Vancouver Sun
October 3, 2009
Mining for old
B.C.'s not getting any younger and some entrepreneurs are already ahead of the aging curve
BY ERIN ELLIS, Vancouver Sun
Combine busy baby boomers with aging parents and you'll find a niche market that's working for some growing businesses in the Lower Mainland.
You can hire someone to drive your mother to a doctor's appointment, for instance, and wait to take her home for $45 an hour. For several thousand, someone will take care of her move from her house of 40 years to a smaller apartment.
"Any services that are going to help that sandwich generation are going to be ideal," says Bridget Field, client services coordinator with Small Business BC. "... Those are things that baby boomers are willing to pay for because they're still working and they're too busy to do it themselves."
And the shape of the aging curve in Canada points to higher demand in the future for services to older clients.
Twenty per cent of British Columbians will be over 65 by 2021 -- growing to 25 per cent by 2031, according to the latest projections from Simon Fraser University's Gerontology Research Centre. Those senior citizens will be concentrated in the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island, Sunshine Coast, the Okanagan and Kootenays, if current population patterns hold.
Companies that have already hit that demographic are in expansion mode.
Take Driving Miss Daisy, a privately held car-and-driver service that started seven years ago in St. Albert, a suburb of Edmonton. It has already sold 37 franchises -- which now go for $15,000 each -- in Alberta and B.C., with two more recently added in Ontario.
Company director Tara Youngson lives in Tsawwassen and is the daughter of founder Bev Halisky. Youngson is overseeing expansion in B.C. and Ontario and says they've hit an underserved niche.
"We're certainly not seen as being a taxi service of any sort. ... We provide a level of service that hasn't been seen in the marketplace before we brought the service to seniors."
For a rate of $45 per hour, a Driving Miss Daisy franchise owner or employee will pick up a client in one of the company's PT Cruisers or Chevrolet HHRs and drive them to appointments, shopping or any other local trip. They'll help the client get ready to go out, take along a walker or wheelchair, accompany them into a doctor's examining room to jot down notes -- to relay to family members, if necessary -- or escort a client onto an airplane.
"For those of us who are able-bodied, perhaps we don't notice how difficult it is if you have challenges like hearing loss or mobility issues. ... Unfortunately as we age those impairments become insurmountable so it's difficult for a senior to get out and about in a conventional way."
Driving Miss Daisy services are often booked by the adult children of their clients, some of whom don't live in the same town as their parents.
"People's time, unfortunately, is limited now. We're in a society where we're far away from our loved ones oftentimes. We don't live out the back door like it used to be years ago," says Youngson. "So there has to be the type of service that can provide that comfort level from afar."
Working with customers who may be vulnerable means the company has refused to sell franchises to people who don't measure up, says Youngson. Franchisees and their employees must have a clean criminal and driving record, and references that check out.
While Driving Miss Daisy began with one woman who wanted to help seniors, other businesses start out serving a general clientele but see a need to specialize.
Susan Borax and Heather Knittel started Good Riddance Professional Organizing Solutions in 2005. They put clients' homes in order by banishing clutter and have seen their business grow each year since then.
When they added a home downsizing service, Borax and Knittel called it Practically Daughters in consideration of the clients they want to attract. About a third of their 30 clients so far this year are using the Practically Daughters service.
"We love the name Good Riddance. It's memorable and it gets a smile out of people, they think: Good riddance to bad rubbish. However we felt that with older people it might be a little insensitive," says Borax.
"We liked the idea that if you don't have children nearby or children who are in a position to help you, or children at all, we're the next best thing."
Current clients include seniors who are leaving a home they've lived in for decades to move to a retirement apartment or assisted living with drastically reduced space. Others are empty nesters who are ditching a house in the suburbs for a condo or people who want to stay in their homes, but are overwhelmed with the accumulations of a lifetime and need to streamline in order to get around easily.
"Many have lived through the Depression and wars and the scarcity mentality means they have a tendency to really hold onto things and become very attached," said Borax.
"Many of them realize that they would be happier if they were in a retirement community or a smaller place that was easier to manage. But the stuff is the stumbling block; they just don't know what to do with it."
While the price varies by project and clients can go with an hourly rate or all-in quote, Practically Daughters typically charges from $2,000 to $5,000 to help a client move from a house to an apartment. That includes sorting their possessions, giving away, recycling, selling or throwing away what they can't take and moving them into the new home.
The wildly successful Nurse Next Door is a great example of hitting the demographic target.
Nurse Next Door, a private home health care company that started in Vancouver in 2001, now has 27 franchises and a thousand employees across Canada. Fifteen of the franchises are in B.C.
Nurse Next Door public relations manager Arif Abdulla says the company's revenues doubled in its 2008-09 fiscal year ending Sept. 30, and the same level of growth is expected next year.
One of the services it offers is enabling adult children who may live in another city to set up nursing and caregiver visits to their parents.
Any entrepreneur who wants to see the future first-hand need go no farther than White Rock. That's where almost one in three residents -- 28 per cent in 2006 -- are over the age of 65.
For Christine McGurrin, who works in White Rock and south Surrey, becoming a personal trainer with an exclusively older clientele just happened.
"It wasn't my original intention. ... At first when I started I used my mom and aunt as guinea pigs."
Now all the clients of McGurrin's Fitness by Design are over 45 and fall into two main groups: baby boomers who are trying to maintain a relatively high level of fitness and members of the over-60 crowd who want to keep mobile.
Since her clients have different needs than 20-something gym-goers, she has taken extra courses about osteoporosis and fitness for seniors.
"That's sort of the main population here."
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