How To Start a Home Care Business

If you want to start a home care or house cleaning business, it’s easier than you think. Like any business, you’ll need to form a business entity, open a business bank account, and get basic insurance and legal support. After that point, the difference in starting a home care or house cleaning business is based on your focus.

According to Statistica, “In 2020, the annual cost of homemaker services reached an average of 53,768 U.S. dollars, whereas the cost for home health aide services was roughly 55,000 U.S. dollars.” As these services are expected to increase in demand with the aging Baby Boomer population and more people remain in the home for care, CareAcademy says that the home healthcare industry has grown already to $97 billion. That leaves plenty of room for those who want to start a niche, home care or house cleaning company.

What Types of Insurance You’ll Need as a Home Care or House Cleaning Business

For house cleaning and home care businesses, you’ll need basic liability insurance and professional liability insurance, which protect you against claims of negligence and incompetence, as well as covering injuries that might arise from work associated with your company. Unless you keep patient information beyond the basic contact info, you shouldn’t need additional insurance to cover HIPAA compliance and potential data breaches of customer personal information, but you might want to look into it with an insurance provider if you’re not sure.

Do you need a license? That depends on what kind of home care business you’re starting, and what state you’re in. Generally for a house cleaning or home care business you won’t need a license, but you can speak with a licensing consultant specializing in home care if you aren’t sure where your business is going to focus.

Marketing a Home Care or House Cleaning Business

You should always start with basic regional advertising for a home care or house cleaning business, but the key to standing out among the competition is to make it clear where you specialize. You could combine the idea of home care and house cleaning to help disabled individuals with general personal care and house care needs. Make sure you highlight your services in any ads to help clients find you. Try advertising in:

• Google Ads
• Yelp listings
• Google Map listings for local businesses
• local publications
• online industry publication

Also remember that many home care patients are being released from the hospital or a nursing home, so it doesn’t hurt to leave your card with local nursing homes or other patient care facilities and network with medical patient care providers so they can give you referrals and vice versa.

How To Run a Home Care or House Cleaning Business

Next you need a plan to draw up company policies. Create systems for how you are going to handle:

• New client onboarding
• Creating care plans or house cleaning chore lists
• Tracking employee and payroll records
• Invoicing and client billing
• Client rights and responsibilities

Once you have your plans in place, you’ll also need a CRM or software tool to manage your client contacts, and handle scheduling, invoicing, payment processing, and teams. Yottled offers these services along with a white-label website if you need one, to keep everything in one place.

Congratulations on your new home care business, and thank you for what you do to serve your clients. We wish you all the success.