Today's Guest

At 20 years old, Jeff started Caring Senior Service as the solution for local and long-distance caregiving. Within five years, he had five total locations and then began franchising. Jeff brought a never quit attitude to Caring Senior Service, which has added over 47 locations today and operates in 18 states. Jeff talks about how to build a business that leaves a legacy and aligns with your passions.

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning On Main Street, and this week we're fortunate to spend some time with Jeff Salter. Welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeff Salter:

Hi. Thanks a lot for having me.

Gordon Henry:

Great to have you. Quick intro on Jeff. Jeff began his career in senior care in 1991, working for a home healthcare agency in Odessa, Texas. He started his own company just four months later serving seniors that needed additional non-medical care to remain at home.

He then expanded the business to include other locations in Texas, Midland, McAllen, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, and Austin. In 2003, after operating the business for 12 years, he began offering franchises, and today there are approximately 47 locations in 20 states.

Quite a story, Jeff. This is effectively a business show, really. What's the business of senior care? How do you look at it from a business perspective, and what's the business model?

Jeff Salter:

Sure. What we do is we provide a caregiver to go into a senior's home and provide hourly service to that senior. We create a service plan depending on what their needs are. And then based on that service plan, we provide a caregiver that's there for any length of time from four hours to 24 hours a day. We charge the individual a charge rate based upon the market, and then we have a pay rate. From a business model, it's really about generating as many hours as you can serving your community.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. And it's always in the individual's home?

Jeff Salter:

It's really wherever they call home, but probably 90% of 95% of our service is done in the senior's home. But they might be residing in assisted living, they might be in a nursing home, so we would go there as well.

Gordon Henry:

Got it, okay. Why did you decide to start your own company?

Jeff Salter:

Well, at the time, there just wasn't a service. I worked for a company that would give out a list of names for free, and I saw that people struggled with trying to manage this on their own. If the individual's kids were living somewhere else, they were hundreds of miles away trying to coordinate care, make sure mom and dad had someone. If someone didn't show up, they were left without service. And they'd call back another free name.

I saw that there might be an opportunity here to help coordinate that because they definitely needed help with it. It wasn't something that's easily managed by an individual. Today it's still the same. Even though we can dial and get an Uber really easily on our phones, getting service and consistent help at home is really a challenge even with all of the websites and technology that's available. People still need our type of services, a man in the middle, if you will, to help coordinate that process.

Gordon Henry:

As you evolved from those early days where you were just starting out to now four decades later, when you think about the growth of your company, how did you expand? What was that journey like?

Jeff Salter:

I have to say, I refer back to that 20 year old because most of us at 20 aren't thinking about building a business. I certainly wasn't initially at 20. I didn't say, let's wake up and do this. But as I started the business, and it began to become successful, I really felt that it was something I could do anywhere. And I had an offer to go work with a company on consulting in McAllen, Texas, which from Odessa, McAllen is about an eight hour drive.

I went to McAllen and saw that the market existed there as well, so I started an office there. I had two locations. Then I realized that it worked in those two places. I want to try it in a midsize metropolitan city of Corpus Christi, Texas. And then finally in '96, I wanted to test it out in a metropolitan city with over a million people because I still didn't know if it was just something I got lucky doing, if I just had a knack, met the right people.

I knew going to San Antonio meant that I would go to place I'd never lived before, never really been except driving through, and see the work. We had tremendous success in that first year in San Antonio. At that point, I knew I could really do this anywhere. I just had to figure out how to expand and grow the business to add locations.

Gordon Henry:

When did you get into franchising?

Jeff Salter:

Well, 2002 initially, I thought that I could expand the business through just growth as an entity, add additional locations, add staff. I quickly found that that was going to require a lot more infrastructure costs than what I was expecting. It put all that burden on myself to be able to raise the capital to be able to do it and all the risk that was there.

I knew the concept worked. I had proven it over and over again. Actually opened up a location in Austin, Texas and then Fort Worth, Texas, but eventually I still thought that there's got to be a better way. A few years earlier, I'd heard of a company that had been doing franchising in our space and looked at that and found that there were multiple companies doing franchising in the space. So then I said, maybe that's the route to go.

In 2002, I worked hard to create our franchise offering and really package the business up. We found it to be relatively straightforward to become a franchisor, mainly because we were running multiple locations already. So we already had systems in place that most companies didn't have, and we had processes to get the job done in a way that was very efficient. It just made a lot of sense for our early franchise owners as it does today.

Gordon Henry:

Who are your franchisees, and what's the process of becoming a franchisee?

