“We talk a lot in this sector about ‘making a difference’, but the difference for us this thinking differently about the people who provide the service”


I’ve started the business here in the UK and I’m running a franchise myself, the way a franchisee will run it. I’ve learned from it, so all challenges they’ll face, I’ve stood there and faced them. I know what day one in the business feels like and understand how the model needed to be modified for the UK. We’ve gone out and built the business in the pilot area from scratch and it’s more proven now than it was 18 months ago and it will be more proven in 18 months’ time.


Tell us about the brand – what’s different? One of the frustrations I’ve got with care in the UK is that everybody talks about the good quality care they provide, the person-centered care and caring for their clients, and the elderly, but very few people talk about the people who are delivering that care. It’s impossible to run a good, effective, quality care provider without focusing on the people that deliver the care – and that’s the caregivers. And we do... for us, the most important people in our business are the caregivers We’re what we call ‘carer-centric’; we think


of the concerns and needs of a caregiver before anything else, and that enables us to provide a different standard of service. We pay better – our model is predicated on being able to pay a caregiver what they deserve for the excellent work they do. We reward people for loyalty. We reward people for developing themselves – we allow people to learn and grow within the business and that allows us a level of stability in our care team that very few providers have. So, whereas the average turnover of care staff is close to 50 per cent, ours is circa 20 per cent. We’ve been very adept at finding good people


and keeping them. That enables us to deliver consistency and continuity of care because we’re not always trying to find new caregivers to replace ones who are leaving.


Why hasn’t it been done before? It sounds so obvious, doesn’t it? But there’s a fundamental disconnect in care conversations between that which is delivered and the cost of said care. If we’re clear on how well we’re rewarding the staff, it justifies and vindicates the charge for that service. Families don’t want someone on minimum wage who could earn more elsewhere, they want someone who is well-rewarded to supply proper care to their loved one. And it takes good-quality people to give that care. We’re holding a conversation that some in the sector, I would suggest, are not brave enough to have. Our mission is to become the care industry’s


employer of choice by 2022. People should want to work in care, and for Visiting Angels. We need people within communities at a local level who can make that difference. You have to look for people who want to


differentiate themselves. We talk a lot in this sector about ‘making a difference’, but for us it’s thinking differently about the people who provide the service. For that reason I’m looking for franchisees who are a bit iconoclastic – they want to be slightly revolutionary in the way they operate and how they think. If you are carer-centric you have better


retention, which means you spend less on recruiting caregivers, less on training. You’ll provide a more consistent, better quality service to your clients. That’s not difficult if you think of


it in those terms but nobody else really does it. One of the things that Visiting Angels in the


States does well is recruitment and retention – they’ve won award after award for being a top employer in the US. Those mechanisms they use, that excellent customer service everyone associates with America, we’ve learned from and started using it in the UK – and it’s bearing fruit. There are two approaches to care. There’s what I would call the older approach – set yourself up as a care provider, go to the local authority, they send you work – you will spend all your time recruiting and training caregivers, and it becomes a logistics job, working out the way to get caregivers from A to B to C. Our way of doing it is very different. Because we put the caregiver at the heart of what we do, it’s easier to find care staff. Because the issue of holding on to good staff is resolved, we moved the focus in the business away from recruiting and logistics into retention and a sales effort. You’ve got to be brave enough to think differently, act differently, be the difference and do it for a longer period of time and most providers aren’t. There are providers where all of their work comes from the local authority. So they have one client and, by dint of that, they could lose one client – which will kill their business. We are at 36 clients in a year and a half – 36 clients who’ve chosen to use us. It’s a safer business because we’ve put the


work into finding individual clients rather than going to the council for care jobs like everybody else does. Franchisees don’t need hundreds of clients, they’ll run successful businesses based on a smallish clientele. A £1million turnover is possible with only 100 clients.


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