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After Honor acquired Home Instead in 2021, many Home Instead franchisees were not sold on the strategic direction they were given. They believed Honor’s model lacked a “proof of concept,” and were unwilling to alter operations to appease their new parent organization.
But, over the last few years, a lot of the friction between Honor and Home Instead franchisees has eroded.
Bill Mishkin, a Home Instead franchise owner with an agency in Melrose, Massachusetts, was one of the strongest voices advocating against looming changes coming by way of Honor. He helmed the Independent Association of Home Instead Franchisees, which was made up by at least 253 owners and 325 franchise locations.
There were a handful of core gripes that Mishkin and other franchisees had, much of which had to do with Honor’s technological ethos.
“Technology companies want things to fit into a box,” Mishkin told Home Health Care News in 2022. “They want specific numbers of hours. They want specific duties that people need to perform. And our client care can change day to day and hour to hour. And we’re really afraid of losing that most-important high touch.”
Home Instead is the largest home care franchise in the U.S. Its network includes over 1,100 locations across 13 countries, as well as more than 100,000 caregivers. On its end, Honor is a home care technology company that has raised hundreds of millions since its founding in 2014.
In June of 2023, Honor also laid off 15% of Home Instead’s HQ staff, including many long-time Home Instead employees. Nearly two years after the acquisition, the turbulence remained.
Of late, a few moves from Home Instead – and likely years of building trust with hundreds of franchisees – have begun to pay off, however.
Mishkin told HHCN that recent developments have turned a Northeastern cynic like himself into an optimist regarding the future of the Home Instead brand under Honor.
“One thing that a lot of us owners really saw is that Honor has brought Home Instead some incredibly bright and talented people, whether from Amazon or people with strong franchise experience,” he said. “The recent discussion seminars we’ve had are really informative and really next-level compared to what we’ve seen from HQ in the past. I was really impressed. And I’m from the Northeast, I’m cynical by nature.”
Those new additions to the Honor/Home Instead team came shortly after the aforementioned layoffs, and included: Linn Free, who was named senior vice president of operations at Home Instead; Stefan Haney, who was named senior vice president of growth technology; and Mark Privett, who was named vice president of design.
Free comes from Yum Brands (NYSE: YUM), where he led KFC Global, while Haney and Privett come from Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN).
Additionally, Mishkin said that Honor has now been “getting their hands dirty,” bouncing around from office to office to ensure Home Instead owners’ voices are heard.
“They’re seeing what goes on in offices, they’re visiting offices, they’re going into homes,” he said. “I think that the realization is that they just can’t come and give you ideas, they need to understand what the business is and why it’s so challenging. And now I think they’ve done a pretty good job of taking that deep dive.”
Honor CEO on the turnaround
Honor CEO Seth Sternberg agrees with Mishkin’s sentiment. He thinks that the turnaround has come from “showing” and not just “telling.”
He also believes that Honor still had a lot to learn about the Home Instead brand, even after the extensive due diligence it conducted prior to the acquisition.
“When we initially bought Home Instead, we obviously did due diligence, but we didn’t know all the things,” Sternberg recently told HHCN. “As we came to understand the actual state of the business – from the perspective of people who run businesses with a lot of data and processing technology – there was just some pretty fundamental blocking and tackling that we felt we had to put in place just to literally understand where things were at, to even have the data flows to be able to analyze what has happened. And to the franchisees, that doesn’t feel like progress. That feels like, ‘Time is passing, and I’m not seeing anything.’”
That blocking and tackling took “about a year,” according to Sternberg. Then it took additional time to instrument the business, to start receiving the information it needed. After that, it was finally time to create solutions and tools that will help fix problems that were recognized.
“I think what the owners have now seen, because we finally had enough time to do it all, is tools released that they just never knew they needed,” Sternberg said. “But now that they have them, they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. That actually materially improves my life, and improves my business as a franchisee.’ That’s really the biggest thing. Instead of telling them what we are going to do, franchisees are now seeing what we are actually releasing to them. And that’s just a huge difference.”
The recognizable payoff helps, and so does the fact that Mishkin and and other franchisees have met with Honor leaders to get on better terms.
Mishkin, for one, believes that data becoming more visible – and more actionable – will be a game changer.
“They keep coming up with more stuff, and more data for us to be able to work with,” he said. “And to be able to access it in a much easier format than what we’ve seen in the past. The hope is to have one dashboard where you can find all of your metrics in one place. They’re really working towards that. They’re definitely minimizing the amount of work that we have to do to get some of this information now, which is great.”
One example is the dashboards and reports that Honor is driving through Salesforce, which is the platform that most Home Instead franchisees are on.
Ultimately, Mishkin and Sternberg both believe that the Home Instead-Honor partnership has a chance at developing new solutions to the aging problem in the U.S. – ones that don’t exist today.
“We have no plan around opening 100 new offices or 1,000 new offices, right? The footprint is pretty good,” Sternberg said. “The thing that we need to do is give the tools to our owners to be able to double, triple, quadruple their existing businesses. That looks like the right owners, with the right tool sets, that let them serve much larger swaths of the market.”
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