What Stops Most People From Starting an Assisted Living Business?
Mar 27, 2026
Starting an assisted living business is exciting, but it can also feel confusing and overwhelming. Many people want to get started, but they get stuck before they even begin.
In this post, I’ll show you the three biggest things that stop people from getting started, and what you can do to move forward.
Want the full breakdown? Watch the video below👇
Fear Makes Starting Feel Risky
The first big reason people don’t start is fear. This shows up in many ways when you’re thinking about launching an assisted living business.
You might worry about regulations and licensing. The rules can feel complicated, and it’s easy to wonder if you’ll get something wrong. Some people also fear losing money. That’s a real concern, which is why learning how to underwrite your numbers carefully is so important.
Others worry about caring for residents. If you’ve seen a bad experience in a facility before, you might feel pressure to do everything perfectly.
And then there’s the fear of failing in public. Starting a business means putting yourself out there, and that can feel scary.
Here’s the truth I’ve learned. Fear is normal when you’re building something new. But fear doesn’t mean you shouldn’t move forward. It just means you need a better plan and clearer steps.
âś… Take time to learn the numbers and understand the regulations so fear becomes confidence.
Overwhelm Happens When There Are Too Many Steps
The second big challenge is feeling overwhelmed. There are many moving parts when you start an assisted living facility.
You need to understand:
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Property options
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State regulations
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Licensing steps
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Funding options
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Operations and staffing
When you look at everything at the same time, it can feel like too much. Many people get stuck because they don’t know where to start.
I call this the overwhelmed zone. This happens when you don’t yet have clarity or confidence.
Some people respond by researching nonstop. They watch videos, read articles, and study regulations for months. This becomes analysis paralysis.
Others jump into the hustle zone. They work hard and try everything, but they don’t have a clear direction.
Neither approach solves the problem. What actually helps is getting a clear starting point.
đź’ˇ Instead of trying to learn everything at once, focus only on the next step.
Confusion Comes From Not Having a Proven Framework
The third thing that stops people is confusion.
This usually happens when someone is trying to learn from too many places at once. They watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, read blogs, and follow advice from several experts.
Suddenly, they hear different strategies and don’t know which one to follow.
When that happens, people start mixing random advice together. They take one idea from one person and another idea from someone else.
That creates a messy plan with no structure.
Without a proven framework, it’s hard to know:
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What to do first
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What to do next
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Which steps actually matter
You might still make progress, but you’ll probably make expensive mistakes along the way.
âś… Follow one clear roadmap instead of piecing together random advice.
The Real Goal Is Getting Into the Focus Zone
When you combine clarity and confidence, something powerful happens. You move into what I call the focus zone.
This is where progress becomes much easier.
Think about it like taking a road trip. You could probably reach your destination by guessing and following road signs. But it would take longer, and you might take wrong turns.
When you use a map or GPS, the journey becomes much simpler.
Starting an assisted living business works the same way. When you have a roadmap, you know exactly where you’re going and what steps to take next.
A strong framework usually includes phases like:
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Building your foundation
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Choosing the right property
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Securing capital and funding
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Navigating licensing and regulations
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Planning your strategic launch
When you follow a structured process, you move from feeling stuck to taking clear action.
đź’ˇ Clarity creates confidence, and confidence creates momentum.
Wrap Up
Most people don’t start their assisted living business because of fear, overwhelm, or confusion. The good news is that all three problems can be solved with clarity and a simple roadmap.
If you take things step by step and follow a proven framework, you can move from feeling stuck to confidently launching your assisted living business.
If you need help creating a business plan for your assisted living business, check out the Free Business Plan Checklist.
And if you’re ready to figure out your next step, join me for the next Roadmap Challenge, where I’ll walk you through how to get started.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00 - 00:00:50
Hey friend, have you been trying to start an assisted living business, but you're just like confused? Maybe you're just like, "Ah, I feel so overwhelmed. I can't figure out how to do this. I don't even know where to start." Well, in today's video, we're going to be talking about what stops most people from actually kicking off their own assisted living business. So, if you need some help with that, you need some clarity, you want to get some confidence, make sure you stick around for today's video.
