I Regret Buying This Assisted Living Facility
Oct 09, 2026
Six years ago, I bought an assisted living facility, and honestly, I regret it. But that same decision also became one of the best things I could have done for my assisted living business. It taught me a lesson I wish I had learned before I bought my first facility. Want the full breakdown?
Watch the video below👇
Buying an Existing Facility Does Not Mean It Is the Right Facility
When I first started looking into assisted living, I thought I needed to buy a house and turn it into a facility. Then a mentor told me something that changed my thinking. He said, “Why don’t you just buy an existing assisted living facility?”
That sounded much easier.
An existing facility already had residents, staff, and a history of operating. I thought, if someone else had made it work, surely I could make it work too.
That was my mistake.
I had plenty of confidence, but I did not have enough clarity. I saw an existing facility and assumed the numbers had to work.
They did not.
The home I bought was built in the 1890s and had a lot of steep stairs. We served people with mental health needs, which was a population I cared deeply about. But the stairs limited the type of residents we could serve, and staff turnover could also be difficult.
I had not thought through these things before buying.
You Need Clarity Before You Take Action
I call this the Focus Clarity Quadrant.
Think about two things: confidence and clarity.
When you have low confidence and low clarity, you are in the overwhelmed zone. You want to start an assisted living business, but you do not know where to begin.
When you have lots of clarity but do not take action, you move into the research zone. You watch videos, study funding, learn about licensing, and research properties. You know more and more, but you still do not move.
When you have confidence but not enough clarity, you are in the hustle zone.
That was me.
I was ready to move. I was ready to figure things out. I believed I could make it work.
And I did get it done.
But I made mistakes along the way.
The goal is to reach the focus zone, where confidence and clarity come together.
đź’ˇ You do not need to choose between doing research and taking action. You need both.
Build Your Foundation Before You Buy a Property
One of the biggest lessons I learned was that you need a strong foundation before you start making big decisions.
I now teach this through three building blocks:
Your business plan helps you understand what you are building and gives lenders a clear picture of your plan.
You need to understand where people are moving, where people are retiring, how much competition exists, and whether there is a need for your assisted living business.
Do not just look at the numbers and hope they work. Run different scenarios. Be conservative. Ask what happens if occupancy is lower than expected or expenses are higher.
When I bought my first facility, I did not do these things well.
Later, when I was ready to buy another facility, I did.
That changed everything.
The Right Process Can Save You Time and Mistakes
After my first facility, I knew there had to be a better way.
My dad and I started looking at what we had learned. We wanted to know how we could repeat the process without repeating the same mistakes.
That is when I started building what I now call the Focus Framework.
FOCUS stands for:
-
Foundation first
-
Optimal property selection
-
Capital and funding
-
Understanding rules and regulations
-
Strategic launch
When we followed this process for our next facility, things moved much faster.
We found a market that made sense for us, built the business plan, worked through the numbers, found the right property, and worked through the rules and regulations.
The process took about four months to close on the facility, and the biggest delay was getting the licensing and policies ready.
That experience showed me something important: when you have clarity, your confidence has somewhere to go.
Ask Yourself Where You Are Before You Buy
Buying my first facility was not the right decision for me at the time. But I would not erase the experience.
It taught me how important it is to slow down, get clear, and build a process before taking a big step.
So before you buy an assisted living facility, ask yourself:
âś… Am I overwhelmed?
âś… Am I stuck doing endless research?
âś… Am I rushing forward without enough clarity?
âś… Or am I building the confidence and clarity I need to move into the focus zone?
You do not need to know everything today. But you do need a process that helps you know what to do next.
Wrap Up
My first facility taught me the hard way that confidence alone is not enough. You need clarity, a solid foundation, good market research, careful underwriting, and a clear process before you move forward.
If you can combine confidence with clarity, you can stop guessing and start taking the right steps toward your assisted living business.
