How to Get the Funding to Start Your Assisted Living Business

assisted living business funding assisted living business plan assisted living financial projections assisted living financing assisted living investors assisted living loans assisted living market research assisted living occupancy rates assisted living startup costs assisted living startup funding assisted living underwriting healthcare business funding how to get funding for assisted living business residential care home funding senior care business plan senior care business startup senior care entrepreneur senior housing investment start an assisted living home Jun 24, 2026

If you’ve been stuck wondering how to get funding for your assisted living business, you’re not alone. Many people spend months, or even years, worrying about how they’ll raise the money before they ever take the first step. The good news is that funding is usually not where you should start. Want the full breakdown?

Watch the video below👇

Build the Foundation Before You Ask for Funding

One of the biggest mistakes I see is people trying to get funding before they have a plan. It’s like trying to build the roof of a house before you pour the foundation.

Funding is not step one. In most cases, it comes much later in the process. Before a lender or investor says yes, they want to see that you have done the work and understand your business.

When you build a strong foundation first, funding becomes much easier because you can clearly explain your opportunity.

✅ Focus on building your foundation before approaching lenders.

A Strong Business Plan Helps Others Believe in Your Vision

Your business plan is one of the first tools that helps you get funding. Think of it as a way to tell your story and explain why your assisted living business will succeed.

Your business plan should include:

✅ Who you want to serve

✅ How your business will operate

✅ Why there is a need in your area

✅ How the business will make money

Many healthcare workers already understand resident care and daily operations. The challenge is putting that knowledge onto paper so lenders, investors, and partners can understand it too.

You do not need an MBA or a writing degree to create a good business plan. The goal is simply to communicate your vision clearly and show that you have thought through the details.

Market Research Gives You Confidence in Your Opportunity

Once you have a business plan, the next step is market research.

Before opening an assisted living home, you need to know if there is enough demand in your area. Start by identifying the population you want to serve. This might include seniors, veterans, individuals with developmental disabilities, or another group.

Then look at the numbers.

Ask questions like:

✅ How many people in this area need these services?

✅ How many licensed beds already exist?

✅ Is there room for another provider?

Good market research helps you avoid expensive mistakes. It also gives lenders confidence because you can show that there is a real need for your services.

I’ve seen people narrow their search from several cities down to just a few strong locations simply by looking at the data. That makes it much easier to find the right property and move forward with confidence.

💡 The more clearly you understand your market, the easier it becomes to explain your opportunity to lenders and investors.

Understanding the Numbers Makes Funding Easier

Numbers scare a lot of people, but they do not have to.

At its core, assisted living underwriting is simple:

Revenue - Expenses = Profit

Revenue comes from two main factors:

✅ The number of residents you serve

✅ The amount each resident pays

Then you estimate your major expenses.

A simple framework discussed in the video is called WIFE'D:

✅ Wages

✅ Insurance

✅ Food

✅ Energy (utilities)

✅ Debt service (mortgage, rent, or loan payments)

These expenses often make up most of your operating costs.

When you understand your numbers, you can answer important questions like:

How many residents do I need?
What occupancy rate makes this profitable?
Can this property support my financial goals?

Lenders want to see these projections because they help prove that your business can succeed. When you can confidently explain your numbers, your chances of getting funding improve dramatically.

Funding Comes After You Build the Right Foundation

Many people think funding is the biggest obstacle standing between them and their assisted living business. In reality, funding often follows preparation.

When you have:

✅ A solid business plan

✅ Strong market research

✅ Clear financial projections

You become much more attractive to lenders, investors, and partners.

Instead of asking for money with only an idea, you are presenting a real business opportunity backed by research and numbers.

That changes the conversation completely.

Wrap Up

If you are struggling to figure out how to fund your assisted living business, start by building your foundation. Focus on your business plan, your market research, and your financial projections before worrying about loans or investors.

Once those pieces are in place, you will have the confidence, clarity, and credibility needed to move forward and secure funding when the opportunity comes.

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.

▶️ Watch on YouTube

🎙️ Listen to the podcast

Show full transcript 👇

Transcript

00:00:00
Have you been trying to figure out how to get funding for your assisted living business? Like you've been thinking, how do I go and talk to a lender to get them to say yes? Or maybe you even tried talking to the lender and they're like, well, come back to us when you have a deal. Or something along those lines and you're just like, how do I go from I want to do assisted living, I know I want to do it, I'm trying to figure out how to get it started, but the big thing that I can see that's on the horizon

00:00:23
that I need to figure out is funding, and I don't know how to do that. And I don't know how to get started, and now you're overwhelmed and you're confused, and now you're just sitting on it and it's been months or even years, and you're just like, I don't know how to get started. And they're just sitting there. If that's you, in today's video, how to get the funding to start your own assisted living business, I'm going to walk you through that exact process of

