In the Trust Business featuring Right At Home Franchise Owner Nick Paul

Danny Rosenthal: Today we’re diving into an inspiring journey of career transformation, leadership, and purpose. My guest Nick Paul went from a career in finance to becoming the owner of a right at home in Spokane, Washington. Nick often tells his team they are in the trusted business, and that philosophy has been key to his success in recruiting, hiring, and retaining top talent.

All will drive in growth and profitability. We’ll touch on the benefits of a franchise system, some of the best places to find support, what clients are really looking for. And we’ll talk about how starting with people who have a heart for care makes all the difference. Let’s jump into my conversation and hear how Nick Paul is making an impact in the world of home care.

Hi Nick, thanks for joining us on the How to Build a Care Agency podcast. How are you doing today? 

Nick Paul: Good, good. Yeah, thanks for having me. 

Danny Rosenthal: I guess I’d just love to start with like, how did you even get into this? 

Nick Paul: Yeah, um, well actually I’ve, uh, my background is in accounting and finance, so I did that for 20 years and part of that I was a CPA for a while and the job prior To me starting this business.

I was working for a non profit medical clinic. Uh, they serve the native community and you know, that’s where I kind of got my aha moment, right? So, um, I want to do something worthwhile giving back to the community and, and all that. And I figured, you know, I need to be in healthcare. That’s the kind of industry I want to be in where I can actually serve people.

Right. Also, I mean, I wanted to own my own business for like, 20 plus years, you know, uh, but I just didn’t know what I wanted to do If i’m gonna spend my time and energy and money into a business I want to make sure it’s something i’m passionate about and that’s how I ended up over there Yeah, 

Danny Rosenthal: home care stuff is like that’s a huge Undertaking.  Where did you start and being like? Yes I’m gonna own my own business and it’s gonna be this one. 

Nick Paul: Right? No, it is a huge undertaking. Um, That’s why so my the name my company is right at home, right? So it is a franchise system and and I chose a franchise for a reason because I wanted the the guidance and also the help of a big Corporate office, you know, someone has been doing this for 30 years and, but still retain control of my business and the direction that I want to take it to.

So with the franchise system, they’ve been really helpful and growing my business and it’s been tremendous. If I would have done this. On my own, it would have been so overwhelming and I’d probably given up the first year, right? So having that support system was beneficial. Yeah 

Danny Rosenthal: What are a few like the really giant benefits of going with a franchise?

Nick Paul: Well for one, like I mentioned you get the support from from our head office, you know It could be from, um, business development, it could be employee retention and recruiting, could be some legal advice. When I first started out, they helped me with the registration and getting license for a home care in Washington state.

So they, they were tremendous help getting you off the ground. They always have a pulse in the industry that knows what’s going on, what’s the latest trend and make sure that we’re on top of it instead of, uh, knowing about it, like, Six, 12 months, 18 months behind, you know, so we always try to be in the forefront of everything that happens in the home care industry.

There’s so many benefits to being in a franchise system. Again, not everybody will fit in the franchise model. Right. So like for me, I’m a great learner. I always take directions really well. And I always, um, value other people’s advice, right? So, but it’s not for everybody. Some people like to go at it alone and that’s okay.

You know, so it’s, it’s important for them to find out what’s their learning style is and whether they like to be coached or not, you know, 

Danny Rosenthal: what made you go with the right at home franchise? But 

Nick Paul: when I was looking for a business, homecare wasn’t like my go to at first, you know, so I looked up a, uh, a franchise counselor and, and he kind of interviewed me and kind of see what my strengths are and all that.

And they found, he told me you need to be in home care. And then, and he told me that, okay, here’s a three options, check it out. And I, I did my due diligence, uh, research the company and right at home, one of the top companies to belong to, um, I, you know, I had a conversation with them and then I talked to all the franchisees in the system.

You know, I spent maybe an hour interviewing like 10 of them, you know, uh, just to make sure it’s a, it’s a good fit and everybody had good things to say. So that’s how I kind of, kind of narrowed down which company I want to go with. 

Danny Rosenthal: Where is it like the handholding? Stop, I suppose. And like, you get to be like, this is how I want to do this.

Nick Paul: It depends on what, how much handholding you want. Right. At least in my experience, it’s like, always on my phone with my corporate contact almost every week. You know, I have an issue. I reach out to them. Or sometimes if I have an issue, I’ll reach out to some of the owners, uh, franchisee on to see how, how do you handle this and stuff like that.

