Episode #209:
Todd Treml, Chief Executive Officer at Touching Hearts at Home, outlines a 30-year journey leading franchise growth across retail, B2B, B2C, and senior care. He explains franchising as a distribution model for entrepreneurs. He recounts scaling from two stores to 1,200 locations. He shares why home care work delivers dignity and compassion.
“Labor is a major challenge, so don’t put barriers in place. Be lightning fast in your response to people who want to work for you. Those companies that are prepared to recruit and retain the right way, they’re the winners in business.” – Todd Treml
Todd Treml highlights why labor is both a constraint and a growth lever. He explains how brand reputation, fast response to applicants, and purposeful work improve conversion and retention. He also shares how culture, training, and targeted technology raise productivity while keeping teams engaged and focused on client experience.
Follow host Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn
[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspective podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today we have on a really special guest, Todd Treml. Now, Todd, you are not only the CEO of a company that I’m going to let you describe because it’s really unique and very, very incredible—what you’ve accomplished, what you’re doing, and the purpose behind your company—and that purpose is something we’re going to talk a lot about today.
[00:00:32] Steve MacDonald: We’re also going to talk about something that is one of the greatest challenges, but one of the greatest competitive advantages in business. We’re going to talk about labor and how important that is, and taking care of your employees and company culture and all kinds of things.
[00:00:45] Steve MacDonald: Today, we’re going to unpack all of that, but you’ve been doing this for a little while. You’ve been in the franchise industry for 30-plus years, dealing with, you said, over 5,000 different entrepreneurs. That’s very special. And one of the things that I think was really important, that I wanted to say, is that there is a big takeaway for me right away: focusing on our employees is the most important thing that we can do.
[00:01:12] Steve MacDonald: It’s why private equity firms, VC firms, invest in the team first versus the idea. So, carrying that forward, that’s going to be a theme, focusing on the employee. But that’s easier said than done, right? Especially in high-turnover environments. So, I would love to have you spend a couple of minutes to talk a little bit more about your background, your company, and then we’ll dive right in.
[00:01:37] Todd Treml: Well, Steve, thanks for having me today, and I appreciate it. Yes, as you said, I’ve really dedicated my career to franchising, and for those that don’t follow franchising, it’s really a distribution model of goods and services that you put to the marketplace and ultimately find individuals that will invest in it, and you can support them in a business model.
[00:01:58] Todd Treml: And ultimately, franchising dominates every industry in America today, and we see it every day in our lives. I’ve spent my career in that. So, 30-plus years of working with organizations, many of those at leadership levels, helping to support franchisees, support their dreams to come true as entrepreneurs, and I’ve been in it in a variety of industries. Retail, I’ve been in B2B, B2C, food, health and wellness. Now, senior home care and experiential businesses—the list goes on and on. But I really started my career very young and spent my first 20 years at an organization called Winmark Corporation, and most people would know that company by its brands, which are Play It Again Sports, Once Upon A Child, Plato’s Closet, Style Encore, Music Go Round.
[00:02:44] Todd Treml: And that really built the foundation of my career, which was helping to build a company that went from two retail locations to 1,200 over a 20-year span, and taking it from literally not franchising, to franchising, to taking a company public, and ultimately doing over a billion at retail, and that experience taught me a lot about how to support franchise owners and work towards operational excellence, and a lot of that has to do also with what we’re going to talk about today, which is labor.
[00:03:16] Todd Treml: Today I’m the CEO of Touching Hearts at Home and couldn’t be more proud of the work that we do. We’re a franchise organization. We’re located in, and operate in, 21 different states. We have 73 locations and growing. We’re on a fairly significant growth curve right now, and what we do and what our franchisees do is very important work. We provide senior in-home care, or adult in-home care. This is a booming industry, as most people know. With the aging population, 10,000 people a day turn 65, and so it’s absolutely staggering what’s going on in the aging population and the desire to age in place.
