Home Care U - The Story of Building A Place at Home Franchise (Pt. 1 Jerod Evanich)

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

In this episode, I sit down with the co-founder of A Place at Home to explore their journey from starting the business to building a national franchise. We dive into the key strategies that led to their success, the challenges they've faced, and their mission to embrace diversity. Plus, get a glimpse into what they’re focused on today and their exciting vision for the future of home care.Enjoying the show? Send me a text and let me know!Learn more about Careswitch at: careswitch.comConnect with the host on LinkedIn: Miriam Allred This episode was produced by parkerkane.co

Welcome back to Home Care U. U is for university because nobody went to school to run a home care business. It's great to be back for another live session. I am Miriam Allred, your host and head of partnerships at CareSwitch. Again, it's great to be back with you for another live session. Quick reminder for all of our listeners, we have started adding links, resources, transcripts, and episode highlights to these sessions on our website. You can visit careswitch.com backslash homecareu to get access to all of this great content. So again, you can listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, but these extended resources will be found on our website. So make sure you go and check those out. I know I have a lot of people

that DM me or email me asking me for transcripts. So we're trying to make those more readily available so you can get those in real time. So again, that's careswitch.com backslash homecare you. So I'm super excited to be joined by a first-time guest on the show. I've got Jared Ivonich, co-founder of A Place at Home. I already told him I've been mixing up his name with his other co-founder. So I'm hopeful not to mess that up here live. But it's Jared Ivonich, co-founder of A Place at Home. Some of their corporate team are avid listeners of the show. And they recommended that we get their founders on.

So I'm really excited for this session and the next one where I'll be joined by his other co-founder, Dustin DiStefano. I also met a couple of other franchisees, shout out to Nalima and Fatima at a recent conference in Florida. They told me not to take it easy on you, Jared. So ready or not, we're going to get after this. So thanks for being here, Jared. And ready or not, here we go. Awesome. No, appreciate it. Thank you for having me today, Miriam. So let's get started with an introduction and a little bit about yourself and your personal story and your journey to starting the business. So why don't you take it away and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Yeah, would love to. So Jared Evan is president and co-founder of A Place at Home. And in-home care has really been a part of my life now since about 2011. But really,

my story in home care started well before that. It really started with my grandparents. And my reason for wanting to be in this industry really stems from, you know, the relationship and the support that I had had my whole life, thankfully, from my grandparents. So, you know, at an early age, you know, they were always with me and provided me so many opportunities, camping, fishing, golf, travel, you know, just simply being the kind of daycare provider after school in summer. So as my parents were, you know, working and trying to, you know, provide for the family. So luckily I was able to spend, you know, a good portion of my life, my young childhood with them. Unfortunately, as it happens with so many people that as life continues and obligations grow and, you know, we get all grown up, you know, start families, businesses, and you often have

things that take up the time that would have otherwise been able to be spent with family and being able to kind of provide that helping hand. So that's really when it hit me that, man, I'm not the grandson that I once was. I can't drop everything at the drop of a hat and go and help like I once did. And it was really kind of affecting me. And so as my grandparents aged and needed more help, and I increasingly couldn't be there for them, and we have a small family unit, so there wasn't a whole lot of help out there for them within our family. It opened my eyes to saying, what else is out there? What could possibly fill this gap to where I once was able to be able to be there? And that's when I really discovered what in-home care

was. And so, you know, the stars really aligned because as you mentioned, Dustin DiStefano, co-founder, and he's a childhood friend of mine. We've been buddies since the fourth grade. And so growing up together, you know, spending a lot of time together through, you know, our childhood and high school and early days in college. Well, then he kind of split paths and spent some time overseas and in Arizona, but finally found his way back into Omaha. And this was about the time when I was really realizing the toll that it was taking on me of not really being able to be there for my grandparents. Well, Dustin, and he'll tell you his story when he's on next week, but just a little tidbit of that. He was experiencing some

issues within his family with his great grandmothers and them having to leave their homes to go to a nursing home in rural Iowa. And that was really taking a toll on him and his family because of their want and their need to stay at home. And so one night as Dustin was making his way back into Omaha from Arizona, his wife and myself and my wife were having some dinner and drinking some wine. And a few bottles of wine later, we're talking about life and family. And that's when home care really kind of came up as to what could potentially fill that gap. Fast forward a couple of weeks later, and Dustin and I are looking into the industry. And a couple of weeks after that, I'm like, you know

what? There's a business here and we can help, but we can also do things. And really what we felt as do things differently. There was a fantastic, we're in Omaha, Nebraska. There's awesome home care companies right here. And even the corporate headquarters of Right at Home and Home Instead. So a couple of bohemians that we entered into, but we wanted to bring a different approach to in-home care. So that was kind of the culmination of my personal story and kind of what brought me into home care. Amazing. Thank you for sharing all of that. I was going to have you take us down memory lane to talk about that kind of initial meeting where you and Dustin had maybe the heart to heart and you covered that, which is amazing. And I wanted to ask, taking us back to, you said 2011,

