Some company co-founders have large offices.

Ken Sim has a cubicle.

That's just one of the differences that you'll find at Vancouver-based home-care franchisor Nurse Next Door. Other differences include a seven-minute huddle at precisely 10:55 a.m. each morning, when every head-office employee quickly reels off daily goals and challenges.

Other differences? Everybody wears a vest with the Nurse Next Door logo and the company's motto - Making Lives Better - on the back. An LCD projector, linked to a database, displays locations where a caregiver has not shown up on time. All employees have access to financial records and most senior executives have non-traditional titles. Sim, a former investment banker, and partner John DeHart, an information technology specialist, call themselves co-founders while they both act as president and CEO.

Bayne Stanley, Business Edge
Nurse Next Door co-founder Ken Sim helped launch the company after finding existing services inadequate.

And, while many small-business operators have been accused of never having enough time and not doing enough to embrace corporate social responsibility, the firm stresses work-life balance for employees and franchise partners alike. Unlike other franchisors, Sim and DeHart handle most logistics so franchisees can promote their business and focus on caregiving.

The co-founders teamed up after being introduced by their mentor, Milton Wong. The chairman of HSBC Asset Management Canada, Wong is an Order of Canada recipient who is well known for his philanthropic and corporate social responsibility. Following Wong's example, the pair have also tried to adopt the best practices of leading corporations after travelling the world to get advice.

"We actually don't use health-care companies as role-model companies, because they've done certain things and they've encountered a bunch of problems in the past," says Sim. "The way they're dealing with (the problem), they're very well intentioned, but they're not addressing it in the right way. So we've had to look outside of our industry and outside of our company to find world-class companies that are thinking differently."

1. What are your parents' backgrounds?

"My mom was an administrative assistant. Basically, she was in the typing pool at B.C. Packers (a fish-processing company). My dad still is an entrepreneur who has always owned small companies. Struggling entrepreneur, starving entrepreneur, whatever you want to call it. He came from pretty humble beginnings. He was in the import-export business. He imported rice from Asia - just little odds and ends from here and there. They were from Hong Kong. They emigrated back there in '57, trying to make a better life for their kids. They did fairly well in Hong Kong, but it wasn't the future that they wanted for their kids, so they came to Canada. They really took a step back in their personal life to see the kids succeed. I didn't realize at the time how powerful that was and how selfless that was."

2. What was your childhood dream?

"I had all the typical ones. I obviously wanted to play for the Vancouver Canucks. I wanted to be a rock star, maybe a movie star, but in hindsight I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always thought about running my own company, but never building something. Looking back, I can see those little pockets of where I was really interested in being an entrepreneur. That's why everything else I did, while I had an OK time with it and it was fun working at CIBC and KPMG, they didn't really fit. It was work. It wasn't really having fun or pursuing my passion."

3. How did you get steered toward accounting?

"That's actually a funny story. I think I would take the accounting route (again, if necessary). Life is full of opportunities or diversions or roadblocks. Oftentimes, it's yourself (making them). I thought, at the time, I wanted to be an investment banker. When I graduated, the job market wasn't that great. Frankly, it sucked. Unless you were incredibly brilliant, it was a tough time to get a job. I had articled as a CA as a summer gig when I was going to university and looked to my mentor (HSBC chairman) Milton Wong. I asked him for career advice and he said, 'Suck it up. Work as a chartered accountant, learn a ton and that will help you become an investment banker if that's really what you want to do'. So that's how I ended up as an accountant."

4. How did you get connected to Milton Wong?

"My best friend actually got hired to work at M.K. Wong and Associates. From a very early age, I've always hooked up with mentors. My friend helped me set up a meeting to bounce some ideas off him and get some advice. So that's how the relationship began, back in early '93. Milton has been a mentor ever since and, actually, he's the chairman of our company now."

5. When did you take steps to start your own business?

Ken Sim

"It would have been September of 2000, about four months before I resigned from CIBC World Markets.

It was just before my 30th birthday. I realized I had to pursue my passion and take a chance. I started to lay the foundation for leaving. Set up your advisory board. Milton was the first one on that board. I approached a bunch of people that I worked with - lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs - to act as mentors."

6. So your advisory board was not geared to starting Nurse Next Door?

"No, not at all. When I first approached the advisory board, I said, 'Look, I'm going to be leaving my job in January of 2001. I want to either buy something or build something - I don't know what yet. Can I count on you to be on my advisory board and share your thoughts?' " 7. How was the idea for Nurse Next Door formulated?

