Workforce Development & Consulting
20 years building workforces. 13 years perfecting home care.
Spence Consultants delivers workforce development, compliance, and technology systems to organizations that need results they can defend to a regulator, a funder, or a board.
Ten questions. About four minutes. You get a scored result and your three biggest gaps, no call required.
What we hear, and what we find
Most turnover problems are misdiagnosed before anyone calls a consultant.
Agencies describe a people problem. Underneath it there is almost always a system problem, and the system problem is fixable. Open a row to see what we usually find.
“Our aides are unreliable.”
No structured contact after day one. A new aide goes from orientation to a client's home with no supervisor check-in until something goes wrong. Most of the loss happens in the first three weeks, before anyone has flagged a performance issue.
Who speaks to a new hire on day three, and what are they required to ask?
“We cannot find workers.”
Recruiting is disconnected from scheduling. Candidates are hired against a headcount target rather than against the shifts, boroughs, and languages that are actually unfilled, so new hires sit without hours and leave inside a month.
Are we hiring for the shifts we cannot fill, or for a number on a spreadsheet?
“The training did not take.”
The curriculum was built to satisfy an hours requirement, not to produce a specific competency the employer can name. Nobody defined what a graduate should be able to do on their first shift, so nobody can tell whether the training worked.
What should a graduate be able to do unsupervised on day one, and who signed off on that list?
“We are not audit ready.”
The policies exist. The evidence that anyone followed them does not. Documentation is created at audit time from memory and email threads rather than captured as the work happens, which is what turns a finding into a citation.
If a surveyor arrived Monday, which records would you have to reconstruct?
“Supervisors are stretched too thin.”
Supervisors were promoted for field competence and never trained to coach, document, or run a retention conversation. They absorb the gap personally until they burn out, and their departure takes a portion of the workforce with them.
What was the last thing we trained a supervisor to do, as opposed to told them to do?
“We have the data but cannot use it.”
Turnover is reported as a single annual figure. That number cannot tell you when people leave, which supervisor they reported to, or which referral source produced them, so it cannot drive a decision.
Can you see turnover by week of tenure, by supervisor, and by hiring source?
How we work
The Field Model
Five stages, run in order, on every engagement. It is the same sequence used to build and hold a 30% turnover rate in an industry that averages 65 to 80%. Nothing here starts with a recommendation, because a recommendation made before stage two is a guess.
Map
Trace the actual worker journey from first contact to month six. Not the org chart, not the policy manual. What happens, in what order, and who owns each moment.
Diagnose
Find where people exit and why. Turnover by week of tenure, by supervisor, by source. Exit patterns, not exit interviews.
Design
Build the touchpoints, curriculum, and documentation that close the specific gaps found in stage two. Employer-aligned, competency-defined, audit-ready.
Install
Train the supervisors who have to run it. Set the cadence. Put the records where a surveyor can find them. A design nobody was trained to operate is not a deliverable.
Prove
Stand up the KPIs, dashboards, and reporting that let you defend the program to a funder, a board, or a regulator without rebuilding the case each time.
Who we are
Built from the field up
Spence Consultants was founded by a practitioner, not a theorist. Every method we apply was stress-tested in a real organization, with real workers, under real compliance demands.
Lamont Spence spent 13 years as Workforce Development Director at Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), the nation's largest worker-owned home care cooperative, based in the Bronx. During that tenure CHCA held caregiver turnover at roughly 30%, against an industry norm of 65 to 80%.
That was not luck. It was systematic workforce design, multilingual training infrastructure, employer-aligned program development, and sustained attention to the moments in a worker's journey that decide whether they stay.
We bring the same discipline to every engagement, whether you are building a training program from scratch, navigating DOH or DOL compliance, pursuing workforce grants, or modernizing operations. Based in Mount Vernon, NY. Serving organizations across New York State and beyond.
Practitioner track record
13 years as Workforce Development Director, Cooperative Home Care Associates, Bronx, NY
Certifications
Scrum Master · Product Owner · Program Management · Salesforce Administrator
SAM registered
UEI WQ4HVGH9XEG8 · Federal contracting ready · NAICS 541612, 611430, 541618
Active client work
Trivium Way Training Center · Lincoln Trade School · Elite Homecare Services · Ossining Padres Hispanos
Published
The Young Learners Series, educational coloring book series · WGA-registered feature screenplay
A note from the founder
For 13 years my job was not to advise an agency on retention. It was to hit the number, every quarter, with the workforce we actually had.
