A (0:00)

I want to tell you the crazy story of how we got our 35th Midas shop by sending one cold DM on LinkedIn. And so it was back in February of this year, 25, and my CEO and I were texting about how do we find more locations to buy? Ideally, we want to walk into a second gen automotive or basically an existing shop that we can rebrand, convert it into a Midas, which is our brand. And so we have a competitor who's a publicly traded company. And we had heard rumors that they were closing locations around, you know, the country in, specifically typically in our market in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And so we thought, well, like, let's just start at the top. And so we, we go on LinkedIn, we find the CFO of this publicly traded company, and we sent him a message that basically says, you know, hey, this is who we are. If there are any stores in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey market that you're looking to exit early, you know, we could help you with that.

B (0:52)

Right?

A (0:53)

Because think about from their perspective, if they're on the hook for a bunch of leases that are, you know, unprofitable stores, and they have this like, plan to, to close the stores early, they still on the hook for the rest of that lease. And so we've had success in the past of saying, well, how about we like negotiate a deal with you with the landlord, and we can take over whatever day that you want to get out of it and save them multiple months of rent and other expenses that they're gonna be on the hook for.

B (1:23)

Right?

A (1:23)

So it was a great idea in our minds, right. But we had to talk to somebody about it. And crickets, no response. Like, we got nothing. And we didn't really want to bother the guy. We thought about, well, should we send like a physical letter to their office? But we decided, let's just chill. And then sometime I want to say it was in April or April or May, we got a response back and they said, nice to meet you, here is so. And so, he's my head of real estate, you guys should talk. And so it worked, right? Then we had our next lead, and we get on the phone with them, we start building relationships, and we find they have a number of properties they're looking to close. One of them is right in our market. And at the same time, they must have been in contact with the landlord because we got a listing from the landlord saying, hey, this property could be available. So now, you know, the clock is on. And so we work with the landlord to negotiate A deal on the lease of this property. We try to buy it. We like to buy whenever we can. But like, sometimes the landlords just don't want to sell. They're all triple net leases, which means we as the tenant pay all the expenses. Like literally we pay everything. We pay the taxes, pay the insurance and pay all the utilities. The building maintenance, repair. It is like mailbox money for landlords. And so many times they don't want to sell these properties. And we just have to decide at the end of the day, you know, do we want to, you know, if we can make money and it's in our footprint, we're probably going to do it, even if it means leasing the building. So anyway, we negotiate a deal to lease this property. Simultaneously, we're negotiating with our competitor for them to sell us their equipment and terminate early because their lease didn't run out on this building until September. And if they wanted to, they could stay in this through September and then we would take over, I think October 1st. But like July, August, September are some of the best months in our business. It is seasonal. And so we went to the competitor and said, how about we take this thing over? Like June 15th. We went to the landlord and said, hey, they're willing to hand over the Keys on June 15th. Are we able to terminate their lease and start ours on the same day? And we got everybody together, we got everybody to agree and it happened. We took over the Keys on June 20 after a few days delay. And the clock was on. Like our goal was to get this store open by July 1st. We essentially had like nine or ten days over the weekend to do a ton of stuff. So we needed to remodel the waiting room, which was total paint, like redoing the floors, the waiting room TVs, like Total, Total gut remodel of the waiting room. We had to paint the whole entire outside of the building. The shop. We had to power wash everything. We had to throw out like, like a dumpster full of junk that they had. We'd install computers, we had to install security systems. We had to beg the township for use, an occupancy permit and a fire inspection and all this crap. We had to get new employees, like onboarded and trained with the point of sale so they could start day one and they can know what to do. We, we had to get our vendors to set up accounts to deliver inventory, to have, you know, oils and filters and brake pads and like all the stuff that we needed to successfully launch. We had to work in Midas to Get the franchise agreement, the website up the Google page, like tons and tons of stuff. Now, you know, we have acquired a lot of stores and 35 now stores. We've only done three from scratch where they were like brand new. From zero. We did a Pep Boys conversion. We did a former, you know, Midas. There was like a dark store conversion and then, and then this one. So we had a very thorough checklist both from new stores and conversion stores of all the things that we had to do and all the different people. And so if you are looking to, you know, expand your business and you want to kind of run this like roll up strategy that I have, you know, done it, done a pretty good job with, you really need to get this checklist down of all the, all the crap that you have to do. Because what happens is if not like all these things fall through the crack, you know, 21. We bought this package of seven Midas shops in New Jersey and it was like the first really big deal we did. And there was a ton of this stuff that we missed. And