When life hands you lemons—or in the case of Dustin de Stefano and Jerod Evanich, personal hardship—you squeeze out an opportunity to change lives. Today, we're honored to share the heartwarming genesis of A Place at Home, where these two visionaries transformed their family challenges into a thriving senior care franchise. They let us in on their transformative journey, from the initial concept to the intricate strategies they've developed for navigating the complex healthcare system and ensuring top-notch care coordination.
Our conversation with Dustin and Jerod takes a deep dive into the art of franchising, revealing how A Place at Home stands out in a competitive market. They emphasize the importance of establishing a family culture within their franchise network, offering coaching and support that goes beyond business basics to truly resonate with franchise owner values. Their passion for empowering others to succeed is matched by their innovative approaches to caregiver recruitment, ensuring that their services remain a beacon of reliability and compassion for seniors and their families.
As we pivot to the realities of operating a home care business amid a pandemic, we find resilience is key. The founders elaborate on the necessity to adapt quickly to a landscape where caregiver shortages are juxtaposed against increased demand. Their nimble strategies for tapping into unexpected labor pools showcase the importance of satisfaction ratings and meticulous service delivery. Listen as we close this episode with an open invitation to fellow entrepreneurs to share their brand stories and wisdom, reminding us all that in the world of business, the journey is just as vital as the destination.
We don't just talk about operations, we help you refine them. Check out how FranWise can help your business!
When life hands you lemons—or in the case of Dustin de Stefano and Jerod Evanich, personal hardship—you squeeze out an opportunity to change lives. Today, we're honored to share the heartwarming genesis of A Place at Home, where these two visionaries transformed their family challenges into a thriving senior care franchise. They let us in on their transformative journey, from the initial concept to the intricate strategies they've developed for navigating the complex healthcare system and ensuring top-notch care coordination.
Our conversation with Dustin and Jerod takes a deep dive into the art of franchising, revealing how A Place at Home stands out in a competitive market. They emphasize the importance of establishing a family culture within their franchise network, offering coaching and support that goes beyond business basics to truly resonate with franchise owner values. Their passion for empowering others to succeed is matched by their innovative approaches to caregiver recruitment, ensuring that their services remain a beacon of reliability and compassion for seniors and their families.
As we pivot to the realities of operating a home care business amid a pandemic, we find resilience is key. The founders elaborate on the necessity to adapt quickly to a landscape where caregiver shortages are juxtaposed against increased demand. Their nimble strategies for tapping into unexpected labor pools showcase the importance of satisfaction ratings and meticulous service delivery. Listen as we close this episode with an open invitation to fellow entrepreneurs to share their brand stories and wisdom, reminding us all that in the world of business, the journey is just as vital as the destination.
We don't just talk about operations, we help you refine them. Check out how FranWise can help your business!
Fran Wise presents What's Your F'ing Business?, a podcast about franchising. Here's your host, Mary Ann O'Connell.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Hey everybody, welcome back to another edition of what's your Effing Business, a podcast about franchising, and on our podcast we like to talk to the leaders in franchising to find out, operationally, what are they doing to achieve excellence, to help their franchisees and to promote effective and ethical franchising. So today, I always think that this particular vertical just embodies so much of those qualities. I am very pleased to have with us Dustin Destefano, who is the CEO of A Place at Home, and their president Jerod Evanich. Welcome, gentlemen.
Dustin Destefano:Hi, thanks for having us.
Mary Ann O'Connell:It's our pleasure. So let's start off with a lot of people don't know the brand, so can you tell us a brief history and how this came about and what you are about?
Jerod Evanich:Sure, yeah. So Dustin and I, actually long time friends since fourth grade, grew up by each other, close friends, close families and, over time, growing up, going to school, going off to college kind of separating ways. Professionally as well, as you know, pass in our professions. We found ourselves back in Omaha and around that time, having some problems within our own families being able to manage care Me with my grandparents and some of their increased needs, and Dustin with his great-grandmothers, aaron in particular, who was in a nursing home that and he tells this story far better than me, but just to kind of give you a snapshot she was leaving the nursing home to go back to her actual home, which wasn't too far away across the street and so obviously wanting to be at home.
Jerod Evanich:So these kind of realizations really brought to us that there was a need and the want for seniors to remain in home and with small families, sometimes either in rural areas where there isn't the ability for home care or just the lack of, you know, help to go around. We needed a solution. So, 2012, we set our eyes in home care and wanting to make a solution that our grandparents, great-grandparents, would be proud of and hopefully our families and those for generations to come and community could take advantage of. So very solution-based that kind of brought us through to you know, opening, thriving in Omaha and also being able to help hundreds and hundreds of seniors employing hundreds of employees. And so we grew a great business and no easy decision decided to franchise. So that was kind of decision-making time about 2016, launching into franchise in 2017 and opening our first franchise locations 2018. So a lot of exciting things have happened since then, but I'll leave it there for now.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Well, it seems like you've had quite a lot of growth, because you were telling me just before we started to record you're up to 54 locations that are sold and in the pipeline getting ready to open. So that's pretty darn exciting. I loved hearing that you said you made the difficult decision to franchise. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because for a lot of our audience, they are people who are contemplating making the conversion to being a franchise, and I believe it's one you don't take lightly. So what were your concerns and how did you get over them?
