Christian Wilse

Wilse is Norwegian and moved to the UK in 1990. He told Elite Franchise Magazine in 2018 that he had worked in sales for almost 40 years, in media and related fields, before moving into care. He was a sales manager at Viking Film in Oslo from 1988, then vice president at Kinnevik Media Ventures in London from 1990, supervising sponsorship, programme distribution and production rights for the Scandinavian broadcaster TV3. He has been a director of Ardua Communication Ltd since 1993. In the late 1990s he was a sales manager at the sports marketing agency CSI. He ran Liberty Surf's Oslo launch as chief executive in 2000 and 2001 and was chief executive of Luup from 2001 to 2003. At Meltwater he was managing director of Meltwater News from 2004 and of Meltwater Drive from 2008, and procurement director of the Meltwater Group in 2009.

Wilse told Elite Franchise Magazine that his wife brought home an in-flight magazine carrying a Seniors Helping Seniors advertisement, and that he phoned the US founder, Kiran Yocom, some months later. After a series of visits to the US he won approval to open in Britain in 2013, as the first international franchise of the brand. He chose not to offer personal care at launch, and said the UK model differed from the US one in that respect. By 2018 he said the UK business had two further franchisees, in Harrow and Pinner and across Guildford, Woking and Godalming, and was recruiting more.

The business has won several awards under his leadership. UnLtd gave it a Fast Growth Award in 2014 and selected it for the Big Venture Challenge in 2015. It won the Sustainability Award for Innovation in Social Enterprise at the Sector Success Awards in 2014 and a Canterbury Business Award for customer service in 2018. In June 2021 the Living Wage Foundation gave it the Against All Odds award for leadership on the real Living Wage in a low-paid sector. Wilse said at the time that the average age of a Seniors Helping Seniors care worker was 59.7 years. He was a director of The Canterbury Academy Trust from 2014 to 2016.