Business Thompson Okanagan

May, 2007

Penticton native is 'Mover of the Week'

by LINDA WEGNER

PENTICTON – Talk to John DeHart about Nurse Next Door Home Healthcare Services and it’s his passion for his work that grabs one’s attention.

It’s captured national attention, as DeHart, along with his business partner Ken Sim, have had their company named Mover of the Week by the National Post in April.

The uniqueness of the company’s beginning, structure and growth is next.

In 2001, the Penticton native was an information technology whiz, 28 years old and looking for a new business opportunity, Ken Sim was 30, a former investment banker and also was seeking out a career change.

They both moved to Vancouver in September of that year. In their individual quests to further their business aspirations, each contacted Milton Wong, chairman of HSBC Asset Management and, according to DeHart, “an amazingly wise man.”

After a single meeting with each of them, Wong proceeded to introduce the men to each other. It was then they discovered their common interest.

“We both wanted to buy a company in a health-related industry although neither of us had a health care background,” DeHart recalls.

The men took six months researching every aspect of their proposed business and concluded that in light of an aging population, home health care will become a major component of Canadian society – a component that falls outside Canada’s Health Act.

An additional driver was the family health crisis both men faced early in the process.

For Ken, it was the need for a caregiver when his wife was confined to bed rest during a pregnancy. For John, it was the need for a qualified person to care for his grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s. Later the pain of his father’s death from cancer reinforced DeHart’s belief in their choice of career.

“The Business truly turned into a passion for me when my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I took two months off work to care for him until he died. When I got to be a caregiver myself is when I understood the need for this type of business.”

Once the decision was made to launch Nurse Next Door, things moved both slowly and yet more rapidly than they had imagined. Drawing upon their business know-how, they avoided the usual start-up costs of a new company.

“We started in the local Starbucks. We bought two cell phones and hired six caregivers and decided we wouldn’t pay ourselves until we had broken even. We knew that someday we would franchise and we wanted to reflect how a franchise partner would feel,” he explained.

Within four months the pair had their first client and by month seven they drew their first pay cheque. DeHart explained that those first three months were spent “learning the industry”.

“Once that happened, though, we went from one client to 40 within the next three months,” he said. After that it was uphill all the way.

In just over five years the in-home care service has grown from two business partners to an enterprise with more than 1000 employees, franchises in Burnaby, New Westminster and Kamloops, and active plans for further expansion this year.

Requests from entrepreneurs hoping to open the next franchise are on-going. Since its beginning, the company has grown an astounding 3,400 per cent.

DeHart attributes their major challenges and successes to two factors: people and systems.

“We call it having the right people in the right position on the bus,” he says.

According to DeHart, learning that lesson takes time. He tells of having hired people, only to discover they did not fit into the company culture. It then became necessary to move them into other roles.

“It wasn’t until we identified our true core values that we really got that piece right. Those values have created our culture so now when we hire we don’t necessarily hire the one with the greatest credentials. We want people who are high energy and are passionate about what we are doing,” he says.

The second thing, DeHart explained, was in knowing the value of systems. Convinced that systems, not people, fail, the men took time to ensure the foundation and infrastructure were securely positioned on proven business, and in particular, franchise, models.

“We were asked to franchise within the first year but we’re glad we didn’t. We needed time to do it right,” he says.

And get it right, they did. With an obvious sense of satisfaction DeHart described the success of newly opened branches. After interviewing more than 100 hopeful applicants, three new franchises were launched in April and, DeHart says, all three had clients within days.

“That proves we were right in waiting five years to get the systems in order,” he says.

For further information: www.nursenextdoor.ca.

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