Why So Many Assisted Living Homes Feel Nasty, And How You Can Build a Better One
Jun 05, 2026If you have ever walked into an assisted living home and thought, “I could do this so much better,” you are not alone. Many healthcare workers, family members, and future owners see problems in these homes and wonder why they happen in the first place. The good news is that most of these problems can be avoided when you understand what causes them.
Want the full breakdown? Watch the video below👇
Overworked Staff Often Leads to Poor Experiences
One of the biggest reasons some assisted living homes feel dirty, disorganized, or unpleasant is that staff are overwhelmed. Caregiving is hard work. It takes patience, energy, and compassion every single day.
Most caregivers genuinely want to provide great care. The problem is that many are responsible for too many tasks and too many residents at once. When people are exhausted, things can fall through the cracks.
đź’ˇ Before judging a facility, remember that what you see may only be a small snapshot of a very demanding job.
âś… Support your staff with proper scheduling and manageable workloads.
Owners Who Only Focus on Money Create Bigger Problems
Not every assisted living owner starts with a heart for service. Some see assisted living as nothing more than a business opportunity.
When profit becomes the only goal, corners often get cut. Staffing levels drop. Training gets overlooked. Residents receive less attention. Over time, the culture of the home begins to suffer.
I have seen that the best assisted living homes balance great care with strong business practices. You need both.
If you are a healthcare worker, you already understand how important it is to serve people well. That passion can become a major advantage when building your own assisted living business.
âś… Build a business that puts residents first while still operating profitably.
Strong Systems Keep Small Problems From Becoming Big Ones
Many new owners underestimate how important systems are.
An assisted living home has dozens of moving parts every day. Medications need to be tracked. Rooms need to be cleaned. Laundry needs to be done. Meals need to be prepared. Families need communication.
Without clear policies and procedures, chaos starts to build.
In one of my own businesses, we dealt with constant washer and dryer breakdowns. What seemed like a small issue quickly affected staff time, laundry schedules, and daily operations. We had to create a better process to solve the problem.
That is what systems do. They help your team respond consistently when challenges come up.
âś… Create systems for cleaning, medication management, staffing, and communication from the beginning.
Profit and Purpose Must Work Together
Many people enter assisted living because they care deeply about others. That is a great reason to get started.
However, there is a mistake that some owners make. They focus so much on helping people that they ignore the financial side of the business.
The reality is simple. If your business is not profitable, you cannot continue serving residents.
You need enough revenue to pay staff, maintain the property, buy supplies, and provide quality care. When finances become unstable, stress increases throughout the entire organization.
Residents feel it. Families notice it. Staff experience it.
đź’ˇ Making money and helping people are not opposites. A healthy business allows you to serve more people for a longer period of time.
âś… Know your numbers and make decisions that support both care and sustainability.
Great Assisted Living Homes Are Built Intentionally
The best homes do not happen by accident.
They are created by owners who understand the market, know their numbers, build strong systems, and stay focused on their mission. They make intentional decisions that support residents, staff, and families.
If you want to build a home that families trust and residents enjoy living in, you need a solid foundation before you open your doors.
That means creating a business plan, understanding occupancy goals, preparing for challenges, and building systems that support growth.
I have seen firsthand that owners who take time to build that foundation are much more likely to create successful, thriving assisted living businesses.
Wrap Up
Many assisted living homes struggle because of overwhelmed staff, poor leadership, weak systems, and an unhealthy balance between profit and purpose. The encouraging part is that you can avoid these problems when you build your business intentionally.
If you want to create an assisted living home that families love and residents thrive in, start by focusing on the foundation. The stronger your foundation, the better your results will be.
