November 2012
| Business World Magazine | 47
always be on call, every day and every night.
It could be years before you can afford to
hire someone 24 hours a day and seven days
a week to be on deck to handle those calls
and needs,” DeHart says.
To cope with providing 24/7 care,
the brand has built an innovative telephone
based care services centre to schedule and
handle all the calls for their franchisees. “The
real stressful parts of the business, we handle
for them,” he says. “It really frees up our fran-
chisees to focus on sales and caring for the
customers whenever they need it.”
UNITED STATES MARKET
Moving forward, Nurse Next Door is rapidly
expanding across North America, rolling out
roughly 25 locations over the next year. In
five years, DeHart confidently predicts they
will have 300 locations, 65 of them in Cana-
da. “Our plans are to keep expanding across
the U.S., to keep on the edge of thought lead-
ership and differentiating our brand,” he says.
Looking ahead to the longer term, they
are looking at getting into a new branch of
home care – remote monitoring. Being able
to monitor a client’s vital signs and motions
from afar will go a long ways in ensuring they
are able to stay in the comfort of their own
homes. “That’s a big part of our future for
our organization – the merging of technol-
ogy and our people-driven service,” DeHart
says. “It comes down to building a business
with a heart.”