00:00:46
what you need to do so that you can get the funding for your assisted living business. 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 it out and know exactly what to do next. So, in today's video, again, we are going to be talking about the funding process and exactly what you need to do in order for you to get funding so you can start your own assisted living business. Okay, let's get into it. Now,

00:01:13
the first thing that you need to do, and this might sound a little bit weird to you, but I promise you this is the first thing is you you got to start at the beginning. Okay. So, let's use an illustration. Hopefully this resonates with you. Let's say there's 100 steps to starting your assisted living business, right? You know, step 1 to 100, okay? And you're trying to figure out how to get started. When you try to get funding first, and you try to figure that out, that's actually like step 50 or 60 or even 70,

00:01:43
okay? You're starting somewhere in the middle. It's like when when you're trying to build a house, when you build a house, you don't start from building the roof first, right? You don't do that. Have you ever sat and watched them build a house? What's the first thing that they do? Like they dig a hole, they build the foundation, they pour the foundation, they get it ready, they build the platform, then they start building up on top of that, and then eventually one day they get to the roof.

00:02:06
Okay? That is exactly how you need to build your assisted living business. You have to build your foundation first. If you're going to be successful, if you want to get funding, you need to build the foundation first. You don't start at, you know, in the middle trying to get funding. That That's not what you do. I I teach a five-phase framework to getting started. Capital and funding is the third of my five phases. And it's third for a reason, okay? You need to have a foundation first, you

00:02:34
need to have the property before you go start talking talking to a lender. Where you need to start is step one, step two, step three. Those are the things that you should be focusing on first if you want to figure out how to get funding. So, you you know, you're asking now, "Okay, what are those things that I need to do?" The first thing you need to do is build a foundation. Just like when you're building a house, you need to build a foundation. That's the thing that's going to give you the

00:03:04
clarity, the confidence, the tools that you need to then go to a lender, go to a partner, go to somebody to be like, "Hey, I need a million dollars," or whatever amount it is. Give me the money, >> [laughter] >> right? And you're trying to convince them What you're doing here is you're creating this foundation that is going to convince other people to work with you to get you the funding you need so you can launch your assisted living business. That's what you need to do.

00:03:26
Okay? When you have the foundation that you need, funding is going to follow that foundation. Just like when you're building a house, you can't build the roof first, you need to build a foundation and build it up so that you can eventually build the roof on top of it. That's what comes after you've built the foundation. So, the three big things that I want to teach you about today are for building your foundation, Uh, they're they're to be key. And if you need some help with any of these,

00:03:55
just type in foundation down below in the comments. I'll give you a link to come join me in my foundation builder program. It is a program that is designed specifically to helping you figure out exactly how to build the foundation, how to do the things we're going to be talking about in this video, which are your business plan, your market research, and understanding the numbers, okay? That's what I teach you in the foundation builder program. Would love to have you in there. It's a cohort

00:04:19
style program. Just type in foundation, we'll give you the details for it. Okay. Now, let's get into it. The first thing you need to do as you're building the foundation is a business plan. Okay. If you need help with your business plan, type in BP down below for business plan, and I'll get you a link to my free business plan checklist to help you out along the way. Now, when you are building your business plan, you need to take the things that you know about assisted living, your drive,

00:04:44
why you want to do this, what this looks like, you know, who you want to serve, all of those things, what it looks like to operate as, you know, if you're a health care worker, you know a little bit of the type of staff you need and what day-to-day operations are going to look like. You're familiar with those things. You need to put all those things down because guess who doesn't know those things? Your partner, your bank. They don't understand how this business runs. You have to tell them, "This is

00:05:06
what we're going to do in this business. This is why it works financially. This is how much money I need." This is what you're going to be putting in your business plan. It is a sales letter to them to say, "Hey, look at me. I've got a great opportunity to generate some good income here, but I need money to do it. You should give me money." Right? As as weird as it sounds, that's kind of what a business plan is, okay? So, you're going to take that, you're going to tell your story. It's

00:05:31
going to tell the story of why you need the money and how you're going to make it successful. And when you do that, you're clarifying your vision, you're clarifying your strategy. It's giving people confidence in you that you know what you're doing and that what you're doing is not just something that you're super excited about. It's actually something that is profitable and a good business opportunity and people are excited and want to work with you. That's the idea behind your business

00:05:55
plan. And it can be really hard to write that out. Um but I also want to tell you, you don't need to be an MBA. You don't need to be a writer to do these things. Especially today, you can just use AI to help you generate a lot of this. Okay? And that's going to help you out a ton. But you need to take the things and the excitement and everything that you have in your head about this, you need to put it on paper. That is what's going to help you be successful. Okay? That's what's going to help you