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
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Have you ever looked at an assisted living business and you thought to yourself, "I could do this so much better than they could. This place is not clean. Their caregivers are maybe subpar. Their food, the interactions, the residents, they just look unhappy. It's not fun. Maybe you've even had a loved one be in one of these types of facilities and you're like, I could do this better." In this video, why assisted living facilities are so nasty. We're going to talk about exactly why
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that happens and how you can avoid that as you are looking to start your own assisted living business. So, if you're interested in learning about that, make sure you stick around for today's video. Hey friend, my name is Brandon Gustafson. I help healthcare workers start their own assisted living business so they're not stuck trying to figure things out and know exactly what they should do next. So, let's talk about it. Why are so many assisted living facilities so nasty? Why do they have just this bad
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reputation? And why is that? Uh, specifically, and I really want to hone in on helping you understand that you don't have to have a facility like that, cuz I know you don't want to. That's why you're watching this video. You have had some kind of an experience. I would love for you to share with me, by the way, what your experience in assisted living has been. Type it down below. Like, is it a loved one that you have been trying to get into assisted living? You look around, you're like, "These are
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horrible. I would never let my mom, my dad, my grandpa live in a place like this." or is it a loved one that had an experience already um and they maybe passed away or something like that and you're like I could do this better or are you just a healthcare worker that you go around to these different facilities and you're like man I could do this so much better than these people why is it like this what we're going to talk about in today's video number one the first thing that you need to
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understand is a lot of these staff members in assisted living and for my healthcare workers you get this right a lot of them are overworked and When you're overworked, that leads to poor care and a bad experience. Now, one thing that I also want to point out is this is just a low level of care. And so, you do get a lot of people that they're trying it out to see if it's a good fit, if they like it or not. It's also very um hard on you physically and mentally sometimes to be working with
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this population. It is a special person that can be a caregiver. And if that's you, thank you so much because you do incredible work and you probably don't hear it enough. You are amazing. So, keep up the incredible work that you're doing because it is so much needed in in this industry. And I'm not blaming you for being the ones that make this a nasty place or anything like that. Um, but I do want to acknowledge that a lot of times people in these positions are overworked and they feel overwhelmed and
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they have a lot of care they have to provide and it's so hard to be completely turned on and attentive to everybody's needs to the needs of, you know, six to 20 people or however many are in the home that you're just like it's mentally taxing on you and that can be really hard and sometimes that is where things fall through the cracks. And so from a person on the outside or somebody that wants to own an assisted living facility or get started and you look at this and you're like, why would
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they do that? That's a horrible decision. I want you to take a second just have a little bit of grace for these people because they do incredible work and they're just overwhelmed. most of the time that we have had staff in the past that in our businesses I've owned businesses since 2020 and we've had staff in the past that um maybe weren't like super malicious and I would say definitely not uh intentionally being malicious but maybe not making the best decisions or not caring so much that they were making
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good decisions for the residents and that's something that you want to avoid but it is very very few and far between when that happens I would say 95% of the staff in your facility, they want to do a good job for your residents. They're just exhausted and they're burnt out and they they have a lot of responsibility. So, you have to have a little bit of grace for them. But that is the first thing for why you walk into a facility sometimes you're like, "Man, this is just why is it not clean? Why is the
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staff member over there sitting down and not helping the residents?" It's because you've come in for one little tiny snapshot of that and you're not seeing them the entire time. Okay? They're overworked and that it can be hard. There's high turnover. It's a bit of a high stress environment. So, you just need to acknowledge that. The second thing is ownership who don't have like a real heart in this. They're in this for the money. They're in this because they see it as,
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you know, a good revenue generator. And it can be for sure. But when you have somebody that is doing this just for the money and as assisted living becomes more popular and it becomes more prevalent, as the population ages and more people need access to this type of care, what you're going to see is more people that are not passionate about providing adequate care to residents are going to get into this business. And what that means for you as a person that wants to avoid that is now is a great
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time for you to do it because you can really set yourself apart as you're trying to start your own business and set yourself apart in a way that makes you know people are like, "Okay, I know I can go to Sally's place or Bob's place or whoever, you know, put put your name in there, your your own assisted living business. put that one in there because I know that they care about me, about my loved ones, about my family, about the community. And a lot of you who are healthcare workers, that's why you're in
00:05:30 - 00:06:29
healthcare, right? That's the reason why you do what you do, because you love serving people. And I was talking with a nurse um we just did a challenge together um a week ago as of the recording of this video and I was talking to her about uh how you can raise prices and the amount of value that we have. And if you're interested in a video on how to raise your prices, we're going to link that up above for you about how to charge premium prices in assisted living. But what I want you
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to recognize here is you're providing something that people want and need, like really really need. And people will pay a premium for that because of the amount of service that you're providing. And it can be really hard for you as a caregiver to be like I just I want to care for people. I don't care about the money. And I'm going to also propose to you that you do care about the money because there's no way that you would be, you know, trading 8 to 12 to 16 hours per day of your life for nothing.