"One of my passions was having a family. I knew that with investment banking, I couldn't have that family. Go to work at six o'clock (in the morning). Come home at 12 o'clock at night. If I had kids, I would never see them wake and I would never see them go to bed. We found out right around Christmas time, when we were on vacation, that we were pregnant with our first kid. My wife knew how miserable I was at my job. She said, 'Let's just quit, anyways.' She was going to quit her job. I was going to quit my job. So we were prepared to leave Toronto, move back to Vancouver and potentially live in my mom's basement to start a company, and she was good with it. When I came back, I hooked up with Milt and he introduced me to John (DeHart), because John came back to Vancouver at a similar time. We started looking at business opportunities. John and I would act as CEO, CFO and advisers to a bunch of companies. If we liked what we saw, we'd actually buy the company. So we were busy running around. My wife came back to Vancouver and we got a phone call saying she had to go on emergency bed rest. Just like that, our world changed. I was still busy at work, so I couldn't really help there as much. I couldn't be there 24/7. So I needed to call someone - a home-care company - to help my wife. I called a couple companies and had really bad experiences ... John had a similar situation with his grandmother (who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease). I needed help for my mom as well. It all came together, we did some research and we launched Nurse Next Door in September 2001."

8. What was your vision for the company after you made this decision?

"The vision's always evolving. When we first started, we just wanted to build something really cool. I guess we always knew that we were going to franchise. We've always built this thing with the view of creating a world-class company or world-class operation so that our franchise partners could lever off of it. For us, it wasn't about the money. It's always been about building something credible. As corny as that sounds, it's really true."

9. You took about six years to open your first franchise. What did you do in the meantime?

"We were perfecting the system. You'll see a lot of franchise operations. They'll say, 'What a great idea!

We're going to franchise the business.' But they don't understand the business. We spent a lot of time learning the business. So John and I have actually pretty much done every single job you can do in a home-care company ...

We're really selective in bringing on franchise partners ... We want to grow right."

10. What did you do to support the company in the meantime?

"We raised some initial money. John and I invested a good chunk of our life savings at that time into it, and then we asked strategic investors that shared the same core values as we did to come in. Really, we were pretty much profitable within our first year. We hit break-even within our first year and we've internally funded our business to this day. We invested about 80 grand of our own money and then raised another half million bucks."

11. Now, what is your expansion strategy?

"We're going to be global at some point. We're at 21 franchise locations and two corporate locations today. We'll add another 25 (franchises in 2009). From now to December of 2009, we're expanding across Canada. We're going to really open up the (Greater Toronto Area).

"We're going to hit all the Prairie provinces. We're already in Calgary, but we're going to hit Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon and Winnipeg. There are probably about 100 locations that can support a Nurse Next Door franchise successfully. We will be looking at expanding into the United States. We are starting to work on those plans right now and we'll start to pilot it by October of 2009. It'll be the same sort of rollout that we did with Canada. We could open up 100 locations tomorrow. We'll probably open three or four to test it out. Our goal is to be at 500 locations by 2021."

12. Have you laid it all out month by month?

"Yeah. We looked out 15 years. We have a 15-year plan which is now a 12- or 13-year plan. Then we brought it back 10 years, five years, three years, two years, one year, six months, three months and one month. It's actually pretty structured."

13. What are the challenges to starting a business like yours?

"We learned everything the hard way, so we tried to do everything without necessarily talking to people and realizing that everything has been done before. We tried to reinvent and then we figured out, after about three years, that we can actually talk to people. Our current challenge from a Nurse Next Door perspective is finding the right franchise partners. We're really selective. We use a process called Top Grading. (General Electric) uses it when they're hiring their people. We use it when we're hiring as well, but also when we're looking at franchise partners. When we look at a (potential) franchise partner, we make sure that they buy into our core values, because if they don't, it doesn't matter how good they are, they won't ever make it here ... We run into challenges on almost a daily basis, but we view them as opportunities. I could give you a list of 600 challenges, but we actually follow Toyota's method of problem-solving. We actively seek out these challenges, so we have this thing called Hansei every day at 3:44 p.m. We talk about what worked well ...

or what are challenges that we encountered today? So we address them all in real time."

