10/01/2026
(LOOOOOOOONG POST!!! But well worth the read!)
Twenty years ago this month, on October 9, 2006, Jacqueline and I were officially awarded our first Home Instead franchise. One week later, on October 16, I walked into our little office in Manassas, turned on the lights, and opened the doors for the first time. 🤩�
I was 24 years old. I had dropped out of college. We had moved to one of the most expensive areas of the country, and I had taken on an amount of debt that still makes me a little sick to think about. I remember standing in that office and realizing that the months of applying, interviewing, borrowing money, finding a space, and getting ready were over. Now we actually had to make this thing work (talk about being nervous!!! I was nervous 😬 !!!)
If you had told me that morning that I would still be here 20 years later, I would have wanted very badly to believe you. I’m not sure I could have.
The story really begins a few years before that. In 2003, Jacqueline and I moved back to Virginia after living in Dallas/Fort Worth while she earned her Master of Social Work. I needed a job so I drove around Lynchburg and the surrounding area dropping off my résumé at just about any office I thought might need someone with my skills. Doctors’ offices, dentists, insurance agencies, landscaping companies. More than 50 places. Most of them weren’t hiring, and some seemed confused about why I was even there. 😂
I kept telling people some version of, “I would make an awesome assistant or office employee if you would just give me a chance.” After weeks of that, I was exhausted and pretty discouraged. (I still feel like I would make an amazing Executive Assistant!!! I think about that often!)
Then Jacqueline ran into our friend Jenny Cox at a conference. Jenny worked for Chris and Betsy Head, who had opened a Home Instead office in Lynchburg and needed help. Jacqueline passed along my résumé. When I didn’t hear anything for a few days, I called and asked for an interview. I drove to Roanoke and was offered the job on the spot. Mic drop! 🎤
I started with Home Instead in Lynchburg in October 2003 and later moved to the Heads’ Roanoke office. I learned an incredible amount in those three years. I also realized that this was a business where you could make a living while doing something that mattered to people. Jacqueline and I had both spent time serving others through mission work, and she had worked with children in the mental health field. If we were going to own a business, we wanted it to be something we believed in.
In April 2006, we went to Africa to visit a friend and do mission work in the Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda. Near the end of the trip, we were having dinner outside at a hotel in Kigali when the conversation turned to where each of us thought we would be in five years. Jacqueline said she could see me owning a business.
I had dreamed about that since I was a kid. But hearing her say it out loud that night made me ask a more specific question: Could I actually open my own Home Instead franchise? I was 24, and I knew there were plenty of reasons someone might say no. I also knew I wouldn’t be able to let the question go until I found out.
When we got home, I talked with Debbie Witt, who had worked with me in Roanoke and had recently opened her own Home Instead franchise. She told me, “Jack, if I can do it, you can do it.” I started the application process. I researched everything I could, filled out the paperwork, and worked through the interviews. Some people encouraged us. Others thought I was too young. Jacqueline kept saying, “I believe in you and I believe in us.”
The trip to Omaha for our corporate interviews was chaotic. Our connecting flight through Minneapolis was canceled, so Jacqueline and I spent the night sleeping on a little twin size mat in an airport. After about three hours of terrible sleep, we arrived in Omaha with coffee stains on our shirts. We changed into our suits in the airport bathrooms and went straight into a long day of interviews. I sometimes wonder what Kathleen McKay thought when she met the two of us stumbling off that plane. 🧐
A few days later, Kathleen called. Home Instead wanted to offer us the Manassas franchise, provided we could come up with the $100,000 we needed to get through the first year. That was a pretty big “provided.”
I asked people I thought might be willing to lend us money. We weren’t looking for a handout. I had put together terms for paying an investor back, and I believed with everything in me that we could make the business work. But one person after another said no. Meanwhile, corporate had given us a long list of things to complete before new owner training. I worked on that list every day while wondering whether I was preparing for a business we would never be able to open.
Eventually, I had asked everyone I could think of. I remember driving home from Roanoke to Lynchburg and thinking it was over. I was already composing the email I would have to send Kathleen telling her we couldn’t move forward.
When I got home, the mailbox was stuffed with credit card offers (this was back in the day when you could get half a dozen offers in one day). I stood there looking at them and had a thought that was either very brave or completely insane: What if I applied for enough credit to piece together the money?
I knew exactly how much risk we would be taking. I thought about the possibility of having to file for bankruptcy if it didn’t work out! I thought about what that kind of financial pressure could do to our marriage. But I went inside and started making calls. Between credit cards and a home equity line of credit on a townhome we had owned for only about a year, we came up with $104,000. Four thousand dollars more than we needed. I called Kathleen back and told her we were ready.
