Our Director of Franchise Development, Del Salinas, was interviewed by Dr. Kathy Gosser on FranchiseU! podcast. Del discusses the role of Caring Senior Service in helping seniors remain in their homes by assisting with daily tasks such as shopping and food preparation. With a background in restaurant management, Del shares his journey into senior care franchising, highlighting the importance of systems, processes, and team development. Listen to the episode or read the transcript below to learn about the challenges and successes of franchising in the senior care industry and the innovative approaches Caring Senior Service is taking to stay ahead of the competition.
Podcast Transcript
00:08 – Kathy
The US population is aging. That’s a fact. Twenty-two percent of the US population will be 65 or older by 2050 and 10,000 Americans are turning 65 each day, and there is a lot of competition in this space but room for more. In this episode of FranchiseU!, I talk with Del Salinas who is the Director of Franchise Development for Caring Senior Service. They provide a service that allows seniors to remain in the home because they help with everyday tasks that are needed such as shopping, errands, food prep. It’s a great episode. I hope you take a listen.
INTRO
Welcome to the FranchiseU! podcast where key industry leaders provide education and inspiration. Here’s your host, Dr. Kathy Gosser, Director of Yum! Center for Global Franchise Excellence at the University of Louisville.
00:52 – Kathy
Welcome to another episode of FranchiseU!. With me today I have Del Salinas who is the Director of Franchise Development at Caring Senior Service. Welcome Del. I’m so glad you’re with us.
01:02 – Del
It’s my pleasure, Kathy. Thanks for having me.
01:05 – Kathy
Absolutely. So you’ve been with Caring Senior Service for over five years, and before that this was very interesting to me with my background, you worked in restaurants. So you definitely understand the customer interaction and that entire platform. So let’s get started with a little bit about your career in franchising but let’s start with the restaurant business which I believe was Cracker Barrel, and tell us how you made that leap into senior care.
01:33 – Del
Well, my strength has always been in team building and developing people. I’ve had an opportunity to work with a lot of great leaders and mentors over the course of my career, and I got into restaurants and bar management and team building and development through franchising first through a company in San Antonio, Texas through Red Robin Restaurants and transitioned into the corporate side with Cracker Barrel. I learned quite a bit from both opportunities. I had some really great people I was involved with and was able to develop some people into new leadership roles. As I was looking to transition into another kind of level of my development, I reached out to some mentors and leaders that I knew in the past and one of them was a CEO for Caring. We started having conversations about what he was looking for in the department here he was growing within Caring. We had some chats over about 18 months trying to better understand what he was looking for and what I was looking for, and what aligned was the systems and processes, learning and being able to execute and train, develop teams and then ultimately execute for results really aligned with franchising. And, from a business perspective it kind of was the best of both worlds giving me the opportunity to continue my development but also develop teams and people and work with new individuals to start their business. So I had the opportunity coming with Caring first to work with owners and offices in client acquisition and caregiver acquisition, and staffing their offices and working with a team here within Caring that was able to provide that assistance. The opportunity arose to transition into franchise development, and I was able to work with a good mentor and leader within Caring, and here we are today.
03:19 – Kathy
What a story. You know, it’s really difficult to make the leap from leading a company-owned restaurant into the world of franchising. What do you find were the biggest differences and similarities?
03:38 – Del
Some of the biggest differences and similarities actually are very co-existing. The systems and processes I always come back to and having the economy I think in franchising to make those decisions and then having the accountability peace and having great people around you to do so, so I was fortunate enough to see that on the restaurant side and now working with a corporate company that has some really good strong systems and coming into Caring and seeing that there are also strong systems here and looking for growth and opportunity to expand those systems and processes to more people.
04:08 – Kathy
That makes sense, and that’s what franchising is. You are selling a proven business model with a systems and processes that work, and it sounds like you’re the right person to do that since you’ve proven it as well. On the fun side, there was a quick clip about you about what you like, do you like this or that, and it was so fun to watch. One of the things is that you like to play sports but what interested me was that you were asked about one brand or Whataburger, and you chose Whataburger and you did it so enthusiastically, I have to know why.
04:36 – Del
Well, um being from Texas I’m very supportive of Texas brands and companies. A lot of folks that come to visit have their loads of their hamburgers and um the hamburgers are a pretty good staple in most states, and I had to support the local Texas based, and I think they’re really good, good burgers and shakes. I have a sweet tooth so chocolate shakes are my kind of go-to and they are also very good.