If you need help creating a business plan for your assisted living business, check out the 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
6 years ago, I bought this assisted living facility and it was one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made, but also it was like one of the best decisions I ever made. So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about why I regret buying this assisted living facility in today's video and also why it ended up being one of the best decisions I could have ever made to help me along my path to launching my assisted living business. If you're interested in learning more about this process and
00:00:26
this story, make sure you go check out the workshop. It's going to be in the pinned comment down below this video. Would love to have you over in the free workshop. Okay, so let's get into it. Let me tell you a little bit about why I bought that facility and you know exactly what my process was for it. I had been looking to get into assisted living for about a year. I had been trying to figure things out. I thought I had to buy a home and convert it into an assisted living facility. And it wasn't
00:00:53
until I talked to a mentor of mine and he told me, "Brandon, why don't you just buy an existing assisted living facility? It's going to make your funding process easier. It's going to allow you to be more profitable more quickly." Uh, and I was like, cuz I didn't know I could do that. And as I started looking for opportunities and started talking to more mentors of mine, what I found is there are opportunities that are out there. After talking to my mentor that told me, "Hey, go buy an
00:01:18
existing facility." I went and talked to another mentor who told me, "Hey, I know somebody that's buying an existing facility right now." He introduced me who introduced me to my broker and he is the one that helped us buy our first facility, buy this facility. And it wasn't until I started reframing the way that I looked at things that things really started to shift for me. But I did something wrong when I went into this. I started just going all out and figuring, hey, this is an existing
00:01:48
facility. it has to be profitable. There's no way for it not to be. And as I got into it and owned this facility for about 5 years, I realized, hey, this probably isn't the best fit for me. But what I also did was I looked and looked for about a year. And once I found the right person and started talking to them, we went from, "Oh, cool. Here's a facility to closing 5 months later." And then I learned the entire process and was able to close on something, a second facility 4 months after that. So once I
00:02:18
learned, hey, there's actually a process to this, it went so much faster. So I'm going to draw this up for you so you can kind of see a little bit of what I call the focus clarity quadrant. All right. Now, the focus clarity quadrant, something that I have learned as I have gone through this process is there truly is a process for getting started in assisted living. I'm going to share a little bit of what that is today. But so many of you, you fit in somewhere in this continuum. All right. So we have
00:02:46
right here our yaxis and the y-axis is clarity right we we need to understand what what it is that we're doing the clarity part of it and our xaxis right here is confidence we need to have some level of confidence as we are trying to start our assisted living facility or our assisted living journey trying to get started on the path and when we have no confidence and we have no clarity We sit down here and what I call this spot is the overwhelmed zone. And so many people are sitting in this zone. You're just like, I know I want to
00:03:30
do assisted living. I don't know how to do it. It's really confusing. There's so many things that could go wrong. It just feels overwhelming. I don't have the money. I don't understand the licensing process. there's so many things that are coming at you and you feel overwhelmed and so you freeze and you don't move forward. Or you could be like uh a lot of people and you move up here and you start getting clarity. You start doing research. You start moving forward and
00:03:54
it feels like progress but in reality it's just fake progress. And you shift up here into what I call the research zone. Okay, this is where you get into analysis paralysis and and you you start working through things and you're just like, "Oh, I I know more about this than anybody else." But you can't take action because you you get scared like it paralyzes you. It it is one of those things where you start looking at the different funding options. You start going down YouTube rabbit holes and you
00:04:24
start just watching all of the things and start learning about funding and learning about licensing and learning about finding a right property and what you need to do there. And now you know more about people, but you can't move past it. Okay? Or you could do what I did in the scenario, the story that I'm teaching you with the house that I purchased and I just move forward. Got all the confidence in the world. I'm just going to figure this thing out. It's going to work for me. Everything's
00:04:48
going to go well. And when you have confidence, but you don't have clarity, you're over here in what I call the hustle zone. All right? And when you're in the hustle zone, this means that you are just moving forward. You're probably making mistakes. You're a bull in the china shop. You're going forward. You're trying to figure things out. You will make mistakes as you go through the process. The cool thing about the hustle zone is you're probably going to get there. But if you're like
00:05:16
some of my students or or people who don't come into my programs until it's too late, you make big mistakes. I was talking to a potential student of mine the other day that came to one of my challenges and they were able to start their facility and they did all the things. They got it going and then they called me a couple months after they had the facility running and they're like we got it done but now like I can't figure out the the hiring process and finding the residents is taking us a little bit
00:05:46
longer than we want to get to. And I was like okay well let's figure out your break even point. How many residents do you actually have to have? And where do we want your staff to like actually focus their time? Is it do we need to have them focused on residents? Do we need to have somebody that's going out into the community and building relationships? We need to figure these things out. And frankly, the process of what this individual went through is they were kind of in the hustle zone.