Even after that, there was no time to breathe. For months I had been driving back and forth to Northern Virginia looking at office space, handling business licenses and bank accounts, and working through all the details that had to be in place before opening. Our friend Susan Daniel spent countless hours helping me look for a place to live and a place to work. She helped paint that first office, shop for furniture, and gave me pep talks when I needed them.
The office was in the basement of a building behind the Manassas post office. It was tiny, roughly 600 square feet. At the time, it felt like the place where our whole future was going to be decided.
Those first weeks are a blur. I was doing the client inquiries, caregiver inquiries, marketing, and staffing myself (Jacqueline had not yet moved to Northern Virginia as she gave her employer a 3 month notice of resignation). I forwarded the office phone to my cell phone, so work followed me everywhere (my… oh my… how some things never change! IYKYK!). During our second week, I placed newspaper ads looking for caregivers and received roughly 300 calls in a week. I would visit a hospital to introduce myself and come back to the car to find a PILE of voicemails. By the time I returned those calls, more had come in. Some days the phone started ringing around 5:00 in the morning and didn’t let up until close to midnight.
Jacqueline joined me in the business full time in early 2007. We worked seven days a week more often than I care to remember, sometimes arriving before the sun came up and leaving after it went down. At least we were doing it together. In the middle of building the business, we also became parents to Jonathan and Mary Anna. There was no separate, tidy chapter where we finished building a company and then started a family. It all happened together. I would NOT recommend doing it all at the same time!
I will always remember our first client. He asked me how long I had owned the office, and I told him, “A week.” He was understandably surprised. I asked him to give us a chance and promised I would do my best to find him a good caregiver. We matched him with a woman named Pat for our very first shift. His late wife had also been named Pat. The two of them built a close relationship that lasted for years, until she moved away. That was my first glimpse, as an owner, of what a thoughtful match could mean in someone’s life.
I remember another early client who had almost no furniture in her apartment. When I asked for an emergency contact, she told me she didn’t have one. Her family, including her children, had died 😭. I left that visit knowing that opening this business had been the right decision. There were people who needed more than a company to fill a shift. They needed someone to notice them and care what happened next.
The business grew faster than our little office could hold. We outgrew it within the first year of a three-year lease (ouch… that financial penalty hurt!) and moved to Church Street in Old Town Manassas. Eventually that office became so crowded that I joked it was like playing Twister just to walk through it. We moved again as the team grew. Each new space represented something we had once hoped for, along with a new set of responsibilities.
I remember celebrating our first $10,000 monthly revenue in December 2006. The following year brought milestones that once seemed impossible. By the end of 2007, we had billed more than $100,000 in a single month. I was proud, of course. I was also exhausted. There were wonderful people joining the office by then, but growth never meant the work suddenly became easy.
In 2008, only two years after that first day in the basement office, Home Instead received a Certificate of Excellence through the City of Manassas Mayor’s Small Business Awards Program. I remember what it meant to see the name of our little company on that certificate. We were still figuring out so much, but people in the community were noticing the work our team was doing.
The community work mattered to us from the beginning. Our Be a Santa to a Senior program brought local businesses and volunteers together to provide gifts for older adults who were lonely or struggling financially. Some of those seniors weren’t our clients. That wasn’t the point. They were our neighbors, and we wanted them to know they hadn’t been forgotten at Christmas. That first year we provided over 5,000 Christmas gifts to seniors in the area. It was insane!
In 2011, that program received the Prince William Chamber of Commerce’s Agnes L. Colgan Community Service Award for Health and Human Services. That plaque means a lot to me because it belongs to everyone who helped collect, wrap, organize, and deliver those gifts. The same year, the Alzheimer’s Association’s National Capital Area Chapter recognized me as an Inspiring Champion for leadership with the Prince William County Walk. I’m grateful for that recognition, but what stays with me is the number of families we met who were living with Alzheimer’s every day and needed people in their corner.
A newspaper article from 2013 brought back a memory I can still feel in my bones. During the huge snowstorm in 2010, a caregiver called from a client’s home near Haymarket. The power was out, there was about 25 inches of snow on the ground, and the client’s daughter was in Richmond. I got into one of our SUVs and headed out. Another staff member offered her home so the client would have somewhere warm to stay.