[00:03:59] Todd Treml: And so, our franchisees, our caregivers, and our administrative staffs who are in communities do very important work, and we want to continue this momentum to support these very important people in their homes and have them age with dignity and compassion. I’m very, very proud of the work that we do, and we’re headquartered out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I’ve got a wonderful team of people here that we’re continuing to build every single day to support those franchisees and their teams.
[00:04:24] Steve MacDonald: One of the things that I want to say upfront here, because a lot of folks that are tuned into this podcast, in fact the vast majority, are in a B2B, ABM-focused go-to-market strategy. So, we’re convincing other businesses to buy our products and services, high-ticket purchases, and that’s not a quick, easy decision. It’s not like buying personal online. That happens over many, many months, many, many, many conversations.
[00:04:50] Steve MacDonald: And the people that are investing their livelihoods, maybe their career earnings, and they’re coming in and they’re saying, “I want to put this into an entrepreneurial venture with you.” That is a very considered decision. What you have to say here has tremendous value across the board for our audience. I just want to say that upfront.
[00:05:12] Steve MacDonald: But to start us off, tell us a little bit about your perspective that labor is the number one challenge across all industries. It’s also the number one competitive advantage, opportunity. Tell us your perspective on that.
[00:05:27] Todd Treml: In our particular industry, it probably goes without saying that labor is a major challenge, but this runs across all industries, and virtually every industry that I’ve been involved in—we can go from hospitality to retail to senior home care—and it’s all a challenge, and so we understand the shortfalls in the industry. So, there are a lot of things that we have to do to prioritize, to make sure that we have enough people working in our businesses to support our clients. At the end of the day, that’s the most important thing, and to support them with the highest level of service that the client deserves.
[00:06:04] Todd Treml: So, is it a competitive advantage? I think those companies that are prepared to recruit and retain the right way, and they put the effort into it, at the end of the day, they’re the winners of the business. They’re the ones that are going to get the market share.
[00:06:17] Todd Treml: And for us, it really starts with positive brand reputation. Knowing that if somebody’s going to apply to us, we work very hard on the standards and the practices of this business. Make it easy for them to apply.
[00:06:30] Todd Treml: Make it easy for those individuals to onboard with us. Don’t put barriers in place. Be very fast—lightning fast—in your response to people that want to come to work for us. And then probably the most important thing that we can provide them is purposeful work, very purpose-driven work, because I’m competing every day with Amazon, with Target, Walmart, restaurants, hospitality.
[00:06:52] Todd Treml: We’re competing with all of them, and we would love to have them come to work for us. So, we prioritize things like purpose, we prioritize things like culture, and we can go into more details about how we do all those things. But if we do those things right, and if companies do that right, they absolutely, clearly have a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
[00:07:11] Steve MacDonald: We all compete for labor to different degrees of level of professionalism and the kind of quality of individual we’re trying to bring in. But we all compete for labor, and retention is one of the most important metrics that we can track in our business. The amount of money that it takes to recruit and train and put in place somebody that is a high performer—high performers are the ones that drive our business. So, replacing high performers is very hard to do.
[00:07:40] Steve MacDonald: Tell us a little bit about your retention strategy. How do you, as a CEO, with a key metric of retention, think about that? How do you foster it? How do you create that challenge and turn it into a competitive advantage?
[00:07:54] Todd Treml: There are several tiers in our business, or what I would call almost two different businesses that are going on here. One is we have a core classic franchise company that, as you just described, is a little more focused toward what we would call B2B, which means we are looking for ideal candidates to come in and be business owners. And so, they come in and be business owners.
[00:08:16] Todd Treml: We have another business, which is obviously our business in our communities that our franchisees operate, and that is more B2C. The retention goes across all spectrums here. It could be anywhere from what we do at our corporate office here to make sure that we have the employees necessary to support franchise owners and have high performers.
[00:08:34] Todd Treml: I’m a big believer in A players. I’m a big believer in going out and doing that. Quite frankly, I personally recruit the people that I want to bring into my company. I go to them one-on-one and make sure they hear from the CEO of the company that they can be a good fit for us, and there’s a future here for them.
