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Company-owned — or corporate-owned — locations are generally a staple at home care franchise companies. These locations are largely associated with experimentation.
In recent years, some franchise companies have chosen to double down on these locations, while others have not. Some have even gone in the other direction, and begun to re-franchise former company-owned locations.
Comfort Keepers is one of the companies focused on the latter. The company is in the process of re-franchising its 69 company-owned locations.
“Upon having a strategic review with our new owners, we quickly came to the realization that it would be much better to put all of our focus and energy into growing via helping our franchisees grow,” Ramzi Abdine, chief operating officer of Comfort Keepers, told Home Health Care News.
Irvine, California-based Comfort Keepers is one of the largest personal home care providers in the U.S. The company has more than 600 locations. In 2023, The Halifax Group purchased the worldwide home care division of Sodexo. This deal included Comfort Keepers.
In the past, having a large footprint of company-owned locations had been an asset when it came to working with Comfort Keepers franchise owners.
“At the end of the day, it helped us talk to our franchisees with a little bit more street credibility,” he said. “We walked in their shoes. We understood their pains, whether it was caregiver recruitment and retention, or going after referral sources. That proved useful for a while, but we got to a certain size with our company-owned operations and we had to make a choice. Either we would invest into a back office which is shared, and would help us streamline the operations, or go back to our ethos, a franchise network.”
However, the flip side of having a large footprint of company-owned locations was the time and energy it diverted from Comfort Keepers’ franchise owners.
Abdine previously described the process of re-franchising Comfort Keepers’ company-owned locations as a “herculean effort.”
More recently, he explained that this meant finding buyers for these locations.
“Very early on, we decided that we wanted to incentivize our own employees and franchisees to buy most of these locations, so we priced these locations competitively to help spur the demand,” Abdine said. “We were very successful. Most of the locations went to either existing franchisees or existing employees, which to me is a great measure of success.”
Almost every segment of Comfort Keepers was involved in the effort to re-franchise these locations.
“A lot of [our legal team] is involved,” Abdine said. “A lot of the franchise support network is involved, because they’re the ones reaching out to our franchisees to see who’s interested. A lot of the operations were involved, especially in terms of free credentialing with the different payer sources. IT was heavily involved because we had to take special care in terms of, when do we cut off access for our company-owned operations, and when do we move that over to the new owners.”
At the end of the process, Comfort Keepers wants to be a 100% franchised organization.
“Being 100% franchise allows us to focus 100% on franchising,” Abdine said. “We have a lot of room for growth by selling new territories.”
Corporate-owned
On the opposite end of the spectrum, corporate-owned locations have been a major part of BrightStar Care’s strategy over the years.
Chicagoland-based BrightStar Care offers personal home care, home health care and supplemental staffing. The company recently reached a milestone of 400 open locations across the U.S.
About 10% of BrightStar Care’s locations are corporate-owned.
Like many of its home care peers, the company has used its corporate-owned locations to test out new programs and services. This was the case last year when BrightStar Care launched primary in-home clinician and transport services in Arizona.
“We’re a franchise organization, so we went and bought back several of our franchisees, made a multi-million dollar investment in Arizona to own the territory, control the territory,” Shelly Sun Berkowitz, founder and executive chairwoman of BrightStar Care, said during a panel discussion at Home Health Care News’ FUTURE conference in August. “We believed hospital at home would be so important for the growth of our brand and the transformation of health care in our country. We wanted to make sure we could spend the money, get the vehicles right, meet all the expectations of a great partner, but we felt like that’d be difficult to do, if we were relying just on a franchisee.”
BrightStar has also tested new technology in its corporate-owned locations, as well as Medicare Advantage (MA) as a larger revenue source.
Griswold is another home care provider that has decided to roll back its company-owned locations.
The Blue Bell, Pennsylvania-based Griswold is a franchise company that provides personal care services in 30 states. In total, Griswold had 8 company-owned locations across three states.
In recent months, Griswold decided to re-franchise three of these locations.
“The idea of the company-owned location, in our mind, was this ‘test kitchen’ philosophy,” Griswold CEO Mike Slupecki told HHCN. “We didn’t feel we benefited by having eight company-owned locations to test things out on.”
Another reason the company decided to reduce its company-owned footprint was to simplify operations, according to Slupecki.
“There’s state regulations that govern how you operate a home care business in three different states,” he said. “Do you have the complexity of managing company-owned locations, with various rules and regulations for home care, various rules and regulations for wage and hour, overtime, paid sick time. These all varied state to state. It was really about reducing the complexity of having a company-owned footprint.”
Meanwhile, if Griswold and Comfort Keepers are pulling back, and BrightStar Care is leaning in, it’s safe to describe Senior Helpers as staying put.
Maryland-based Senior Helpers is a home care company that operates over 380 franchise locations in the U.S., Canada and Australia.
Senior Helpers has five corporate-owned locations, and at this moment, they aren’t looking to expand or reduce, according to COO Mari Baxter.
“If you look at our five corporate stores, it’s our highest number of caregivers in the system, highest client count and our most revenue,” she told HHCN. “It’s not that [these locations] aren’t successful. It just takes a lot of internal resources. When you start talking about government payer sources, you have to have a separate team to make sure all your T’s are crossed and I’s are dotted, and that you’re doing everything from a compliance standpoint. We’re a franchise model, and our system really is reliant on helping franchisees to grow their business.”
Ultimately, Baxter believes that home care leaders looking to take on more corporate-owned locations should be prepared before taking the plunge.
“Any franchisor in the home care industry that’s looking at doing corporate stores — make sure you have the infrastructure to support them,” she said. “You just can’t become a corporate store owner without understanding that they’re going to need support too. It’s not something you want to learn on the job. You want to have a strategy in advance.”