Dustin Destefano:Yeah, I'll take that one. So you know, jared and I, from the beginning we talked about franchising or corporate growth and we tried doing corporate growth and I wouldn't say it was a failure. It was more too close. We had Omaha more cannibalized it was right across the river. We're in Omaha, nebraska, and we tried opening one and Council Bluffs for that. Omaha really just took care of it and it turned out being more like a satellite hub. So that didn't work out that well. I mean, we grew it. We just didn't need the office space. That makes sense and we didn't need a team over there to manage it. We could use Omaha. But during that point in time you know me personally I was always a fan of franchising. Jared was more. Put it to a spreadsheet and if you know me and Jared's relationship, anything I would ask him needs to go into a spreadsheet and then he can put it in a spreadsheet and then he'll always usually see it my way from the beginning anyways. So he's spreadsheet it. I'm just kidding, but not really.
Jerod Evanich:Just like my wife, yeah, yeah.
Dustin Destefano:So similar. I decided to franchise because of the ownership and, like I see, oh, right, now I'm more on the opposite Jared's, more on the development side. He runs the development team, I run the operations team and my passion that I really love about franchising is the coaching Right, like I'm a great problem solver. That's probably one of my best attributes. And every new owner that opens up a location is going to experience issues because they just don't know what they don't know when they open their franchise Right. So it's always seeing the grind in that first year first year to two years even, you know, from employment issues to growth issues to I don't know what this happens or what do I do when this happens and kind of walking them through that and then growing. Like, if you look at our first 17, I looked at a stat the other day the first 17 to 18 locations right now all are over a million dollars in revenue and we're not selling franchises here today, so I don't have to worry about income disclosure. So all over a million dollars, and so we got this new wave of newbies coming in and then those first year to 12 months. They're like. They're like Dustin, this isn't going the way it is. This isn't going the way. And that's what I love about franchising Like, listen, I'm going to tell.
Dustin Destefano:I had a conversation with a new franchise owner the other day. He's like it's not going how I thought it was going to go. And I said you know, todd, I need you to know this, you're not special. Every single person ahead. If you did the same thing and look where they're at, you just got to stick to the process, right, stick to the script that we're giving you as your franchise, or, and follow your coaches and keep doing it and it'll pave the way. And that's really when. That's really why we chose franchising was because of the owners. Right, you get to own this business. It's not a manager. You can hire and disappear two months down the road and then we're hiring again and it turns into a revolving door, right, like these owners are, they own it.
Dustin Destefano:And then the other thing too for seniors, this is a very compassionate business. You got to want to do this. So, like the owners that want to do it, they all have a story. Jared just shared our story. They all have about similar stories, but they don't have the healthcare backgrounds, so that's our job to teach them that right. And so, on the franchise side, when you're going out and talking to clients and you say I'm the owner, I own your mom's care, it's not a hired manager, it's not a hired this, I'm the owner of this location, that is what seniors really enjoy. They, when they used to call Jared and I when we all owned our location, right, they bought into us. And that's the thing. That's the difference between home care and, I would say, like home services, restaurant franchises is you don't know the owner of McDonald's. You go to McDonald's you don't know the owner, but when you go to a senior care company, odds are you're going to know that owner. That owner is the one managing everything right. So that's really what led us to franchising.
Jerod Evanich:Yeah, and I'll just add that you know in college, majoring in business, small business management and entrepreneurship, some other focuses, but it was always the going knowledge kind of just the ongoing thought process that franchising is not the best. You will lose control. You won't have the ability to, you know, maintain the processes across a large span. People are gonna go off the rails and start selling chicken in a hamburger restaurant, or you know. So it was something about you're losing margins, right? Why don't you start a corporate location at 25% net margin or 30% net versus 4.5 to 6% in royalty? Or just do it yourself, take all the profits, take on the risk, but also oversee and make sure that you control it all. So that was really what we were taught, and it wasn't until later in life, when I was researching and Dustin and I joined the IFA early on, before we even decided to franchise and just started investigating, going to the conferences, meeting new people, meeting franchiseeors, specialists and consultants in the business.
Jerod Evanich:Attorneys again didn't take the decision lightly. We spent over a year just trying to decide who's gonna be helping us with our manual, who's gonna be helping with FDD, what about our financial claims, auditing our prior locations, making sure that we have a buttoned up system that we can pass on to other owners. So it was a lot of heavy lifting and it wasn't cheap. And you know, dustin and I, two young guys coming into this industry that's aging, mostly female, with no healthcare experience right, we kind of had some odds against us and also going into franchising. The same way, you guys are young, it's a new business. What do you know about franchising or corporate growth in general? So we took some risks along the way but ultimately, like Dustin said, it was about the owners really having that accountability, because they have the stake in the game, and finding that story with our owners to ensure they're not selling chicken Although we have some franchisees that are pretty good cooks. I wouldn't mind maybe having some of their chicken, but probably not buying them through a place at home.
Mary Ann O'Connell:That is an amazing story, because there are way too many people, in my opinion, who jump into franchising without having done that homework, and it makes a big difference. It also, to me, is some having started as one of the first franchisees at Moneymailer. If you don't have all your systems together, you're constantly playing catch up the franchise or is, and so is the franchisee, because you spend some time just foundering and figuring out what to do. So my hats off to both of you for doing that. I also noticed that you are not just home care. You seem to have a couple of different revenue streams. Can you talk about what those are and how you decided, and when you decided, to add those in?
Dustin Destefano:Yeah, I can give you the timeline. So we started off doing in-home care and that's what all of our owners do, right, because you're so ingrained in that and that's definitely our biggest revenue system. The other service lines you're talking about is care coordination. So let's start there. We started doing care coordination. When we first started we had a previous partner who was an RN, who had a company called Mike Concierge. Nurse's name was Paula Howard.
