unLTD’s Ash Birch spoke to the Dan Archer, the UK Chief Exec of Sheffield headquartered care home franchisor, Visiting Angels, to talk about their care-centric approach to being the fastest growing care provider in the UK…
Hi Dan, can you start by telling us a little bit about your journey into the care sector?
I’ve been in franchising for 25 years. I always say the days before the internet, because I kind of accidentally joined a franchise company. I saw a job advert in a newspaper, which is how we used to do it back then. I couldn’t check them out online and I thought they were a sign company, but it turned out to be a franchise sign company. 25-years later and I’ve had a career in franchising!
I’ve been Deputy Director General of the British Franchise Association, I’ve been a main board director of the BFA, which is our regulatory body for six years in total, I’ve spoken internationally about franchising and I’ve helped development agencies like Yorkshire Forward and the old RDA units to put franchise models together. I’ve done a tonne of stuff around it.
I hadn’t been involved in care, and the thing with care is, you don’t know about it unless you work in Adult Social Care, or you’ve had to care for a family member. Everybody else is blissfully unaware about what goes on in Adult Social Care, and that’s exactly how it was for me. My nan was our first instance of needing care.
“We’re investing in our people in order to be in a position where we give quality care, and have more stability in the workforce, which means clients can choose their carer and get that same carer coming every week.”
For the last couple of years of her life, her arthritis was in her spine, which was causing dizzy spells and light-headedness. A social worker said we needed to get someone in to provide care in the mornings and in the evenings. In the first eight weeks of care and support we had 15 different carers through the house. She had a sense of humour about it, and used to say, she only knew she was getting care when the blue tabards showed up!
Because of the high turnover of staff, the visit times were changing, and we ended up having breakfast calls at midday, meaning my nan was getting out of bed unsafely. I complained about it, but it didn’t do any good, and in February 2011, she had a bad fall and we lost her, so I’d seen the worst of it.
Six months after that, I was speaking at a conference in Telford and the Chief Exec of a business called Home Instead Senior Care saw me speak and a couple of weeks after that, out of the blue, I got a phone call from a recruitment consultant, to say that Home Instead was looking for a head of marketing and was I interested?
In the space of about a year, I went from knowing nothing about the sector, to seeing the worst of it, to working for, who are currently, the UK’s largest provider. I’m currently running the UK division of the world’s second largest.
Visiting Angels is in five countries, with 837 franchisees around the world. I’m responsible for the UK and Europe.
How did you end up getting involved with Visiting Angels and bringing them to the UK?
In 2016 I was UK MD of a business called Pro Medica 24, which is a live-in care provider. We had 52 recruiting offices in five European countries, finding carers from Poland Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and the old East Germany and bringing them to the UK. I was running that in June 2016 when we voted for Brexit – not the best day at work!
In the weeks that followed, when there was no change in passport, work permit or visa requirements, we saw a 40 per cent reduction in the number of European care workers wanting to come to the UK, because they didn’t feel welcome.
I got to February 2017 and I resigned and went on gardening leave. I’d been talking to the Americans about bringing Visiting Angels to the UK for about six months prior to that, but I actually started the market research at that point. I looked at nearly 50 care providers and something struck me as odd; if they had a mission statement at all, their mission was focused on clients in care delivery. Nobody had a people focused mission statement and I thought, hang on that’s the biggest problem we’ve all got. How do you find and keep good carers?
In a moment of clarity, in summer 2017, I had a big idea and I called that being ‘carer-centric’, so we run our care business making carers the most important people in the organisation. More important than the client receiving care and that sticks in people’s throats, but that’s what we do.
How do you follow through on that mission statement?
We don’t pay people minimum wage or less, we pay them a proper wage. We don’t have zero-hour contracts, we pay travel time, we guarantee pay increases each year, we give people their birthday off, we service their car every year, and we give them life insurance. There’s a tonne of stuff like that, that we do to make the job of being a carer more attractive.
“I hadn’t been involved in care, and the thing with care is, you don’t know about it unless you work in Adult Social Care, or you’ve had to care for a family member. Everybody else is blissfully unaware about what goes on in Adult Social Care, and that’s exactly how it was for me.”
We’re investing in our people in order to be in a position where we give quality care, and have more stability in the workforce, which means clients can choose their carer and get that same carer coming every week.
We were able to grow a team because we weren’t just replacing levers. My staff turnover in Sheffield is nine per cent, compared to 70 per cent elsewhere in domiciliary care. People are living longer with more complex medical conditions and those complex medical conditions mean the job of being a carer is far more complex now than it was five years ago. If you’ve got 70 per cent of staff leaving, you can’t do that work because your staff never stay long enough to learn the skills they need.
We’ve proven this model works so we went into franchising in 2019 and I went into lockdown number one of the pandemic with three active locations: Sheffield, West London and South Hearts. We’ve currently got 58 and we’re the fastest growth care provider in the country. We’ve added 20 this year and we’re doing it because the model is working.
What’s the plan for the future?
We will probably do 15 or 20 UK based offices next year, because that will be the growth rate for the next two or three years in the UK, but we’re moving into the German market next year as well. So we’re exporting the model into other Western European countries where we know they’ve got an ageing population. So Germany next year, probably Holland the year after, then Sweden and Denmark, with a view to then be growing at a rate of five to ten offices per year in each of those overseas territories, so that we can move towards the ultimate growth target, which is a European base of 500 offices.
