Home Instead, a franchise company with one of the largest home care footprints in the U.S., has made major moves to bring on outside talent. This has allowed the company to utilize expertise gleaned from executives’ time at companies like Nordstrom, Nerdy (NYSE: NRDY), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and more. 

However, Home Instead isn’t the only home-based care company that has an eye for recruiting and leveraging outside talent. Multiple home-based care C-suite executives began their careers outside of health care and are now leveraging these past experiences to bring fresh ideas and strategies to their operations.

Finance, journalism and fast food corporations are just a few examples of the industries that line the resumes of home-based care’s top executives.

Home Health Care News heard from four home-based care executives and leaders who detailed their experiences working outside of health care, and the lessons they brought with them to benefit the industry.

Responses are listed below, lightly edited for length, style and clarity.

***

I was with Yum for 8 years. During that time, I worked for Yum Corporate, KFC, Yum China and Pizza Hut in senior HR leadership roles. There were really two tenets that helped form who I am as an HR leader and have transferred nicely into health care.

Lead with Culture: Team member experience drives customer and patient experience, which ultimately improves business outcomes. At Elara, we focus on our culture of caring — whether you are a caregiver providing care in patient homes or a care support team member providing care for caregivers. We are all in the caring business.

Talent is King: Yum was a global growth juggernaut during my time. I was a senior leader in Global Talent Management, so I found myself on a three-year assignment with Yum China. I like to say I went to ‘Scale School’ there. We were opening 500 restaurants a year and my job was to ensure we had the crew and management talent pipeline to do so.

You must differentiate yourself as a business with highly evolved talent systems; in essence, this encompasses the full talent cycle: attract, screen, hire, onboard, lead and develop your teams. We have done this at Elara Caring, fully transforming our talent acquisition infrastructure with a relentless focus on talent and leadership development.

I’ve been a health care CPO for 13 years, which has given me the ability to draw on my experiences from global restaurant leadership – particularly in high-volume recruiting, engagement, culture building, and communications with a large, dispersed workforce – and apply those insights in the health care space at Elara Caring. We’re seeing the payoff from our investments in culture and talent with a truly differentiated employee experience.

— Laura Hamrick, chief people officer at Elara Caring

***

Over the past 25 years, I’ve had the opportunity to work in financial services (JPMorgan Chase [NYSE: JPM], Capital Group), SaaS (RingCentral) and media (AOL). Each industry moves fast, demands innovation and pushes you to think differently about how to engage people — lessons that have proven just as valuable in home-based care.

What I’ve carried over into this space is a mix of data-driven decision-making, digital engagement and brand strategy, all with the goal of building trust, improving efficiency and supporting our workforce. In finance, I saw how personalization and trust can create lasting relationships. In SaaS, I learned the power of scalable, tech-driven solutions. In media, I experienced firsthand how storytelling connects people in a meaningful way — something that’s essential in health care, where emotions and trust play such a big role.

Bringing in fresh perspectives is critical because home-based care is evolving. While compassion and reliability will always be at the heart of what we do, we also need to embrace new ways of thinking to better serve clients and caregivers. By applying lessons from other industries, while staying true to Bayada’s mission, we can continue to elevate and modernize the care experience in a way that truly makes a difference.

— Steve Ireland, chief marketing officer at Bayada Home Health Care

***

Working at [the Connecticut-based television station] WFSB as a sports multimedia journalist was fast-paced and exciting. We covered the entire state of Connecticut – filming, editing, writing, and presenting local sports stories daily, including UConn basketball. Our marquee segment, “Friday Night Frenzy,” spotlighted high school football and became a community favorite. It was a crash course in storytelling, tight deadlines and finding meaning in the moment.

Looking back, I brought more from that world than I realized. Journalism sharpened my skills in storytelling, data interpretation and celebrating people doing great things. Those are the same muscles I use now – whether it’s tracking KPIs, building culture through team recognition or communicating our value to families and referral sources. Home care is a human business, and so was sports journalism. In both, stories matter.

It’s like handing a crossword puzzle to a friend – what stumped you for hours, they solve in seconds. Fresh thinking breaks old patterns. When I joined my mom in this business, I asked “why” constantly – genuinely because I didn’t know so much. Those questions sparked the changes that fueled our growth.

— Jonah Francis, CEO of Pansy Homecare

Hear more from Francis on HHCN’s latest episode of Disrupt.

***

My time at the Gap [NYSE: GAP] was exciting. We were in high growth mode, and the Gap is phenomenal at creating systems and processes. They had a binder for any process, and this really taught me to appreciate operational excellence. It was also about leading people. The stores that mastered people leadership, what I now call Bold Kindness, got the best results.

Leadership and culture are paramount. They set the tone for everything else, and creating a culture of care and performance stems from this.

Sometimes the best ideas, the ideas that push and challenge an industry, come from outside of it. Home care and health care, generally, I think, are in desperate need of fresh ideas and innovation. For us, we ask ourselves how we learn from world-class organizations and step into premium client and caregiver experiences.

— Cathy Thorpe, CEO of Nurse Next Door