After building Cardea Healthcare around a commitment to truly person-centred care, founder Karen Neil is opening the door for others to build care businesses of their own through a franchise model that keeps Cardea’s values at its heart.
Karen’s career in social care began in 2004 and has taken her through larger home care companies and specialist live-in care services, alongside personal experiences of care within her own family. Not all of those experiences were positive, and seeing this first hand gave her a clear ambition: to create an organisation with care truly at its heart.
That ambition became Cardea Healthcare. Following the success of her Berkshire office, Karen began thinking about how others could have the same opportunity to build something of their own. Developing Cardea through a franchise model offered a way to do that – giving people the chance to establish their own care businesses, build their own legacies and have something to be proud of.
There was a personal motivation too. Business ownership has allowed Karen to be more present as a parent while maintaining a rewarding career. Life, as she says, is often lived “in the fast lane”, and having the freedom to run her own business has given her the best of both worlds.
But growing Cardea in this way comes with an important responsibility. Creating opportunities for new business owners cannot mean losing the values and person-centred approach on which the organisation was founded.
That starts with choosing the right people. Franchisees joining the Cardea family are expected to share the values at the heart of its services: empathy, growth, integrity, respect, resilience and person-centred care. Continuous support, training and mentoring then help those values carry through into franchisees’ own leadership, their teams, client relationships and the way their businesses operate.
Karen’s own approach to leadership is refreshingly simple: “Passion and integrity – simply and truly.” If you believe in what you do, she says, you can lead others to create and deliver real change in their work.
That human element has become even more important to her in a world increasingly shaped by technology and AI. Being a good leader is about being “real” – acknowledging mistakes, continuing to grow and helping the people around you become the best they can be.
It is a lesson Karen has learnt through her own leadership journey. Like many people, she once looked at well-known business leaders and saw them as flawless. Look more closely, however, and their mistakes – and what they learnt from them – are part of their success.
Growth and learning therefore sit alongside Cardea’s care values. Understanding people as individuals – what motivates them, what they hope to achieve and where they want to go – can help both people and businesses thrive.
For anyone thinking about a career in care, or perhaps taking the bigger step into business ownership, Karen has one question: “If not now, then when?”
For those looking for a career offering more than financial reward, she believes care has a great deal to offer. “I don’t have a career; I have a hobby that happens to include running a business,” she says. “Who else gets to spend their days visiting the seaside, watching others develop and witnessing lifelong goals being achieved?”
And when it comes to starting a business, she encourages people to turn a familiar fear on its head. It is easy to ask, “What if it goes wrong?” But what if it goes right?
For Karen, getting it right has meant being able to take her child to school, pick her up, take her to activities and be present, while continuing to build a career and business she cares deeply about. It still requires hard work, but the rewards, she says, far outweigh it.
Her ambitions extend beyond Cardea’s growth. Karen also wants to broaden perceptions of what care can be and the people it supports. Speak to someone outside the sector, she says, and their first thought is often care for older people. While that is a crucial part of the picture, it is only one part.
Every day, care and support services work with children, adults and older people, including people with learning difficulties, mental health concerns and physical disabilities. Support can mean helping someone into employment, enabling them to contribute to their community through volunteering or developing the life skills that increase their independence.
It is this breadth of possibility that continues to excite Karen about the sector – and why she wants more people to become part of it. By developing Cardea through franchising, her aim is not simply to grow a business, but to give others the opportunity to build something of their own and make a positive difference through care.
