Home care franchise companies may be in the midst of a major growth period brought on by the COVID-19 emergency. With that in mind, it’s not too surprising that Nurse Next Door is seeing a surge across all three of its operational markets.
Vancouver, Canada-based Nurse Next Door is a home care franchise system that operates roughly 200 locations across the U.S., Canada and Australia. As an organization, the company provides personal care, companionship care, homemaking services, dementia care and more.
Arif Abdulla, Nurse Next Door’s vice president of global franchise development, believes that interest in home care franchise companies is at its peak.
“There has never been more interest in home care franchising, and I’ve been a Nurse Next Door for 15 years,” he told Home Health Care News. “It’s a very unique time for this industry.”
Overall, the company is on track to add about 150 locations by the end of September. Of the new locations, 60% will be in the U.S., with the other 40% will be split between Canada and Australia.
In the past, interest in joining a home care franchise system largely stemmed from the financial opportunity it presented for entrepreneurs. The average profit for senior care franchises is $135,625 annually, according to Franchise Business Review.
The public health emergency has shifted this away from being a strictly financial opportunity, according to Abdulla.
“Now, what we’re seeing is a lot of people that have been touched personally over the last year throughout the COVID-19 [emergency] by health care and home care,” he said. “They have this purposeful interest in our business. I think that’s what’s unique about this moment in time. The interest isn’t only financial; that’s certainly part of it, but it’s based on personal experiences that people had.”
Nurse Next Door has also seen a change in the kind of people interested in entering the franchise systems.
“We’ve seen a significant rise in interest from front-line caregivers and nurses that want to get into the home care business, because they’ve seen the impact it can have or they’ve seen what has played out in institutional settings,” Abdulla said. “They have that desire to be a part of it in the future.”
In response, the company has built an entire campaign that focuses on making home care business ownership more accessible to this group.
“We launched this ‘front line to franchisee’ program because we know how effective and how strong front-line health care workers can be if [they have business support],” Abdulla said. “We’ve had a lot of success with that recently.”
Nurse Next Door’s ‘front line to franchisee’ program reflects the company’s broader efforts to ensure franchisees are supported, especially with recruiting and retaining caregivers.
In order to do this, the company has heavily invested in technological tools that automate the hiring process and make it easier to recruit and onboard people. This includes a digitized applicant tracking program as well as online caregiver training.
The team at Nurse Next Door’s headquarters has also taken charge of the initial intake of prospective caregivers.
“We take that process on behalf of our franchisees, as opposed to simply forwarding them to our website or sending them to a franchisee,” Abdulla said “We’re saying, ‘How do we get these people that are qualified into our system as quickly as possible?’ That’s a service that we provide to our franchisees at no cost to them.”
Ultimately, Abdulla believes that Nurse Next Door’s efforts in regard to supporting its franchisees have been the key to the company’s growth.
“We put a lot of focus and energy into maturing the way caregivers are treated, creating employment that is rewarding, lucrative and attractive, and helping our franchisees invest into that,” he said. “How do we pay our people competitively? How do we build the right margin? How do we make sure caregivers are cared for in a meaningful way?”
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