Extra Help Franchise | Award-Winning Home Help Business from £10,000

A Business Built Around Helping People

The Extra Help Franchise was born from a simple but powerful idea: that there is enormous, unmet demand for flexible, affordable home help across the country. Founder Claire Robinson launched the business in Plymouth in 2010, growing the first branch from scratch and developing a model that has since been replicated by franchisees across the country. Today the Extra Help Franchise is a BFA member, the winner of the BFA HSBC Lifestyle Franchise of the Year award, and covers over 3.3 million homes through its network of 33 franchise locations.

What sets Extra Help apart in the home services sector is its flexibility. Unlike many franchise models that lock franchisees into a single service, the Extra Help Franchise allows owners to offer a wide range of support services to a diverse client base. That breadth of offering means franchisees can reach more customers, generate multiple income streams, and adapt their business to meet the specific needs of their local community.

Who Extra Help Serves

Demand for the Extra Help service comes from a broad range of people, not just the elderly. Franchisees can target:

• ✓ Older residents who want to remain independent in their own homes and need regular household support
• ✓ New and expecting parents who need help with childcare, meal preparation and household tasks
• ✓ Busy professionals who want to reclaim time by outsourcing domestic chores
• ✓ Anyone going through a challenging period and needing a reliable, trusted helping hand

Services include regular domestic cleaning, deep cleans, laundry, ironing, basic gardening, shopping runs, errand running and companionship. Home helpers are self-employed, organising their own tax and National Insurance, which keeps the franchisee's administrative burden low and removes the complexity of direct employment from day one.

A Simple, Proven Business Model

The Extra Help Franchise operates as a management franchise: your role is to find clients and recruit reliable, DBS-checked home helpers to serve them. You do not do the work yourself. You match supply with demand, oversee quality and grow your client base over time. The model is deliberately straightforward, supported by a detailed Operations Manual and a step-by-step guide to building the business in your first months.

Clients are charged a flat hourly fee. The simplicity of the pricing model makes it easy for clients to understand and budget for, and easy for franchisees to manage. There is no complex job pricing or quotation process to navigate.

The Investment and What You Receive

The Extra Help Franchise fee is £10,000 plus VAT, which covers the complete start-up package. Included in this investment are:

• ✓ An exclusive postcoded territory covering 100,000 homes
• ✓ Two days of in-person initial training, with a dedicated mentor assigned from the start
• ✓ A meeting with an external business coach shortly after launch
• ✓ A detailed Operations Manual and ongoing access to head office support
• ✓ A complete branded stationery pack
• ✓ A dedicated telephone number with answering service, corporate email and an optimised web page
• ✓ Professionally-designed marketing leaflets
• ✓ Ongoing refresher training and access to regional meet-ups and the annual conference

The first three months of trading are completely free of ongoing service fees. From month four, fees are £200 plus VAT per month, rising to £250 plus VAT or 10% of turnover (whichever is greater) after the first year. This low-cost, fixed-fee structure means that as the business grows, franchisees keep an increasing proportion of what they earn. Many franchisees realistically recoup their investment within the first year.

An Experienced, Supportive Founder

Claire Robinson brings a wealth of franchising experience to the Extra Help Franchise. She has represented EWIF as South West Regional Director, served as CEO of The Approved Franchise Association and represents the BFA as a Lifestyle Ambassador. That background means franchisees are supported by someone who not only understands the operational demands of a home help business, but who also has a deep understanding of what good franchising looks like.

The Extra Help Franchise community is described consistently by its members as family-like, with franchisees actively supporting each other through social media groups, regional meetups and the annual conference.

According to Age UK, the demand for home support services continues to grow as the population ages and more older people choose to remain in their own homes for longer. That trend underpins the long-term opportunity for Extra Help franchisees across the country.

Extra Help on stage collecting the BFA HSBC Franchisor of the Year Lifestyle Award - peer-recognised quality in a competitive home-services market

Training, Mentoring and Ongoing Support

New Extra Help franchisees start with two days of intensive, in-person training at head office, covering recruitment of home helpers, client onboarding, DBS checks, marketing and day-to-day operations. Each franchisee is assigned a dedicated mentor from day one, and meets an external business coach in the early weeks of trading to help set realistic targets and a structured launch plan.

Support continues well beyond launch. Franchisees have year-round access to head office, an active community of fellow owners, regional meet-ups and an annual conference where best practice and marketing ideas are shared.

A Day in the Life of an Extra Help Franchisee

Because Extra Help is a management franchise run from home, the working week is shaped around three core activities rather than the physical delivery of cleaning or care:

Franchisees typically build the business through a mix of word-of-mouth referrals, GP surgery and care-coordinator relationships, leaflet drops in high-density older-resident areas and local Facebook groups. Many owners design their week around school hours or other commitments, which is part of why the model has been particularly popular with parents returning to work and with people looking for a second-act business in their fifties.

Founder Voice and Franchisee Community

Beyond the award itself, Extra Help has been awarded 5-Star Franchisee Satisfaction in independent benchmarking by WorkBuzz, with 100% of responding franchisees saying they were satisfied with the initial training and support, and 90% saying they would recommend Extra Help to others considering a franchise. That score sits behind the brand's reputation as a hands-on, supportive franchisor rather than a remote head office.

Industry Context: Why Demand Keeps Growing

The Extra Help opportunity sits squarely on top of one of the most durable demographic trends in the UK economy. Age UK reports that around 2 million older people in England are now living with some unmet need for social care, and local authority budgets are increasingly stretched. That gap is being filled, in large part, by private and self-funded home help.

At the same time, busy working parents, dual-income households and an ageing population of "sandwich generation" carers all create steady demand for the kind of flexible, ad-hoc support Extra Help franchisees coordinate. Because services are paid for privately rather than commissioned through a council framework, owners avoid the tendering cycles and rate caps that compress margins elsewhere in the home-care sector.

Who Suits the Extra Help Model

Extra Help franchisees come from very different backgrounds, including teaching, healthcare, retail management, HR and corporate sales. What they have in common is a genuine interest in their local community, comfort with people-facing recruitment and the discipline to run a small management business from home. No prior care or cleaning experience is required, but a clean DBS check, a willingness to network locally and a hands-on approach to the first 12 months of building a client book are essential. Owners who treat the role as a relationship business, rather than purely a transactional service, tend to grow fastest.

Interested in exploring more opportunities in this sector? Take a look at other home care franchise opportunities available on Franchise Hunt.