00:06:21
build out your business plan and ultimately help you get the funding that you're looking for. This is the first thing. If you want to get funding, you're trying to figure it out, start with your business plan. Okay? Just start with your business plan. Work on that first. The second thing that you need to do is your market research. Okay? Your market research is identifying, hey, I want to serve a population. So, think about it. What type of population do you want to serve? Is it elderly

00:06:51
individuals? Is it mental health? Is it people with autism? Is it, I don't know, developmental disabilities? Veterans? Who is it? And comment that down below by the way. I'm curious like who who do you want to serve? Let me know. But you pick that that population out. And now you need to go and look and see, are there enough of those types of people that I can actually serve them? That I could build a home that I have enough volume of that group of people that I could bring into the facility and

00:07:20
we can serve them and I can have a profitable business. Okay? This is how you do market research. You can get a lot of this data for free, by the way. If you go to like census.gov or city-data.com, they have a lot of this as a free data out there that lets you validate the market. So, let's say you can do this at a specific geographic, you know, zip code, county, city levels. You can get really granular in how you look at the data. I love data, so um this is something that for me is actually fun. Um in my

00:07:46
foundation builder program, we actually give you the market research, so you don't have to do all of it by yourself um and really simplify the process for you here. But, you can go grab all this stuff for free. Um it's online. Okay. And then you're going to do what I teach in my book, The Profitable Assisted Living Facility, if you're interested. You can go get it on Amazon. Looks like this. Or just type in book down below, we'll give you a link to go purchase the book. So, in that book, I teach you

00:08:08
something called the 5% rule. And the 5% rule states that 5% of a given population that I want to serve is going to need assisted living services. Okay? So, if the population I want to serve there's 10,000 people of that population of that elderly population I want to serve, then 5% of them or 500 in this example are going to need assisted living services. Now, what I need to then do is go start looking and seeing how many licensed beds are there in this area that that serve that population. If

00:08:37
there's already 800, it's probably not a good fit. But, if there's only like 150, 200 of them, I've probably found a really good spot for me to hone in and build my facility foothold. One of my students actually used the 5% rule and narrowed her search from what was five to seven facilities down to just two or three. I was able to very quickly and easily eliminate, you know, four or five different cities and just make it a really easy for her to hone in on what she was looking for in doing her market

00:09:05
research, which then made it a lot easier to go find the right property. And once she found the right property, it was a lot easier to go to a lender and say, "This is my business plan. I also want to do things, you know, in this area. Here's the property that I found." And then it just snowballs and you're able to get the funding. It just clicks into place when you do these things in the right order. Okay? But, it all starts right there with doing your market research and understanding what the market says.

00:09:27
There's going to be actually a market research component in your business plan, and this is going to fit, boom, right in there. It's going to give that lender or that partner confidence that you know what you're looking at and that you understand the market and that it can be successful. Okay? So, that's how you do that piece of it. That's the market research. And the third thing that I need you to do is the numbers. The numbers, right? That part can be pretty scary for some of you. When I

00:09:56
start talking about numbers, you're like, "Oh my gosh, here he goes. He's going to talk about numbers. I'll fast forward through this part. I know I've got to figure out the numbers. I know I've got to do them." But, I also want to tell you you don't need to be, you know, like a CPA, finance, you know, have a master's in finance, or anything like that to run the numbers to help you understand if this is going to be profitable or not. It's actually very, very simple for you

00:10:18
to figure this out. It's a simple formula. It's revenue minus expenses equals profit. Okay, revenue is how much money you bring in. There's two levers you can pull there. The number of residents that you have and the amount of money that they are paying you on a monthly basis to be in your facility. So, if I've got 10 residents at $5,000 per month, that's $50,000 in income. Simple, right? Now, if I change that from the the 10 residents at at $5,000 per month and I have 20 residents in there now, now I'm

00:10:44
up to $100,000 in income. I doubled it right there, right? Or if I keep my 10 residents but I'm charging $10,000 in income, that's also 100,000. I've doubled my income from there. Or if I pull both of these levers and now I have 20 residents at $10,000 per month, I'm at $200,000 in income. I've quadrupled my income earning potential and that's pretty cool, right? So, these are the levers I can pull as I'm trying to figure out how much revenue could I make in the facility. I've used round

00:11:11
numbers. You can choose your own numbers to fit your model. But, the next thing you need to do is figure out your WIFE'D expenses. You're married to them. I know it's cheesy, but you are. These are your five biggest expenses when you're getting started in assisted living. They stand for wages, insurance, food, your energy, which is your your utilities, and your debt service, so like your lease payment, your mortgage payment, You your loan payment is what that is. Those five expenses are going to make up

00:11:35
80 to 90% of all of your expenses. So, if you can figure those out, you're in a really good spot. If you can figure out wages alone, you're that's 50 to 70% of it. So, if you can hone in on those, figure those types of expenses out, then you can take your revenue minus your expenses and figure out your profit and see if it's going to work for you and help you know what is going to reach your profitability goal. And when you do that, what you're going to find is, you know, if you were thinking I've got a

