10 Most Trusted Senior Care Service Providers 2022 Vol 2

they were discharged from the hospital. He visited them in
their personal homes and assisted living communities when
he noticed that many of them were being discharged into
places that didn’t match their care needs.
Witnessing this, he had an idea of a service which could
help families match their care options with their appropriate
care needs. “Families for decades were used to using real
estate agents to find a new house. I was convinced that
finding care for their parents was much more important. I
founded my first company called Preferred Assistance.
Fifteen years later it morphed into the current largest Senior
Placement franchise system in the nation, called
CarePatrol,” Chuck stated.
He and his wife, Becky refined their business model with
formalized systems and began franchising in 2009. In 2014,
they acquired their biggest competitor and doubled the
system in the same year. And the rest was history.
CarePatrol was acquired by a large private equity firm in
2018, Bongiovanni stayed on two-and-a-half years before
he moved on to Majestic Residences. Before he franchised
CarePatrol, he seriously considered creating a franchise
system for residential care homes. However, at the time,
there wasn’t enough residential care homes in the country
for it to make sense. After he stepped down at CarePatrol he
followed his passion to franchise the residential care home
industry.
The residential assisted living home industry is primed for
success in franchising because there is an established and
growing market with a built-in demand, the industry is
extremely fragmented, it is unorganized with substandard
marketing practices, behind in technology which can
improve care and in desperate need of general office and
backend management.
When you put this all together you have a natural recipe for
success for franchising, scaling, and branding. The only
problem was that Chuck had no experience in operating a
home. The universe conspired to help him realize his dream
and he met his business partner, late Gene Guarino and the
rest of the Majestic Residences’ team.
Gene was a well-known leader and fixture in the residential
care home industry. He founded Residential Assisted
Living Academy (RALA), a “school” that has taught
thousands of people how to open their own residential care
home.
Between Gene’s expertise in the operations of these homes,
and Chuck’s experience and expertise in franchising, the
duo believed they created something that will have a
permanent mark in the assisted living industry. So, in the
middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, they took the leap and
founded Majestic Residences Franchise Systems, LLC.
Braving the Pandemic
The entire world came to a standstill with the advent of the
global pandemic. Those who took the risk of thinking out of
the box, not only survived but thrived. And Chuck did
exactly that.
It’s only natural to see all the negatives that life throws at
you. COVID-19 wasn’t just a curve ball, it was a curve ball,
fast ball and a knuckle ball combined. While many in the
healthcare industry went into survival mode, he saw an
opportunity. he knew that many small residential care
homes wouldn’t make it through the pandemic due to
negative consumer’s perceptions.
The biggest challenge for him, however, was starting a
company in an industry where the consumer was too afraid
to purchase their services. While nursing homes and large
assisted living communities took the biggest public
relations hits, small residential assisted living homes did
very well at controlling the virus. There were very limited
fatalities compared to the others.
However, due to industry fragmentation and the lack of the
power of branding, many of these individual “mom and
pop” businesses couldn’t get the message out to the public
about how truly safe their homes were.
He knew that many of them would feel alone and on an
island during the pandemic, wanting to be part of a bigger
support system after it was over. “Our franchised homes
gaining higher occupancies during COVID then they had
prior to the pandemic,” shared Chuck.
Technology to Ease Care
Chuck believes in the power of technology in the healthcare
space. Companies in the healthcare space must invest in
new technology and be prepared to adopt a fail-fast
business model to realize the technological breakthroughs
they need to stay ahead of their competitors.
Companies need to think outside-the-box and take the risk
of implementing technologies like virtual reality and