Best Life Brands, a holding company that has a portfolio of companies across the care continuum, announced Thursday the launch of its newest franchise brand: Boost Home Healthcare.
Backed by the private equity firm The Riverside Company, the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan-based company’s arsenal already includes the personal home care provider ComForCare — known in the Houston area as At Your Side — in addition to other senior-focused companies Blue Moon Estate Sales and CarePatrol.
Overall, that portfolio includes over 400 franchise locations across the U.S. and Canada.
In March, Best Life Brands announced that it had acquired PROHealth Home Care, which provided in-home nursing, therapy and home care services to patients in the greater Los Angeles area. But in a way, it had not yet made the provider truly its own.
Now, Boost Home Healthcare — derived from PROHealth Home Care — will operate as Best Life Brands’ first home health provider, giving it another home-based care franchising brand in a different industry.
While PROHealth Home Care was based in Los Angeles, the goal is to have franchisees sign onto Boost Home Healthcare from all across the country.
“Boost Home Healthcare is the next step in our vision to have a comprehensive portfolio of brands that serve older adults in a more effective and holistic way,” J.J. Sorrenti, CEO of Best Life Brands, said in a statement. “A home health company complements our other brands and allows us to offer skilled nursing and occupational and speech therapy. The pandemic has amplified the value of in-home health care, and we are looking forward to expanding this brand nationwide.”
Boost will be led by its brand president, Bill Porrock, who brings over 25 years of home health industry experience to the role.
ComForCare, on its own, has more than 215 locations in the U.S. and Canada. CarePatrol is a franchise senior placement organization, while Blue Moon Estate Sales is an estate sale franchise.
The launch of Boost extends Best Life Brands’ reach and also expands its capabilities as an home care-focused holding company.
“Home health has been part of the company’s strategic plan since I joined the company a year ago,” Sorrenti told HHCN earlier this year. “It was just about us finding the right business to acquire, one that we could learn fast and scale quickly across the country. So once we identified the business that worked well, with those criteria in place, we just moved forward with the acquisition.”
While there are currently no quantifiable goals for expansion, Best Life Brands believes that acquiring a home health agency, and then beginning to franchise out locations, was the best path forward.
“It’s about being able to scale a business while leveraging the franchisee who’s interested in expanding the brand in a local market, so that when a client wants to talk to an owner, the owner is in the business,” Sorrenti said. “That allows us to scale much faster … [and] the demand for that business is growing so much,”
While Sorrenti acknowledged that home health can be a difficult business, it made sense as a complementary line to its other brands.
Best Life Brands is also confident that, as it learns the home health business, it will be able to help its franchisees navigate any legislative or payment issues that surface.
Now that it has home care, home health and other senior-adjacent companies up and running, other opportunities could be on the horizon for Best Life Brands, whether that be expanding into additional spaces or acquiring more home health and home care companies across the country.
“Our franchisees have been very resilient through COVID-19, and this is an opportunity for us to add a complementary brand to help them continue to grow their businesses,” Sorrenti said. “And we want to continue to add brands to the portfolio so that we can catch a senior as they become a senior and help them through the end of life.”
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