Intro: Coming to you live from the Business RadioX studio. It’s Franchise Marketing Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of Franchise Marketing Radio. And this is gonna be a good one. Today on the show, we have the founder and CEO with Caring Senior service, Jeff Salter. Welcome.

Jeff Salter: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: Well, Jeff, before we get too far into things, tell us about Caring Senior Service. How you serving folks? Yeah.

Jeff Salter: So we’re a non-medical home care business. So we send caregivers into a family’s home to typically help with personal tasks that that elderly individual can no longer do safely. Maybe it’s helping them get up in the morning, get their bath, might be some restroom assistance, but also their to cook meals, go grocery shopping, errand running, and just overall make sure they’re safe at home at that point in time, which they maybe did a little bit of assistance.

Lee Kantor: So what’s the backstory? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Jeff Salter: Well, I started now years ago. In 1991, I started the business in West Texas, recognized that families were really struggling with the scheduling and the management of caregivers. There wasn’t an industry at the time, so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for them to call someone to help coordinate the caregiver when they were going to be there, and at times, multiple caregivers. So I saw that there was an opportunity to help families out and started my business initially as kind of a it was a side business, something to do while I was in school. But I quickly learned that families really needed this type of help and attention, and the business just started growing from there. My first office in 91 grew it to about five locations through 2003 and then become a franchise system. So today we’ve got 62 locations across 23 states.

Lee Kantor: So what was that kind of thought process in deciding to go the franchise route because you spent a long time not franchise. So what kind of put you over the edge of, hey, I think this can be a successful franchise?

Jeff Salter: It was early days, and for me, at least in the early 2000, to make a decision, we want to grow the business. I tested it out in multiple markets. Odessa, Texas was a small 100,000 population city, uh, McAllen, Texas, which is about, you know, the entire what’s called the Valley. There’s 300, 000 people, but a wide space. And then finally 96, I moved to San Antonio. So metropolitan area knew I wanted to grow the business and expand. But I was trying to make that decision. Do I want to invest a lot of my own dollars in building the infrastructure needed to have a kind of command and control over a large geographical area? Or do I look at this opportunity and franchise, and we’re helping other people start their own business. Strong advantage. And the fact that I had built a business that was operating the same way in every location, so it wasn’t five locations that were operating differently. They were all operating the exact same way. So for me, it was easy to kind of take what we had done and turn it into a franchise system, help other business owners use their capital to gain the benefits of what we’d learned over those first ten years, and it just made the right sense. It was it was better to, to share that with, with individual owners and entrepreneurs that, you know, really want to do something different. They’ve been working in corporate America. They had jobs working for someone else. And those jobs oftentimes were and still are not meaningful to them. It doesn’t really give them purpose. And they find that a caring senior service operation and what we do each and every day, helping families and helping caregivers find work, it really gives them purpose and gives them something to feel proud about each and every day.

Lee Kantor: Now, was it a difficult transition from you, from changing the customer, from being that caregiver or family member or senior to now I’m helping an entrepreneur grow a business in their local market, and I have to give them the support that they need. Yeah.

Jeff Salter: You know, um, I think every founder goes through that transition or change. I had luckily, um, had gone through that when I, in my first location to the second location and I moved, I mean, I moved from Odessa, Texas, West Texas, to McAllen, Texas. It’s an eight hour difference in those two places. So that was a big change. And then to go to San Antonio was another dispersed location. Turned out to be between those two locations, but also Corpus Christi, kind of throughout Texas. And for me, I’d really been having to reinvent myself already. I go from being a solo entrepreneur, one location to a second location, which is a big leap when you’re in business. Second growth challenge. But now, 5 in 10 years meant that I really had to reinvent what I was focused on. So for me personally, having that runway of ten years of kind of reinventing myself, it was a little bit easier to become a franchisor, to change my focus on helping those entrepreneurs get, get their business started. And then, of course, you reinvent yourself again. The more success you get as you grow that business and expand, you have to then think about team members and you’re leading a promoting what was once your your baby, if you will.

Lee Kantor: Now, what does that ideal franchise, uh, franchisee candidate look like to you? You mentioned kind of having, you know, wanting a bigger why and having something mission oriented. What are some of the qualities you look for in your franchisees?