[00:08:49] Todd Treml: So, that’s important from my standpoint, and we continue to onboard really high-quality people. Once they’re here, it is ultimately about a lot of the same things that happen even at the consumer level or at the client level, which is you have to have the right kind of culture and the right kind of fit. You have to be very transparent in how you deal with your employees. You have to acknowledge them in what they do, and you have to give them, ultimately, if they choose, a career path. And if you do those things and you manage properly and you lead properly, the rest of the good things will follow.
[00:09:23] Todd Treml: But I can tell you, the biggest challenge that we deal with in our entire industry, most industries, is retention, really almost at sort of the very ground level, on the front lines of the business. That’s a big thing. I don’t care if you’re B2B or B2C. For us, it all starts the minute they put in an application. It starts there.
[00:09:42] Todd Treml: Now, hopefully they have seen us, and we’ve recruited properly, and they come in. But it’s warm welcomes. It’s onboarding quickly. Once they’re here, making sure the training is really solid, training them properly, and then ongoing training because this is something that they want, and we’re talking about caregivers here.
[00:10:00] Todd Treml: Regular check-ins, making sure that you’re checking in with your team, your staff. Make sure that feedback loop is going constantly, not ignoring them. It’s very purposeful. Celebrating wins, it’s what we do every single week in our corporate business and our franchisees do the same thing. It’s celebrating wins constantly. Flexible schedules, again, as a retention point, some companies only want people to work in their business, in their headquarters and what I have found is a tremendous recruitment tool and retention tool is being open to remote work and half of my team is remote right now. And I’d love for them to be here. Great. But you know what? The best talent in the world doesn’t live here and they don’t want to live here in Minneapolis. So, we make sure that we have a really good system in place for our team members that don’t work out of our headquarters. Really super important.
[00:10:52] Todd Treml: But you know, it comes down to open communication. It comes down to, I haven’t talked about pay yet, which oftentimes, as long as you’re competitive, isn’t the number one issue on everybody’s list in terms of retention. But there are those obvious things that are important, like pay and benefits and bonuses and all these things that come into play. But the big things that I just mentioned, Steve, team bonding, team building, culture, purpose-driven work, a path, training, all these things are critical to retention.
[00:11:22] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting because I do a podcast that’s in the HR and talent acquisition industry, and we had a gentleman on, the chief people officer, and for his thesis and his PhD, he did a study and he proves what we all know is right and true that if we focus on employee engagement, that translates into better retention, better experiences for our customers that then translate into more revenue for the company. He actually proved that, and we all know, we innately know that it’s true, but nobody ever that I heard of has actually, like, proven that before. And so, I love what you’re talking about here.
[00:11:57] Steve MacDonald: There’s also, what’s interesting is a whole other side that we talked about in terms of retention and AI is like the number one topic that everybody wants to talk about, right? But I’d love to hear about AI and technology and how you use it to improve retention rates as part of this equation.
[00:12:19] Todd Treml: Well, of course, everybody’s talking AI. I just got back from a conference and the whole thing was about AI and technology and innovation and for our particular industry, I think the marketplace, the technology world is chasing it right now because we’ve always been thought of and we still are very much so a human-to-human business. And so, how does technology play into it?
[00:12:38] Todd Treml: And I believe what I have taken away from all this, and we study innovation and technology and AI a lot. In fact, I put together a task force of franchise owners just to focus on this because the last thing you want to do is be behind. You can get behind very quickly with this technology, so you got to be paying attention to it all the time.
[00:12:56] Todd Treml: What I have found is technology can do two things. Number one, for us, enhance the client experience, and number two, make us more effective and productive in our day-to-day operations of the business and I kind of lean more on the second one because what we’re finding is there’s lots of AI out there, but what it really is doing, I believe, is making us more efficient, more productive. Taking away some of the mundane tasks that we deal with every single day, and not replacing key staff, but rather reallocating their skills and experience to other areas that have priorities in our business. And so, it’s not a replacement situation for us. It’s really just a reallocation, and we’re finding more and more technologies that can help us do that. There’s lots of stuff going on in every industry, but if we can become more effective with it, it helps our business tremendously.
