Griswold Home Care plans ‘morale booster’
A 35th anniversary is an impressive milestone for any business, and certainly, a 40th anniversary is an even bigger milestone.
But the folks at Griswold Home Care decided that four years was too long to wait to honor employees with a party, so it threw a bash at its Plymouth Meeting headquarters on Thursday to celebrate its 36th year of providing compassionate home care for its clients.
“This began last year with the big 35th, and they plan to do it every year. It is a nice morale boost for employees, and a good opportunity to recognize the caregivers,” noted Griswold spokesman Gary Frisch.
The company used the occasion to spotlight the loyalty of longtime employee Allegra Chaney, who has been with Griswold for its entire 36-years.
On the occasion of the 35th anniversary last year, CEO Matt Murphy said that what Griswold specializes in is peace of mind.
“It’s peace of mind to the family that can’t be there to care for their loved one, and peace of mind to the care recipient that needs that little bit of help,” Murphy noted. “There are services that happen — some intense services — with daily living that is the bread and butter of what we do, but the business is really about that beautiful caring relationship between
the care recipient and the caregiver. That is the fundamental of the business,” Mursphy added.
The home care industry may have exploded in the last few years, but it was an unknown entity in 1982 when company founder Jean Griswold, a former geriatric nurse and the wife of a pastor, grew concerned about the elderly population at her husband’s Chestnut Hill parish who were struggling with the chores of daily living in their homes.
“Jean wanted to help people in the congregation who were aging, so she organized people to help them,” Murphy explained. “It was very altruistic… she just wanted to take care of people. But after a while they realized they had a business model
and there was a need for a business like this. It was a classic small business story where they’re working out of a living room and decided they needed an office.”
The franchising model was a natural evolution of the company’s desire to lend a helping hand to as many elderly folks as possible so that they could remain in their homes, he added.
“They wanted to be able to help more people in more places than they could physically meet,” Murphy explained.
In 2009, the Griswold family sold the business, which had grown nationally at that point, to a venture capital group.
“When the venture capital group came in it kind of jostled everybody who was a franchisee,” Murphy admitted. “Because up to then, the business end wasn’t the important part; the important part to Jean and the family
was the client, keeping the client satisfied. And the caregiver was important to Jean as well. And then when you start doing the business calculations there was a change in the philosophy in what Griswold had been, to what the new venture capitalists thought Griswold should be.”
The franchising model is now essentially divided into company-owned offices ( or COOs), which are largely in Montgomery County, Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley; full employment (FE, where caregivers are full time Griswold employees with benefits and independent contractors (IC), with caregivers who are not Griswold employees but contracted by the franchise owner and paid hourly.
Stephen Rymal, who has owned and operated Griswold Home Care franchises in Burlington, Gloucester/Salem, and Hunterdon
counties in New Jersey for more than 20 years, said that the typical franchise owner signs on for the long term.
“I have to say most of the franchisees from 35 years ago are still there; this really is a long term relationship,” said Rymal, who makes it a point to meet the majority of his clients personally. “It’s not just buying into Griswold for a year or two and turn around and flip it and do something else. These are people who are committed to doing this.”
As people are living longer, their desire to age in place in their own homes is stronger than ever, Rymal noted.
“They would rather stay in the home they lived in for 30 years and paid the mortgage on,” he said. “However, every family has a different solution on how they want to manage it. Some want to do it themselves and just need a little bit of help with someone looking in on mom and dad, while others are too busy and caught up in their own lives, and they need a lot of help. They may live in another state and they want someone to live with mom and dad in their home.”
Providing in-home care is essentially a supply and demand business, Rymal said.
“Families recognize that they have a need for a loved one that needs this kind of care. The supply side is making sure you have people that can provide the care, finding caregivers and matching them up with the clients. The fastest growing part of our population are 80 and over,” Rymal added, “and they want to stay at home. That’s why it’s so attractive to other businesses like ours wanting to get into the space, but we’ve been at it longer than anybody.”
Frisch reflected on the 36th anniversary for the company blog: “We bear the name of our company founder, Jean Griswold, and it’s a heavy responsibility to bear. Jean, who passed away in 2017, believed no one living at home should have to go without basic care. She saw the result of lack of care when a parishioner at her church tragically passed away, malnourished, and set out to ensure that wouldn’t happen again. She was driven by that incident to found Griswold in her dining room in Erdenheim, Pennsylvania, in 1982. It’s that compassion that guides all Griswold Home Care staff and caregivers each day. We occupy a unique position in a highly competitive field, one that sets us apart from all others. It’s a distinction born of our heritage and values. We call it our ‘Griswoldness.’”