Marcus Richards
care seakr is changing the way home care is provided across the UK by offering care professionals and vulnerable adults the freedom to choose one another on mutually agreed terms.
Tell us about yourself?
Over 25 years in health and social care. My Aunt Julie needed help in her own home but we struggled to find a properly vetted and trained carer that we could choose and would become a part of our family. I wanted to go back to being her nephew rather than her carer.
I founded care seakr in 2016 after interviewing several carers and their clients and found that the legacy care delivery model seldom fully meets the complex needs of care recipients, their families, their carers or the agencies that employ them.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
To have invested more time in understanding community power and behaviour. Today, carer engagement is a huge focus for us and uniquely drives awareness of what makes us different in the minds of our carers, their recruitment and retention.
What problem does your business solve?
The UK home care market is worth in excess of £10bn pa yet is broken because carers feel undervalued and underpaid. care seakr is a community of over 1000 properly trained and vetted care professionals across the UK that are matched with their ideal clients based on care need and personality.
Carers choose us because we give them the freedom to choose their client, the nature of care they like to provide and the fee they feel is fair to charge. The average seakr carer earned £19.27 per hour in 2021 yet their clients on average paid, 11% less than with a conventional care agency.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
We are driven to improve the lives of both carers and their clients. We seek to provide freedom to both parties to choose one another and in turn, generate consistent and sustainable cash flows.
What is your magic sauce?
What differentiates our model is that we uniquely bring independent, self employed carers together in our community app, rather than pitching them in competition using technology. We also engage deeply with our clients in a meaningful way.
Our competitors have attempted to solve the care crisis using technology to engage with both carers and clients but are burning cash as a result. Care seakr is the only UK wide introductory care company making profits.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Our growth trajectory suggests the seakr carer community growing to 5000 vetted visiting and live in carers and the business will have acquired some targeted vertical, value added service providers
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
We are only as good as our carers and have invested hugely in our carer vetting process. Identifying the ideal carer profile based on current carer quality and behaviour is an ongoing challenge that will bring quantifiable benefits to the business.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Moving into the scale up phase, we would like to hear from investors interested in helping us with our ambitious growth plans. Also carer recruitment agencies and case management companies dealing with complex patients that could benefit from access to care seakr’s dynamic carer capacity model.
