bcbusiness.ca october 2016 BCBusiness 59 bcbusiness.ca october 2016 BCBusiness 59
W
hen Cathy Thorpe
joined Nurse Next
Door as its presi-
dent in 2014, she
already knew the
home-care pro-
vider from being a customer
ve years earlier. Her mother
was recovering from surgery,
and she was struck by the
quality of care the company
delivered to her family. Four
months later, Thorpe began
a friendship with co-founder
John DeHart, whose daugh-
ter attended preschool with
hers. Over the years, the two
parents would meet for cožee
where talk would inevitably
turn to business. Thorpe was
impressed by the company's
core values and vision for
making people's lives bet-
ter, not just more bearable;
DeHart admired Thorpe's
smarts. "She would ask me
these piercing questions
about the business," DeHart
says. "In a very short amount
of time, she would gure out
what the issues were—what
the challenges were."
So when DeHart and
fellow co-founder Ken
Sim decided in 2014 to nd
someone to lead their then-
13-year-old company through
its next phase of growth,
DeHart immediately thought
of Thorpe. Thorpe was
running a consulting busi-
ness in Germany but was
Ken Sim + Cathy Thorpe + John DeHart
Co-founder + President and CEO + Co-founder, nurse next Door
contemplating a move back
to working within a com-
pany and back to Vancouver.
DeHart and Sim knew the
hire would be pivotal for
their company. They needed
someone who would carry
on the company's culture
and values yet had the vision
and skills to execute on a
bigger scale. Thorpe won the
job after a lengthy, deliber-
ate process, and has since
delivered everything the
co-founders hoped for.
When Thorpe rst took
charge, Nurse Next Door had
85 franchises across North
America. The new president
spent her rst year visiting
80 per cent of them to learn
their businesses up close.
Unfortunately, they did
business 85 dižerent ways,
and Thorpe knew this scat-
tershot approach could not
deliver quality service in a
scalable fashion. She built a
leadership team to tighten up
processes, improve training
and provide support for all
the franchise partners. In
just over two years, Thorpe
has nearly doubled the num-
ber of franchises to 140, and
Nurse Next Door's revenues
have nearly doubled as well.
The rising tide has lifted
current franchises too, with
some franchisees reporting
a tripling of revenues in one
year. —D.H.
