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)
Fill the remaining 6 memory care beds to reach 100% occupancy, then build a waitlist for ongoing pipeline management.
| 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 |
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)
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.
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.
The prior agency's dashboard (Further) does not sync with Eldermark, forcing Erica to maintain and reconcile two separate systems simultaneously.
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.
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."