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Welcome back to the Business of Beers podcast. Your daily dose of strategies, tools and tips to help you build an eight figure business. Today's episode is a clip from one of my YouTube lives. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, there's a link below in the description. Cheers.
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What direction do I want to grow my, grow my business in? And this is like the big thing, right? Is from a strategy standpoint, it's like you could go in any direction and what direction makes sense, right? What direction do you want to grow the business that makes the most amount of sense. And to start adjacent is the best decision. So if, like, for example, let's say I owned this franchise here and I had four opportunities I was looking at and this one's 20 minutes away, this one's 35, this one's 45, and this one's like an hour and a half or an hour, whatever. My goal is proximity, right? Proximity is what matters the most. So I would be looking to acquire this one first, this one second, this one third, and then this would be my fourth and final idea. And if you're in a mobile business, so I know like Sarah, you're in a territory based, she's in a plumbing, Plumbing business. They don't have specific locations, but you have territories. And so it'd be similar but like you'd be looking to acquire adjacent territories or ones that seem to have synergies because all these businesses require hands on work, right, to really get them going, especially in the franchise world. Many of the stores that I've acquired over the years were low performing stores or underperforming. And we've bought stores that were losing money on the day we bought them. And we got really good deals. But a lot of them the weight becomes on us to be operationally strong. And the only way we can actually turn them around is we're physically in the stores. We get there and we, you know, we're, we're there setting the expectations, setting the pace. You know, you can't expect to do turnarounds if you're hands off. And this proximity really matters because if you're, if you're, you know, if you're, if it's an hour and a half between your locations, like it's going to be, you're just, it's going to be hard to be able to give them the support that they need. And so if you're looking to develop a strategy to roll these franchises up, then you really want to start from a proximity basis. And then we go from There. So this is like the summary of my personal priority in my business where the number one thing that I want to buy and is an existing franchise that's next door to me. Like I will overpay for one that is right next to me because of all the synergies that I'm going to get and the influence that I already have and the margins. My second one priority is if I can buy just any existing one in the market. Right. So back to that map I was looking at, the one that's right next to me, that would be the first, the main one I'd pursue. Otherwise anyone in the market I'd pursue then like order of priorities would be then yeah, open a new unit in my current market. So I'm in Philadelphia for example. I'm going to look to open a new location now. What does that one look like? Yeah, it could be a retiring mom and pop owner that's looking to get out. In our case it could be a competitor that is not renewing a lease or the landlord is not renewing a lease. So for example, we took over a like a Pep Boys that is a competitor of ours who they were not renewing the lease and we just went in there and, and took it over. Same for a Monroe muffler. You know, now we're in, in talks with some other landlords who, it's the reverse. The landlord doesn't want to renew the lease with the tenant and then so now they're coming to us and we're in negotiation to sign that lease. We've talked to many independent shop owners about selling their selling the shops and like us taking it over. It's just we could never come to an agreement on price and terms, but we would. I mean it just has to meet our criteria and you know, it's just gonna actually, you know, it's a little bit more unique in my situation because like we operate a very specific property in that it, you know, it's retail automotive. Like if you were in, you know, Paulo's in a, in a sub, a sub business, you know, sandwiches and so like for him it's like, you know a strip center. That's a good location. Right. Like he's going to be probably looking at more of, you know, who are the competitors in the space, what is the parking like, you know, in when, you know around lunchtime and dinner time. And for him it might make sense to go find a failed people pizza shop off biz by sale that's in a really good spot, like an A plus location for him and then maybe even quote buy the business for almost nothing. But buying the business gets access to that real estate which is like prime real estate that he couldn't get otherwise. And so I think that's all kind of like as you work to develop this strategy, you kind of have this order of priority. Oh yeah. And then so after that new unit, so if we can't get a new unit, whether it's a mom and pop or whatever, then we'd be looking to the next order for me is can I buy an existing multi unit package in a new market. And so for me this was like I did this in New Jersey, I did this in this Allentown which is about an hour, hour and a half away. I would look to do that. We have looked at buying existing multi units in plane ride away. So we've looked at you know, the Midwest, we've looked at Florida, we've looked at other, other markets. At the end, you know, we've decided at least at this point we are not interested in getting on planes because of the additional complication that it, that it adds and just our belief that we can, we can build in the markets that we're already