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I bought my first business in 2016. This year we're going to do $50 million in revenue. I have no outside investors or shortcuts, just betting on my team and refining a proven playbook. And in this video, I'm going to break it all down so you can steal what works and dodge some of the dumb mistakes that I've made along the way. Now to start, I don't buy random businesses off biz. Buy, sell, and just hope for the best. I stick to what I know, which are boring franchises. They have proven and repeatable systems, they have a built in network of buyers and sellers, and they have scalable operations. Then once you can figure this out, it's copy paste, copy paste. And by the way, if you're new here, my name is Brian Beers. I release new videos every week documenting my journey of building an eight figure business. Plus, I help other people do the same. All right, so I bought my first two franchises in 2016. These are both Midas auto repair shops. Now what had happened is the seller I got to know, he wanted to retire, he wanted to go climb mountains in Machu Picchu or whatever. And I wanted to build. I was 28 years old. I was partners with my brother and we each put down $65,000, so $130,000 total to acquire these two shops here. And then we got bank debt on the rest. Now you may be asking yourself, well, why Midas? Midas Auto Repair has been around forever. I grew up in Midas. My dad and uncle were Midas franchisees and had been in it for many years. I had been working in the business since 2016 as a, an employee, as like a manager. And by that point I'd saved enough money and had enough courage to go out on my own and, you know, go and, and own a business. And so I was ready to do it. Now 28 years old, I just dumped my life savings into buying these two stores. And every single employee when I walked in there is older than me. I think this was one of the biggest lessons that I had to earn very on was like I had to build their trust. Right? Right. I had to stabilize the stores because I had these debt payments. I had all this pressure on me and I just had to make it work. And so the first thing that I did was I wanted to find some easy wins. Now when people are looking to sell, especially when they are older, and in my case, you know, the guy had been around for many years. He'd been planning on selling, there's all these things around the shop. So it was like air hoses that didn't work, computers that were slow. Like literally. Windows 98, I think, was running on one of these things. Phones, out of date equipment, all this stuff. And for some of it, it was very inexpensive for me to fix a couple airlines or to upgrade the computers or install this latest software. Like, it didn't cost a lot of money, but I did things that made their jobs easier. Because I think sometimes a lot of people have this perception of, like, I don't know, maybe it's private equity or whatever, but someone comes in and they buy this thing and they're going to, like, tear it into pieces, they're going to strip it down, like they only care about money, blah, blah, blah. Right? I'm sure you've heard this before and you probably maybe experienced it too. It's just. Could be totally legit. But that's not my philosophy. My philosophy is we go in and we invest in these teams, we invest in these people, and we give them all the tools that they need to succeed. And then you give high expectations of, you know, the results that should follow. And so I went in there and did that. I spent a bunch of money. I said, hey, listen, guys, I'm here for the long haul. Like, this matters to me. I want to be successful and I'm going to make you guys successful and we're all going to win together. And so we invested a bunch of money into getting these stores to the standard that they needed to be. And that really helped iron out all those, like, wrinkles that they felt, maybe some of the animosity that this young kid's now bossing them around. And like, I worked shoulder, shoulder with them to prove that, like, I am one of you guys. Like, we are going to make this great. So that was 2016. I did that for over a year. I had these two stores, we got them stabilized. And then in 2017 comes along and there was another franchisee who down here by the Philly airport. And I got to know him, you know, because I was in it. And he wanted to move. His wife got this dream job in North Carolina, and he's like, listen, I just want out now. He listed with a broker. He came to me first. I didn't really want to pay the price that he wanted to pay or he wanted to sell for. He listed with a broker and he went through multiple rounds of people looking at this thing, and by the end of it, he. He like, really wanted to move. Like, they hit a deadline to move to Start this new job. He didn't want to own the business while living somewhere else. And so he came to me, said, listen, Brian, just tell me what you want, and we can work out a deal. I ended up buying that store, I think, for $120,000 of cash, which, you know, pretty much I saved from whatever these two stores were making, and it was making about a hundred grand a year. So, like, I essentially got 100% of my money back. Like, it was 100% cash on cash return. I think a couple things that I learned from this that are super important. One is, like, you really got to build these relationships. Like, I had a great relationship with him. We shared ideas, best practices. We knew each other. He was like a younger guy too. And when he was ready to do it, and he knew that I could close and franchisees want to sell to other franchisees. I'm going to get to that in a lot more. But, like, there's this. This tight, private network when you join a system. And this is why an outsider, which he had lined up, he had this fear that they would fall through, and, yes, they would pay him a little bit more money, but the fear of them falling through and the Midas corporate franchisor not approving them and financing all this stuff, all that just, like, wasn't worth it to him versus. He