Dustin Destefano:She was bought out and retired down in Florida with her husband, but she had what she saw was a neat that navigating the healthcare continuum is very extraneous and can be very stressful, right, let's just I'll just paint a picture. I'm gonna try to do a story tale so you can paint a picture here. So your mom goes into a hospital. You're a family member who lives in Delaware I don't know why I picked Delaware, but let's just say Delaware and your mom's down in Texas as she retired in the very nice warm climate. She goes into the hospital. You're trying to navigate that situation from Delaware. Well, where's mom going? What hospital is mom at? What doctor's mom seeing? Who's telling the doctor what meds they're on? Right now, today, you can log into the systems and you can usually see them if they have a primary care physician. What is being said? What is being interpreted? What's the next step? All right, so the next step is there's two steps after that. This is a little education piece for everybody watching too. Two steps after that you go home.
Dustin Destefano:You go into skilled rehab rehabs, inpatient rehab let's do the rehab route. You get discharged out of the hospital. Now you gotta go into rehab. Who's managing that discharge process? Who's looking at the rehab they're going to? Social workers in today's day and age are so ingrained and busy they're just gonna give you a list and say pick one. You gotta do a little bit more extra research. Look at the Medicare scores. All right, is this a two star rehab? Do I wanna go to this one? Is it close to my home? Is it close to my friends? There's a lot of different variables you wanna look into. So we would do that for you under care coordination.
Dustin Destefano:After rehab, there's two things that happen. You either go home and you can get home health. But are they getting home health and what do they need from home health? Again, a social worker at the rehab is managing that process and then, after their discharge to home, they get home health we can provide in home care and we bring it in and we as care coordinators we bill by the hour, about $125 an hour. I would say it's kind of like an attorney, right? When you have legal issues, you call your attorney, when you go through this process, you call us and we'll help navigate and get you all the way back home.
Dustin Destefano:Now the other option on that is going out, getting discharged and moving into an assisted living. This is when we started doing placement services. In placement services, I'm sure you might know what placement services are, but they basically they go out and they find memory cares, assisted livings, independent livings, they place them into those communities and then they get a finder's fee, kind of like a real estate agent, for placing that person in. It's free to the consumer. What we used to do before placement really started booming 11, 12 years ago, we used to charge a client $125 an hour and we go out and find the place for them that best fit their finances and the demographic and what they need and location and all that. Well, then we started doing placement in about 2000 and I wanna say what it was Jared like 2014 or 15, three years after we opened our first location, essentially, and we went outside in these contracts and now, if you go that route, we could move you into the placement. I know charge to you but we get paid by the community. So, like that's placement services.
Dustin Destefano:And then the fourth one is staffing. Staffing is all these communities memory care, assisted living, rehabs they all want the same employees that we're constantly recruiting. The biggest thing to know about home care we're a recruiting agency. My background is traveling or recruiting before this, so I know how to pound phones right and so, like you have to constantly recruit, well, you bring up this big pipeline of caregivers and what we teach our owners is your job.
Dustin Destefano:Now, in today's day and age, with employee shortages and caregiver shortages, you gotta keep them working, otherwise they're gonna jump ship to another agency and give them hours. So, with staffing, you sign these contracts and you say, hey, give us, how many hours do you need this week? That maybe an employee called out sick, went on some type of leave or you're just short staff in general, right, and then those communities would send hey, I got Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I have a seven AM to 3pm shift that I need filled. And you build a staffing pipeline and you can continually take that pool of caregivers you have and place them. So that's our four service lines and they all go together really well. But the care coordination and the placement fees or the placement services, it was one that like there's a huge need for it, because it's very, very confusing.
Mary Ann O'Connell:All of medical care seems to be confusing these days and I have gone through the situation with two relatives of being on the other side of the country and trying to manage it, and a care coordinator would have made life a lot easier for myself and my siblings. So when you're marketing, are you marketing on two levels, like, yes, I have that senior who still might be very aware and very competent and wanting to manage their own health care, and or are you marketing to family members, just that you know top of mind awareness that when it happens and it will happen to all of us because everybody's getting older that they call on you first and you can differentiate, that you can help them through all the facets.
Dustin Destefano:Yeah, typically when we do our intakes we will go through all the service not staffing, obviously on the in-home side, that doesn't pertain to them, but we'll go through all the services. You know, I guess care coordination if you were to think in terms of, like additional services, like an upgrade you know you offer out care, care coordination, but we don't get a lot of calls you just say, hey, I need care coordination. It usually all stems from in-home care. Now it's on you as the owner to realize that's where we come in as franchise or as to train. You have to realize the situation so that you can see it.
Dustin Destefano:Right, I've had owners all the time. They're like I'm doing this, this and this and I'm like that's care coordination, are you charging 125 an hour? And they're like, no, I'm like you know you're leaving money on the table doing that and it may be quick, but then once you start going down the process it's not quick anymore. Right, you're going to the hospital and sitting down with the family. That's a couple hours of your time. Like you should value your time.
Dustin Destefano:You're doing a lot of work on their behalf and so it's just that education piece of seeing the situation from even the caregivers reporting so and so didn't take their meds. Well, maybe we're not there every single day to give meds, remember, they're there three days a week, but the meds are missing. And so that's us saying hey, family member, do you want us to send one of our nurses, or at least someone from the office, to go over and make sure these meds are filled and being taken, as opposed to the caregiver every other day who's maybe there twice or three times a week calling us and saying so, things like that.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Well, I can see your franchisees wanting to add on those services and not charge, because I have to believe a big component of a successful franchisee is a lot of heart and empathy and they would want to do take care before they took care of themselves financially.
Dustin Destefano:Yeah, that's, that's what's been. That's the trouble of being a business owner sometime in this industry as you put the heart first, especially our nurse owners and I won't go down that old. But we have some nurse owners who I'll call them. They're like I'm doing the caregiver and like, stop doing the caregiving, you can't be going to the how you got to do the marketing, the sales operations, and they're like, well, I just can't. I want to take care of this person. You know, I feel, I feel like I have to do it and I'm like don't do it, don't do it. I know you're a nurse, you know statement nurse first, right, that's. That's. That's where we got to do the training piece to them to say it's gonna be hard for you to do, but you can't do it because you're going to stop your growth.