2012, things looked quite a bit differently. That was not too long ago, but long enough to where things did look differently back then. And you mentioned there was already a few big competitors or home care businesses right there in your backyard. And you mentioned doing some research, kind of getting your feet wet, figuring out if this was a, you know, a good idea to go all in on home care. What, just take us back a little bit. What were the things that you all found that made you decide to commit and go all in on home care? Yeah, no, absolutely. So once we really discovered that home care is an option and realized that, wow, this is actually an industry and there are a lot of players in this industry at that time. And we did kind of our first market analysis. I believe there was 46 other in-home care companies in Omaha, most of which were smaller independent companies. But, you know, at that time, I think Homestead had four locations,

Right at Home had three locations. There was a Comfort Care. I mean, a lot of the biggest names out there had multiple locations within our market and they'd been established for quite some time. But in that, we wanted to see, first off, is it viable? Does it make sense for us to enter into this kind of what it seemed at that time, a crowded industry? And of course, it didn't take long with the research and the baby boomers and the 65,000, you know, 65 and older, 10,000 a day, turning 65 is to saying, you know what, although a lot of the market, you know, is currently being had by so many great home care companies, there's a lot of additional room out there. So that was kind of the first step is like, is there room for an

additional player in this business? And so once we kind of overcame that step, now we said, okay, well, what do we really need to do to be able to stand apart from others? And what we noticed kind of on day one, when we were starting to call and talk to different companies and even receive some of the care for family was, you know, professionalism across the board seemed to lack, right? We were calling, we were calling up providers and they weren't answering and they weren't calling us back and we'd be leaving a voicemail or maybe they did answer. And, and finally we would, we would get somebody to come into the home. We had people showing up in flip-flops and, you know, a scratch piece of paper trying to, you know, create the care plan. And then after this actually receiving the care,

caregivers wouldn't show up. And it just, this, this list of things that started happening and said, you know what, if we just like answer the phone when people call and, and we do what we say, what we're going to do and we like not have shifts that go unfilled, like we could, we could be different from everybody just by doing those things. And so that was our initial goal is like, say, Hey, we're going to, we're going to do that. And, and we did. And Dustin and I, for the first three, four years of business, never, never missed a shift. Like that was, it was, it was our goal to never have anybody go without care. Now that's not always sustainable. And there's not always a magic potion out there to make people go or to have somebody readily available. But we sure did our best and we had a really solid track record of just doing that. So yeah, professionalism is

something that was important to us that we wanted to bring into the industry. And there's a lot more to this story I'd be happy to share, but we also wanted to bring in at the time care coordination. Right. And so this for us was a hands off approach to health care. We were utilizing an RN and a non hands on way to be able to navigate and coordinate the health care continuum for our clients. Right. And so we brought that in from day one. So we were like, you know what? Not only are we going to be professional, but we're also going to bring in a nurse who can be able to help navigate and this can be this great service that nobody in the market at that time that we really saw was providing this additional service. Now it's going to be our differentiator. And it was, it most certainly was a differentiator. And there are in ways, of course, companies, in-home care companies, they do care coordinate,

whether or not it's a service line or not. That is a part of just what our day-to-day lives are as in-home care owners. But that is like from the get-go, that's what we wanted to do. It's what we wanted to start with. But it was interesting because when, as I was mentioning, 2011, 2012, when we launched, you know, Dustin and I, we had business plans, performers, and we're doing industry analysis and our SWOT and our Porter's Five Forces and, you know, businesses and entrepreneurship as a background kind of that I had brought to the table. And I was like, man,

we are ready to go. We know exactly what we're going to do. And we actually came across at Creighton University, they had an incubator program called Halo at the time. And so it was for, you know, young budding entrepreneurs that either are going to launch or had just recently launched a business. And so we applied and we got accepted to it. And so we come into this program and like, hey, we got it all figured out. Here's all of our stuff. And like, man, you tell you what guys, you do have, you guys have figured out, you know, you basically fast forwarded yourself to, and neither one of you guys have any healthcare background. We're like, oh, man. No, honestly, out of all the research we did, we never really looked back at ourselves and thought about that.

So they really did help us to kind of have our own internal SWOT analysis and be able to help at that time connect us with a nurse who had had a business called My Concierge Nursing. And we actually formed a business partnership with Paula Howard and brought on the concierge nursing concept into a place at home, made a care coordination. She kind of checked the boxes, you know, female, you know, 65 or older right there. So an aging, you know, individual healthcare background and didn't hurt that she was pretty well connected in the healthcare industry. So that was some of the early days of coming into a place at home.