14. How does your client services centre work?

"We field all the calls for all of the employees system-wide and all of the clients system-wide and we do all of those logistics. If Mrs. Smith in Ottawa wants a caregiver to show up at three o'clock, they don't call the local franchise partner. They call us (at head office). We run a 24/7 immeasurably scalable (booking centre). I think we're the only health-care company in the world who's doing that right now. That's what kills every home-care company. When we started the company, John and I had the benefit of being partners, so we could help each other. Most companies would only have one person. They basically burn out because they're working 80 hours a week, fielding those calls at 11 o'clock at night or four o'clock in the morning. We deal with all of that (at head office) so that our franchise partners can work on growing their business and providing great care ... We're all about work-life balance here."

15. How do you try to achieve your own work-life balance?

"For me, it's actually really easy. When you invest in really good people and basically making them better and showing them how to do things and seeking the best practices, they do a lot of stuff for you. But, also, from the very beginning, we've always built our organization around work-life balance. When I was an investment banker, I was working 110-120 hours per week. It's not sustainable. Everyone hates it. Basically, we don't work super-late here. For me personally, my family is really important to me, so I have set time for work. I always have dinner with my family. On the weekends, I'm always there with my family."

16. How do you try to practise corporate social responsibility?

"First, we live our core values every single day. That goes to our suppliers, it goes to our customers and it goes out to our community. These core values are the laws of our company. They're non-negotiable. We'll suffer the financial losses with them. We actually fired a client that was giving us $15 million a year revenue because they were treating our people like garbage. Our people are still with us. Our clients? Not there ... We have a policy of one day per quarter, you get a paid day off to support the causes that we truly believe in, as long as it's a not-for-profit cause. We support a lot of charitable foundations ... I'm building a home in the Philippines, as an example."

17. It seems like you're straddling the line between private and public health care. What's your view on private vs. public health care?

"I can tell you we're big supporters of universal health care. That's what makes our country great, the fact that, if something happens to you, you won't be turned away because you don't have a credit card with a big limit on it. We're actually trying to help the public system by providing services that take the strain off the system and services that they don't normally provide for health-care partners. It costs between $5,000-$10,000 (per month) to keep a person in a long-term care facility. If we can keep them in their own home, guess what? The system doesn't have to fund that."

18. What is your service that is in the most demand?

"I would say caregiving. Basically, someone looking to take care of Mom while they're not there. It sounds incredibly simplistic, but Mom and Dad can usually stay at home, except for the fact that it may be too hard to do the laundry or cook for themselves. So they have to move into a nursing home. By doing that one simple task, we can keep people in their home, where they want to be, and take a lot of stress off the health-care system."

19. How do you market your company?

"A lot of it is through word of mouth. I'm a big believer in it. We measure the enthusiasm scores of our clients and our staff with a program called Net Promoter Index that's been used by Southwest Airlines, Dell and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. There's actually a whole management science behind it. We track that stuff. We know our clients are giving us a really high promoter score, which means that they are telling all of their friends to use our services ... We do some marketing. We have some Smart Cars to get the brand awareness out there, but no one is going to hire us on the fact that we have neat cars."

20. If you weren't running Nurse Next Door anymore, what would you be doing?

"I'd be running some other company. I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I really have an opportunity to play at work. This is like a game."

Nurse Next Door

* Brass: Chairman Milton Wong. Co-founders Ken Sim and John DeHart.

* Profile: Nurse Next Door is a home-care franchisor based in Vancouver. It operates two corporate locations and 21 franchise outlets in B.C., Alberta and Ontario. It is now exploring expansion into Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the rest of Canada.

* Stats: The company employs approximately 25 people at its head office and a total of 1,000 among its franchises.

* Website: www.nursenextdoor.com * HQ: 320 - 5511 West Boulevard, Vancouver, V6M 3W6 * Phone: (604) 228-4357.

Ken Sim

* Title: Co-founder, Nurse Next Door.

* Born/raised/age: Vancouver/38.

* Education: Sim graduated from the University of British Columbia with a bachelor of commerce in 1993. He also obtained his chartered accountant designation.

* Family: Married with four children aged seven, five, three and newborn.

* Career: KPMG until 1996, investment banker with CIBC World Markets in Vancouver, Toronto and London, England, from 1996 until 2000, when he joined CIBC Capital Markets as a merchant banker.

* Moonlighting: Sim sits on the Kerrisdale Business Association Board, advisory boards, Young Entrepreneurs Organization and supports several charities.

* Awards: Sim garnered a 2006 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for emerging entrepreneurs with DeHart. Nurse Next Door has also won several honours for its care quality, high employer rating and employee diversity. Sim was also ranked as one of Vancouver's Top 40 Under 40 in 2005.

* Passions: Family, living every day to the fullest, mountain bike riding, running, swimming, snowboarding.