00:06:09
I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to move forward. And this is where I was 6 years ago when I started my first facility. Just a bowl in the china shop. I got it done. But it wasn't the best decision I had ever made. Now, for people that do this the right way, and this is what I teach, if you can bridge confidence and clarity and move forward that way, you're going to get up here into the focus zone. All right? The focus zone is when you have everything you need. You have you
00:06:41
have that clarity. You have that confidence because you've gone through things the right way. And that's what we need to work through. Now, focus, by the way, is an acronym. I don't have space up here to write it for you, but it stands for foundation first. So, we'll just throw it up on the screen for you. Uh, it stands for foundation first. The optimal property selection, finding the right house, capital and funding is next, which is figuring out the funding process. U is for understanding rules
00:07:10
and regulations and S is for having a strategic launch of your facility like actually running the business in a way that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So once we figured out, hey, there's a process here and I can follow this process, it's going to allow you to be a lot more successful. All right, so we have overwhelm zone. If you're just like, uh man, I don't know how to get started. Once you start doing a bunch of research, you're going to move into the research zone. A lot of people, they
00:07:36
just bounce back and forth between these two areas, right? And they just keep moving back and forth. People that get into the hustle zone, they generally just move forward, but they never get clarity. They never start moving up. It's once we really start combining these things and we start, okay, I've got to take action. I have to move forward. I'm doing all the research and now I'm going to like start taking action and doing the thing. I'm going to start implementing it. That is when we
00:08:05
start shifting ourselves up here into the focus zone. That's what's going to allow us to be successful. All right. So, this is something that I learned for myself and I learned it the hard way. And I want you to understand that as you are trying to start your assisted living journey, you need to do this. You need to get clarity. You need to get confidence. And when you get those things, it's going to make everything so much easier. So, drop in the comments like where are you struggling at the
00:08:31
most right now? I would love to see what's the thing that is holding you back. And as I go through the process of telling you why I regret buying this facility that I'm going to tell you about how it helped me once I understood this, it made everything go so much more quickly, more simple for me. It just made everything go so much better and it was just understanding that process. So as I was getting into this, what I had was all the confidence in the world. I was like, "Yep, confidence. I got it. I
00:09:01
got all the confidence in the world. I had done a bunch of research on how to get into real estate. I had talked to a bunch of mentors, but I had been looking for about a year and I was sick of looking. I was sick of just trying to figure things out and trying to to just like being in this holding pattern. I wanted to move forward. And when I talked to my mentor who told me, "Buy an existing facility." And I was like, "Oh, okay." Like this this is a cool thing. And the first time that I found a
00:09:28
facility, I found it on a site called lupinet.com. And I found this property and I looked at it and it said like, "Contact me, you know, contact the listing agent." And I did it and my phone started ringing. I started freaking out and I fumbled my way through the conversation. It was the worst conversation you have ever heard. But I learned a ton from that process. But that facility wasn't a good fit. I did have enough of the clarity piece to know, hey, I can't move forward with
00:09:56
this one. But I had kept looking and I kept thinking, oh, this is something that's going to work. And it just didn't. What you're going to notice here is this home that that we're going to pop up there for you. It's not what you would think of as a normal assisted living facility, right? It's tall. Like, it's it's it's big right there, right? You can see it's it's tall. It's it's multiple levels. It has Look at that fire escape on the side over there,
00:10:19
right? It has so many things on it that you're just like, "Oh my gosh, how could you turn that into an assisted living facility?" Now, in my mind, these things were moot because this facility had been operating for 30 plus years. Like, somebody knew what they were doing. They started it. So, I can make it work. Again, I've got all the confidence in the world. I'm going to figure it out and we're going to make this work. If it worked for somebody else for 30 plus years, it's going to work for me. That
00:10:48
was kind of my thought process as I went through this and I had these just rosecolored glasses on that everything's going to be fine. It's going to work out. We're going to be okay. I'm going to be able to start this facility. We're going to be profitable. But in reality, that's not what happened for us. And we did have periods where everything worked really well. But we worked with a population that I love serving. The population that we served in this house is mental health. Okay. So this is uh a
00:11:19
lot of our residents had bipolar or were schizophrenic and they are such an incredible population to serve. I loved doing it. So much I have worked uh in the mental health space for years professionally. Like this is not something that I take lightly. But what I also learned is it was really hard to deal with this population because we'd have a lot more staff turnover because of just the the way that you're working with the population. If they don't stay on their medication the way that they
00:11:46
need to, then it creates an atmosphere that's not super fun for people. And also, like I showed you, there's a lot of stairs in this facility. So even if I wanted to change it over and do elderly care, if I wanted to bring in an older resident into my home, I can't do it if they can't do stairs. Now, I did have 80-year-old individuals in my home, so this wasn't something that like, oh, I can't do old people at all, but they did have to be able to do stairs. There's a
00:12:12
lot of stairs in this house, and it's built in the 1890s. These are steep stairs, right? And what I learned from that process is stairs, while it's possible to have them in your facility, it can be something that limits in the type of resident that you bring into the home. So, you just want to be aware of this. These were things that I didn't think of. As I'm getting started on this path and I'm getting into this assisted living facility again, I've got all the confidence in the world. I'm going to
00:12:37
move forward with this thing. I'm not thinking about how are the stairs going to impact me. I'm not thinking about those things. I am not doing the research. I'm not doing those things right now. I'm just Yeah, somebody else did it. The numbers look pretty good. If we can keep it relatively full, we're going to be fine. Okay. I'm doing my foundation first kind of I'm just moving forward. I'm being very reactionary at every step along the path with this focus framework. I'm just being
00:13:05
reactionary in the way that I'm trying to get started and the way that I'm finding the property, right? I'm talking to a bunch of people. Oh, there's a property here. Let's go under contract and then we've got to figure out funding. Let's just reach out to dozens of lenders and see what sticks and let's have conversations there. I'm not being strategic at all. I'm not doing my foundation, which is my business plan, my market research, and my underwriting.
