Episode 102 · 2021-10-12 · 36:41 · Original in Finnish
Helppy Remade Senior Services | Richard Nordström | Negotiator 102
Originally published as “Helppy uudisti senioripalvelut | Richard Nordström | Neuvottelija 102”
Richard Nordström built a career at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and BCG until his mother fell ill and, at thirty-four, he found himself organising an elderly parent's daily life alongside his job. Helppy grew out of that, with the mission that the family carer is not left alone. The hard core of the episode is a diagnosis of what is broken in Finnish home care: carers rotate so that nobody knows who is visiting, the family member has to integrate five separate services and pay five separate invoices, and reporting is still done in a paper notebook. Nordström also opens up the business turn from the Dutch Buurtzorg neighbourhood model to a platform-like hybrid, and the funding round that brought in Icebreaker and two unicorn founders.
Core theses
- The customer of home care is the family member doing the integrating, and Finnish provision is designed as though it were the elderly person alone.
- Rotating carers destroy the one thing the service is actually delivering, which is someone who knows the person they are visiting.
- Five services and five invoices is the failure stated precisely: the coordination work has been pushed onto the family without anyone deciding to do so.
- The founder did seven hundred hours of care work himself and knew the first hundred customers personally, which is what separates this diagnosis from a consultant's.
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Summary
Richard Nordström built a career at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and BCG until his mother fell ill and, at thirty-four, he found himself organising an elderly parent’s daily life alongside his job. Helppy grew out of that, with the mission that the family carer is not left alone. The hard core of the episode is a diagnosis of what is broken in Finnish home care: carers rotate so that nobody knows who is visiting, the family member has to integrate five separate services and pay five separate invoices, and reporting is still done in a paper notebook. Nordström also opens up the business turn from the Dutch Buurtzorg neighbourhood model to a platform-like hybrid, and the funding round that brought in Icebreaker and two unicorn founders.
The customer nobody designed for
Finnish home care is organised around the person receiving it. What Nordström found, doing it himself, is that the load lands on the family member who has to assemble five providers into something resembling a life — and that person is not a customer of anything, which is why nobody has designed for them.
Rotation destroys the product
If a different carer arrives each time, the service delivers a task rather than a relationship, and the relationship was the part with value in it. Stated that way, staffing continuity is not a quality improvement but the product itself.
Seven hundred hours
The founder worked the shifts and knew the first hundred customers by name. Whatever one concludes about the company, that is a different epistemic position from the one most sector critiques are written from.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Helppy uudisti senioripalvelut | Richard Nordström | Neuvottelija 102. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.
In depth
The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.
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