The line that stopped a room at MadFest

I was at MadFest last week and caught a talk by Rory Sutherland (the advertising and behavioural science chap) in conversation with the founder of Leon restaurants. One story stuck with me the rest of the day.

Rory had gone back to a restaurant he’d always loved and found it somehow off. Same menu, same room, but the magic had gone.

Someone at the table put their finger on it: “This meal tastes like it was made by private equity.”

They checked. It had recently been bought by private equity.

His phrase for it was corporate isomorphism. When businesses all optimise for the same thing (usually profit over a two or three year hold) they slowly converge. They trim the same “inefficiencies” and end up looking, feeling and tasting like each other.

Distinctiveness gets stripped out, because on a spreadsheet distinctiveness just looks like cost. And everyone loses: blander service for clients, less soul for the team, and eventually the business loses the very thing that made it worth buying.

It maps neatly onto homecare. There’s been a wave of consolidation, and you can spot it a mile off. The same beige branding. The same “person-centred care” line on every website. Visits shaved to the minute. An owner you’ll never meet.

When someone starts searching for care, they hit a wall of look-alikes that taste like private equity.

A founder isn’t running a two-year clock. Your name is on it, you live in the community, you answer the phone. You get to be distinctive precisely because nobody’s flattening you toward a category average to make the exit maths work.

In a sector where quality is patchy and trust is everything, being unmistakably yourself is the hardest thing for a competitor to copy.

One thing to try: next time you’re introducing yourself to a referrer (a GP, a discharge team, a social worker), drop the word “care” from your pitch for a minute. Don’t say “we provide person-centred homecare.” Everyone says that, and it’s exactly the beige they’ve heard from the last five providers. Instead, tell them the specific thing you do that the others don’t, in plain words. The founder who’s in the business, the one carer who stays with a client, the actual thing that happened last Tuesday. If a referrer can repeat your point back to a family later that week, you’ve beaten isomorphism.

It’s also the whole thinking behind GoodOaks. We’re founder-led ourselves, and every single one of our offices is founder-led too, run by a local owner whose name is over the door and who genuinely cares how things go on a Tuesday afternoon. That’s not an accident. It’s the thing that keeps us distinctive rather than sliding toward the same beige average.

And there’s no franchise sales team, no flogging territories and moving on. Our Shared Success Guarantee means we do well when our partners do well, so everyone’s pointed at the same long-term horizon. Distinctive local founders, with proper infrastructure behind them.

If you’re weighing up starting something of your own, that distinctiveness is one of the biggest cards you’ll hold.

Worth a chat about how to play it: calendly.com/benashton/discoverycall,

Cheers,

Ben