In this episode of the Best Franchise Brands Podcast, host James chats with Jeff Salter, founder and CEO of Caring Senior Service, about the brand’s continued expansion, its caregiver-first culture, and innovations using AI technology like Sensi.AI and Kerry Care.
Jeff shares how the company has grown, thanks in part to a more inclusive franchisee recruitment approach. He highlights the company’s commitment to putting caregivers first—from reserved parking at HQ to consistent in-home introductions and a culture of recognition. This focus has contributed to high team satisfaction and a Net Promoter Score of 8.86 out of 10.
Salter also discusses how AI tools like Sensi.AI (which detects care-related audio events in clients’ homes) and Kerry Care (which manages family communications and caregiver scheduling) are improving safety, streamlining operations, and enhancing quality of care.
For those considering franchising, Jeff emphasizes that experience in senior care isn’t required—just a passion for helping others and a desire to make an impact as the senior population continues to grow rapidly.
Listen to the full podcast or read the transcript below.
Transcript
00:36 – James
Welcome to this episode of the Best Franchise Brands Podcast. Today we’re approaching a topic with Jeff Salter who is the founder and CEO of Caring Senior Service. They started in 1991 and started franchising in 2003. It’s an honor to have him back on the podcast today to talk about some things they are doing right now, and some innovations they have had with Sensi.AI since we talked the last time as well. So Jeff, it’s an absolute honor to have you back on the podcast today so thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.
01:00 – Jeff
Yeah, great to be back and thanks for having me.
01:03 – James
You bet. Well let’s start off talking about kind of some of the growth of your business since we chatted last and then talk about some of the things that are helping you guys to sustain your growth and what’s happening there as well.
01:12 – Jeff
Yeah, yeah. We’re uh we’re doing really, really great. We’ve got, we’re up to 55 locations, 20 states. I continue to see strong growth. We really made a change in some efforts to be much more inclusive than our franchise system. You know, having started the business myself, someone who was not experienced in health care, I tell people as a leader of a senior care brand, I didn’t necessary start out with an affinity for seniors. I was 20 years old when I started, didn’t have the personal experience of a senior in my life going through these challenges. But what I did recognize was the need for these services, and I felt that if I could do it anybody can.
And so we’ve really tried to be much more inclusive, finding people that are qualified but not following all the traditional franchise acquisition process is what I feel like. We’re really looking for people that have a passion for this. Maybe individuals who don’t fit that perfect mold of the future business owner but really finding an opportunity. Looking for ways that we can bring them on board. Helping them find the financing that they need, helping them really implement our business model because there’s a lot of people out there that want to change lives. They want to make a difference, but they don’t fit the mold of a typical franchisee, and we’ve been focusing heavily on not just those folks but others as well. We’re not definitely excluding anyone, but it’s really paid off in dividends in the last 18 months.
02:39 – James
Umm, well one thing that’s interesting about you guys’ business. And this is something I have noticed I guess in stock annual surveys down a couple of years ago that 82% respondents of the key driver for productivity was being happy and engaged at work, and I would imagine especially in your industry in senior care happy and engaged means team members are providing excellent care services. And they’re enjoying what they’re doing. Maybe not always the most exciting enjoyable thing they’re doing but the way that they’re doing it can be very exciting if they’re engaged in helping people have a good experience.
One of the things I think is really remarkable about what you guys are doing there at Caring Senior Service is that you guys achieved a net promoter score recently of 8.86 out of 10 which is pretty remarkable. In your annual survey you guys recently did which obviously shows strong loyalty, satisfaction of your team members, talk about that a little bit about how that promoter score gives you kind of an indication of what’s happening in your individual franchise locations and how that benefits those who are participating in what you’re doing.
03:31 – Jeff
Like many things, it’s the culture that you create within your organization. I try not, this is definitely no longer about me. At the starting stage, a founder/CEO, he’s got, it’s often about him or her, and their passion that they pour into it. Given, I’m still pouring a lot of passion into the business, it is our franchisees but it’s the culture we’ve built. And I do take back to you know the foundations, and that’s something I hopefully have had an influence on.
I came from a relatively poor background. My mom was a single mom, 2 sons to take care of. She was a caregiver at one point in her life. In the early stage when I started the business, I probably didn’t appreciate that the way that I do today. But I think what that meant for us, and it’s always meant for me is putting the caregiver at the center of everything. And that’s different.