[00:13:49] Steve MacDonald: You know, there’s not one company out there that says if we just had more time for our staff, there’s so many productive, proactive things that they can be doing, and it holds everybody back and it plays into your retention strategy too, because if we can actually get to the things that we want to get to versus the things that just have to get done, those mundane things, those typically aren’t the things where we get value out of our jobs and our positions. We get value out of moving things forward and having new ideas and innovating and putting those things into the marketplace, and talking with more of the franchisees, talking with the customers, talking with the caregivers, right? Those are the kind of things we just don’t have enough time to do usually and if AI can free that up, that is a direct impact.
[00:14:37] Todd Treml: The best companies are doing it. The best companies are figuring it out. They’re getting ahead of the curve on AI. They’re learning, educating themselves. They’re putting resources behind it to do exactly what you just said, which is retention and turnover is very intentional. It’s hard work which you put into it. You get out of it every single day. So, that I agree completely.
[00:14:55] Todd Treml: The other area that we’ve seen technology, or I’ll call it virtual technology, and this goes along with the recruitment side as well as the retention side, is we have many owners now that have engaged what we call VAs or virtual assistants, and now we are using virtual assistants, oftentimes from the Philippines or other markets, to help us to recruit and onboard and so, it’s not as much AI, but it’s virtual and it’s another area that we kind of put into the technology side of our business to help us free up people in our organization to do more highly productive and prioritized projects.
[00:15:33] Steve MacDonald: One of the reasons why I was so excited about doing this is because an unfortunate challenge in your business makes you one of the leading experts in addressing it, which is you have something like a hundred percent turnover rate, and it’s not a thing unique to your business. This is an industry thing, right? Tell us a little bit about that, because most of us are saying, “Okay, if Todd can figure this one out, they make a dent in it, then maybe there’s hope for me and my business.”
[00:15:59] Todd Treml: Yeah, high turnover rates, I don’t know if we’re alone in this from an industry standpoint. I’m sure hospitality has their statistics as well, but you have to prioritize retention, and you can’t be reactive about it. That’s really important.
[00:16:11] Todd Treml: Our particular industry right now has an average turnover rate of 79%. So, that means you’re very close to turning everybody over in your organization in a full year. That doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t help the confidence of the client. It is extremely expensive and laborious to onboard people and continue to have that churn happening.
[00:16:33] Todd Treml: Now you have lost service continuity, and you have high training expenses, and so high turnover environments are really difficult. I’m proud to say that our particular business, you know, we’re beating that norm, and we’re working really hard, with daily retention being really important. There’s no silver bullets to this. It’s really what I said earlier. It’s a lot of hard work. It’s a lot of acknowledgements. If you want to be the employer of choice in your particular community or in your business, whether it’s B2B or whatever it may be, you have to be focused on this all the time.
[00:17:04] Todd Treml: So, I would just say we focus on it, on all the things that we talked about earlier to make sure that we’re dealing with this, and we watch it. We actually measure this every single day. Every single month we’re looking at retention and how do we make it better?
[00:17:19] Steve MacDonald: This came out in a Harvard Business Review study and it said that we learn things and remember them 22 times better if they’re told to us in the form of a story. I’d love to hear a story about one of the programs for retention that you put into place and the impact that maybe had. I’m sure you have something in mind that you could share with us, right? That just kind of helps bring this to light.
[00:17:43] Todd Treml: Yeah. I love stories, and I think a lot of people can learn from this, but there are a lot of organizations or tools that you can use, and we’re not sitting up here, we’re not geniuses trying to figure out every next move.
[00:17:53] Todd Treml: Oftentimes we follow our franchisees’ leads because they’re in the business every single day, experimenting with different things, and so our best practices come from the field, so to speak. But the one I really love that we put in place is what we call a survey retention tool, and what that is, is we use a third party to do surveys to our employees in the first 30 days, in the first 60 days, and in the first 90 days.