Jeff Salter: You know, it’s, uh, for us, it’s a matter of finding someone that really does want to make a difference in other people’s lives. Well, we can do very well financially with a senior care business, and I think there’s a lot of motivation for people to look at this because of that. But if it’s financial motivation alone, I think that’s not enough to keep people involved long term, because you do have a bit of a passion for helping people, and you’ve got to be really caring about your caregivers. You want to make sure that that they have fulfilling meaningful work as well. And that means a lot of management of people. So it really, we’re looking for someone that likes to work with people, wants to have a business that’s going to employ a lot of people, and they actually want to give back to their community. They want to feel like they’re doing something that kind of keeps us all grounded, makes sure we make the right decisions when we need to. Because, uh, it’s, it’s a people business and it’s not just producing a product and shipping a product or producing a food item and serving that food item. It’s about a long term relationship with those clients and families. And that’s something really professional specialty, um, from an individual. But I’m also very respectful of the fact that I did this when I was 20 years old, when I started the business. And I tell people that if I can do this, anybody can do it. It’s just you have to have the right motivation and the right desire to be successful.

Lee Kantor: How important is it to be hands on and kind of live in the business for a period of time?

Jeff Salter: Yeah. You know, we we feel that our new owners benefit greatly if they’re very involved in the first 6 to 12 months after that. We encourage people that if they’ve done it well in those 6 to 12 months, it’s time to think about a second position and try to help more people. And you can only do that if you actually expand and maybe open a second location in another city or in another part of the city if you’re in a large metro area. Um, so we really encourage that people live in the business at first, but then as soon as possible, step out, hire people. We have a. We’re unique in the space and that. We have very specific positions within the organization, and those positions are designed to run the whole operation. I’m still an owner and operator, still have my five locations. I have a team that helps me manage that. Got a layer of two people that really helped run the locations, but each location has those positions that run the office locally that are managing locally. But you can’t do that from day one. You can’t expect that they’re going to have everything they need. They still need leadership, and they need leadership that has the knowledge of how the business operates. Because that leadership comes coaching. You’ve got to coach people up and get them to really execute the business model. But we’re really proud of the fact that we do have a business model that is intended to be ran by, by employees, and doesn’t require the owner to be there day in and day out.

Lee Kantor: Now, how have the systems changed? Because I would imagine over the 20 years you’ve seen, uh, you know, the advent of now AI, but technology, the internet. Um, and how have you adapted your systems to kind of this, um, rapidly evolving technological, uh, you know, changes that we’re going through.

Jeff Salter: Yeah. I think it’s a, it’s, again, I kind of hit on this theme of reinvention. Um, for us, it was a matter of really in healthcare in general is at least in the home care space, home health, hospice and home care. They’re actually really slow to technology advancement and they resist it quite a bit. Example is um, paperless office. Uh, most businesses look at banking. Banking went paperless many, many, many years ago. Um, at least started down that pathway. But in home health care and home care, that transition is only probably the last five years. People have really leaned into it. We were doing this though almost 15 years ago, we were working towards that paperless office focusing on computer systems and programs that would allow us to capture signatures in the field. Uh, you know, we had this in 2013. We had this ambition that a caregiver being hired by us would write her name, only type her name only one time. After that, she doesn’t have to type her name or write her name anywhere else. And that was kind of our guiding light was like, let’s make it super easy for the employee so that their onboarding process is easy.

Jeff Salter: And then we took that same concept and walked it through every other aspect of the business. How do we get clients and families onboarded? So because we have to provide critical care plan for each one of our clients depending upon the state licensing, but even making that experience really painless, if you’re in healthcare and you’ve been to a doctor’s office, you know what it was like originally to fill out all the forms you had to fill out, and then that all went to electronic format. Still fill out a lot of forms, but at least a little quicker if you have a tablet or you can do that on a phone. So we brought all this technology into the equation to make it streamlined for everybody involved. And that just meant that we started gathering information that gave us insights into our business and really allowed us to focus on things that others we feel weren’t focusing on at the time, because they were still doing things kind of older, older way. But it was we had all that data into a system. We could start really doing interesting things as an organization.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there any advice for other emerging franchisors out there listening when it comes to a successful launch for one of your franchisees? Do you kind of have a good system to help a franchisee get up and running as quickly as possible?

