How to Start an Assisted Living Business in 2026 (Step-by-Step Beginner Roadmap)

Transcript

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Hey friend, welcome in. Today we're going to be talking about how to start your assisted living business, creating giving you a step-by-step road map so that you know exactly what you need to be doing, the steps you need to be taking, the process you should be following as you're trying to launch an assisted living business cuz you've been trying to figure this out. You you're just you're confused. You don't know how to get started. You don't know how to get funding. You don't know how to get

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licensing. We're going to cover all of that in today's video. So, make sure you stick around and I'll help you out in building your personal roadmap so you can launch your assisted living business successfully. Hey friend, I'm Brandon Gustafson with Assisted Living Investing. I help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs launch profitable, purpose-driven businesses, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace in their lives. I help people from, man, I don't know how to get started, all the way to

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I have a facility or I want to scale and grow something big. I have coaching programs that help everybody along that path. and to find the one that is the best fit for you, go check out my 30 secondond quiz, aliquiz.com. We'll link that down below for you as well. But would love to have you go take that so I can see how I can best help you and give you some direction there to make sure you get unstuck and can reach your goal of time and financial freedom and creating an impact on your community

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and in your family. So, go check it out, aliquiz.com. And I have a special offer for you if you stick around till the end of the video to work with me. So, make sure if you're interested in learning about that, how to work with me for a full week at a fraction of my normal coaching cost, then make sure you stick around for the end of today's video. And if you need some free resources, go grab them, assisted livinginvesting.net. I've got a free underwriting calculator there for you to help you out as you're trying

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to figure out the numbers. And that's something we're going to talk a lot about today. So, with that, let's get into today's video. All right. Hey, friend. Welcome back into assisted living investing. Super excited to be chatting with you today. Today we're going to be working through a road map, creating a road map for you and giving you some guidance and the things that you should be doing as you're trying to launch your assisted living business. So, if you find this video helpful, make sure you like it,

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share it with somebody else that is trying to figure all these things out as well so that they can learn and make the same amount of progress that you are making as you are trying to launch your assisted living business. So with that, the first thing that you need to do, you you've got to clarify your vision. So this is you can spend time doing this. This is not hard to do to go in and and just spend some time. It it might feel a little awkward. Just just know that I do this all the time. So you're not alone.

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Um millionaires do this. Billionaires do this. It's taking time to just sit back, relax, and visualize. Start thinking what what would my facility look like? How many beds would I have in the facility? How many residents? What type of resident would I be serving? What does that look like? And not only are you going to be visualizing that, but then take some time and journal it out. Just write it down. I want to serve an elderly population, you know, 70 plus. I want to work specifically with abused

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women. I want to work with a mental health population. I want to work with disabled adults. These are all types of people that people in my success system program have been working with and that they desire to work with. So take some time and think about man who who should I be working with and who am I passionate about? Who do I want to serve? Take some time and figure that out. Also spend some time thinking about why assisted living for you. That could be something like I had my parents in in

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a facility and it was a really bad experience. I know I can do it better. Or you're a nurse and you're thinking to yourself, I've worked in these assisted living or caregiver or facility administer. I've worked in these facilities for a ton of years and I know that I could run one of these better than anybody else. Or maybe you see the income potential that that this business has. Uh maybe and the legacy you can leave for your family and the impact you can have on your community. I'm not

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going to judge you at all on your why for getting into assisted living. I think all of them are valid or any combination of those are going to be valid for you. But you want to make sure that you spend some time and think about why do you want to be in assisted living. That's what's going to really drive you. And every time you hit a roadblock, you can come back to that why and come back to your vision. And the more that you can hone in on that, the more successful you're going to be. This

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is probably the most important thing I can tell you as you're trying to get started is stop trying to do all of the things. Let's get organized. That's what this video is about. But the before you can really get organized, you need to think about these things. You need to think about why assisted living, the population you want to serve, what are your goals and dreams, what do you want to have happen, and then write those things down. The first thing I do with people when I bring them into any of my

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coaching programs is a vision exercise. I I take things that I have learned from my coaches in the past and I I've simplified that into a really fun vision exercise to help people know exactly how to get started. And those who take it seriously are the ones that have the most success in my programs because they now have this clear vision about where they're going and how they're going to achieve their goals. So, take some time, take a breath, do some visualization, journal out your why, get clear on what

