When’s the best time to start a care business?

This week I’ve been helping potential franchise partners plot out a timeline for their homecare start-up launch.

Always an interesting conversation, and one that throws up an interesting question;
“Is there a best time of year to start a homecare business?”

Nobody wants to set off into a headwind. My honest answer is that the year does have a rhythm. Winter is busier. As a brand we see more enquiries in what’s called ‘winter pressures’, and that’s reflected in national stats too.

Oct-Feb, cold snaps, flu, falls and a stretched NHS all arrive at once, and a lot of that lands on homecare, often getting someone safely back home from hospital, or covering when a family is at breaking point.

Recruitment swings about a bit too. Hardly anyone changes jobs in the run-up to Christmas, and July/August goes quiet while half the country’s on holiday.

Ripples, not waves

You shouldn’t let the tail wag the dog though. In the scheme of things, care is a remarkably steady business. When someone needs support, they need it, whatever the calendar says. Demand doesn’t take a summer holiday the way it might at a garden centre.

And the seasonal stuff is tiny next to the bigger picture. To keep up with an ageing population, the sector needs an extra 410,000 care posts by 2040. Finding and keeping good people has always been the hard part, the vacancy rate recently dropped to its lowest in a decade at 6.2%, and even that is around three times the rest of the economy. That’s a year-round challenge, not a seasonal one. It’s the same in spring as it is at Christmas.

Planning ahead

Starting up is quicker and easier with a franchise brand partner, but it still generally takes longer than you think.

Franchisor discovery process: 2 weeks
Business planning and due diligence: 4 weeks
Sourcing bank funding: 2 weeks
Recruiting a registered manager: 8 weeks
CQC application wait period: 6 weeks
Total lead time: 22 weeks

We at GoodOaks have a unique system that reduces the time and cost of start-up by at least 8 weeks and £10,000. More on that in the Franchisor discovery process, if you get in touch.

So, what am I saying?

Shifting your launch date forwards or backwards by a month or two can give you a bit more early momentum, but in the scheme of things, by the end of the first year, whatever season you launched in will be a distant memory.

So the question I’d push back on isn’t “is now a good time?”. It’s “am I ready, and have I got the right people around me?”. That’s definitely worth a conversation.

If you fancy having that one, no pressure either way, you can grab a slot here: calendly.com/benashton/discoverycall