wanted to go and turn this new page, start this new life, whatever it is. And I was the guy who he trusted can make that happen, and I did. So we got that store down, and, you know, our goal was simple again. Don't rock the boat, you know, oh, we wanted to get a hundred percent of our money back in the first year. And, you know, we did that. We grew the sales, and we continue to do today. So that was in July 2017. And then 2018 comes along. Now, the first one that we had was, so we have three stores. We're making money. You know, my brother and I kind of in our business now. We're gaining some confidence. We have this store up here now. This is the first store that we ever opened from Zero. Now I want to show you this thing. So right around this shop, there's literally a Pep Boys. Across the street from us, There is an AutoZone. Right down the street, there is a Mavis Tire, a Firestone. There is a. Or was a. A good year, like, literally right here, that used to be a Goodyear. There's another shop up the street. I knew this store was available, and I was just afraid of it. I was afraid because I thought man, there's so much competition. Literally. Oh, there's a Jiffy Lube, too. Forgot about that one. Literally, within, like, somebody could throw a baseball. They could hit a bunch of these stores, and the previous owner had failed. It had been closed for multiple years. And I was just like, I don't know, like, could I do this? Could I run this store? Like, is this worth me risking all this stuff? And so. So what did I do? I picked up the phone, and I called every single competitor that we had. I essentially called the Pep Boys. I called the Firestone, I called the Mavis, I called the Jiffy Lube. I called the Goodyear. And what I learned was, like, none of them were that good. I was like, man, like, we could do better than them. Like, it wasn't like they were crushing it. And so I said, all right, let's rock and roll. We got $150,000 line of credit from a bank that we had, you know, now established a couple years of history with. So we went out, we bought all the equipment. I'm going to throw up some pictures here on the screen. But, like, this place literally didn't even have a roll of toilet paper in it. It was empty. And so 150 grand. You know, we install new lifts. Uh, we paint the building, we renovate, you know, some of the waiting rooms. We do all that stuff. My only cost on this was my note payment, which was like a couple grand a month. It wasn't that much. And we were cash flow positive, I want to say, by this. By probably by June, we were making money. And so that was a really confidence boost for me of something that, hey, I'm, like, afraid of this thing. But I knew I trusted in our ability to execute. And so many people need to get their cars fixed, right? And then comes the store that I think changed everything. This store here and here in Philadelphia, I, once again, older franchisee, wanting to retire, had owned it forever. And he had come to me and said, hey, I want. I want to sell you this store and let me just show you it so you can get an idea. So it's on Market street in Philadelphia. So it's in. It's in west side of Philly. So Drexel and, like, Penn are, like, right here. So here's Drexel, Drexel University, and Penn's, you know, right down there. And so we're here. So really close. But, you know, if you don't know Philadelphia that well, it can turn pretty quickly. And so it's not the best area but tons of population, tons of people that live away, or tons cars that need to get fixed. He came to me and said, Brian, this is, this is what I want to do. This store is making about $100,000 a year. I want you to buy it for $350,000. So three and a half times what the earning was, which is fine, but I only want $50,000 down. And I'm going to act as the bank and you can make payments to me every single month. And what we'll do, this might get a little complicated, but we are going to amortize the loan over 10 years. So my payment was like $3,100 a month. But at the five year, you're going to have a balloon payment. I'm going to give you low payments basically for five years and then you're going to owe me a bunch of money in five years from now. And so it's funny, he came to me with this. I didn't even know seller financing was a thing. But he comes to me and he wanted to do it and he trusted me that I make his payments every month and he, he knew it'd be a much easier and quicker process to not go through the bank. And the other thing, it saves him on taxes. When a seller sells a business via seller financing, they get to defer their tax payments over the life of the loan essentially based on how much principal this they get. And so he got to basically defer a very big tax bill, capital gains tax bill that he have over five years instead of having it all do at once. So I thought, okay, like I'll do this. I got $50,000 from my other businesses, right? Like we were just like saving money. Like I have zero lifestyle inflation during this period. And we buy this thing $50,000 down and then we, we set up the seller finance and we go in there. This is like one of the funniest stories. So I roll up, it's December of 2018 and I get there at 7 o', clock, 7:15, something like that. Because we open at 7:30 and I want to meet the manager and, and like I am here to basically say, hey, I'm your new boss. Like this was literally the handoff. Like there was no, he must have called everybody. And I pull up, nobody's there at the shop and there's a car next to me and there's this guy sleeping in it. And so I'm just like sitting there. Then this guy, you know, rolls out of this truck, his ass cracks hanging out fat Guy, you know, overweight or whatever, and, you know, seeing things you don't want to see. And he goes up to the door and he unlocks it. And I was like, oh, okay. I guess this guy works here. So I walk in and I. I introduce myself. Hey, I'm Brian. I'm. I'm the new owner of. Of this place. And he goes, well, just to let you know, I'm quitting in a month. And I'm like, okay, okay, nice. Nice to