Dustin Destefano:And it does it does stop it right, you can only do that for so much, and so that's. It is a very compassionate business and that's where our nurse owners tend to run into some snags sometime. But the good thing is we have great coaches in Auburn, jennifer, and when they notice that they, we hit it and that's our job as a franchise, or our says accountability, like it's your business to operate and execute. But our job here is we're going to hold you accountability to yourself, because the worst thing when you become a business owner, the biggest enemy you have is yourself, and so you have to. You have to stay disciplined and you got to. You got to execute the plan and we're going to hold you accountable accountable to yourself.
Mary Ann O'Connell:So so, jared, I'm going to throw that back to you, though that wouldn't that really start during your development and sales process, that a screening out, the people who might just be too compassionate for their own good as a franchisee, and also who are going to make, yes, compassionate caregivers, but also good franchisees who run their business as well?
Jerod Evanich:Yeah, absolutely so. I'm sure you've heard of Zoracle. We use Zoracle profile tools to help analyze all of our potential franchisees and we're finding that we've got pretty well balanced. Achiever societal If it's over societal and underachieve, usually that means that people are cutting rate and they are giving away services and it's really hard for them to hold margin and be able to, you know, keep their foot on the ground and say, hey, we're worth these services, but it's a competitive industry all together. So having that achiever mentality, some competitiveness in you, that'll help. That'll help to strive. And ultimately, yes, we try to look at their personality traits. We do have a couple nurses now that are franchisees. Both, I feel like they're standing pretty strong in on their ground in terms of rate increases and making sure that we're being competitive and valuing our services. But yeah, we also went that achiever mentality. So societal great, have to have it. Honestly, it's basically one of our eliminating factors. It doesn't mention earlier.
Jerod Evanich:All of our franchisees have a story and so we're pulling that from the beginning. We need to have that story. We want to have that relationship to care in one way or another, whether it be seniors, friends, family, neighbors, children, whatever it is but you wanting to be, you know a solution and to help the community. So that's where we start. But you get a little too much. We've got to kind of tone it down. But then we can also see where coaching efforts can help.
Mary Ann O'Connell:We're big fans of Zoracle here, In fact, listeners. I think our very first podcast, if you go back through the archives, was with Rebecca Monet, who is the founder of Zoracle, even talking about not only understanding profiles and drivers for individuals, but what makes a great franchise or what's the personality for that. So I encourage you to listen to that one. So you did mention both of you have mentioned that it is a competitive field. How do you deal with that? Let's, I want to start with Jared first. How are you dealing with that when people are looking for a business opportunity?
Jerod Evanich:Yeah, so I stick to our core differentiators, our varying revenue streams. Absolutely, are we our care values? You know us weeding out people in the process to make sure we're not chasing after the wrong ones to begin with, and then, ultimately, when we do have a solid candidate that does meet our value system, and that would be a good you know, member of the team, we take them through a process to where they're learning at a reasonable rate, but at the same time, what they're hearing isn't necessarily earth shattering from competition. So we have to show that, hey, there is competition.
Jerod Evanich:The FTDs are going to look similar, royalties are going to look similar, fees are going to look similar. There's not too much earth shaking movement going on there. We're very comparable. However, what you are going to see is our coaching, our support, our franchise family with the place at home. We've got revenue differentiators. We're going to guide you through the FTD and those questions and we're going to kind of close the deal on saying, hey, our franchise family, our validation and our values it's amazing, it really is, and our franchisees will all testify to that.
Mary Ann O'Connell:You're making me chuckle. I hate the word franchise, family, whole joint important conversation.
Jerod Evanich:I know it's hard but honestly, we see it almost every well, not every day, but I'd say on a weekly basis someone's using it and it's not us, it's our franchisees, so it just happened.
Mary Ann O'Connell:But I want to compliment you on your differentiation and this goes back to you, dan, with. You have very extensive training and I've seen people that have lots of topics but they miss the mark, and it seemed to me that you were doing a lot that was training them on how they made their money, so that you can focus on everything else you're asking them to do and how it relates to that. How did you form your training course? Because this is something especially for newer franchise or that confounds them.
Dustin Destefano:You know, in terms of training, when we first made it we just did it situationally right, like very process oriented person. So we just took the very beginning stage and I can give you an outline really, really fast on our training. To get to, for in home care to work, you need one clients. How do you get clients? Referral sources. So how do you get referrals? You go marketing. That's day one. Teach you marketing, create your why, and then it's funny, throughout the whole week we used to just randomly throw out Tell me your why. Two minutes go Right. We're at dinner one time and Jared's wife said tell me your why. And they're sitting there taking a bite of pasta and they're like what? And I tell us your why. Why do you do it? You're going to sit here at a table with somebody randomly someday. Just tell us, and so that's.
Dustin Destefano:It starts off with referral source entering in marketing. And how do you get those? Then you get your referral source right. They send you a prospect. Now what? Oh boy, I got my first lead. How do I handle this? And we talked about that process and that bucket, the prospect bucket, and how do you work those?
