The Momentum in Senior Care Franchising Continues
Baird’s Multi-Unit & Franchising Team Shares Category Perspectives After Advising on Second Home Care Franchisor Deal in 2025
Fueled by strong fundamentals and surging investor interest, the senior care franchising market is experiencing unprecedented momentum. As an advisor to two of the sector’s most notable transactions of 2025, Baird is very attuned to today’s senior care franchising space and its opportunities for investors. Our team shares its perspectives on the current landscape below.
Recent Baird-Advised M&A Transactions in the Senior Care Franchisor Category
How would you characterize the current state of the M&A market for senior care franchisors?
The energy and engagement around the senior care franchisor category has never been higher, with four completed M&A transactions over the past 24 months (Senior Helpers acquired by Waud Capital, Synergy HomeCare acquired by Levine Leichtman Capital Partners, Brightstar Care acquired by Peak Rock Capital and Always Best Care acquired by Nexphase Capital). Baird advised on two of the most recent and notable deals in the category, representing both Synergy Homecare and Always Best Care in their recent sale processes.
With every completed deal, the energy around senior care franchising continues to build with a growing and increasingly diverse pool of investors looking to gain exposure to the category. What’s driving the energy? Extraordinarily attractive category fundamentals: highlights include an enormous addressable market, near double-digit recent & projected category growth, tremendous fragmentation and a plethora of growth levers. When you combine the attractive category fundamentals with the always-in-favor franchisor business model, it’s easy to understand why the universe of potential suitors for these businesses continues to grow.
What have you observed as it relates to valuation trends within the sector?
As energy and engagement continue to grow around the category, so too have valuations. What's driving this upwards pressure on category valuations? Much of the step-change can be attributed to how senior care franchisor stories have been articulated in recent processes and the corresponding impact on the market's perception of the category. Specifically - storytelling has evolved to focus on both the non-medical nature of the service offering and, perhaps more importantly, the underlying franchisor business model.
As perceptions have shifted, and with the market now largely viewing these businesses as consumer service franchisors (albeit with a slight healthcare bend), we’ve seen a marked impact on both the depth and orientation of the potential investor universe. Once primarily comprised of healthcare-oriented investors, the investor universe for senior care franchisors is now made up of a healthy mix of both healthcare and franchisor investors, with both groups viewing the category as an elegant and low-risk way to participate in the large and growing senior care market.
What do investors focus on when assessing the quality of a senior care franchisor?
Not unlike franchising at large, investors in the senior care franchising space are focused on who in the category is driving the best underlying return for their franchisees. On one hand, driving returns entails brand building and marketing and generating new client referrals. For more sophisticated franchisors in the category, driving demand might also involve support in navigating diversified service offerings and payor sources – both of which hold the potential to unlock incremental (albeit potentially complex) revenue opportunities.
But in a category where demand is often not the governor of growth – equally as important as the demand side of the equation is how franchisors support franchisees in managing a notoriously challenging labor pool. Franchisors that understand the importance of supporting franchisees in their efforts to recruit and retain caregivers continue to position themselves for share gains given their franchisees’ unique ability to accommodate continued growth in demand.
And at its core – it is difficult to overstate the importance of helping franchisees manage the challenges and complexities of the category in a profitable manner. Focusing on more than just top-line growth and helping franchisees manage caregiver wages and other G&A necessary to scale their business is critical to driving energy and engagement across the franchise base. For franchisors that do all of this in an impactful manner, the systemwide growth and momentum is hard to stop.
What do the next 12-24 months hold for the senior care franchisor sector?
Our team is highly bullish io the near-term opportunity for both buyers and sellers in the category. Given the strength of the M&A market for senior care franchisors, the strength of category performance and the number of assets with institutional backing approaching the end of a traditional hold period, our expectation is the category’s healthy level of M&A activity should continue.
With our team’s recent momentum in the sector, supported by a hybrid approach that combines the power of our expertise across both franchising and healthcare / provider services, there is no team on the Street with a more informed perspective on how to optimize value within the category.
Interested in learning more about trends in this space? Connect with Baird’s Global Investment Banking team.