Amazing. Okay. I have so many questions after all that you just shared. So that was great. The first one is, was franchising always a part of the plan or did you guys start as a single site and then you were just going to kind of take the growth as it comes? Like what was the initial vision and did that change? Yeah. So it really did change. And from day one, I mean, like I mentioned, we had the performance. We were looking into the future.

We saw our 10-year picture. We had scaling on our mind. But one thing that Dustin and I could not agree on was whether or not we're going to stay like an independent business or if we were going to franchise. From early, early days, that was something it took us years to come together and make a decision together that franchising was going to be the way forward. Being in an industry and in the backyard of some home care giants that, you know, were the franchise model, I'm thinking to myself, you know what? I don't always like taking the path that has already been taken.

If everyone's doing this, I want to do this. And to take it even a step further back when I was in undergrad and business college, franchising was kind of negatively looked at. Like when our instructors and professors were talking about franchising, they said, hey, you're going to have less profit. You're going to lose control. Like franchising is, you know, why in the world would you franchise? If you're going to run a business, keep the profit yourself. Add those additional locations. You can manage an employee.

You can't manage an owner, right? You're going to have home care owners out there selling chicken, right? Like you never know what's going to happen. They could go AWOL, right? And you can't have consistency in a franchise. So I kind of was jaded coming into the conversation and really came out to like, I have to be proven otherwise. And there's no, you know, or else I'm not going to go down that path. So again, it took years to kind of really come to that understanding. And it was not an easy decision. We opened up another location and we really ended up using that as a model as to how

we could open up additional franchise locations. We also joined the International Franchise Association well before we ever franchised to really learn franchising, to make connections, to talk to attorneys and consultants as to how can we do this? How can we do it right? And so it was a journey. But ultimately, after it all was said and done, the most important thing to us was that we had owners that had buy-in and that at the end of the day would drop what they're doing to go and take care of their clients and their caregivers. And we didn't, although many great managers and directors out there, I don't by any means want to say this negatively on that, but we didn't feel like we could get that same buy-in with an employee as we could an owner.

Right. And so that's ultimately where we came into making this a franchise. Yeah, amazing. Can I ask a couple of specifics? Just because I do think this is really interesting. There are a lot of providers that from the start think about scale and think about the future as should any business owner. But it's interesting to hear you say, you and your co-founder were conflicted about this really large decision. And I think a lot of large home care businesses come to this crossroads of do we continue to scale as a large independent or do we go the franchising route? So could you share a little bit more specifically, how many years into business were you when you made the

decision and about how big was the business when you guys decided to franchise? You could say, share maybe how many hours or revenue, like what stage was the business at when you ultimately made this big decision? Sure. Yeah. So it was roughly three years in, right? So we launched in 2012 by about the end of 2015 is when we said you know what franchising i think is going to be the route and that's really when we we had joined the ifa we had not yet taken the leap into franchising but we're now creating our performance we're raising some funds we're seeing what it would take to franchise. But yeah, making that decision really came in about 2015. 2016 was the year into 2017 was the year of, you know,

getting our franchise disclosure document, our franchise agreement, revamping our manual, making sure that we had all the right standards and policies and procedures in place to be able to not only have our, you know, corporate staff be able to not only have our corporate staff be able to utilize, but how can we make it franchisable, right? Instead of us having terms such as our employees, things like that, we had to kind of separate ourselves through because of joint employer issues from any kind of terminology that would kind of breach a franchise owner to an individual franchisee's employee. There was some background work that went into that. It was 2017 when we said, okay, we're ready to franchise. We opened our first three franchise locations in 2018.

When we made that decision, we were at about a $2 million agency. And so that was what 2000 at that time, by the way, we were charging like 16 bucks an hour. You know, it's, it's, it's a different day and age gone up quite a bit, but we had about two years consistent consistent revenue of about 2 million. I mean, we had absolutely grown. But in that last kind of year, we were dividing our focus between creating a franchise entity while also bringing in the right systems to be able to allow our corporate location grow without us being there every day. So that was really a balance is how can we divide our

attention without lacking in quality and revenue from our headquarters and while also creating this new company, which is Franchisee. Amazing. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Again, I just think out of curiosity, it's interesting to know when you have those conversations, what stage you are in the business and ultimately how you make those really large decisions. Because again, I think all owners are thinking about scale and thinking about the future and there's no, there's no silver bullet. There's no one right way or one right direction to take your home care business. There's a lot of different options. And so it's interesting to hear you kind of play back what it looked like for you all and how you made these decisions. I want to backtrack a little bit to your

