FirstLight Home Care Franchising Stands Out By Focusing on Client Satisfaction

“There’s no silver bullet,” Jeff Bevis, co-founder and CEO FirstLight Home Care, says of the franchise’s ongoing success. The brand’s rapid ascension in the home-care industry is the result of any number of efforts to assure the highest quality in every corner of their operations.

In eight years of franchising, FirstLight has established more than 230 territories in markets all across the U.S., and Bevis attributes that growth to a wide range of factors that all contribute to the brand’s key point of differentiation from other home-care concepts: client satisfaction.

“The satisfaction of our clients is the top priority, always,” he said. “That sounds simple enough, but client satisfaction is the result of many different things. That’s why so many brands end up losing a grip on the quality of their services.”

A poor quality of service is an unfortunate reality for too many businesses in the home-care industry, to the point that poor treatment and even abuse have become the most common concerns among clients. Bevis says FirstLight is adamant about counteracting that trend, and the results have been encouraging.

“We measure every office on a quarterly basis to make sure our clients are satisfied,” he said. “The testing has shown fantastic results, and those results have vaulted FirstLight into a leadership position in the industry in a very short period.”

One of the key points of data that FirstLight tracks to monitor the quality of its services is caregiver retention. In home-care, when a caregiver quits, the consequences can be difficult for both the franchisee and the client. Franchisees must find and train a new employee, and the client must establish a new relationship with a new caregiver which takes time.

According to Bevis, the industry-average caregiver retention rate is just 30–35 percent, but FirstLight boasts an impressive 86-percent retention rate over the past four years.

“That low turnover rate shows us that our caregivers are happy and the families they are working with are happy,” Bevis said. “And that also leads to happy franchisees.”

Bevis attributes that high retention rate to a uniquely hands-on and comprehensive training and support program for new caregivers.

Before any caregiver even steps foot in a client’s home, they complete a 6-8-hour orientation training. “That may sound simple, but it’s unusual in this industry,” Bevis said.

And that’s just the beginning of the training. Every caregiver will go through a “seven-touch program,” in which a member of the local FirstLight team, an owner or a client-care coordinator will meet with the caregiver seven times throughout their first 30 days to make sure everything is going well for both the caregiver and the client.

And Bevis says caregivers aren’t just assigned to whatever home needs help. Instead, FirstLight offers a detailed matching process to make sure that caregivers and clients are matched appropriately.”

“There are 16 criteria we use for every single assignment to make sure that our clients are matched up with the right caregivers,” he said. “Of course, that goes a long way to keep our clients happy and comfortable, but it also does the same for our caregivers, and that’s extremely important. If we have a caregiver who has asthma, we don’t want to put them in a home with pets or a smoker. That leads to caregivers quitting, which leads to a bad experience for everyone involved.”

Though FirstLight is less than a decade old, it’s management team boasts more than 130 years of cumulative experience in both the home-care and franchise industries. That, Bevis says, is what has enabled FirstLight to design such a resolutely quality-committed concept.

“It’s extremely rare to find the kind of depth of experience that we have on our management team,” he said. “It’s not that most brands don’t share our commitment to quality because they don’t want to, it’s because they don’t know how. Our franchise was built by people who know how to craft and refine a system that is firing on all cylinders to provide best-in-class service, and that’s exactly what FirstLight is.”