Growth is the ambition. Family confidence is how you achieve it.

Where are you losing families after they enquire?

You paid to make the phone ring. It rang out. A family came for a show round. No one called them back. Another asked about live-in care and got a price before anyone asked what was really important to them. You are losing out to your competitors but you don’t know why.

A care adviser talking with an older woman and her daughter in a sitting room

In a competitive care market, a lost enquiry is an expensive mistake. At £1,500 a week, a 15-month care home stay or live in care position is worth around £97,500 in potential revenue. That’s what can be at stake when a suitable enquiry slips through your process.

Care Growth Academy helps care homes grow occupancy and home care providers turn more enquiries into care.

Our unique diagnostic Blueprints, mystery shopping and competitor intelligence help you see where enquiries stall. Through sales and marketing consultancy, commercial recruitment, training and coaching, we help your team put the right changes into practice.

Talk to us or start with a free Blueprint

Prefer to talk it through? Get in touch. Or start with the free Care Home or Home Care Blueprint to see where to focus.

CARE HOME ACADEMY

Turning family confidence into sustainable occupancy.

Grow occupancy by helping more suitable enquiries progress to a visit and more families reach a confident move-in decision. Start with the Care Home Blueprint. We can then help you examine what happens on calls, during visits and after families move in, with consultancy, mystery shopping, training or coaching.

DISCOVER THE OCCUPANCY BLUEPRINT
HOME CARE ACADEMY

Turning family confidence into sustainable growth.

Turn more enquiries into hourly and live-in care by improving first conversations, assessments and follow-up. Start with the Home Care Blueprint. If your results point to a gap, we can help your team understand what is happening and improve how families are supported from first contact to the start of care.

DISCOVER THE HOME CARE BLUEPRINT

We built the Blueprint on more than 20 years of hands-on experience opening care homes, helping home care agencies by leading commercial teams and improving the customer experience.

Using our I MUST DO™ framework, you will be asked to rate 47 short statements about your home or branch. Your personalized report gives you an overall score and a score for each of the seven stages of the family journey. It shows your strongest area and what to focus on first.

Want a fuller appraisal? Book a complimentary Blueprint Review by phone to talk through your full results and decide what to tackle first.

About Care Growth Academy

Care Growth Academy grew out of the consultancy Inspiring Possibilities. Founder Sarah Devlin brings more than 20 years of senior commercial experience in the care sector, including roles at Sunrise Senior Living, Signature Senior Lifestyle and Cinnamon Care Collection.

Sarah’s consultancy work has included Barchester Healthcare and Caring Homes Group, as well as home care providers Trinity Homecare and The Good Care Group. She brings experience of the different decisions families face when visiting a care home or arranging hourly or live-in care.

Her experience includes supporting care home openings, building commercial teams and improving how providers attract and support families. Having also been an equity owner through a management buyout and subsequent sale, Sarah understands the decisions that shape both day-to-day performance and long-term business value.

How I MUST DO™ grew out of that experience

Across her leadership and consultancy work, Sarah saw the questions families were trying to answer. Will Mum feel at home here? Who’ll come to Dad’s door on Monday? The way a team responds can give a family the confidence to take the next step.

Those moments shaped I MUST DO™, our framework for looking at seven stages of the family journey, from the first enquiry to starting care and recommending it to others. Our Care Home and Home Care Blueprints help you see where your team builds that confidence and where a family might still hesitate.

If your Blueprint points to follow-up, for example, we can look at what families hear after a showround or home assessment, when they hear it and whether they know what happens next. That gives us something specific to work on together through consultancy, mystery shopping, training or coaching.

Growth is bigger than sales and marketing

Families make up their minds through the conversations they have and the care they see. An unanswered enquiry, an unclear next step or a difficult first week can undo the confidence a family has already built.

Our consultancy helps you work out where progress stalls. Mystery shopping shows what families actually experience, while competitor intelligence helps you understand what other providers offer and how they present it. We can also support recruitment for commercial roles and help teams put changes into practice through training and coaching.

Client Testimonials

This training distils 20 years of opening and filling care homes into a methodology that is practical, measurable and immediately actionable. It has helped focus our team immensely.

Mervyn Smith, Founder First Care Ireland

Results and Impact

Our experience spans opening new care homes, building commercial teams and improving how providers support families. We bring that practical experience to each assignment, whether the priority is filling a home, converting more enquiries or strengthening the experience after care begins.

How a home care provider turned more enquiries into care

A home care provider wanted to understand why some families who enquired never went on to receive care. Using the I MUST DO™ diagnostic, we looked at the whole experience, from how families first heard about the agency to how calls were answered, home visits arranged and follow-up handled.

The team did more work in the local community and put more focus on gathering reviews. It addressed gaps in phone answering, made the enquiry experience more inclusive and introduced a new CRM to keep track of enquiries. Staff sent more personalised follow-ups.

More initial enquiries progressed to home visits. The share of enquiries that led to care being put in place rose from 18% to 24%, an increase of six percentage points. The provider also increased the number of reviews on homecare.co.uk, and its overall company review score rose from 9.5 to 9.8.

One philosophy. Two specialist pathways.

What leaders expect of their teams shapes what families experience. In a care home, that might be the quality of a visit and how well a resident settles in. In home care, it might be how quickly a family gets a response and whether the first visit matches what they were promised.

When teams deliver that experience consistently, families have more reason to trust the service and recommend it. Our two Academies apply this principle to the different decisions families face when choosing a care home or arranging care at home.

CULTURE

Shapes behaviour.
BEHAVIOUR

Builds trust.
TRUST

Creates reputation.
REPUTATION

Drives growth.

We don’t teach people how to sell care. We teach teams how to earn the confidence of families.

Where is growth getting stuck?

Still looking at rooms you expected to fill? Paying for enquiries that go quiet? Or finding that good conversations with families rarely turn into care? Tell us what’s happening at your home or agency. We’ll talk it through and see where we can help.

Already completed a Blueprint? Bring your results and we’ll talk through what they mean for your team.

Prefer to talk? +44 (0)75455 83999