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that looks like for you, and you're going to be a lot more successful if you can go and do that. Okay, start off there. The next thing you need to do is you've got to build a foundation. You need to build your foundation first. I have what I call the focus framework. It's a five-phase process. We're actually going to talk about it in today's video. your focus framework. It starts off with building your foundation. And this is going to be having your business plan in place. Learning how to create a

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million-dollar business plan. And it that sounds like a really cool big huge number, right? But I promise you it's possible. You can do that. You can create a million-dollar business plan. It's not as hard as you think it is. I have a free checklist for you. If you go to assistedlivinginvesting.net/bp checklist, you can go and access that. We'll link that down below for you as well. But create your business plan. Then I want you to do your market research. Analyze the market. See if

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it's going to be a good fit for you or not. How many people that you want to serve? The population you want to serve. Figure out what that is. That's why we did the vision exercise, right? That's why we did that first. And then once you've figured that out, let's say it's individuals who are 70 plus, you're going to go and grab that data. It's online. It's publicly available. census.gov, right? go and grab that information and start looking at how many people that are are that age

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group in your area. And then from there, what you're going to do is you're going to shift over and you're going to start looking at how many licensed beds there are in the facility. This is also publicly available. Could be hard to find for sure, but you're going to go look at how many licensed beds, how many facilities there are that are licensed. And then you want to do use what I call the 5% rule. And I teach this in my book. You can get that at thebook.com. I'll link that down below for you. The

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book is called the profitable assisted living facility. You can get on Amazon. You can buy it there. So, in that book, I teach what I call the 5% rule. The 5% rule basically says if of the population that I want to serve, at least 5% of them are going to need assisted living. Okay? So, if there's a thousand people that are in that age group for me, then I would be looking at about 50 of those people needing assisted living services. It's a much smaller sample size, but to just kind of illustrate the principle of

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the 5% rule. If you want to learn more about that, just type in five down below. We'll do a separate video that's specific to the 5% rule. Okay? So, you you need to be doing your market analysis. Make sure that it's going to work for you for your assisted living business. Super important for you to do that. You need to underwrite. Go to assisted livinginvesting.net. Right there, the big, it's a light blue box right there at the front of the page. You cannot miss it. you can get my free

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underwriting calculator. This is the thing that's going to help you determine if the opportunity you're looking at is going to be profitable or not. Okay? I spent hours building that calculator. I love data and analytics. So, if you're a numbers person like me, you're going to love this calculator. If you're not, you're honestly, you probably will feel a little bit overwhelmed with it, and that's okay. I I have some coaching programs that can help you out in understanding how to leverage that tool

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to help you get the funding that you need. Okay? But it's so important for you to do your underwriting because that's how a lender is going to be able to determine if they can or want to work with you as you're starting your business. So, you need to understand how you can make money. You have a couple levers here, right? You can make money with income and you have your expenses. And with your expenses, you can either increase your expenses, it's going to cost you more to run the business, or

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you can decrease the expenses and and maybe it's not as good of an experience for people. So, you kind of have to find this fine balance here. I teach what I call the wife expenses. They're the top five expenses. WF. If you want to learn more about that, type in wife down below. We'll do a separate video for that. But if you can understand the wife expenses, then what you're going to understand is how much it's probably going to cost you about, you know, ballpark what it's going to cost you to

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run your assisted living business. And then you can back that into figuring out how profitable it's going to be. And that's going to help you make the decision on if you should move forward with an opportunity or not based purely off of income, right? Because as much as we want to do this and and we want to help people, we still need to make money off of this business. And so you need to understand those expenses so you can move forward with confidence that you have an opportunity in front of you that

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is actually going to make you money. It's really important for you to do that. And then the other thing you need to do as you're creating your foundation is creating an entity. And this is something that I see a lot of people just do this from the beginning. they create an entity and it's what I call fake progress. Um, you need to create an entity. I'm not an attorney, so don't take this as legal advice, but I strongly encourage you to talk to an attorney to have an entity set up because it protects you and your

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personal assets. It's really important for you to do that. So, make sure that you have an entity at some point, but also don't get caught up in, oh, I created an entity. I'm making real progress towards launching my assisted living business. The reality of it is you need to spend a lot more time underwriting, building your business plan, doing your market research. And when you do those things, you're going to have a much more solid foundation. And that's what's going to allow you to

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find the right property and get the funding you need and understand how to navigate those rules and regulations to get the license that you need and help you launch a successful business. So, spend more time doing those things. underwriting, business plan, market research. That's what's really going to propel you forward and having you build this solid foundation. Okay, that's the F in the focus framework. Foundation first. Build those things first. The O is optimal property selection. So, this