Jeff Salter:

The great thing about a business like ours is there's not a specific mold that fits perfect with an individual says, "Well, if you've done this, then you're going to be a perfect Caring Senior Service franchise owner." It's really individuals that have a heart and a desire to impact other lives. That's a little bit of a calling, but also about people that want to do that, have an impactful business, but also want to look at an investment that makes a lot of sense.

Just like I as that 20 year old kid didn't have an affinity for elderly, I wouldn't have some reason that something that happened, I just saw the business opportunity that could be had, same thing for people today. They're able to look at this as a business opportunity if they want to really invest and put their time into it. We have a system that allows anyone to operate. Either they can operate in the business directly as an agency director or marketer, or they can work on the business and be hiring staff and have that staff implement the business model.

Today I still own and operate five locations. One of our business partners has additional two locations. So we are truly living that model, which is owning a business, having other people manage it day in day out for us, yet ensuring that we're delivering a high quality service to the seniors in those markets.

Gordon Henry:

What's the economics of being a franchisee? Say one of our listeners hears this, is interested in becoming a franchisee. How much money do they have to be able to put down in order to get the franchise? And then what's the expected income in the first year, second year, and so forth?

Jeff Salter:

There's an initial investment, a franchisee fee involved of $45,000. And then we have a spend that's expected in the first six months of the business. And then from there, it's really a matter of them attaining clients at the local level. We teach them how to do all of the marketing in the business. We have a tremendous online presence that helps really generate referrals that way.

But then also they network with their local communities, and we teach them how to network in that local community, who to spend time talking to so they're not wasting their time going out to people that aren't going to send referrals and really laser focus them on those efforts so that they're able to quickly get up to speed by gaining new clients, getting referrals, and generating billable hours. That's really the main goal.

We're holding their hand the entire way. We have a online training that happens at the very beginning. Then there's in-house training. Come in to San Antonio, spend some time with us. And then after that we go out in the field with them to help teach them how to run the business at that local level. And then we've got just ongoing support.

We're really proud of the fact that we've done all of that, but also in our technology, we've developed our own software to be able to help them manage every aspect of the business and give them all the tools they need to really do what we want them to do, which is being out focused on clients and focused on their staff and not worried about what are the inner workings of the business. We've kind of taken all that and resolved most of it through the software.

Gordon Henry:

You recently made a major journey to call attention to the senior care industry. You did it on an e-bike, right?

Jeff Salter:

Yes.

Gordon Henry:

Tell us about your journey.

Jeff Salter:

Yeah. I, in 2021, decided to celebrate 30 years of our business being open, and I decided to ride my electric bike to every location in the system. I rode to in the end over 49 locations to each office and visited the office, met the teams and staff there. Along the way, we raised money and raised awareness about the needs of seniors in general, trying to encourage individuals to get involved in our industry, get involved in senior care, focusing in that area.

I was really trying to get people to think about technology and how they could advance technology to help seniors age in place, but also about people that want to start their own business and understand that we're going to need a lot more business owners in the future just to serve all the seniors that are coming into the market. That's something that was really an important part of the message.

Really good for the company, good for us to get out and good for me specifically as a CEO and the founder to meet and see everybody, that was a fantastic personal journey on that side, but then just to see the enthusiasm of all of our organization and just the general public. I met so many people just along the ride that were encouraged and really excited about what we're doing and we're willing to give and help out. But just raising that awareness was fantastic.

Gordon Henry:

Terrific story. When we come back, we're going to hear about Jeff's thoughts on what he would tell future entrepreneurs. Stay with us.

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Gordon Henry:

We're back with Jeff Salter of Caring Senior Service. We just were talking about your journey and inspiring people about getting involved in either franchising or the senior care industry. I'm curious, what's your recommendation? When you think back to yourself at 20 years old, what would be your recommendation for an entrepreneurial person thinking about starting a business or joining a franchise that you're passionate about? What would be your words to them?

Jeff Salter:

Well, I think it's been said over and over again about individuals and when they're deciding to work for themselves is to find that thing that they actually can really get behind and believe in. You might become passionate about it if you're not necessarily yet passionate about it, but if you believe in it, then you can get there. If you don't believe in it, you're never going to get there.

There's a lot of people who say, "Do things you're passionate about." I definitely agree with that, except there's some things that I'm passionate about that I don't think would ever gain me the wealth that I might feel like I need or the legacy that I want to leave.

So for me, it's about really building a business that is something I can build for my family. But I'm super passionate about what I do. I love what I do, and I think that if you're going to be an entrepreneur and you're going to go into business ownership, don't do it in anything that you're not really excited and believe in because then you're just buying yourself a job.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, great point. I'm curious, are there still big opportunities in senior care? Is this an area where you think it's still growing and there's still opportunities like you had 20 or 30 years?

