They had the values and experience – they just needed a franchise that matched

If you found Julie Scott’s story interesting, you will not want to miss this one, because where Julie came to Radfield with no background in care, Jackie and Mark Gillen arrived with decades of experience in supported services and a very clear idea of the kind of business they wanted to build.

Between them, they had managed sheltered housing for older people, run hostels and overseen services for people with enduring mental health conditions. They understood, better than most, how much depends on the quality of support people receive, and how often it falls short.

Working within other organisations, they had always come up against the limits of what they could change. The move into home care through Radfield was all about building something that operated the way they genuinely believed care should be delivered, with the freedom to make the decisions that mattered.

“We’ve always had that drive to do the right thing,” Jackie says, “but when you’re working for other organisations there are limits to what you can change. We’d both seen examples where it worked really well and others where it didn’t, and you end up thinking you’d do it differently if you had the chance.”

With the Radfield Home Care franchise, they got that chance.

A framework for people who already know what good looks like

Jackie and Mark joined Radfield in 2018, following research into the sector and a visit to the BFA National Franchise Exhibition. The family-owned model, founded and led by brother and sister Alex Green and Dr Hannah MacKechnie, felt right in terms of culture as well as structure, something which mattered enormously for two people whose careers had been shaped by values as much as systems.

What the Radfield framework gave them was not a set of ideas they had never encountered before, but a platform for applying what they already knew at a scale and with a level of support they could not have built alone.

Eight years on, Radfield Home Care Wakefield & Huddersfield delivers around 500 hours of care a week, employs 36 care professionals and seven office staff, and continues to grow steadily. A staff retention rate of 91%, against a sector average of around 70%, reflects a business that has understood from the start that without care professionals who feel genuinely valued, there is no business worth having.

An Outstanding rating from the CQC for caring, customer excellence recognition at the Yorkshire Business Awards and the 2026 Gold Award for Best Franchise at the Home Care Awards are the external confirmation of what the retention rate already suggests: that this is a business built on doing things properly, and that the people who experience it – whether as clients, families or care professionals – can tell the difference.

What this means for you

Jackie and Mark will tell you that the franchise route does not do the work for you. It gives you a foundation, access to support and a framework that genuinely works, but the quality of what you build depends on what you bring to it.

They are also open about the fact that some early decisions, particularly around hiring and structure, would be made differently with hindsight and that kind of hard-won perspective and honesty is incredibly useful if you’re considering what your life might look like as part of the Radfield franchise.

You can read their full story, alongside lots of others, here on the Radfield Home Care Franchise Success Stories Page.

If you already know what you want to build, the only question left is whether Radfield is the right place to build it.