Vancouver Sun

October 29, 2009

Ever-expanding Nurse Next Door franchise may be coming to a neighbourhood near you

BY MALCOLM PARRY, Vancouver Sun

NURSING THEIR NURSE: When they appeared in this space 27 months ago, Nurse Next Door founders John DeHart and Ken Sim had 25 head-office staff and three franchised locations: Burnaby, Kamloops and New Westminster. Today, 32 operations stretch from Victoria to Halifax. But only 22 employees occupy the home-care firm's second-floor Kerrisdale headquarters. By this time next year, Sim said, there'll be "60-plus" locations. Halifax opened last month, Regina will follow next spring, Winnipeg by summer. The vast majority of new operations will be in Ontario, he said.

"We could have had 150 by now," Sim said. "But our partners have to be right." That apparently entails more than putting up $35,000, showing the ability to handle first-year costs of $125,000, and committing to royalties of five per cent on gross income over a five-plus-five-year term. There's the matter of aligning with former IT specialist DeHart and gold-field investment banker Sim's core values, as well as demonstrating leadership skills, and "being driven by a sense of purpose to make lives better."

As for their www.nursenextdoor.com enterprise getting better, Sim said they're "fleshing out" a business plan to award the first U.S. franchise within six months to a year. It'll likely be close by in Washington, with California to follow. The two are casting around for a senior employee with U.S. experience to oversee that growth. And, in the style of friend and Lululemon Athletica founder Chip Wilson, they'll seek a U.S. private financing of up to $20 million in "strategic money."

Folk pay heed to them Down South. Young Entrepreneurs' Organization founder, Gazelles, Inc. CEO and so-called "growth guy" Verne Harnish chose Nurse Next Door to be one of 22 enterprises in a successor book to his Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Fast-Growth Firm. In Dallas last week, DeHart and Sim addressed 700 Growth Summit delegates on how to adapt Toyota's "Lean" manufacturing-plant methodology to a service-based organization.

DeHart, who is a lean five-foot-10 and 155 pounds, hurried to Dallas from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, a "dream" he'd deferred when co-founding Nurse Next Door. "Now, I realize that living life is living your dreams," he said. "But I need help dreaming, because running a business is hard." Even so, it's become an official policy at Nurse Next Door, where there's now a designated part-time dream manager.

One wonders, then, whether their current corporate aim is dream or nightmare. "One day, we want to run 500 locations, with about a billion dollars in sales and 40 people in our office," Sim said. "If we do, those 40 people will be the happiest, most well-paid people in health care." 



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