What does someone do after running a Radfield office? Open their own.

Even with all the information you could ask for at your fingertips, choosing to leave the career you know and make the move into running your own business can still feel like a real leap of faith.

However, if that leap means building your own version of a business you already know inside out, it becomes a very different kind of decision altogether – and one which offers you a unique insight into what makes the Radfield Home Care franchise stand out.

That’s the decision Katy Sansom has just made, and she made it knowing exactly what she was choosing. Together with Natalie Heymans, she has opened Radfield Home Care Oxford & Abingdon, and for anyone still weighing this up from where you are now, her decision is the closest thing to an insider’s view you’re likely to get.

She’d already run a Radfield office

Before she became a franchise partner herself, Katy Sansom was the Registered Care Manager at Radfield’s Wycombe office. She has spent fifteen years in care, working her way up from Care Assistant, and she’s been a CQC Registered Manager four times over.

So when Katy chose to open her own Radfield office, she wasn’t a newcomer learning the ropes and exploring the potential of the business model for the first time. She’d already watched it work, day after day, and knew exactly how much it could offer her, and those in need in her community.

Katy’s business partner, Natalie Heymans, comes at it from a different direction entirely. She brings clinical depth – experience at the high-dependency, more complex end of care – alongside the financial and business operations expertise that keeps a growing care company as well run as its care is well delivered.

Between them, they cover everything a strong home care business needs from day one: care quality and regulatory know-how from Katy, clinical and commercial strength from Natalie.

What they’re setting out to do

Their priority is straightforward: person-centred care that helps people keep living well in their own homes, and the same investment in the care professionals who make that possible. Care and careers, side by side, which is exactly what Radfield’s “Be There” promise is truly all about: be there for the people who need care, and be there for the people who provide it.

Care is demanding work, both physically and emotionally, and retaining good people is one of the biggest challenges facing the sector. Staff turnover averages around 28.3%, compared with just 4.2% at Radfield Home Care – the kind of figure only achievable when a business is built around the concept of looking after its people from the very start.

As Katy and Natalie put it themselves: “Great care and great careers go together. We’re investing in our care professionals just as much as our clients.”

So what does Katy’s decision tell you?

You might not be coming to Radfield with 15 years of care experience, or with the advantage Katy had of already running one of its offices, but you can still learn a great deal from her decision.

She had an unusually clear view of what Radfield was really like. She’d experienced the model first-hand, seen the challenges as well as the opportunities, and could have taken her experience somewhere else.

She chose Radfield.

If you’d like to learn more about Katy and Natalie, I’d be happy to pass along some questions. Likewise, if you’re interested in other Radfield franchise partners and their journeys, check out some more case studies on the Success Stories page of their website.

And if they make you start to think about your own next move, it could be time for us to have a conversation about whether the Radfield Home Care franchise is right for you.