Joyce Authentic Care: Registered from home, with no office and no team

1. 0:00

   Hi, and welcome back to our page. Joyce Authentic Care Limited is officially CQC registered. Joyce, congratulations, you did it. Now, before I tell you what we did together, I want to tell you what Joyce did not have when she started. She didn't have an office, she was registering from home.

2. 0:15

   She didn't have a management team, she's the director, the registered manager, and the nominated individual, all one person. And partway through the process, her application stalled with CQC. You're watching this from your kitchen table thinking, "I can't register from here, and I'm on my own. Nobody does it like this." Then I want you to watch the end, because Joyce did it exactly like this, and she passed.

3. 0:38

   Joyce Authentic Care is a domiciliary care service in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Personal care in people's own homes for older adults, adults 18 to 65, people living with dementia, and people with physical disabilities. Joyce herself has spent years on the front line of adult social care, delivering personal care, medication support, safeguarding, and end-of-life care.

4. 0:56

   She knows what good care looks like, because she's delivered it one visit at a time. And her vision for the company is clear, quality over scale. A small caseload done properly. Care workers match the people they support and paid fairly for their work. So, Joyce didn't need anyone to teach her about care.

5. 1:11

   What she needed was her application to say all of that in the way CQC expected to read it, and that's where we came in. We on-boarded Joyce and built a full application pack from the ground up. A business plan written for the Abingdon and Oxfordshire market with a full 12-month financial forecast.

6. 1:27

   A statement of purpose built on the official CQC part one to part four template, so every field CQC expects is there, in the right order, meeting schedule three of the registration regulations. Complete policy pack written for a domiciliary care service, not lifted from a care home.

7. 1:42

   Safeguarding, good governance and quality assurance, consent to care and treatment, medication management, recruitment and safer selection, infection prevention and control, compliments and complaints, equality, diversity, and inclusion, and a service user guide. A training matrix mapped to the care certificate and her four service user bands, including dementia, and the application forms themselves.

8. 2:03

   It included the new provider form, the registered manager form, and the additional form for providers of personal care. We also went through her CV line by line because CQC wants a continuous employment history that meets schedule three. And this is where a lot of applications get sent back. Now, here's the part I want to pay attention to if you're planning to work from home.

9. 2:22

   CQC needs to see that you have the legal right to run a business from your address. Joyce rents her home, so we acquired a landlord letter of authority for home-based business use and a nominated individual declaration of legal occupancy. Joyce got written permission from her landlord to run the agency from there.

10. 2:37

    The letter went into the pack, no office lease, no service office, her home with the right paperwork behind it. And if that's your situation, it's not a barrier, it's just a document. We submitted, and then for a period the application went quiet. Nothing moving, and if you've been through this, you know the feeling. And you've done everything you can, and now you're waiting on somebody else.

11. 2:55

    Joyce put it like this in her review. "When my application was at Holdsworth CQC, they reassured me and continued to chase things on my behalf, and that's what made me feel better." And this is what we do. We don't submit and disappear, we chase. We kept in contact with CQC, and we kept Joyce informed, and we kept the application alive until it moved.

12. 3:13

    Because an application that stalls is not a failed application, it's one that needs somebody paying attention to it every single week. Then came the fit person interview, and Joyce had the hardest version of it because she holds both roles. CQC assessed the registered manager and the nominated individual separately.

13. 3:28

    As the manager, you have to show day-to-day operational leadership, and as the nominated individual, you have to show strategic governance and how you hold yourself to account when there's nobody above you. Same person, two sets of questions, and you have to switch between them in the room.

14. 3:41

    I personally led Joyce's preparation, one-to-one sessions built around Joyce's own documents, her statement of purpose, her policies, her business plan, and mock interviews. We covered safeguarding, medicines, governance, complaints, duty of candour, recruitment, all of it. And always from both seats. I asked, "What would you do as a manager? And how would you assure yourself of it as a nominated individual?"

