Starting a Home Care Business - Franchise or Go it Alone?

Introduction

For the many of us with a background of working within the care industry, the experience gained and solid understanding of the inner workings of a care company may one day make us dream about how it might be to take control and run our own home care business.

As we know, there are many crucial elements of delivering care service including stringent policies, procedures and quality standards, delivering the highest quality of care to valued and often vulnerable customers, as well as all of the other elements that go into making a well-managed business successful.

If what you’re reading aligns with your experience – you might wonder; can I build my own home care business? The answer is yes, but with the caveat that starting from the ground up is a huge undertaking that meets all of the factors we’ve described, as well as building a brand and putting in place the systems that a modern home care company needs to flourish.

Why is Care a common industry for franchising?

In recent years, care has become a staple sector for the franchising industry, and it’s easy to see why home care businesses lend themselves so well to the franchise model.

Key factors to consider:

Regulation

The British care industry is heavily regulated, and rightfully so. Organisations such as the CQC (Care Quality Commission) ensure that home care companies are delivering their services to fundamental standards of quality and safety.

Implementing the systems required in order to capture the level of detail needed to deliver outstanding care is a time, resource and experience driven task.

For an aspiring home care business owner, the clear benefit is that the franchise uses standardised systems that are already well established.

Trust & Recognition

For a loved one, entrusting the care of a family member to a care company is a difficult and often emotional experience. Naturally, they will look towards an established care company that they recognise provides quality care and can be verified by testimonials, reviews and experiences of other customers.

This factor offers a substantial benefit to joining a home care franchise over going it alone and building your own home care business. Once your systems are in place, from day one of joining a franchise you benefit from the immediate brand recognition that the franchise has built up over many years.

Contrast that to starting your own home care business – where you’ll need to develop your own branding and marketing materials before you can even begin to raise awareness of your service, you can see that the level of time and financial investment to begin delivering services will be much higher.

Training & Support

For every aspiring business owner, the most important task is to concentrate on what’s important – running the business.

By joining a franchise, you immediately benefit from the many years of experience the franchise has developed over their time in business. With this comes a full support team in all aspects of what makes a home care company successful, including HR, marketing, finance and quality standards.

With a franchise, you have the ability to draw on this expertise from day one, and in turn keep focus on running the core element of any great home care business – delivering the highest quality of care.

Are there any downsides to franchising over going it alone?

To make an informed decision on what the best route is for you, it’s important to think about what benefits building your own business from the ground up would bring.

One factor depends on you and your aspirations; particularly if you’re used to always doing things your own way. As we mentioned, a care franchise builds recognition for the entire network through use of a consistent brand. That means you’ll deliver your services under the franchise name, using the branding, marketing materials and digital content that collaboratively strengthens the franchise network.

Another factor is that of company culture and guidelines. For a successful franchise relationship, franchisees and head office need to be on the same page in terms of their strategic goals and the way they operate their businesses. That said, a great franchise is built upon collaboration, and franchisees have the ability to positively influence the way the entire network delivers its services.

I’m still not sure if Franchising is for me

Joining a franchise (or starting your own home care business) is a substantial decision; in fact, it’s most likely the biggest decision of an individual’s care industry career.

The best place to start is often by speaking to someone and drawing on their experience to understand what’s right for you.

At CareYourWay, we’re always open to meeting with aspiring care business owners and learning more about them. In turn we share advice and experience – and with franchising being a mutual decision, learning whether we would be a great fit to work together and build a successful home care company in your territory.

If you’d like to get started, give us a call on 01548 521789 or e-mail us at franchise@careyourway.co.uk.