00:00:30 - 00:01:16
Hey friend, my name is Brandon Gustafson. I help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs launch profitable, purpose-driven businesses, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace in their lives. I love doing this. I'm super excited to top into this topic with you today to help you learn how you can get unstuck and actually kick off your assisted living business. So, if you're interested in that, let's hop into it today. But before I get started, I want to encourage you if you need some help
00:00:53 - 00:01:37
with this, go join me in my next roadmap challenge. roadmapchallenge.com. I'll tell you a little bit more about it at the end of the video. So, make sure you stick around for that and learn how I can actually do this for you, but it's a great experience and an opportunity for me to really help you out as you're trying to get things going and launching your assisted living business. And if you can't do that for whatever reason, time commitment money, which it's very affordable, by the way, go check out the
00:01:15 - 00:02:02
profitable assisted living facility. It's my book. You can get it at the alibook.com. It's a bestseller in several categories on Amazon. So, I would love to have you get that. takes everything in my brain, puts it on some paper for you, and lets you really make some progress. There's some action items in there. Can really help you make a difference on your path to launching your assisted living business. Also, go over to assisted livinginvesting.net. I've got a bunch of free resources for
00:01:39 - 00:02:30
you over there, including an underwriting calculator. Go grab that. And if you're just like, "Yeah, you know, this guy's cool. I like his videos. They're pretty awesome." Go take my quiz at aliquiz.com. It's a 30-second quiz. will tell you the different options that you have in front of you to work with me directly to help you out in launching your assisted living business. So with that, let's hop into it. What stops most people from kicking off their assisted living business? I don't know
00:02:03 - 00:03:03
what is it. The thing that I see is there's three big things. Fear. Fear is one. Okay, you have this fear of getting it wrong. You're just like, I don't I'm scared. I don't know if I can do this. the fear of the regulations and compliance like that's scary. Licensing that that whole process is just feels very very overwhelming. Um it's just like I I don't know if I can figure it out. The fear of losing money and this is real. Uh this is why I take you through underwriting. Go again assisted
00:02:34 - 00:03:28
living. Grab my free underwriting calculator. But the fear of losing money is real and it's something you should take very seriously. But I also am 100% confident that if you take it seriously and you underwrite and you're very conservative in your underwriting, you will be able to be profitable. And we take you through also how to understand those numbers in the roadmap challenge. So go check that out, roadmapchallenge.com. Maybe you have a fear of harming residents. You're like, I just I've seen
00:03:01 - 00:03:56
so many other facilities. Maybe I my family member had a bad experience at assisted living and while I know that I could do better, like that's still a lot. and you just have this fear of what if I can't care for the risk and I what if I do them harm not intentionally but just because I'm running a business and it's it's hard to run a business or maybe you have fear of public failure like you're scared of actually putting this out into the world and saying I'm doing this world everybody come just
00:03:28 - 00:04:26
like watch me do this and then all of a sudden you fail and I like I totally get that I've actually had a business that failed not an assisted living business another one but it was hard and it has now become a part of my story. And when I tell it to people, they're like, "Oh, I'm so sorry." But as difficult as it was for me to have a business that failed and have to sell my house and live with my parents for a year after having been married for 15 years and having two kids and and trying to
00:03:57 - 00:04:58
navigate all that, as hard as that was and as embarrassing as it was, I don't know that I would have changed that like the sequence of events that that happened. I probably would have still made the decision I did. maybe slightly different, but I probably would have still made those decisions. It probably still would have happened, but my family got closer because of it. I learned a ton and I'm in a better place for it. And that fear of failing in public is real. But I also want to tell you, you
00:04:26 - 00:05:24
can get past it and they're just things. Everything will be fine, right? So, it it will be okay. I I get it. I'm going to acknowledge you, but I also want to tell you it'll be okay. All right. The second thing that that I see for why most people they just get stuck when they're getting started is they feel overwhelmed. So, I teach what I call the focus zone. The the focus clarity quadrant is what I call it. And we'll try to draw this up here for you, but on your y-axis, in this quadrant, you've
00:04:56 - 00:05:44
got clarity, right? Over here on the x-axis, you got confidence. And when you are when you don't have clarity or confidence, you're in what I call the the overwhelm zone. And that's that's what we're talking about here is just feeling overwhelmed. There's there's too many steps. There's I don't know how to do these things. You just feel overwhelmed. And you're down here in this bottom left quadrant, right? And and it's really hard for you to get out of that. And you can remedy it by
00:05:20 - 00:06:08
getting some clarity. You know, you read watch a bunch of YouTube videos. You you go and you read regulations, whatever. You get into research zone. you get into analysis paralysis and and you're up here in the top left, but you're not. You're you're still kind of stuck, right? Or maybe you you just hustle. You you just you're going to work harder than everybody else. You shift over into what I call the hustle zone, and you're you're getting there. Um and we're going to
