Episode 3: Aaron Harper- Rolling Suds Franchises

Welcome to another episode of The Franchise Business Radio Show powered by the franchise sisters and sponsored by their company, franchise intellect, a consulting firm that provides knowledge of the franchise community and thoughtfully aligns aspiring, ambitious entrepreneurs with the right franchise, investigate before you invest by contacting the franchise sisters.

Hello. Pam curry here, co host of The Franchise Business Radio Show, along with my business partner, my sister and co host Sherry curry, thank

you. Pam, yes, excited for another great episode on the Franchise Business Radio Show. Hashtag the franchise sisters. That’s

right. Hashtag the franchise sisters. For our listeners, I just want to remind you that the Franchise Business Radio Show was intentionally founded to be a platform to bring together business professionals, to connect, educate and collaborate, to serve those in the franchise community and those considering franchise business ownership. And I’m very excited about our guest on the show today, and part of the reason for that is he has been a very valuable contributor to the franchise community, and I think you’re getting ready to learn a little bit more about that and everything. Even goes so far as to say And Sherry my guests, you’ll agree with me on this. Not only do we respect this guest as a franchise professional, but we really consider him to be a wonderful business friend.

Absolutely, I definitely consider Aaron a friend and a business professional that I very much enjoy interacting with and working with. And part of the reason for that is because Aaron comes to the show with deep franchise knowledge. He is a visionary and places a high value on business relationships and responsible franchising, which we all believe in, hashtag responsible franchising, we would like to welcome our guest, Aaron Harper, CEO of the franchise, rolling suds, power washing. Welcome Aaron.

Awesome. Thanks so much, guys for having me. We’ve been talking about this for years, and I’m so stoked that we get to sit down and do it, and I’m a huge fan of the franchise. Sisters.

Well, thank you. And as Sherry said, I we kind of like, we love, we like each other a lot. As Sherry already stated, you are the CEO of rolling suds, power washing. And really love your backdrop around this. However, first, could you please share more about your background and your franchising career?

Sure, yeah, yeah. So I’ve been in franchising for years, all in the residential and commercial services space. So starting with the carpet cleaning concept, as an employee working in the development side, so helped scale that brand by about 200 locations in three years, that business was purchased by a platform, organization of service brands, and they wanted me and the leadership team there to help grow that company by adding brands and locations across the country, kind of in a family of brands. So when we got involved there, there were three brands. We merged. We became five brands. They bought a sixth brand in the drywall repair space, and it’s just the middle of COVID. They gave it to me. They’re like, Aaron, sell this. I was like, Hold on. Let me like, figure out what I’m selling. And so I called the 40 franchisees under territories that were sold, and realized very quickly that some infrastructure needed to be built in order to get us to that next phase of growth, and we needed to do that before we sold any franchises or awarded any territories. And so we did that, hired a brand president, him and I went and on a listening tour to get to know all the franchisees, and then we built systems around everything they needed. The first franchisee launched. He was cash flowing in his first month. Had no experience in drywall repair, so I felt we were prepared to grow that company. So from October of 2020 to October of 2022, I personally, with the help of many friends or consultants, added 223 locations to that business in 24 months. And thank you. What’s even more amazing is they all opened, and they opened in the time we said they were gonna open. So when I left that brand, we were signing up a new franchisee about every seven eight days. And then we were launching seven franchise groups across the country every eight weeks or so, six to eight weeks, depending on the training schedule. We sold out the whole country. Became the biggest drywall repair company in the world. And I started thinking, what’s my. What’s my thing? What’s my next thing? Like, do I want to go and work for another company and do this again? Do I want to start my own business? Do I want to start a sales company? What do I want to be a franchisor like? And it became really apparent to me that I did not want to do what I did for those companies for anyone other than myself. And and they did offer me a pretty amazing job. I mean, like, I’ve told you guys about it, like it was would have been on target to earn probably close to a million dollars a year had I just done what I had done in the past. And I would get to shape a brand from scratch, and they were going to double my salary, and I get a title with the word president in it, and, and I turned it down before doing that. And I think this is an important part. I went to my wife and I, she was six months pregnant, and I said, I really want to franchise a business. And, you know, I’ve been kind of talking about doing my own thing for a few years. I don’t have the business yet, but I want to, but I want to find it. I promise I’ll find it. I’m going to, I’m going to raise capital. Never raise capital before, but, like, I’m pretty sure I can get it. What are your thoughts? And and she said, Aaron, I know you’re going to take care of us. Go do what you want to do like we’ll be fine, and that’s why we have good partners. So I I then went and sought out across the country to find a business that I could franchise. I wanted something that I could replicate in every market, something that was recession resistant, something that had unskilled labor, something that was super fragmented, something that had a proprietary process, something that didn’t have 10 other franchise brands competing. I basically wanted to find a unicorn of a business. And I looked at about two dozen of them, until I found rolling suds in September of 22 it’s the best business I looked at 34 year old power washing company with great founders, great processes, great systems, everything I was looking for, and I acquired the franchise rights to the business, partnering with the founders to create a national franchise brand. In January of last year, we finalized the transaction. We took the brand to market end of February.

We now have 197

locations in 27 states, 54 franchisees. Thank you. 54 franchisees. 47 of them are open and operating with trucks on the road. 25% of those franchisees have added another truck, and 30% of those franchisees have added another at least one other territory. So we in the last 18 months, we’ve sold 54 franchisees. We’ve opened 47 of them. The rest of them will be open by September and and, you know, I live in Nashville, as I mentioned, you have before we I do races, triathlons, stuff like that. I’ve got a three year old son, and my daughter’s one so

beautiful family we’ve had that we’ve been fortunate enough to actually at least meet part of the family you have. I don’t think so. Yeah,

you met Margaret. You did meet Murray. Murray was at school, but yes, you got to meet Margaret and my wife, Sarah.

Absolutely adorable. You know what, Aaron, what I really like about your story and behind rolling Suds is I really see the marriage of the the two sides, right? You, you found someone like you, found the unicorn to be able to partner up with that had a proven track record. They had the proven methods of operations. They understood the industry. And then they found you too, right? And I knew they bring in that industry business model expertise, and you’re bringing in the franchise expertise. Really that perfect combination. So I’d like to understand a little bit more about the actual business model itself. Yeah, talk to us about that.

Yeah. So it’s a 34 year old residential and commercial power washing company. We’re close to about 60% commercial. So a lot of people, when they think power washing, they do think it’s kind of like a baby business, a side business. Maybe someone buys a machine, or rents a machine even, and goes and kind of does driveways. We’re doing water towers, parking garages, apartment buildings. We can power wash four or five stories from the ground. We can do a 3000 square foot house in 20 minutes, start to finish. So we’re kind of operating on a different level, and a lot of that has to do with the sophistication of our equipment and the proprietary nature of the work that we do, the process that we have. So I joke. But like, the business model is we spray water and soap on the side of buildings and then we rent it off, and then they pay us money for making the house or the building or the structure clean. Like that’s the business model. We don’t do anything else. We don’t mess with Windows. We don’t do gutters. We don’t get up on roofs. We can do it all from the ground. If it’s above five stories, we can send out Jerome. Loans to the franchisees across the country, and they can do anything above five stories with the drones that we have. So it’s truly just the simplicity of a building and a structure needs to be cleaned at some cadence. And we can do it better, faster, stronger than any other power washing company out there, and we are the first nationalized power washing company that is coast to coast

out there. So,

so a very fragmented space, right? Anytime you have a fragmented space that’s really an opportunity for a franchise or to come in and dominate,

which is here too. Yeah, Aaron, I actually remember being in an airport with you when you were, you know, in the process of making this transition, of taking a franchise and launching it yourself, and you know, you wanted something that was fragmented, that you could be the first to be the national brand, and obviously that is what you’re in the process of trying to do here with rolling suds. I do love the story. I know you shared a little bit already, but when it comes to taking a brand and converting it into a franchise, you can to see two things happen. The founders stay on board, are 100% invested and and the growth and the development of that brand. Other times, they don’t necessarily stay on board. They give you all of the proprietary technology, and then they kind of step away and maybe want to do something different. I would love for you to give us a little bit more background on your founders. It’s great story and their commitment to this franchise.

Yeah, so I’m, I’m not an expert in power washing. I’m an expert in franchising. And I made that very clear to anyone that I was evaluating to franchise their business is like, I’m not going to pretend to know how to build like how to do the best type of lawn care or the best type of power washing, like I can build systems and build teams and raise capital and scale a franchise, but I still need the institutional knowledge of how to properly train franchisees to power wash or teach their employees how To power wash and lead the company. For that reason, the way I structured the deal is the founders of rolling suds, which is the Wenling family. They started the business in 1990 Brian Wenli senior started it, you know, with his wife running the office for 13 years, and him running the truck. And then they started to scale. And then Brian wendley Jr came in after college, and really has almost quadrupled the size of the business at this point. But I did not want them to just like, run off into the sunset and like, I wanted them to be with me till the end, because a it’s the best thing for franchisees and B I do think it’s the best thing for them, because with them being part of rolling suds now, and you know, I’m the largest shareholder in the company, they’re the second largest shareholder in the company, they get to have an opportunity that they would have never been able to have with just their corporate owned local business. And so the way you structure the deal is you make the the equity and the opportunity meaningful enough for them to to stay invested. And I think that that’s really important. I have seen brands that don’t do that, and I worry about where that institutional knowledge comes from in order to transition, because the success of a franchisor is largely dependent upon how well they do a knowledge transfer to their franchisees, right, and and so the founder son actually called me at the end of last year and was like, Aaron, I’m having two Aaron, I’m having so much fun working with franchisees. Can I come on full time on your leadership team? I was like, Absolutely, let’s go. Like, when can you start? Yeah, like, when can So, so he’s our Vice President of Operations. And very, very like, this is everything to them, the wetland family, like it’s everything.

No, no doubt I love it, because I know the family started out involved, but just in speaking with you, it sounds like more members are coming from the family, and everybody’s invested. It is truly a family that wants to make an empire. And you, are all family in this. But I also want to get into, you know, just the true business model. So some of the basics, what is your your growth has been incredible. 2022 I think, is when you started this, when you actually started franchising, might have been a little. Later, you can get the details on that, but I think you’ve already shared a little bit about your initial growth, but you want to play that out a little bit about how much you’ve grown in the amount of time you’ve done it, and kind of throw in, if you don’t mind, some of the growing pains you dealt with and how you picked it.

Yeah, absolutely so. So met them in 22 in September of 22 we worked a deal out from September of 22 to the beginning of January of 23 acquired the brand in the first second week of January. During from the minute I met them till January, I effectively started ask, acting as the CEO of the company, which any lawyer would tell you, that’s a bad plan. I was investing 10s of 1000s of dollars in my own money and rebrands and manuals and training programs and all the stuff that I knew we were going to need so that we could launch in February. I was like, we’re going to get it done. We’re going to get it done. And then took the brand to market in end of February of 23 so now it is July of 24 so that is up about 1718 months, so a year and a half. And in that time, we have added 197 locations in 27 states. Wow. I had to learn in the last 18 months how to be a CEO and founder of a startup. And there’s no real books you can read, and trust me, I tried that will that will just teach you this is how you be the CEO and founder of a startup. The only way to learn how to be the CEO of a company is to be the CEO of a company. And now I was fortunate in the sense that I had pre existing franchise experience working for what is now the second largest conglomerate of service brands in the world. However, other than one or two employees underneath me, I was an individual contributor, and now we have 20 employees. And then we also opened a corporate location, so we’ve got about six employees there. So in 18 months, I’ve gone from or two years, let’s just call it, since September of 2022 from an employee that made a good income on a w2 level to the leader of one of the fastest growing franchises in the country. Now, in that you’re going to learn stuff personally, you’re going to learn stuff infrastructure wise, you’re going to learn like and it has been the most intense professional development course I’ve ever gone on. So one of the the hardest things that I had to learn pretty early on is when to remove someone from an organization and and I will say that is that is still something that I’m that I’m figuring out, right? Like, I have a lot of compassion. It’s one of our core values, is compassion. I want what’s best for my team, and I want that. I want them to grow, right? However, like, when you grow a company at the rate that we’re growing like, you’re going to outgrow team members. And I saw this, this influencer post that, like, basically a company starts to get up to a million dollars. You have a few generalists, and like you as the owner, are doing like, all these roles. And then you get up to $5 million and then, like specialists, some specialists come in and start to replace generalists. And then once you’re 10 million or above, you you had just have a bunch of specialists that come in and run the company who are good at like finance or good at HR, good at marketing, but the company can’t afford specialists when they start. And you don’t need specialists when you start. You need people who can put on the the HR hat or put on the marketing hat. And and there were a couple times where I tried to promote generalists into specialist roles, and it it back to bite me and, and in retrospect, I probably should have gracefully removed those individuals from the company and put them into giving them the opportunity to go work somewhere else where their skills could have been utilized. But when I had to let someone go for the first time, that was really hard, because I have a lot of compassion, and I want what’s best. But I saw this video that the CEO of LinkedIn, an interview that he did on like 60 minutes, and he goes sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do for the person who’s working for you that’s in the wrong seat is remove them from that seat so they can go find a seat that is more fulfilled. Healing for them, and while it’ll be painful for a period of time, they’ll get to go be an opportunity that will allow them to grow, rather than inhibit growth. So those are some things I also learned that, you know, the marketing of a franchisor really needs to be. It’s one thing for a franchisor to like provide resources and support and analysis, but for them to do it in house is not something that I would recommend any emerging franchisor to try to do. We didn’t do it in house, but we managed the vendors, and we paid for the vendors on behalf of the franchisees and build them. We don’t have any control over whether the marketing vendor can produce in Wichita, Kansas versus Dallas, Fort Worth like we don’t have any any control now we can hold those vendors accountable, but we can hold them accountable a lot more if the franchisees pay them directly. So we recently brought in a specialist who has built marketing programs. She’s incubated brands from scratch. You’ll see the announcement go out here in the next couple of weeks on LinkedIn, but she’s done this before, and she’s building an infrastructure that will be able to better serve franchisees and on the marketing side. And so, you know, this is all stuff that I’ve learned in a very condensed period of time, but it’s given the us the opportunity to sell and open units at the same pace. And, and I always say, like, like, we’re the worst we’re ever going to be. Right now, you know what I mean? Like, we’re gonna, like, my team is gonna constantly get embedding so like, right now we’re the worst we’re ever gonna be. And so I’ve created a culture amongst my team, understanding that if we can get 1% better in every realm of the business, every day, like we’re, we’re, we’re great, but I feel like once you’ve, like, arrived, or you feel like you’ve, like, figured it all out, like you’ve lost, right?

So continuous

improvement, yeah, I that’s making me think, and Sherry great with all of that growth, and you’ve said you’ve built out a team, and you’re continuing to build out that team. How are you keeping in pace with the growth and the infrastructure? There’s a balancing out there,

so you have to pre invest, and I think that’s one of the reasons why franchisors don’t do it, is a they don’t know who they need to hire, and they don’t know what systems they’re going to break, because they’ve never been a franchisor before. They’ve never seen challenges come across. So I’ve been involved with multiple brands. Not one of them has had as many employees as we have on the corporate team right now. They’ve had shared employees from different departments, but, I mean, we’re over staffed, and I did that on purpose because I want, I’d rather have the coaches established and knowledgeable now, then wait six months, and then we need a coach, and then we got to train them up, and then the franchise, like I’d rather have the team before the news. So we are set up right now to handle three or 400 units right now with the team we have.

That’s great. That’s great. I’m gonna, I’m gonna pick on the growing pains a little bit more. And I think the sign of a good leader like yourself is the ability to pivot, be that visionary, right? Really putting some right, just some appropriate things in place, but share the story about how you got you had to pivot when it came to your equipment and your trucks.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’d be happy to so

So creating trucks and building trucks and equipment and manufacturers all that. It’s a big undertaking, so I didn’t deploy resources towards that at the beginning. And what I did is I chose the biggest supplier in the entire power washing industry and worked a deal out with them, for them to do it. Given our exact specs, our exact SKUs, everything that we do, we built a whole like diagram and layout and said, This is exactly how these trucks need to be built. Here’s our expectations. Got a pretty robust service level agreement in place with them, and towards the end of last year, we

taught them cutting corners,

whether it was like they were just they they didn’t go fast enough, they weren’t installing things the right way. And I. So we one of the biggest inhibitors of growth. Potential inhibitors of growth is being able to actually get locations open. And for us, yes, they have to find, like a warehouse space, but that’s like more plug and play. The actual truck to us is the location, right? And so opening of the locations is solely dependent upon building of the trucks. And there’s a significant amount of capital that would go towards actually, like needing to being in a position where you can build out 100 trucks per year. And so at the end of last year, me and my business partners, we pivoted. We invested hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of dollars, and we built a truck distributorship. And so we we hired an in house welder, we hired an in house wrap installer, and in house wrap, like we did the whole thing, we got a 7000 square foot space. We started pre ordering equipment, and now, in just a few months, we got in the position where we could build 12 trucks per month.

Impressive. That’s, yeah, I love, I love that story of how you’ve pivoted. And I think that’s a really great example of leadership, you know, because we know things are kind of come down the pipeline, and can you pivot and continue to grow and and scale your business effectively, which is basically what you all did. And I also want to make a comment that I know you didn’t have a whole lot of books to read, but you were wise enough in your relationship building to put a great accountability group around you as references to help you navigate this, this new journey of yours. Okay, so you’ve scaled to well over 100 territories. I’m sure you’ve got a very clear picture of the type of franchisee you’re looking for. Do you want to give that to us?

Yeah, absolutely. So I find that a lot of people buy, oftentimes, buy a franchise, and they end up kind of buying themselves a job, and they leave a job, or they’re making 200 grand a year, and they kind of step into another job, they work that job for two years, and then they’re like humble now, why don’t I just go there’s way more stress than when I had a consistent paycheck. I want to sell this business, but the business has limited value because they’re the business. And so we’re really focused on bringing in people who have the risk tolerance and the grit to scale out of that role, like basically continually reinvest in the business. And so I say, like the franchisee that needs to replace their income year one is not our franchisee. We’re bringing in higher net worth individuals who want to grow a massive company that has enterprise value and and so like, out of the 54 franchisees that we’ve signed up. 13 of them are former C level executives that were either CEOs, coos, CFOs, CTOs at startups and larger fortune 500 companies, and just realized that they could keep running other people’s organizations and making between two to 5% equity in the company, or they could own it all and and build something that has value. We’ve signed up the largest fast signs franchisee, him and his business partners do $42 million a year. We recently signed up an orange theory fitness franchisee who has eight locations in the St Louis area. We signed up a professional poker player. So really kind of like fire level individuals, I would say that want to that have are comfortable managing. Managing teams are comfortable networking in their community. They like kind of the handshaking and the building of relationships with different referral partners, property managers. I mean, the majority of our business is commercial, so it’s property managers, it’s facilities managers, it’s maintenance companies, and these are the people that are going to produce recurring revenue for franchisees, but they have to go out and be in their community. We also look for people who have a true attitude of ownership. So if, if they deflect or blame other people or other things, places, people or things for challenges that they’ve had in life. They’re also not our franchisee. We want people who take ownership of their successes and also their failures, because that allows them to be better. And so we’re we’ve really had an opportunity to bring in, I mean, a very robust and incredible group of franchisees who you. Um, they’ve hired two people prior to going to training. They bring them with them a training. Those people run the truck. They’re out building the business. They promote one of them to General Manager. Within the first six months, they hire three new people. So they’re really on this, like growth, growth trajectory, which is pretty, pretty aggressive. And so they have to have kind of the risk tolerance to go through that as well, because not everyone’s going to work out. You’re going to have to rebuild your team sometimes and like, that’s okay, because that’s business.

I like giving a franchise or actually has a profile of what they’re looking for in a prospective franchisee. And I kind of want to take this journey a little bit further. Aaron, so we have, we have the profile of prospective franchisee. They go through your discovery process, they’re awarded a franchise. Then what talk to us about onboarding, the training, yes, all of it.

Ramp up time. Yeah, yeah. So it’s about 10 weeks to open. So after they sign, we can get them open with a truck on the road and a physical location about 10 weeks. That includes one week of in person training, and eight to nine weeks back of like pre launch stuff. We will basically train them effectively how to run the business virtually. So we teach them how to read a P and L, how to do their marketing, how to network in their community, how to build relationships in the first four weeks after they sign and the final four weeks before they go to training. We require they are out in their community at least 40 hours per week doing business development. We turn leads on for them. On the commercial side, about a month back from training, we have two outbound marketing vendors that do warm they do cold outreach to bring franchisees warm leads, and so they’re out responding to those leads and doing those estimates. A month back from training, it is not uncommon for franchisees to have six figures worth of commercial bids out before they’ve gone to training. Most of them, if not all of the recent ones, have had jobs on the calendar before they even got to Nashville for their training. And and they will recruit two people prior to going to training to run the truck. One, we recommend being a higher level lead technician, kind of a general manager and training type who can evolve into managing multiple people, but is not afraid to get their hands dirty and run that truck and and then within those first six months of operation, they will scale to their second truck, so that by month seven, They have two trucks on the road and they have five employees, so a general manager, two lead technicians and two Junior technicians, so that they can purely focus on the things that are going to drive the business forward, which is revenue. And driving revenue, I joke for any franchisee, it doesn’t matter the model. When you start your business, you are a chief revenue officer. That is your role. You find a way to generate as much revenue as possible. And if you’re not thinking about generating revenue, you’re losing money. And we impress that upon our franchisees to make them understand that there’s only so much you can tweak the P and L to where like it’s not a big lever until you have enough revenue to where it makes sense and and so that all goes into kind of the coaching strategies of what we do. And then, on an ongoing basis, they have a business coach that they’re meeting with weekly. We have peer groups that we’re launching where franchisees will be do monthly masterminds with each other. We have a teams chat that franchisees are in all day long, where they’re sharing ideas, and we’re able to answer questions, and and then we have a whole kind of marketing and operations team that supports franchisees. And then we do the normal stuff. We have conventions every year. Our first one will be in February of next year, and and, you know, regional meetings and stuff like that. So we really try to foster a community of collaboration so that franchisees can benefit from one of the things that a lot of franchisees don’t really think about before they buy into a brand, but the value that they get from the actual franchisee network is oftentimes more valuable than the actual support they receive from the franchisor. And so we try to foster and create that so that they can. There’s systems in place for that,

yeah, value of that pure exchange holds true, just universally, right,

wildly. So,

Sherry, should we talk about what? Everybody I know, whatever. Oh, yeah,

get us started. Pam, absolutely, I

made a job. So, Aaron, you just mentioned Chief Revenue Officer, right? Money matters. So why don’t we just start off with understanding what that item says? Seven is the estimated initial investment to get started in the

business, sure. So I’ll be speaking from the perspective of our 2023 numbers, which are published in our 2024 Franchise Disclosure Document. So if someone listens to this two years from now, those numbers could be different. So I would urge you to pull from whichever you can find our Franchise Disclosure Document publicly online. As of 2023 our corporate owned unit did just over $2 million per year

and brought home about 618,000

in EBITDA. So that’s after

all of their kind of expenses that they have before taxes and depreciation and such like that. Now it’s a 34 year old business, so those are not franchised locations. We do not have enough data yet to have franchisee performance operating long enough to have that in our FTD we will next year. So what we do is we break it down on a per truck basis. That way it’s a little bit more it’s a little bit easier to understand. So I had our founding location say, hey, what does a truck do in Philly, where you’re located, if a truck is operating, their average truck is operational 205 days out of the year, so not a full year. And that truck does, on average, about $422,000 a year.

And when you have multiple trucks, you’re operating about 168,000

in EBITDA net earnings before you know any taxes and depreciation and such like that. So you know, you get three, four trucks on the road, and you can start to see kind of the the scale and and really what we’re focused on heavily is the commercial side of the business, because that’s really where you’re going to see the recurring revenue. You’re going to see contracts once you get in with a taco bell that needs to be cleaned quarterly, like, as long as you do a good job, you’ll have that job forever, right? And so really, that’s where the value starts to build. Is like, if you have three trucks that you literally don’t have to get new customers for because you’ve got those three trucks that are operating fully on recurring revenue, you have a pretty valuable asset at that point that you could sell for a multiple of its earnings. And so, so yeah. And then in terms of the item seven,

our item seven goes up to about 297

for one territory.

And that’s one territory, one truck, one sales, vehicle and marketing startup costs. However, we don’t do one territory like we don’t do one territory deals. The minimum we’ll do is two territories. So you know you’re, you’re, you need around 300 to 350 now, some of that can be in retirement, some of it can be cash, some of it can be home equity. They just needs to be accessible. And then we can help you get up, set up with a an SBA loan that leverages that type of stuff so that you can hang on to more of your cash. But we do want people to have considerable higher liquidity or liquidatable assets, because going back to like the scale of this, we we just don’t want someone coming in, buying two or three territories with the hopes of building a big business and then wanting to draw as much out of that as possible, because it just makes it really hard to get to the size business that’s going to justify that level of investment without adding additional trucks and additional people and sales teams and other sales vehicles and such like that. So that’s really what we’re focused on helping our franchisees do is build, build an asset versus a job.

Yeah, I’m sorry. Go ahead, Sherry. No,

I was going to say those are that was great information regards to the investment. But also, you know, the potential return on on investment sounds really strong, which is obviously very exciting for for anybody. But also, I really like that you’re kind of pushing that need to have the patience and the longevity to get there, and people having an awareness around that. Is there anything else, Aaron, that you think you would want to, want everybody to know? Example, that I come up with, for example, is that when the when you partnered with the Brians to then franchise their model, they were able to take on some of that franchise wrap and improve their own personal territory, which just as another. Example of the success of wrapping your business around a franchise with great systems organization and scalability.

Yeah. So their business got even larger on the commercial side the first year of franchising and and they were really able to scale and build that commercial side of the business in a way that they hadn’t been to in other years. I think the thing I’d like to mention is, and this is for anyone who’s considering buying a franchise, franchising their business, really, the franchise side is completely different business than whatever the let’s call it the widget is like building a hamburger stand is very different than building McDonald’s, and so you need the institutional knowledge of franchising as well As whatever the widget is in order to truly provide the value that you should get from a franchise or a franchisor. For me, even though I had never been a CEO for I had that institutional franchisor knowledge because I had been working and learning from that, I still needed more, and so what I call is intellectual capital. When I raised money, I wanted, I was advised to raise smart money. There’s a lot of dumb money out there, private equity that wants to put $1 in and get four out three years later, I’m just not interested in that. I wanted patient mentorship, intellectual capital, and so I partnered with I was fortunate, based upon my reputation in the industry, to be able to be selective on who I chose to partner with from a capital standpoint. So you guys have spoken with David Barr, who’s one of my big, biggest mentors and investors. I talked to him weekly. He has 800 dominoes locations, 42 Wendy, 32 Wendy’s 42 KFC, Taco Bells, eight. Capriotti is nine. Chicken Salad. Chicks like, yeah, really,

That sounds like he’s got a lot of time on his hands.

Yeah? He just chose that.

Yeah. He’s also on the on the board for college Hong selling junk and Junk King, or excuse me, college Hong selling junk capris, chicken salad, like he’s, he’s just a franchise legend and and so he’s, he invested in rolling suds, and then he doubled down eight months later and invested again in rolling suds. And in fact, he calls me every about three and a half weeks and asks if he can give me more money. And I’m like, David, I’m okay. He goes, you sure, because I’d love to just send you some more money. And so I think this is really important for any kind of franchise buyer to analyze. Is like, what is the institutional knowledge around franchising, and how vast is that or is that lacking? And if it’s lacking, how is it balanced out? And and I think that’s why there’s an inherent risk in emerging franchisors, because the majority of emerging franchisors don’t have experience in franchising. They have a good epoxy coatings business, but they know nothing about franchising, and so now they’re learning how to franchise. Wow, right? So it’s just so I think something I’m really proud of is building not only the team to support franchisees before I need the team, but also building a board of advisors, where you have intellectual capital. Now the other thing that I’ll say is you need actual capital, because the way franchising works is the franchisees need the most support when they produce the least amount of royalties. So if you’re going to add another franchise, if you’re going to add a ton of franchises, the bigger the support you need to get them to the point where they are producing royalties to then pay for the support. So it’s a huge bet on yourself, because you have to hire all these people before you need them, and then a year in a year and a half in now, theoretically, most of them are producing royalties that then pays for the infrastructure. But a franchisor might be burning cash for quite some time, depending on their what their structure looks like. And so we raised a lot of money so that we could build the team before we need the team. And so these are just things that not everyone thinks about when they decide to buy a franchise, but I think it’s a very important thing to look at

that’s definitely and you’re and you’re kind of the example of what you’re looking at a smaller scale for your franchisees to do, you know, yep, you bet on, you bet on rolling sets yourself and your team, and you’re asking the franchisees to come in and bet on themselves and your support and your systems. Just give it time and it will, it will play out as everybody’s hoping. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Stuff

invest for Sherry, and I always like to say, be sure to investigate before you invest.

Exactly important, right?

Just real quick. Aaron, and I know we’re getting ready to wrap up here, Donna, I always like to close out with any tips for us. You’ve already given us a lot of tips. But any final tips for aspiring, budding entrepreneurs,

I would say, whatever the amount of money that you think that you need to have is to start the business, whether it’s starting from scratch or buying a business, or starting a franchise or buying a franchise, double it double, you know, however long, however much time you think it’s going to take to, like, get to a point where it’s in a good, like, double that, you know what I mean, like, because if you’re doubling it, then it’s like, okay, well,

you’re going to be

set better expectations, so that When you actually go through the throes of business ownership, you you have a cushion there. You know, there’s a lot of reasons by why franchise, why businesses in general, fail. Being over capitalized is not one of the reasons

that a business money matters. Yes. Money Matters, yeah, yeah. So,

yeah. So I would just say, really it, you know, it doesn’t matter whether it’s franchised or non franchise. You want to go into it with eyes wide open and understand that a franchise is not just a money machine like you will have more tools than if you were to go start on your own, but you as the business owners still need to go out and use the tools to build that that business, but it is very much your business to Grow

well. Aaron, thank you very, very much for being, I guess, on the Franchise Business Radio Show, co hosted by the franchise sisters.

Yes. Thank you, Aaron. It has been great having you on the show, and thank you for all the tips that you’ve given us. And for our listeners, if you’re considering pursuing franchise ownership, please don’t try to figure it out on your own.

Oh, yeah, please don’t, gee, it’s over there, and I think Aaron’s even a testimony of that. But over the many years of being in the franchise business community, we really want to pay it forward to aspiring entrepreneurs who are looking to navigate the franchise selection process. Yeah, the

goal is to put you in a position to make an informed decision and eliminate any potential pitfalls along the way, and we help you do this by aligning wisely.

Align wisely. I mean, Sherry and I talk about this all the time. Specifically, what we’re referring to when we say align wisely is if you’re if you’re aligning yourself with the right business opportunity, it is going to put you in a strong position to breed success and financial independence.

That’s right. Pam, so what do we mean by alignment? We mean aligning your operator preference, aligning with the territory that’s going to work best for you, aligning with how customer acquisition is determined, your investment range, and of course, aligning with your lifestyle goals and your financial

goals. Yeah, and like Aaron alluded to, the culture, the leadership, there’s so many right? There are just so many pieces of puzzle that need to come together to establish what we call business vision match, and that’s what we like to help you achieve.

That’s right. So contact us is easy. You can contact us at Franchise intellect for our complimentary franchise consulting call, or you can simply go to www dot franchise intellect.com or email us Sherry at franchise intellect.com

or Pam at franchise intellect.com thanks for tuning in. We appreciate you tune into the Franchise Business Radio Show. Yes, we

do. We look forward to hearing from you. This is the franchise sisters signing out.

Ciao. You.