Dustin Destefano:Not everyone needs care today, they may just be inquiring, and how do you follow up with them? Then, after that, the prospect you go and get the home assessment, when, if you go into the home assessment, that's 80% or more, you're going to convert that client. If you can get in their home, 80% are going to convert, right. So how do you get there? Okay, after you go into the home and you do your assessment, how do you schedule? Now you're in the operations piece, all right. So now you're at the scheduling. So then you go back and say, all right, what do I need to schedule? I need caregivers. Go back, let's look at recruiting. How do you recruit? What job boards do you use? What do you need to say? What kind of postings do they look like? We have a big partnership with the ATS and applicant tracking system where all of our jobs are in one spot and we're building a caregiver website right now where all of our jobs will feed in. All of our jobs will feed into one website and we would use our brand fund to drive applicants to that job and we can get all the metrics we need on where they're coming from Right. That's very exciting. That will launch and end in January. So, after you recruit, how do you do your hiring paper? What's your HR laws Right? Go through that. Then scheduling you schedule them, you match them based on what criteria? Right Location, blah, blah, blah. Not going to give away the secret sauce to home care called Jared if you want to learn more and we can get you a franchise After that.
Dustin Destefano:After that is situational things what are we looking at occur Right. Well, how do you handle customer complaints? How do you handle caregiver call outs? How do you handle no shows? Right. And then after that, how do you do billing and payroll? And then after that, how do you do client follow up and drive your customer employee satisfaction scores and then to discharge, and that's it. It was what Two minutes Home care in two minutes.
Mary Ann O'Connell:That's pretty good, and I know we briefly talked about this before we started to record this and I really wasn't going to go down the path until you mentioned this website.
Dustin Destefano:You want to buy a franchise. Are you saying, mary, no, I want. Well, no, I mean that's a baby.
Mary Ann O'Connell:I think you guys need to change positions because, dustin, you're definitely selling franchises. Now my curiosity is this aggregated employment board in light of possible changes. Listeners, we're recording this the day before the NLRB takes on a pretty big vote that could have a major effect on franchising. So are you looking at that and seeing if it's going to have a major impact on your system?
Jerod Evanich:You. We can't not look at it right it's. This has been a point of Concern, contention and and so many other things since the day we started franchising. You know, dust and I, even with home care Association of America, worked early on Marching Capitol Hill and doing some lobbying to try to help protect the home care industry and this is honestly something that would have major implications not only to home care but, you know, broadly, really across multiple industries. So I Got a long story and a short story. Try to keep it as short as possible, but essentially it increases our risk of Taking on the liability of our franchisees employees and our franchise E.
Jerod Evanich:As an employee I kind of just pierces right through that veil of a franchise ownership. So if that were to occur within the industry, I see kind of two things happening. One would be More contract workers where it's 1099 employees and would severing the W2 and direct employee which that's one of the reasons why we were against this in the first place at the HCA away, because contract work leads to higher abuse, neglect, theft, mismanagement of care, inconsistency and and other things. But in terms of, you know, franchise ores, it may turn into a situation to where we're not able to manage them as franchisees. We're not able to hold them to the kind of control and standards that we had before, which is scary, right, if we can't give them a standard of who should be an employee. Now, granted, we have a great system allowing great people in, but it's not foolproof and the liability could be too great for us to be able to maintain a franchise relationship.
Dustin Destefano:Just add to that too, it's gonna raise costs right, because our liability is gonna go up. So you'll see, right across the whole franchise community I would imagine royalties will start going up because we're taking added risk, you know, and it's just gonna really. I mean, I'm there's, there's pros and cons to it. I know everyone looks at it negatively. I kind of see a glass. I see other sides on the on the positive side. But it just won't for for us as a franchise, or not for the franchisee, I should say. But I Just, I don't know, I just I cost are gonna rise. It's gonna really hurt the whole model of franchising.
Jerod Evanich:So yeah, well enough implications of union. Is unionization just kind of bringing it all into the masses? Absolutely? You know best case scenarios cost go up.
Dustin Destefano:Yeah, and it sucks too I guess push to the consumer right, yeah, and on an operational, like, we've been preparing this for years. This hasn't a new right, has been going on for years. So, like, operationally, I have coaches who I have franchise owners who are like, hey, can you coach our salesperson? And I'm like we're like, yeah, you can coach your salesperson. However, huh, they need to know that you're there. We're not their boss. Right, it's like it's we.
Dustin Destefano:We have to operate in fear as a franchise or to talk to the employees of the office because we don't want them seeing us. And it happens, it's, it's happened to our coaches. I've, they've had to fire their employee and then, all of a sudden, that employees reaching out to us, one of our coaches saying, hey, I just got fired. And then I'm like, don't respond, it's not your problem. Right, like it's just it. Just, it just sucks. You have to operate in fear. Sometimes we they're wearing the name of our brand on their shirt, all right, they work for a place at home and we started this thing 12 years ago and we have to sit here and be like, all right, we can't help the franchise owners. Employees train and our owners want that. They're like guys, as part of franchise. I would expect you have a university that my employees can take and and and learn from you guys. That's why I bought the franchise.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Yeah, but I Was just doing a class on Not what's coming but what's here in terms of with one of my franchise or clients and their staff. I have been in franchising since late 1979 and there were no, there really was very little involvement from the franchise or in those days, and then it kind of swung all the way out here where we were doing everything for them and then now starting to pull it back in. It's just to me finally curious to see how far does the government think you can pull this back in and still make it viable, and are they going? I'm trying not to get super political on this one, but how far do they regulate us when we are such a huge financial engine for the US economy?
Mary Ann O'Connell:Yeah, don't kill the goose that laid the golden egg, kind of thing. But moving on from that, yeah, I was just curious, though, for more franchisors to start looking at what are some of the programs they have that they might have to drop or modify because changes are coming. At least this time it sounds like we're gonna have a definition. That would be nice. Haven't had that for quite a long time. Let's talk about you touched on it briefly hiring. So many other verticals have been able to bounce back since COVID, but you folks first of all had your employees and your franchise. These employees had to work through COVID. I would imagine there was a greater need then, but is it harder to recruit and to retain staff now, or are you still on an even plane?