meet you. That was. That was our first interaction. And then we're there. The phone's ringing off the hook right there. The phone is ringing. There's people coming in. There's like, all this traffic. And this guy, he was not the right guy, right? We learned later, learned through chatting with him. His. His typical habit was to, you know, work the shop, and then he'd go to the casino down the street, and then he'd, you know, make his way over to the strip club. And then he would come back and fall asleep in his car. And I don't know where he'd shower, but I guess at his house every once in a while. But anyway, this is the guy that we run in. So, like, I just bought this store, and I'm all excited to buy it, and this is the guy we have running it. And I knew, I was like, we gotta fire him. We gotta fire, honestly, the entire team. Because of other issues that were going on when we go back to business at. At that point, we had a couple other locations. I had some people, you know, kind of on the bench. And so we then pulled a manager from another location to say, you know, you're going to go run this store. This is a great opportunity. This is going to be way bigger opportunity than the one you're at now. And we pulled another mechanic. We hired a bunch of new people. You know, literally we restaffed the entire store. And guess what happened next? We took that store from $100,000 a year of profit to $400,000 a year. The next 12 months, we literally 4xed the profitability. In 12 months, this one store was making more money than essentially these other, you know, three to four stores combined. Like, it was very close. I learned a, that, like, you know, sometimes we think in business that growth has to be slow, right? We think that it's this, like, linear, step by step and 10% and all this stuff. But we went in there, we literally 4x the profitability overnight, and all we did was change five people. I mean, it was 100 of the staff, don't get me wrong. But it wasn't like we moved mountains. It wasn't like we did these things that anybody else could have done. And that taught me that, like, whenever I'm facing a problem or whenever I have a store that is really struggling, sometimes we make up all these excuses. We make up these excuses, oh, it's the marketing and, oh, it's the location, and no one in West Philly has any money and this and that, and there's all these excuses. But at the end of the day, if we are not having success, it is because we have the wrong people running the business. And sometimes it's only one person that we need to change. It's usually the manager, but it can sometimes be, you know, the assistant or a lead technician in our business, Somebody who else is like a key player. But if you're struggling to grow your business or if you. If you know that it could do so much further, the first thing you really need to look is internally. Don't make up excuses and try shuffling things up a little bit. It. It's amazing what will happen. So now 2019 comes along. The franchisee who owned this store here came to me, said, you know, Brian, do you want to buy this? And I knew him, we were friends. And he owned six stores, all of them north. This was the furthest one edge of the empire, as we like to say. And it was his worst store. He just like, couldn't make it work. He was so split between all the other stuff they had to do that it just like, wasn't worth his time. We struck a deal to buy it, and at the time, it was doing $600,000 in revenue. 600,000 in revenue, but $0 in profit. Zero. I think that's a misconception. A lot of times people tout big revenue numbers. Even me, you know, I talk about, we'll do 50 million in revenues here. Easy numbers to talk about. I do 600,000, whatever. But like literally $0 in profit because you have all these expenses when you run a business. You got payroll, you got cost of goods, you have royalties, you have rent, you have insurance and utilities and all this stuff. And so for me, like, our break even is probably 800,000 ish. I could do about 800 now to make money. Back then it was 600, 700, something that range. So anyway, the question is, well, how do you price a store that's not making any money? Like, a lot of times we price things based on multiples to say, hey, this is worth three and a half times or these were worth 3.75. Right. A lot of times when we value businesses, it's, it's based on that. But when a business is not making any money, there's nothing to multiply it against, right? So we price it based on the assets. Now, in his case, the assets were, were we thought worth. Well, we bought it for 120,000, so that's what we thought it was worth. Because, you know, if I looked at this store and said, all right, I bought this store a year earlier. I went in there, it was totally empty and I had to put $150,000 into this thing to get it going, right? So I started zero sales and I put 150,000 into it. This thing. I said, all right, if I could get this for 120,000 and I start with 600,000 in sales a year, 50,000amonth, whatever. Um, that like I am in it for less dollars and I have a basic. I can only go up. Hopefully, hopefully I don't fuck it up. Um, so that was my theory, that was the bet I took. And the cherry on top was the deal I negotiated with Seller Finance because I just learned how to do it a couple months earlier. I said, listen, I don't want to do $120,000 cash. I need payments. And so we put $20,000 down to buy this store. So I had $20,000 into it, and then we paid off the rest over the, I don't know, four years, something like that. Net notes totally paid off. By the way, we get these stores rolling. 