In this episode of The Roots Podcast by 12 Oaks, host Greg Puklicz, President of 12 Oaks, is joined by Richard K. Blaylock, Chief Executive Officer, for a forward-looking conversation on the 2025 Thematic Goals guiding the organization. Together, they explore the strategic priorities shaping the year ahead—from deepening operational excellence and enhancing partner value, to aligning teams around shared purpose and delivering consistent community outcomes.
Grounded in clarity, focus, and accountability, this episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how 12 Oaks is turning bold goals into measurable impact across its senior living portfolio.
Produced by Solinity Marketing.
Intro 00:00
You’re listening to The Roots Podcast by 12 Oaks, where we’ll be joined by industry leaders to discuss and highlight the character, competency and care that is required to successfully manage senior living portfolios.
Greg 00:13
Well hello again. It’s Greg Puklicz welcoming you to another episode of The Roots podcast, brought to you by 12 Oaks Senior Living. Today, my special guest here is Dick Blaylock, founder and CEO of 12 Oaks Senior Living. Welcome, Dick.
Dick 00:33
Thanks, Greg. It’s great to be here. Look forward to our conversation.
Greg 00:36
Let’s jump right in. 2024 was a fantastic year for 12 Oaks Senior Living. Our thematic goal for 2024 was to be best in class with trusted partners. And I think we achieved quite a bit in that regard in terms of, upping our game, upping our capabilities, seeing occupancy growth, margin growth, improved cash flow across the portfolio and establishing some new relationships with new trusted partners as well. And so as we look to 2025 and we think about our thematic goal for 2025, it is us looking for sustainable excellence. So let’s break it down a little bit, Dick. What does sustainable excellence mean to you?
Dick 01:30
Sure. And I just want to go back a little bit. We talked about 2024, and best in class as trusted partners. That was a thematic goal for that year, but it’s foundation. It’s something that’ll always continue on, in the 12 Oaks business plan and how we’re going to operate. And so as we moved forward and we were at our retreat, back in December, planning for 2025, we took a look back at that thematic goal for 2024, and we thought, what can we do now? And, we looked at it and realized that best in class as trusted partners is something we always want to attain to. And so the theme of sustainability or stability came up in our discussions at our retreat as we were trying to develop the new one. And we also knew that that best in class, one of the themes that’s part of that is competency or excellence. And so as we talked amongst ourselves, the eight people there at the executive retreat, as we tried to come together with the theme, what we realized is that we wanted to continue doing what we were doing, but we wanted to do it in a way that was sustainable, and that was with excellence.
Greg 02:44
Let’s talk about sustainable. What do you think 12 Oaks needs to do to be sustainable? What do you see as part of that vision?
Dick 02:54
Well, one of the things that we’ve known and recognized as we’ve grown over the last couple of years is that as we’ve added to our portfolio, we want to be able to stay at this level that we are, which is a medium size regional operator in senior living. And to do that, that means as properties from year to year may roll off as a third party property manager, we need to also be looking at how we’re going to bring properties on. So business development and what we did in business development and the team involved in business development was important, and it was really kind of centrally focused for what we could do. And we always want to look at our portfolio to see what we can do. And Greg liked to say that our portfolio was maybe a basket of spiders and what would you say it was, Greg?
Greg 03:46
A basket of spiders. And we want to convert it to a basket of puppies and kittens.
Dick 03:51
Yeah. And that’s nothing against our portfolio, but it’s just 12 Oaks is known for taking over properties that maybe have had challenges or problems in the past. We’ve worked with lenders to take over property. So, looking at what we can do in our portfolio to make it more stable, make it more sustainable was important to us, and it was something that needed to be thematic, something that we needed to be thinking about all year long.
Greg 04:15
And the second part of that thematic goal is excellence. So what do you think 12 Oaks needs to do to achieve excellence?
Dick 04:26
Well, we talk about excellence a lot here. And it’s part of our competency core value. And so what we really realized with that point is every aspect of our operations, we needed to have that kind of over the top of it excellence. How are we doing excellence in our market and leasing? How are we doing excellence in our leadership? What does excellence look like in back of house, in accounting, in H.R., in the support that we have for our teams in the field. And so it felt like that not only did we want to be sustainable, stable company, but we wanted to be excellent at how we were doing that. Our programs, our processes, systems that we might use in any one of our departments. And so we are always looking at that and we’re particularly looking at this year, as it relates to us having sustainable excellence.
Greg 05:24
As you know, once we develop our thematic goal, the next step is trying to identify key initiatives to achieve our thematic goal of sustainable excellence. And it’s a funny thing, as we started to write down potential initiatives, I think initially we had a list of about 40 or 50 things, right. And so there’s all kinds of ideas on the board, different things. So the key though to remain focused was trying to identify how these projects, because everything was either a workflow item or a project we would want to undertake. How do we categorize those things into what are truly initiatives? And we were able to come up with three key initiatives for 2025. And so the first initiative we came up with was under business development. And so, Dick, how does the initiative of business development fold into the achievement of our thematic goal for 2025?
Dick 06:42
Well, we realized that if we’re going to be sustainable, if we’re going to be stable, business development is an important part of that. Everything that we do to look for new business, everything that we do to grow, the relationships that we have. Looking for transactions, making sure that we’re aware of what’s going on in the market. We’ve got Paul Wang, our VP of Asset Management, who leads in business development. Greg of course you spend time in business development. I spend time in business development. And so we think it’s a key part of this sustainable goal that we want for 12 Oaks Senior Living.
Greg 07:21
So when people hear that and they say, oh 12 Oaks is going to grow some more, is it about growth? Is it about curation? Is it about a combination. So can you define what growth looks like a little more to you?
Dick 07:35
We said this a little bit earlier, but growth to me, in the context of sustainable is looking for ways and looking for relationships that we can develop. Because generally properties will turn over time, and we want to be sure that we can manage those properties for an ownership group if they decide to make a change, sell the property, we want to be able to be available to manage for that next group that comes in. And so from that standpoint, that business development is focused on sustainable relationships, people who are committed to senior living, people that want to be in senior living and are bringing their capital to this industry that we’re in, and that’s who we try to pursue.
Greg 08:18
That reminds me of some of your past experiences, particularly with a community like with Caruth Haven Court or Preston Wood Court, where you originally developed those communities. And, I mean, how long did you manage those communities, how many ownership changes did you go through?
Greg 08:39
Well, Caruth Haven Court was a property that we built back in 1999, and we continued to manage that property all the way out to 2015 through three different ownership groups. And, I think that was a testament to the quality of the management, the excellence that we had, the culture that we put in place at those properties. We had long term leadership, which was important to us at that community. And so that was really the type of community that we’d like to see in our portfolio as we move forward. When we talk about growth, it isn’t necessarily a number, but it’s also about, I guess, the type of community.
Thank you very much for once again being on The Roots Podcast. And thank you to our listeners. Tune in next time to 12 Oaks Senior Living.
Outro
We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Roots podcast by 12 Oaks. Get connected with us on social media and at 12oaks.com.