05:05 – Kathy
I’ll buy that. That sounds great. That was a very fun clip to get to know you, and it told me a lot about your company. So, let’s talk about Caring Senior Service. So, Caring was founded in 1991 by Jeff Salter. So, what happened was, as so many of our senior companies done, he recognized a gap in home care for seniors. That was for those who maybe didn’t need medical care, but they needed help with everyday tasks of living such as preparing foods, running errands, etc. So, he founded the first location in Odessa, Texas. You all are definitely in Texas. He opened a few more and then started franchising in 2002 which we are going to talk about in a moment.
05:44 – Del
Sure.
05:45 – Kathy
But I love your mission statement “We believe every senior should be able to remain healthy, happy and at home”. So, you have a method. Let’s unpack this a little bit. You have a method called “great care” that addresses three areas of concern: quality caregivers, care solutions, and active involvement. Can you please talk about this?
06:04 – Del
Sure. You know great care kind of births from working with the people and working with our clients. I always go back to systems and processes and that the franchising piece came from how can we grow the opportunity to provide more care for people throughout the United States and what that looked like to scale and what that looked like to provide a system and a platform where a person can come in and take this and run with it and execute. Some of the biggest opportunities is getting clients and caregivers, and that’s always going to be the two biggest challenges in home care. What GreatCare is is a blueprint for how to execute and it’s a step-by-step process that walks you through, that we train you how to execute the tasks you would do, the training that you would receive and provide your team. So, it’s very systematic. It’s very simple. I won’t say easy but simple. If you’re able to come in and buy in and believe the process and systems and see it work, and then you go and execute what we’re showing you it walks you through steps to do so that you don’t get overwhelmed so you don’t miss anything, and that’s one of the biggest differentiators is that we’re able to walk you through how to onboard a client from the very first conversation you have with them reaching out for information on what’s going on. Nobody knows about home care until they need it. You’re not talking about home care growing up. I mean when you’re a young adult until your folks or loved one needs it, so nobody knows about this so when someone calls, they’re trying to learn what is this and what does it mean. People know about nurses and physical therapists, and you might get that come to your home for an hour or so and then they leave and now mom or dad or grandparents are by themselves and what’s going on next and how do we provide that assistance. Great care is the method that kind of walks you, the owner, and your team step-by-step on how to onboard that client, to ask the right questions, and make sure we are capturing the right information and from the caregiver’s side it leads you through specific questions and steps so that you don’t miss anything, and we ar able to capture all those qualities that are needed to make a good match for that caregiver and client.
08:11 – Kathy
That does sound pretty impressive. And you know, you’re right. When you’re younger you don’t think about that. You think wow I’ll either need medical assistance or not but there’s that in-between that your company fills. That makes a big difference. You know, the stats on your website are so impressive. You have 97% of your clients are satisfied with their caregivers. 96% feel their caregiver is compassionate, and that’s a strong word, and 100% feel their caregiver takes a personal interest in their wellbeing. What do you attribute this strong performance of your caregivers to?
08:45 – Del
It’s really the people. I’ll start with our owners. When they are speaking with me and they’re talking with our team here at headquarters, they talk to other owners, there is a certain group of individuals that go into the home care business and they do so because they have a personal experience either with a loved one themselves or in the business through a medical or health care service before and they see that need and have that passion. Like anything, from the top down we have owners that come in with that passion to provide that quality care to a loved one. Their teams are an extension of them so everything from their office team to the caregivers is a reflection of them and in turn a reflection of us. So, they want people, and we want people that are going to treat everyone like their mom or dad. When they go into a home, they treat them as such.
09:38 – Kathy
Boy that’s a great word picture. Thanks for that Del. And you know one last question. With what’s going on in the world today because with this aging population, competition seems to be growing in this space?
09:49 – Del
Yep.
09:50 – Kathy
I saw a statistic that stated 22% of the US population will be 65 or older by 2050 and 10,000 Americans turn 65 each day with 90% wanting to remain in their homes. What is Caring Senior Service doing to stay ahead of the competition?
10:07 – Del
Education is really the biggest piece that we’re leaning on and not just in a hands-on perspective but also in a digital capacity leveraging AI, leveraging different ways to connect with people. I think over the past five to six years we have seen the ability to connect via virtually like we are doing right now or have different ways to connect with loved ones so the education piece going back to recognizing or realizing when you might need this service and provide an opportunity and option for people a lot sooner, and being able to be very flexible with what their doing. So, they might be a fulltime mom or dad or a student who will have a fulltime career and have that passion to provide care and understanding that needs to be flexible. This type of work is something that is 24/7 and nobody can work 24/7 so we need to have more people available to step in and assist and close those gaps where they pop up.
