Pre-Signing Meet & Greet — 2025-11-06
Overview
Final meet-and-greet call before The Cordwainer signs with AAG. Owners Bodo and Tamalyn were traveling in Germany and delegated the meeting to their on-site operators. The conversation surfaced concrete CRM and workflow pain points, confirmed AAG's integration approach with Eldermark, and aligned on a 90-day planning model and results-driven retainer structure.
Attendees:
- Erica Lathrop — Sales Director, The Cordwainer (elathrop@cordwainermemorycare.com)
- Maria Lastoria — Executive Director, The Cordwainer (mlastoria@cordwainermemorycare.com)
- Mark Hope — AAG / Asymmetric (mark.hope@asymmetric.pro)
Key Decisions
- Eldermark integration: AAG will be granted admin access to Eldermark to automate lead capture from web forms and optimize the CRM as a single source of truth. Manual copy-paste workflows will be eliminated.
- Email marketing ownership: AAG takes over email campaign execution, replacing the current manual monthly-export-to-MailChimp process run through the prior agency (Further). Hot leads will no longer be excluded from campaigns.
- Event creative support: AAG's design team will produce all event flyers and brochures; print-ready files will be delivered to The Cordwainer for local printing.
- 90-day marketing calendar: AAG will build a rolling 90-day campaign calendar, working backward from confirmed event dates to ensure timely asset delivery and outreach.
- Retainer model confirmed: No hourly caps. Work is need-driven and results-focused. Campaign pivots (e.g., a last-minute respite push) will not be blocked by hour-limit constraints as they were with the previous agency.
Action Items
- [ ] Erica Lathrop — Email Tamalyn re: next steps; request contract; sign and return on receipt.
- [ ] AAG — Assign account manager upon contract receipt.
- [ ] AAG — Schedule kickoff meeting to introduce the full team and present initial strategy.
- [ ] AAG — Begin Eldermark integration immediately upon contract receipt.
The Cordwainer's Situation
Primary Goal
Fill the remaining 6 memory care beds to reach 100% occupancy, then build a waitlist for ongoing pipeline management.
Lead Sources
| Source | Quality / Volume |
|---|---|
| Word-of-mouth & family referrals | High quality, primary driver |
| Referral partners (Care Patrol, Oasis Senior Living, Two Sisters) | High quality, primary driver |
| Web forms & inbound calls | Low volume (1–2 calls/month in summer; can go months without in winter) |
| A Place for Mom / Caring.com | Low quality; contract in place but minimal return |
Competitive Landscape
The Cordwainer is a 3-year-old community on the South Shore (Norwell, MA) competing against established regional brands (Benchmark, Bridges, Epic) with 60–70 years of market presence. Brand awareness remains a challenge — residents in Norwell still don't know the community exists. The core strategy is to get prospects through the door, where the community's differentiated experience closes the deal.
Tactics in use:
- Professional events (Chamber of Commerce lunches, cocktail events) to build referral relationships
- Local magazine coverage placed in medical offices
- Billboards (used at launch)
CRM & Workflow Pain Points
Manual Lead Entry
Web form submissions are not automatically pushed to Eldermark. Erica manually copies contact details into the CRM — a process that gets delayed by interruptions, creating data gaps and timestamp confusion.
Stale Email Lists
Once a month, Erica exports a contact list from Eldermark and sends it to the prior agency for MailChimp campaigns. This means the most recent (hottest) leads are systematically excluded from every send.
Disconnected Platforms
The prior agency's dashboard (Further) does not sync with Eldermark, forcing Erica to maintain and reconcile two separate systems simultaneously.
Rigid Campaign Limits
The prior agency enforced a 2-campaign/month cap tied to hourly allotments. When The Cordwainer needed an urgent respite care push in late November, they were told to wait until December. AAG's retainer model eliminates this constraint.
AAG's Proposed Approach
- CRM integration — Admin access to Eldermark; automate lead ingestion; optimize configuration for a single source of truth.
- Email marketing — Own campaign execution end-to-end; ensure new leads are included in sends in real time.
- Event support — Design team handles all flyers and brochures via account manager brief → design → client approval → print-ready delivery workflow.
- 90-day calendar — Plan campaigns backward from event dates; align creative, outreach, and digital campaigns.
- Flexible execution — Results-driven retainer (~30 hrs/month as internal guidance at $150/hr equivalent); no hard caps; work expands or contracts based on business need.
Relevant Transcript Excerpts
Erica Lathrop: "A lead comes in through our webpage. It would be great if that was uploaded. I've had to go in manually, make sure I get all the phone numbers and email addresses, a lot of copy and pasting… sometimes I don't get them in on that exact day."
Erica Lathrop: "Because I'm only doing it once a month… if we're sending an email to somebody and my last five leads aren't getting it, and those are the hottest leads because they're my last five leads…"
Erica Lathrop: "We needed something [from the prior agency]. It was pretty much like, oh, you're at the end of your allotted hours, you're going to have to push it to next month."
Mark Hope: "We don't even pay attention to the hours… we never, ever even know what number of hours we're at during the month."
Mark Hope: "None of us are getting paid for effort. We're getting paid for results."
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