differentiators and what sets you all apart. You talked about professionalism and care coordination. Talk a little bit more about kind of your core model, your core services, and how maybe that's evolved over time, how you establish those core services and what they look like today and really what is your bread and butter? Yeah, no, great, great question. As I mentioned, when we launched, we did have care coordination as an additional service line and really did feel like that was the differentiator that we needed to make a big impact in the market. With that, though, we also got licensed in a state where you didn't have to be licensed, which allowed us to, and actually required us to provide care at almost even a higher level with more scrutiny from the state and compliance. And so we use that as a selling tool, right? So it was like, hey, we don't have to be licensed, but we are. We don't have to have a nurse, but we do. We don't have to have these plans of care, but look

at our plan, right? So we use a lot of that in our early days of saying, this is how we're different than a lot of competition. But that alone wasn't enough, right? We found ourselves needing to have a solution for caregivers when we had a client who had a hospitalization, who perhaps, you know, passed and all of a sudden their hours are stripped. And although we do have, you know, at that time, a great kind of inflow of new clients, we didn't necessarily have the right client in the right location at the right time for these caregivers. So we said, you know, how are we going to help our retention by keeping this caregiver who doesn't have ours? So what do we need to do here? And so we actually started staffing.

Right. So we started a short term staffing solution. solution is partnering up with local healthcare organizations, primarily assisted living, you know, memory care and long-term care communities. And even, you know, kind of your quote unquote nursing homes, whoever really needed that additional staff, we were partnering with them and helping them fill shifts, right? So that's something that we did that really helped to separate us. And then on down the line, we realized that as a part of care coordination, we were charging our clients an hourly rate for care coordination. But one of our top services through care coordination was helping those that were at home who could no longer be at home for whatever reason, physically, financially, mentally, something was driving them away from the home.

A lot of times it's financially right. It does become pretty expensive when you're looking at 10, 12 plus hours of care compared to maybe an assisted living. So we were charging through care coordination or our clients to help find the best assisted living or the best memory care, the best community for them. And so we're looking at it and we're like, you know what, there's this placement industry that's kind of emerging at that time. It's like, why charge our clients when we could provide it as a free service, get a referral fee, which is way more than profitable than the hours or the four or five hours of care coordination we may have been charging. And it allows us to better kind of partner with our referral sources. A lot of ours is living in a lot of these communities,

which already were partners of ours. And so we created Senior Living Alternatives, which is an alternative to the home, which is our placement line. And so it was around that time, right? When all these things are starting to fire on all cylinders, we're getting like that 2 million plus revenue. When I say, you know what, we're, we're doing something here. We're, we're growing a pretty good sized company and we're starting to get noticed in the marketplace, best of Omaha year after year, you know, and we're pretty new here. So we must be doing something right. Right. So that's when we said, you know, we got to scale and, you know, and then decided of course to franchise.

So we coined the term senior focused care, and that is what we kind of put it all together. So in-home care, care coordination, staffing, and our senior living alternatives. Amazing. So it sounds like, am I understanding right, that you formed these core services when you all were just getting started or has it evolved since you've started franchising? Was the model pretty set before you all started franchising or has it evolved as you've gone? No, that model was set coming into franchising or has it evolved as you've gone? Yeah, that model was set coming into franchising. And so we try to take a different approach when growing and finding new owners of saying, yeah, we are in-home care. That is our foundation. That's where our owners are going to grow. That's

where they're going to focus. We're going to make you an in-home care owner first. But these are ways that we can differentiate within your market by being senior focused care. And so that allowed us really to take things, you know, really to a whole nother level and also gave us so much more. And I mean, you, of course, being in the industry, you know, when you go and talk to a referral source, say you're in an assisted living, all the other in-home care companies are there to really saying, hey, you know, I can help your residents live here longer through in-home care with, you know, better care or more consistent care. And so they don't have to go to that next level of care into the long-term care community. So I can keep your residents here longer, right? We're all saying that, but now we can go to an assisted living and say, hey, you know, by the way, have you had anybody call out recently? Did you have any staff maybe over this last weekend who just didn't show up? Give us a call. We can help you out. Like, Oh really? You do that? Yeah,

we do that. Great. And then, Oh, by the way, how is your occupancy? Right. What's your occupancy like rate? You know, what's your, what's your rate? And they're like, well, you know, 75, 80, 90%, whatever it may be. It's like, Oh, so you have some open rooms? Yeah, we do. Well, how would you like it if somebody who could no longer stay at home, we refer to you? Would you like to, you know, fill another room? Like, yeah, we're set.