15. 4:03

    And between those sessions, Joyce was not left on her own with a pile of notes. She had our CQC interview preparation portal, and let me show you what she was working on. You log in, you choose your role, whether it's registered manager, nominated individual, or as in Joyce's case, both. Then you choose your service user bands.

16. 4:19

    Joyce's what adult age 18 to 65, 65 plus, dementia, and physical disabilities. And the portal filters everything to that. Out of more than 2,300 questions across 25 categories, you only see the questions that apply to your registration. Not a generic list, your list. You open any question and you get a model answer and practical guidance on what CQC are actually testing with it.

17. 4:41

    You can listen to the answers as audio, so you can revise on the drive to work or in the kitchen whilst the dinner is on. And it tracks your progress by category. So you can see which areas you've covered and which ones you keep putting off. So when Joyce sat down with me, she was not starting from nothing.

18. 4:55

    She'd already met the questions, the sessions turned that knowledge into answers she could say out loud. Under pressure, in her own words about her own service. That combination is the whole method. The portal for one breath. She walked into that interview prepared and she absolutely smashed it. After the interview, Joyce left us a review on Trustpilot.

19. 5:12

    I'm going to read you the whole thing, including the part where we let her down. Because if I only read you the nice bits, why would you trust any of it? She wrote, "I had a great experience with Care Sync Experts. They were very professional, caring, and dedicated. They delivered the job as per contract."

20. 5:26

    Then this, "Anytime I needed to speak to either Collins or Millicent, they were available. Except on one occasion, the day before my interview with CQC. I was booked in for the final last session by Millicent. However, she was double booked and nobody communicated that to me. Hence, I was not a happy client." That happened the day before her interview, the one day it mattered the most.

21. 5:45

    A session was double booked and nobody told her. And we're not going to explain it away. She was right to be unhappy, but this is what Joyce wrote next. However, the admin staff handled things very well, and most importantly, Millicent took ownership when things went wrong and resolved it immediately. The next day of the interview, communication from CQC was poor, and there was a mix-up.

22. 6:04

    Again, Millicent resolved the issue. To me, that is what I call a great service. And she finished, I recommend Care Sync Experts confidently to any provider or potential provider. To Colin and Millicent, through their work and dedication, I know they're valuable assets to the company. Hence, I give Care Sync Experts a big five stars all the way.

23. 6:21

    Please keep up the good work. Big, big thank you to you, Joyce, for the five stars and for the paragraph before them. Anyone can make a compliment. The paragraph in the middle is the one that makes us better. Congratulations again and welcome to the CQC register. I'm sharing Joyce's story because a lot of people rule themselves out before they even start.

24. 6:37

    No office, so I can't do it. No team, so I can't. It's just me, so I can't. Joyce registered from her home. Joyce holds both roles, and Joyce had an application stored and a preparation session that went wrong day before her interview. And Joyce Authentic Care Limited is on the CQC register.

25. 6:53

    What you need is not an office, it's the right documents, the right preparation, and people who stay on it with you when things go quiet. So, if you're sitting at home with an idea for a care company, and the thing stopping you is that you don't have an office or a team or a clue where to start with the paperwork, talk to us.

26. 7:08

    This is what we do every single day. We build a full application pack around your service and your area, your business plan, statement of purpose, policies, training plan, application forms, and the home-based evidence if you're working from home.

27. 7:20

    We stay on the application after it goes in, and we prepare you for the fit person interview one-to-one, build on your own documents with full access to the interview preparation portal you've just seen. Whether you're one person holding both roles or a full team, we have registered over 50 providers, and 94% of our clients pass first time.

28. 7:37

    We support CQC registration in England, CIW in Wales, and RQIA in Northern Ireland, and Ofsted for children's services. Book a consultation, the link is in the description along with the link to the portal or call us on 0335770887 or email us at hello@ccexperts.co.uk. Tell us where you're starting from and we'll tell you what it takes to get to where Joyce is.

29. 7:59

    Hit subscribe and share this with someone who's been telling themselves they can't do it from home and we'll see you in the next one.

Transcribed from the video's captions and lightly edited. Where the wording differs, the video is the record.