Most health care organizations put the client at the center. Here at Caring that’s not the case. I happily tell anyone and everyone I don’t have a thing in my life without the work of a caregiver. I don’t put my kids through college. I don’t put a roof over my head. Without a caregiver actually doing the work. I don’t do the work; the caregiver does the work. And so we really, our whole culture is around that caregiver. We put them first.
When I started the company, it was about recognizing in the health care spectrum you have this ladder of people. You know, you’ve got the doctor that’s on the top and it kind of scales down to where the caregiver, typically the ones that we’re working with is at the bottom of that ladder. I wanted to create an organization that put caregivers on a pedestal. It’s not just said but it’s in all the actions and things that we do. An example is that here at our headquarters we have a parking lot. There are 4 spots in front of the building that are reserved for caregiver parking. Now we don’t have a lot of caregivers coming in anymore, but that’s just kind of an in-practice way that we do things here because we recognize that caregivers are important and I think that leads to things like a high net promoter score.
05:30 – James
I think sometimes you read about organizations that have a great culture, that do a good job with recognizing the employees and stuff like that. Obviously turnover costs are pretty high, and if you do a good job taking care of people and recognizing them, they’re going to be much more wiling to do things for you than they would otherwise. I mean if you talk about loyalty and what serving people like that and helping them feel involved and included in what your organization does to help reduce some of those costs for turnover and just helping improving your overall brand reputation.
05:57 – Jeff
Yeah. For us I made a personal mission of mine to, at least in the industry, I go against the grain in this category and that’s about retention. I actually don’t focus at all on retention. We don’t think of that as something that’s really in our control. Now it doesn’t mean that we don’t do things that a good employer should do, and we don’t do those really, really well. But in our industry, just the nature of the industry, is that if I have a caregiver working today with a client and for whatever reason that client stops service, maybe they pass away, maybe they get better and no longer need that caregiver for the 8 hours a day that they needed them, that caregiver goes into a situation where she doesn’t have work the next day. And, in our industry, if we don’t have a client that’s been admitted at the perfect timing that she needs work, then she’s going to be in a situation where she’s underemployed. She’s got to find work. And again, back to that example that these are individuals who are working who can’t take 6 days off and wait around so they have to go somewhere else.
So our focus is not about necessarily he retention so much as creating the experience in which the caregiver feels welcomed while there’s work here and knowing that when we get work available, they want to come back and work with us. So that’s what we call a kind of boomerang effect. We want to control that boomerang affect as much as possible.
And doing things like creating an amazing awards program. Our caregivers can participate in rewards that not just gives them actual points to use for purchasing things but it’s the recognition piece. It’s recognizing that the work that they’ve done is often as many times as possible and I think that in itself, a rewards program, doesn’t move the needle. But when the entire team is thinking about rewards then that means that we’re doing things that are actually acknowledging the work done. And I think that’s where the real difference is made. Sometimes that’s missed in the entire equation.
I think sometimes people focus on the program of the reward item itself and not the idea of like, if we think about this and talk about this on a regular basis, we’ll be actually achieving what our outcomes are which is making people happy about where they work and there’s a welcoming environment. And that starts, it starts in the parking lot when they come in to fill out paperwork for their initial application or their initial hire, every client gets a visit from us, a personal introduction.
It’s done by other companies, but it’s not done the way that we do it. We do it religiously. Every single client, the first time they meet a caregiver, it’s a supervisor and a caregiver there at that time so the client is never meeting a stranger and the caregiver is never meeting a stranger. And it’s actually the caregivers that appreciate that meeting more than our clients because they’re introduced to the client. They’re welcomed, they feel more comfortable when that happens. Other companies just say, “Here’s the address go show up and do your job.” And for us, it’s, “Here’s the client, let me tell you a little bit about them, let me introduce you to them, and let me show you around the house. Let me get you comfortable with where you’re going to be at for the next X amount of days working.” It just changes things dramatically.
09:04 – James
Absolutely. That’s such a great point because I think you’re talking about you don’t focus on retention part and it seems you don’t focus on the customer loyalty part, but that makes a dramatic difference for someone who is experiencing it. They don’t feel like, “I don’t know who this person is,” and that makes them feel comfortable.