Right? And so we had more to talk about. We had more to partner with them. And so it formed better relationships and more relationships in those communities. Because now you're talking to the DON and you're talking to the activities director and you're talking to the director, like you're talking to all these different people for our senior living alternatives agreements, for our staffing agreements. And then of course, just to help those who want to live in assisted living longer, happier, healthier lives through in-home care

and care coordination. Yeah, thank you for explaining. I think this is, it was such a smart business decision to really round out these services so that you could set up these franchisees to take something unique and differentiate it out into the market. So they too could be, you know, winning on the levels that you all did early on. So I think that's smart and I'm sure has proven, you know, successful for your franchisees as well. I want to go back to a comment you made earlier, and this is getting maybe a little bit into the weeds, but I think people's ears probably perked up. You mentioned how early days, you know, professionalism was a big issue, calling out, missing shifts was a big issue. And you said that you all took it

upon yourselves to make sure that there was no missed shifts. Can you explain how you all did that? That's still an issue today. And I think a lot of owners are still trying to figure out how to avoid call-outs. So what did that look like for you? How did you figure it out and what worked well? Yeah, no, great question. You remember back at one of those early kind of aha moments of like, hey, you're guys in the female industry, you're young and aging industry, you have no healthcare background. Dustin and I both got our CNAs. So right off the bat, we're like, you know what, if we're gonna be managing people, we need to know what they know. And we need to be able to relate with them on the things that they do on a day to day. And also, if they don't show with them on the things that they do on a day-to-day. And also,

if they don't show up, we can show up. So having a business partner between the two of us, we were making sure that shifts were being filled. But that really didn't happen all that often, to tell you the truth. We had our core group of caregivers who we knew that if we were calling, they were going to answer. We? We treated them well, we respected them. And, you know, we really try to develop their, you know, their professionalism, give them more skill sets, bonus the heck out of them if need be, you know, throughout the different times. But we absolutely had kind of our go-to list of caregivers that it doesn't matter if it was midnight or if it were, you know,

four o'clock in the afternoon, they were, they would go in. Yeah. So it sounds like a combination of things, culture and expectations, but also having backups in the office, you know, being able to have people that could fill in if need be. You mentioned also, you know, rates. And I'm going to interrupt you, but we were also kind of wizards with the schedule, right? So the schedule, a lot of times can help kind of devise your answer in its own, right?

You have somebody call out, you look at the schedule and say, well, is there any other, you know, caregivers that are just finishing up a shift that can just go and take over this one? Perhaps there is a client who just needed some companion type help or some, you know, cleaning around the house. Well, maybe we can move that to a little bit time later the day. The caregiver that was going to go there is going to go over here. Right. Or, you know, there's a really high need client that perhaps I'm going to take what caregiver put them with a high need client where we had a call out. I'm going to go play rummy with Jim because, you know, and make them some breakfast myself. Like, you know, we,

we took some of the easier shifts, of course, but like it was, you know, we had a lot, we had a lot of fun doing it, but you know, I think having a good insight and having a good scheduler also can really help with some of those, those call outs and just being creative. And ultimately knowing your people, knowing your clients, knowing your caregivers, knowing their strengths, knowing their availability and unavailability. It really is kind of that Rubik's cube of scheduling, but I like to hear you spin it in a positive way of like, it is doable. If you know these people, know their schedules, know their preferences, you really can make things work. You also mentioned rates back then were very different than they are today. What has been your all's approach to rates in general,

you know, being kind of a market leader or, you know, what's been your approach to rate setting and also wages on the flip side of that? Yeah, great question. We try to be at about 46 to 50% gross margins, right? So if we're charging 30 bucks an hour, we're normally paying 15 bucks, right? That's kind of the basic math of it, you know, managing it correctly and managing overtime, drive time, things like that. We have some owners that, you know, will absolutely see kind of that 46% growth. But traditionally, that's kind of how we approach it. But every market that we go into, it's market analysis, it's calling, it's online searching and just trying to figure out what the market currently will allow. We don't come in, we're not a discount service. We're not a discount brand. We are not 1099, right? We W2

all of our employees. And so we try to find out kind of where the bottom is and where the top is. And we come in just right underneath where the top of the market is, is usually kind of our go to for the pricing. Awesome. Yeah, again, just just out of curiosity, you know how you all have approached these different components. And I know we're getting into the weeds here, which, you know, thanks for bearing with me as I as I string you along here. I want to talk about kind of the early franchising days. So you said I think it was around 2017. You brought in, you know, a couple of franchise owners. Talk to me about those early days franch it was around 2017, you brought in, you know, a couple of franchise owners. Talk to me about those early days franchising, you know, you got all the agreements and the documents and all the logistics in place, but then here you are, you have to go out and find

these people, you know, who are they? What do they look like? What are their strengths? What are their backgrounds? And then how do you, you know, train and coach and help them get started? Talk to me just about that experience in general. Yeah. Oh, man. I don't know how much time you have. It was a lot of trial by fire. It was a lot of, you know, just kind of learning on the run.