When we reached the client, we tied grocery bags around her feet to help her through the snow and down the slippery driveway. Then we had to get past a fallen tree on the road. I looked at the space underneath it, decided the SUV might fit, and told the caregiver we were going to go for it. 😳 We made it through, and the client stayed somewhere safe and warm for the next couple of days. That is one of many times our team did what was needed because a person was depending on us. I’m glad someone wrote it down, because after 20 years some of those days start to blurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr together.
Over the years, we have served thousands of older adults and their families. By our 15th anniversary, our teams had provided more than three million hours of care. In 2014, we purchased a second Home Instead franchise serving Reston, Herndon, and Leesburg. None of that was something I could picture while standing alone in the little basement office in 2006.
In 2016, Jacqueline and I received the International Franchise Association’s Franchisee of the Year Award. That one was especially hard for me to wrap my head around. Ten years earlier I had been wondering whether corporate would approve a 24-year-old college dropout and whether we could even find the money to open. Now we were being recognized as franchise owners. Around our 10th anniversary, the Virginia Senate commended our service, and Congressman Gerry Connolly sent a letter congratulating our staff on what they had done for older adults in the area. I still look at those framed pieces and think about how many people’s work they represent.
Another newspaper article, published in 2017, showed how much had changed since that first tiny office. By then, we had moved into an 8,200 square foot space on Godwin Drive. Across our two franchises, more than 200 caregivers and 20 administrative employees were caring for more than 250 clients. I had to stop for a second when I reread those numbers. Yet what Jacqueline and I talked about in that interview was our staff and our clients. We wanted employees to feel valued, and we wanted clients receiving care around the clock to keep seeing familiar faces. Growth only meant something if we could hold on to that.
The article also mentioned something that had made this work personal for our family. Jacqueline’s dad had Parkinson’s disease. We knew what it felt like to be on the other side of care, to worry about someone you love and to trust another person to help them. That experience stayed with us when families called our office. We even used our own caregivers when he would come and stay with us in Northern Virginia.
There have been seasons I would gladly relive and seasons I wouldn’t wish to repeat. We have dealt with economic downturns, changing labor rules, rising costs, difficult staffing situations, COVID, and all the complicated things that come with caring for people in their homes. We have made mistakes. We have tried things that didn’t work and changed course. This year has brought another enormous transition as we’ve moved back to the traditional Home Instead model after being on the Honor Care Model for nearly 24 months. Even after 20 years, we are still learning and still working hard to get it right.
Some of my most vivid memories have nothing to do with an office, a revenue milestone, or an award. I remember the families who sent notes saying our team had helped them get through a time when they didn’t know what else to do. I remember caregivers rearranging their lives for a client they cared about, and office staff staying with a problem until the person on the other end of the phone had an answer.
I also remember the lives of the people who have worked with us. I’ve watched their children grow up. I’ve celebrated weddings and babies with them, looked at vacation pictures, and listened to caregivers light up while telling me about a client they loved. I’ve grieved with staff members through illness, death, divorce, and losses I wish none of them had experienced. When you work beside people for years, they become part of your life.
I also think about the many people who helped us along the way. Chris and Betsy Head gave me the opportunity to learn this business. Jenny Cox connected me with them when I couldn’t find a job. Debbie Witt pushed me to believe I could open my own franchise. Susan Daniel helped make that first office real. Kathleen McKay gave a 24-year-old college dropout a chance. Friends and family encouraged us, prayed for us, and listened when we were worn out. Our office teams and Care Pros took a dream that started with two people and made it far bigger than either of us could have made it alone.
My faith has been part of this from the beginning. There were times I felt sure God was leading us and times I was asking Him what on earth He had gotten us into. I’m grateful that He met us in both kinds of moments. I’m grateful, too, that He brought people into our lives who kept believing when we had trouble believing ourselves.
At our 10-year anniversary, I said I couldn’t imagine what another 10 years would look like, but that, God willing, I hoped we would still be here. Well, here we are. I’m 44 now. The business, our family, and my life look different from what I imagined at 24. I still care just as much today about what happens when a family calls us and asks for help as I did when I first opened.
October 9 is the day we were awarded the franchise. October 16 will mark 20 years since I turned on the lights and opened the office doors. I want to spend this month remembering both moments: the incredible relief of finally getting our chance, and the realization that we now had to earn the trust people were placing in us.
To every Care Pro and office employee who has been part of these 20 years, thank you. To the families who trusted us with someone you love, thank you. To the people who helped us get started and the people who have helped us keep going, thank you.
Twenty years. I still can’t quite believe it.
Jack St.Clair, Franchise Owner