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You're you're doing it to get paid. So, you do care about money in some capacity. I'm like, I submit to you that you do. All right? So, just recognize that. And I also want you to recognize that that's okay. All right? It's okay to get paid for the service that you provide because you are providing a very, very valuable and much needed service. and that is totally fine. But I also know that you have the heart of a caregiver. You understand the needs of your residents and you want to help them
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out. And there are people unfortunately in this industry that they don't care about that and they are all only about the money and they see these businesses as dollar signs only, not as people, not as individuals. They are focused solely on the income. And that mindset of those people at the top trickles down below and they don't care. They cut corners. They hire less staff. It creates more burnout. They do those types of things and it puts them in a bad situation. That is another big reason why some of
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these facilities just feel nasty inside and just feel like somewhere where you wouldn't want to have your loved one. So, I just want to acknowledge that one as well. The third one is this is actually a big one and this is something that you do from the beginning when you're building your foundation and trying to on how you're going to get started. This is something that a lot of people miss. You need to build in systems. Okay, systems are like your policies and your procedures. And for a lot of
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people, that's something that is like, "Oh man, I don't want to have to write dozens, hundreds of pages of policies and procedures because it's hard." I know. I've been there. I've written a policies and procedures manual that was like three, 400 pages. Like, I know how hard it is. It is not easy. It will take you a ton of time. But when you lack those systems on how you're going to follow up with people or get things done, cleaning schedules, um med pass, uh tracking, making sure that rooms are
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cleaned and laundry is done and things are put away. And those things all have to happen. Uh this is a part of running the business. You have to do all of these things. You're like running a mini city here inside of your assisted living facility. And if you don't do those things, things will build up on themselves. They stack up. And that creates a major problems very very quickly. Could lead to, for example, in one of our facilities, we used just a normal residential washer and dryer. Okay? I recommend you do not do that, by
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the way. Get a commercial one. Pay a little bit extra. Get a commercial one. Anyways, what we found is it broke. It kept breaking the drum inside the washer and or dryer. Like both of them were con consistently broken. We had bought them at Lowe's. we had paid for the extra, you know, amount to to have them do the service. It got to the point where they're like coming out enough. They're like, "Okay, I know you paid for it, but there is a limit to the amount of work that we can do on this thing. You either
00:09:20 - 00:10:09
need to buy a new one cuz or or something else because we're just not coming out anymore. Sorry." Like, that's how many times we had fixed this thing up. It was dozens of times. Like, it was just an insane amount. Okay. Now, when we did that, it was like, "Oh crap, now we have 16 residents in this home. We got to do laundry for it. How are we going to do that?" uh we don't have the money to like just go in and buy, you know, drop a few thousand dollar on really good units right now. Uh we need
00:09:45 - 00:10:32
to save up. We probably can't do that until we get to the end of the month so we can get our monthly rent payments in and then we can do it. Um or do we want to do it right now? Like we're we're just like bouncing these ideas off of each other trying to figure it out. Ultimately, we decided we're going to wait a little bit and that led to needing to use a laundromat. And that led to needing to go there and like have somebody spend time there and wash the clothes and that took away, you know,
00:10:08 - 00:10:51