Thankfully, as I mentioned, we did have some great franchise consultants who showed us the path, but we still, you know, we did not meet our initial goals of how many owners we were going to have. It was a lot harder than what we thought. Our first franchise expo that we went to is called the IFE in New York and Javits Center. And Dustin and I, this is our entree to franchising. And there's thousands of people and we're getting cards. I'm like, this is amazing. We're going to get so many franchisees. And then we started noticing like, ah, I think this person just wants

my pen. And wow, they just stole all of our mints. And like, hey, what's going on? There is a lot of that going on. And it's like, there's tons on? Like, there is a lot of that going on. And it's like, there's tons of competition there. It was a whirlwind, but we're like, no, this is amazing. We've got, you know, dozens of referrals and we're going to, we're just going to crush it. Well, it wasn't that easy. It was not that easy about just put up a booth and go and talk to people and they're going to believe and trust. And yeah, we were still two young guys at the time, you know, At the time, a lot of these gray hairs have come since, but no, it was a lot of trial and error.

There are just like in home care, like lead portals, right? Like you got your aging care, you got your caring homes, you got your caring.com, right? You can go and you can buy leads, right? Well, you can absolutely buy leads through portals and franchising. Dustin and I went through like 3,000 different leads and just smiling, dialing for like a year before we finally were getting some traction and some people to catch on, right?

And so it was a lot of work. There was a ton of hard work to get there. And so finally we found our initial owners and they were in Denver, south kind of suburbs of Denver. And we were so excited. Like we got the first ones. The first ones are the hardest. Talked to one of our franchise kind of consultant friends. They're like, you got your first one.

That's great. Right. But any idiot could be first. The second one's the toughest. And we're like, Oh no, the second one's the toughest. This is ridiculous. Right. So, but we, we did, we went back to back. We had our first three kind of bang, bang, bangs, launch our first three locations, you know, 2018. So, but it took us from 2017 to 2018 to, to get those first three. And, but yeah, it was, it was a lot, it was a lot of, it's a lot of smiling and dialing to, to try and find them. Now we, we have a much different approach now. We still do have some of those portal leads as a part of, of the process. Cause there's some definite, definite relevance

to that, but we've got a lot of obstacles we put in people in the way of making it through our development process. And so that helps us to focus our time on the quality leads and not just somebody who's disgruntled at work one day saying, I hate my boss. I want to do this myself and whatever that may be. Yeah. I want to ask about, and I'll explain where I'm going with this, ask, you know, who these people were back then, you know, what, what maybe occupations were they in? Do they have backgrounds in healthcare, you know, maybe age or demographic. And then I want to ask, you know, has that changed to who they are today? You know, there's a lot of interest and attention on home

care post pandemic, and a lot of people are flocking this space. And I'm curious if the demographic has changed substantially over the last decade, decade and a half, or if there's still parallels and similarities. So what was the demographic or the persona of these people early on? And then we can kind of transition and talk about what the demographic looks like today. So early on, we had to find entrepreneurial minded people, people willing to take a risk, not only in starting a business, but take a risk and starting a business with two guys who don't have any locations that are, you know, that they're really taking a leap of faith on. So really, our target for even the first 20 owners was very much targeting people that

were more risk tolerant high achievers and entrepreneurial right like it was very important of them to be a part of a new and growing brand because they themselves could be a part of that growth and they can make a contribution to the rest of the system whereas going into right like a like a homestead right at home they're like you know we we have our our paths right please be a part of it and i'm sure you'll do great but you know we may not be as accepting to your ideas as a new brand who is really trying to learn as we go, right? So it was important for us to have somebody that was a little bit more of a risk taker, for sure.

So our first owners, their background was entrepreneurship. They owned other businesses in the past. We did have as well, we had a, let's see, somebody who is a part of a nonprofit organization that was focused on trying to advocate for seniors who were being taken advantage of. Right. And so like they, they knew about the industry because of this nonprofit, but they did not know home care. They were not healthcare. And really we didn't have anybody in healthcare really even in this industry until, you know, yeah, well, I guess we did have a social worker join us about number five, I believe in the system.

I think number four in the system came from an assistive living background. But other than that, the majority of people, I mean, we have all walks of life, you know, who are owners, everything from corporate ladder climbers nurses again entrepreneurs and kind of everything in between but yeah early days very much more entrepreneurial was was a lot more of that persona and so now it we're we're kind of getting to that next level to where we have people who want to be enterprise builders. They want to, of course, still high achievers. Societal is another big kind of key persona marker that we're looking at is

somebody who like loves helping people, but they want to be the best at it. Bring us those all day long, right? Like we can jive. We want to do that too. So that, yeah, I'm rambling now. So if there's a. Yeah. I'll jump in. You talked about how you and Dustin got your CNAs and how impactful that was for you to better understand your employees because you didn't have healthcare backgrounds. Has that ever been a recommendation to, to these owners or is it really up to them or how, how do, how do you advise and help them really start to understand healthcare and understand home care? Yeah, no great question. With some of our

