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Are you wired to be a franchise owner? Today we're going to figure it out by diving into the personality traits, the risk tolerance and the mindset shift required to go from an employee to an owner. I've learned all this in building an eight figure franchise business over the last decade, plus helping dozens of other entrepreneurs get started in franchising. So let's go now. The biggest mistake that I see with new franchise owners is thinking that a franchise is low risk, that it's plug and play, that I can just sign this agreement, I wire some money, I go on. Indeed, I hire a manager for $60,000, I send him to training and this thing just prints money and I collect a check on the 15th every month. Man, that sounds great. Sign me up for that. Now, the truth is, franchises are scalable. They should be systematized. You should be able to copy and paste all that is true from a business model standpoint. But it takes time to get there. It takes years to get there to be honest. And you have to earn the right. You. And to earn the right, you have to build the business. And that's the thing about franchising, right, is we are a real business. Like I run 35 automotive repair shops that happen to be a franchise. By that I mean like I am driving a car as fast as I can down a highway and yes, I have guardrails that I have to stay into. The franchise provides those guardrails in terms of the things we have to do on one side and the things that we can't do on the other side. And as long as I stay within those bounds, you know, I can go as fast or as far as I want to go. That's the thing you have to know. And the biggest misconception is that a franchise is a real business that takes real work to get it going. And so what are the traits of a successful franchise owner, AKA business owner? The biggest one by far is the ability to get shit done. It's a burning desire to take action in that you see a problem in your business and, and you fix it, like immediately. You come up with a plan, you identify the problem and you go ahead and you fix it. If you have that trait and you have this desire to just get it done as quickly as you can and you get everyone around you to do it as quickly as they can too, you will have success. And on the flip side, if you do not have that trait, if you were somebody who, who sees a problem and you just sit back and you're like, oh, well, I got to like, I got to write a business plan and I have to crunch all these numbers and then I got to think about it for three weeks and then I got to call a bunch of people and a bunch of different opinions and I get, I get seven different quotes to pay for it. Like, if you get stuck down by analysis paralysis, you might as well stop watching this video and forget about owning a franchise because it is probably not going to work for you. And it's just because like, in business, the people who move the fastest, who have the greatest sense of urgency are the ones who have the most success. Because if I see a problem and I want to fix it, or if I want to see a solution, or I have a great idea of how I think I can make more money or how we can improve the business, like, I am going to just go ahead and do it and like, I may take that shot and I may miss, but I am going to learn something and then I'm able to adjust and I can take the shot again and that time I'm going to be a little bit closer and I might miss. But then boom, by the third time I nailed it. And so now I've taken three shots, I've learned three different things, I've hit the goal that I wanted to hit all before you finished your spreadsheet. That is the thing that I think more than anything, it's this desire to get shit done. And I think it's tough for some people who come out of the corporate world. Maybe they come out of government, whatever it is, but big organizations where like there's lots of procedures and checklists and protocols and all these things that like you've been trained for 15 or 20 years that things have to move slow and you need all these approvals. But then, you know, you come out of that world and you get into, you know, a franchise or small business ownership and there's none of that, like the decision maker is you. And like as quickly as you decide to do something, you can go ahead and take action. And so that is the thing that if you have that, you can be wired. If you don't have that, you got to find a way to get it. Otherwise maybe sick in corporate America could be better for it to be totally honest. That's true. Number one. The next thing is to be sales minded. Now when I talk about sales, we're not talking necessarily about, you know, selling solar or like door to door pest control or whatever, but when we talk about sales, what we really mean is like convincing people about your ideas, right? Getting other people to see the world the way that you see the world. Now. Every business is sales is the lifeblood, right? We have to generate revenue. We have to get sales in the door. In the early days, every single employee should be a sales generating machine. Whether they are the owner, a technician, some sort of manager. Like everybody needs to be generating revenue because if not, like you are not going to have money to pay people and like actually build the business. And so there needs to be a burning desire to get shit done to sell, right? And building a sales culture, if that is totally new to you and you're like, why I've never, never had a sales job, then that is something that I think you really want to familiar yourself with. Where there's a number of books, Number one, Jordan Belfort's the Way of the Wolf, who's like the wolf of the Wall street from the movie. He has an excellent book. There's a book called Sandler Sales Training that has, has a number of series that's really good. There's a number of books that could get you in that mindset of what it takes to sell. And at the end of the day, people have a problem, we have a solution. It's just a matter of like making sure we understand what their goals are and if we can sell them or not. And listen, at the end of the day, like, we are not everybody's best provider in our artificial turf franchise called Waterloo. If people want the cheapest possible