How has that overall improved your revenue or your repeat business for people because they sense that connection with you and with your organization there at Caring Senior Service?
09:27 – Jeff
I think that word of mouth is going to drive the equation necessarily, but it absolutely helps in every other effort that you put out there, word of mouth does. So, your reputation does matter. Yes, your Google scores matter. But, what’s most important is that the experience that person has and that their family has, and again that’s a big driver of the decision making. And the family needs to be able to know that the company that they’re relying on, depending upon, has a reputation and has experience, and they’re going to go ask other people about that. They’re going to ask neighbors. They’re going to ask other health care associates they might be involved with, and they want to hear that the company they’ve chosen or they’re thinking about choosing has a good reputation. And that’s where word of mouth, you can actually empower word of mouth by driving that.
We do a lot of work to not just do the right thing the first time but also go out and make sure other people know what we’re doing and that communication about referral sources, other care partners involved, we try to ensure that we’re talking to them on a regular basis and make sure they understand what we’re doing and how we’re helping that client, and we’re actually helping that other company in achieving their goals.
10:37 – James
That’s awesome. Are there any things you want to add about how team satisfaction helps to correlate to brand growth? You guys are seeing growth across your organization. How does the overall team satisfaction from your perspective blend into that equation of improving your brand growth and having more locations and more outreach for what you’re doing for your customers?
10:56 – Jeff
You know, that’s a challenge for every organization especially in franchising is: How do you motivate an entire team? When you have things like working against you, take joint employer as a situation that can really make a brand say, “I’m afraid to engage because I don’t what to cross any lines.” We’ve definitely not taken that approach. We have leaned into the fact that we’ve got a brand, we want to make people proud of our brand, we want to help them in achieving that culture building. You know we’re definitely not building their culture locally, but we’re giving the opportunity to the owners and their team members to attach to something that they can appreciate. That means that they feel more satisfied with what they’re doing. They understand that they’re part of something bigger.
If you’re a franchisee and you’re in a city, you’re likely one franchisee among maybe all of those but you’re isolated. You’re on an island still, and we recognize that. That’s why I decided to become a franchisor because I lived that life. Ten years of building my business, figuring out everything on my own. My own team members, even though we were 1 company with 5 locations, we were 4 hours apart from each other. There was not a chance, but I made an effort to bring those people together every chance that I got to make sure they felt like they felt they were part of a team even though day in an day out. They worked independently but they knew there was someone else out there sharing their pains and sharing their joys, and they could communicate those things.
We’ve made a lot of effort at Caring to ensure that there’s opportunities for that interaction so they don’t feel alone. They do feel like they are part of a company that’s trying to help seniors in America age as gracefully as possible and sometimes in really tough situations. And I think that leads to overall, that culture, it helps everyone feel like they are empowered, and it makes them feel like they are part of a team that’s more than just that team locally.
12:58 – James
Well one thing that people are talking about a lot today in the news and just across the company is AI. You’ve guys are doing some pretty remarkable things with that when you created Sensi.AI. Can you talk about what that is and what you guys are doing and how you’re using that to help expand your business?
13:12 – Jeff
Yeah. We just to clarify we actually didn’t create the product itself; we’re just really leaning into it. The company discovered that the sounds that are made in a home, the things that go on, the activity that goes on, visual cameras no one really likes and appreciates and visually you can’t tell as much as you can from sound. And what they discovered is that there’s a lot going on audio-wise that you can use to determine what’s happening with that client. You can find out if an individual is maybe getting up and going to the restroom, the sounds we make to do that. We all talk to ourselves a lot more than we recognize, and we all talk to each other a lot about things that we normally might not mention during maybe a health evaluation or when the question is asked directly.
What Sensi does is that it’s able to take audio, process that audio, and find care-related items inside that audio. Imaging someone that has gotten up and gone to the restroom multiple times at night. That could be an indicator that they’re experiencing a urinary tract infection, and that can lead to dire, dire situation if not treated and found early. A person develops a UTI as more referred to as, can start having delirium, can start getting really confused. They can have all sorts of complications, and it can lead to death. Intervention early with that one type of situation can save someone’s life.