so we didn't update a bunch of utilities and we didn't really have a good system for the mail. And anyway, like we had shut off notices, we had all these fines. Like it was a bunch of stuff fell through the cracks that we learned from. Updated our checklist. So now when we do new stores, I mean we can turn them because we've made so many mistakes. And so if you're looking to really grow your business, lock these down. It makes it so much easier. We also learned that if we can run processes in parallel, it can compress the timelines because sometimes people go through these lists and it's like one thing after another after another. But then that like 10th thing you have to do is like delayed by the 9th, 8th and 7th, versus if we can do them simultaneously and get all these plates spinning, a lot of times it can go a lot faster. The other part is like building this team. Years ago it was just me. It was just me and some people and I honestly am not the best operator. I'm really good at the visionary and had the ideas, but I'm not the person to get in the weeds and just drive it forward. And I intentionally then have built this leadership team in our company who are excellent at that stuff. All of them are former military, special operations, elite military leaders, the top 1% who come out of the army, they retire and then their next job is with us. And these guys are just badasses across the board in accountability, in leadership in organizational and emotional intelligence and the ability to get people to do things and just stay on it until it's done. They have infinite more patience and grit and resiliency than I do, which is why they are in the roles from this direct operational standpoint. Because, you know, I. We would not be where we're at today if we didn't have these guys and this system. And so it goes back to like just this theory in this level that I play at, which is having an insane level of sense of urgency, Just this like burning desire to get shit done. We know that July, August, September are the best months. We need to be able to capture that. And so we needed to get this thing open. And so full fledged effort, you know, 10 days straight. July 1, we are open for business right now. It's not all done. Like we have temporary banners. We're still like, some of the bays are down because we're still working on them, but we're open for business. And on day one, we do a whopping $114 in sales. Crushing it. Day two, we did 600. Day three, we do 1500. We end up doing 5000 the first week, 7000 the second week, 16,000 the third week at 20,000 the next week. We ended the month at $52,000 in revenue. We actually broke even on a cash flow basis because we were able to negotiate free rent and like delayed a bunch of other expenses. And you know, normally we would lose money at $52,000, but I'm pretty happy with the result overall. In August, we set the goal of $90,000 in revenue. And we are on pace right now as of today for 85,000. So our team is ramping up. We just got our direct mail marketing hit. We just got our state inspection and emissions license, which is like really important in Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago. We're still fine tuning the growth. A lot of things are still happening and we're starting to stack success now. This begs the question of why did I believe that we would be successful when our competitor failed there, right? Like our competitor, when they exited, I think they were doing about $10,000 a week in revenue. Call it $500,000 a year. They were losing money and thought like, this store is not worth us keeping it. And I come in here and I dump all in. We're going to be about $150,000 into this store by buying the equipment, the signage, all the remodeling, the equipment, all the things we got to do. We're about 150 grand. And why am I so confident in that? Signing a 10 year lease, personally guaranteeing all this shit. And a couple reasons. One, we've done this now 35 times, right? So we know what it takes. A lot of times it's a people and a process problem. It's not a location problem specifically in this one. The location is actually really good. I'll talk about that in a second. But our business, we're in the people business that happens to fix cars. And we know if we can get the right team in there following the right process, that we can make all the money that we need and want to make. And so I believe myself. We believe in the process. Then it comes down to location. We have to have a good location. We're in retail, Automotive retail being the key word. Most of our stores are right next to like a kfc, a Popeyes, a Burger King, usually not Chick Fil A because usually they're in much nicer sections and newer sections. Most of our stores are in middle to lower income areas or just older areas that don't have the latest and greatest fast food like Chick Fil A. But anyway, so this location though, literally next door to it, they're building a brand new ground up Starbucks right behind us. They're building like 150 townhomes with like retail on the bottom. They're building a Goddard School, they're building a dollar tree. Like there's a ton and ton of development literally next door to our building. And so part of me says, all right, well if all these big developers spending like, like I don't know how much it costs, $100 million probably to build all this stuff and Starbucks is there and Duncan is there, like it's probably a pretty good spot from a demographics and income and retail standpoint. And so the combination of that and our just ability to run these things to me was like a no brainer. And it's already proven it as we are going to do, you know, 85,000 this month. Hopefully we'll probably break 100 in September. You know, this store will be one of our best stores in the coming months and years. And so when you launch a business though, when you launch a franchise, you can't get excited by the five year goal. Like I think in five years a store could be doing $3 million. I believe it.