paying staff extra for it. And then we found that, hey, we could actually pay somebody to come and get it. They'll take it, they'll wash it, they'll fold it, they'll bring it back. Ah, this works. Well, do we want to do that or do we want to buy a new washer and dryer? Like, what's going to work best for us? So, these are the types of things that you have to figure out. just like a little microcosm of what happens inside of an assisted living facility. And if you don't think through those things and
00:10:30 - 00:11:27
you don't have really good systems and processes in place and you don't adjust to things when they come up on the fly cuz they will like running this business is not easy. It's very difficult. But when you don't have systems in place and you don't use systems thinking to improve the way that you are running your business, your staff, your residents, the families of each of these, they will fill it. And so you have to have those things in place. That is what's going to help you really get
00:10:58 - 00:12:03
out of a rut. And when you don't have those things in place, it trickles down. Staff get overwhelmed. The the home isn't clean. It feels nasty, right? That can happen very quickly and very easily if you don't have really good systems and processes in place. So, if you're if you're not that type of person, you might need to hire somebody to make sure you have something that is very systemoriented and going to allow you to run your business efficiently. Because as much as you have a good heart with this, you're
00:11:31 - 00:12:37
going to quickly find out that it's hard to run this business and you need to have these systems and processes in place if you're going to be successful. Okay. The fourth thing that I want to point out to you, and this is another big one, is profit versus purpose is a balance that really matters. So, we talked about it just a couple minutes ago. There are people that get into this just for the money. And those people are not prioritizing the purpose and the care of the residents. That they do
00:12:04 - 00:13:06
care, but it's only at a level that ensures that they get the money that they want out of it. Okay. You are going to have to make money when you're doing this. I'm going to give you permission right now. It's okay for you to make money doing this business. It's totally fine. You actually need to do it. Otherwise, you can't run a successful business. You can't serve more people. You go bankrupt and things fall apart for you. So, you have got to prioritize hitting your metrics with
00:12:35 - 00:13:30
your money and making sure that that gets in there because if you undercharge people or you try to bring people in and and you're like, "Yeah, you can come in for free for the next two months while we try to figure something out." Um, those types of things, you still have to keep the lights on. You have to feed people. You have to do those things. And when you are prioritizing other people's comfort over your own, you put yourself in a really bad situation. very very quickly. The numbers um with assisted
00:13:02 - 00:14:01
living can dry up very quickly if you don't have a really good solid foundation and understanding of the numbers and how they work. So, let me illustrate this really quick. When it comes to revenue, you have two levers that you can pull, right? One of them is how many residents you have in the house, and the other is how much money you are charging your residents um for that. We're going to focus here on the amount of residents that you have in the home. Let's say you're licensed for 10
00:13:32 - 00:14:39
beds. Okay? So, you have 10 residents in there. Let's say you're charging $5,000 a month. Keep these numbers really easy. Let's say that it costs you 35 $40,000. Let's say it's $35,000 to operate your business on a monthly basis. Okay? So, when you are at 100% occupancy with those 10 residents at $5,000 a month, that's $50,000 in revenue. Cool. you have $35,000 in monthly expenses. That's $15,000 in profit. Cool, right? We're we're in a pretty good spot. But what happens if uh
00:14:05 - 00:15:10
one of our residents pass away or a resident says they can't pay that month or somebody just moves out or this has happened to us, we lost five residents plus another one that passed away, six residents in about a two-month time span. That was horrible. So, if we go back to to this example here, you lose six residents at $5,000 per month just in some weird freak accident, you know, mass exodus that happens. All of a sudden, you go from having 10 residents down to four. That's $20,000 in income.