2019, we bought that in December, I think it was of 2019. So talk about timing with, with COVID And so then Covid comes along, right? And I think Covid for, you know, obviously a lot of people, it was, it was a terrible, terrible time with, with sicknesses and losing, you know, loved ones and obviously lots of drama around the truth and restrictions and, you know, all this different stuff. But at the end of the day, I mean, it was positive for us. You know, we got well funded PPP loans which, if you don't remember, the government was basically giving businesses payroll protection plan or something like that, basically giving us money to make payroll, which that money was then forgiven. So it was, it was like a gift of money that kept us afloat during this period. Now there are people still got their cars fixed. Like it was way less, but people still got it fixed. And so anyway, we got a bunch of cash through PPP that allowed us to like stabilize the business. We were allowed to pay down some of our debts. And the biggest thing it did, or two things. One was it accelerated the number of people that wanted to get out. So if you were thinking about selling your business right around this time, and you went through Covid and you have all this restrictions and masking and health concerns and the sales and the cash flow, and you're like. And you just got some PPP money. You're like, why the am I doing this? Like, I'm done. I want out. I wanted out last year. Now I had to deal with all this stuff. So we had multiple people that accelerated their expansion of the business. I'm going to show you all those deals. But I would say the more important thing for me, the thing that really unlocked the millions that we've grown the business since then, was I had a young family. I was concerned about their health. I wasn't in the stores, like, I used to be in the stores, like, a lot. And then when Covid hit, we had people that worked for us, but I personally didn't go in the stores much. We leverage zoom. We leveraged teams calls and slack. And, like, just because I physically wasn't there didn't mean I was not present, but I. I was not physically there. And it proved to me that, like, the business could grow without me. And for years, I thought that all of our success up to this point was because of me and that I had some magical touch when I went in there and that. I don't know, like, they needed me. And so for years, I didn't want to grow beyond Philadelphia. Like, I had opportunities beyond these stores that came to me. And at the end, I turned them down because I was afraid that, hey, I can't physically go to those stores, and the business isn't going to be successful if I don't personally do it. Talk about a big ego, right? And so after Covid, I learned, like, I don't need to do that. We get through Covid. We got some money. There's a franchisee that owns this store. And we called him up, and he's older and said, hey, listen, all of his other stores are up here in New Jersey, right? These purple ones. And I said, how about we would just buy this one store from you? And he says, well, how about instead of buying just that one, you buy, like, all of my stores? And we're like, whoa, you know, we're ready for that. And. But then we thought about it and said, listen, I think we can do this. Like, we can do it here. We're having success. Why can't we do it over here? It's only an hour and a half away. It's not that far, right? And so we put together a deal to buy seven locations. So of his, which are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. It's. It's these. And we start a deal. We started it in January of 2021. We finalized the deal. Took a while between negotiations and inspecting all the properties and leases and corporate approval and all this shit. We settled, I think, in May or no June or June or July of 2021. So it took us about six months. So it does take some time if you're doing some of these bigger deals. And the lesson for me was like, I can't physically be there in these stores, but I can hire somebody who will be in these stores, and hopefully we'll do it 80% or so as good as me. We were now into a second market here. We had these core stores in Philadelphia, and then we had these stores in northern New Jersey. And so we get them cranking, we get them making money. We once again, seller finance the deal. We put it was over a million dollars for them. I think we had about $200,000 of cash, which we had gotten, you know, from once again, reinvest profits. Like, if you gotta learn a lesson here, that's a big one for me. And we take over these stores. They need tons and tons of deferred maintenance. Similar, like Covid had been tight money, had tight tons of lifts and roofs. And I essentially, for the next, I want to say two years, put tons of money back into these stores to get them to the level that we expected. And then along the way, there's other opportunities, right? So I mentioned there was seven stores. We have an eighth store up here. Once we were in the market, there were other stores that people wanted to sell. And so we got that store. Cause they came to us. Actually, Midas corporate came to me and said, hey, we just did this business review with this franchisee. He's looking to get out of the business. This is how much he wants for the store. Are you interested in buying it? And I was like, yeah, like, done deal. So we went up there, gave him exactly what he wanted. It was a fair price for this single store. And we took it over. And that's kind of the thing about, in my business, at least in a retail location with physical locations, I can't have one store, like all the way up here, right. I need kind of a group of stores. And then once I have a group of stores, then it's okay to then fill in the rest. So I get this group and then what you're gonna see is as we fill in a few more here, of filling out the market. And it's just because like we are like a people heavy business. Like we need people in the stores physically touching things, eyes on stuff. Because otherwise, I don't know, people take shortcuts. Like, it's really easy to slack off. And you know, we have high expectations of what we want done. And so for me, my style of trying to build this, that's what we do. And so I get those. Then there's another one down here that we do. This store is really interesting, really interesting story. So I, I don't interview a lot of technicians. Like normally I'm only interviewing managers and higher level people at this