Jeff Salter:

Yeah. As a person in the industry that knows the numbers, understands the numbers, we do not have enough individuals involved in business ownership in just our small segment of healthcare. There is such huge numbers that just the processing of the number of people that we are going to have to have in the employment field to serve these seniors, there's just not enough today. We will never have enough locations as a single company even to do that. We think there's a huge amount of space.

The market right now is still very, very fractured by the individuals that are in the space. There's a lot of small operators that exist. Not that that's not a great place for some people, but that just means there's a lot of market share to be taken in just about every market in America.

We look at places where there's competition already, and we're happy to go into those markets because we think that there's just enough room. The senior population continues to grow. Look at any statistic that shows the growth of the senior population. That alone says your market pie is almost exponentially going to be growing in the next 20 years.

There's not a lot of businesses that can say 20 years in the future we're going to be double the size or triple the size we are today just in market growth alone. For me, yes, it's absolutely something people should get into. There's no saturation exists.

Gordon Henry:

We just have a couple minutes left. I'd like to know a little bit more about you personally, so I'm going to ask you a couple questions. I like to call it our lightning round. First of all, do you have a mentor or a person you feel you've learned from who you could say, hey, this person really helped me along the way to become who I became?

Jeff Salter:

Yeah. I've been a member of a organization called TAB. John Dini is my local TAB owner, and he's worked with me for over 10 years now. It's been a great relationship, really able to ask him a lot of questions. He's got just an amazing experience and able to talk through just about any situation I've got. He could tell me how someone else has been through that situation, here's what they found to be helpful, and guide me through how I might make a similar decision. So it's been instrumental.

I think everyone needs to have some sort of a mentor if you're a business owner, especially entrepreneurs because it can feel like an island. That's one thing I tell my franchise owners. It's great because for 12 years I didn't have anyone to go to say, hey, here's some ideas. If I did, I was speaking the competition. I didn't want to do that. Franchise owners have a group of people to talk to. And for me, mentors are super important.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah. You're a busy guy, you're running a big operation. What's your secret to managing your time? How do you think about your time, organizing your day, making sure you get everything in that you want to?

Jeff Salter:

Yeah. I'll fully admit that I don't have a great system for that personally. I have some weaknesses, and that's one of them is managing my time really well. What I try to make sure I do is look at my calendars in the morning, make sure I get prepped for the day, and then throughout the day try to make sure that I'm just going through making sure I've met those.

Gordon Henry:

Do you have a favorite hobby or pastime when you're not working?

Jeff Salter:

Well, biking has become a hobby. Lately, I'm doing a lot more of that, still trying to continue. But prior to that, and I hope to get back to it, but I turned 50 a couple years ago, so rugby is what was my passion for many, many years. A local rugby team here, spent a lot of time playing rugby and enjoying that and got to do a lot of traveling with that sport. For me from activity wise, that, but just pretty much anything that gets me outside is what I enjoy doing.

Gordon Henry:

Last question. Do you have a favorite famous person or celebrity? Anybody who you model yourself after or just who you think is a great person?

Jeff Salter:

I'd say no. I don't really tend to look up to celebrities in that sense. I definitely try to see what people are doing and model what I see in the good. Little interesting, I get often stopped along the day if I'm out and about at the cash register, on a train, on a plane, people often tell me I look like Kevin Costner. I've been stopped multiple, multiple times. That isn't my favorite celebrity, but I happen to look just like him or so people say. That's my only claim to fame.

Gordon Henry:

That's a pretty good compliment I'd say. So you should take that, feel good about that one.

Jeff Salter:

It's not bad especially since his career lately, he's been doing really well.

Gordon Henry:

He has, he sure has. He's got that Yellowstone going. Just to finish up, Jeff, how should people who are interested in maybe getting involved with you or Caring Senior Service or just in this field, how should they learn more about you and what you're doing and maybe get in touch with you?

Jeff Salter:

I think the best to learn more about our company is to go to caringseniorservice.com or caringfranchise.com, either those two sites to learn more about the franchise opportunity, learn more about what we do as a company. I think that that's easiest. And then both those websites have all of our contact details and they can reach out to us. I'm often available to people also, if they want to reach out, find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to talk to anybody directly.

Gordon Henry:

Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on our show, Jeff. It's great to hear your story and really appreciate having you here on the show.

Jeff Salter:

Yeah, I enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Really, really appreciate your time, and I look forward to it.

Gordon Henry:

Thanks also to our producer, Tim Alleman and our coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. If you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your friends, colleagues, and family to subscribe, and please leave us a five star review. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us in the rankings. Until next time, make it a great week.

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