At the Senior Living Innovation Forum, Jeff Huegli, President and CEO of Beacon Hill Senior Living, delivered a talk that read less like a strategy briefing and more like a manifesto.
His central message: organizations that cling to their legacy — the building, the balance sheet, the way things have always been done — will ultimately fail the people they exist to serve. His prescription is counterintuitive but clear. "Letting our organizations fail faster is essential," Huegli told the audience, "so that we can move quickly forward and succeed in being progressive and radically different in the way that we deliver care."
Grand Rapids, MI-based Beacon Hill has been in operation for 67 years, and for much of that history, Huegli said, the organization saw itself as a building-centric provider rather than a mission-focused organization.
His original business card featured an image of a 65-year-old facility under the name "Home for Baptists" — a label rooted in history and place, but not purpose.
After coming aboard as the organization’s leader, Huegli's realization was blunt: continuing to operate the way Beacon Hill always had would eventually spell big time challenges for the organization. The fix wasn't more construction. It was a new hierarchy of priorities: people over facilities, mission over capital obligation.
That shift, he argued, requires genuine – and disciplined – risk-taking.
"It’s about carefully managing the process," he said, distinguishing deliberate, calculated risk from chasing every new idea that comes along. Small, consistent moves compound into meaningful change over time, "one or two degrees at a time," as he put it, small but in the long run, radical moves that can alter an organization's overall trajectory.
One of the more candid threads in Huegli's talk was his own admission that he doesn't have most of the answers. Instead, his job as a leader is to hire strong talent, empower them, and then get out of the way.
That philosophy extends outward too — Beacon Hill has increasingly looked to outside partners and emerging technologies to fill gaps in its own thinking, treating collaboration as a shortcut to innovation rather than a threat to it.
Beacon Hill's transformation hasn't been guesswork.
Huegli described an eight-month human-centered design research project that gathered more than 10,000 data points from residents, caregivers, and industry experts, ultimately distilling 13 design principles now shaping new construction.
A companion "human flourishing" study — still underway and tracking both current residents and prospective ones on the waitlist — has already helped surface a striking early finding: current residents report higher satisfaction and optimism than those still waiting to move in, a reversal of what Huegli expected.
The clearest expression of Beacon Hill's new identity is Arcadia, a wellness, longevity, and vitality-focused services venture the organization is actively building. Rather than confining its offerings to residents within its own walls, Arcadia is designed to extend Beacon Hill's model of care — virtually and in new formats — to a broader population, including those still on the waitlist.
Huegli described the effort candidly as "building an airplane while we fly it."
His closing point tied his talk together: bricks and mortar are temporary infrastructure, not the mission itself.
For senior living leaders wrestling with legacy assets, aging campuses, and mounting pressure to modernize, Huegli's message was less a multi-step playbook than a permission slip: let go of what no longer serves your mission, take calculated risks, and trust that a faster, more honest reckoning with failure is what actually clears a path toward transformation.