turf and they really don't care about quality, we are not never going to be the cheapest because that is just not our business model. And that's okay. There's other people that can service them and they'll have comebacks and low quality, but they don't really care about that. That's a big thing, is you have to be sales minded. Number two is you have to be emotionally stable under pressure. Owning a business. A lot of stuff comes at you. Like you're going to have the weight of payroll, of your credit card bill to be doing every month. You're going to have lease payments or mortgage payments and debt payments. You're going to have employees coming at you all the time and then they want to raise and then they got this problem in this customer issue. And then you're going to have like a lawsuit or an insurance claim. You have all these things that weigh down on you every single day. Like you just get beat up, beat up, beat up. And you have to be emotionally stable under that pressure. You have to be able to just like, just not react, stay level headed and just come up with a solution. Be like, all right, we have this problem, here's a solution. I'm gonna take action, we're gonna get this thing done and we're gonna move on. And you're not gonna let those things weigh on you. Because I remember when I was first starting out, everything would weigh on me. Like, people would quit this, we'd be getting low in money. Like, all these things would be happening and I would be like stressed out and I couldn't sleep. And then we got this lawsuit. It was like this class action lawsuit over this like totally BS claim. And then I thought I was gonna go bankrupt because it was like these nasty, nasty grams from these lawyers in Florida over like ridiculous stuff. And we didn't do anything wrong. And I knew it was going to be okay because we didn't do anything wrong. But the weight of all that still, like, I carried it everywhere, right? And it was like really tough. And now, you know, I've been doing this for 10 years. It is very difficult. Like, I have thick skin, right? It's very difficult for things to weigh on me, which was then allows me to stay level headed, which allows me to continue to focus on the bigger picture and the things we have to do to continually grow the business. And so, so in the beginning, you will cut easily, you will bleed. But the longer that you're in the game and the longer that you can keep playing at it and stay like, emotionally sound, the more success you're going to have. And your team takes clues from that, right? If you're a total wreck and you're totally bipolar and you react to the stupidest little things, like your team's not even going to want to bring you things that really they should bring you because they're afraid that you're going to totally flip out on them, right? And kill the messenger. And then ultimately now your business is even worse off because people don't trust that you can handle it. So you have to be able to, to just take a deep breath and just figure it out and like keep moving forward. Next, a successful trait, franchise owners here is being coachable. Like, my mindset is just show me how to make money and I will do it. I don't care if it's my idea, I don't care if it's my name. I care nothing about any of that. All I want to do is be the best at what I can do, which is operating these franchises and growing these business and Once I figure out the playbook, then I can copy the playbook again and again and again. And like Today we have 35 automotive repair shops, we've got, you know, 13 paint territories, we got the five territories in the Waterloo business. We're trying to build a towing business. We're doing all these things. But a lot of it's because I have playbooks in each one that I've copied from somebody else. And my goal is just to run the playbook and then find my little ways that I can fine tune it within the playbook, within the guardrails of the franchise is find ways I think we can get just a little bit better. But we need to be coachable, right? And there's things that I do in my business that we could do better at, right. And I am learning from other franchisees because there's a really strong community within franchise systems, at least most where franchisees believe that the rising tide lifts all boats and franchisees want to help each other. And so I am looking at the guys who are doing, you know, 3 million, 4 million, $5 million a year in revenue per store compared to my store which may be doing 1.5 million. So they're doing double to maybe even triple what I'm doing. And instead of saying, well, in their market, they do this or was so and so is involved in the community. Well, he has all these connections, right? There's so many people that see somebody way far ahead of them and instead of saying like what could I learn from this person or how could I take the things that they're doing and adapt them in my business, they make up all these excuses, they come up with all these reasons of why they are special. Also in turn saying, well, I can't do that. This wouldn't work in my market. And guess what, you're right. If you believe that it will not work in your market, then that is a self fulfilling prophecy that will come true. You will not do it. Versus if I believe that, hey, if they can do 5 million here in Detroit, in Florida and South Carolina, in Virginia and there's all these guys that have the success, there's no reason that I can't do it. I just need to figure out how I could be better. And I, and I want to be coachable. I want to learn, show me what to do and I will make money. I don't care whose idea it is, right. If you have that trait. So you're now, now we're coachable, so we're learning new things. We, we're emotionally stable so that we don't. We're not a fricking roller coaster going up and down. And then we take action on all the things that we said we were going to do. Like it is such a powerful combination and that is the power of a franchise, right? All these things start to come together and then finally here is someone who has leadership qualities. Like they value leadership over diy. Here's what I mean. There are really three phases to grow in a franchise. And I have a whole other video we can talk about this. But basically in the beginning it's I do it like I do everything myself because I need to and I want to learn it. Then we do it together. Like I'm going to show you what to do and we are going to do it together. And then eventually it becomes they do it and they do it. Now you have a self managing team that you trust can execute the process from end to end. They can get the customer, they can estimate, they can sell, they can produce the job, the customer's happy, we deliver on the service, whatever it is. And once you have the ability to let go and let the team, they run without your like daily involvement and nitpicking and micromanagement and all stuff, then if you could have one team that is self managing like there's nothing that stops you from having two teams. 