It just depends on up to you. So some people. Don’t like the handholding and they’d like to go at it themselves. And I find out they’re less successful doing it that way. I always rely on my corporate office to, to solve some of the problems I’m having at the local market. You know, every market is different.

Every market has its own challenges and I’ll reach out to the office to kind of tackle some of the issues. 

Danny Rosenthal: That’s awesome that that’s like available. I think like, oh yeah. The community aspect of it alone is probably really helpful to have someone guiding you that’s like, yeah, talk to, you know, so and so, and so and so and so and so they had something very similar.

Nick Paul: Right, right.   

Danny Rosenthal: That’s how they handled it. Is that kind this conversation? Yes. 

Nick Paul: Yeah, exactly. So when I first started out, you know, one of the things is I get to learn from other people’s mistakes, right? That’s one of the best thing about the franchise. It’s like, hey, how did you handle this issue? Well, when I was doing this five years ago, I tried this, it did not work.

I tried that, did not work. Now I’m trying this, this work. Why don’t you try that? So I’ve eliminated maybe six months of trial and error, whatever it is, and, and just get to it, you know, trying to find the solution as fast as possible. So that’s one of the benefits of being in a, in a franchise system. 

Danny Rosenthal: Yeah.

Is there other things like mechanisms for that? Like, are you in other like groups or like resources that you use? Like do you go to conferences and stuff? 

Nick Paul: Yeah. So I try to be as involved as. It’s an engage as far as much as possible. I go to conferences every year. I also belong to what we call a performance groups where we have about eight to 10 owners that meets, uh, once a quarter talk about our financials, our operations, they act like a mini board of directors, you know, and they kind of hold you accountable.

It’s like, if you’re not growing, why aren’t you not growing? If you’re having issues with employees, why are you having issues? Let’s, let’s dive deeper and kind of solve your problem. So it’s a very collaborative. group. And I think I wouldn’t have grown or be successful as fast as, uh, without their help.  

Danny Rosenthal: I hope like they listen to this, they hear it. Like I would be like crying. Oh my gosh. Nick appreciated all those things that we talked about. 

Nick Paul: Oh yeah. They’ve been a big help in my business. 

Danny Rosenthal: So then I’m assuming then you also like give them ideas and support too, right? 

Nick Paul: Oh yeah. Yeah. In the performance group, you know, you just don’t want to be taking right.

So you want to be giving as well. So that’s, that makes it a really collaborative and engaged group. So, you know, I’ve tried things in my market that may not work and I convey to them, you know, or maybe something that worked really well and now, Hey, I’m really excited about this new program. And it’s like, you need to check it out.

You know, this might help your business. So yeah, we definitely exchange ideas and try to be a good group. 

Danny Rosenthal: Being in that environment, where do home care agencies often kind of like falter? Where’s the real struggle? 

Nick Paul: Well, I think right now, um, I think in any industry, I think the biggest issue we have right now that’s facing us is the workers shortage, you know, trying to find qualified people.

Trying to find caring people to do the kind of work we’re doing. That’s one of the biggest hurdles, right? But that can be overcome with different things. You know, five years ago, you can just put out an ad and people would just apply and become in droves, right? But now it’s not like that after COVID post COVID it’s, it’s so different.

You’ve got to leverage technology and also have a finger on the pulse on how the recruiting environment has changed so much in the last five years, you know, in our industry, it’s all about speed. You know, once upon a time you could take. A week from someone to apply to hire or even two weeks before they get onboarded.

But now it’s like, you gotta be quick, you know, and you have to be efficient. If they can wrap around that ideas, like the recruiting and retaining employees has changed. The culture has changed a lot, you know, trying to embrace that and. And knowing the kind of people that you hire with right at home in Spokane, we have like a few, we kind of put them in buckets.

Like we hire like college students, we hire moms. We also hire retirees, you know, we hire teachers trying to understand the mindset of each group. It’s almost like putting yourself in their shoes. and what’s important to them. And knowing what’s important to them is really helpful when you’re recruiting and retaining people.

Danny Rosenthal: You know, you had mentioned like, you know, you used to be able to just like toss out like a job description people would buy in droves. Is that still kind of happening? You’re just like better at like knocking out people that are like not qualified? Yeah. 

Nick Paul: Yeah. Yeah. You definitely need to know what’s important for your business, right?

Knowing what your culture is, knowing the different things that’s important to make the business successful and having good employees. Uh, definitely in my top three, right? That’s like number one, having good employees. And then you have systems in place to kind of weed out the bad apples of people who we don’t think is a good fit, even though our process is fast, but we are very.

