A little over a year ago she retooled Caring Companions, a company she had headed up in Minneapolis, as a franchise business named Touching Hearts at Home. In 2007 franchisees opened 26 offices in 10 states, and in 2008 her target is to launch 40 more franchises nationwide. “With baby boomers aging,” she says, “we all want to stay in our homes and it’s going to be services like Touching Hearts that help us do that.”
Olafson grew up in New London, a small town of about 700 people. She was the youngest of nine children, and with a 21-year span between the eldest and herself, “it was family raising family,” she recalls. She graduated from the state university at St. Cloud with a degree in education and a minor in art and then taught briefly, before deciding the economics would not be sufficient for the long term. Married out of college, she took a job with a large corporation, IDS, in Minneapolis, in the Human Resources department. She became pregnant with her first son and although the corporation was developing a position for her, felt pulled to start her own business.
“I was very naive at 25 or I might not have done it,” she says. She purchased a Merry Maids franchise, launched it out of her home, and four years later bought a second one. (Her brother is the founder of the Merry Maids corporation.) She continued to like the flexibility of being an entrepreneur, although she makes no bones about the fact that “owning your own business is hard work.”
In 1986 she had her second son and sold the franchises after nine years of ownership. She turned to her art background and passion in her next enterprise, an art gallery. After six years, she sold the gallery and went looking for another challenge.
Caring Companions, the precursor to Touching Hearts, hired her to do some consulting work, and as she grew into the business and found out more about its services and potential, she found it dovetailed with what she was experiencing as her own parents aged. Her father had passed away, and she and her siblings were juggling how to care for her mother. She eventually assumed ownership of Caring Companions and in 2007 renamed it Touching Hearts and launched the franchise business.
The company’s mission is to help individuals live independently for as long as possible. Because the services are non-medical, caregivers may be retired nurses, teachers, or mothers of school-aged children, for example. “We work a lot with clients with Alzheimers and dementia where the people are physically fit but need someone to be with them to remain safe,” says Olafson. “We do meal preparation, driving to doctors’ appointments, sitting with them, going out to lunch, staying with them at night, light housekeeping, grocery shopping, and more.”
Caregivers are the key to success, and screening, training, and matching individuals to the appropriate caregiver are essential elements of the service. “It takes special people, and the beauty is we’re attracting wonderful owners who really want to give back to others,” she says.
Olafson stresses in her company’s mission and in her philosophy the values of empathy and respectfully receiving and giving back with integrity. She holds up as her model her own mother, now 92 years old and a recipient of daily visits from a Touching Hearts caregiver.
For more information on Touching Hearts at Home, go to www.touchinghearts.com.