Kisco Senior Living Turns Eye To Staffing, Dining In Latest Growth Push 

Kisco Senior Living has added over 1,000 units to its senior living portfolio since 2023. With more growth on the horizon, the company has turned its focus to improving staffing and other operational aspects.

In 2025, Carlsbad, California-based Kisco is focused on improving its leadership hiring efforts while bringing “consistency” to its dining program, according to CEO Andy Kohlberg. All the while, the company is layering in technology to support staff.

Now at 32 communities in 10 states, Kisco’s portfolio has grown to over 6,000 units with approximately 3,300 employees. Half of the company’s portfolio is made up of independent living and the other half assisted living and memory care.

The company has added new communities to its management portfolio while also completing ground-up development in limited instances. The operator recently opened new communities in Washington, D.C. and Boston while expanding and renovating other properties. Last year, Kisco finalized the acquisition of the Balfour Senior Living portfolio of communities in Denver, Colorado, in an affiliation agreement that was first announced in late 2023. 

To improve operations, Kisco is focused on improving its dining and care delivery operations while also attempting to reduce turnover through increased employee training.

“Our number one strategic objective for this year is hiring top talent and we’re focused on the hiring process and retaining talent while improving onboarding and training,” Kohlberg told SHN. “We’re beefing up our training.”

Staffing ‘biggest driver’ in care delivery, resident satisfaction

Senior living operators in recent years have faced stiff competition for top talent, especially in search of licensed care staff. These competitive conditions have led Kisco to introduce new training opportunities for existing staff while refining the company’s recruitment and hiring efforts to ensure the right candidates are getting hired.

“Having turnover, it’s very hard to have any sort of consistency in quality of care,” Kohlberg said.

Kohlberg sees an opportunity to improve the company’s ecosystem of technology platforms for existing staffers, specifically through layering in artificial intelligence (AI) to the company’s proprietary applications for dining, care delivery and back-end support for operations teams.

“We’re looking at ways to automate some things and remove some of the data entry burden on caregivers so they can spend more time with residents,” Kohlberg said. “The future is embedding AI in those apps and trying to automate workflows inside the app that really delivers our whole service package.”

This has led Kisco to focus on the executive director leadership position and the company has a deep bench of “long-tenured” EDs. Kisco’s current challenge is hiring talented and experienced community leaders.

“It’s hard to find a care services director who has never worked in senior living before. It’s a tough transition; even bringing someone in from nursing or a hospital setting can be challenging. It all starts with the executive director, but hiring top talent is always the hardest part, especially for key management roles,” Kohlberg said.

Kisco is also grappling with hiring shortages for licensed care staff. Markets in Northern California pose the toughest challenge for cultivating top clinical talent, Kohlberg added. Where it’s easier to attract talent is on the sales side, bringing in a “wider net to cast” for hiring sales directors, Kohlberg noted.

Dining Program Consistency

As the appetites and dining habits of senior living residents continue to change, senior living providers have worked to improve their culinary programs to meet a diverse range of dietary and lifestyle-driven preferences.

Kisco has identified areas of its dining program that it can standardize across its portfolio of communities, Kohlberg said.

Past resident complaints centered on inconsistency of food and services, which drove the company to revamp aspects of its menu development, purchasing and applying quality control to bring uniformity across all communities.

Across its 32 communities, Kisco dining teams oversee 78 dining locations, all of them with brands and menu offerings, with some communities having four dining venues spanning bistros, pubs and traditional dining areas.

“We’ve done a good job in reorienting the resident view of dining and it’s similar to how if you go to a resort, it has multiple dining places, each with a different name and experience,” Kohlberg said.

“We’re working on the purchasing side to be able to control our food costs and we’re improving quality control to deliver a more consistent product.”

Inside Kisco’s recent growth

Fueling Kisco’s need for evolution are its plans to continue growing. On that front, the company has expanded its holdings in recent years.

Kisco recently opened The Carnegie at Washingtonian, a new 300-unit community in Gaithersburg, Maryland, along with an expansion at a community in Raleigh, North Carolina, to increase the community’s size to 190 units. The company’s D.C.-area community, The Fitzgerald, opened earlier this year, along with a community in Newberry, Massachusetts.

The company is also expanding its Salt Lake City community with 40 new cottages on the campus—the company’s largest cottage expansion. Kisco has its sights set on growing in the D.C. market, aiming to add three communities in the area, along with an additional property in the Boston area, Kohlberg said, while also seeing opportunities in Denver to grow.

“We’re looking at trying to do cluster markets and grow, so we’ve always been focused on slow growth, responsible growth,” Kohlberg said. “Our plan is to try to densify in the markets that we’re in, and we see North Carolina, D.C., Boston, Colorado and California as key markets for us.”

Kisco has added 15- to 20-unit memory care additions at multiple communities depending on local market demand for higher-acuity services, with some expansions ranging up to 40 units to complement communities with 125 independent living units. This comes as communities, even with large components of independent living, are “becoming much more care-driven,” Kohlberg noted.

Residents seek to stay in independent living as long as possible before transitioning to assisted living or memory care. Some Kisco communities are seeing an influx of couples seeking senior living services, with up to 40% of new move-ins this year being couples.

That’s due to the company’s philosophy in unit count and development, with larger units and multiple dining venues being two attractive selling points for sales and marketing teams that attract a “much more active” older adult profile.

“Over time, these communities become high-acuity communities,” Kohlberg said, alluding to the company’s expansions to increase assisted living and memory care services.

In care delivery, Kisco has changed its assessment process and relied on staff to identify residents who may need to make a transition from independent living to higher-acuity care, Kohlberg added.

All this is in the name of positioning Kisco as an operator in senior living bound by “heart-led hospitality” to fuse lifestyle and care services for residents.

“We’re trying to fuse the two in our operating models and we have a new branding campaign with a new website coming out soon that talks about boutique hospitality, heart-led service, and all those things that we’re trying to fuse together and do a little bit differently,” Kohlberg said.

With Kisco’s three brands, including its lifestyle brand, the Balfour banner in Colorado and an upscale luxury brand, Kohlberg sees an opportunity to create “bespoke hospitality” experiences for residents with customized services and increased life enrichment programming to cater to changing consumer demand in order to bring in the first baby boomer generation.

For example, adding tech concierge positions has been popular with residents to ease the transition into their new units, while tweaking medication management at higher acuity.

While supply and demand demographics are the strongest they have been in 35 years, Kohlberg said he’s keeping an eye on the risk of stagflation going forward, a combination of high inflation, slow economic growth and high unemployment.

“It could be challenging if recession and high interest rates occur together,” Kohlberg said. “In this business, brand and trust come from consistently delivering on promises and service, because unlike hotels, customers cannot simply walk away the next day, making our execution far more critical than just marketing.”

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