Portfolio insight Specialsitter – Committed, inclusive, scalable

Specialsitter provides comprehensive, customised care for young people with disabilities or chronic diseases

Start: 2015
BONVENTURE partner since 2023
Founders: Friedrich Bartels & Sebastian Börner
Fund: BONVENTURE 4

When Friedrich Bartels was studying computer programming in Berlin, he had a part-time job providing one-to-one support to disabled children and young people. That was when he spotted a key gap in the care provided to children with disabilities in Germany: their parents had great difficulty finding care, and especially spontaneous support.

Families suffer from long waiting lists, a complicated legal system, and a general lack of information in many areas of education, care and nursing.

“What would happen is that parents would ask a carer if they could drop by on Saturday evening or stay longer on a particular day,’” recalls Sebastian Börner, who co-founded Specialsitter with Friedrich Bartels. “Back then, Friedrich and his colleagues always had to say no, even if they wanted to do the job because care work is very strictly regulated in Germany.” Families suffer from long waiting lists, a complicated legal system, and a general lack of information in many areas of education, care and nursing.

Friedrich Bartels and Sebastian Börner, who previously worked in recruitment, founded Specialsitter in 2015 to provide a unique combination of education, care, nursing and support to children and young people with disabilities. Born out of those early experiences of having to turn down requests from parents, Specialsitter now aims to fulfill every request they receive. “We thought really hard about the reasons for saying ‘No’ to such requests and couldn’t come up with any good ones,” Sebastian adds.

“What BONVENTURE looks for are founders with a clear commitment to maximum impact”

Around 3% of children and adolescents in Germany – nearly half a million individuals – live with some disability. Most are cared for by family members who are frequently unaware of or unable to access state-run support services. Specialsitter’s vision was to change that. For BONVENTURE, the huge potential impact of that vision was clear from the start. “What BONVENTURE looks for are founders with a clear commitment to maximum impact,” says Christina Smith, who manages partnerships at BONVENTURE. “Health is an area we prioritize and when we assessed the market and learnt about Specialsitter, we were very impressed. They’re not driven by profit, although they are uniquely profitable. They’re focused on the impact on the children and their families.”

Specialsitter’s services are as diverse as their vision is ambitious: To provide care to everyone in Germany who has a legal right to it and to do it in a totally new way: Helping parents navigate the legal framework and minimizing paperwork for carers in a sector that is considered bureaucratic even by German standards; building a non-hierarchical organizational structure where each care worker sets their own schedule; and letting the trusting relationship between families and carers guide their business decisions.

BONVENTURE has supported Specialsitter through its journey from a small team in Berlin to over 900 professionals in ten locations across Germany. This team of idealists, who were “generally quite suspicious of organizations with a lot of money”, needed a partner that shared their commitment and complemented this with expertise: “We wanted to be sure that this would be a success in our lifetimes, but to sustain our growth rates, we needed financial and structural help,” the founders explain. “We needed people who had built businesses before and who could help us with their expertise, because we’re not businesspeople! What BONVENTURE offered us was their experience and professionalism, which is very necessary at the moment.” That support allowed Specialsitter to continually optimize its care strategies to meet families’ changing needs.

Are growth and commitment incompatible? On the contrary, the Specialsitter team discovered. With a growing team and wider range of services, Specialsitter has also gained a broader range of talents, which helps them find solutions to problems they would otherwise have been unable to solve. “We can now pay for supervisors who monitor the quality of our work. We have teams of people whose sole job is to make sure our employees are being treated well,” the founders point out. Their ambition is to turn Specialsitter into the best employer in the care sector. “Growth and quality are not mutually exclusive. We’d argue that our growth made quality possible.”

With BONVENTURE’s support, Specialsitter has enhanced the efficiency of its work. That, the founders emphasize, is one of the best levers they have to remain profitable and keep increasing their employees’ wages. One feature of care work that causes many sleepless nights is that you only get paid if you can provide proof of the work done through a signed receipt from the child’s parent or guardian or the individual themselves. If a signature is missing, the carer has to go back and get it. And as the Specialsitter team discovered, this wastes an incredible amount of time. “The first thing you think of is that when you get a parcel from Amazon or DHL, you sign on a little machine. So why not do the same thing for care work? As everybody has a smartphone now, an app was the obvious choice. We used to write about 20 invoices a month and it took us so long to chase up the money. Now we write 2,000 invoices a month and it takes us three days to send them out.”

The Specialsitter team is optimistic about the role of ethical impact finance in improving the social sector’s reach. “We’re a team of people who’ve poured their lives and passion into a shared vision. What BONVENTURE is helping us do is to build an organization that is robust and sustainable.”