Fast-growing Synergy HomeCare is aiming to cement itself as the clear market leader in home care by scale. But as the company expands, CEO Charlie Young is focused on striking a careful balance: offering a wide, varied portfolio of programs and services without overcomplicating operations for franchisees.
For Young, the biggest constraint on growth is the potential to overwhelm franchise owners with new offerings. This requires the executive to continuously test, refine and, at times, pull back on new offerings to keep the model streamlined and executable.
At the same time, Synergy’s physical footprint continues to widen. The company is on pace to open franchise locations in roughly 100 new territories in 2026, approximately matching its growth in 2025.
Tempe, Arizona-based Synergy, which was acquired by Levine Leichtman Capital Partners (LLCP) in 2025, operates in over 626 territories across 44 states. It offers non-medical in-home services including personal care, companion care, memory care and specialized care
Young sat down with HHCN to discuss his company’s growth engine, goals for growth in 2026 and finding the right balance of service offerings and manageable programs for franchisees.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
HHCN: Synergy added 101 new territories last year. Where are you at in terms of growth so far in 2026?
Young: Our growth engine, in terms of adding new franchisees and territory expansion and geographic markets that we serve, continues. The momentum we’ve been on has been a long-running story. We had a fabulous first quarter. I’m not quite ready to publish those numbers, but they are on pace or better than what we had planned and budgeted for the year. If we continue to perform this way, it’ll put us in the same category that we finished last year.
The demand for franchises is so strong largely because of the demand for home care service in the market. People see that there’s just a great business to be had here. And so we get all sorts of different people who are interested in buying these Synergy home care franchise locations.
What are the barriers to the Synergy growth engine?
The biggest challenge we have is that we have so many good things happening in our business that our franchisees have only so much bandwidth. In the last year, we rolled out new products, like the cancer care product; we rolled out a new CRM package; we did improvements to our recruiting management system; and we’ve introduced more data and analytics about their business. We’re giving them so much that they have to process and focus on, as well as programs for long-term care insurance and the VA, the biggest challenge for us is, how do we not overwhelm our franchisees? How do we get them to focus on the area that will make the most difference to their business? And it’s not one-size-fits-all. So we really have to work on an individual basis with franchisees and find the one or two things that are gonna have the biggest impact on the business.
So is there some restraint involved when you are creating some of these new offerings and service lines?
There is, indeed. That’s one thing we talk about all the time. We will hold rollouts and introductions of new ideas, because we just don’t think that the system can handle it at the moment. I spend a lot of time editing and prioritizing where we should be focusing or leaning in and where we should maybe pause. If we think that there’s something we’re doing that doesn’t serve this idea of helping franchisees do well while doing good, then we’ll sunset it, or pause it.
What are some of the techniques to help get buy-in and build scaffolding to support new programs and service lines?
It’s a lot of one-on-one interaction, a lot of communication in large groups, small groups and individually. We have a whole side of our business which we call the performance success team. We have the individuals that work in that group, who are largely the role of what we call performance coach. So they all have books of business of franchisees that they work with. So there’s a lot of one-on-one work, talking about opportunity, talking about organizational structure within the franchise’s business, their business plans and what they should be focused on. It’s a very hands-on approach to managing the business and to helping our franchisees.
It’s hard not to talk about AI these days. What’s Synergy’s approach to AI technology?
It’s very popular – it’s harder to do. Our approach to AI is really in two areas.
One is that we will invest in ideas, test ideas, and be focused on things that improve the client and caregiver experience. And then we will also invest in data and AI that will help us get better business intelligence and insights into the activities of our franchisees that are the most profitable and drive the most growth. And we’re doing some real promising work in that area. We have an AI-driven analytical scorecard that we give all of our franchisees that uses some pretty sophisticated back-end analytics to help them focus on the things that they should expect to see the biggest return on.
What’s your vision for Synergy in, say, five years?
Synergy is very much on a pathway to be the clear market leader in terms of size of company. I think that in terms of the number of markets we serve, the number of people that we serve, the number of franchisees in our system, I think we are on a clear path to be number one there. But beyond that, becoming a leader in defining what home care looks like in the future, because this is still a really young industry, a really developing industry. When we achieve the size and scale that I’m talking about here, we will have both the obligation and the unique position to really shape what care looks like in this side of the marketplace.
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