in without having to add that to our lives. But that would be my next preference and then it would be can I buy the real estate that we currently own? So you know all of our buildings are triple net leases which means we're responsible for paying all the expenses. And if we can buy them, great. Unfortunately most of the landlords don't want to sell. They have no reason unless they want to redeploy the capital. And then other than that I'm a big fan of just keeping it simple and putting the index funds. But the next way I'm going to look to grow as we think through. All right, I'm in this market, I want to add more locations, I want to build it up. This one is specific to it kind of depends on the concept. This wouldn't work in all the brands but it's, but it's running what's, what would be known as like a hub and spoke strategy. So in the auto repair business, for example, you know we could have a massive store right here. So say I have like a ten bay store. It's huge. We have tons of inventory. I can have like all the best like mechanics and tools and everything there. And then I could look to acquire smaller stores. Maybe these are only like three bay shops or four bays, like you know, less than half the size but are in very good Areas that the big stores are not available. Like, a lot of our business is access to real estate. People don't go very far to get their cars fixed, even for making sandwiches. People aren't gonna drive out of their way to get a sandwich. People pay for convenience, right? And so for me, it's like, can I open up smaller stores here and, you know, max out whatever we can do in revenue, but then any overflow we can. We can shoot over to the hub store. Right? Do I know? Do it. Do any existing Midus owners come to you? Let's see if I can. Just like, I'm gonna. John asked, did the. Any owners come to you to check first before selling with a broker? So I've only. Of all the stores I've ever acquired, only one store was listed with a broker. One out of, well, 35. And they went to a broker. That was the second, the third store that I bought in 2017. And so they went. He came to me first. He actually did come to me. I gave him a price. He didn't like the price. He went to a broker, listed it with a broker. But then he had this time to move. His whole family, they were moving to another state. He had a hard deadline. Like, literally, he had to sell the business. And he just got really nervous at the end that, you know, he would move and, like, the deal would fall through at the end. And then, like, what would happen if he's down there and the whole thing, like. And, you know, he was willing to accept a lower price from me. I bought that for one time. The store is making about 120 grand. I think I bought it for about 120 grand. And at the end, he was happy with it all. I mean, we're still friends today, so it's all good. But, yeah, a lot of times they don't go, the brokers, because if you think about it, like, the brokers are going to take 10, 10% or more if they're really big deals. I mean, there are some. If they get into the really, really big side, they can go outside. But most franchises, most the deals get done internally. Franchisee to franchisee. They never hit the market. They never hit the brokers. And this is what makes it hard for other people to break into these things. It's because, I mean, even in the mice business, like here, for example, the red dots are my stores. The blue dot, the blue stars are areas that I want stores in. Most of these, there are not existing franchises currently. But if someone pops up, like, there's a Guy over here, there's a store up here. There's a store up here. Like, if any of those people want to sell, like, I am going to buy it, and I'm probably willing to overpay for it because I know I'm going to have so many. I just have so many more synergies. And so. So if you're looking to break in, John, like a couple, like, if. So if I were starting from zero today, like, and I said, hey, I want to get into. And I want to run the same play as. As. As I'm doing you, you're not going to be able to work with any brokers. Most likely, it's going to be a manual process. Like, I would first go out and find a brand that has a lot of units. This map here, all these different colors was 2016. So, like, when I was starting this whole thing, these were all the different owners. So, like, these different color groups are all the different owners. So, like, I bought. These are the first two stores I bought in 2017. And then I bought a single store here. Single store here. You know, we opened up one from scratch. This was a package of seven and then a package of three, and then this was a package of five and two and, like, one here and one there and six. But, like, this is our footprint today. These are all my stores today. But in 2016, it was highly fragmented. There was, I want to say there was, I mean, at least 12 owners here that we've consolidated into one. So if you were looking to replicate this, you would want to find a brand that has a lot of owners and. And a lot of fragmented ownership, which means you have a lot of different owners. Because think about it like the other way. Like, if. Where's my. Like, this is the. Whatever. It's the same map. I just changed the logos to Midas. But, like, if you looked at the map and I owned all of these or another franchisee, like, they are not going to sell one store, two stores, or even if I decided, hey, I hate whatever this store, I'm going to sell it, you really don't have any other opportunities to acquire because you're competing against, like, a large player who has all the connections and has the resources and all that stuff. Right? So you would want to find a brand that looked like 2016 Midas, where it's lots of locations and they're highly fragmented, they're owned by tons of different people.