Best Life Brands, the holding company for a handful of senior care companies, is officially entering into the home health space. It is doing so thanks to a new acquisition, which it announced Tuesday.
Specifically, Best Life Brands has acquired the home health agency formerly known as “PROHealth Home Care.” The agency provides in-home nursing, therapy and home care services to patients in the greater Los Angeles area.
It will now operate under a new name after the Best Life Brands purchase.
As an overall company, Best Life Brands has already ventured into at-home care through its home care franchise ComForCare, which is also known as At Your Side in the Houston area. Now, however, it feels primed to move into the more medical side of things, J.J. Sorrenti, the CEO of Best Life Brands, told Home Health Care News.
“Home health has been part of the company’s strategic plan since I joined the company a year ago,” Sorrenti said. “It was just about us finding the right business to acquire, one that we could learn fast and scale quickly across the country. So once we identified the business that worked well, with those criteria in place, we just moved forward with the acquisition.”
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan-based Best Life Brands acts as the holding company for a group of companies that takes care of clients across the continuum of care.
The company is backed by the private equity firm The Riverside Company. Its network also includes CarePatrol, a franchise senior placement organization, and the estate sale franchise Blue Moon Estate Sales.
The deal expands Best Life Brands’ roster of companies to four brands and diversifies its overall offerings. It plans to begin franchising the home health company immediately.
On its end, PROHealth Home Care has been operating in and around Los Angeles for over 20 years. It now gives Best Life Brands an opportunity to get in on the demand for home health amid the public health emergency.
At the moment, there are no specific scaling goals for home health expansion. Instead, Best Life Brands will be doing everything it can to learn the business and make sure it has the right model to scale it appropriately.
“It’s about being able to scale a business while leveraging the franchisee who’s interested in expanding the brand in a local market, so that when a client wants to talk to an owner, the owner is in the business,” Sorrenti said. “That allows us to scale much faster.”
Best Life Brands will first work with its existing franchisees across its other three brands to see if they are interested in buying into the home health arena. Additionally, it will market the opportunity to other prospective franchisees.
This process will take time, but the company ideally wants to move as quickly as possible, Sorrenti said.
“The demand for that business is growing so much,” he said. “We understand the business model can be difficult at times, but we’ll help our franchisees navigate through that with our expertise.”
That expertise will come from a transition team, which includes the two founders of PROHealth Home Care, who are nurses.
The company has aspirations that go beyond home health as well. There are “a dozen” other paths in senior care that Best Life Brands is exploring, Sorrenti said.
Overall, its strategic plan is to continue adding complementary companies that serve older patients with diverse needs in a more effective and holistic way.
“Our franchisees have been very resilient through COVID-19, and this is an opportunity for us to add a complimentary brand to help them continue to grow their businesses,” Sorrenti said. “And we want to continue to add brands to the portfolio so that we can catch a senior as they become a senior and help them through the end of life.”
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