Care acquisitions turn on what the sale particulars don’t say: registration realities, workforce dependency, fee books and quality risk. We are the provider-side eyes that see it before you sign.
Buying a care business is buying its operational truths: a registration that must transfer or be re-granted; a rating history and the practice behind it; a workforce whose stability walks out the door or doesn’t; a fee book of commissioner relationships with their own renewal risks; and premises, policies and records in whatever state years of operation left them.
Financial and legal advisers examine the numbers and the contracts. Our role is the operational layer they cannot: quality and compliance risk read from inspection history and records sampling; true staffing economics including agency dependency; the realism of occupancy and fee assumptions; safeguarding and incident patterns; and what integration will actually require in the first hundred days.
We serve both directions — buy-side diligence and integration planning for acquirers, and sell-side preparation for owners who want their business diligence-ready and worth more.
Recurring diligence discoveries in this sector: a Registered Manager central to the rating who is not staying; agency spend masking an unsustainable staffing model; fee levels historically negotiated and vulnerable at next review; regulatory conditions or recent enforcement not volunteered; and occupancy propped by placements at unviable rates. None necessarily kills a deal — each changes its price, structure or integration plan. Finding them before completion is the entire point of provider-side diligence.
Buy-side: the target's operational profile is assessed from available information. Sell-side: your business is reviewed as a buyer's diligence team will see it.
Registration, quality, workforce, fee book, safeguarding history and records are examined in depth, with findings quantified.
Findings feed your valuation, negotiation and structure decisions alongside your legal and financial advisers.
Buy-side: a first-hundred-days integration plan covering registration, leadership, staff, commissioners and quality. Sell-side: a remediation plan that lifts value before market.
It depends on the deal structure. A share purchase keeps the registered legal entity intact; an asset purchase generally requires new registration by the buyer — a process with its own timeline and risk that must be planned into the deal. We map the regulatory pathway for your structure early, alongside your legal advisers.
The public record first — inspection history, ratings trajectory, published enforcement — then the seller’s information against it. Our pre-offer assessments are deliberately fast: enough operational truth to decide whether deeper diligence is worth the cost.
Twelve to twenty-four months before market, ideally: time to strengthen ratings, stabilise leadership beyond the owner, tidy contracts and records, and let improvements show in the numbers. Sell-side preparation routinely returns multiples of its cost in price and deal certainty.
Providers, investors and owners buying, selling or merging care businesses.
Bring us the opportunity — buy-side or sell-side — before the numbers get emotional.