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is the part where you're going to leverage that market research that you did. This why it's so important for you to do that. And that's going to help you narrow down where you're going to be looking for an assisted living facility. Whether you're going to rent and rehab a home, whether you're going to buy an existing home and convert it, maybe you're going to buy an existing facility or you're going to build something from the ground up. Whichever of those things

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you decide you want to do, there's kind of those four different paths. You get to choose. But once you've decided, hey, this is the model I want to go after. You've done your market research. All of a sudden, the process of finding the perfect home for assisted living becomes that much easier because you've done all of this leg work in figuring out exactly what you want out of your facility. And it narrows it down from I know I want to do this in New York, but I don't know where. I want to do this in New York and

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Pennsylvania, but I'm not sure where. Right? You go from having this big broad thing down to I know I want to be in this specific neighborhood or this this set of cities that I want to be in. I want to buy an existing home and convert it into assisted living. And I know I want to serve a population that is elderly care. So, I need something that's more of a ranch style that doesn't have a lot of stairs. And if it does have stairs, maybe on the exterior, I can build a ramp for it. And that's

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not going to be too costly. Takes you from this really high level down to this very niche thing. And that's going to help you as you try to find the perfect property. Work with a broker, work with a real estate agent to help you find these things. That's what's going to make the process that much easier for you. Honestly, that's a pro tip for you. Make sure you are working with a broker or an agent. Find somebody that can be an advocate for you that can help you out through the negotiations and help you

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navigate the process of finding the perfect property. Like, do not skip that. That's so important. But once you get and you start locating different homes, then you can start talking about zoning, uh, working with the city planner at the planning department. Sometimes this is at a county level, so it just kind of depends on your municipality. U, but go talk to that person. Talk to the fire department for approvals as well. You're going to need to have that. That's what's going to

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give you your what's called a certificate of occupancy. Like if you've ever gone into a restaurant and you see by the exit door, it has a thing that says maximum occupancy 53 people. That you need essentially that. You're not going to have to put that in your building. But what happened for them to get that plaque is they had the fire department come in and do an analysis of the building that says you could have x amount of people here in the event that there was a fire that we'd be able to

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get that many people out of here. Um, so that's kind of what you're working with when you do a certificate of occupancy. So you have to talk to the fire department. That's what you need to do as you're finding the the right property. That's the optimal property selection process in the focus framework. Okay. So let's move on to the C in the focus framework. This is capital and funding. This is the part that a lot of you you're confused like I don't it's scary, right? I don't know

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how to get funds. I don't have the funds. I don't want to partner with somebody. I don't and and you did you hear what I just said? I don't have this. I don't want this. Don't. That that's a key word right there. And all those things that I was saying. I said don't or I don't have you know all of those things. You're coming from this spot and this is a little bit I don't know you think about it how you want but you're coming from this mindset of being of scarcity that you can't have

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those things. It's not going to happen for you. You got to shift your thinking. Honestly, this is number one. Stop saying that I don't want that or I I can't have that. That's not going to happen for me. Stop saying those things like get it get it out of your vocabulary. I promise you, you're going to be a lot more successful if you do that. Shift it to how. How can I get the funds? Who do I need to talk to? Start refraraming those things just slightly in your mind. This is the thing that's

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going to help you out. And it's scary. You probably have talked to somebody who's had a partnership with somebody or your aunt, your uncle, your grandparents, somebody has told you, don't get into business with somebody. It's messy and it's going to be hard for you. You know, speaking as as somebody who has done this multiple times. I've partnered with my dad. I've looked at doing partnerships with other people. I've partnered with my brother. I've had businesses fail.

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And it's hard. It really is hard to do those things. If you can look at it in this different light of how you're going to shift the way that you talk about it, opportunities are going to start coming up. And yes, partnerships are hard, but also it's worth it. It's going to allow you to reach your goals. So, let's think about a pie. Okay? When you're partnering with somebody, you think to yourself, "Man, I've got a pie, and if I'm partnering with somebody, I can't

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have my whole pie, right? And I I want to eat my pie. I don't want to share it." This is the the mindset that you're coming from. And the thing is, when it's your pie and you don't have the funds to get started and you need help with capital and funding, you can't figure all those things out. You have a small pie. Your pie is it's one of those little pocket hand pies. You know, it's tiny and you're not going to share it because you want all the pie. But so you're coming from this standpoint. But

