North Carolina · Residential care, assisted living & memory care
I’m asking care operators what’s actually breaking the business.
I’m a software engineer spending this year listening to owners and administrators of care homes across North Carolina — trying to understand where the time and the money really go before I build anything.
There is no product here yet, and nothing to sell you. Just a 30-minute conversation, and a share of everything I learn from every other operator.
Phone or video, whenever suits your day — including early mornings and after hours.
What I’m asking for, exactly
Thirty minutes
One conversation about how your last year actually went. No preparation, no paperwork, nothing to fill out beforehand.
No demo, no pitch
I’m early enough that I genuinely don’t know what should be built. Hearing that an idea is wrong is worth as much to me as hearing it’s right.
You get the aggregate
A written, anonymized summary of what operators around the state told me — what things cost them, what software they use, what they gave up on.
The kinds of things I ask
Real questions about things that already happened — not hypotheticals, and not a survey. Wherever the expensive part of your week turns out to be, that’s where we spend the time.
- Walk me through covering a normal week of shifts. Where do the gaps happen?
- When someone calls out at 5am, what actually happens next?
- What did you spend on agency or temp staff last month?
- How do families pay you, and how much time goes into chasing that?
- Tell me about your last state survey.
- What does an empty bed cost you, and how long do they sit?
- If you could delete one recurring headache, which one — and what is it costing you?
Who I’m hoping to talk to
- Owners, administrators, and directors of nursing
- Residential care homes, assisted living, and memory care
- Any size — a single six-bed home is as valuable to me as a multi-community operator. I need both to tell which problems are universal and which aren’t.
If this isn’t you but you know someone it is, an introduction is the single most useful thing anyone can give me right now.
Who I am
I’m Drew Buckman, a software founder based in North Carolina. My background is data infrastructure and payment systems — the plumbing behind other people’s software. I came into this world through operators near Raleigh, and I’d rather spend months listening to people who do this work than a year building the wrong thing for them.
Anything you tell me stays between us. If I quote a number publicly, it will be pooled with other operators and stripped of anything identifying — and I’ll ask you first.
Willing to spend half an hour on this?
Pick any slot that works, or reply to me directly and I’ll work around your schedule.