The Zorzee Report | Issue #2 | Home Care Series, Part 2 of 4

Note: the franchisee and affiliate figures below are 2025 actuals, pulled from the April 8, 2026 One You Love Homecare FDD. Issues 2 through 4 in this series all run on the most recent 2025 data and the 2026 editions of each brand's filing.

In Issue 1, I told you the tailwind is real and beside the point. Twelve thousand Americans turn 65 every day. That number doesn't decide whether you make money.

What you do in your first twelve months does.

The One You Love FDD hands you something close to a controlled experiment on exactly that. One owner. One pair of territories. Two completely different businesses, separated by nothing but how hard the owner decided to work.

Call them Location 6.

They opened in March 2021 with two territories and ran it part-time, the way you run a thing that isn't yet the thing you do. For three years the numbers read like a side project that billed by the hour: $500,879 in 2022, $568,647 in 2023, then a slide to $473,570 in 2024 (Item 19, Part II). A home care business shrinking while 12,000 people a day turned 65? Weird how the tailwind everybody sells you on didn't lift a finger to help.

Then the owner stopped treating it like a hobby. In 2025, same person, same two territories, same brand, same fees, they posted $1,486,920. The FDD picked them up off the part-time table and set them down on the full-time one.

Revenue more than tripled in a single year.

Nothing about the franchise changed. The owner changed. That's the whole category in one sentence, and One You Love's data shows the mechanism more cleanly than any FDD I've read this year.

What One You Love Homecare Is

One You Love Homecare Franchising, LLC was formed in Pennsylvania on May 4, 2018, and began selling franchises in October 2019 (Item 1). Private pay, non-medical personal care: bathing, dressing, meals, transportation, companionship. No physician's order, no nursing license, no insurer to chase for ninety days. The family pays you directly.

Item 7 puts the all-in at $95,400 to $170,800, with $49,800 to $60,850 of that going to the franchisor. Each territory covers up to 50,000 people over 65. Veterans get 10% off. The royalty's 5% of gross sales, and once you stack the brand fund, the $1,000 monthly marketing minimum, and the usual technology and conference fees, the load runs 7% to 8% at a million in revenue (Item 6). That's before you've paid for a single thing that matters.

Standard for the category. Model it precisely, then stop thinking about it. The number that should keep you up at night is the next one.

The Trap: Caregiver Labor Is Climbing

Caregiver payroll as a percent of revenue. The number I hammered in Issue 1. The One You Love affiliate in Philadelphia, running since September 2016, shows it moving in real time across five years (Item 19, Part I):

2021: $3,349,736 in gross sales, 65% caregiver labor, 35% gross margin.

2022: $3,293,970, 65.3% labor, 34.7% margin.

2023: $4,533,346, 66% labor, 34% margin.

2024: $5,267,171, 67% labor, 33% margin.

2025: $4,727,632, 70% labor, 30% margin.

Watch the labor line. It climbs every single year, 65 to 70, and in 2025 revenue actually fell while the margin got wrung down to 30%. This is the quiet math of home care, the part nobody puts on a slide: caregiver wages rise faster than you can raise your bill rates. The difference comes straight out of the only line that was ever going to be yours.

Model this brand at 30% for the current reality, then stress it lower. Find the floor before you put your name on ten years.

So if the margin is tightening for everyone, how did Location 6 triple?

Same answer the whole business turns on.

The Mechanism: What You Do in Year One Decides Year Two

Home care has no walk-in traffic. Nobody wanders in off the street because they liked your sign.

Clients come from referral relationships: hospital discharge planners, primary care offices, elder care attorneys, geriatric care managers, the social worker at the assisted living place down the road. You earn those one conversation at a time, in person, over months. You're the operator who shows up, then shows up again. You do not earn them from behind a desk approving timesheets.

Here's the trap nearly everyone walks into. Year one, new owners bury themselves in the caregiver side of the business: hiring, scheduling, covering the 6 a.m. shift nobody else will take. They tell themselves that marketing can wait until operations feel smooth. Then year two shows up to a phone that doesn't ring and they can't work out why. It’s because nobody spent year one in the discharge planner's office earning the referral.