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the thing is when you are working with a partner, when you have somebody that knows how to get the funding, that can help raise funds that that has the capital, it turns your little tiny hand pie into a much bigger, you know, Thanksgiving style pie. You got a much bigger pie. And so even if you had 50% of that bigger pie, it's still bigger than your small hand pie, right? So that's something that I want you to recognize that the pies, they're not all the same size. And maybe if you find the right person,

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you've got a Costco size pie, right? You got this huge pie or it's like Guinness World Records pie size. Like what you can do as you get into this is as you create more opportunities for you to work with people that have funds, you partner with people, your pie doesn't stay the same. Your pie grows. It's a bigger pie. And so much better for you to have 50% of a big pie rather than 100% of a small hand pie. I hope that I hope that illustrates it for you. If it does, like type in pi down below cuz

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we've been talking a lot about I hope you're not hungry now. I am. I want to go eat some pie. I got some in the fridge upstairs, right? So, I might do that after the recording of this video. But it is so important for you to understand, get out of this scarcity mindset, out of the can't, won't, don't, stop saying those things and start reframing it into how can I, who can I, what can I do to reach this goal. Capital and funding, it's the third phase in the focus framework. It's so

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important, but you need to be figuring those things out. There's a lot of options as well when it comes to funding. Um, and in my roadmap challenge, I teach what I call the cash compass. And and so that's something that we talk through four different ways, four big broad ways of how you can get funding. There's so many ways out there and you can combine them. Like there's so much that that goes into this. And so make sure that you're not getting caught in this scarcity mindset.

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Look at it as I I have the opportunity to do it. Who can I talk to so that I can reach those goals? And as you're getting into this phase of finding capital and funding, the reason why your foundation first is so important is you have built your underwriting and you have done your business plan and you're going to be able to leverage those things and that's what's going to help you get the funding. Whether it's a business partner, the SBA, uh working with private money, whoever it is, they

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want to see these things and so the more time you can spend on refining that, the better off you're going to be. So, make sure this is why you do the foundation first. It's going to help you out with that. The other thing that I'm going to tell you is get comfortable being told no. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. Do not be like, "Talk to that lender and they said no." Like, I guess there's no way I can do assisted living. Stop it. You will get told no dozens of times. I

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lost count of how many times I've been told no. It is so important for you to understand that every lender is different. Every deal is different. Just because one lender or one person told you no does not mean that the answer is no. Stop. It's that scarcity mindset. Get yourself out of that and start looking for other opportunities on how you're going to make this work. I promise you you can. You just have to be persistent with this. Why I tell you at the end of every single video that I do,

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you have to be consistent and persistent. And when you do that, you're going to be successful. And a part of that is the way that you work and talk to lenders. You have to be consistent and persistent. You got to ask dozens of them and that's what's going to allow you to do it. Like 90% of the time they're going to tell you no. That means statistically you got to talk to at least 10 lenders before you get one that'll tell you yes. Okay? So stop getting into this frame of mind that I

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can't do it cuz this one lender told me no. Keep asking. Just keep going. That's how you're going to be successful. Okay? I promise you you can. You're going to find somebody who's going to work with you. You just have to consistently do this. That's how you're going to get there. All right, I'm gonna get off my high horse for capital and funding. It's It's one of those things that I like I hear you. You're confused. You don't know how to do it. It scares you, but I

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know you can do it. I know you can. All right, you can figure those things out. Let's talk about the U in the focus framework. This is understanding the rules and regulations. This is the other one that I hear from people. I don't understand how licensing works. I'm scared of it. It's confusing. I don't want to do it. That's why I'm not going to do assisted living. Stop that as well. It's not as hard as it sounds. Uh it's it's it's a lot easier. The the

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most difficult part honestly is finding the right licensing agency. I was talking with somebody in my road map challenge a few weeks ago and he said it's confusing. Like I could spend 15 to 20 minutes just trying to find the right site and then I don't even know if it's the right one. I've got to hope that it is and try to call them and figure things out. I get it. I have worked in the healthcare industry since 2013. I understand how stupid and confusing it is. Like, I get it. I have done

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insurance contracting with people and I have tried to get bills paid. I have done all the things in in the world of of healthcare. I get that it's hard and it's confusing and it's a pain in the butt. But also, I know that you can figure it out. The hardest part is finding the right agency. And once you do that, it is so much easier because after that, it's just a checklist that you got to follow. And it's it's really pretty easy. And the other thing is these people want you to get assisted