Conscious about who we hire. We don’t hire everybody. First and foremost, we want to make sure they have the heart to do the kind of work we’re doing and an understanding of what caregiving is and what entails. We’re very upfront in the beginning, telling them what caregiving is, what the expectations are, and then If they’re a good fit then yeah, we’ll bring them on.

We just don’t hire anybody off the street I mean, that’s that’s gonna be bad for the office morale bad for our reputation, you know We’ve been doing a really good job recruiting and hiring. I mean last two three years. We got multiple awards You know, we’ve been great place to work certified. We’ve been employee of choice, you know, because we really conscious about who we hire that kind of translate into revenue growth and got awards two, three years in a row for client satisfaction.

So that all kind of translate to business growth and profitability and client satisfaction. So it’s really important who you hire. 

Danny Rosenthal: I love that. It starts at the people that are working, like the heart that that drives. Rose, it was like one thing that it’s like the first thing you look for. 

Nick Paul: And I tell this to my team all the time.

It’s like, they may not have experience. You can teach the stuff that we do. Right. That person has to have a heart to do caregiving. They, they need to have a heart for people. They got to show empathy. They got to show compassion. You know, if they have those skills or those, those feelings within them, they can be great caregivers.

Everything else can be taught. We have an in house training program. And we have staff in the office that will go out and do on the job training on top of formal training with the state to get certified, you know, so there’s plenty of training opportunities within right at home Spokane. But yeah, all that can be trained.

But the most important thing is you’ve got to have the heart. 

Danny Rosenthal: I have to say that that’s amazing. It’s really like, that’s, did you even recognize that? I think that would be a really great starting point. Right. When somebody does apply, like is the training, like how rigor, like how hard is it for someone to go like, You know, I got this and they become like really good at this.

Nick Paul: So our training program, we have, um, when they first hired someone who has no experience, we hired people that has no experience, um, HCA or home care certified aid and CNAs. So if someone comes in and say, Hey, I’ve never done this, but I love to help people. I have a calling for this. Then we’re like, okay, let’s do the interview process, all that stuff.

And we tell them about training program. And then we also tell them about our on the job training where my. Applying care coordinator will go out to the home and stay there as long as possible until the employee feels comfortable about the task that needs to be done at that on that shift, right? As far as the formal training, they go through 75 hours of training that’s put on by the state and then they have a time limit.

They got to get it completed within 120 days and then get certified within 200 days, right? So we put a time limit on that so they don’t procrastinate. We always tell them, Hey, you got to keep doing this if you want to better your skill. And also Their bonuses and, and pay raise might, will be tied to that as well.

So, you know, give them a little incentive to get it done. I didn’t 

Danny Rosenthal: want to have to ask, like, I didn’t want to bring that up, but I had, like, I wasn’t sure, but I love that that’s something you do to encourage that. 

Nick Paul: Oh yeah, we try to reward our caregivers as much as possible. We have a retention program and bonuses and, and those kind of pay raises and all that.

The monetary compensation is all part of that. 

Danny Rosenthal: Is giving someone a lot of money, like in your experience, like, does that help or is it like the high fives, you know? No, 

Nick Paul: so, so we try to not hire people who just focus on pay because if they, during the interview, they say, hey, you know what, I’m, I’m leaving this company to come to work for, for your company because.

You’re offering 50 cents more and if that’s the first thing they start out the gate with and when we ask them the question They’re not doing this for the right reason, right? So we try to not hire those kind of people or at least I don’t but anyways But we also recognize that you know pay and and compensation is part of the package You know caregivers need to put food on the tables and roof over their heads But one thing I find out like good caregivers.

They’re not monetarily motivated to do a job Right. They’re doing it for the, because they have the heart for it. But again, we recognize that compensation package is part of, of the whole deal, you know? So we do like bonuses. We do pay raises. Uh, we pay for their training. The training is quite expensive, so we pay for that.

We try to reward our caregivers other than just monetary benefits. You know, we offer like medical package dental and all that, you know, we have paid vacation, not a lot of home care agencies do that, you know, we offer paid sick leave. So for 1k, those kind of thing. Um, but we also, we also very hyper focused on retention, showing our appreciation, the office showing our appreciation for our caregivers is like paramount.

