Why Comfort Keepers Is Shifting Its Focus To Its Franchise Owners

Last year, Comfort Keepers set its sights on becoming a 100% franchise company. This meant re-franchising all of Comfort Keepers’ 69 company-owned locations.

Ramzi Abdine, chief operating officer of Comfort Keepers, once described the process of re-franchising Comfort Keepers’ company-owned locations as a “herculean effort.”

Checking in at the top of the year, Comfort Keepers CEO Natalie Black said she believes that the company is well on its way to reaching its end goal. Ultimately, the company wants to shift the attention and resources back to its franchise owners.

Home Health Care News recently caught up with Black who discussed the latest update on Comfort Keepers re-franchsing initiative, why the labor market is still a major pain point and some of the biggest regulatory challenges the industry is navigating.

HHCN: Let’s start with a brief rundown of your company’s 2024 highlights?

Black: 2024 was a big year for us. Our biggest initiative was our re-franchising efforts. We had a very large company ops presence, and we have decided to move to 100% franchise. That was quite a big and successful initiative for us. We are not all the way there, but we’re mostly there. That also just created a lot of excitement within our franchise system. It’s just kind of led to having incredible growth here for Comfort Keepers.

One of the big projects on the company’s plate last year was re-franchising its company-owned locations. Can you provide an update on how that is going and what direction you plan on taking the company, in light of this move?

We are almost there. We still have a small handful of company operations, but they are well on their way too. It hasn’t been the easiest journey, but the team at Comfort Keepers has just done an incredible job doing this. A lot of the offices actually went internally to existing franchisees and employees, which was just a wonderful result. I think it speaks volumes to how people feel about Comfort Keepers, and then wanting to expand their businesses or wanting to enter as a franchisee. It was just such a phenomenal result.

What this does for us, though, is to be able to focus all of our attention on our franchisees. With company ops, the attention was being split. Sometimes the company ops needs the same things as a franchisee, sometimes they do not. We were having to split our attention and our resources. Now, we’re focusing completely on helping our franchisees grow and be successful.

Has the labor market become less challenging, and are you implementing any new workforce initiatives to strengthen recruitment or retention?

I would say the labor market, for the most part, has become a bit less challenging. That doesn’t mean things are easier for our franchisees. Before we had labor market challenges, we were focusing really on client recruitment and retention, and then that flipped, and we focused really heavily on caregiver recruitment and retention.

Now, we often find ourselves in a place where attention has to go to both. That’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. Yes, the labor market has become less challenging, but that doesn’t mean it’s less challenging as a whole for our franchisees. For us at Comfort Keepers, we’re really focused on our caregivers. That has not changed. We’re focused on recruiting compassionate people, and skilled individuals.

All of that leads to the quality of care that we can provide. We’re investing in caregiver growth and career growth. I think that’s an important one, because some caregivers want to be caregivers and they don’t want to grow in their career. Some caregivers want to be caregivers right now and then they want to grow into other roles in the future. We want people to have that capability to go do that. Our caregivers aren’t just our employees, they’re valued members of our Comfort Keepers family. That’s such an important mindset to have.

How has technology played a role in making recruitment or retention less of a pain point at your company?

We embrace technology, and we will continue to do so. It’s evolving quickly, and I think we at Comfort Keepers, but also as an industry, need to continue to be flexible with that.

AI is just a phenomenal tool that we are starting to use and leverage. We want to give ourselves, again, that flexibility because AI today may look different than AI five years from now. We want to be able to embrace technology through the years. We are implementing scheduling platforms to give caregivers more flexibility and visibility.

That goes back to our caregiver retention question. A lot of times what we’re hearing from caregivers is that they don’t want their schedule dictated to them, and that probably isn’t a surprise to anybody. They want to be part of that. We’re allowing that more and more. We have some fantastic partners that we’re starting to work with for that.

We have always, but even more so now, we’re leveraging data and analytics to gain insight to caregiver satisfaction and in a more real-time way. We’re able to react and maybe retain caregivers, rather than find out after we’ve lost the caregiver.

Where are you seeing the biggest business opportunities? Are there still untapped opportunities out there?

Home care is a big industry now, and there’s continued room for growth and to take on more. Certainly, the demographics are on our side from a client perspective, but they are not on our side from the caregiver perspective.

Our opportunities are around, how do we continue to be able to provide quality in-home care, knowing that we’re going to have limitations on the caregiver side in the future, and we’re focused on that piece.

At Comfort Keepers, we are focused on bringing in more franchisees. We still have a fair amount of space where we can continue to develop that. There are certain areas where we are not providing service just yet within the country, and we would like to be touching all areas in the country, so that we can provide quality support.

What are some of the toughest regulatory challenges home care providers are facing right now? How is your company tackling these issues, or preparing?

One of the bigger challenges is that those regulatory things happen at a state level. Where one state doesn’t have an issue, it will be a regulatory challenge in a different state. It’s about being able to adapt and support our franchisees in all the different states as a whole.

I would say balancing high-quality care with our reimbursement limitations, especially for Medicaid, is a challenge. We advocate for fair compensation rates to providers, so that we can deliver the quality care that we are known for. In some states, we’re able to do that very well with the Medicaid rates as they are. In some states, it’s much more challenging.

Another piece, I’d say, is the evolving compliance requirements, especially around caregiver training and documentation. At Comfort Keepers, we are very focused on making sure that our caregivers are well trained, but when [state requirements] are constantly changing, sometimes that can provide hurdles. It can also create a longer time period for when we can onboard caregivers, which is just a recruitment challenge.

What are some notable or unique partnerships your company has established in recent years, and how are they driving your company forward?

Our most recent one was with PBS on the documentary Caregiving. It’s actually executive produced by Bradley Cooper, and its big focus is on the critical role of caregivers. We are sponsoring that documentary, and we think that that’s going to be pretty great.

We’re also continuing to support some of the other ones that we have focused on in the past. Walk to End Alzheimer’s is a big partnership for us. To date, we’ve raised $700,000. It’s a focus of our franchisees, staff and caregivers to continue to raise money for that one.

A lot of our other focus goes to our local community organizations. As we all know, home care is a local business, so making sure that we help our franchisees partner with their local organizations.

How do you plan to grow in 2025?

Making sure that we support our existing franchise owners in all the ways that they can. That we keep bringing the technology that puts us at the forefront of the industry, and that we provide the best level of field support and support at our home office, so that they have all the tools and resources and they can focus on growing their business. We’re very intentional on that growth.

We’re also focusing on franchise development, and making sure that we are continuing to grow our franchisee base, and not just grow it, but bring in incredible new franchisees.