Radfield Home Care

You both grew up around a care home in Shropshire. How did that shape the business you run today?

It was hugely influential. The way our mum, Christine, built a culture of care around the staff and residents in the care home set the blueprint for how we approach our care services. That culture - that if you look after your people, they’ll look after your clients - is exactly what we see our best franchise partners replicating in their own businesses. Many of them have come from careers where they felt that values and commercial success were in tension. In-home care, done properly, reinforces each other.

Radfield Home Care was founded in Shrewsbury and remains headquartered there. Why keep the business rooted locally while expanding nationally?

When we started the business, we both relocated back to Shrewsbury. The care home was still operating and so we ran the two businesses alongside each other to start with. Shrewsbury was the natural home for us and our business, and with Birmingham (a very good central location) nearby, we saw no reason to leave Shrewsbury. It also means that when franchise partners come to visit us – which they all do before joining, and after – they’re meeting the same people who will support them throughout their journey. You meet Hannah, you meet Alex, you meet the whole team who’ll be on the phone when you need them.

Why did you choose franchising as your growth model?

We initially grew a company owned network of care businesses around us in Shropshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Cheshire and while this worked well, we struggled to get the balance right. For a care business to be really successful, there has to be a relentless focus on quality, there has to be a strong drive to develop and grow the business locally and there needs to be a very good logistics and people management skillset.

We found it difficult to find people who could deliver on all of that in the same way that we did. Franchising became the clear direction for us to take as soon as we really understood the key benefit of franchising which is that you have an engaged and invested business partner who will help you grow and develop the brand in their local area. That unlocked everything. A franchise partner has skin in the game – their investment, their reputation, their community.

We’ve consistently found that the people who thrive with us are those who’ve moved from careers where they were delivering someone else’s vision, and are ready to put that same drive and professionalism into something they own. Franchising gives them the structure and support to do that without starting from scratch.

How do you maintain standards across independently run offices?

We have a quality and compliance team who focus on the care quality across the network. They run remote and in-person audits, training and support that helps our network deliver high standards. We also have a business performance team that helps them with the business planning, development and financial aspects of running a business and a marketing team who support both online and local marketing activity.

We rely on our franchise partners to want to do a good job as it is their own business that they are running, but we do everything we can to assist them and support them. We’re proud that no UK care franchise has our support ratio – one dedicated support team member for every two offices.

That’s not accidental. It reflects a decision we made early on – we’d rather grow more slowly and keep our franchise partners genuinely supported than scale quickly and lose what makes this work. Three consecutive Workbuzz Five-Star franchisee satisfaction awards tell us that approach is working.

What have been the main challenges in building a national network from a single local operation?

We had already done a bit of the hard work in developing our regional presence for the business, but with franchising, you just can’t plan where your initial franchisees will come from. We were very quickly supporting an office in Hastings and in Harrogate. The honest answer is that brand recognition takes time, and our early franchise partners carried some of that risk with us.

What we’ve learned – and what protects the franchise partners joining now – is that local trust matters far more than national profile in home care. People choose a care provider because of a personal recommendation, a review, a word-of-mouth conversation at a local business event.

We’ve built our marketing and business development support around exactly that insight. And today, with 9.7 out of 10 across 1,230 Homecare.co.uk client reviews and a Top 20 national group ranking for eight consecutive years, the brand does a lot of the heavy lifting it couldn’t do in 2017.

You work together as siblings. How do you divide responsibilities?

We have always played to our strengths and been clear about where we work best. Hannah has a medical background but is also a fantastic businesswoman and focuses more on the business operations. Alex is a strategist and has focused more on brand strategy, marketing and communications.

While we are always both involved in decision making, having a separate focus helps us to divide and conquer. Hannah trained and worked as a doctor before co-founding Radfield. That background – rigorous, people-focused, high-stakes – turned out to be excellent preparation for running a care business. We see similar patterns in many of our franchise partners: professionals from nursing, teaching, corporate management, who bring a different kind of credibility to care leadership.

Does working as a family present challenges?

For us, it has always been something we valued. I think that because we watched our parents work together and build their business and we knew that we wanted to do the same, it has helped us to quickly align on what we wanted to do. I think that one huge thing you can get from a family business is trust and both wanting the best for the business and for each other. We have rarely disagreed on any big decisions in the business and if there has been a significant challenge, it was more about having clarity in leadership in the early stages of the business. because we hadn’t separated our roles at that stage.

We think that same principle – choosing people you trust and share values with – is the single most important decision a prospective franchise partner makes when choosing a franchisor. It’s why we spend so much time in our discovery process making sure both sides are genuinely right for each other.

How are you planning for the long term while keeping the business family-owned?

Our franchise partners are signing 10-year agreements. They deserve honesty about what that means for Radfield’s future. What we can say is this – the business exists to deliver care that genuinely improves lives, and any future we plan for will protect that. We’re building something that lasts – and our franchise partners are part of that story.

What differentiates a family-led franchise network in the home care sector?

Most of the larger home care franchise networks in the UK are now owned by private equity or US corporations. That’s not a criticism – but it does mean their strategic decisions are made in boardrooms far removed from a franchise partner in Shrewsbury or Harrogate. At Radfield, Hannah and I are the decision-makers.

When a franchise partner calls with a problem, they’re not navigating a support ticket system – they’re reaching people who built this from scratch, who care about the outcome and who have their own reputation tied to every office in the network. We think that changes the dynamic fundamentally. It also means we’re not chasing rapid expansion at the expense of quality. We’d rather have 40 exceptional offices than 200 average ones.

What do you see as the main pressures facing home care providers over the next five years?

All sectors face both opportunities and pressures, and home care is no different. The most significant long-term driver for our industry is demographic change. With an ageing population, demand for high-quality care at home will continue to rise steadily over the next five years and beyond. Care is also relatively resilient to economic cycles, as support is needed regardless of wider market conditions.

However, there are real financial pressures emerging. Increases in National Insurance contributions and changes to employment legislation will significantly increase operating costs across the sector. These pressures will be felt most acutely by providers delivering local authority-funded care, where fee rates are often fixed and do not keep pace with rising costs.

Recruitment will remain one of the defining challenges for the sector. Providers operating primarily in the local authority space are often constrained in the rates of pay and level of support they can offer their teams due to financial pressures. This has a direct impact on attraction, retention and ultimately continuity of care.

At Radfield Home Care, we operate exclusively in the private-pay market. This model allows fees to adjust in line with genuine cost increases, protecting sustainability while enabling investment in our people. It is not simply a margin decision; it is about ensuring franchise partners are not exposed to local authority fee constraints and can instead focus on delivering exceptional care.

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