00:13:29
I'm just I'm going for it. And hopefully, we're going to figure it out. I have all the confidence in the world. I am hustling like nobody's business. Okay? And when it comes to understanding rules and regulations, a shoot, man, I'm going to figure it out. I'll figure out who I need to talk to at the state. We'll work through things. I'll figure that out. It was very reactionary. It took me a long time to figure this out. Oh, our residents have Medicaid. How am I going to figure that out? ah we'll
00:13:53
just figure it out. Right? Confidence. I'm not worried about clarity. I am just moving forward with it. This is where I made a ton of mistakes as I went through the process. And it's something that I want you to avoid as you're trying to start your own assisted living business. Because what I missed is that if I go fast and I just hustle and I just have confidence and I try to move forward and I just sit here and I hustle, I'm going to get it done. I will. like I I know me. Now you maybe you're different, but
00:14:24
I know me. I am going to get it done. Am I going to do it right? That's up for debate. Okay. And in this situation, I I I probably made a mistake. I I probably did not do things the way that I needed to. I figured, hey, I'm going to move forward. I'm going to have confidence. I'm going to move forward. I'm going to have hustle, and I'm going to get it done. For those of you who have watched the channel for a long time, you're going to notice in some of my early videos, I have this little block that
00:14:53
says dreams demand hustle. And I used to like live by that mantra. I found it at Hobby Lobby. I was like, "Oh, that's cool. I'm going to have it here." I used to have it behind me on YouTube. And since then, uh, I have shifted the way that I do things because now I know that I also have to do research. I got to get clarity. I got to move myself into the focus zone. And when I do that, I'm going to be have a lot more just a lot more success in the way that I'm building my business and and having
00:15:19
confidence that I'm doing things the right way. Okay? And what I learned as I went through this entire process with this facility up here is that there is a way a right way to do this. And here's what I did. Um, as I was going through this process, I decided that, hey, I I I partnered with my dad and we got done with this one and we sat down and we were like, okay, this was good. What did we learn here? And I knew that I wanted to buy more facilities. And so, I took some time. I was like, there's got to be
00:15:50
a way for me to do this again. There has to be a process here. I just did something. There's got to be something that I can replicate, right? I've got to figure this out. The focus framework is what I call it now. But I didn't call it that then. But what I realized is, hey, there is a process. And if I do this the right way, if I build that foundation first, that F part of the focus framework, I'm going to have a lot more success. And that is when I sat down, I talked to my dad and I looked at him and
00:16:18
I was like, "Hey, we've got some extra money. Are you interested in doing something else?" And he said, "Yeah." And I was like, "Okay, I'm going to do something here. I am going to do uh something." I I I teach this um inside of some of my workshops and and things like that. And if you're you're interested in that, go find the pin comment down below. But I teach that there are we're going to draw it up here. There's three building blocks that
00:16:42
you need to do when you are building your foundation. All right? The first building block is going to be your business plan. The second building block is market research. And the third building block is underwriting. Now, I don't care necessarily what order you do these in, but if you can do those things, you have a really solid foundation that you can build your house on. All right? And this house, by the way, like look at it. It is just it's so beautiful, right? It's like architectures digest. Look at those
00:17:15
windows, right? I'm a horrible drawer. Anyways, uh okay. So, what I learned is I need to focus on these three foundation building blocks right here. business plan, market research, and underwriting. And so that's what I did. I started going through and I was like, "Okay, well, we want to do an assisted living facility. Where might I find that there's enough people to do assisted living? What are the trends? Where are people moving? Where are people moving to retire? How much competition is there
00:17:42
in an area?" I started looking at all of that type of information. and started doing the research, started doing market research, and that's when I found for us the Boisee metro area in Idaho actually works really well for us. But it came out of doing market research, doing one of these foundational things. And I had done in the the C part of of this, the capital and funding, I had talked to literally dozens of lenders. I had been told no by so many people that it was frustrating. But I also learned, hey, I
00:18:13
