What’s Happening in Home Care M&A And How it Impacts Operators (Cory Mertz)

Every home care business will go through a transition at some point in time via buy, sell, or exit. Cory Mertz, Managing Partner at Mertz Taggart shares why owners often overestimate “the multiple” and underestimate risk, and how factors like reimbursement exposure, transition planning, and management depth quietly drive value. We talk about common blind spots in profitable agencies, why highly unique businesses aren’t always the most attractive acquisition targets, and how buyers are thinking differently today than they were a few years ago. Cory also opens up about the emotional side of selling, the life events that change an owner’s timeline, and what transition risk really looks like before, during, and after a sale.

Play Episode

min

Mar 4, 2026

What’s Happening in Home Care M&A And How it Impacts Operators (Cory Mertz)

Miriam Allred (00:11)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with you. Hope everyone's having an awesome week. In the lab today, I am joined by Cory Mertz, the managing partner at Mertz Taggart, a leading healthcare mergers and acquisitions leader in the space. I hope all of you know them, and if you don't, it's my pleasure to introduce you to them. Cory, thanks for joining me today.

Cory (00:34)
Thanks, Miriam.

So my name is Cory Mertz. I'm a seasoned M&A advisor. ⁓ I've been doing healthcare services M&A since 2006. So I've been at it for a while now. Based in Fort Myers, Florida. I grew up here. It's a nice place to be this time of year. Die hard Florida Gator fan ⁓ and alum. Go Gators.

Miriam Allred (01:00)
Amazing and been at it since 2006. What were you doing before this?

Cory (01:05)
Yeah, pretty different industry altogether. I had a short term in real estate, ⁓ but I was only doing that for about a year and a half or so. But prior to that, I had about a 10 year career in electronics manufacturing. ⁓

worked for a global EMS provider and for about 10 years held a number of roles in operations and business development. Ultimately settled into an M&A role. So that's how I kind of got my beak wet, I guess, in the M&A world. So we were acquiring manufacturing operations all over the world. ⁓

was kind of drawn to that. leverage that opportunity to get back into the healthcare services M M&A game in 2006.

Miriam Allred (01:53)
Okay. And your title is managing partners. you've got other partners that you, I believe, started this business with. How did you connect with your other partners?

Cory (02:05)
Yeah, so I have one partner. So he put the Taggart in Mertz Taggart. ⁓ His name is Kevin Taggart. He's based in Tampa now. But at the time, I met Kevin and his family ⁓ in 2009. They owned a home care agency, private duty home care agency in the Atlanta area. Really nice company. They engaged us to take the company to market, had a successful transaction. And that's how Kevin and I got to know each other. ⁓few years later, we were business partners.

‍

Miriam Allred (02:37)
Good deal. And talk about the early days of starting this mergers and acquisitions company. think that might be a little bit foreign to many people of how a company like yours initiates and gets started. What do those kind of early years look like?

Cory (02:56)
Well, so I had already had experience. So we started the company in 2014. So I'd already had experience with another M M&A firm doing M M&A, home care M M&A.

So we, Kevin and I actually worked there together for a couple of years and then we transitioned out of that company in 2014. We had a one year non-compete, know, which we of course honored. So that's how we got into the behavioral health services industry. So we established ourselves in behavioral health, you know, in the early days and just focused on that, built up that practice. And then, within a couple of years we had, pivoted fully back into

into home-based care in addition to behavioral health.

So the way we're organized today is we have two business units. We have our behavioral health business unit. My partner Kevin heads up that business unit and I head up our home-based care business unit. And we're organized around representing sellers. That's pretty much all we do is sell side work.

Miriam Allred (04:01)
Okay, and explain that a little bit

more. So you represent the sellers, meaning you're connected to the buyers. And I've asked you some of this like offline, but I think this is interesting for people to understand. Talk about your relationship and how you've come to build your reputation with the buyers to be able to successfully represent the sellers.

Cory (04:22)
Sure, yeah, you know, think it helps to have been doing it a long time. You know, I think, we have a good reputation in the buyer universe. You know, the materials that we put together and present them are, are professional and credible. I think they understand that we're always gonna run, you know, a competitive but fair process. ⁓

to be honest. We may not share the whole truth, but we're going to be honest in our dealings.

And I think over time, buyers have learned to respect that. So over time, we built our database of what we call both the strategic buyers and the financial buyers out there. Strategic buyers are in the industry currently. They're looking for additional opportunities so they can expand their business. The financial buyers tend to be looking for platform opportunities that they can kind of build off of.

So we built up those databases over the span of the last, I guess call it 12 years now. And we continue to build it. It's a dynamic thing. New buyers pop up all the time. Fortunately, I think we've got a pretty decent presence. So they tend to find us if we don't pick up on them.

‍

Download Transcript