By Stephen Tweed
Who are your major competitors in your local market? If you are like many home care companies across
the US and Canada, your major competitor is most likely a franchise.
According the the latest research conducted by Leading Home Care and The Academy for Private Duty Home Care®, there are now 57 companies selling franchises in the private duty home care space, with a total of more than 6400 active locations. The top ten companies account for 4513 local franchises.
Here is our list of the top ten franchise companies and the number of franchise locations:
- Home Instead Senior Care, Omaha, NE – 986
- Comfort Keepers, Dayton, OH – 762
- Home Helpers Home Health Care, Cincinnati, OH – 650
- Visiting Angels, Havertown, PA – 551
- Interim Home Style, Sunrise, FL – 300
- Senior Helpers Franchising, Townson, MD – 294
- Brighstar Franchising, Gumee, IL, – 259
- Right At Home, Omaha, NE – 250
- Griswold Special Care, Erdenheim, PA – 242
- Homewatch Caregivers, Boulder, CO – 219
Again, the 80/20 theory applies … the top ten franchise companies account for 73% of all franchise locations.
The two other categories of home care companies are independents and affiliated. Affiliated home care companies are private duty companies that are affiliated with a home health agency, a hospice, or a senior living community. Based on licensure information from the 29 states that license home care companies, we believe there are over 19,000 private duty companies. That means there are about 9,000 independents and as many as 4,000 affiliated companies in the private duty business.
Is your local market becoming saturated?
One of the questions we often receive in our live workshops is, “How many home care companies can a local community support?”
Great question. The short answer; we don’t know. The reason we don’t know is that there are no data showing home many elderly people use home care services per 100,000 seniors in the local market. We can get that data about Medicare home health services. The latest number we have show that 38 out of 1,000 Medicare beneficiaries received Medicare home health services. Unfortunately, we don’t know how many people over the age of 65 received person care services on a private pay basis. Wouldn’t you like to know that number?
What we do know is that the number of new companies offering private duty home care services continues to grow rapidly, and the competition for clients at the local level continues to be more challenging. That suggests that each of us needs to look closely at the local market place, identify the top competitors, define our competitive advantage, and stay focused on being more competitive.
For a short video on The Seven Sources of Competitive Advantage, visit the online learning section of The Academy for Private Duty Home Care®.