11:08 – Kathy
That’s great. As you know, I was talking with some friends over the weekend, and you always think when your parents get older, you’ll just take care of them. You go oh I have extra space here in my home, I’ll take care of them. But the reality is we work and to take care of your parents 24/7 is just improbable. So, you’re filling that gap for that population particularly, I would think.
11:29 – Del
100%, 100%. That caregiver becomes part of the family. They’re with that person normally four, eight, 12 hours a day, and they’re an extension of the family. And they are caring for someone that you love, and they end up having those bonds with them also. Whether it’s for a limited amount of time or extended amount of time, they provide that care.
11:51 – Kathy
That’s wonderful. Well let’s take a turn into franchising. So it’s your primary growth engine right now. You have about 50 locations across the US. So why did your founder decide to franchise, and what are your plans to continue this?
12:05 – Del
It simply was the need or seeing the need and the opportunity, and then trying to find a way to provide the service wherever it is needed. It’s quite challenging. It’s very fun as well. You know, I think being challenged is good to figure out how we can provide a solution for this problem. So if you’re a critical thinker and you like getting hands on and building teams, all of this kind of leads to franchising. It allows you to do all that together and seeing the opportunity. Competition is good. Competition is heathy. Quite frankly we need more home care agencies and businesses so leaning into that competitive and partnering with different organizations to understand what we can leverage to grow the service. Whether someone gets care from Caring or somewhere else, if they’re getting the care they need and they can remain home, that’s a win for us. But leaning into that so that we can provide opportunities for business owners to have the entrepreneurial opportunity to go and again provide care in their community and for their families and people they care about, and also an opportunity to be profitable and their team grow businesses.
13:15 – Kathy
You know to that point, I dug into your FDD which is one of my favorite things to do and I found a reference to converting an existing business to Caring Senior Service. Do you have examples of where someone has had a home care service, and they have converted to yours?
13:30 – Del
We do have a recent transfer in Canton, Ohio. We have a family, husband and wife and son, who had a home care business that were looking to scale and grow, and like any business there’s going to be opportunities and challenges. A lot of them happen to be on the technical side. The long piece is sometimes the simple piece where you’re loving the work you’re doing in providing care and when you get to a point where you’re scaling and taking on more clients and you need more systems in place, kind of checks and balances for your team to make sure you’re providing the right quality of care not to mention invoicing and billing and scheduling and all those other technical sides of the job. When the opportunity becomes available to grow this family was looking for a way to consolidate. They loved what they were doing. They’re entrepreneurial in other businesses and saw Caring as a good opportunity and it made sense to convert over.
14:23 – Kathy
I can see that. And you also provide a bit of relief with the royalty payments with a conversion. Why is that?
14:28 – Del
It was truly the right thing to do. When you have clients already that you’re getting revenue from and haven’t had an opportunity to use our system just yet so it gives you time to grow the business and learn and execute Caring’s processes while you’re still serving the clients that you worked hard to get, and over time it will even out to where now your clients are using Caring systems and processes so it gives you time to slowly ramp up those royalties.
14:56 – Kathy
Ah, that’s a nice benefit. That’s a great incentive as well for those with an existing business. So, you mentioned AI and of course AI is the hot word of today, right? So, you do have an AI service, and I believe it is optional. Can you tell us about this?
15:14 – Del
Yes. We saw a need to improve the initial contact when someone comes in. This came from investigating the interactions when someone is calling to get information. We have a department within Caring called our Help Department that is able to assist with that initial call, you know with clients but also with caregivers. But the way you grow the business is to get new clients. You know that initial call a lot of times there are specific questions to ask to better understand what is going on with that person or the loved one, and a lot of times unfortunately business is going on and the person answering the call may or may not have the right tools to ask the right questions. Like with anything, practice makes perfect or makes permanent, and you need more repetition. Well to that end, getting better coaching is a need. AI allows us to have that coach that we can use any time of day, 24/7, that is giving our team so our owners, our office team, have real-time feedback and real-time ways to improve that call. So, when a call comes in, the AI records it, transcribes it, giving a snapshot of the call but then gives you ways to improve. There are specific metrics that we have added in the AI to make sure these areas are covered and if they are covered well it rewards and recognizes that person and there’s opportunity and a way to fix that and them helps craft the reply back so if there’s an opportunity that was missed that person can call back immediately and use this tool to get or gather that information, or if it’s a referral source that is calling in and we missed an opportunity, it’s a way to email them back, it crafts an email for you immediately and hit those spots that may have been missed or areas that we want to get better at to respond back better. So that’s just one small way that we are leveraging an AI system.
