Much has been said about the social and business opportunities buried within the COVID-19 crisis. Who hasn't been on a video conference when someone tried to invoke Sir Winston Churchill's quote: "Never let a good crisis go to waste."

In the middle of May, I had the opportunity to participate in a conference call with leaders in the field of providing support services to individuals affected by intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD) during which we discussed the impact of COVID-19 on our services. This group consisted of direct service providers, area agency/managed care providers, and those who help with consulting and/or planning services. Representatives shared their current perspective of COVID-19 and how their services were affected, how they are planning for the "next phase" of communities opening back up, and the possibility of another lockdown.

While home medical equipment (HME) providers are well-recognized for adapting to change, especially as insurance companies shift requirements and the healthcare industry matures, what happened with COVID-19 blindsided everyone. Planning and projections went out the window. Now, we're trying to settle into a "new normal" that keeps changing.

By mid-to-late March, we all felt the immediate effects of the "lockdown" of our communities. Some healthcare businesses stopped services entirely while others saw a large dip in those offered. Organizations with a diversified payor source probably fared better than single-source providers, everyone felt the effects. At VERTESS, we had some deals stop, some slowed or paused, and others moved along. Progress — or lack thereof — all depended on the confidence of the buyer and ability of the seller to adjust.

The VERTESS team of mergers and acquisitions advisors have seen many successes in their careers. We've also witnessed some failures when representing healthcare owners who could not sell their businesses. For some of these owners, their window of opportunity was lost for good. Fortunately, for others, they were able to eventually complete a transaction, but often learned some difficult lessons in the process.

For sellers, there are many factors to consider when evaluating typically complex offers. Once our team gets a business out to buyers, we take competing bids and provide a side-by-side analysis to sellers to help simplify how offers compare with one another. Our job as mergers and acquisitions (M+A) specialists is to explain these in their entirety. Owner financing, carried interest, and indemnification caps all present (possible) future opportunities and/or problems. When these side-by-side comparisons are completed, there is almost always a clear monetary winner. But is it all about the money?

The time has come when we are all being forced to embrace technology, whether we like it or not. Before the coronavirus pandemic, some businesses implemented extensive information technology (IT) solutions to support their operations while others resisted. In these unprecedented times, we will need to not only embrace technology, but rely on it.

While all of healthcare has been hit hard by the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, some industries have been affected more than others. Much of the news has focused on the impact to those facilities providing care to clients and patients, such as nursing homes, senior living, hospitals, and urgent care centers, there's another industry that's been greatly impacted but is under the radar: pharmacy.

The healthcare industry is continually in flux. Business owners and operators of urgent care centers (UCCs) are constantly experiencing changing regulatory guidelines and suppressing reimbursement from payors. These unpreventable changes and a demanding environment may lead owners to seek monetization of their assets. For those UCC owners considering selling, there's good news: The marketplace is currently hungry for your companies and buyers are eagerly gobbling up well-performing UCCs.

Integrated care is one of the big buzz words in the human services industry. Integrated care is fundamentally the combination of primary healthcare and mental healthcare in a single setting for the purpose of creating a team-based approach to general and mental care. As managed care becomes more commonplace in human services, payers are pressing for its providers to achieve the objectives of integrated care. As a result, providers are finding themselves tasked with the challenge of further decreasing cost while improving outcomes for those receiving support services.

In July 2015, Diplomat Pharmacy was the talk of the town. Momentum seemed like it was on the company's side, with Diplomat looking poised to be a major player for many years to come. But, as it is often said, "the higher they rise, the harder they fall." In December 2019, UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx agreed to acquire Diplomat for about $4 a share in cash. What caused this "All-American success story" to come up so short on expectations?

We're in that time of the year when business owners see their year-end financials and begin to make decisions for the upcoming year(s). Oftentimes, the succession planning you had in mind when you started the company, such as passing the torch to a family member, doesn't look as promising as you had hoped (if you even planned that far ahead). If succession planning isn't an option for you, there's one that almost certainly is: selling your company.