Into every life a little rain must fall, but into some lives a rain the magnitude of a hurricane pours down.
Julia Burden was involved with her husband’s Interim HealthCare franchise in the New Orleans area, but not in the decision-making - or even the confidant - roles. When he became ill with cancer, the treatments and the pain caused him to make some bad business decisions. Creditors, threatening to shut down the business, started calling her on her cell as she drove home from her husband’s funeral, she says.
"People were afraid to tell me how bad it was," she says. "But I felt in my bones that it was doable." She sought out good business counseling, hired a CPA who specialized in the home health-care field and hired a highly recommended CFO and COO.
Since pulling the business from the brink of bankruptcy to thriving, Burden says corporate "acts like I’m a rock start." Her CFO and COO were the rock stars, she says, adding, "My choice was to get up every day and make Interim work or put in my application to be a greeter at Wal-Mart."
She discounts how difficult learning the business was, not to mention having to deal with all the legal and financial difficulties. A friend, who was an attorney, laughingly told her "you’re a walking bar exam."
And just when she was beginning to think she’d made it, Hurricane Katrina - a storm of "Biblical proportions," she says - roared into town covering the low land in water and causing wind damage everywhere else.
They went from 425 patients down to five they could locate. She and her staff went to every patient’s home and the local shelters, stepping over downed trees, wading through water and praying the people they couldn’t locate had gotten out of town before the storm. If the home - or office - wasn’t totally destroyed, it had water damage and downed trees across driveways or roofs.
There was no electricity, no air conditioning for relief from the hot, muggy August weather, no power to operate beds for paraplegics or home medical equipment. Communication had to be done through texting. And food, water and supplies were limited.
"It’s hard to understand how civilization breaks down (in those conditions)," she says. And yet, in every tragedy there are bright spots, such as the nurses who had lost everything and still came into work to help others.
"A lot left and never came back," Burden says, including doctors. "And, boy, did I wish I had a nursing degree."
There’s a reason people invest in franchising - and it’s more than a business in a box or product development. It’s the support.
"I didn’t start crying until I got stuff from Interim," Burden says. "One franchisee in California sent office supplies. Then cards and money started coming in, that’s when I started crying. To know we weren’t in it alone." Her business is now back to serving 450 patients.
On your own turf
Interim HealthCare CEO Kathleen Gilmartin, who started out in nursing, said all franchisees have a story. "Some event or experience has brought them to us," she says. "People don’t do an academic search, it’s some tug at the heart that this is the place to be."
Service businesses are filled with people who like helping people and can empathize.
But caring isn’t enough: "You’ve got to have head and heart," she says.
And while home health care isn’t particularly a "sexy business," it’s also "not an arms-length business," Gilmartin says.
Unlike some of its competition which is fairly new to the market, Interim HealthCare has been around since 1966, and franchisees employ more than 75,000 health-care workers. Its two core businesses are home health care, including patients recouping from operations in their own beds, as opposed to the hospital, and health-care staffing. In addition, it trains franchisees to do hospice care.
Based in Sunrise, Florida, the original company was called Medical Personnel Pool. The name was changed in 1992 and five years later the health-care division was spun off, it was then acquired by Sentinel Capital Partners.
Interim today is a 100 percent franchised-focused company. Focusing on franchising was one of the insights and strengths Sid Feltenstein, a former IFA-chair and veteran restaurant chain turn-around artist, brought to Interim’s board of directors. "Sid is the guru of franchising," Gilmartin says.
Like many franchise businesses that were started in the ‘60s, Interim is looking for ways to revitalize its brand and to fill the rapidly escalating needs in the home health-care field.
Gilmartin, who returned to the company at the bequest of Sentinel, after leaving earlier to pursue other interests, has the heart for the business, but also the head. Interim has 328 offices and about 100 ownership groups, more than a fifth of which are run by the second generation. "The next generation has grown up in the business and as franchisees identify them, we include them in meetings," she says. They’ve even gone so far as to form an emerging leader group to provide more structure and formality to the passing of the baton.
Franchisee input is included at all levels, she says, and, "We bend over backwards to provide training and services. The environment we’re in, people want to grow and we have to stay in pace with them."
Their "hedgehog," based on Jim Collins’ bestseller "Good to Great" (a company’s one big thing or core value) is to be the best at franchising, which means running all decisions through that filter. Which means franchisees, patients and management are well taken care of.
