COVER SERIES

From Cockpit to Caregiving

What happens when a former fighter pilot & his family launch a homecare franchise

By Hannah Wolfson

When Dwayne Booker was looking to take on a new business, he knew he wanted to continue his family’s tradition of service.

After all, Booker spent 12 years as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force and comes from a family with a history of military roles. So when he landed in homecare, it allowed him to serve his community and scratch an entrepreneurial itch.

Booker and his family launched a branch of BrightStar Care in the Atlanta suburbs in January of 2026, offering medical and non-medical in-home care ranging from activities of daily living to infusion. In less than a year of operation, they have grown to about 40 employees and a census of about 35 patients.

A Perfect Partnership

Deciding to open an in-home care franchise wasn’t as random as it sounds for Booker. He wanted to partner with his wife, Brittany Booker, a certified family nurse practitioner with a wide range of experience in clinical care, and his sister, Duanesha Booker, who has over a decade of experience in senior living and rehabilitation.

With those skills, homecare made sense, and the idea of a flexible business based in their community sealed the deal. Booker still flies for Delta Airlines and is in the Air Force Reserve, where he serves part-time. His wife also retained her job as a consultant for a national value-based care company.

“I looked at the three of us—I did the old Venn diagram and just saw what fell in the middle,” Booker said. “With their experience in medicine and my experience in leadership and business consulting, we kept coming back to homecare. So that's how we landed on opening our agency.”

With Booker’s military background, he made it a priority to get credentialed with the Veterans Administration (VA)—something BrightStar Care of Locust Grove and McDonough was able to do very early in the process.

“I'm very thankful for the VA's support and for being able to find veterans a home with our company to get the care that they need, which is obviously one of the reasons why I started (the agency),” Booker said. “Vets taking care of vets is near and dear to my heart.”

Training Is Key

Probably the largest challenge in the role, he said, is managing the team’s employees, especially learning to support and motivate a wide range of generations, from baby boomers to Generation Z employees.

But growing the team has also been surprisingly rewarding, Booker said. While he knew they would find joy in serving patients, being able to provide jobs and growth opportunities—for example, two of their early caregivers now have office roles—has turned into a bigger reward.

“We were talking (recently) about planning our Christmas party—our first Christmas party, you know, we've only been open since January,” Booker said. “We've got 40-something employees. And we were talking about just being able to provide. We were talking about some of the gifts we were going to give. And to know that we are helping these folks and their families put food on the table, clothes on their backs and a roof over their head is purely chicken soup for the soul.”

One touchstone Booker frequently returns to is the way that the military provides training to members proactively. That means people are prepared to take on leadership roles before they step into a new position.

He also says his Air Force skills—and the skills of other veterans—are an enormous asset to the homecare industry and in business in general. After all, members of the service are highly disciplined and have learned how to meet strategic targets by working backward from the desired outcome to the start point.

“We arrive at solutions by being very result-focused,” he said. “A lot of the folks that run businesses or try to solve problems in their daily life, they're going to try to do it from A to B, like ‘This is where I am and this is where I want to go. But as fighter pilots, we're taught you actually do it in reverse, and it's very efficient and it saves you a lot of time.”

Couple that with the need to problem-solve in life-or-death situations while in the cockpit of an F-15 fighter jet, and running a business feels easy to handle.

“Sometimes we're flying faster than the speed of sound, and you get to a point where your brain adapts to that,” Booker said. “Your decision-making process adapts to that.”

The key is to plan for the situation well in advance, trust those decisions made in midair, and then come back to discuss what went right or wrong, Booker said—all sound business advice.

The family hopes to grow the business in the future, including the possibility of more branches and also moving into other parts of the senior care market. But for all his planning and goals, there was one factor Booker wasn’t sure would work out as well as it has: working so closely with his family, something friends cautioned him about.

“You know you want to build something for the family, but it’s like, are we going to survive kind of all of the low points and all that stuff?” Booker said. “It has definitely made us stronger. I think that's been a pleasant surprise just to know that all the strong bonds we had to begin with are only getting stronger.”

“Sometimes we're flying faster than the speed of sound, & you get to a point where your brain adapts to that. Your decision-making process adapts to that.”