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living businesses. They are not out to get to you. They will help you along the path. So once you find who you need to be working with, you're going to get the right application. You're going to fill it out. They're going to help you out with it. Even for those of you, if you want to do an unlicensed home, by the way, type in unlicensed down below. But even if you're going to do an unlicensed home, I still think that you should be kind of following the process that a licensed home would do. Get familiar

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with what it looks like. Even try to find the person for the the process of becoming licensed and fill out the application as if you were doing this as a licensed facility. It's going to make your business now much stronger and make sure that you kind of futureproof yourself if they ever come to you and say, "You know what? We're actually not doing unlicensed facilities anymore. Everybody's got to be licensed. Make sure you do those things. It's going to protect you. It's going to make it a lot

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easier for you to get the insurance that you need. It helps you run a more efficient business. It's going to help you have the policies and procedures in place. Do those things even if you're unlicensed. Promise you licensing is not as hard as as you think it is. There are hoops to jump through. It's going to be timeconuming. I will give you that. But it is not as hard as you think it is. And you can do that. Now, the S in the focus framework, this is after you've done all of the things. This is having a

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strategic launch of your business. The most important thing you can do here is hire the right people. Find and hire the right people. If you're not going to be the administrator, make sure you hire a solid administrator who can run that business for you and knows what they're doing and they can take it and run with your vision. So important for you to do. And that's scary. I' I've had some bad situations. If you want to hear a hard story about when my administrator quit the week of Christmas, type in Christmas

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down below. I'll give you a separate video that's specific to that. But it it was hard and I've been there and it's happened to me multiple times. So, I get it. It's scary. It's it's difficult, but I'm fine as well, right? So, I've learned a ton from that process. But in addition to hiring the right people, you need to have good systems and processes in place. This is where in the understanding the rules and regulations phase, you're going to be writing your policies and procedures.

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That is your handbook for running your business. Make sure you follow that. Make sure you keep it updated. Make sure you do those things. But you're also going to have to do EHRs um or you're going to have to track the care that you provide to your residents somewhere. Ehrs is the best way to do it. You're going to want to be looking at meal planning and buying groceries and medication management and running payroll and all of these things that come with it. And it's it can be really

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hard because you go from this spot of, you know, if you're in healthcare, you're in real estate, this is a business and there's a lot that goes into that. And so you need to understand some of the the tools that you have at your disposal to make this work really well for you and to be able to run a successful and profitable business. So it's s super important for you to do that. All right. So we've covered a lot today. We went through the full focus framework. foundation first, optimal

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property selection, capital and funding, understanding rules and regulations, and having a strategic launch. And it all starts with creating that vision for where you want this to go. If you can do those things, you can follow all of that, you're going to have this blueprint, this road map that's going to help you get to where you want to be as you're trying to launch your assisted living business. I help you out with a lot of this in my roadap challenge. I told you at the start of the video, I've

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got a special offer for to work with me and that's inside my road map challenge. We do this multiple times a year. You can learn more about it. Go to roadmapchallenge.com. Would love to have you over there and and just give it a give it a look. It is a live coaching challenge. This is not courses. This isn't videos. This is me working with you directly, answering your questions, helping you build your personal road map. We go through a lot of the stuff that we talked about today. And you're

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going to come out of that experience with a lot of guidance and direction on what you should be doing next. Okay, that's what it's it's coaching. It's me giving you my time and helping you out. There's VIP sessions where you can get in for an extra hour every single day to ask me whatever questions you have. You can get extra access to the recordings when you do that. It's a lot of fun to be in there and to be talking with you and helping you out along your path. So, go check it out.

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roadmapchallenge.com. With that, make sure if you found this video to be helpful, like the video, subscribe, ring the bell so you can get notified every time we put out content. We go live on Tuesdays. We put out content on Thursdays. Share the video with people so that they can understand what they need to do to launch their own assisted living business as well. And you know, are you curious about assisted living, but you're not sure how to get started? I help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs launch profitable,

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purpose-driven businesses, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace in their lives. I help people from I don't know how to get started all the way to those that have facilities or looking to scale to multiple facilities. to find the program that best fits for you. Take my 30 secondond quiz at aliquiz.com. Would love to have you over there. And remember, it doesn't take a lot. Just just a little bit. Just keep going step by step by step. And I promise you, if you do and you are consistent and

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persistent, you are going to be successful. Thanks for watching and have a great day. >> [music]