So, Sensi is able to detect that based upon patterns of movement in the house that it’s able to process and hear. It’s not a fall protection device. It does an amazing job at detecting falls. We have saved multiple lives at Caring when we’ve discovered that a client has fallen and they’re in a situation where they could not press a button if they were wearing one. They could not get to the phone to call for help, and that alone has made it for us something that we wanted to figure out how to get into every single client’s home because falls are the leading cause of death among seniors. And, if we can help prevent that end result by detecting a fall early, then we feel we should be using that technology in whatever way possible.
But it helps us in so many other ways to deliver a better experience for our clients. A client sometimes when you go visit them you ask how they’re doing. They’ll say their doing fine. They often want to appear outwardly and to anyone asking that they’re doing great. But meanwhile what’s really happening is things that if we knew about, we could help and create an intervention, if you will. Take someone with knee pain. If they’ve got knee pain, that means they’re going to start limping. If they’re limping that’s going to lead to a fall, but our pride doesn’t want to do that. We’ve experienced it as people of all ages. You fall down, “you okay?” “Oh I’m fine.” Meanwhile your arm hurts really badly, you know (laughter). You’re not going to go do things that you’d normally do. But you don’t tell people. And when you learn about that sort of thing and you can find out, so someone with knee pain they might be complaining to their spouse about their knee really hurting, but the second the nurse comes out to ask how they’re doing they say, “Fine.”
Our ability to detect and understand that means that we can go in and rather than asking how they’re doing we can ask a question that is more related to: how’s your walking doing right now? Are you having any challenges walking? We know that they may have some knee pain that they’ve reported but they’re not wanting to tell us necessarily, so we can do an evaluation that lets them tell us that they’re having knee pain and we can get other people involved if necessary. We can help them kind of help themselves, if you will. And it’s just common human nature, we understand it. So, Sensi is really helping us understand things about our clients that we just would have never known before.
17:10 – James
So how does that work exactly? They hear the sound, AI picks it up, does it send a message to the caregiver right away as a text message, or an email, or how does that process work there and notify them that that has happened?
17:21 – Jeff
Yeah we really, we classify it in basically 3 types of events. The most urgent event is something that we need to intervene in right away and get out there and get eyes on. The second is something that is important and we want to probably pay attention to, and we want to think about an intervention plan for that one. And then something that’s minor that it’s good to know but it’s not stopping them from operating as normal, if you will, but it helps us overall.
When you think about a senior aging it’s kind of a long curve, if you will, that goes up. And curve going up meaning that they need more assistance and more help. And any event can get them to a point where they need a lot more help if it’s not understood or you don’t intervene earlier.
Like that knee pain situation. You can get that person some physical therapy, get them to a doctor, get them some medication, and therefore, they can stop limping and stopping limping means they won’t fall. Without that intervention, the likelihood of a fall is much more, and a fall can be just devastating for a senior. One, it can lead to immediate death from a fall. Hitting your head on the ground is not something we want to see, but a hip fracture, a broken bone of any type takes that much longer to heal. And it means that they will need more assistance, and we prefer oddly enough, if we can prevent people from needing our services, we think that’s a good thing.
18:48 – James
And then there are things that you notice from case studies and things like that about technology. I like what you said there that if you can identify those issues and have more of an in-depth conversation about that, that’s helpful too.
So, you mentioned the AI picks up that thing. Does it send a message to the caregiver then for them, and do you guys give a recommendation of what question you should be asking them when you show up for the visit, or how does that work?
19:08 – Jeff
Yeah, a lot of training goes on. I apologize. I didn’t fully tell you exactly how it works. Yes, so the AI detects the event. It alerts the office. We have a dashboard that we’re able to see. If it’s one of those urgent events, we get a text message immediately if that happens. Everything else we have to go into the dashboard and review the dashboard. Part of our process is to, one thing that different from other agencies is we’re visiting our clients on a frequent basis, as often as weekly. If everything is going fine as often as weekly to go out and put eyes on that client, talk with the caregivers and interact with them. Prior to every visit, we review all of the Sensi logs to see what happened in the home during the time since the last review and AI gives us an amazing summary. So it actually takes all of that data and puts it into a summary format for us, so we don’t have to go hunt and peck and look and do data review.