Jeff Salter: You know, we we’ve looked at there’s obviously a lot of, uh, partners in the franchising space that help with these things. And there’s a lot of opportunities and a lot of options that are out there. We looked at a lot of those and felt that, um, uh, I’m a big bill, which was by person, I like to go and build the systems I need versus buying them off the shelf. We create our own our own software to manage our actual locations, scheduling of caregivers, client management, applicant tracking, and and HR systems. And we did the same thing with, with our franchise onboarding process to really control that experience. And that was for us what it was really all about. The experience needed to be as positive as possible. And we want to make sure we could, we could launch the way we wanted to launch, share the information, the way we want to share the information. It’s not to say those systems don’t work, and I would advise anyone that they should investigate and look at those systems and find the right tool that works for them at that moment. And as they grow, those, those decisions change, right? The larger you get, the more capital you have. And you can maybe think about creating your own systems. And today, I think that with the advent of AI, the ability for people to create systems very easily. It’s really changing that, that question for everybody. And I’m I’m not sure where everyone should necessarily fall on our side. We’re building just about everything we can, and we’ve got the capability and the people to be able to do that.

Lee Kantor: So is there anything actionable you can share? Like that is a best practice when it comes to having a successful launch of a new franchisee, or are there some must haves or must do’s that you recommend?

Jeff Salter: Yeah, I think the, the we ourselves are guilty of, of failure. So we only put systems in place because we found that what we were doing didn’t work. And I think that’s important that once you you’re honest and sometimes as an owner, especially as you get a kind of five, ten locations under your belt and you’re, you go through that change process, you’re like, okay, I can no longer do all the work I was doing. I’ve got to hire people and bring them on board. That’s when you start. Things start kind of breaking down because you were maybe able to handle it. Keep all the plates spinning in the air. But as you hand those off, sometimes there’s, uh, just gaffes that get formed. So that’s when you really have to look at what systems do we have in place to make sure this process is being followed? Because it can be as simple as just one email that didn’t go out, or one thing that didn’t get completed on that checklist, and suddenly everything grinds to a halt. So for, for, for us, it’s a matter of really focusing on that checklist. What are all of the items that need to get completed for a successful launch of a location and then looking for ways to streamline that through, um, you know, systems, you know, we start a paper based is the easy way to do it.

Jeff Salter: We then went to, uh, electronic checklists kind of simplified, but that was, we found as we were launching more than a few a year that required us to really rethink that process. And what we found was probably the most important was clear communication capability. I’ve assigned as a task to complete. It’s a blocking task, meaning until they complete that, I can’t do the next step in the process. And they could communicate back and forth to whoever’s in charge of helping them with that part of the process. And, you know, it’s marketing team might be doing brochure design, there might be licensing, helping with getting the licensing set up. And so there’s multiple people communicating and just making sure the system allows for a free flow of that communication so that nothing gets missed. We had to go off of email because email just became a trap for us. So we had to look for systems that allowed us to communicate inside of them.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share about a franchisee that maybe is memorable for you or, um, rewarding? Uh, example of how someone can really impact their community when they do this, right?

Jeff Salter: Yeah. I think I’m lucky in the fact that just the work we do in general is, is in itself is intrinsically Rewarding, and we get to sit down with families at one of the most vulnerable moments and help them solve a problem that they’ve never had to deal with before. The fact that their aging loved one your mom, your dad is now the hero in your life, but now they’re at the point where they actually need people to help them in a way that they never needed before. And it’s really tough for families going through that. And for us, it’s a matter of finding owners that also want to take on that challenge. And some people come to it because they, they think it’s just a, um, the latest and greatest thing to do. But the ones that really are successful, uh, lean into that. And I’ve got a number of stories. I know that I had a group of that were in my Phoenix area that came to this and they themselves had had successful business ownership prior. They’ve been in the printing business. So you definitely don’t see a clear path to go from printing to senior care. But they wanted to get out of printing because it was not giving them fulfillment. They didn’t think they were really doing anything. Thing. And it was at a time when I was younger. I was in my early 30s.

Jeff Salter: They were already in their in their late 50s, at the start of this new business venture and this new chapter in their life. So it was really humbling for me to see someone who had far more business experience than I did, but really leaned into what advice I was giving. They respected the experience that I had, and they, they took everything that I said, like, I’m gonna make sure that I follow everything Jeff’s telling us because he’s been successful. And this is an area in business that I’ve never done before. So they didn’t want to, you know, bring their preconceived notions and ideas to that until they were successful. They became our most successful franchise EAS for, for a long period of time. And they always went back to say, you know, we just made sure that we followed this system. And when we didn’t know what to do, we we’d would ask questions, but then later on they were able to really help our system grow and give advice back to our existing franchisees of how they didn’t change what we told them to do, but really enhanced those things they added to and brought value to those simple things. Maybe it was their sales techniques and the way they implemented the sales strategies. They used the core, but then added to it. And I think that’s what makes a great franchise owner.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a thread amongst your franchisees that they were touched by a senior, or they had a close relationship with their grandparents? Is there anything that, you know, folks who kind of had that kind of an upbringing that end up being good franchisees down the road?

