CT man founded a company after experiencing unreliable home care for his dad. Now its going national

Hartford Courant – Monday, July 20, 2026
By Sean Krofssik

Madison resident Bryan Dylewski founded Middletown-based Solenvia in 2014 after experiencing unreliable home care for his ailing father. Twelve years later, his company is on the verge of going national.

Solenvia, formally known as The HomeAides, is expanding its transportation and caregiver reliability model nationally through franchising. The company is finalizing six to eight franchises by the end of the month in Connecticut and beyond. Dylewski said he hopes to have 150 franchises throughout the country within the next three years.

Dylewski said his company addresses the home care industry’s most persistent but overlooked challenges: Caregiver transportation. Dylewski said he experienced the challenges firsthand when helping his father through his ALS battle. He found that many home care providers don’t have reliable transportation and many home care providers want to work but many can’t afford Uber or Lyft consistently.

Solenvia provides caregivers transportation to and from the client’s house. The company has a fleet of company cars and drivers that operate across the state to pick up caregivers and bring them home after a day with their client.

Solenvia has serviced 3,500-plus families in Connecticut and Massachusetts since its founding with 80 to 90% of the business coming from Connecticut. Dylewski said he’s excited to replicate this through franchises across the country with the demand for senior home care rising.

Dylewski said searching for reliable home healthcare for his father compelled him to start the own business in 2014.

“My father had a terrible accident and ended up falling and had severe head trauma and was later diagnosed with ALS,” Dylewski said. “While he was in the hospital, he was in a skilled rehab and was getting therapy but like most people, my dad wanted to come home and did not want to stay in a nursing home.

“We took him home and he needed 24-hour care. In order for the rehab facility to discharge him, they needed to know that there was 24-hour care in place. I interviewed and hired a couple of Connecticut companies in the Hartford market and had negative experiences with them,” Dylewski said.

Dylewski said reliability was “a big issue” across the board. A number of home health care providers would show up two or three hours late at times or sometimes not at all. Eventually, Dylewski hired a private caregiver that, between that caregiver and himself, provided 24-hour hour care for his father.

Dylewski said in his experience, many of the caregivers didn’t have the proper knowledge, training or support from their agencies.

“I had an expectation that when the caregiver came in, they would actually know what needed to be done. That wasn’t necessarily the case,” Dylewski said. “This experience was personal. My father was dependent on having this caregiver by his side on a day-to-day basis. … It hits home when you think “I can do a better job.”

“I thought if this was happening to me, this is a real industry issue and I started The HomeAids,” Dylewski said. “I learned the real issue of caregiver reliability started with transportation. A lot of caregivers that are in the marketplace are limited to one vehicle or don’t even have a vehicle or have a vehicle that is not reliable. That’s an added cost component for caregivers coming from cities like Hartford or New Haven and the clients are in the suburbs like South Windsor, Manchester or Vernon. That’s a distance for caregivers to travel each day.”

Dylewski said what he experienced with his father was that a lot of these companies were basically placement agencies. “You called them and then they just sent the caregiver and that caregiver didn’t really know a lot about what was going on,” he said. “There wasn’t that interaction between the agency and the family. I thought that was crucial.”

To combat that, Dylewski said Solenvia implemented a service plan manager position. The person in that position does spot checks with the caregiver on a weekly basis and it could be multiple times a week.

“We believe that it’s crucial for the caregiver to have ongoing support. We want to have eyes in the home with the family to be able to make any adjustments,” Dylewski said. “Maybe the care plan needs to change because mom or dad’s condition is progressing and there needs to be some changes made to the approaches. There are different behaviors that are coming up and new behaviors that need to be addressed and the caregiver needs to be trained on to have a successful outcome. When you see this in motion, you see the results. … Families are happy.

“For the client who’s at a frail stage of their life, it’s important that they’re comfortable with the caregiver in the house and when you see that, it’s rewarding,” he added. “We have clients that have been with us for years. We’ve had clients who have had 24-hour services with us for 11 years. That’s big.”

Dylewski said when he started the business, he knew transportation was one of the first issues he wanted to solve.

“I saw it as being valuable and crucial to delivering a successful service and a quality service. That’s where it all starts,” Dylewski said. “It starts with the caregiver showing up. What I was doing was creating this delivery model to the client, and it closed the gap in the industry.”

Dylewski said his unique offering provided more consistency in scheduling the caregivers. In addition to the transportation delivering care on time, caregivers were also happy with the provided transportation.

“If you could fix that problem, that transportation issue, then it’s a win-win for everybody. That’s what we’ve been experiencing over the years. We believe that we’ve created a care delivery model that is unique and has several differentiators. The market is responding favorably to it,” Dylewski said.

Because of the success over the last 12 years in Connecticut and Massachusetts, Dylewski believes this unique business model can “potentially transform the home care industry.”

“I’m proud of the fact that it’s a Connecticut-based company and we have an opportunity to have a national presence. We launched our franchise initiative in mid-January of 2026. Since January of 2026, we actually have six to eight pending franchise agreements that are out with a closing of potentially 10 to 12 territories throughout the United States,” Dylewski said.

Dylewski said he hopes up to eight initial franchise agreements will be closed by the end of the month. Those territories include new territories in Connecticut, as well as in Georgia, North Carolina and Florida.

“We believe that’s just going to continue to evolve. We’ve partnered with a franchise development company, one of the largest ones in the country. They understand our business model. They understand the senior care market space. They know the differentiators and we have projected out to have over 150 locations over the next three years,” Dylewski said.

Dylewski said the franchise model brings in owner operators, and they “see the differentiators.”

“They believe in the brand. They invest in it. They believe in the processes that we’ve created. We provide training and ongoing support to them to grow into their markets and territories that they purchase. We believe that that is the way to scale,” Dylewski said.

Dylewski said the company closed at $12.7 million in revenue in 2025. That’s been a consistent number over the last few years. The peak was about $15 million in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“While most agencies and most businesses in Connecticut were shut down, we were growing. When people were discharged from the hospital positive for COVID-19, they were calling and needed 24-hour-care. We were providing caregiving services and we still do today. When someone calls and does a request, we can provide a placement within two or three hours. Most agencies, it takes three to five days to get a caregiver,” Dylewski said.

Solenvia has a pool of nearly 700 caregivers in Connecticut and a fleet of about 20 vehicles in its transportation department.

“Once the clients schedules are created and filled, we know the caregivers that need transportation on a day-to-day basis. That schedule goes to our dispatch department, and we have routers that actually develop routes for each driver,” Dylewski said. “Our drivers start their day at 5 a.m. and their route is already developed. They know exactly where to go to pick up the caregiver and what client they need to bring them to. That’s done on a day-to-day basis.”

In all, Solenvia does about 1,600 transports per month.

“The transportation is the part of the business that connects the caregiver to the clients. Without it, we would probably be just a typical agency that could only manage a caseload of $1.5 million or $2 million a year in business revenue,” Dylewski said.

Dylewski said the success of his business “keeps my father’s spirit alive” and that gives him goosebumps when he thinks about it.

“I never thought of growing nationally and franchising. But as the years evolved, I saw the business model and its benefits. I knew I had something unique,” Dylewski said. “Franchising was the way to go. You got to get people who are invested in it. You’ve got to get owner operators. And if owner operators, if you can get owner operators to buy into the model, they’re going to grow it. They want to make impacts in their local communities, and I just got to give them the tools.”

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