[00:18:21] Todd Treml: And the reason why it’s so powerful is because they may say things to a third party, and this is voice to voice. This is not like email and text, and we can detect things early in the hiring process and in the onboarding process. You will generally, in our business, turn over your individuals. The most turnover happens in the first 30 days, 30–60 days, and so you want to catch those issues.
[00:18:47] Todd Treml: So, we’re surveying them. Information comes back and we’re like, “Wow, I didn’t know. Let’s go in and make sure that we know that scheduling is an issue here, or acknowledgement is an issue, or they don’t feel like they have enough training so we can jump back in, and course-correct on these things.” So, these 30, 60, 90-day surveys, super good for what we do, and that’s just one example of how it’s working, and I could probably point to many franchise owners that have reduced turnover as a result of it.
[00:19:15] Steve MacDonald: I’m wondering if there’s a secondary benefit on that. I had a woman on the podcast, she’s in a subscription-based business, and she said when we started reaching out to her subscribers and asking for their feedback or their input, they were so appreciative that we were spending the time to talk to them.
[00:19:33] Steve MacDonald: And you mentioned something in there that these are one-on-one conversations, so you’re giving a voice. You’re allowing these folks to actually voice their concerns, voice what’s going right, what’s going wrong. I’m sure there is a level of appreciation for that versus there’s just no communication or little communication. By doing this, you are prioritizing communication and giving them a voice. You think that has a big part of the impact as well?
[00:19:57] Todd Treml: I don’t have any doubt about it, and it doesn’t matter what employee structure you’re looking at. If we’re talking about caregivers or we’re talking about admin staff, or we’re talking about corporate teams, again, it’s hard work and you have to be intentional to focus on these things, but you have to listen and you have to have a culture of listening, and you have to have a culture of being able to get to these people to understand what their challenges are.
[00:20:18] Todd Treml: We do that at our corporate level from a franchise standpoint. One of our key mission and priorities here is to listen and learn, and if you’ll listen long enough, you’re going to learn something, and you can respond, and we can react and then ultimately be proactive with it. Yes, Steve, you hit it right on the head.
[00:20:34] Steve MacDonald: You also had talked about more in retention here, but lessons that you had learned from the B2C world and how they apply to B2B. And most folks on this podcast are B2B, but we all know that like B2C, expectations on customer experience and like now that we can get Amazon to deliver us things, sometimes order in the morning is here in the afternoon.
[00:20:56] Steve MacDonald: Many studies have talked about how B2C and setting priorities and expectations has directly moved over to the world of B2B. I’m interested in your retention lessons from the B2C world and how those apply to B2B.
[00:21:11] Todd Treml: Good point. Good question. The B2B segment or side of our business is really what I would call franchisor to franchisee. Very much a business-to-business, and we play a number of roles in that relationship. It’s a very interdependent relationship.
[00:21:28] Todd Treml: If you were in B2B and you were selling software, you could probably say the same thing, that you’re really interdependent with your key customers and clients. For us, in terms of, it’s a little bit different with franchising, perhaps, because when a candidate comes into our network and signs a franchise agreement, it’s a 10-year agreement. That doesn’t mean they got to stick around for 10 years. They could sell the business, they could do a bunch of things, but it’s ultimately this agreement that we live by with them, and the best franchise companies, and I hope to believe that we are, and I always act this way, is ongoing support, training. Making sure that you’re innovating, providing technology tools, programs, marketing.
[00:22:10] Todd Treml: All of these things, all of these systems that you provide them, support that you provide them, ultimately endear that franchise owner to the brand, and those are the reasons why franchise owners stay with a brand like ours, and they have no problem paying ongoing royalties or continuing fees because they’re getting great value and they’re getting great support.
[00:22:30] Todd Treml: The second thing that I would say is listening to franchise owners or listening to your client in this process is vital. Listening to their feedback and continuing to be focused on improving systems. They want to have a voice. It’s important to have a voice. This is not a top-down strategy, okay? This is giving them tools and ultimately helping them to execute sharply in their business, and that’s ultimately the order of the day.