know now what a lender wants to see when it comes to funding. And one of the things they want to see is a business plan, and I'm going to refine that business plan. I'm going to make it really, really good. Okay. So, I started working on the business plan. Now, I know I want to do this in Idaho. And now I kind of have an idea of where I'm looking at. We start shifting into, okay, let's find properties. Let's start looking for opportunities. And once I found, hey, cool, I've got a 16 bed
00:18:37
facility here. Let's spend a lot of time doing underwriting and let's be super conservative with it. I remember driving home with my dad. He's driving um from Idaho down to Utah where we live. It's about a 5h hour drive and I've got a hot spot on my phone to bring up my computer and I'm running numbers like for about 3 hours as we're going through it. What if we did this? What about this scenario? What if our occupancy is over here and I'm just running the numbers trying to
00:19:03
figure things out and it was coming through and building out that foundation. the right way that allowed us to identify the property we wanted. It allowed us to go under contract for that facility and four months after that close on the facility. And the thing that took the longest was this understanding rules and regulations. We're in a new state. We got to do new things. I've got to build new policies and procedures. That took us about 2 months. Had we had that in place, we could have closed in 2 months. Like it
00:19:30
would have gone so much faster cuz we had the lender in place, approved, everything was ready to go. they were just waiting on us to get the licensing, right? And so that's something that I learned. If I can build this foundation the right way and I get confidence and I get clarity and I combine those things and I shift myself into the focus zone, I'm going to be a lot more successful as I'm trying to to move forward with it. Okay. Now, as I was going through this process of trying to go on my assisted
00:20:01
living journey, I told you that buying this home was the biggest mistake that I made that I regret it. But I also told you that it was probably one of the best things that I could have ever done. And the reason for that is it taught me this lesson. It really taught me that there's a process here. And it taught me that if I focus on the business plan and the market research and the underwriting that I'm going to be able to move forward with a lot more clarity and a lot more confidence, get myself into the
00:20:28
focus zone and I'm going to have a lot more success when it comes to that. Right? And so that's what I learned. Had I not gone through the bumps and the bruises and the school of hard knocks of buying this facility that I it just was not the best opportunity for us, I would not have learned those things and I would be stuck like so many of you are right here in the overwhelmed and the research zone and just bouncing back and forth and trying to figure out how am I going to get into this? One of my
00:21:03
students looked at starting their assisted living business for 20 years. Okay, 20 whole years. That's a long, long time to be trying to figure out how am I going to get into this? And a lot of it is just bouncing back and forth between, oh, I'm going to do more research. I'm going to figure this out. Oh, this is a lot of information. I don't think I can move forward with it. And then you feel overwhelmed. And then you sit there and then 6 months go by. Okay, I'm going to dig it back up. We're
00:21:31
going to start doing this. Okay. And they know more than anybody else about this, but they can't ever get past this because they don't have the confidence that they need to start getting themselves into the focus zone. That's what you need to do. So, would I erase that experience of buying the home in Colorado? Absolutely not. I learned so much. And we came out of it, we sold it a little over a year ago. We came out of it fine from a financial perspective with a ton of lessons learned. And now as we have
00:22:04
gotten our footing underneath us and we've built out an a better more solid operations plan and we have hired the right people. Now we're going to start looking at how we can expand our operations moving forward. And all of that comes back to now I know there's a process. Now I'm going to follow the focus framework, get into the focus zone. And that is going to allow me to catapult myself into an arena that's going to allow me to be a lot more successful. Before you buy a facility, I
00:22:32
want you to ask yourself, where am I at in the focus clarity quadrant? Am I in the research zone? Am I in the hustle zone? Am I still overwhelmed? Or am I shifting myself up and getting into the focus zone? Once you realize that there is a process and you need confidence and you need clarity and when you get those things, that's going to allow you to follow a correct process and help you get started on your assisted living journey. And that's what's going to help you get there. And if you found this
00:23:00
video helpful, make sure you go and watch this video cuz it's going to help you understand the process of getting started, what you need to do, and how you can actually start moving forward. So, we'll see you over there.
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