Shelly Sun and BrightStar Care: The Importance of Family in a Business That is All About Love and Appreciation
Shelly Sun is keenly aware that family is a major driving factor in her career as CEO of Brightstar Care.. Many business professionals may make sacrifices with her family in order to grow their business, and it becomes this back and forth juggling act. Sun is not naïve to that principle. Instead of trying to work with it, she blew the doors wide open. JD Sun is her husband. He is also the co-founder of BrightStar Care.
This seemingly small little change from the traditional business format has kept family front and center in a big way. Which makes sense given BrightStar Care's focus on taking care of the elderly and building strong relationships. BrightStar has only stepped into franchising in the past few years, but they have been a small single business for quite a while. It makes sense to subjugate a family type of business with the family backing. Notoriously, Sun filed the official paperwork for the franchising while in the last few months of being pregnant with twins. After the doctor ordered her on bed rest, she set up a bed rest workstation. The job was going to get done, and the franchising was going to get filed. Not even the birth of twins would stop that from happening.
Shelly Sun has created an environment where family drives the success. Fittingly, her entire business structure is around family care. BrightStar Care is ultimately about taking care of the elderly through an innovative business structure. They fill a void in the industry. Many elder care facilities do not look at the family relationships that strongly. There’s an air of disconnect involved. Sun and her husband have stated that they’ve received voicemails when calling various facilities, and many of them were more than willing to offer a five-minute online quote. Elder care is not insurance. The type of structure leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
BrightStar franchisees use the resources of the company while pulling their own personal relationships in the community. It works like any popular franchise, except that the strong focus on family and care has made the business far more enthralling and personal.