00:12:00
four or five bedroom home already, I own it free and clear. I'm just going to turn it into assisted living. I can put three to six residents in there pretty easily. What you're going to understand when you do basic back of the napkin type of underwriting and understanding those numbers, you're going to understand how much do I need to charge for that to work and then can I charge that much or man, I can only fit five residents in here and at five residents, my pathway to profitability and consistent

00:12:30
profitability is pretty low. I like to teach people that you should underwrite your opportunity and you should be able to hit your profitability goal. So, let's say it's $10,000 per month, you should hit that when you're at 80% occupied. Okay. If you can't hit that goal unless you're 100% occupied, you're going to be very frustrated when you have a resident pass away or you have a resident leave because of the amount of care that they need or they're just disruptive to the rest of the house

00:13:01
or things like that and all of a sudden your income is drying up. So, you need to pay attention to those things because money can dry up very quickly when you're talking about, you know, $5,000 per month is what somebody's paying you, that is just a round number, and they're no longer there, that's $5,000 per month in income that goes away. Okay, so you have to pay attention to those types of things and understand the numbers. But, when you understand that, that's going to give you confidence

00:13:31
that, "Hey, this actually works." And the other cool thing is, when you're doing the underwriting, that is something that a lender or a partner is going to want to see. They want to see there's something in that calculator. Going to type in calculator down below, um and I'll get you access to it. Um called the 24-month pro forma. And it takes you from month by month for 24 months, and shows you how much money you could be making in the facility on a monthly basis. This is something that

00:13:58
lenders are going to want to see. Like, it is a part of the funding process. So, you're going to need to put something like this together. And the more that you can have those numbers and feel confident in them, not only does it give you peace of mind that, "Yeah, I can hit these numbers." It's also going to increase the likelihood of you getting funded on your project tenfold. Like, it is going to make it so much easier because you can prove what those numbers are showing, and how much money you

00:14:24
could actually make at running your assisted living business. Okay? So, you need to understand the numbers. When you do these things, those three things, right? There is your business plan, you have your market, and you understand the money. When you have those things, and you have built something that that works really well, that's the foundation that you need so that you can then start going and finding the house, and then talking to lenders, and getting the funding that you need. Those are the steps that you need to

00:14:54
take before you get to step 50 that we're talking about there at the start of the video. Because if you're trying to figure out funding, they're going to ask you, "Well, did you do the business plan?" Or, "Where's your underwriting?" Or, "What house are we trying to fund here?" They're going to ask you all these questions. And if you're like, "Oh, I don't know. I haven't done that yet." Or, "Let me do it really quick for you." You're either

00:15:14
going to have just a crappy business plan that they're going to be like, "Well, this is like, why is it only two pages?" And there's a a of spelling errors in it. Um you know, they're going to be like, "This This isn't work for us." And you're ruining a relationship with a lender. Or, you know, cuz you're rushing through it. Or, you're going to say, "Oh, actually, I don't have those things yet." And that kind of gives them a little bit of pause the next time they

00:15:37
read that you reach out to them because the first time you did it, you were kind of wasting their time. So, build in your foundation first. That is what is going to allow you to talk with confidence to a lender, to a partner, to help you get the funding that you need. So, go back to the beginning. When you do that, you're going to be a lot more successful. You're going to get the funding that you need, and then you're going to be able to start your assisted living business. So, if you've

00:16:06
been confused, you've been trying to figure this out, and you can't just the funding piece of it, you keep coming back here like, "I have no idea how I'm going to get the funding." Even if you look at it and you're like, "There's no way I could get the funds to do this on my own, and so why should I even start?" Start building your foundation because when you do that and you have those tools, opportunities are going to start coming to you. You're going to find people, you're going to go

00:16:28
to lunch with somebody, you're going to go to a networking event, you're going to go to a conference, you're going to go talk to a lender, you're going to Something's going to happen. And because you built the foundation, you're going to be able to move forward and jump on the opportunity when it becomes available because you have put in the groundwork and the legwork to build the foundation that you have that's solid so you can now start building your house on. And that is what

00:16:53
is going to allow you to get the funding. Now, are you curious about assisted living, but you're not sure how to get started? At Assisted Living Investing, I I help healthcare workers start their own assisted living business so they're not stuck trying to figure it out and know exactly what step to take next. Now, if you need help with that, again, type in foundation. We'd love to help you out inside the program, but I want to encourage you that if you start doing these things, start building your foundation step by

00:17:21
step by step, I promise you you are going to be successful. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

Download Your FREE Calculator

Send Me My Calculator

Stay connected with news and updates!

Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.
Don't worry, your information will not be shared.

We hate SPAM. We will never sell your information, for any reason.