Kisco Senior Living has added over 1,000 units to its senior living portfolio since 2023. With more growth on the horizon, the company has turned its focus to improving staffing and other operational aspects.
In 2025, Carlsbad, California-based Kisco is focused on improving its leadership hiring efforts while bringing “consistency” to its dining program, according to CEO Andy Kohlberg. All the while, the company is layering in technology to support staff.
Now at 32 communities in 10 states, Kisco’s portfolio has grown to over 6,000 units with 3,061 employees. Half of the company’s portfolio is made up of independent living and the other half assisted living and memory care.
The company has added new communities to its portfolio while also completing ground-up development in limited instances. The operator recently opened new communities in Washington, D.C., Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Boston while expanding and renovating other properties. In 2023, Kisco finalized the acquisition of the Balfour Senior Living portfolio of communities in Denver, Colorado.
To improve operations, Kisco is focused on strengthening its dining and care delivery operations while also attempting to reduce turnover through increased employee training.
“Our number one strategic objective for this year is hiring top talent, and we’re focused on the hiring process and retaining talent while improving onboarding and training,” Kohlberg told SHN. “We’re beefing up our training.”
Staffing ‘biggest driver’ in care delivery, resident satisfaction
Senior living operators in recent years have faced stiff competition for top talent, especially in search of licensed care staff. These competitive conditions have led Kisco to introduce new training opportunities for existing staff while refining recruitment and hiring efforts to ensure the right candidates are hired.
“When a community has high associate turnover, it’s very hard to have any sort of consistency in quality of care,” Kohlberg said.
Kohlberg sees an opportunity to improve the company’s ecosystem of technology platforms for existing staff, specifically through layering in artificial intelligence (AI) to the company’s proprietary applications for dining, care delivery, and back-end support for operations teams.
“We’re looking at ways to automate key processes and remove some of the data entry burden on caregivers so they can spend more time with residents,” Kohlberg said. “The future is embedding AI in those apps and trying to automate workflows that really deliver our whole service package.”
This has led Kisco to focus on the executive director leadership position, and the company has a deep bench of “long-tenured” EDs. The current challenge is hiring talented and experienced community leaders.
“It’s hard for a care services director to be successful if they’ve never worked in senior living before. It’s a tough transition; even bringing someone in from nursing or a hospital setting can be challenging. It all starts with the executive director, but hiring top talent is always the hardest part, especially for key management roles,” Kohlberg said.
Kisco is also grappling with hiring shortages for licensed care staff in some markets. Northern California poses the toughest challenge for cultivating top clinical talent, Kohlberg added. In contrast, it’s easier to attract talent on the sales side, thanks to a “wider net to cast” when hiring sales directors from outside the senior living industry.
Dining program ‘consistency’
As the appetites and dining habits of senior living residents continue to change, senior living providers have worked to improve their culinary programs to meet a diverse range of dietary and lifestyle-driven preferences.
Kisco has identified areas of its dining program that can be standardized across its portfolio, while still allowing culinary directors creativity in designing localized menu options, Kohlberg said.
Past resident complaints centered on inconsistency of food and services, which drove the company to revamp menu development, purchasing, and quality control to bring uniformity across all communities.
Across its 32 communities, Kisco dining teams oversee 78 dining locations, all of them branded with distinct menu offerings, with some communities having four venues spanning bistros, pubs, and traditional dining areas.
“We’ve done a good job in reorienting the resident view of dining, and it’s similar to how resorts have multiple dining venues, each with a different name and experience,” Kohlberg said. “We’re working on the purchasing side to control food costs while improving quality control to deliver a more consistent product.”
Inside Kisco’s recent growth
Fueling Kisco’s need for evolution are its plans to continue growing.
Kisco recently opened The Carnegie at Washingtonian, a new 300-unit community in Gaithersburg, Maryland, along with a planned expansion at The Cardinal at North Hills in Raleigh, North Carolina, which will bring the community’s total size to 416 units. The company’s D.C.-area community, The Fitzgerald, opened earlier this year, along with The Newbury, a community in Brookline, Massachusetts.
The company is also expanding its Sandy, Utah, community with 30 new cottages—the largest cottage expansion in its history. Kisco has its sights set on growing in the D.C. market, adding three communities in the area, while also exploring opportunities to expand in Denver.
“We’re looking at trying to do cluster markets and grow, so we’ve always been focused on responsible growth,” Kohlberg said. “Our plan is to densify in the markets that we’re in, and we see North Carolina, D.C., Boston, Colorado, and California as key markets for us.”
Kisco has added 15- to 20-unit memory care additions at multiple communities depending on local market demand for higher-acuity services. Select communities are “becoming much more care-driven,” Kohlberg noted.
Residents are seeking to stay in independent living as long as possible before transitioning to assisted living or memory care. Some Kisco communities are seeing an influx of couples, with up to 40% of new move-ins at newly built communities being couples.
This reflects the company’s philosophy in community design, with larger units and multiple dining venues appealing to a “much more active” older adult profile.
In care delivery, Kisco has improved its assessment process and empowered staff to identify residents who may need to transition to higher-acuity care, Kohlberg added.
All of these efforts are in service of positioning Kisco as an operator bound by “heart-led hospitality” that fuses lifestyle and care services.
“We’re trying to fuse the two in our operating models, and we have a new branding campaign with a new website coming out soon that talks about boutique hospitality, heart-led service, and all those things that we’re trying to do a little bit differently,” Kohlberg said.
With Kisco’s three brands—its lifestyle brand, the Balfour banner in Colorado, and Signature, an upscale luxury brand—Kohlberg sees an opportunity to create “bespoke hospitality” experiences for residents. This includes customized services and expanded life enrichment programming to attract the incoming baby boomer generation.
For example, adding tech concierge positions has proven popular with residents, easing their transition into new units.
While supply and demand demographics are the strongest they’ve been in 35 years, Kohlberg is mindful of the risk of stagflation—a combination of high inflation, slow economic growth, and high unemployment.
“It could be challenging if recession and high interest rates occur together,” Kohlberg said. “In this business, brand and trust come from consistently delivering on the promise of high-quality service. Unlike hotels, customers cannot simply walk away the next day, making execution far more critical than just marketing.”
