#1 Challenge for New Assisted Living Investors
Dec 17, 2025
I know starting an assisted living business feels overwhelming. I felt the same way when I began, and I want to walk you through the simple steps that helped me move forward. Want the full breakdown? Watch the video below👇
Start with your why and build a clear vision
Before you touch a house or talk to a lender, ask yourself why you want to do this. I found my why by thinking about the impact I wanted to have, the legacy for my family, and the time freedom I wanted.
When you can picture the end result, the big tasks stop feeling so scary. That clear picture can become your north star when things get hard or confusing.
💡 Write one sentence that says why you are doing this.
Make the numbers simple so you can see profit
Understanding the numbers scared me at first — P&Ls, budgets, and profit margins all felt like a foreign language. I learned to focus on the few numbers that matter: revenue per resident, operating costs, and the net profit.
If math makes you nervous, add someone to your team who can read a P&L and explain it in plain words. Knowing and understanding the numbers early in the process will help you know if a deal is worth chasing or if you should walk away.
✅ Calculate a simple monthly profit estimate before you bid on any property.
Choose a model and solve funding & licensing step by step
There is not just one way to get started. You can convert a home, rent under a lease, buy an existing facility, or build a facility from the ground up. When I was first looking into assisted living, I thought the only way to get started was to renovate a house, at least until a mentor showed me I could buy an existing facility — that changed everything.
Once you pick a model, break the big tasks into small steps: find the right property, run the numbers, talk to lenders, then start the licensing process.
Licensing and funding can feel slow and frustrating, but treating them as checklists keeps you moving forward.
✅ Pick one model and list the next three concrete steps to move that model ahead.
Quick checklist to get unstuck today
✅ Write your one-sentence why.
✅ Use the underwriting calculator to start getting familiar with the numbers.
✅ Choose the model you’ll pursue this month.
✅ Make two calls: one lender and one licensing contact.
Wrap Up
You don’t need to know everything right now. Start with your why, make the numbers simple, and pick one model to focus on. Those three moves are what helped me get out of overwhelm and into action, and they will help you too.
If you need help creating a business plan for your assisted living business, check out the Free Business Plan Checklist.
And if you’re ready to figure out your next step, join me for the next Roadmap Challenge, where I’ll walk you through how to get started.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00
In this video, we're going to be talking about what it feels like to feel overwhelmed as you are starting your assisted living business. I get it. Like, it feels overwhelming often, but I want you to know that you're not alone. Most beginners feel the same way that you do when they're looking at getting started. Hey friend, I'm Brandon Gustafson, and I help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs launch profitable, purpose-driven businesses in 12 months, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace
00:00:29
in their lives. Super excited to dive into this with you. Before we get started though, I want to remind you to hop over to the website assistedlivinginvesting.net. We got a bunch of resources over there for you. And make sure you stick around till the end of the video. I have a special invitation for you to work with me directly in our assisted living roadmap challenge. You can check out the details by going to roadmapchallenge.com or stick around till the end of the video and I'll give you a little bit of
00:00:50
an insight into what exactly that is and how I can help you down the path to launching your own assisted living business. All right, let's get into it. So, here's the truth. When you are looking at investing in assisted living, looking to get started, you often see things like, man, I don't know how to get started. You look at funding as a barrier, trying to get licensing, all the regulations, running the business, all of those things. You look at them all as one big whole thing that you just
00:01:17
can't get beyond that that you're like, how am I ever going to do this? How am I going to actually run this business, launch this business? How am I going to get started? So, I want to share my story with you a little bit so you kind of know where I'm coming from and how I got into this business and how I got started. So, it started I I actually went to grad school. This is a little bit part of my story, but I I went to grad school. I have a masters in healthcare administration. I love
00:01:39
helping people. When I was going to grad school, I didn't know what I wanted to do. All I knew was I want to be in healthcare. The impact that I get to have on people's lives is something that for me is it's so rewarding. I I love it. That's why I work in the healthcare industry, why I went into healthcare. And for those of you that are watching that are nurses, that work in healthcare, uh that work in assisted living, that just are kind of in that world, I think you get it right. You get
00:02:06
to have this incredible impact on people's lives. And for me, that's something I wanted to be a part of. But I always wanted more. I've always been interested in real estate and investing and and just kind of being entrepreneurial. It's always been something that has spoken to me and it keeps dragging me back in. And one day my daughter was sick. This was in 2019. It's actually June June 9th, 2019. And I was at home and she was sick. It was a Sunday. And we go to church and my
00:02:35
daughter who was probably 15, 18 months at the time, she were like, "Well, we can't take her to church, so we're we'll just stay home." My wife, I think she was playing the piano for something that we were doing at church. So, I stayed home with our daughter and I'm staying at home. I'm just hanging out with a 15, 18-month-old and she's sick, so she's sleeping and we're watching Daniel Tiger. You know, we're not doing much throughout the day. And I was like,
00:02:58