My people aren’t data scientists so they can’t do that. So, Sensi gives us a report like since two weeks ago here’s the events that we have recorded. Here’s what you might want to talk about, and here’s some questions you might want to ask the client. It actually goes and helps us so it’s an augmented AI and it augments our ability to do the work that we would normally do. It lets us do it as scale so we can do it much larger, a larger number of clients. It allows our focus to be on the client and not on the technology.
20:39 – James
So it basically works like a computer then, is that how it picks up the sound typically or do you have to put a specific device in the home in order to help them recognize that?
20:46 – Jeff
Yeah, Sensi it comes with, we’ve got a base station that’s cellular based so that means we can put it in the home. We don’t need to have Internet services there. It has 3 pods that are audio pods that we put strategically in the home and that way it’s able to hear things in different areas and pick up audio in different areas of the home. And every client knows what’s going on.
It doesn’t record continuously. It only listens for events that might be care-related. It processes them and it throws out anything that’s not care-related. So, if you and I were talking about any subject that we wanted to that was not care-related, Sensi does not record anything. None of our staff can go back and listen to a recording. It’s not like when you watch these crime dramas and they go back to the video tape and let’s watch this whole interaction and listen to everything. We have no ability to do that. We can’t hear what the day was like. We can’t listen in at any point in time. We do get an audio clip when there is a care-related event so we can hear what happened.
So let’s saw Sensi detects a fall. Well, we get an up to 10 second audio clip that was the couple of seconds before the fall was detected and a few seconds after that fall happened. So, you can imagine you hear a thud and then you hear a groan and you hear an, “oh my,” and that’s enough to know okay this person fell. You might hear a thud but no other sound. Well sometimes those are false-positives. Maybe it was the cat jumping off a table and knocked over a book, you know, so there’s all kinds of things that happen. But it’s an amazing ability to detect and know that was an actual fall. Fall detections of any items are getting better and better as the AI learns more and more.
22:36 – James
That’s really cool. Well I think it just helps you give the assurance to them that they’re not being spied on, but you’re observing and hearing what needs to be heard in those moments when they want that. And to have that assurance that, “hey, if I do fall, I’m going to have my Caring Senior Service representative know that this has happened to me and they will reach out to help me out with that problem.”
22:59 – Jeff
Yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely education, and we know that seniors already can be resistant. But as a person that’s been involved with 35 years’ experience now in senior care we are now working with seniors that have experienced technology. The iPhone being over 20 years old now means that our current clients were 65 and the iPhone had just come out and at 65 they could accept that technology and even adopt some of that technology. So, take me back 10 years and technology was incredibly hard to implement with seniors because it was all so foreign. But now today’s seniors have a little bit different attitude. They are more accepting of some things that we bring into the equation, and it makes it a better scenario for everybody.
23:48 – James
Yeah. What are some of the other technological innovations that you guys are doing there at Caring Senior Service that allows your franchisees and your ultimately your customers to have more confidence in the care that you’re providing to them?
24:00 – Jeff
Outside of Sensi, most of our other AI initiatives evolve around actually augmenting our team members, helping our caregivers, and mostly our staff in dealing with the larger volume of clients that need care. I think personally that’s the space where we need to be spending a lot of our time. So, we recently partnered with a company called Kerry Care and what Kerry Care does is that it supercharges our communications capability.
It was initially developed to help families communicate. So, you can imagine a senior at the center and 5 children that live all over the United States. And when that senior needs help trying to communicate with 5 siblings that are in all different modes of life can be extremely challenging. We’ve all been a member of a group chat and recognizing that you’ve got one person that chimes in on every single thing, one person who chimes in on nothing, and the other 3 that might sparsely get involved when they feel like it or when they think they need to. We’ve been like this is too crazy. I’m not even going to pay attention to that group chat. We’ve all been there. What Kerry does is that it eliminates that group chat and Kerry becomes a communicator in the middle with the family members. So, if the daughter does live close by and is able to do transportation, and the senior says, “I need a ride to the doctor’s office.” She’s not echoing that and screaming it into a group chat and no one can pay attention. She asks Kerry, “I need a ride to the doctor’s office.” Kerry knows that the daughter is the transportation person, and immediately it will take place and will contact the daughter and say, “hey, mom’s got a doctor’s appointment, can you be there today?” And the daughter answers back and says, “yes, I can be there,” and it answers Kerry back. If the answer is no, well Kerry now has got these super powers in which Kerry will contact the care provider involved, and they will contact our supervisor. And our supervisor now can arrange care through using Kerry also because Kerry now knows all of our caregivers. So, our supervisor says, “Kerry who do I have available for transportation tomorrow?” And Kerry will go out and give us list of names. And then it will say, “here’s 6 caregivers that can do that transportation.” We say, “Okay, can you reach out and find out who can take it?” Kerry then reaches out to all 6 of those people until someone responds and says, “I can take that shift.”
