Any business will struggle without a strong sense of its core values. But for senior care franchises, weak values are an even bigger cause for alarm. In a field where seniors’ health, happiness, and well-being are at stake, businesses cannot survive without strong guiding principles.

Successful senior care brands like Visiting Angels^® are built on a values-based foundation. And successful franchisees think carefully about how they integrate their own core values into their business.

If you’re starting a senior care franchise — or thinking of purchasing one — you’ll want to think carefully about the values you bring to your franchise. To get started, use the four values below as a launchpad. While your core values shouldn’t be limited to just these four principles, some form of these values will be crucial to your success.

Key Values for Senior Care Franchises

1. Honesty

As a senior care provider, it’s important that you remain honest with seniors and their family members. This may seem like obvious advice, but it’s sometimes hard to follow. When seniors experience physical and cognitive decline, emotions like fear and anger can dominate conversations. In these situations, it’s tempting to tell people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

Even respected senior care franchises are sometimes guilty of making unrealistic promises and claims. Often, this isn’t deliberate. Instead, it stems from misplaced optimism on the part of care staff. While this can provide short-term comfort to seniors and their families, the consequences can be emotionally damaging to your clients while eroding your reputation for trustworthy care.

2. Integrity

Senior care franchises need to avoid making unrealistic claims. But it’s equally important that you stand by the promises that you actually make — even when it’s difficult, inconvenient, or expensive to do so.

Obviously, unforeseeable circumstances can prevent care agencies from fulfilling their commitments. If a caregiver gets in an accident on their way to a client’s home, there’s little you can do to ensure the client’s care session begins on time.

But when these kinds of situations arise, the best senior care franchises react quickly and decisively. To use the example outlined above, you could contact the client to let them know about the situation, make arrangements to accommodate the disruption to their usual care schedule, and find a substitute caregiver to fill the shift as quickly as possible.

3. Compassion

Broadly speaking, there are two types of senior care franchise owners. On the one hand, you have franchisees that recognized the growth potential of senior care and started their business mainly for financial reasons. On the other hand, you have franchisees for whom senior care is a calling, and who prioritize their clients’ well-being ahead of profits.

Ironically, it’s this second group that tend to have the most success as franchisees. The reason is simple. While these franchises sometimes sacrifice short-term profits to provide higher quality care, they build trust with existing clients and earn new ones through word of mouth. In the long-term, these senior care franchises outperform the competition because they’re more compassionate.

4. Respect

Most people associate aging with physical and cognitive decline. Yet for many elderly adults, the emotional side of aging is the hardest part of growing older.

These seniors may not enjoy aging’s physical and cognitive symptoms, but so long as they’re emotionally and socially content, they can cope with these symptoms. Unfortunately, many elderly adults are treated as a burden by those around them. As they receive less and less respect from others, their self-worth quickly erodes.

Successful senior care franchises know how emotionally trying this can be for older adults. In response, they go the extra mile to make their clients feel capable, valued, and worthy of respect. This requires an active effort from care managers and caregivers alike, but it can make a world of difference in how seniors rate their quality of care and quality of life.

At Visiting Angels, our commitment to these four values have helped hundreds of franchisees find success with their senior care franchises. To learn more about our franchise opportunities, call us today at 800-365-4189 or submit an online request.