Should I buy a Home Care Franchise? Key Questions to Ask Yourself

1. How passionate am I about care?

There’s a good reason that we place this question at the top of our list.

Providing quality home care is all about your passion and commitment to delivering services that place the individual at the centre of all decision-making, and your customers will rely on you to support their health and wellbeing on each and every home visit.

We’ve discussed this previously, but it’s a very common misconception that to join CareYourWay as a franchisee you need to have industry relevant experience or to have been a registered care manager.

While there’s no doubt that industry experience is valuable, our unique model of supporting franchisees to deliver home care services means that the only pre-requisite is your commitment to delivering the best quality care. Instead, in most circumstances you’ll recruit staff including a registered care manager.

To achieve this, your passion is what will drive you forward to success in delivering home care across your local area. If you’re a motivated individual who wants to make a difference in local people’s lives and understands the benefit of established systems and processes, continue reading!

Learn more about what life will be like as a CareYourWay franchisee

2. Can I meet the investment requirements? (Start-up Costs)

In our last article we weighed up the options between franchising or going it alone, with a key one being finance. This brings about our next essential question!

In a nutshell, there are of course costs associated with becoming an established home care provider in your territory.

However, the important distinction between buying a home care franchise or building your own home care business is that the franchise approach often offers significant cost savings. The most common reasons for this are:

Systems and processes are already established

A real benefit is that much of the work to establish a solid model for delivering services has already been established. This saves substantial time and investment in setting up your own systems of work.

Great support is a core part of the franchise offering

If we use ourselves as an example, CareYourWay has been established for over 15 years and through that time we’ve experienced many of the challenges that a new home care company is likely to face.

Elements such as recruitment, marketing (including brand awareness) and HR all have the potential to introduce unnecessary expenses whilst finding the right solution. By buying into a home care franchise, this kind of knowledge and support should come as standard; in turn saving you resources and allowing you to focus on delivering great care.

A formula that works

From your first day of trading, the franchise model gives you an open door to success by employing the strategies of an already successful business to source clients and deliver brilliant services that raise your reputation in your local territory.

In summary, the initial investment is a requirement, but provides a foundation that can pay dividends long into the future.

One real benefit of franchising being a proven model means that banks often look much more favourably upon a franchise business than they might do with a brand new business just getting started. In addition, important documents such as your business plan can be produced with the advice and support of the franchise.

Learn more about our the financial projections of a CareYourWay franchise

3. How motivated am I?

If you’re still reading, we can safely assume you have a passion for care, and understand that any successful home care business will require a level of investment.

The final question is all about your future aspirations and where you see your home care business developing over time, and how joining a home care franchise allows for flexibility in how big of a territory you operate across.

With a franchise, you’ll typically deliver your services across a defined area known as your territory. This territory is defined by the franchisor, in order to provide a substantial level of opportunity for business growth. It’s usually based on the number of households covered, as well as plenty of research made into the demographics of the territory and realistically how many customers you can expect to reach.

This means you’ll have the opportunity to build a successful company that once established generates a great level of income and potential profit.

If you have higher aspirations, perhaps to provide wider coverage of services over time, the story doesn’t have to end here – in fact it’s very common within home care franchising for successful franchises to take on additional territories. This offers a very stable means of growing a business by replicating its successes into new areas over time.

In summary on this point, if you’re looking to build a home care business that focuses on supporting people within your local community, franchising offers just as viable a prospect as it does to grow a business covering a wide geographic area made up of multiple territories.