyle versus senior living. Once you gain the perspective that you’re creating a lifestyle for a customer, you’re shifting your whole perspective. Experiential architecture, understanding neuroarchitecture, and combining these things to create environments and spaces. A lot of people stop at just one space, but we look at a space within a space.

It’s constantly pushing the envelope, not settling. You can’t just build a building for one personality. We’ve created one or two new unit-type configurations that have been very successful. Most of it’s been around the lifestyle components of a community.

With that emphasis on lifestyle in mind, do you want to talk about the reason behind you wanting to make those changes?

Initially, what I saw is there’s a whole group of seniors out there who just don’t consider a senior living community. The reason we saw this was just that there weren’t enough lifestyle spaces built into the communities. This led to bad first impressions. First impressions are everything to us.

We weren’t paying attention to first impressions of seniors coming into a new lifestyle. Understanding and first impressions aren’t just pretty buildings. They’re also active spaces. They’re energized spaces. We build a beautiful product, but the beautiful product doesn’t get its full beauty until the people are in it. Once you get the people in it and you energize them with the right environment, you get smiles on their faces. That’s another component of what makes the lifestyle what it should be.

What are some ways you think the industry needs to change in the next five years?

The reason people step into our industry is because they have a healthcare need. We’ve gotten better at putting that in the background so that it doesn’t affect someone’s dignity, and instead, pulling the lifestyle component forward. The future of lifestyle components is more common space and larger campuses.

The other thing is we’ve got to embed ourselves into the healthcare systems. We need to start viewing ourselves as a life healthcare system. The idea of us being real estate is bogus. We are part of that healthcare system. Working closer with the hospitals, the doctor groups, the rehabs, and really tying all that together with technology comes down to this.

You can have all the gadgets and widgets you want in the world, but if you don’t communicate the information, it’s not worth anything. That’s what we’ve got to do.

People in our industry don’t get mad about the news because a lot of news is not great, but what they do get upset about is no news. No information is what upsets them.

When you look across the rest of the industry, do you think that the industry is changing fast enough to keep up with current demand?

Operators are working hard to make changes inside of their assets and to improve quality of life inside of their communities. Technology is one of the things that they’re desperately waiting on. I’m pouring tons of money into building our Fin platform, which helps reduce the employee turnover rate and create more efficiencies.

Now, when it comes down to building products, I don’t think we’re making changes in the type of products that we’re building. We got to build different products. There’s 36 million or more seniors out there that need some kind of service.

Could you talk about a specific time where you tried to execute a change and things didn’t necessarily go according to plan, and how you pivoted and what you learned from the process as a leader?

Our objective is to build products that are a four-season type product. The first thing I did was hire a four-seasons general manager to come run the property. Then I hired an executive director under the general manager. I thought the general manager could manage hospitality and the executive would manage the care component.

What really blew up in my face is that a general manager from the hotel world is used to having a customer for three days. If they got an unhappy customer, comp them $1000, get rid of them, and move on. That’s not how our industry works. To try to bring someone from that environment into our environment, where it’s 365 days out of the year; it’s for people to make that jump from industry to industry.

Changemakers tend to be risk-takers. Do you agree with that statement and how would you describe your own appetite for taking risks?

I don’t agree with that statement. I think changemakers are very calculating. We’re probably calculating something 10 times versus the standard process of somebody calculating something two or three times. The reason we’re calculating it so many times is we are making value-based decisions of the smallest detail that you can possibly imagine. Changemakers have a good sense of knowing what matters and what doesn’t matter when it comes down to those little things.

Honestly, I think changemakers, we view ourselves as less risky because we feel like we have put thought into way more details. We feel like we’ve run the numbers way more times, and we feel like we have a better pulse on just who that customer is.

It’s a challenge to meet that demand because it’s a pretty high standard.

What are some changes that you believe should be brought to the industry in terms of DEI?

A lot of it starts in the interview process. I look at applicants’ personalities because I want people in roles that they’re happy in because then they stay in those roles. Then when you get the right teams together, we’ve created a Galerie University.

You’ve got to sit there and spend more time training employees how to approach people, how to talk to people, how to ask people questions, how to interact with your co-workers. Those are just basic fundamentals that we don’t feel like we have enough time for, but if we don’t, it costs us culture, dollars, and the ability to grow.

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, since he hyper focused on customer needs.