Another reorganization at Honor has resulted in layoffs. The job cuts affected 15% of the HQ staff, including many long-time Home Instead employees.
Honor bought Home Instead – one of the largest home care brands in the world – in 2021.
“Honor has made the decision to reorganize certain teams within HQ, which will result in the departure of approximately 15% of our corporate HQ employees,” Honor co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg wrote in a memo to Home Instead’s franchisees. “Within HQ, we need to make sure that we’re organized in the right way and that we’re using our resources effectively to help us all achieve this goal. Organizations thrive when they are focused, and they thrive when they have the right skill sets in place to fulfill their mission. If there are too many overlapping skills or teams, decisions are too slow and the organization does not move fast enough.”
Lakelyn Hogan Eichenberger, a gerontologist and caregiving advocate at Home Instead, noted in a separate LinkedIn post the position types that had been affected: digital marketing, graphic design, branding, legal compliance, IT, human resources, data analytics, executive support, and learning and development.
“My parents – the founders of Home Instead – always gave credit to the success of Home Instead first to God and then to the talented and hardworking people that they hired. This past week has been really hard because we’ve had to say goodbye to a lot of those people,” Eichenberger wrote. “Since the sale of Home Instead a few years ago, it’s been a rollercoaster of emotions. … [It’s] exciting to see the company evolve, but with that has come a lot of tears and goodbyes and it never gets any easier.”
Paul and Lori Hogan launched the Omaha, Nebraska-based Home Instead in 1994 to care for Paul’s grandmother. Now, the home care franchise employs over 100,000 caregivers across 12 countries. In the U.S. alone, Home Instead has more than 600 franchised locations.
Jisella Dolan – formerly the chief advocacy officer at Home Instead – also wrote on LinkedIn that her position had been eliminated.
“My executive role at Home Instead + Honor has been eliminated,” she wrote. “We completed another reorganization. Many of my colleagues and I didn’t make it to the other side this time given shifts in priorities. I have loved working at this company the past 16 years. I have given my all for our employees, franchise network, care pros, and those we serve.”
Lauren Hagan is another employee who posted on LinkedIn about being impacted by the layoffs. Hagan, who noted spending five years working for Honor and Home Instead, said she was among “100+ [whose] position was eliminated during the third round of layoffs since an acquisition.”
Honor did not specifically address those details when reached for comment.
Founded in 2014, Honor is a technology company backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Prosus Ventures, Thrive Capital and 8VC, among others. To date, it has raised $625 million in funding.
Initially, the company would partner with home care agencies and take over back-office functions. Through those agreements, the company would take home a share of those agencies’ revenue.
It eventually decided that it needed its own home care footprint, and decided to acquire Home Instead. Home Instead’s then-CEO, Jeff Huber, left the company in December.
“I thought about what would be the company that would be the absolute best combination for us and would allow us to execute on our mission, and it was Home Instead,” Sternberg told HHCN in 2021. “You’re taking the world’s largest and highest-quality home care network in Home Instead, and you are combining it with the world’s most advanced technology and operations platform to serve older adults in Honor.”
Since then, Honor leaders have spent time trying to sell Home Instead franchisees on what they feel is a future-facing, tech-driven strategy for home care operations.
The company in 2022 also launched Honor Expert, a senior care placement service similar to A Place For Mom’s model.
Prior to the Home Instead deal, in January of 2020, Honor laid off 35 non-caregiver employees.
“As part of these changes, we’re reducing overlapping functions and expanding the scope of existing teams that have deep expertise to support the whole network,” Sternberg wrote to franchisees. “These moves allow us to create a more unified and cohesive organization, rebalancing our resources toward the skills and capabilities that we need to better help you. We can be faster and more powerful by tapping into the collective knowledge of our entire operations team, rather than relying on a small group of experts, and advances in AI and large language models make it possible for us to do this at a scale and speed that were previously unimaginable.”
Sternberg also announced new additions to Honor’s team. Linn Free is joining as the new SVP of operations for the Home Instead network, effective July 24. Mark Privett is joining as VP of design, effective July 17.
Free spent the last 11 years with the franchise Yum! Brands, most recently serving as the global director of operations for KFC Global, according to Honor. Privett has previously worked at Redfin (Nasdaq: RDFN) and Amazon Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN).
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