The owners who did it the other way leave fingerprints all over the data. Look at the full-time franchisees from their first full year to their second (Item 19, Part II):

Location 1 went from $518,178 to $1,106,957.

Location 2 went from $339,213 to $719,147.

Location 3 went from $230,224 to $838,272.

Roughly double, or better, in twelve months. That's what a referral network built in year one looks like the moment it switches on in year two. The phone rings off the hook because somebody spent a year making it ring.

Now look at the other side of the ledger. The part-time operators sat flat in the low-to-mid six figures, year after year. Location 7 ran $226,156, then $216,128, then $318,648, three years of basically running in place. Across the 2025 data, the full-time operators averaged about $1.4 million in gross sales while the part-timers averaged about $181,000.

Same brand. Same system. Same territory rules.

Location 6 is the proof, sitting right inside that gap. For three years they ran it part-time and the business sank. Then they went full-time, walked into the referral network, and crossed from the $181,000 world into the $1.4 million one in a single year. You get out of this franchise exactly what you put in. The FDD measures it to the dollar.

Nothing complicated about it. It's just work most people won't do.

The Partner You're Signing With

A 10-year franchise agreement isn't a purchase. It's a partnership. The franchisor wants an operator who'll make the brand look good. The operator wants a brand worth a decade of their life. When those two line up, the whole thing flourishes. So the real question under all the numbers is this: who's on the other side of the table?

For One You Love, it's David Giacobbo, and he's not a hire. He's been CEO since inception. He founded the affiliate location, Parents First Homecare, and has run it in Philadelphia since 2016. Thirty-one years in the field (Item 2). He still runs the initial training himself (Item 11), stays hands-on in operations, and sits in on the sales process with new candidates.

That matters more than an org chart lets on. The man who owns the franchise also operates its highest-volume location and sits across the table from new buyers. This isn't a brand some holding company bought at auction and is now quietly strip-mining for fees. It's run by the person who built it, and a good chunk of the growth traces straight back to that.

Two more signals point the same way. Item 3 discloses no litigation, which is rarer than buyers assume. And Item 20 shows the franchised system jumping from 14 territories at the end of 2024 to 24 by the end of 2025, a net of 10 in a single year. It did shed three units in 2024, worth a direct question or two, but the most recent year is plainly expansion. As of December 31, 2025: 16 franchisees, 24 territories, plus the affiliate.

What the Full Picture Shows

One You Love is a strong business on the way up: a founder who still runs the flagship and trains every franchisee himself, a clean litigation record, ten new territories last year, a corporate location pulling $4.7 million even with labor gnawing at 70%.

But the brand isn't what decides your outcome. You are. The risk here is the category's, not One You Love's. Caregiver labor keeps climbing, and it's merciless to the operator who won't go build their own demand. The reward goes to the one who treats year one as a campaign, not a staffing problem.

The FDD is the document. The franchisees are the story. Read one. Call the others.

Your Move.

What Opens Next

Issue 3 is the home care brand that runs caregiver payroll at 53.3% of revenue while the rest of the industry runs 65% to 75%. On a $1,000,000 base, that gap is well over $130,000 a year: the difference between a business that pays you and one that pays everyone but you.

One design decision makes that math possible.

That is the story next week.

If you are looking at home care and want a second set of eyes on the FDD before you go deeper, that is what I do. I have read every home care FDD in this series. I can tell you in 15 minutes whether the numbers support the pitch. My consulting costs you nothing. Book the Free Zorzee Clarity Call.

Tools and Next Steps

Grab the free Five Signals Franchise Audit Guide at zorzee.com: 30 signals across 5 buckets that tell you whether any franchise document holds up. Royalty Burden, Unit Economics, Litigation Risk, Validation Risk, Term and Exit Risk. Same framework Zorzee applies to every brand.

Already own a franchise, or deep into the validation process and the numbers aren’t matching what you were told? Books Brothers does a free 15-minute Cash Flow Audit. See how it works at booksbrothers.co.

Keep Reading