online education platforms, we've kind of created online education that allows them some of those experiences. Now it's not to the extent of actually getting your CNA and doing some of that hands-on approach, but from the very beginning, we had what we call our care track to where it doesn't matter if it was you, your scheduler, your caregivers, you're going to, everyone's going to start and they're going to start as a piece of this and then kind of grow up into some more administrative type roles and leadership roles eventually. But it all started with you got to learn care, you got to learn care, you got to learn what your caregivers are going to know, but we don't require the CNA. We have had an owner, actually husband-wife owner, where the wife went on to, she was an attorney and went

on to get her BSN while being a home care owner, because just love being a part of the healthcare industry. And thankfully there's two of them. So there's enough kind of human capital there to be able to juggle all those things. But, you know, really there's quite a few learning curves in starting a home care business, right? Like you got to, of course, know home care and you got to know how to be able to manage people and you have to know how to hire. And well, that doesn't even factor in, like, you got to know how to be a business owner, right? And it's like, you have these accounts receivables and people owe you money. And it's like, how are you going to collect that, right? There's so many aspects of it. But really, we started with kind of a multi-faceted approach

of like, learn how to provide care, learn how to be a caregiver. And then let's also teach you how to be a business owner, right? And let's kind of grow through the steps of business ownership. I'm going to ask you what's probably the million dollar question here, which is what is a successful franchisee? What does it take? Who are the most successful and what are they doing differently? If you had to boil all that down to, you know, maybe your most successful franchisees, what does that look like? What are they doing and how are they, what does it take for them to be successful ultimately?

Yeah, they are employee focused, right? They are focused on providing their caregivers, their administrative staff, a great experience, right? Putting them first and being a good leader, right? And that's who we see being the best owners. People who are driven entirely by revenue and billable hours, although they may see some explosive growth, they're also going to be the ones that have the highest turnover rates. Retention is probably not going to be that great. Quality of care most likely will kind of be right along the line of that. You grew a great business, but kind of a weak foundation. So those that are really taking

the time to build a culture, build a team, and really kind of establish that trust within their staff, that's our golden egg, right? That's what we look for. And that's kind of our best owners. Really, really good answer. One of the things that I personally love about home care is just how diverse this group of people is. Within your system alone, you've got all of these people with different backgrounds and different experience. And I honestly think that's what makes home care so special is the combination of all of these different owners and operators that come from various and vast backgrounds. And it makes it what it is today. But I love this point that you're driving home of being employee focused. You can

be a good business leader. You can focus on numbers and profitability and revenue and hours. But at the end of the day, this is a very human focused business. And it's all about people. It's all about your people. And you have to be really dialed in and care about these people and do your best to take care of them. So again, I think that was a really great response. I want to ask a couple of questions here, here in closing, you know, maybe kind of just a few one-off questions. What, uh, what are you most focused on today? Can you, well, can you share about how many franchisees do you have today? You know, kind of what does the, the, the system look like today and,

and what are you most focused on, you know Home care is at a really maybe interesting place right now. And what are you focused on for the next decade? Yeah. So to date, we have awarded 65 territories. That is amongst 38 owners. I would say that by the end of next week, we've got some really exciting things happening. There should be the addition of seven territories. Just I would say that that are kind of all in the signing stages that will happen here over the next couple of weeks.

And that'll bring it up to about 41 total owners. So that that's kind of where we are in terms of territories and size. I think that spans across 17 states, I believe. We've got some areas that really, like Texas, I don't know what it is in Texas. Everything's bigger, but we have a lot of locations in Texas, right? The Northeast is really starting to grow to New Jersey. We've got, you know, four territories in New Jersey. So, I mean, we've got quite a few kind of major metropolitan areas where we do have multiples, which is great as well. But, you know, as to like where I am focused. So Dustin and I, we've always really done a good job of kind of dividing

and conquering one of the great benefits of having a business partner. And so Dustin really does focus on a lot of the operations and the coaching. And I'm really focused on the franchise development and bringing on new and the right owners. And so a lot of where my time is spent is making sure that my development team is doing what they need to be doing to make sure that the people we're bringing in, that they're vetting them appropriately, and that we have a solid funnel of people that we're working with to tee up to our operations team for our meet the team days and make sure that they kind of give that final check off with to tee up to our operations team for our meet the team days and make sure that they kind of give that final check off before we ever bring anybody into that

system. So that's really a lot of where I focus my time, but I can't, you know, totally stay out of home care. That's, you know, that's, it's a part of me. So there's always specialty projects I'm working on. I mean, there's of course, kind of your, your key words out there that everybody in the home care industry talks about is like, how can we hire better caregivers? How can we keep them longer? Right. What kind of technology can we add to make the experience better? Right. All of those things, they're not, they're not going away. And when I kind of dig out of the development world, that's where I'm focused. I'm really kind of focused on some specialty projects or