Dustin Destefano:Yeah, I mean the times have changed right, and just to give you a glimpse of what changed since COVID, I will first off and say if COVID was. I'll first let me premise this statement by saying I would never wish COVID happened again. However, covid for in-home care business was boom. So we take that with a grain of salt, because people weren't going into assistive livings, they didn't want to go into the apartments anymore, they had to stay at home. They needed less contact. So what's best for less contact, caregiving, one-on-one care as opposed to one-on-12 care in a community? Now, the impact also was our average bill rate prior to COVID was 24. Average bill rate today is 30.
Dustin Destefano:Cost of care just skyrocketed because we had to adapt to the employee demand and then the employee demand demanded more money than previous. Our previous average payroll was like $12 to $13, free COVID, and now it's $16 to $17. So again, when that happens, what do you do? That's economics 101. When you demand skyrockets, your supply is short, you got to charge more and I don't see that going back. It's not like you can go back and say we're going to pay you less, right, but now, with that on the recruiting question, it was tough for like two years, real tough, like as far as I was getting involved in immigration talks trying to figure out how to get a special visa, work permit for visas. Because agriculture has always had it for farmers and hotel business has always had it for seasonal workers, right. Why can't we get health care workers in Mexico, colombia, ukraine right now, where we can give women and children an opportunity to get a work visa? Because AG is all males right, like in particular, really right. But this gives a huge. There's caregivers ever. The human body is the human body. We can bring them in, train them on how to take care of a human body. They might not speak the best English, but it still gives them the ability to care.
Dustin Destefano:So access to care was really short for the consumer. Like you'll see, this whole industry people would take. We used to be so competitive we'd have to take like three. We'd do three hour a week clients. Not today, not today. We have 12 hour a week minimums. Now Some agencies are 20, because it's not worth it. It's hard to fill that three hour need with people now because the demand is so high. So it's completely shifted the entire home care industry Now in terms of recruiting. Today it's starting to open back up. You know government shut off all their handouts Finally we're not going to go political there but they, you know that money's worn out and so now people are coming back to work and then you have all these early retirees and we can recruit those. You know the 60 to 65 year old healthy caregiver who can go in right.
Dustin Destefano:So you have to try to train your recruiting methods and I'd say right now our application flow is pretty good. What we're also finding is it takes more applicants to hire. Now you know. So you got to. You got to really put out numbers. I'm talking like you need like 40 applicants to probably convert four to five. Wow, yeah, and a lot of people are just. If you go on Indeed I don't know if you ever recruited on it you're going to get a hundred applicants in like a week if you post a job and 50, 80% of them are going to answer the phone. So it's like it's a numbers game for sure.
Mary Ann O'Connell:You opened my eyes on something I hadn't thought about before the early retiree who's still healthy enough to help other people, that's. I haven't even thought about that market. That's interesting. You have something else that I saw in your FDD that I thought was interesting. I'd love to know how you, how you're using it, which is you were rating satisfaction ratings by both customers and your franchisees employees. I've never seen that side of it. It's very interesting to me, so can you talk a little bit about that?
Jerod Evanich:Yeah, I'll jump on this one. So we've always been able to go back to simple measures as to what makes our business move forward, and one of our pillars is growth. We look at that in growth of satisfaction and retention. Satisfaction, retention two key factors if we can keep caregivers happy, they're staying. If we have happy caregivers that are staying, we have happy clients.
Jerod Evanich:And so we've been utilizing third party again not going to really name any kind of special sauce here, However we utilize surveying. So on a monthly basis we're getting scores in from caregivers, from clients, to really gauge how our franchisees are doing, how well our caregivers are trained, the type of care, the number of faces that our clients are seeing, just a multitude of different questions that we are then able to come back, analyze and see hey, are we at least at our standards? Are we at national standards? Are we above standards? Thankfully, we have some owners in our group who have been in the top five in the nation in satisfaction, so we've got amazing owners. But, yes, we hold a pillar of no less than 90% satisfaction in any realm, whether it be recruitment I'm sorry with retention or satisfaction.
Dustin Destefano:So caregivers or clients, and to add to that, just it's very important to us to measure it because, remember, how I said earlier, we're an accountability mechanism. That's us as a franchise, or I would say we're relational and we're accountability. We want to keep you happy in the relations between us and you Great, that's my job and our coach's job right, and then also hold you accountable to yourself. So it's a benchmark. And so how we coach, we use not to jump subjects, but I'm going to jump a subject real quick we use EOS. A lot of people probably have heard of EOS. That's our coaching structure. We do a condensed weekly meeting and we have a scorecard. Well, their scorecard is on all our KPIs, but their customer satisfaction, and so when their customer satisfaction is low as a coach and their revenue is not where they want it to be, you can correlate everything with numbers I take out. We've completely removed all emotional response and all excuses. I'm not an excuse person. You don't want to hear what I say about excuses, because this is a podcast and it's probably censored.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Did you listen to the title of the?
Dustin Destefano:podcast. Yeah, all right. So let's do. I always say. I say excuses are like assholes, everyone has one, they stink. So there you go. So that's what we do, is we eliminate emotion and we eliminate excuses and say it's right here, your customers are saying this, your revenue is right here. Your customers would say this and just get that customer satisfaction up by 5%, watch what your revenue does, and then they focus on that and it's they go hand in hand. And then same with caregiver satisfaction. If your caregiver satisfaction is low and you're telling me, your retention set will right like, focus on your caregiver and watch your retention numbers go up. So it's all part of a big grand master scheme that a place home is made to hold you accountable but also measure and make you successful business owners.
