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Faculty

Jill Valdez

MS, Rev
Owner
n/a

Jill Valdez is the owner of LINK Consulting, where she helps senior care and senior living organizations improve performance by addressing the operational, leadership, and communication breakdowns that often limit growth.

Drawing on more than two decades of experience across healthcare, senior care, operations, leadership development, and organizational performance, Jill works with organizations to identify the hidden barriers that prevent teams from achieving consistent results. Her work focuses on helping leaders move beyond surface-level symptoms to uncover the underlying issues affecting accountability, execution, team alignment, and organizational effectiveness.

Through her consulting work with senior care organizations, as well as her role facilitating the Executive Collaborative for Marketing Excellence (ECME), Jill has a unique vantage point into the challenges facing senior living organizations as they navigate occupancy pressures, workforce challenges, operational complexity, and changing market dynamics.

Known for asking tough questions and challenging conventional thinking, Jill helps leaders see what is often hiding in plain sight: the organizational habits, communication patterns, and leadership behaviors that quietly shape performance outcomes.

At SMASH, Jill will join Marissa Gardner for a fireside chat exploring why organizations often misdiagnose performance problems and what leaders can do to create greater visibility, alignment, and sustainable performance across their organizations.

2026 Sessions

The Visibility Problem: Why Your Occupancy Gaps Aren't a Sales Issue

When occupancy stalls or move-ins slow, the first place leaders look is the sales team. But the root cause is often elsewhere — buried in operational inconsistency, siloed communication, and organizational structures that make it hard to see what's actually happening across communities. This conversation examines the systemic dynamics that quietly erode occupancy and revenue performance, and what leadership can do to get ahead of them. <br><br>

Three Things You'll Walk Away With: <br>
1. A practical way to tell the difference between a true sales problem and a systems or process breakdown that's been misread as one — so your interventions actually land. <br>
2. Early warning signals that visibility gaps exist across your communities before they show up in your occupancy numbers or your bottom line. <br>
3. Concrete steps for building the kind of cross-functional alignment — across sales, operations, and leadership — that creates consistent performance at scale rather than community by community.
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Track Sponsored By: <img src=https://naccme.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/SMASH+2026/Rilla+logo+(1).png alt="Upload Image" width="200" /></p>

Presenter

Tuesday, October 06 2:15–3:00 PM
Room Grand C
Sales Strategy and Management
Faculty

Marissa Gardner

NA
NA

With a background spanning sales leadership, operations, and portfolio-level strategy, Marissa became known for her ability to identify the hidden operational and systems issues often driving inconsistent occupancy growth, reactive decision-making, and performance breakdowns across communities.

Prior to founding Bloomsy, she led sales and marketing initiatives across multi-community senior living portfolios, helping organizations improve conversion performance, streamline operational focus, and uncover significant areas of inefficiency and missed revenue opportunity.

Today, her work centers on helping senior living leaders reduce operational noise, improve visibility across teams, and focus more strategically on the behaviors and priorities that drive sustainable growth.

Faculty

Jill Valdez

MS, Rev
Owner
n/a

Jill Valdez is the owner of LINK Consulting, where she helps senior care and senior living organizations improve performance by addressing the operational, leadership, and communication breakdowns that often limit growth.

Drawing on more than two decades of experience across healthcare, senior care, operations, leadership development, and organizational performance, Jill works with organizations to identify the hidden barriers that prevent teams from achieving consistent results. Her work focuses on helping leaders move beyond surface-level symptoms to uncover the underlying issues affecting accountability, execution, team alignment, and organizational effectiveness.

Through her consulting work with senior care organizations, as well as her role facilitating the Executive Collaborative for Marketing Excellence (ECME), Jill has a unique vantage point into the challenges facing senior living organizations as they navigate occupancy pressures, workforce challenges, operational complexity, and changing market dynamics.

Known for asking tough questions and challenging conventional thinking, Jill helps leaders see what is often hiding in plain sight: the organizational habits, communication patterns, and leadership behaviors that quietly shape performance outcomes.

At SMASH, Jill will join Marissa Gardner for a fireside chat exploring why organizations often misdiagnose performance problems and what leaders can do to create greater visibility, alignment, and sustainable performance across their organizations.
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