Forty Under 40: Jonathan Fry

Jonathan Fry is excellent at following directions. That’s what you get with a franchise business model. Follow the plan, and the formula for success is proven.

Fry has done more than follow the plan. He has excelled. Launched 13 years ago, the Home Instead Senior Care franchise in Fort Smith now has a staff of about 210 and serves five counties in western Arkansas and part of eastern Oklahoma. Home Instead, based in Nebraska, provides non-medical, in-home care services and has hundreds of independently owned and operated franchises.

Through May this year, the Fort Smith franchise ranked No. 9 among 640 Home Instead franchises in North America in service hours provided. Demand has picked up because of COVID-19.

“Home is the safest place for seniors,” he said. “That’s our business model, going back to our founders. That’s never more evident than now.”

A Cabot native, Fry earned a business administration degree from the University of Arkansas in 2002. He added an MBA from Harding University in 2006. Beginning in 2001, during his senior year at the UA, Fry worked five years for veteran broker Gary Tucker at A.G Edwards & Sons in Fayetteville.

He leaped into a career change in 2007 when Home Instead approved Fry to buy a franchise. Fry’s father, a nurse practitioner for more than two decades, purchased a franchise in central Arkansas a couple of years earlier.

“I’d never thought of myself as an entrepreneur,” Fry said. “But I thought, ‘Why not?’”

Married with three children, Fry is a member of Fort Smith Rotary Club and a past board member of the Northwest Arkansas chapter of the nonprofit Alzheimer’s Association.

Fry is also part of Home Instead’s legislative affairs team at the corporate level.