Jerod Evanich:And we hold ourselves to the same standards and actually even higher standards. We utilize franchise business review and we survey all of our franchisees for our satisfaction. We survey our corporate staff for their satisfaction. But it's most certainly at the core and thankfully to date, we just hit the top 50 list, fbr.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Congratulations.
Jerod Evanich:Of all, franchise satisfaction top in our industry as well as industry average rates. I mean many sections were 10, 12, 15% plus above industry average.
Mary Ann O'Connell:So we are big fans of franchise business review here, but I'm going to go back to what Dustin was just talking about, because you're doing something that I see franchiseeers miss and it's that cause and effect that, whether it's a satisfaction rating or a slip in their P&L or not hitting a KPI, missing a benchmark, it is a direct result of an action or an inaction. And training or educating, I would say, your franchisees to understand that that's to me where growth comes from, because once they understand that and they take full ownership for that the accountability part of EOS you don't have to babysit them as much. You can go on and grow bigger and better and faster. So congratulations on that.
Dustin Destefano:Thanks.
Mary Ann O'Connell:You also stole my next question, which was well, if everybody else is accountable, are you going to ask if you are?
Dustin Destefano:using FPL, we also try to eliminate hypocrisy in franchise or to franchisee.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Oh, that's really good. How do you do that?
Dustin Destefano:Practically what we preach. I mean even when they ask how do you drive customers? It's kind of corny, but I came from Enterprise and I did really well at Enterprise. But if you ever rent a car from Enterprise whether they ask you when you return your car where you completely satisfied with your rental, you might not notice that the next time you rent a car from Enterprise you will. And that is how their lifeblood they drill that into you.
Dustin Destefano:If your ESQI is not above 90%, you're not getting promoted, and so that I took that mindset to these guys and said 90% is your benchmark. Hit it Right. And I would do is to walk around in our office and they'd have someone on the phone, a client I'd be in the airplane, asking if they're completely satisfied, and they'd be like what are you doing? Ask them if they're complete, say it and get driving the office to do it. And even on, like we just got the FDR surveys going out, I wrote an email to the entire system and I was basically like if any of you have a problem, you call me right now so I can solve it before you hit that score. Wow.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Well, it's interesting because, jared, you said first off that you had a benchmark of 90%. Is there consequence other than their business not thriving? But is there other direct consequence if they miss that 90%?
Jerod Evanich:It's just, it's an additional piece of their coaching calls, so weekly we talked about our support and our coaching. They're looking at the same numbers. It's something that we have on an overall aggregated scorecard so we can see it across the system. There's accountability measures really in, because it's visible to everyone. We're gonna compare them to others and show them where their satisfaction is. We also incentivize by having at our annual convention Satisfaction awards, retention awards and many others. But they're really really sought after and so people are always gunning for those. We have some really really amazing franchisees I had mentioned before that are set in national Kind of numbers so they're hard to compete against. So they kind of run away with some of the medals every once in a while. But but you know, with again it's, it's really more about incentivizing versus punishment.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Good, that is the way this should be. You. You get a lot more with that, and Congratulations on recognizing the power of peer recognition. Years ago there was a study done and they asked you know what would motivate people to improve their performance or make changes? And the employers it was an employee, employer based one. At the time. The employers all came up with money, pizza parties, vacations, and all the people who were eligible to to get some recognition said I want recognition from my peers and Taking a picture of you getting that award that you can take home to your family Because we spend our best hours at work and say this is why you know, look, all the hard work is paying off. That is fabulous to to use your convention for that, maybe so that the top guys keep winning and we don't discourage everybody else. We do what most improved Everybody do one of those.
Dustin Destefano:You know you do one of those and everybody get everybody a chance. We got a two-time winner down in Texas. You got that one. Really there now. They're a top performer.
Announcer:Yeah they.
Dustin Destefano:They're slower to the race in the first, in their first year and then even in their second year, but then they found their stride your year two, and then one at two years ago and one at last year, and now our Top performer there. I think they're like fourth or fifth in the system right now.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Wow, congratulations to them and to you folks for coaching them to that. That is an important piece. Let's talk on one last thing, because we've coached them on on performance and retention, recruiting and Understanding cause and effect of the KPIs. What are you doing in a day when Market marketing to me is so difficult now, simply because there are a so many channels and B they're all crowded. So how are you helping your franchisees Get in front of the noise that's within business in general, but particularly the noise and clutter that's within your industry?
Dustin Destefano:Well, first off, there's three buckets of referrals. To start there, you have referral marketing, where you're going, traditional marketing, where you're going out and meeting certain referral sources that are gonna have discharges In and out here. The second one is lead gen. So how do we lead gen like paid leads, like caring comm, a place for mom aging gear, calm. We've struck corporate partnerships with a lot of those so that our owners can get access to those leads. And that's one bucket Small clothes right, just like any paid lead. But our average is like 15% closure on those. Actually, jair and I got our biggest client in place of home history out though, so we push that. And then the third one is SEO and Google and word of mouth right, and right now we're rebuilding our entire website. We just struck a partnership with 919 marketing that is Built an entire plan for our website to drive in leads through the website. And we even did that with development and they kind of had proof in the pudding. I'm a Jerick and speak on it more, but we had very good leads and had our best development year last year that we've ever had. So that's kind of our responsibility on that.
Dustin Destefano:But on the referral marketing side, you're right, like it is very plated. People are meeting people all the time, right, and some the relationships are established, but that's where it goes. To stick to the script, you don't need 30 people to like you, right, you need 10. You get 10 people that give you consistent referral source. This is the nice thing about home care 25 clients, 25 clients is a million dollar home care agency. 25. So that I mean that's you need to get the 25 active clients and you can do a million dollars in sales, right? So you just need 10. And if those 10 break things down in numbers, right, if those 10 give you one referral or two referrals a month and you close half of them, multiple clients, then you got that's your referral sources. So you just got to stick to your guns. No, and it takes, it takes grit, like I used to get my, my ass kicked. Going to again.