That changes what you pay attention to. You stop reading turnover as a statistic and start reading it as a calendar. You learn that most of the loss happens in weeks two through five, that a supervisor who was never taught to coach will quietly cost you a dozen aides a year, and that a policy nobody documented in real time is a policy you do not have.
I started Spence Consultants because that knowledge does not travel well in a slide deck. It has to be installed. So we do the mapping, we find the exits, we build the thing, and we train the people who have to run it after we leave.
Who we work with
Start where you are
The work is the same discipline applied to four different regulatory and funding realities.
Home care & LHCSA
Caregiver retention, DOH compliance, in-service infrastructure, supervisor capability, and documentation that survives a survey.
Talk to us →Trade schools & CTE
Employer-aligned curriculum, completion and placement outcomes, accreditation readiness, and enrollment pipelines that hold.
Talk to us →Workforce nonprofits
Program design, participant outcomes reporting, grant narratives, and the measurement frameworks funders now expect by default.
Talk to us →Government & federal
SAM registration support, capability statements, NAICS strategy, agency targeting, and proposal support for workforce contracts.
Talk to us →What we do
Consulting services
Scoped around deliverables, not billable hours. Every engagement ends with something you own and can operate without us.
Workforce development
Program design and implementation, curriculum development, employer ecosystem and pipeline development, recruitment and placement support, program evaluation and outcomes reporting.
Compliance & quality
Policies and procedures, testing and competency frameworks, corrective action and continuous improvement systems, recordkeeping that is audit-ready from day one.
Technology integration
Workflow optimization and automation, CRM and database setup, data governance and documentation, digital transformation for workforce and training operations.
AI & data analytics
AI enablement training for teams and leaders, responsible AI policy development, dashboards and KPI frameworks, performance reporting for funders, boards, and compliance bodies.
Grant strategy & writing
Grant identification, LOI and narrative development, funder research and relationship strategy, DOL and DOH-aligned proposal writing with the compliance documentation attached.
Federal contracting support
SAM registration support, capability statement development, NAICS code strategy, agency targeting, and proposal support for federal workforce and training contracts.
Our platforms
Beyond consulting
Two products built from the same 13 years of work.
Workforce retention platform
RetainReady
A retention platform built on a proven operating model rather than a framework. Developed from 13 years holding 30% turnover in an industry that averages 65 to 80%. Now accepting pilot partners.
Visit RetainReady.com →Educational publishing
The Young Learners Series
A 10-volume coloring book series celebrating Black pioneers in science, athletics, and civil rights, designed for children ages 4 to 7. Volumes 1, 2, and 5 available now on Amazon.
Visit MyYoungLearners.com →Setting expectations
What this is not
Most operators have hired a consultant before. Here is how this differs.
Not this
- An assessment that ends in a slide deck and an invoice
- Best practices lifted from a sector we have never worked in
- A policy binder written to pass an audit rather than run an operation
- A one-time training with no follow-up and no owner
- Recommendations delivered before anyone looked at your exit data
This instead
- Systems installed and handed over, with your staff trained to run them
- Methods tested in an operation that had to hit the number every quarter
- Documentation captured as the work happens, so audits are a retrieval task
- A named owner and a cadence for every touchpoint we design
- Diagnosis first, always, even when it delays the proposal
Free retention risk assessment
Before you buy another program, find out what is missing.
Ten questions across the five places workforce programs usually fail. You get a score, your three weakest domains, and a plain-language explanation of what each one costs you. No call required, and nothing is sold to you at the end of it.
- 1 Onboarding and the first 90 days
- 2 Supervisor capability
- 3 Training alignment
- 4 Documentation and audit readiness
- 5 Data and measurement
Get in touch
Start the conversation
No pitch deck. A straightforward conversation about what is happening in your organization and what it would take to fix it.
Spence Consultants, LLC
Mount Vernon, NY 10550