00:05:44 - 00:06:35
talk about that here in just a second, but you're over here in the hustle zone. Okay, let's come back over here to overwhelm really quick and then we'll get over to the hustle zone. Um, so there's a lot of steps when it comes to launching an assisted living business. You could feel overwhelmed because there's just like too many rules that you have to follow and understand and just kind of work through. Maybe there's just like too much information online. You're watching my videos and you like
00:06:10 - 00:06:58
them cuz they're just awesome. You like the video, you subscribe, you ring the bell, you get notified every time I put out content. Uh, and and you just love it like and I thank you for doing that. So if you haven't, like the video. Anyways, so you're doing all those things. You find information online. You're watching other people on YouTube. You're doing all of these things and you're just like, "Oh my gosh, this is overwhelming. There's so much stuff here. Which of these things should I be
00:06:33 - 00:07:18
following?" Right? You feel overwhelmed. You don't have a clear starting point either, which go to roadmapchallenge.com and give you the starting point right there. So there's boom, got you covered with that one. But you don't have a clear starting point and that's overwhelming because you're just like, I don't know how to get started. I just I'm lost. I I I watch these videos. I don't know what to do. And that's real. I I bring people into my Facebook group
00:06:56 - 00:07:51
and I ask them like, "Where are you at?" Like, "What's what's your biggest hurdle in getting started?" And I would say half the people are telling me, "I don't know how I don't know how to get started." And so that's a lot of what I am teaching you how to do. Making sure you understand how you can get started. Okay. And also, this is a big one. This is I think adds to overwhelm quite a bit. Everything you do in this world feels urgent. It feels like you got to
00:07:22 - 00:08:10
do it yesterday, right? So that's like that's you. It's like, oh yeah, I I've been there. And so I want to tell you, yeah, you got to get stuff done, but also it's okay if it takes some time. I was just talking to one of my students. It's taken her about 18 months to go from she's been working on it for a long time. She's busy. She's got a full-time job. She's mom. She's, you know, she's got a bunch of stuff going on. She's doing this out of state. It's taken her
00:07:47 - 00:08:43
a long time, but she just got the fire department approval and has submitted her license. It's taken 18 months. It it can take a while. It can go faster. Like I did two and five months, so it can go faster, but it can take you quite a while to get to that point. So yeah, everything feels urgent, but also it's okay if you take your time and work through it. It's okay if it takes you some time. I'd rather have you take time to figure out how to do this and do it right than rush through it and make some
00:08:15 - 00:09:08
very big and costly mistakes. So, so don't do that. The third thing for why people don't get started is confusion because they don't have a proven framework. This is going back to our our focus clarity quadrant. They're in this hustle zone. They're just I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to go for it anyways. I'm just I'm going to figure it out. And that that's probably how I got started. When I look at my my focus clarity quadrant, after I got out of
00:08:42 - 00:09:36
this overwhelm zone, I probably shifted mostly into the hustle zone. Actually, if you watch my early YouTube videos, you'll see behind me, I have this thing that says dreams demand hustle. And that means very different to me now than it did then. But at that time, it was like heck yeah, I'm going to hustle harder. I'm going to work harder than everybody else. I'm going to get this thing done. And that was my mindset. I've shifted quite a bit since then, but that's where I was. And
00:09:09 - 00:10:09
you know, you but I was confused. I didn't know all the stuff I was doing. I was just moving forward. When you get in that hustle zone, you can make progress. And when you're up in the research zone, you can make progress, right? You can you can do all these things. But you also need to realize that having a proven process, a guide, a proven framework, these things are going to make a difference for you. Because when you're in this this confusion state, this hustle zone, you you're unsure of
00:09:39 - 00:10:19
what comes first or what comes next and what you should be doing. You're mixing random advice together. You're watching my video. You're watching Serge's videos. You're watching the residential assisted living academy, the RAW Academy videos. You're watching all these videos. You're listening to people on podcasts. You're hearing all this stuff and you're just like, "Oh, cool. Well, I got to do this. Well, this person said I should do that. I don't know which flip
00:09:59 - 00:10:44
a quarter. Which one should I do? We'll go with this one." and you're just kind of working through stuff, but there's no structure to how you're doing it. And you might make progress. You're going to hustle. You'll probably get there eventually, but you're going to make a ton of mistakes. You're going to get lost. You're going to probably lose money. And and these things are are really bad. So, stop mixing that random advice together. Get something that's
00:10:21 - 00:11:20
structured. You don't have a clear road map that you can follow. You should be working through that. And you are probably also constantly second-guessing your decisions because you don't know which steps or steps you should be taking next or first or where you should be. So which of those ones resonates most with you? Because I'm sure at some point or right now you feel the fear, the overwhelm or the confusion. Like which of those three matches where you're at right now? Type it in the
00:10:51 - 00:11:43
