About
A method, applied to the small-home capital of California
Sacramento Senior Guide exists because of a pattern that's hard to unsee: a family in crisis searches "assisted living near me," lands on a national platform, and becomes a lead. Their phone rings for weeks. The "recommendations" turn out to be whoever pays. And in a region where 84 percent of licensed senior care lives in small board-and-care homes with no websites and no marketing budgets, the platforms barely show families the actual market at all.
Who's behind this
I'm Johnny. I spent more than a decade leading customer support and success teams for enterprise software companies, which is a corporate way of saying my entire career has been taking calls from people having a very bad day, with real stakes on the line, and getting them to the other side. I'm based in Southern California, where I built this guide's sibling, Westside Senior Guide, on a simple idea: judge senior care by the state's actual licensing and inspection records, publish the real numbers, and show families how to verify everything themselves.
Sacramento gets the same method, and honestly, the method matters more here than anywhere. With 441 licensed facilities in Sacramento County and 158 more in Placer, nobody can personally know them all, including the people who claim to. What can be known: every facility's license, capacity, inspection history, citations, and complaint record, all public, all checkable, all checked before any community reaches a family we help.
How the service is structured
I run the guide: the research, the data work, the cost analysis, and the vetting standards. When you reach out, I connect you with an independent placement advisor who is local to the Sacramento region and works with families full-time: the calls, the tours, the negotiations, the move-in. Independent matters: the advisors we work with are their own businesses, no senior living company employs them, none owns a stake in them, and they place families across the whole market, from large communities to six-bed homes. As the site explains in plain English, communities pay the advisor when a move happens, the advisor shares part of that fee with us, and you pay nothing.
The standards
- Records over awards. Every community is checked against its California inspection record before it reaches a family. Disqualifying records disqualify, whatever the fee.
- Disclosure first. How everyone gets paid is explained before any referral, on the site and in every conversation. You should never have to wonder.
- Fit over fee. A $3,500 board-and-care that fits beats a $7,000 community that doesn't. The recommendation goes to the fit.
- Honesty about scope. No skilled nursing referrals, no medical advice, and a straight answer when we're not the right resource, including pointers to who is.
- One advisor, never a list. Your information goes to the single advisor helping you. It is never sold or shared further. The privacy policy says this with legal teeth.
Why the plain name
Because it says exactly what it is: one region, guided. Sacramento, Carmichael, Roseville, Elk Grove, and the communities around them. If your search is outside the region, we'll say so up front and try to point you somewhere good.