point. But for whatever reason, one day I decided we were having trouble staffing a store and I said, screw it, guys, I'm going to show you how this is done. So I just like went through indeed. And I just like started going through resumes. I was texting people, I was like getting people on the phone. I wanted to prove to them that it wasn't that hard to hire somebody. And so I get this kid on the phone and I, you know, typical. Just like, why are you looking for another job? And he goes, well, they're closing down my shop. It's like being sold. And I was like, oh, okay, where do you work? He's like, he works at a major competitor. I don't know if I can say the name or not. Whatever. He works a major competitor. And I said, what's the address? I put the address in. I'm like, listen, man, this is, this is a great store based on its location, based off of kind of its footprint. It wasn't near any other shops. Like it made perfect sense. And so what do I do? We go to the landlord and who is about to lose a tenant and we end up like negotiating a lease. We go to our major competitor and work our way up the chain. All the through all the corporate bullshit to figure out who is the right person. We negotiate a deal to buy all of their equipment because they were they as part of their lease, they had to eliminate everything. And so we said, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't do that. Like we could use it. We were able to buy all their equipment. And then we went and midasized it, right? So we flipped it over to Midas, we painted it, we rearranged the shop, we Got rid of a bunch of old inventory. You know, we added another lift. Like, we did a bunch of work, I want to say, all in between buying their equipment and all the stuff I had to do. We were probably 100,000 dol into the store, something in that range. And we got it open in 30 days. So it was closed. Our competitor closed it. 30 days later, we had this thing open. Cranking, ready and making. Making money. If you are interviewing people and they say they're leaving and they work for a competitor, your ears should be, like, ringing to figure out more about that, because that was. You know, I have zero down on that store. It makes money every month. Fills in a footprint. Like, it was such a great opportunity from just an interview that I did one day. All right, that's 2021, 2022. This is where we make one of our biggest jumps in the business. And let me just kind of go through it. Opens up multiple. Multiple stores. So early 2022, we have these ones in New Jersey. So same thing. My footprint was in the market. There was another guy. He had three stores, wanted to get out of it and wanted to sell. He'd been in it for a while. Seller financed again, I think we put $75,000 on for these. 75 or 50, something like that down and bought these stores. They once again fit the footprint perfectly. Lots of synergies. And same thing on those quick wins. Like one of these stores, I want to say it was this. This store. Randolph, the guy we bought it from, did not put a lot of money back into the stores. And you ever seen those things miners wear? They're like the hats with the lights on it or whatever. So it was so dark inside the shop where the guys were, like, fixing the cars, that all the mechanics had to wear these minor hats so that they could see what they were working on when they were working on a car or under the hood or under the carriage. It was so ridiculous. And the shop was a mess. It was filthy. There was so much junk. And we're like, how are we supposed to attract good employees and retain them when we literally live in a pig pen? There was another store that we bought. Now I'm going to try to find a picture and throw it up here on the screen. It had this, like, secret room. So there was, like, the manager's office, and then there was this other room in this, like, building that was like kind of a hodgepodge. And you walk in there, and there's like, a Barca lounger, which is like a. Like, A Lazy Boy, like a tweed Lazy Boy. And then there's like a bunch of magazines. And as part of these magazines, there's a bunch of, you know, Playboys. And a security system so you could see if anybody was around. Anyway, I don't know what happened in that room, but I can tell you it was not good. Not good for anybody. That was some of the things that you come across when you do these deals is you get really surprised with how people operate them. And so we lock those in, get them rolling, then we have these stores. So these were the stores that my dad and uncle kind of were operating. They owned and operated. They had six stores here. These six, you know, they were looking to retire. They were ready to get out. You know, we had kind of proven ourselves. And so, you know, we struck a deal with them. Same thing, down payment, owner, finance, making monthly payments to them and let them kind of go and retire. Now they still both help in the business. They're like, handy. They love fixing things, renovating the stores. Just don't want to deal with all the people and kind of a lot of the bullshit stuff that we deal with. We locked in those in January of 2022, obviously already familiar with them. So it was. It was in a big deal. And then these stores. So we got these five stores up in this Allentown area. All of them were previous owned by the guy that we did the one deal a couple years earlier. And he was just finally ready to get out and said, hey, listen, I've been in this business a while. I am ready to kind of get out of here. And so once again, who does he want to sell to? The guy that bought his other store. The guy that's the number one franchisee in the market. The guy that is already, you know, been making reliable monthly payments for the last three years. And that guy was me. And so, same thing, we struck a deal. Guess what? Owner financing. I was kind of like, name your price and I'll set the terms. And so he wanted $2 million for these stores, which I thought was a fair price. And we put. Normally if you were to finance that through like