The specialist domiciliary care and nursing franchise Kare Plus has seen strong growth in demand for its services in 2012 and has recently announced that it will be further expanding its operation via the franchising model.
Fully accredited by the Care Quality Commission, Kare Plus is the only service provider in the private-care franchising sector that has been officially licensed as an NHS supplier. This means that the business is now placed to tap into valuable NHS contracts worth an anticipated £140m in the next 5-10 years.
Managing Director Steve Walsh also believes that the business model is proving to be ever more attractive to those employed within the health service, who are seeing radical changes taking place within the sector first-hand and witnessing the impact. Steve explained that the NHS is currently undergoing the largest restructure in its history. Changes are being driven by a hugely elevated demand on the NHS as well as long-term under-funding and an increasingly ageing population who need complex care and support packages. This provides a range of opportunities for care providers working on an independent basis, such as Kare Plus. Those who are already at work within the care sector have quickly recognised the value of these service providers and Kare Plus in particular has been held up as a business model that is ideally positioned to benefit from these structural changes.
Two of Kare Plus's franchisees provide a useful case study. Nav and Suki Samarai are a married couple and business team who enjoyed careers in the NHS for some years. However, government cutbacks were reducing their progression opportunities and freezing the potential for pay rises. The couple initially considered investing independently into a care or nursing home, but they couldn't quite make the figures stack up in the business's favour.
With this in mind, they decided that the franchise route would be a more secure option and they visited last year's National Franchise Exhibition to find out more. The Kare Plus stand immediately caught their attention and the offer aligned perfectly to their background and interests a service that offered both medical and domiciliary care, within an affordable franchise package.
The Samarais met with Steve Walsh, the Kare Plus MD and found that he'd operated his own hugely successful Kare Plus franchise and understood the business inside out. Eventually, the couple decided to invest in Kare Plus and managed to obtain partial bank funding without any problems, the lender being happy with the Kare Plus model and their business plan. The Samarais spoke positively of the support provided by Kare Plus, particularly by their Clinical Lead, who advised on recruitment as a driver to securing and building lucrative contracts in the longer term.
Since then, the Samarais have done business with various nursing homes who have given excellent feedback to the franchisee's staff and the couple are hitting their targets every week. Their next objective is to obtain their CQC licence so that they can move into the domiciliary front. And all of this within a few months! Certainly, as these new franchisees show, business success is achievable with a strong franchise model, great training and support and a strongly branded market proposition.