17:09 – Kathy
Alright Del. That’s incredible. Because when I first saw that I thought how can a company called Caring use AI because we always jump to AI’s going to take the place of people, right?
17:18 – Del
Right.
17:19 – Kathy
So you’re thinking are they going to answer the call but to use AI as a coach and to catch things they miss, and then to incent those operators ok, that is pretty fantastic and a unique way to use it. So well done. I’m really glad you explained that. that’s cool. And let’s go on and talk about the benefits of the hub back-office support center. I believe you led that for a while.
17:40 – Del
I did. I did. That was the original department I came in to head up and develop. We have a pretty lean model for your office team and there’s opportunities where the office team gets stretched a little thin. A lot of the front lifting kind of the top funnel of work whether its caregivers or clients calling can put a strain on the office team. As an owner or office team, you may be with clients. You may be in the field talking to referral sources. You may be talking to caregivers. Meanwhile the phone is ringing or people are emailing or texting in, there are caregivers that need to be talked to, and that’s really a big part of the job and the role is that top level, that top funnel. The amount of time it takes to reach out to somebody to connect for a caregiver or the amount of time it takes to reach out to someone who may have been online at 2 a.m. surfing the net trying to find information for mom and then they next day they’re at work and playing phone tag or email tag and trying to get them on the phone to understand what’s going on. It takes time. And on the day-to-day operations, it can be different to block that time out because curveballs get thrown at you every day, things happy every day, but minutes to turn to hours and hours turn to days, and if something’s not done you can become a downward spiral. So we are able to step in and take a bulk of those daily tasks off the plate of the office team and they’re almost like a personal assistance to the office to where they’re handling those high volume calls and those text messages and the emails. So, to your point about AI, when you leverage some AI on some of the initial texting, but the messages you’re getting are from real people. They are people that are working within Caring that are replying back to texting and having conversations via text or via email in order to get people on the phone or virtually like we’re doing right now to make connections that goes back to the office so by the time they get to the office they have chatted a few times with someone in our hub team to get all of the front end leg work out of the way, get them into our system so that they can go back and use our Great Care method to lead those candidates to the end or from a client’s side get that director or owner into the home to do a proper assessment with them.
19:54 – Kathy
Okay, that’s a lot of support. And that’s needed because as you said, the franchisee wants their folks focused on their clients versus the components you’ve discussed. That’s excellent. You know, you also have something called a GreatCare Audit. That is that all about? You’re required every 24 months. What does that mean?
20:12 – Del
Yes, it goes with accountabilities. Just like anything that can happen in life. We can take our eyes off the ball for a minute and get kind of caught up in daily operations and miss a step. So, the GreatCare Audit is where we are able to dig a little deeper into the day-to-day tasks and operations for every role we have within the office just to ensure that nothing is getting missed and to assist if there are some breaks in the system or if there is some education or training that needs to be revisited. As offices grow and you get new people within your office, they may not have gotten the same training some people have had originally for whatever reason. Business dictates what’s going on and they were having to move quickly. We are able to come in and realign the business and make sure they are still operating at a high level.
21:00 – Kathy
That’s awesome. I think auditing is an important part of any franchise business. You talked about training, and it looks extensive. What do you think is different about your training versus what the competition provides?
21:12 – Del
First and foremost is the people. We have a great director of training. Her name is Kimberly Johnson-Searcy, and she has tons of experience to leading our training team. We lead with a model called an acronym KUDO where it’s know, understand, do and operate, so we want to make sure that something in not only understood but know the how and why and we’re able to execute it. So, we kind of lead with that from the get-go. From the time that someone is talking with me at the front of the process or discovery, and then meet with Kimberly and the rest of our team, we lead with that and let them know that education and knowledge is one of our fundamental cores with Caring. We understand that you must continue to learn and must continue to discover what is new within the home care space so that the learning doesn’t stop. The training doesn’t end. That’s one of our biggest differentiators also is that we have monthly coaching calls with our different office people, so the training never stops. That’s one of our biggest differences. There’s so much to learn and that when you’re coming in like anything it’s like information through a fire hose. You want to make sure that we’re able to break that down into bite size pieces. We’re constantly reviewing it. You get the digital aspect where you’re able to learn on your own at your own pace but then you also get the one-on-one aspect of working with Kimberly and our training team so we can walk you through any part of the business and then once you get into operations we’re still with you as things pop up or if you forget something or aren’t quite sure, we’re right there with you, a team call away, a phone call away or in person to assist.
22:49 – Kathy
You know the best CEOs say that learning never stops and so it sounds like you all ascribe to that as well.
22:54 – Del
Yes ma’am.