a bank, they'd require at least 10% down to 200,000. Some banks may require 20% down, which would be $400,000. We got it for $50,000 down. So we put $50,000 down into this thing and took over 5 cash flowing, profitable stores. You're probably like, why the heck would they do that? Right? Why, why wouldn't he just want a bunch of money and Just go away. Well, I don't know. It's what he proposed, number one. Number two, if he took the big payday, if he took the $2 million up front, he would have to pay all this capital gains. So he would just pay all this money in taxes. And he said, okay, well, if you make payments to me over, I think it's eight years, nine years, something like that. Over eight or nine years, I just get to defer my taxes over eight or nine years. So it's much better for my taxes. Plus I get monthly income. I think as business owners, we're used to monthly income. We're used to every single month, you know, getting those distributions, getting that paycheck. And it's scary for a lot of people just to get one lump sum of money and then they give it to a financial advisor. And the goods in the stock market, like, what's going to happen with it? For him, he was just like, listen, he trusts me. I'm a proven operator. He believed that I would be very consistent in paying $12,000 a month or whatever our number is. It's something in that range. And that's what he wanted. So. And it was an easy deal. He didn't want to deal with the banks. He didn't want to deal with all this stuff. He didn't want to go through tax returns. And, like, my due diligence, and I hate to say this and sound like an idiot here, but, like, I already know this business. I've been in it for years. I operate a ton of these stores. I didn't ask for a tax return. I wanted a P and L. But, like. And I wanted to see the leases. The leases really matter because, you know, I'm signing those leases with whatever leases he has. I'm now taking them over. So in terms of when are they coming for renewal? How many options do they have? Are there any major increases? Does the landlord have the ability to, like, knock it down and rebuild your building, like, way in the back so nobody can see it? I've passed on one of those leases before for another deal. And so that's all, like, part of my due diligence. And I want to know who are people? How long has it been there? Like, I do due diligence, but it's not this, like, financial colonoscopy that an outsider would do and I would do if I was an outsider. But because I'm an insider, I already know the business. This is why it's so much easier to sell to me. And this is why Franchisees want to sell to other franchisees. This is all, like, kind of part of the game here. We land those deals. Same thing. Now it's a new market for me. I don't have those fears that I had anymore of being so far away. And we just hire somebody who lives up in that market, and they're in the stores every day working it. And then the final deal we did that year was another store in Philadelphia kind of along that same route. And I had been working on this store for three years. Okay, Three years. I've been going back and forth with this guy looking to sell. It was like, 2018. I think it might have been 2018. I don't even know. It was 2018, 2019. There's Covid and there's this and that and back and forth and back and forth. And, oh, my God, I spent more money on legal fees to close that one deal than I did for the seven deals or the five stores, because there was so much back and forth. And it was struggled to get all the terms ironed out. I almost gave up multiple times, but it was right in their footprint. We do really well in the city stores, and I didn't want to lose the opportunity. But the icing on the cake for me was this. It was that he had a manager that had been the store manager for him for, I want to say, 15 years. Like, almost his whole life, his whole career, he had been with Midas at that store as a technician and as a manager. And as part of our deal, whenever we buy these stores, we take everybody that works for them. It's part of my pitch. I say, listen, we are going to employ. Make offers to every one of your employees. We are going to give them a shot, and, you know, we hope that they succeed with us. And for a lot of people who've been in this business for a long time, and they care about their people, they don't want to just, like, leave them on the street. They don't want to hire, send them to somebody who's like, I'm going to fire everybody and bring in my own people. I don't have that reputation. I have the reputation of giving people a shot. And, you know, I mean, we still have people that work for us today that from. Essentially, we've done the deals in 2018, like, it's been years, and they're still working for us because we treat them right, and we're in the people business. And so, anyway, we take over the store. We get a couple of. We'll get all those employees and this one guy who'd been his manager. Yeah, we absorbed him and you know, he started to show us some amazing qualities. Like the store grew, we started to have record sales, record months, same thing, lots of low hanging fruit. We put a ton of money into giving him all the resources that he needed to continue to grow. He was a leader in, in our meetings, he spoke up with his best practices and what was working and where he was struggling. He helped other people, he coached people. He showed us the signs of somebody who had a lot of potential. And so when we had an opportunity to add another district manager to our Philadelphia region, he was our number one choice. So instead of going out and hire some random outsider, we said, who is somebody who is in our organization that we know that we trust, who's a proven leader, who is. And that everyone else will like, respect and follow. And he is now in that role and he is one of the best, if not the best district manager that we have. And if I didn't do that store, he wouldn't be working for us today, Right. If I didn't spend three years in pursuit, I wouldn't have got that. And so