Watermark Names Coo In Anticipation Of New Growth In 2025

Watermark Retirement Communities has hired a new Chief Operating Officer (COO) as the company prepares for new growth in 2025.

Jeff Slichta, a former executive with Sunrise Senior Living and Experience Senior Living, will take over as COO starting next week to succeed Karen Mlawsky, who is stepping down from the COO role to “pursue new interests,” the company announced on Thursday.

Once in the role, Slichta will begin executing on the company’s 2025 business plans, aiming to achieve “key performance indicators for each community and in aggregate for the enterprise,” Troy Hollar, Watermark Retirement Communities National Director of Marketing and Sales told Senior Housing News on Thursday.

Slichta joins Watermark having most recently served as the COO for Experience Senior Living, a fast-growing senior living operator in which Slichta played an important role in the company’s early beginnings. He specifically helped set up the company’s operating system, putting the organization on a path for growth, Watermark’s announcement noted.

Prior to Watermark and Experience, Slichta was the senior vice president of operations for Sunrise Senior living with operations oversight for five regions and 145 communities across 17 states and Canada.

“Mr. Slichta’s time at other operators has reinforced for him the prevailing importance of culture, people, and relationships. If you take great care of your people, they’ll take great care of your residents, which will in turn take good care of your partners and investors,” Hollar wrote in an emailed statement to SHN.

Priorities in operations for Watermark span from programming and care to dining and improving staffing, Hollar added, along with new growth with a “strong pipeline” of new developments that are “teed up but awaiting a shift in the capital markets” prior to work starting.

The company anticipates starting construction on two to three projects in 2025, while also evaluating new acquisition and management opportunities, Hollar said in the statement.

In SHN coverage earlier this year, Watermark Chief Investment Officer Bryan Schachter said those projects would “continue to align with our strategy of higher-end and larger scale independent living, assisted living and memory care projects in either primary or secondary markets.” 
In recent years, Watermark has focused on building its data and analytics platform to optimize operations and drive performance; evolving its regional management support and opened new communities with intergenerational and luxury components. The company also recently launched the BrainCafe to improve memory care programming in partnership with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

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