22:55 – Kathy
That’s wonderful. So, you know, I also noticed you have minimum performance criteria for your franchisees. Can you talk about that and the rationale behind it?
23:04 – Del
Sure. It goes back to the accountability piece. We want to make sure there is growth. You want to constantly be growing. We want to see our owners and offices succeed and be profitable. We want to come in with some metrics that they can judge themselves and base their growth on. We want to set up some standards to where these are very achievable metrics and give them targets to aim for. We want to make sure that from the get-go there are expectations that we want your success to grow so we set these targets to have something to shoot for.
23:36 – Kathy
That makes sense. What happens if they don’t make them?
23:39 – Del
We go back and we revisit what was missed. Going back to the training piece and the systems and processes. We have shown that when you’re executing these specific tasks regularly and doing the specific documentations within our company software and following the systems and processes these are very modest targets to hit so if they aren’t successful, we want to look at what is being missed, what part of the process needs to be revisited. Was it a training opportunity, that’s revisit the training. If it’s an execution opportunity, let’s go with you and show you how to execute that better so we can ultimately get you back on track to achieve those targets.
24:19 – Kathy
So the intent is let’s get you back on track and it makes you profitable and helps Caring overall as well.
24:25 – Del
100%.
24:27 – Kathy
All right, great. And then I couldn’t help but look at your Item 19 and your gross margins are so high. What do you attribute that to?
24:33 – Del
Well, it’s again a very simple model. We have a very simple model that has been successful for over three decades where the charge rate and pay rate are very simple. There’s not a lot of overhead. I mentioned earlier about the very lean model that we have that provides you to have opportunity to reinvest your business from the profitability piece, but the model is very simple. It’s a very simple charge rate and pay rate. It’s been very successful. It’s a very basic model within the home care space and allows you opportunity to be very profitable.
25:08 – Kathy
Gotcha. I can see that happening. What do you think is the biggest challenge for your franchisees right now in running their operation?
25:15 – Del
Well, it’s always going to be the people piece. It’s always going to go back to having the right people in the right seats doing the right things regularly. So again leading from the top down from headquarters down to our owner to their office to their caregivers, it’s doing those basic daily tasks that allow you to be successful or having good leadership to be able to provide ways to improve if something gets missed, so finding good caregivers, finding good people who can execute those processes, finding good home care consultants which are our marketing and sales piece. They go out to make relationships within the community so that when folks do need home care services, they are calling us for care. So having people in the right seats doing the right things.
25:58 – Kathy
It always comes back to that, the award for talent. It never ends, never ends. So, let’s talk about the qualities that you think make the best Caring Senior Service franchisees.
26:10 – Del
The first one is the passion for the business. I mentioned earlier that we see people who have experience in their personal lives with either struggle with opportunities that their loved ones had to deal with and thinking they could do a better job or there’s a need so first and foremost is having the passing for the work. Our motto puts that person in the space to pour out of the business to help it grow but those first few years it is very hands on. They’re going to be actively involved in a role or multiple roles in their office and we want them to know and understand that you’re going to be hands-on. You must have that passion to provide care at home. Besides that, it’s going to be the faith and belief in our system and process and coming in and executing at a high level and then having the tenacity and grit to stay with it. It’s proven we have a really good success rate. I go back to its simple but not easy so coming in to the business with a passion to execute getting the right people in the right place to follow the motto and execute those tasks regularly and then being able to stay with it and to stay on course.
27:23 – Kathy
Yeah, you’ve touched on some very important elements there. You know, a lot of people think franchising is a passive income opportunity and it’s just not. And you’ve dispelled that for sure. And again, having that tenacity but then following the system, that’s what franchising is all about to insure that consistency. So, thank you for all that. So, as we conclude, I want to ask you a couple of questions, Del, and you’re so knowledgeable about franchising it’s pretty impressive. So, you’ve accomplished just a ton in your career. What are you most proud of?
27:54 – Del
Really, it’s the people again. Being able to one, learn from a lot of great leaders and mentors but to be able to share that information with people I work with, to see them succeed, so whenever someone is able to be a success and whether that successes really defines their success but seeing them excel in their careers and in their lives, I think that’s what it’s all about. So I’m very proud to have great people succeed with me and after me and continue to do so.
28:26 – Kathy
Ah, that’s great. My last question is, is there anything you wish you had known before you took the leap into franchising?
28:33 – Del
Just to have learned more about it sooner.
28:34 – Kathy
Yeah. It’s such a great opportunity, isn’t it? So many opportunities in franchising so thank you. Well, Del I can’t thank you enough for this half hour of leaning about your company and you. So, thank you so much for being a guest today on FranchiseU!.