From the pharmaceutical industry to managing director of a US franchise…

Can you tell us about your current role?

I’m the managing director and owner of Visiting Angels, Cambridgeshire. We provide adult home care ranging from companionship right up to more complex care. It’s a franchise that came over from the US, in 2017. I joined early in 2020, just as the outbreak of Covid was happening.

I was franchise number five or six in the UK. There are now 74. I pretty much built the company in Cambridgeshire from scratch, and we now employ ~50 people at the quality end of the care spectrum, looking after private clients only.

Can you tell us about your previous role?

I spent 25 wonderful years in the pharmaceutical industry, working for three of the biggest pharmaceutical groups on the planet during that time, Roche, Novartis and AZ. I started off as a sales rep for Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, speaking to GPs and rose to the post of senior global brand director with Astra Zeneca. During that time, I progressed through senior sales, marketing, and brand roles, and lived in Switzerland for six years during my time with Novartis.

In 2014, Astra Zeneca made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to come to their new biomedical campus in Cambridgeshire. I spent six years as senior global brand director, working on new molecules and then looking after their integrated product solutions, which combine drugs with apps to maximise the drugs’ benefits.

What made you decide to change careers?

My wife also worked in the pharmaceuticals industry, that’s how we met, and throughout my career, she’s always been senior to me. We went to Basel in Switzerland together.

But in these big organisations, if you’re not moving up, you need to move out. For me to move on in my career, I really needed to move country and I was offered good jobs in places such as Japan and Boston in the US.

But my wife’s parents were ill. My father-in-law had suffered a stroke, and he was in hospital for six months. While he was there, we found out that my mother-in-law had dementia, my in-laws had been hiding this from us. It was a double whammy that they both needed home care.

My wife is an only child, and both her parents were ill so we weren’t going anywhere. That’s when I started to look for other opportunities.

How did you choose your new career path?

Visiting Angels wasn’t my first choice. I sat down and was looking at different businesses – everything from running a fish and chip shop to maybe running a McDonald’s franchise, property development and business consulting. I even thought about setting up my own microbrewery or gin distillery.

My wife said to me that the National Franchise Show was going on in Birmingham, so I decided to go to that. I sat in on presentations by McDonald’s and Subway and a number of other sessions. But I also sat in on Visiting Angels and because I’d spent a week with my parents-in-law in their house, whilst doing up their assisted living apartment that they were going to be moving into, I’d seen what their carers were doing and how they were doing it, and thought this is shockingly dreadful.

Each individual person was really lovely, because if you’re working in care you’ve got a heart of gold, but they were just set up for failure. Everything about how they were organised, managed, and arranged was just never going to deliver dignity and respect to my father-in-law who was a very proud man. God rest his soul.

I’d narrowed my choices down to care and property management. Visiting Angels just drew me in against a background of shockingly bad care that I had recently witnessed. There was no adequate provision of care for people who’ve worked all their lives and deserve a quality level of care, when they need it most. That’s not being adequately provided so I saw a gap in the market.

How did you go about building your new career?

I pretty much built the company from scratch.

At one point, there was me and one other person in an office in Huntingdon. It has been a struggle to build up the business from nothing, and starting during Covid was a big mistake in hindsight.

We’ve pretty much blazed a trail for everybody else coming after us and we’ve won awards. We’re in the top 20 out of 1,020 care companies in East of England, and the only one in Cambridgeshire. We have also won a number of Visiting Angels awards, including Angel of the Year, and an Outstanding International Award.

How hard was it to make that change?

I noticed that I’d moved from one of the richest industries on the planet to the care industry which must be one of the poorest. Neither Government nor people plan for their old age, there is no proper funding provision, so everything is done cheaply. This showed in the written documentation and training materials. All written documentation in the pharma industry was perfect but in the care sector, it’s all garbage in comparison. With some of the training materials, it was impossible to make sense of them.

For example, the one regulated activity that we have is personal care, so we are registered and inspected by the Care Quality Commission. Nowhere, to this point now, have I found any training materials, anywhere, on how to deliver personal care. It just doesn’t exist in the care sector. You learn it by osmosis. There’s no instruction on how you give a bed bath or how you assist someone in the shower.

The franchisor had put together a few bits and pieces. We had training and policies designed for a care home, not for home care. A half-finished operating manual. Basically, I’ve spent the last four years building the business for myself, making lots of mistakes, and having lots of regrets.

What transferable skills did you find you had?

Before I joined the pharma industry, I’d done a lot of business courses – BTECs, HNDs and I learned a lot about business in the pharmaceutical industry. I did an MBA (Master of Business Administration) and learned a lot about corporate finance, management accounts, and HR strategy. Marketing and digital marketing was something I became passionate about. I had this education in business.

Obviously with the pharma integrated solutions experience, we were constantly breaking new ground, so a mindset of research it yourself and fix it yourself was developed. There was no one to say, ‘here’s one we prepared earlier’. That pharma experience really helped.

What are your feelings now about your new career path?

I’ve set my mind on making it a success and I have. But there have been times when I’ve hated it, and hated the franchisor, thinking ‘You’ve sold me a dud.’ However, running your own business, you have to take responsibility, you cannot blame others, the buck really does stop with you!

But people tell me that what I’ve done is actually pretty good, my wife is very proud of me. The big difference for me in being your own boss of a home care franchise is that every day I can turn up as me. I can just be me. In the pharma industry, I would turn up at meetings and try to be the senior brand director that everybody wanted me to be – fit their culture, fit their thinking, fit their communication style.

In my last three years in the pharma industry, I was looking in the mirror and not recognising myself. I had stopped being me, lost my sense of humour, and had become some other person. Now, I turn up to work and I’m me. I sleep better at night because I’m not trying to be something I’m not.

What would you say to other people who are thinking of making a change?

Time spent on due diligence is never wasted. I should have done more research, and I should have challenged more. I was very green and naïve.

You could trust people in the pharma industry where everything was evidence and research-based, the people you work with were exceptionally well educated, and the operation was well financed. So, moving into the corporate world and running a small business, not everything is what it seems, you have to build from scratch your own support network of trusted employees and suppliers.

The other piece is setting your mind to it. I’ve realised that if you really set your mind to something, you’ll probably achieve it. It has been a struggle to get some level of success. But the success is more enjoyable because you’ve had a tough journey. It’s more worthwhile because it’s hard-earned.