I believe everything happens for a reason, right? No matter what it is, good or bad, everything happens for a reason. I think a lot of it is like you just got to stay positive and you just got to continue to move forward and good stuff will happen from it. And so that brings us to 2023 at this point. Let's see, these are these orange ones and so. Or these orange ones and same old story. I'm in a market, right? I'm up here. There's another seller who has two locations and she says, hey Brian, I want to sell. I'm the guy to do it, right? There's no other actually mighty shops around here, except one down here. She comes to me with, with a price of what she wants to pay and I'm like, it's too much money, I can't pay that. The stores are only making a hundred grand between the two of them. I wanted to pay three and a half times, four times something in the 350 to 400. I thought that that's a fair number. That's what I was been used to paying for stores at that volume. And I knew they would take some work. And she was dead set on 500,000. She's like, I'm not taking a penny less than 500. And so we were at this like stalemate for like six months because I was being stubborn and didn't want to pay. And she was being stubborn and didn't want anything less. I eventually said, screw it, I'm just gonna buy these things. Let's go back with a seller finance deal. So I went back to her and said, all right, I'll do your $500,000, but $50,000 down is what I'm willing to pay. I don't know if you've noticed a trend, but $50,000 is like the number I like to pay. It seems to get the deals done. I don't know. But anyway, $50,000 down and I'll pay you four grand a month for the next whatever, seven years, six years, and in total, I'll pay you $500,000. Okay, we had a deal. It was good. So I get into these stores for $50,000. I same thing. Lots and lots of improvements that we get to make. The biggest one was none of their employees were on any sort of like performance based compensation plan. Everyone was like hourly and they had some bonuses, but they weren't significant. And we pay everybody based on the performance. So the more you produce, the more money you make. We have it for our technicians, we have it for our managers. This is very common in the automotive repair business because there are certain technicians who invest a lot in education, in training, and in tools. They invest over a hundred thousand dollars potentially in tools in order to fix cars. Right. And quickly. And those technicians deserve to make more money if they produce more than the guy who's like a newbie and just sitting on his butt. We put all their employees on the same performance based compensation plan that we already have in all of our other stores. And immediately they are vigorated to take more cars in, to say yes, to fix them a little faster, to make, you know, recommendations on factory schedule, maintenance, and all the things that, you know, perhaps we were missing out before we introduce our payment options. So we have multiple payment plans that we help make repairs affordable that they weren't using that our guys do. Like, there's all these little things that we developed this playbook for both as a franchise, right? So once again, I'm a franchisee. Midas Corporate has a franchise model that we follow. But within that, I have my own way of doing things. And I think this is like a big misconception that a lot of people don't understand is that, like, I run my own business. I run an automotive repair business that happens to be a Midas brand, but I get to choose of all the, like, menu items that I have available to me. On the Midas menu, I get to choose what I eat, right? I get to choose what are the things that I want to focus on. What are the things that I want to go big on. I like payment plans, I like financing. I like alignments. We like to focus on brakes and tires and suspension. There's other guys that love to focus on big trend transmissions and engines and more complicated things, right? Everyone has their different way of doing it, but you run it the way you want to run it. Now, every brand's a little different in the flexibility and all that stuff, but like for ours, we have a good amount of flexibility. And that is how I choose to remind. And so we get this store rolling. I'm into it. Same thing, we invest in computers and technology and we paint the stores, we make them look great and we staff them up and we give them all the resources that they've been wanting and needing up to this point. And same thing, the one store, we literally double the volume overnight. Essentially within a few weeks, the store went from 20,000 a week to 40,000 a week. We fixed all the margin issues and the pricing issues, and immediately these stores are making $300,000 now between the two of them from, you know, a hundred, we triple the money overnight. And like I get all my money back. The things are profitable and we're going from there. Again, repeat the process, repeat the process. Like, this is why I am into franchising. This is what I like. It's because once you know what you're doing, doing like it's copy and paste and copy and paste, there's nothing new here. Same for this store. Another store franchisee wants to sell. Guess who he calls? They call us. We get the deal done. We go in there, we bank the store, we renovate it, we, we upgrade the equipment. Like I sound like a broken record here. And it's because I am intentionally, like we're intentionally doing the same thing over and over again. And then finally, 20, 25, two stores. I got a store over here that in New Jersey that we bought from a guy, same thing, just looking to downsize and wanted us to kind of get in there. Similarly, lesson learned, he had a high price, a price that was more than what I wanted to pay, but it fit in really, really well in our footprint. We thought had a ton of potential. We thought there was a ton of low hanging fruit that we'd be able to fix. And so we get in there, same thing. Seller financed the deal, put less than a hundred thousand dollars