what can be a new initiative of ours coming into the future. Can you share specifically maybe one of those that you're either working on as the year ends or looking forward to next year? One of those initiatives that you're excited about and maybe most focused on right now? Absolutely. So, you know, as an industry, in-home care isn't really looked at as healthcare, right? Although we're impacting the health of our clients, right? Every single day. And so where we want to take our company to the next level in 2025 is making sure that we are an integrated part of the healthcare continuum and seen as a legitimate provider of healthcare, not just in-home care, right, by being able to prevent hospitalizations, reduce our readmissions, helping to manage chronic conditions,

perhaps even be a part of early intervention for worsening health conditions. So right now, that's really a focus of ours. And we've got some tools within our tool belt that I hope will help us to get there. So yeah, that's really kind of where 2025 focus is. Awesome. Thank you for sharing. Another maybe, I don't know, one-off question that might not catch you off guard, but what would you say is keeping you up at night, you know, with these bringing on these new owners, you know, things that you can't control that are happening out in the field? What maybe are you most stressed or concerned about when it comes to your role and the business as a whole?

Well, I would say that something that ultimately keeps me up at night, I knew you were going to ask this one, I really came a little bit more prepared. No, I mean, I want our owners to always be more profitable. And we are. We are profitable. We are a profitable agency. We just got awarded as one of the most profitable franchise entities through FBR, which is kind of setting some of the gold standard in recognition, a lot of our satisfaction of our franchisees and so forth. But it could get better. I want us to be able to be more profitable.

In order to do that, we have to be able to keep our caregivers longer. We have to be able to continue to use technology. Some of these areas where I said are some initiatives going forward, not only is it going to be able to provide better care, but a better experience for our caregivers. It was a huge focus of ours during COVID to be able to make sure we had a great pipeline of caregivers. And now this great pipeline of caregivers is kind of like it's back, right? But now, like, it's not just about finding those, it's always about, you know, being able to retain them. So if we can better implement technology, and we also have some other outsourced kind of resources that help us with the hiring process, right? That'll make us more profitable by adding additional service lines or having our owners focus more on some of the service lines that we already have, right?

Although we are senior focused care and we have the four specific revenue streams, our owners really get dialed in because that's where we want them dialed into in-home care. But I would love for them to be able to branch out and take on more staffing, right? To be able to, you know, be more robust with senior living alternatives, because it's a better, you know, it's a better experience for our clients and it ultimately will make our owners more profitable. So making them more profitable, right? And the more profitable they are, the more people who are going to want to be a part of this system, right? It's kind of a revolving,

you know, thing for us. But yeah, that's what I would say. Profitability. Yeah, that was great. You've shared a lot of great insights. Jared, thank you so much for coming prepared to this conversation. I know I took you off script here. I've asked a lot of questions off the cuff, but I think you've handled everything really well and you've represented your business extremely well. I want everyone to know that we're going to bring Dustin on next week, Jared's co-founder, and we're going to get more into the weeds on operations. Jared was here today to tell the story and share kind of the background and the thinking behind their business. But next week, I've got Dustin in the hot seat.

We're going to talk about operations. I know some people in the chat have asked about recruitment and sales and marketing. And I'm going to actually pick Dustin's brain on that of how they've approached really specific things like recruitment and retention and technology and operations so we can understand some of the decisions that you all have made to build this successful business. So Jared, just in parting, I know you've shared a lot today, but what advice would you give? I know you've got franchisees of yours that are listening to this and other owners and operators.

What maybe parting words or parting advice would you give to owners going into 2025? Oh, let's see here. Parting words going into 2025. I would say just do it, right? Like there's a time for thinking about things and analyzing things. And then there's a time to just go out and do it. And so oftentimes we get caught in the revolving door of what could I do and not enough people just do it. So I would say, you know, going into 2025, make those decisions. If it's the wrong one, learn from it. If it's the right one, you know, replicate it. Yeah. Don't overthink or don't overanalyze. There's a lot of people that need care and the employees are out there. We've just got to find them. So I think that's

great. Don't overthink, don't overanalyze. 2025 will be a year of doing. We've learned a lot post-pandemic and I think you're exactly right. Now is just the time to get out there and execute and do what we've got to do. So Jared, thanks again for being here. This has been a really great session. Again, I think you've shared a lot of good insights in a lot of different directions. So thanks for bearing with me and I hope everyone will join us same day, same time next week. We've got Dustin on to dive into operations. So we'll go ahead and wrap up here. Thanks everyone for being here and we'll look forward to next week.

Thanks, Kate, for having me. That's a wrap. This podcast was made by the team at CareSwitch, the first AI-powered management software for home care agencies. If you want to automate away the menial of your day-to-day with AI so that you and your team can focus on giving great care, check us out at careswitch.com.