comments down below. Let's come back over here really quick to our focus clarity quadrant. So, what I want to do is I want you to get clarity. Again, that's our y- axis. And I want you to get some confidence over here on the x- axis. I want you to do those things at the same time. And that's where you're going to get up here in the top right into what I call the focus zone. You want to get to a spot where you have clarity, you've got confidence, you're doing the work, you know the work that
00:11:17 - 00:12:13
you're doing, and you do that by having frameworks and and road maps to help you get where you need to be. It's like, you know, we went to Oregon this past summer and we're going up there. We live in in Utah and so I've got to go up and there's a few ways I can go to get there um to get over to the Oregon coast and I I could have probably figured it out on my own. Like there's street signs and highway signs and stuff like that. We probably could have made it, but if I didn't have a map or I didn't have
00:11:45 - 00:12:33
Google Maps up, I I could have, you know, maybe I took a wrong turn and we went up to northern Oregon or we went up to Washington or, you know, you're getting into Portland and you're along the Columbia River and what if I accidentally took the wrong exit and now I'm in Seattle and it's just like that's not where I wanted to go. So, what you should be doing is having a road map, having a guide, having a framework, a system that's going to work for you. And a lot of what I teach is to help you do
00:12:09 - 00:12:56
that. The challenge, the roadmap challenge is one of the best ways for me to do that to help you build a road map so you know what you should be doing and understand if this is going to work for you and take the right first steps. Go to roadmapchallenge.com to learn about that. The focus framework is my five-phase process for helping people launch an assisted living business. This is the framework that you should be following. This is, you know, going back to taking random advice and just trying
00:12:32 - 00:13:22
to like implement it stuff and trying to figure out how you're going to get this going. Use the focus framework. Foundation first. You have to build a foundation. Optimal property selection. Choose the right kind of property for you. Capital and funding. Get the funding. There's there's so many options out there for funding, by the way, way more than you understand. Understanding rules and regulations, the licensing process, what's that going to entail, your policies and procedures, getting
00:12:58 - 00:13:49
everything submitted, finding the right licensing agency. These are all big things that that you need to figure out. And then finally is strategic launch. you follow those things, you're going to go from, I don't know what I'm doing. This is an idea. I want to do it, but I feel so overwhelmed. I'm scared. I'm confused. I don't know how to get started to following this path, going creating a road map for yourself, following a framework, and that's going to help you get to where you want to be
00:13:24 - 00:14:17
in launching your assisted living business. Okay, so we talked about a lot today. We talked about fear and overwhelm and confusion. I want to know where are you in that process? I also want you to know that you can get out of whatever you're feeling. And maybe you feel all three of them or two of them or I don't know what you feel, but maybe you feel that way. But I promise you, you can get out of it. You get more clarity. You get more confidence. You get into the focus zone. And everything
00:13:50 - 00:14:36
all of a sudden becomes so much better for you when you follow a process, when you follow a road map, when you have a system and a framework that's going to help you launch your assisted living business. So, if you found this video helpful, make sure you like the video, subscribe, ring the bell as well so you get notified every time I put out content. We go live on Tuesdays and put out content on Thursdays, all designed to help you launch your assisted living business. Go check out the roadmap
00:14:13 - 00:15:08
challenge as well. Roadmapchallenge.com. I'm going to tell you a little bit about it right here. It is a live coaching experience. It is not a webinar. It's not some weird recorded thing. It is me live in a virtual room teaching you how to make progress, answering your questions, helping you create the road map that's going to help you launch your assisted living business. So, go check it out. roadmapchallenge.com. I would love to have you in there. Uh, again, it's live recorded. Come join us.
00:14:40 - 00:15:26
roadmapchallenge.com. If you need some help, you can't get into the challenge for whatever reason, go get the book, The Profitable Assisted Living Facility. You can get it at thebook.com. I've got links there for you so you can go get it. Again, bestseller in a few different categories on Amazon, which is really cool. Uh, but it really helps you out and helps you launch your assisted living business. I would love to have you do that. And if you're just like, I don't know which of these is going to be
00:15:03 - 00:15:49
best for me, go take my quiz, aliquiz.com, 30 secondond quiz will tell you, hey, books best for you, roadmap challenge, one of these other programs, they're the best fit for you. And use that to get into the right program to help you launch your assisted living business. Are you curious about assisted living, but you're not sure how to get started? At Assisted Living Investing, I help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs launch profitable, purpose-driven businesses, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace in their
00:15:26 - 00:16:01
lives. I love doing this. It is so much fun for me. Go check out the challenge, roadmapchallenge.com. And remember, it doesn't take a lot, just a little bit. Just keep going step by step by step. And I promise you, if you do and you are consistent and persistent, you are going to be successful. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
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