Blue Oceans Ahead: Why You Must Let Go of The Way Home Care Has Been Done

A few years ago I sat in an INSEAD (based in Paris) classroom in San Francisco, working through a strategy canvas with a room full of executives from industries that had nothing to do with home care. Airlines. Wine. Software. By the end of the week I had a certificate that says I'm a Blue Ocean Strategist. But that's not really what I walked away with.

What I walked away with was uncomfortable. In the best way.

Add that to four years sitting in Strategic Coach's Free Zone Frontier, being taught by Dan Sullivan himself, with a small group of entrepreneurs who've stopped competing for a living, and something shifted in how I see our industry. I used to think home care's biggest threat was the agency down the street underbidding us on hourly rates. I don't think that anymore. The real threat, and the real opportunity, is coming from people who never planned on competing with us in the first place.

What a Blue Ocean Actually Is

Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne coined the term almost twenty years ago, and the idea is simple even if living it isn't. A red ocean is your existing market: same services, same client base, everyone fighting over the same margins until the water turns red. A blue ocean is uncontested space you create instead of fight for. You're not beating the competition. You've made them irrelevant, because you're solving a problem nobody else is solving, for people nobody else is serving.

The tool I keep coming back to isn't complicated. Map your agency and your competitors against six or eight factors families actually care about: price, reliability, specialized training, technology, client experience. Then ask four questions. What can you eliminate that the industry assumes is necessary? What can you reduce below industry standard? What can you raise above it? And what can you create that doesn't exist yet? Most agencies never get past the first exercise, rating themselves against competitors on the same tired list. The founders who find their blue ocean go looking for the families nobody's serving at all: the ones burned by a past provider, the ones not quite ready for care but circling it, the wealthy senior who won't downgrade their lifestyle for a caregiver who looks like a stranger in scrubs.

What Free Zone Taught Me About Competing With No One

Strategic Coach has three levels. You start in the Signature Program. If you grow, you move into 10x Ambition. And if you keep growing, some entrepreneurs get invited into the Free Zone Frontier, a program built entirely around one idea: stop competing, start collaborating. Dan Sullivan puts it bluntly. Free Zone entrepreneurs don't fight over what already exists. They build Intellectual Shortcuts with other builders and create space so far ahead of the pack that competition simply doesn't follow them there yet.

I've been a Strategic Coach member for sixteen years now. I won't turn this letter into a pitch for the program, that's not the point of writing to you. But it has changed how I think, how I lead, and honestly how I show up for my own family. If you're curious what that kind of coaching looks like for a home care founder, reach out. I'm glad to make an introduction.

Here's the connection to Blue Ocean that took me a while to see. You cannot find a blue ocean while you're still thinking like a competitor. Free Zone and Blue Ocean thinking is the mindset shift.

The Disruptors We Love to Dismiss

I hear it in nearly every founder conversation I have. Some new player shows up: a subscription-based care app, a tech-enabled concierge model, a caregiver referral/staffing agency, a company that doesn't even call itself "home care." And the reaction from traditional agencies is almost always the same. That's not real care. That won't last. They don't understand this business the way we do.

Sometimes that's true. I've watched a few of these companies flame out because they mistook technology for trust. I spent the last newsletter series making that exact point: AI and automation can sharpen the caregiver experience, the referral pipeline, the back office, even leadership development, but there are rooms it cannot walk into. A daughter crying in her mother's kitchen at 2 a.m. needs a human voice, not a chatbot.

But many of these disruptors are staying. And a good number of them are making our industry better. They're expanding who gets served, not just how. They're proving families will pay for convenience and dignity packaged differently than we've packaged it for decades. Dismissing them outright is the same mistake I made once before, prioritizing the comfortable path over the right one. I'm not interested in making that mistake going forward and neither should you.

Where This Leaves Riverside

We're using this same thinking on ourselves right now. Not because our model is broken, it isn't, but because comfort is the first sign a blue ocean is closing back into a red one. We're asking the same questions I'm asking you: what are we doing purely because "that's how home care works," and what would we build if we let that assumption go?

If you're a founder wondering whether your agency has a blue ocean waiting to be found, or whether you're just rearranging deck chairs in a red one, our Founders Proven Process was built for exactly that conversation. Check it out at www.rivhc.com/founders.

P.S. If you want to talk Free Zone, Blue Ocean, or just where your market might be more open than you think, my inbox is open. Twenty-five years in, I still learn something every time I explain it to someone new.