Business Ideas in Romania

Looking for two more customers…

• Posted by Sara on March 5th, 2007 filed in Homes and housing, Services

Interview: Caminul de Batrani Orhideea

As promised earlier, I called the people who run two private nursing homes to ask them the questions you (and I) wanted to know: Batraneti Linistite and Orhideea. At Batraneti Linistite, the lady who answered the phone told me that she would have someone contact me to talk about my questions; that was 4 days ago, and I still haven’t received a call.

At Orhideea, I talked to the head physician and found out:

• The facilities are finished, but the center is not functioning yet.
• They had planned to open in October, because they had four patients already lined up. However, two of the patients changed their mind at the last moment. At this moment, they are looking for another 2 people to be at the point where it is economically feasible to start operations. (Note - the website says that their maximum capacity is 18 persons).

• Rates start at 400 Euros / month. Personally, I think this should be affordable to people who have apartments they can rent out, and certainly to people whose grown-up children are well-paid professionals or living abroad. (For example - not too long ago, I was talking with a couple living in Spain who pay 1500 RON / month to a local person to take care of the wife’s mother. They had recently found out that the elderly lady was very poorly cared for - but they had no idea what alternatives were available!)
• They have received numerous requests from people who need special assistance, but they are not equipped to take care of them, nor do they plan to move in this direction - this would drive the costs upwards by a significant factor.
• Most of the marketing effort has been done outside the country - to begin with, the owners live in Canada and have promoted it among their network. They’ve also published newspaper ads in some cities in the US and Canada.

This promising business seems to have trouble taking off. What more do you think they should be doing?