[00:22:54] Todd Treml: And so, all of this leads to what our ultimate goal is to make them successful, profitable, and they can hit their goals. But also, when that 10-year agreement is up, they want to renew for 10 more years. So, it’s no different than getting a continuing contract in B2B. So, it leads to another 10 years.
[00:23:13] Todd Treml: That is, Steve, the most important metric of a successful franchise company, which is renewal rate. We have a renewal rate here of about 99%.
[00:23:22] Steve MacDonald: Wow.
[00:23:22] Todd Treml: So, what that means is that everybody’s re-upping for 10 more years, and that’s something that we track. It’s something very important, and I think there are similarities across all industries and B2B that look at these kinds of metrics. Ours happens to be renewals. So, that’s our line of thinking in terms of how we retain franchise owners, bring in new franchise owners. That’s what we focus on.
[00:23:47] Steve MacDonald: There are going to be people that are literally drooling right now because one of the key metrics of the business should be NRR, net retention rate, and they would love to have a 98 or whatever, 99% retention rate. I guarantee you that’s phenomenal in any business that you could do that.
[00:24:04] Steve MacDonald: I wanted to ask you something here because we’ve talked about a lot, but our human brains can only remember about two or three things at a time. So, what I wanted to ask is just if there was one thing that you wanted the audience to take away from our conversation today, what would that be?
[00:24:21] Todd Treml: There’s more than one thing. You know, honestly, what this comes down to, when it’s all said and done, Steve, is people. It’s really about people. You can’t run companies without them. We don’t have clients without caregivers. We don’t have caregivers without clients. And so, we’re all in this thing together, and so for us, we’re in an industry that’s about heart, right? We’re touching hearts at home and I’m proud of the brand that we’ve built, but you really got to focus on people, and you’ve got to continue to have purpose in your business.
[00:24:51] Todd Treml: Don’t talk about culture as just a throwaway thing that everybody’s got, because ultimately it really does matter and it does make the difference in the retention game, and retention is kind of like the new growth, ultimately, right? Because whether it’s labor or leadership, organizations that win going forward tomorrow are the ones that invest in people today. And that’s what we look at. Culture, support, trust, these are the competitive advantages that you got to focus on, and so that would be my message today.
[00:25:22] Steve MacDonald: You know, so important. I had another CEO on, and he said, “Our culture, Steve, is one of our greatest client or talent acquisition strategies,” because people want to today, they’ll ask about company culture. They’ll ask other employees.
[00:25:39] Steve MacDonald: They want to work at a place that they like to work. They’ve all worked at places where they haven’t liked to work, and they know what it’s like. So, it’s actually a part of the acquisition strategy, your culture. Not just retention, but it’s actually a part of the acquisition strategy, and we think about it that way, and we think about the cost savings, and we think about all the benefits that you talked about here today.
[00:26:02] Steve MacDonald: It just raises up the priority of how much we need to focus on it, and that’s my big takeaway from today is that if there’s one thing that I’m going to do in my business, I’m going to focus on the employee, I’m going to focus on the engagement, and if I can do that and do that really, really well, I’m going to attract the right people. I’m going to keep the right people. I’m going to keep my clients happy. I’m going to keep my business growing. So, that’s my takeaway, and I did it in 30 seconds, or maybe 20.
[00:26:27] Steve MacDonald: But I just wanted to say the mission here for the podcast is to bring perspectives from C-Suite individuals from all over the world. We talk to people all over Europe and the United States, India, Asia, and if we can all share something that we can take away from our years of experience and perspectives and insights, then it’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats. And I just wanted to say that I think you were a really important part of that tide today, and I just wanted to say thank you for coming on.
[00:27:00] Todd Treml: Well, thank you for allowing us and myself to share the message, and it’s wonderful to have formats like this. So, thank you, Steve, for everything you’ve done for me today.