Seven months after changing ownership, Always Best Care is looking to expand its franchise footprint – doing so, in part, by encouraging its franchise owners to diversify their revenue streams and expand their referral networks.

Private equity firm NexPhase became the majority investor of Always Best Care in November, with existing investors Gemini Investors and Plenary Partners reinvesting some of their proceeds. With new sponsorship, Always Best Care is expanding its leadership team and overhauling its tech stack, Jake Brown, president and CEO of Always Best Care, told Home Health Care News.

Rocklin, California-based Always Best Care operates in 298 territories across 31 states and two provinces in Canada. The company offers personal home care and companionship services as its core business, as well as skilled nursing and assisted living facilities.

HHCN recently caught up with Brown to discuss how the company is executing its growth goals, adapting to a new sponsorship and educating franchise owners in the wake of increased Medicaid program integrity efforts.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

HHCN: Tell me about your growth goals right now.

Brown: We have multiple things that we’re looking at. Of course, we always want to add more franchisees, grow our system revenues year over year, and, for our investors’ sake, increase our earnings year over year. Ultimately, our strategy to accomplish all of those things: we have five areas we’re really focused on with our new investors from a strategic position.

One is our existing base of franchise owners. What we can do to help them find opportunities, potentially diversify, and add new referral sources to their bandwidth. So basically just take what you’re doing and figure out how to layer on additional revenue streams. Secondly, we’re looking to help them understand that another good way to scale their business is to hire salespeople, and more salespeople, and essentially have those salespeople focused in particular geographic or payer source opportunities. Third, we’re looking to take our national marketing and advertising fund and enhance it. Fourth, when we bring on a new franchise owner, we want to increase the angle of revenue growth from launch. The better we can assist new franchise owners to get their licensing quicker, to get off the ground faster and grow their business quicker. Last but not least, of course, we’re always looking to grow franchises, which is two-pronged: selling to existing franchise owners, so they can grow and scale their business, and then also finding new franchise owners to start up.

What challenges growth for a company like Always Best Care?

The challenges, especially for a franchise company, are how well your franchise system can adopt the model and the tools that we provide them, and what we can do to really ensure that we’re supporting them as best as we can. The real challenge is just how well we can support our franchisors. It’s a function of developing vendor relationships and tools that we can bring to bear. It’s making sure they understand all the aspects of what is somewhat of a complicated model in some ways. And then just really challenging them to grow. And make sure that we have franchise partners that are aligned with our thinking, which is that we all want to grow together and be successful.

You talked about increasing the angle of revenue growth for franchisees from launch. If you could boil that down to one or two things that move the needle, what would that be?

The quick boil-down would be really understanding how to develop and network with the referral payer sources. That’s like number one. We will help support you and help you understand how to achieve that.

Secondarily, we have them hire a salesperson and put them through our world-class three full-day physical sales training that we hold quarterly, so that the salesperson fully understands the model and how to be successful in that environment. Then basically have the franchise owner and the salesperson become somewhat of a tag team to really accelerate the referrals that they receive.

What has changed with referral patterns in the last two to five years?

In the past few years, I would say there’s definitely been some positive shifts.

Private pay doesn’t necessarily have to be the only thing in your basket of opportunities. Definitely the VA has increased significantly. Some of our top franchises are Medicaid providers. But that’s what’s interesting to me about the industry, both with the VA and Medicaid; in some states it makes more sense than in other states.

We’ve improved diversification much more in the past few years. Franchise owners used to just be focused on one, maybe two different payer sources. In recent years, it’s kind of migrated to, the more different payer sources you can get, the better. So I would say that, in the most recent time, the key thing is just the ability to achieve greater diversification.

Given that some franchisees have a heavy Medicaid focus, are you having any conversations with those franchisees about the increased program integrity focus?

Yes, is the short answer. Franchisees make their own decisions, and at best we can influence them, and at worst they do what they want to do – and in many cases you know it’s fine. But ultimately we have always suggested that they take a look at diversification. A couple of our Medicaid providers have embraced that. They’ve gotten involved with the VA; they’ve explored private pay. But ultimately it’s the business decision of the franchise owner.

What internal initiatives are happening now at Always Best Care – have you made any changes or investments to your technology stack lately?

We’re definitely doing things with our internal technology stack, and I definitely give credit to our new partnership phase that has really looked to help us embrace further advancements in our technology stack as well as in building our corporate executive team. We brought on a new chief marketing officer. We’re also looking to bring on a significant executive in the area of developing new payer referral sources either nationally and or regionally and locally, and we’ve brought on a director of IT.

On the technology [side], we’re really looking to increase the capability of our internal operating system. So we’re going to be moving away from QuickBooks and going on to NetSuite. We’re building a whole new internal portal for our franchise owners that will be working in conjunction with the NetSuite platform. We migrated to a new franchise sales CRM. We’re moving our email platform over to Microsoft 365 in conjunction with SharePoint and the Microsoft suite platform.

It’s been a flurry of activity in what is really just our first six to seven months here of our partnership, where we’re definitely looking at every possible way that we can, technology-wise and personnel-wise, really bolster the future growth of the company.

What’s your ultimate vision for Always Best Care?

Our ultimate vision really is to be one of the top senior care franchise companies in the world. We are always looking at those that started their adventures before we did, and we’re always looking at what we can do to continue to keep ground or catch up with them.

Ultimately, the vision from a corporate perspective is to have a world-class solution that leads to us being one of the top senior care franchise companies that ultimately can provide the best care in the world to our clients. And the bigger we get, the better we can support the franchise owners’ mission to achieve that through partnering with them on everything they need to be successful in that endeavor.