Jenna Wigam: $60M Home Care Bought in COVID, $350M Run Rate Five Years Later

The Setup

Jenna Wigam spent five years in healthcare investment banking, then an MBA at MIT Sloan, then seven years at Anheuser-Busch where she ran a craft brewery as a near-standalone P&L. She liked owning the numbers. She hated executing someone else's strategy. Her younger brother Dennis had a parallel arc at Wayfair. In 2018 they left their jobs and launched a joint search fund. They briefly chased a craft butter startup before deciding product-market fit risk was a distraction from operating.

By late 2019 they had two LOIs. One was FSI, a healthcare maintenance SaaS business (passed to searcher Zach, now five-plus years in). The other was Abound Health, a North Carolina provider of home-based care for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, bolted onto a behavioral-health EHR software company. The seller, Lewis, was an accountant who had built the software in the early 2000s, grown frustrated that his mom-and-pop customers never implemented it properly, then bought one of them (A Small Miracle) as a use case. He took it from roughly breakeven to 10% margin in nine months and proceeded to acquire seven more of his own software customers. A cold email (and a website featuring the Wigams' two golden retrievers as staff) got them in ahead of a formal banker-led process.

The Deal

Close: October 2020, in the middle of COVID. Price: ~$88M (about 8.8x EBITDA) with a $15M growth earnout, so $100M total potential consideration. Roughly $60M revenue, $10M EBITDA at close. Service (home care) was the dominant line; software was small but strategically load-bearing. 1,500 employees serving 1,200-1,300 individuals across North Carolina.

Capital structure was unusual for search. Husatonic Partners wrote 51% of the equity check through their PE fund; the rest came from the Wigams' search syndicate. That gave Husatonic four of seven board seats and voting control, a concession Jenna says was the price of getting a deal this large closed. It has worked out (no forced votes in six years) but she is candid that it could have gone the other way.

Operating Moves

Three growth prongs, attributed roughly 75% M&A / 25% organic:

1. Geographic diversification. Medicaid is a 50-state regulatory patchwork and any state can cut rates. They expanded into Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Michigan off a market study weighting demand tailwinds against state-specific reimbursement risk.

2. Service line expansion. Added pediatric complex-needs nursing in 2024 and personal care for the elderly in 2026, diversifying payer mix within each state.