How to Buy & Double a Home Care Agency | Jérôme Bouillon Interview
Open on YouTube ↗Jérôme Bouillon is a French-born former banker and business broker who immigrated to the US in 2010 and, approaching his 50th birthday, cold-called his way to buying an Asheville, NC Visiting Angels home care franchise in late 2017/early 2018 for roughly 3.5x SDE with seller financing and cash — no bank debt. Motivated by watching his father care for his mother who died of cancer, Jérôme chose home care for both emotional and business reasons: aging demographics guarantee demand, but he quickly discovered the real bottleneck is caregiver hiring and retention, not customer acquisition. He and his wife ran the business hands-on for years — including doing scheduling themselves — before building a mature office team and platform capable of rapidly onboarding new caregivers and clients. By the time of recording, Asheville had grown from ~$500k to over $1m in revenue, and Jérôme had acquired a second Visiting Angels territory in Lenoir, NC in December 2022, creating contiguous territories with operational synergies. He is a strong advocate for the Visiting Angels franchise model and sees the royalty fees as money he'd spend on marketing anyway, offset by brand recognition, a rich intranet of tools, and a peer franchisee community. His arc is one of a self-described control freak and penny-pincher who used the business to force personal growth, and who now eyes further organic and geographic expansion.
Deal facts
- multiple
- ~3.5x SDE
- revenue
- ~$500k at acquisition; over $1m at time of interview
- financing structure
- Seller financing (notes) + cash; no bank/SBA financing. Notes included customer concentration protection provision.
- notes
- Acquired Asheville, NC Visiting Angels franchise ~Dec 2017/Jan 2018. Acquired second franchise in Lenoir, NC in December 2022 (exact price not disclosed). Guest noted he paid a premium due to supply cap on NC home care franchises and quality of territory. Margins described as 10-20% depending on volume; targeting 20% as business scales. No bank financing used on first deal; guest noted aversion to debt.
Why this business
Personal loss (lost his mother to cancer at age 30 and witnessed his father struggle as a caregiver) drove an emotional why. On the business side, he saw it like buying a bond — he knew customers would always be there given aging demographics. He also wanted to be an owner-operator and cold-called home care agencies directly until he found one willing to sell.
What's working
- Doubling revenue from ~$500k to over $1m in the Asheville location through operational improvements and building a scalable platform for caregiver hiring and customer onboarding
- Visiting Angels franchise system: recognized national brand, extensive intranet with documents, vendor relationships, training resources, and peer franchisee network — guest views franchise fee as money he would have spent on marketing anyway
- Treating caregivers as 'customers': investing in caregiver wellbeing (paying 100% of Aflac supplemental insurance, offering scheduling flexibility for single parents and part-timers) to improve retention
- Building an operational platform that can onboard 6-10 new caregivers per week and 6-10 new customers per week with minimal friction
- Territorial advantage: original franchisee (an Army Ranger) carved out a large, well-defined territory with significant untapped capacity
- Expanding to a second contiguous territory in Lenoir, NC, creating operational synergies and a larger team to backstop each location
What's hard
- Caregiver hiring and retention is the primary bottleneck, not customer acquisition — guest admits he completely misread this before buying
- Scheduling is a never-stopping, complex 'Tetris' game; guest and his wife did it themselves for months before hiring a dedicated scheduler
- Being a control freak and 'sitting on his purse' (French idiom: being too frugal) delayed key hires and investments, costing time and growth
- Made several bad early hires by hiring too quickly out of desperation, then overcorrected by being too slow to hire, before finding the right balance
- High employee turnover (similar to the restaurant industry): caregivers are often part-time, non-full-time, with variable hours, making consistent staffing difficult
- Second location (Lenoir) had been allowed to decline by the previous owner due to personal/family issues, requiring rebuilding
- Regulatory complexity: state regulations around director licensing, payroll, and patient care require ongoing attention
- Covid was disruptive — caregiver availability dried up, causing lost billable hours
Notable quotes
Being an entrepreneur is basically jumping out of the plane with someone catching you with a parachute and you say hey you know at the grace of God or inshallah or whatever and just pray for the best and hope that you feel right.
I am French so politically correct is not in my nature so I just called the front desk say hey can I speak to the owner they say what is it regarding I say it's personal but I can ensure you they want to talk with me.
After three months I found out completely wrong — the key to find the caregiver and keep them, not to find customers.
I bought the business that helped me not being a control freak anymore or less of a control freak anymore — so I bought my own medicine.
People will not leave you because of the money, people will leave you because you don't respect them, you yell at them, you don't give them opportunity to grow.