It cost £14. It meant everything.

Rob Dancy, owner of the Radfield Tarporley & Mid Cheshire franchise, knows how businesses work inside out, but the last nine months have taught him something about the business of care he didn’t expect.

One of his clients had kept an old tape of her daughter’s wedding for years. Her late husband was on it – his face, his voice, a recording of a whole day the family had given up on seeing again. After all, who owns a VHS player these days? It sat gathering dust on a shelf until Rob and his team had it digitised, so his client could sit down with her family and share those memories again. They watched it together, and heard his voice fill the room once more.

The cost? Fourteen pounds. You can imagine what it was worth to her.

Now, Rob is no soft touch when it comes to business. He came to it after twenty-five years advising hundreds of aspiring business owners, and dozens of franchise brands, including Radfield itself. He knew the numbers and the model better than almost anyone, and his first nine months have hit every growth milestone he set, but it’s moments like these that stick in his mind most of all.

“It’s really rewarding,” he says. “You put so much into building the business, so seeing the difference it can make to people and knowing you’ve played a part in that is a great feeling.”

This is what we mean by “Be There”

Radfield’s Be There movement underpins everything Radfield wants to achieve, and is the guiding principle for all its franchise partners. It means looking past the operational detail of the visit itself and focusing on what makes someone feel like themselves again.

Take Julie Scott, whose team over in Cheshire & Ellesmere Port has committed to building a personal moment for one client every single month. One lady had loved horses her whole life, so a care professional arranged to bring a horse round to the house for the afternoon. “She got to stroke the horse and spend time with it, and it was just lovely,” Julie says. Not everyone has a horse to bring round, of course, but it’s the instinct that counts, and sometimes it’s as simple as baking someone a cake to brighten a grey afternoon.

Jackie and Mark Gillen of Radfield Home Care Wakefield & Huddersfield tell a gentler version of the same thing. One of the people they support, widowed after a lifetime of marriage, had drawn away from the world before care arrived. Slowly, with the same familiar faces turning up week after week, her confidence and her routine came back. Jackie puts the whole philosophy in one sentence:

“We focus on the person, not the task. The task matters, but it isn’t the priority.”

So where do you come into this?

When you’re looking for the right franchise to help you build a business, the numbers definitely matter: turnover, territory, how much you need to invest etc. All essential parts of weighing up an opportunity, but all three of the franchise partners mentioned here came to Radfield for something more than that, too. Yes, they wanted a sound business they could shape their own way, and they found it – Julie’s was named National Franchise Partner of the Year at Radfield’s 2026 conference. What they also wanted was to create moments exactly like these for the people around them who need them most.

That’s the part of a franchise like this one a spreadsheet could never show you, and it might just be the part that matters most.