down. I think it was 50 or 60 or something in that range. Put that down. We make monthly payments to him, he's happy, he gets the thing off. We get in there, we renovate the store, we increase sales 50% now, and it's crushing and making money. And then we have this other store again. This is was a major competitor of ours that was closing down stores because we have realtors who are like looking for opportunities for us and bringing us deals. We get in there and within 10 days of signing the lease, we get that thing flipped to our brand. I have a whole other video we'll link below here that you can watch if you want to hear more about that story. But pretty awesome. I think it's gonna be a great store right in your footprint. Literally next to a brand new Starbucks and like 150 units and all this stuff. That's how I did it. That's how I built a company that will do $50 million in revenue this year. By focusing on really boring stuff, to be honest, which are just like rolling up franchises, right? Same thing over and over again. And the nice part is there's no new challenges. Like there's almost nothing that ever happens in the auto repair business that we haven't faced already that we don't already know what to do. Whether it's a car that someone doesn't know how to fix, a technical issue, a personnel issue, a staffing issue, an equipment issue, a marketing issue. Like we know exactly what to do because we were in it so much. I think that's where a lot of people get stuck and a lot of people struggle is like they get so involved in all these other things that they have trouble like really nailing it and really getting it down. And so then you ask, well, what about all the other stuff I do? Some of you, you may know, I'm in more than just Midas. Well, in 2022, I said I'm going to build a team because I want to replace myself. You know, I've always been the visionary. I've always been the one to like have the idea. But I am terrible at operations. I am terrible at the execution of things. I am the idea guy. So I went out, I had had some entrepreneurial friends who would hire veterans who were former military special operations specifically to basically run operations. Because some of these guys, like, they're excellent at operations, they're excellent at execution and in high level of emotional skills and dealing with people and problems and challenges. And so I went out and worked with a nonprofit that helps, basically a recruiter helps Place these guys in high level leadership roles. And we hired, hired our COO in 2022. By December, uh, so about four months in, he, he had already taken over the operations from me. He, he had learned the business and he has been really the one driving a lot of this growth and our success from 2022 into 23 into 24. And in the beginning of 2025, we promoted him to be the CEO. So I'm not the CEO anymore. I am, I guess the president, a board member. I don't know. The, like, all the structure gets a little funny when, you know, we're still kind of like a small company. I mean we have a lot of employees, we have a lot of stuff. But like, I am still highly involved and highly aware of a lot that goes on. That's the best thing about, I think a franchise business too is like we at the best of, we have a national brand, we've got all this market, and everybody knows Midas, it's the most recognizable, one of the most recognizable names in auto repair. But at the end of the day, for anybody that works for us, like, the buck stops with me, my brother, who are the owners, and Colin, who has her full support in whatever he decides. But the decision tree is extremely small compared to other big architects that have tons of bullshit and politics and all that stuff. So we just continue to build up the leadership team. We've continued to build it out. So we have a back office. We run everything out of the, almost everything out of the Philippines. So we only have a two, three people that work here in our office. The rest, our entire team is, you know, remote and they do an amazing job. And I decided in, you know, now I'm out of it, right? So I said, all right, I'm kind of out of this thing. You guys are going to run with it. You're way better operators than me. Like I've, I got it to this point, but like to get this thing to the next level, we need other people who are better at than me in driving it forward in this business. I mean, our goal is to get to $2 million. Our first goal at least is to get to $2 million in revenue per store. That would get us, you know, over $70 million in revenue from our current level now, all while having like, basically no additional stores, no additional overhead. We're going to fill in a couple stores, maybe less than and five over the next couple of years. But what we're really focused on is driving same store sales because it's way more profitable. All other videos on that in terms like the math and all the stuff behind it. But that's going to be a bigger focus. I have diversified into other brands. We launched a painting franchise in 2024 that we, you know, built from zero. We own a artificial turf franchise with a partner in Texas and we're building that from zero. I have a mastermind that I run called eight figure franchisees. So for any franchise owners that want to learn like directly from me and and other people who to build eight figure businesses, we get together, we share best practices ideas. I have a ton of fun doing this. I'm building this YouTube channel. My goal is to be one of the top voices in franchising in business and helping people ultimately create freedom through franchising. I mean, it's what I believe in. It's what I've done my whole, literally my whole life. And I have many other friends that do it too. And it's not just Midas. I have friends that do this in almost every single brand out there. It's totally possible. So if you enjoy this content, please subscribe. Please comment Happy to answer any questions you have. I have a lot more stories, all this other stuff for another time. So I'll see you on the next video. Cheers.