Jeff Salter: Yeah, I don’t, um, there’s definitely a thread of if you talk to our, our franchise owners at the start of their experience, nearly every one of them came to us because they had some kind of an experience either directly with a parent, or indirectly with a grandparent or other loved one. I think that’s pretty common theme amongst just about every one of our franchise owners. But recently we’ve been seeing more younger folks that don’t have that actual experience, but their biggest expression is that they want to do something that has meaning. And I think that’s a very interesting take on the current generation that some of the younger generations is that they really are looking at. We already knew that they want to give back. They want to work for companies that are have a purpose and that they’re in any of the business itself doesn’t have purpose. They want to know that that business is doing something with purpose, that they’re involved in their community. They’ve got a charity tied to them. They’re doing something that’s a give away free services when they get clients. This, there’s a generation that really appreciates that. And I think you’re seeing that now getting manifested in that. They want to take it a step further and they only want to they want to focus on something that really has purpose and gives them kind of self-fulfillment. Um, so I think that’s something that we’re noticing more and more, but just about all of our, our owners, that if they’re in the 45 to 55 age range, they more than likely they’ve been experiencing it. And that’s what turned them to senior care when they started thinking about, you know, what’s the next chapter in my life?

Lee Kantor: So you’re seeing kind of a trend to younger folks being open to the idea of being a franchisee.

Jeff Salter: Yeah, we just just had some training with one of our newest franchise owners. And, and they’re, they’re not unique. They might be our youngest group. They’re, they’re under 30. They’re in, they’re, they’re like 26 to 28 range, which is pretty young for an entrepreneur and, and especially in senior care. Um, I’ve not yet found someone that wants to be at the age of 20 like myself, but we are seeing that more people under 30 are leaning towards senior care as a kind of a life passion. And that’s for me. That’s amazing See, I, um, you know, in about five years ago. I went on a big bike ride to celebrate 30 years of our business. One of the messages is I was, as I was talking to people, was that I hoped that I would inspire people at a younger age to get involved in senior care, because people don’t tend to think of it when they’re at that young age. And not that this this couple that I referenced came from that directly, but it, it feels good to know that there are people out there that are younger in age, that are looking at senior care as a place they want to kind of put a stamp on, on their career. So I want to, I want to do this because it really matters.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, because the impact is real. It’s impact. You can see, you know, on a day to day, week to week basis, and there’s not a lot of jobs that you can, you know, get that level of appreciation on a regular basis. People are hungry for that.

Jeff Salter: Yeah. And I, you know, part of becoming a franchisor and being in the franchising world is you get to you get to experience all these cool businesses that are out there. I respect every single franchise order that’s out there. The fact that the Oscars and they’re building businesses that other people can become part of, and it’s it’s important that we have that in every sector that we can. But there is something about having to having to like, go home every night and know that what you did made a real true difference in someone’s life. And that’s and we get it on both sides because we are helping the senior and their family, the seniors, getting the the safety and the support that they need to remain at home. Somebody is getting peace of mind. But with us, every step we bring on board, we bring on at least one caregivers to working jobs in our communities with every client we land. And that’s really important because if we get the messaging right to get more clients, that just means we’re employing more people and won a client that needs 24 over seven home care. And that’s not uncommon. We have to employ up to seven people to care for that one person at home, and that’s a really good position to be in.

Lee Kantor: Well, if somebody wants to learn more, have more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Jeff Salter: Yeah. Karen. Franchise.com is really the easiest place to go get more information and be connected directly to us. I’m available on LinkedIn. If you search for Jeff Salter Caring Senior service, you’ll find me on LinkedIn. Um, and our website, caring senior service.com. Also, all three of those places are the easy way to connect.

Lee Kantor: Well, Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing an important work and we appreciate you.

Jeff Salter: Yeah, thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Franchise Marketing Radio.