00:14:37 - 00:15:34
Now, you're losing $15,000 in income every month. Now, the likelihood of that happening to you is slim, but it's also there. It's a reality. So, you need to be paying attention to this because you lose one res. You have 10 residents of $5,000 per month. That's $50,000 in in total income there. You lose one resident, now you're down to 45. You lose two, now you're down to 40. So, what was 15,000 in total profit is down to 10. And then down to 5,000. And then you lose one more resident, now you're
00:15:06 - 00:16:03
down to breaking even. You lose one more. Now you're losing $5,000 a month. And that can happen quickly. Okay? So, you have to pay attention to what those numbers look like and what your profitability goals and how they work. And you cannot give away free services for people. You just can't. You have to have people paying for the services because if you are losing 5, 10, $15,000 per month, how long are you going to be able to keep your doors open? Probably not very long, right? Maybe a month or
00:15:34 - 00:16:22
two while you're trying to float things. And then it just gets to the point where you're like, I I give up. I I I give up. I can't do this anymore. And you close the doors. And now all of those residents that were in your home are out. So you have to prioritize the care of your residents. Yes. But also your ability to generate profit in your business because when you don't, you get stressed and you create a bad environment and that creates something that people don't want to be in. Your
00:15:59 - 00:16:41
staff, your residents, their families, they don't want to be there and your facility starts getting dirty. It starts getting nasty and it dries up quickly. This is another reason why some of those facilities are like that because people don't prioritize the generating a profit in the business. They just want to do this out of the goodness of their hearts. When you help others, you're going to help yourself and you're going to be a lot more successful that way. Now, the last thing
00:16:20 - 00:17:12
that I want to teach you is great homes are built intentionally. So, what do I mean by that? What I mean is if you want to build a home that is great, that does not feel nasty, you have to be intentional with that. You have to build a plan. You have to be working on things inside of your home and getting it set up so that your residents are going to be happy and healthy in that home. Your staff are going to be happy. They're going to enjoy their jobs. The families are going to enjoy coming there. It
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starts with building a solid foundation so you have a business plan so you know what you're going to do. You understand the numbers. You understand where you can be profitable. You understand the market so you know if there's going to be enough residents to come into the facility. you're doing all of this research and getting ready to do it. So when you start a business, you can then move forward with intentionality and now you've got something that is going to generate a profit and that serves your
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population powerfully and and allows you to have a huge impact in your community and leave a legacy for the people that you are serving and also for your family. You have to be intentional with this because it does not fall into place. It is not easy. It is hard. But when you go through the process and you follow a proven stepby-step system, that's what's going to allow you to get there. And when you create that for yourself, you're going to be a lot more successful. Now, if you need help
00:17:41 - 00:18:27
building that foundation, building that out, and figuring out exactly how to get started, because if you feel overwhelmed and you're like, I want to do this, but all these, and I know I could do it better, and you need help with that, just type in foundation down below. I will get you a link to my new program, the foundation builder program. Would love to see you inside of there. Just type in foundation. We'll give you a link to it and have you uh hop in there. It is all designed to help you remove
00:18:04 - 00:18:58
all the overwhelm, the confusion, and figure out exactly how to get started. I would love to see you in there. Type in foundation. We'll get it over to you. Now, we talked about a lot about why these facilities are nasty. We talked about how staff can get overwhelmed and how ownership sometimes prioritize profit over anything else and that's creating a problem. We also talked about how systems and a lack of systems are going to create chaos in your facility. And then we talked about the idea of
00:18:31 - 00:19:21
profit versus purpose and you have to you have to balance both of those things if you want to be successful. And then the extremely important part of creating this intentionally and that's what's going to bring you success. Are you curious about assisted living, but you're not sure how to get started? At Assisted Living Investing, I help healthcare workers start their own assisted living business so they're not stuck trying to figure it out and know exactly what they should do next. So, if
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that's you, would love to have you inside of my programs. Again, type in foundation down below if you're interested in learning a little bit more. And I promise you that if you keep going, keep making progress step by step by step, you are going to be successful. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
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