So what’s happening it might sound like somewhat simple, but what’s happening is that it’s eliminating a ton of communication that we’ve had to do in the past. An individual would have to text 6 people or call 6 people, and Kerry is doing all that through text and now voice. So it’s able to communicate directly with people through voice communication, and it reaches into our systems because it’s tightly integrated within our software, and it actually schedules it within our system. So, it eliminates like what I just mentioned there it eliminates like 20 steps from a staff member’s responsibility, and it allows us to service so many more clients without having to increase our staffing costs which is a big deal when you’re running a business.
27:08 – James
Yeah.
27:09 – Jeff
That’s an area that we’re really excited about, and we’ve got a lot of other cool projects that revolve around AI that we’re working on to augment our staff’s abilities.
27:18 – James
Well that’s exciting. I look forward to hearing more about that growth in the future, but I think what you’re describing there is just making it more convenient and helping them know that they’re taking care of for the client and also for them. You guys do a great job with that specifically. Just in conclusion here, for someone who’s listening to this and hears what you guys are doing there at Caring Senior Service, what advice would you give to them about why they should be a part of your franchise, and grow and inquire about learning how to become a part of your franchise because the growth is happening in that sector with people growing and aging in that place? But also what are the opportunities for people who want to be part of your franchise as well?
17:50 – Jeff
Oh, we’re different from that. We’re looking for people who don’t have to have experience in senior care. You need to have a passion for what we do, it’s important. But we’re also looking for nontraditional, people who might think of themselves as, “I’ve never owned a business, I haven’t been an executive in senior care.”
We’re really proud of the fact that we’ve got people that were caregivers that today are franchise owners. We’ve got people that are staff members that became franchise owners. So, we believe in helping anyone that wants to be involved in this business segment to join our team of franchisees because we think that’s really, anyone can do it with the right system in place and the right people in place, and we pride ourselves on actual system.
We create an environment in which it’s not just, “Here’s a business concept for you,” but we really do focus on, “Here’s the way the business should be set up, here’s the team members you should hire, here’s the roles and responsibilities of each of those team members.” And that just makes it a lot easier for people. They don’t have to figure all that out. They need to be good managers, and we’ll train them how to be good managers. But they don’t have to come to this with a wealth of experience in health care or in management. As long as they have the desire to help people, they really want to make a difference in the lives of others because we’re looking for people to join the team so we can help as many seniors as possible.
The growth rate of the 85+ population is actually, in 2010 and 2020 what people don’t know is that the growth rate was actually a negative number from 2010 to 2020. Now the senior population was growing but the 85+ population was actually a -2% growth. In 2020 to 2030 the growth number is doubling and in 2030 to 2040 it’s doubling again. So, 14 million people will enter into the 85+. And I mention the 85+ population because our average age of omission is 83.2 so that means that that’s the group of people you should be focused on and know what’s really happening there. So, we’ve got amazing growth potential, and we’re going to need everyone.
Every brand is going to need more franchisees. Of course we want to see more. We want more people involved in senior care because it’s going to be a continual challenge for our country and the more people we can recruit and get involved now the better off we’re all going to be.
30:19 – James
Absolutely. What’s the best way for them to contact you? Is there a website or email address they should send their information to?
30:24 – Jeff
Yeah. Caringfranchise.com, caringseniorservice.com gets there also so either of those two are the best option. Start there and from there they will be engaged with our team to help them understand what the opportunity is.
30:36 – James
Awesome. Well thanks again Jeff for taking the time to share the recent innovations you guys are doing and exciting things you’re doing with Sensi.AI and also the other things that are happening in your organization. So, thank you so much. We really appreciate it.
30:46 – Jeff
Yeah, I appreciate being on. Thank you.