And I drilled that into my office. That’s like, you know. We have really awesome caregivers and, and showing them that we appreciate them. Right. And we do different things. You know, um, we have, we do Christmas bonuses and, uh, we have, uh, every quarter we do lunches for the caregivers, you know, give us swag bags, you know, caregiver when, um, get employee of the month, you know, we kind of posted on social media just to recognize them for their efforts and how they’re helping our clients.

To stay at home to age in place. Yeah, we definitely do some other things just to highlight the achievement and our appreciation for them. 

Danny Rosenthal: I have to underline all these things you’re doing. That’s how you get those awards. It sounds amazing. Like, I’m like, where do I sign up to like, learn, you know, to like, with clients, what is it that you see the clients are really looking for?

Nick Paul: I tell my team this. Yes, we do home care, but we also in the trust business. So having the ability for clients to trust us. To do what’s right to have them age in place when we develop a care plan, you know, it’s not one, one, one size fits all care plan. It’s very, um, custom to that client, you know, so, and then we, and we have, like I said, that on the job training will come, we do supervisory visits, uh, at random just to make sure that they’re getting the kind of, uh, quality care at home from our caregivers, from the office.

So it’s a lot of trust, a lot of relationship building with our clients. And they appreciate that, you know, not to say we’re perfect when, as humans, we’re never perfect. We always, sometimes we make mistakes and, and we, we recognize that. And we tell our clients, I’m sorry we did this, but let’s see what we can do to make it better.

Right. So we always own up to our mistakes and, um, and take care of our clients basically, you know, and, and that’s, that’s kind of our mantra is like. Let’s do right by our clients. 

Danny Rosenthal: So what is it that the first thing that families reach out looking for, what does that kind of look like? 

Nick Paul: Most of our clients they’ve never had home care, they’ve never had somebody in the house take care of their loved ones.

Um, so it’s a lot of time it’s educating them over the phone like when they first call we’ll tell them what home care is and what we can and cannot do. When they call, they ask for rates. We’ll give them the rates. We’re not necessarily the highest or the lowest. We’re kind of in the middle. You know, when they call us too, they call us because they checked us out.

Danny Rosenthal: You know, you mentioned a care plan. How long does it take from like that phone call where they’re like, Hey Nick, I hear you guys are the best. Um. How soon is it from that phone call to like actually getting someone in the house? 

Nick Paul: Yeah. So it could be as quickly as 10 minutes. You know, it could be one or two days.

It just depends on the need, right? Just the other day we had someone called us and say, Hey, my dad’s getting discharged from the hospital. The hospital gave me your name to call. And, uh, he’s gonna be discharged in two hours. Can you be there? We’re like, sure, we’ll be right there, you know, uh, so it can go pretty quick.

It just depends on the needs. 

Danny Rosenthal: That’s  incredible, by the way. That sounds remarkable. 

Nick Paul: Yeah, so yeah, thank you. But, uh, we try to do right by our caregivers. You know, we, we have loved ones too. And we understand like someone needs care at home. It’s how stressful that could be on the family members, right?

Trying to take care of their loved ones. So we kind of put ourselves in their place and try and do right by them. And we, we try to help us as much as we can. 

Danny Rosenthal: So where do you see the future of home care going? 

Nick Paul: I’m sure you’ve heard of the silver tsunami, right? So we have, we’re going to have a lot of people in retirement age.

This, I think it’s during the boom and generation that, that are getting the retirement age and, you know, it’s going to be. A problem, because I don’t think as a country, as a community, I don’t think we’re prepared for it. Uh, the demands, it’s going to be a lot of demand, just not a lot of supply, right? Yeah.

We just don’t have enough workforce to accommodate that demand. So I think as far as the future of home care goes, or health care in general, it’s going to be good. Now, there are going to be challenges just because of a workforce shortage and all that. How we’re going to tackle that is yet to be seen, at least I’ve not seen it yet, the solution.

But it’ll be interesting to see what’s going to happen within the next 5 10 years, 15 years. 

Danny Rosenthal: It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you. I love everything you’re doing, like it’s I You say everything so relaxed and it’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. 

Nick Paul: Well, you’re very kind in your words.

I appreciate it. Thank you. 

Danny: Where can people go to learn more about your Write at Home? 

Nick Paul: Yeah, so they can go, uh, to our website. We have a really awesome website. It’s, uh, www. writeathome. net backslash spokane or can call our office 509 315 5787. 

Danny Rosenthal: Thanks again so much for sharing everything. 

Nick Paul: Well, thank you so much, Danny. I appreciate you and thanks for having me.