20 | Managing Director of the Year 2023 Most Visionary Social Care Advocate & Home Care Provider MD 2023: Dan Archer Having been providing care for the past 20 years, Visiting Angels was already a relatively successful franchise care provider. However, when visionary Dan Archer joined the firm a few years ago, the company went from strength to strength thanks to his innovative approach to the welfare of his staff. We speak to Dan and find out more as he celebrates a phenomenal win in the Managing Director of the Year Awards 2023. Visiting Angels has been providing care in the UK since 2018 and is the UK’s first and only carer-centric care provider. Broadly speaking, that means that its carers are the most important people in the business; from better pay and benefits to training, career progression, and mental health support. “Why? Because without our caregivers, everything else falls apart,” explains Dan Archer, the Managing Director of the company. “Our unwavering commitment to this core vision and value means we’re very different to the competition – and our results speak for themselves.” Dan continues to tell us that Visiting Angels is successful because it holds itself to a higher standard and it was because of the poor domiciliary care that Dan’s own nan experienced in the months before her death, that he is driven to make a long-term and crucial change to the in-home care industry. “My mission is to change the perception of care workers within society,” he tells us. “That starts with rewarding them well for the outstanding work they do. I recognised that my family had a poor experience due to high staff turnover so when I started Visiting Angels that needed to be fixed.” Visiting Angels puts care workers at the core of the business by treating them fairly and with mutual respect, enabling them to deliver a truly caring service that is becoming so highly sought after. Its values are based on the fundamentals of family, relationships, responding swiftly to the needs of clients, and equipping them with the freedom they deserve to live their lives in the way they want to. Refreshingly, Dan understands that these deliverables can only be achieved if the people within the business feel valued enough to deliver that service and has made it his mission to bring about change. This includes paying caregivers more, supporting them better, and rewarding them for their loyalty, for without these things, a homecare provider will have high staff turnover, leading to an irregular and inconsistent service. Dan’s approach delivers unrushed, consistent highquality homecare from caregivers who want to care and who work within an organisation which allows them to care. “Our solution is retaining the valuable team members that work for us, rather than relentlessly recruiting,” he continues. “Putting our carers at the core of the business isn’t just about being ethical – it’s about making a long-term change to the entire social care industry.” And this approach is definitely working as Visiting Angels is the UK care sector’s first employer of choice thanks to it being the first care business to be built on the concept of carer centricity. When it originally launched in the UK, it could only be truly carer centric by repeating none of the mistakes that it believed other care franchises were making. Therefore, Dan did things his way. “We did not use franchise consultants; we started with a blank sheet of paper. We analysed what is wrong with the sector and what we need to do differently to fix it. My market research prior to putting the business model together meant I looked at close to 50 care business competitors – franchisees, corporate and independent. I found that all of them had client and service focused mission statements. I thought – that’s odd because we are a people industry. Why don’t care businesses have people focused mission statements? So that’s what we did.” As a franchise specialist with more than 25 years’ worth of experience in the industry, Dan has worked with a number of now well-established franchise brands and has helped more than 350 franchisees to realise their dreams of self-employment. After starting out as a budding marketing student at University of Leeds, Dan went on to become a Marketing and PR Manager at a national signage franchise in Norwich. After a number of years, desperate to return home to his beloved Yorkshire, he moved back to Sheffield where he set up a successful marketing agency with his brother. Despite the success of that business, Dan made the leap back into franchising in 2006 after realising that this was the place where his passion truly lay. Following his own personal experience of the shortcomings of the care sector for both his paternal and maternal grandmothers, this brought about a desire to change the UK care sector for Dan. He joined UK home care franchise, Home Instead Senior Care, in 2011 and as part of his commitment to bringing about this change, he attended a number of meetings in Westminster in 2011 as cross-party groups were considering solutions to the needs of an ageing population. Mar23140
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUyMDQwMA==