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Franchising is for losers. It's elementary. It's a starter business with training wheels. Real entrepreneurs build businesses from scratch. You know what? I used to think all that too. But today my loser Franchise will do $50 million in sales this year with strong margins. Those weaknesses that everyone talks about are exactly why franchising creates millionaires. So let me show you what I mean. In college, I studied finance, entrepreneurship, software development. My friends were getting jobs at Google, Goldman Sachs, General Electric, Boeing. And I felt embarrassed to say that I was getting into franchi because finance, tech, startups, all this stuff sounded way more exciting than what I was doing. But I was missing something fundamental. Because franchising simplifies running a business by removing as much complexity as possible. Think about it like this. Every business owner must figure out the same thing. They have to have a business model, branding, marketing, a website, pricing, supply chain, R and D for new products and services. If it's a real estate business, they need to figure out good site selection and construction. They have to develop a technology, stack, referral partners. If it's a mobile business, they need vehicle plan and equipment. Plus they need to hire people, fire people, train people, drive sales, worry about cash flow, excellent customer service, deliver on operations, get Google reviews, have a growth strategy, benefits for their employees, worry about taxes, and get the accounting done right. A franchise is a partnership where you split responsibilities and the franchise or should be handling about 90% of this stuff, leaving you as the franchisee to focus 90% of your energy on this stuff, which is operations. And by focusing on less things, you're able to obsess over it, putting much more time, effort and energy into it, which should lead to better results. One of my favorite books is Ben Hardy's 10x is easier than 2x. And in the book he talks about setting this massive goal. So. So let's say your goal was to double your profit in 12 months. That is actually an easier goal to achieve than a small one, such as growing by 5 to 10%. Because think about it this way. If we wanted to grow by 5 to 10%, there are a bunch of things that we could do. We could increase prices, we could develop new products, we could serve more customers, we could upsell them things, we could increase marketing, we could cut spending, we could open new locations, we could acquire new locations. And you know, there's some other things that we could do. We could do any one of these things if our goal was to grow by a 5 to 10% for the year, if that was our goal, like how Would we know which one of these to pull on? Would we do all of them? Would we just do a few of them? The more things that are on our plate that are on our whiteboard, the bigger challenge we have in deciding which ones are going to get us there. Now, on the other hand, if we said we want to double sales in 12 months, there's a number of things on here that wouldn't work. Like just increasing our prices wouldn't work. We can't upsell or have new products. We can't service double the amount of customers out of our existing business. We can't spend to infinity on marketing. We can't cut our expenses that much. However, we could acquire new locations, we could open new locations. We would focus entirely our efforts on opening and acquiring new locations if we wanted to double in 12 months. And then there becomes clarity, right? So now, instead of worrying about all these other things, if I set this massive goal, I can focus most of my energy on this one thing, which is growing through acquisition. In this example, in a franchise, it's pretty similar because the franchisor removes a bunch of stuff off of my plate and allows me to focus on operations, on delivering the service, on cash flow and profitability. And I let them worry about all this other stuff so I can focus on unit level profitability. Now, here's what that looks like in real life. A lot of people start with one location, and when they have that one location, they do everything. They wear every hat, they learn the business, they clean it, they do the accounting, they do the service, they do the sales like they do as much as possible intentionally, because they don't want somebody else to bullshit them later and say, this is not how it's done when you've already been doing it for the last year. So there's definitely value in getting your hand and rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty and getting to work. Once you nail that single location where it's profitable, it's working, it's going as planned, then you look to grow. And now you're looking to have two locations. Now in this stage, you need to change, you need to move from do to manage. Because if you try to do everything at both locations, you will be split in half. 50% here, 50% there. In fact, it'll probably be less because of the switching costs. You will not have success. To be honest, this is where a lot of franchisees get stuck. This is a big reason why a lot of people say franchisees buy themselves a job is because they can't grow out of this location model and they get. They get stuck. And the only way you can get out of it is if you value progress. Progress over perfection. This is one of the things that I am very passionate about and have successfully done many, many times over is building a team, leading them, accepting that we are not going to be perfect. But as long as we continue to make progress on our sales, on our process, on our customer reviews, on everything we're working about, if we are making progress, that will continue to compound over time and we will achieve our goals. If you are stuck on being a perfectionist and everything must be to this, and if it's not this, like you're going to freak out, then it's probably not going to work because you're not going to be able to let go as you need to. And so then once you get two locations down, the next step is to jump. And if you can manage two, it's very likely that you can handle three, four, five, up to six locations. And this is the key to unlocking freedom. Because now instead of you being kind of all at the ground level, in the trenches, you move up a level and you take over the role of what I'm going to call district manager. So at this point, you've got six frontline managers reporting up to you. You've got more freedom, you've got more flexibility. You're going to be run the business a lot more by your phone and by your computer. But you can be on vacation somewhere handling business. Right? Once you can get to this level, this is where it starts to get fun. Because once you can operate a market here of, let's say, six locations, and let's say this group of stores is making $500,000 of profit, once you can get to that level, it is not much difference to say, well, let me have another group of six stores here with another district manager making another $500,000. And at this point, you're now replacing yourself. So both these seats here, DM and dm, are employees. You've got a business that could be making a million dollars a year. And now you're another level removed, giving you even more freedom. But it doesn't stop here, because once you have two, you can have three, you could have four, and you can start to see how you can build this pyramid up where it goes. You have stores, you have multiple stores that lead up to a dm, which lead up to a region, which could lead up to a division like East Coast, West Coast. This is how franchisees scale from 10 to 50 to 100 to a thousand locations because they're purely focused on operations. There's all this other stuff that they don't have to worry about so they can just get down to the things that they're really good at. You know, I bought my first franchise in 2016. I bought another one in 17, two and 18 and another one in 19. And then I made this big jump. We bought like eight of them in 2021. Six of them. 22, five or six and 23. I lose count. But like today we have 33 locations. We have five more lined up for 2026 and I path to $100 million a year business before 2030. I don't care that my name is not on the building. I don't care that I will never be featured in Entrepreneur magazine. What I care about is building a strong, cash flowing business, providing well paying jobs for over 200 families and making a real difference in our community. Franchising gets a bad rap for multiple reasons. It's true, there are a lot of negative things. There are terrible brands. Many franchisees buy themselves a job. There's also many franchisees who start with the wrong expectations. They think that the business runs itself. But the truth is every business, franchise or not, takes a lot of work to get it off the and the franchisor gives you the tools, they give you the support, they give you the playbook. They like stick it in this box. They see here you go. But it's still up to you to go use that and build the empire. And as a word of caution, I know I've made franchising sound easy, right? Because I say how it's elementary. But that's not the case. It's simple. But simple is not the same. Simple means less moving parts. Like there's less things to worry about versus easy means without effort. And I can tell you the early years of launching a franchise you are probably to work three times as hard and make three times as less than your previous job. But that's okay since you're not doing this for the short term game. You're doing this to build a foundation for the rest of your life. Think whatever you want about franchises. It's a great vehicle for people who say, just show me how to make money and I'm going to do it. So what do you think about franchising? Drop it in the comments below and also subscribe to this channel to learn more insider secrets to finding, operating and scaling profitable franchises. I'll see you in the next video. Cheers.