well, I've got, you know, I didn't read a lot on a Kindle and I didn't have a Kindle. I just had the Kindle app on my phone. I was like, heck, I got this book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, years ago. Yeah, this might be a good time to to read it, just dive in. And I dove in. I read the entire book throughout that day, and it was life-changing for me. Like I as hyperbole as as that sounds, it is true. It was something that just like hit me to my core and I was like, I have got to figure out how to get into
00:03:27
assisted living. So I started looking at other books and started listening to podcasts and just trying to figure out how am I going to get into this world of assisted living and ended up going to a Rich Dad Poor Dad event and ended up joining a group that would help me out that gave me real estate education. spent $20,000 to learn more about real estate. So, I spent, you know, $80,000 at grad school to learn about healthcare, $20,000 in real estate education. I was in this. I was deep into it. I was ready to go and ready to
00:03:58
figure out how to get started. And what I learned through that process, as I was going through it, is yeah, there's a lot here with assisted living. I didn't have the resources that you have. There was not really anybody on YouTube when I was getting started. I looked around. Gene Gino had a few videos, but they were very promotional. Not a lot of like uh they they're great. Jean's awesome. I met him before he passed away. I had some conversations with him. His daughter does great things at
00:04:26
Residential Assisted Living Academy. Serge Leescu had started YouTube, so I was following him a little bit and and reaching out to some of these people to try to figure out how to get started. Um, but I I just I I had just spent a huge chunk of money and learning these things and with my background in healthcare, I was like, I can blend that new real estate education with my background in healthcare and I can get into this. I can get started and we're going to be successful here. So, as I was doing that, I felt all the things
00:04:53
that you feel overwhelmed. I don't know where to get started. I don't know how to get the funding. I don't know where the licensing process, what's that going to look like? Who do I need to talk to? running a business like that hit me like a ton of bricks when we finally closed and started doing it. All of those things like I didn't know what I was getting into half the time. But I knew what I wanted to do. I had this vision in my head. I knew where I wanted to go. and that northstar, that guiding light
00:05:21
for me in the impact that I wanted to have in my community, the legacy I wanted to leave for my family, the time and the financial freedom I wanted to create. All of those things for me were real and helped me get to where I wanted to go. They helped me get past and get beyond all of those things. And I had a lot of mentors and coaches and and people along the way that were guiding me, making sure I was kind of staying on the right track and telling me, you know, don't go over there. that's not
00:05:48
the right way for you to go. At one point, I had thought I was going to get into fix and flip real estate to earn money to get into assisted living and ultimately decided like was told by one of my mentors, that's not what you want to do. Don't waste your time there. Figure out how to do assisted living. Get into that. That's what's going to allow you to be successful. Having that vision, having that why for where I wanted to go was something for me that was huge. Okay. The other thing
00:06:16
that I found was helpful was understanding the numbers. I I'm an analytical person. I do that professionally. I have been a data analyst since I graduated from grad school. I love working with numbers. And when it comes to real estate, when it comes to running businesses, especially upfront, you need to understand what is going to allow you to be profitable. How much profit can you make? Is a deal going to make sense? Should I pursue this deal or not? And those numbers are confusing, especially if you're not a
00:06:45
finance person. You look at a P&L or a balance sheet. You you hear me say P&L and you're like, "What the heck is that? It's profit and loss statement, by the way." You hear these things and you're like, I don't know. You fall asleep. You get anxious. You get nervous. And those types of things can really be hard to understand. But understanding numbers or getting somebody on your team that can help you understand the numbers is so important to being successful in this
00:07:09
business. You need to know if it's going to be profitable up front so you know if you can move things along. Another thing that I struggled with on my journey was what type of house should I be going through? What model should I be doing this with? And for me, I initially thought I'm going to buy a house and renovate it. That's what I had heard from anybody that I talked to that I saw on YouTube listening to podcasts. That was the only way to get started. And it wasn't until I had a conversation with
00:07:35
another mentor of mine who I followed from afar and have had a few conversations with. His name's Vern Harris. You may have heard of him. He's done stuff with the residential assisted living academy. He's pretty active on Facebook. He does a lot of investment. I had a call with him at one point and I presented to him this plan. I'm going to buy a home. I'm going to renovate it and turn it into assisted living, but I don't know how to do the funding. Uh so we were talking about that and in the
00:07:59
course of that conversation he said why don't you buy an existing facility like it sounds like that's probably the better route for you to go and I was like you can do that for me it was just like this huge light bulb moment that you can do that and what I found is there's actually four ways that you can get into this. There's the rental arbitrage route. You can buy a home and you can convert it. You can buy an existing facility or you can build something from the ground up. you can
00:08:23
choose which of those models is going to work best for you. But I didn't know that getting started and I didn't know which model was going to work best for me, how I was going to get into it. Um, the other thing for me that was really hard and confusing was funding, licensing, just like how do I navigate, how am I going to get the funds, what's that going to look like, how am I going to figure out the licensing process? I just can't do I I hear from people like you. I was just talking with somebody