Dustin Destefano:Jared said I was 28 year old male. I had to grow a beard out of the gold. I'd age myself and now I'm 40 and I'm like I'm trying to go backwards, you know. So you go in because you, these seniors, would look at you're like who's this pump, you know, and? But we did everything we did, and that's the second thing. Once you get that referral, you better deliver. You better deliver because you might have just got your shot and the words of M&M you better not lose it. So you just got your referral and you take care of that person. I'm over communicating. Here's what's going on. We got a man. This is how great they're doing. After week one, after a month checking with our referral source, they're doing great and thriving. You got any more right?
Mary Ann O'Connell:that is an important oh, that's really important to Let that referral for referral source know that you do well by their people. Yeah, so it seems to me when I listen to the both of you. First of all, the division of labor is Smart. Not everybody's great at everything else. So Long live Jared spreadsheets. I Hate them. I'm with you, dustin. I Use him for silly things. But then also, understanding the business rule and coaching and educating your franchisees to understand how it all fits together, no wonder you are doing so well and I am so grateful to both of you for sharing this Information with everyone. Any closing thoughts for the franchise? Or is that? Are listening to us?
Dustin Destefano:You know I would say for those franchise, I was just at a SMB I don't know if anyone knows SMB, but I was at their convention and you know I started with them and Jared started with them and we had no idea what we're doing and I saw, I saw a bunch of us is at that conferences last year, just getting in, just got their FDD done. They're all excited. The biggest piece of advice that I can give to emerging franchisors or those thinking about Franchising is block out the noise. People are gonna tell you you're crazy. People are gonna tell you you can't do it. I always say me and Jared made a living from investors telling us no, every one of them told us no. And today I still say whoops, and I have a name, I have a list of their names, but no, I don't. I kind of do.
Mary Ann O'Connell:But Jared has it on a spreadsheet.
Dustin Destefano:Yeah, it's on a spreadsheet, they're on our mailing list too, and we always make sure the income is shown. But Just just block out the noise and focus and focus on your culture. And the biggest piece of advice I can give on franchising is 90% of successful friend in our success right now is the relationship between you and your franchisee. If you can maintain that positive relationship with them, they'll go to the end of the earth for you and they know you're gonna go to the end of the worth for them. Right, focus on that, because you can be wrong, you could be wrong, you could do something stupid as a franchise or own it. Apologize and don't let your ego get involved. That's my closing statements.
Mary Ann O'Connell:That's pretty powerful.
Dustin Destefano:Okay.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Jared top that.
Jerod Evanich:Yeah, well, I mean, right off the bat, I I go back to Launching the franchise and I would say that don't let perfection stop you from franchising. It'll never be perfect, you'll always grow, you'll always Continue to modify and make your systems better, but there's, there's no business out there that says, you know, and I'm just I, you know, it'll never be a hundred percent, will always continue to grow. So don't let perfection stop you from from moving forward and growth into franchising Again. That that's, that's really what sometimes holds me back over analysis. Right, well, what if this? What if that? What if we don't have this? You know we don't have a procedure for that what if that gap is, you know isn't filled, but being able to overcome that, not overthink it, make decisions, be confident in them and and I think you'll continue to grow.
Jerod Evanich:Back to what Dustin said Definitely echo the relationship. It has always been about relationship and it's been about communication. Even just a note on business partners out there right, communication is huge, whether be you know business partners or even with you know, with your spouse. Right, make sure that you air out your concerns, you get it out on the table and you have a real conversation about it. Right based off of trust, and if you can, if you can do that, you're gonna.
Mary Ann O'Connell:You're gonna be alright those are great words of wisdom and Thanks for sharing them. I'm gonna add one more, because it sounds like you know, jared, where you're saying it's never gonna be perfect. You know, the old adage is the perfectest the enemy of the good. But there is one that I had to share with somebody in a unrelated business the other day that was given to me by man named Bob DeVito way back in our money-mailer days together, and it was all you can do is all you can do, and all you can do is enough. So, as long as you're giving it your all every day, it may not be the perfect outcome, but it's the one that you earned because you gave it your all. Gentlemen, thanks. I hope to get to meet you both in person in Phoenix at the ifa convention in a couple of weeks. Is there a way that our listeners might be able to reach out if they want more information about your brand?
Jerod Evanich:Yeah, development at a place at home calm. Of course you can visit our website at a place at home franchise calm YouTube page a place at home franchise. Any of the other social media is under that same name. We have a lot of content out there and we most certainly can get you started. If you want to know about services and about Kind of that that's a life cycle of clients and caregivers in our service lines even more in-depth, check out a place at home calm and that'll also show our operating locations as well as give you access to care if anybody out there needs some help.
Mary Ann O'Connell:Well, thanks, and Jared Evanich and Dustin DeStefan, oh, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom. Thank you, and, as I ask our listeners all the time, if your brand is one that has a story that should be shared, please reach out to us, and if there is a brand you want to know more about or hear from, let us know at info@franwise. net. . Again, thanks for listening and we hope you tune in for the next episode of What's Your F'ing Business.
Announcer:is created by O'Connell and Company Inc. and Fran wise®. It is written and directed by Mary Ann O'Connell, technical mastering by Ryan Cleary. Our theme music was written and performed by Sean J O'Connell and Leviathan Brothers and is available on Spotify. All rights to this podcast and music are reserved. Music are reserved.