When Matt Fitton and I acquired the Australian master franchise rights for Nurse Next Door in 2018, we purchased a proven North American franchise business model, a clear purpose and a bold pink brand. They were incredibly valuable foundations, but they were just that – foundations.
But while a brand can give you a head start, it can’t determine what that business will become in a new country – what you ultimately build with that opportunity is entirely up to you. The harder, more important work is figuring out what will actually work and resonate in your market – and then building the business, network and culture capable of realising that potential.
Our why. Our culture
The vision for what Nurse Next Door could become in Australia – the story we would tell, the culture we would create and the ambition we would bring to it – was something Matt and I had to build for ourselves.
From the beginning, we had absolute clarity about our why. There was no grey. That clarity mattered enormously because there was no established Nurse Next Door Australia success story for people to buy into.
Our earliest franchise partners were backing Matt and me as much as they were backing an international brand. They were our early adopters.
I believe that shared sense of purpose and the culture it created have been among the most important drivers of our exponential growth.
As our franchise partners built their businesses, they brought their own why to Nurse Next Door – often deeply personal reasons for what they wanted to build and the difference they wanted to make. Those individual motivations connected back to the purpose and vision we had established, and as others joined us, that shared sense of purpose grew with them.
We didn’t simply scale a franchise model that had been handed to us; we scaled belief in what we could create together.
That culture became the glue binding a network of independent business owners, caregivers, nurses and HeartQuarters team members around a common purpose and shared ambition. In many ways, it has become our superpower: helping us achieve collectively far more than any of us could have achieved alone.
Deciding what needs to change
One of the lessons Matt and I had front of mind throughout the 12 months of due diligence we undertook to assess whether Nurse Next Door was right for us came from Starbucks’ experience in Australia.
If a business with the resources and global recognition of Starbucks could misread Australia, Nurse Next Door’s success in North America certainly didn’t guarantee success here.
We were very clear about what could never change: the brand’s heart and soul – Making Lives Better, our four core values and the bold pink identity that made Nurse Next Door unmistakably Nurse Next Door.
Beyond those foundations, almost everything else was open to change. Australia has different consumers, employment conditions, government funding systems, legislation and a very different home-care landscape.
We spent months pulling the model apart to understand which parts would translate, which wouldn’t and what we needed to Australianise.
One of the clearest examples was our messaging. In North America, Nurse Next Door had historically focused on senior care, with “Happier Aging” central to how the brand spoke to customers. But that message didn’t describe the business we were going to build.
We knew supporting people living with disability through the NDIS would form a substantial part of our business in Australia. So I made a deliberate decision to put Making Lives Better at the centre of everything we say.
You can’t franchise a theory
We had acquired the rights to franchise Nurse Next Door across Australia, but we couldn’t franchise a theory. So we launched our first corporately owned location in Melbourne on 1 January 2019 and became operators ourselves.
The North American operations manual gave us a framework, but there is a world of difference between reading how a business should operate and actually operating it every day. I needed to understand where the pressure points were, what could go wrong, what needed to change for Australia and, importantly, where our future franchise partners would need the most help.
That experience shaped the Australian operating model we ultimately franchised. It was grounded in our market, workforce, customers and regulatory environment rather than simply replicated from somewhere else.
It’s also why our operating model today differs in many respects from North America’s, from how care is funded and regulated to how we employ and pay our people.
The Australian model has also enabled our businesses to grow to significant scale, with around two-thirds of our locations now generating more than $2 million in annual revenue, and one in four generating more than $5 million..
What success makes possible
Today, more than 55 franchised businesses operate across 77 territories, with more than 150 pink cars on the road in communities around Australia. That scale is something Matt and I are incredibly proud of, but increasingly I think about what having built a successful business now gives us the ability to do.
That question led to The Making Lives Better Million. Over the next 12 months, Matt and I are funding the wages and on-costs for one million dollars of free care for older Australians who have fallen through gaps in aged care funding and don’t have the means to pay for the care they need.
Our franchise partners are contributing their time and resources to coordinate and deliver that care in their local communities.
When we brought Nurse Next Door to Australia, Making Lives Better was one of the foundations we started with. Eight years later, the success of the business we have built around that purpose is giving us the opportunity to bring it to life in ways we could never have imagined at the beginning.
It’s no longer only about what we can build, but what we can do with what we’ve built.