00:08:48
the other day about licensing and they had been on hold with who they were thinking and hoping was going to be the licensing department for hours trying to get an answer. And that is an experience that I have personally had as well multiple times. It can be really frustrating for me. I ended up deciding I'm going to buy an existing facility. I found an opportunity. That one didn't work out cuz I did the numbers. It didn't work out. But I found another one. I worked with a broker, found an
00:09:18
opportunity, ran the numbers, it looked good. We went under contract. Now we got to figure out funding. I talked to dozens of lenders. I was told no 90% of the time. And ultimately, after partnering with my dad to get funds, we were able to find a lender that would work with us to complete the purchase of the facility. So, it was a long hard road to get there. And then from there it was finding the right department at the state that would help us through the application process to do what's called
00:09:46
a change of ownership for our license to get that in place. So that's how I went through it the first time I went through it. But I didn't know any of those things. And I woke up one day and we had to make payroll. So all of those things, it's it's hard. There's a lot of barriers there. There's a lot that goes into trying to get started. I have a method that teaches you what you need to know to help you get to where you want to be. It's called the focus framework. Um, it teaches you the five phases of
00:10:11
launching your assisted living business. I have videos that talk about this. We'll link one up above for you that's specific. But that focus framework, which is foundation first, optimal property selection, capital and funding, understanding rules and regulations and having a strategic launch is going to allow you to be successful. But all of those other things that I talked about where I went through my journey trying to figure out how to get started, you know, figuring out my why, my vision,
00:10:37
how was what I wanted to do, understanding the numbers, figuring out the model that I wanted, understanding funding and licensing and what that looks like. That's something I teach you inside the road map challenge. I mentioned it at the start of the video. I'll mention it here again at the end. But inside the roadmap challenge, I actually take you through the process so you know how to navigate all of those things and answer all of those questions for yourself. So go check it out. roadmapchallenge.com. The other thing
00:11:03
that I really help you do when it comes to this is helping you get into what I call the focus zone. It's where there's an intersection between having clarity on what you want to do and, you know, having that vision for where you want to go and exactly what it's going to look like and what it's all going to feel like when you get there. having the clarity on that and the confidence and I put this kind of in a grid in a matrix and that there's the confidence as well to just know that I know who to talk to.
00:11:29
I know how to get funding. I know which model I'm going to go after. And when those things intersect and you have confidence and you have clarity, you put yourself in what I call the focus zone. If you're not there, you're either overwhelmed, you're in an overwhelmed zone with no clarity and no confidence, you're in a research zone where you're just kind of getting a ton of clarity on things on how you can do it, but you don't have the confidence to move forward. Or you're in the hustle zone
00:11:54
where you have the confidence you're going to be successful and you don't have any clarity on how you're going to get there and and you just keep butting your head up against a wall. I want to help you get into the focus zone where you have clarity and confidence so you can move forward with this and help you be successful in launching your assisted living business. We do that in the road map challenge. I would love to have you in there. Um I just want to remind you what we've been talking about today. We
00:12:19
talked about those things that you need to figure out as you're trying to get into this. Your why, your vision. Why are you doing this? Why assisted living? What does it look like for you? I want you to get at least a base understanding of how to run the numbers so you know if this is going to be profitable or not, if you should pursue an opportunity or not. You need to know what kind of house you should be looking for, the model of home that you want to be looking at. And you also need to understand how to
00:12:43
navigate numbers to get funding, how to get the facility license. And when you have those things, you have that guidance, which we talk about in the road map challenge, you can get yourself in the focus zone and you can really accelerate your ability to launch your own assisted living business. So, go check it out. We talked about all of that in the Roadmap Challenge and I would love to have you in there. We have a challenge that's coming up soon. So, go check it out. roadmapchallenge.com. You can pay a little bit extra and get
00:13:09
into a VIP ticket as well where you get the entire week with me. This is a live training, by the way. This is not videos. It's not a webinar. It is a training and we go through all of this and you can get into the VIP session as well. and you have the entire week, an extra hour with me every single day to ask me whatever questions you have as you're trying to launch your assisted living business. I love doing this stuff. It's so much fun for me to help you and coach you and help you along
00:13:35
your path to launching your assisted living business. Are you curious about assisted living, but you're not sure how to get started? At Assisted Living Investing, I help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs launch profitable, purpose-driven businesses in 12 months, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace in their lives, helping them create that time and financial freedom that they're looking for, have the impact in the community, and create a legacy for their family. And remember, it doesn't take a
00:14:00
lot, just a little bit. Just keep going step by step by step. And I promise you, if you do, and you are consistent and persistent, you're going to be successful. Thanks for watching, and have a great
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