4, 8, 16, right? And at this point this is where we get to the copy and paste and now we can have multiple teams across the city, multiple cities, multiple brands, right? You can continue to grow once you can kind of build this pyramid out and have that. But it all comes down to leadership, right? Leadership is having the vision of this is where we're going is getting the right people of who believe in that vision and then finally it's holding them accountable and saying, hey, this is the level that we are going to play on. If you want to be on my team, you got to play at this level. And if you're not willing to play at this level, no problem, you can go work for one of my competitors and totally fine. But a leader has to have the vision to find the right people and then to hold them accountable. That is what really leadership looks like. Those are the combinations of the personality traits that I am looking for in really good franchise owners. In the people that join my eight figure franchisee community who want to build eight figure businesses. They take action, they drive sales, they're emotionally stable, they're coachable, they have this good leadership quality that is the main part of it. Now the red flags, right? The things that I say, man, if this people has this, we are getting concerned here. Number one is someone who's a serial new idea chaser. They constantly are looking for the newest thing. They're constantly, you know, chasing the new shiny objects. They're constantly focused on invention. Like, I want to invent a new way of doing something versus somebody who says, just show me how to make money. Like, I will take the same thing and I will drive it forward. I will just plow forward in the field of money collecting all these dollars. And it's extremely boring. I get that. But you stay extremely stable. Number two is someone who's like hyper independent. They really want to do it my way. My way. They criticize everything that the franchise is doing. They think everything is like, these guys are stupid and they should be doing this and they should be doing that. And they constantly want to change because they think that they know better than everyone else. And as I talked about a little bit earlier, franchising team sport here, there's like this community where everybody wants to help each other, everybody wants to share ideas and best pract and all these things. And like, if you only care about yourself, like you should really just have an independent business. You can look at yourself in the mirror every day and congratulate yourself on all your accomplishments. And that's probably a better route. I think people who want passive income is a dangerous road here. I have a whole other video we're talking about like semi absentee ownership and all these things. But like a franchise is an active business. It is one where it is high risk and it is high reward. I mean, I've had stores that I put a hundred thousand dollars into him and in the first year I'm making 200,000. I have a store that I put $50,000 on and I made 400,000 in the first 12 months. And once again, established person, I know what I'm doing. Like, not everybody, you know, has a success, but once you get in it, you know how to execute. Those are not passive results. I'm not passive in this. But you can get some crazy numbers if you know what you're doing. And so why are you really in this? If you really just want passive income, the stock market, maybe real estate, go that route. If you really, you don't care about passive income, you say, I want to work, I'm willing to take the risk, then franchising and operating a business could be a better fit for you. And here are the big mindset shifts that you have to have, especially for people who are transitioning out of corporate America into franchise ownership. I've worked with dozens of people who've made this exact jump. Many of them have been extremely successful following these traits. And there's other ones who have totally failed at the franchise ownership and ended up going back to corporate America. If you're in that phase, this is like super important. Number one is you go from having a lot of job security to cash flow uncertainty. Like you start a franchise, most of the time you're starting from zero, right? And you have no idea when you are going to be able to replace your corporate like salary and, you know, lifestyle that you have. And so you are going from something that is completely stable to something that's completely unstable. You have to want that. Like, it can't be just about the money because the money is going to go down in the beginning. You are going to make less money for way more hours and way more stress than you ever had. So if you're doing it just for the money, it's a terrible idea. Now if you're doing it for other reasons to say, hey, like, I feel I'm not satisfied with the work I'm doing. I feel like I could do a lot more and I want more fulfillment or like I want to make more money. But I've recognized that that is a long term goal and I'm willing to take short term sacrifices in order to get there. I think that's a huge, huge part of it. The next part is like you have to go from a task completion mentality to a ownership side of it. So like task completions, like, oh, I had this checklist and I did everything for the day, right? Like, it's like you're taking the actions, you're doing the things and then you count that as success versus when you own it. Like really what we're talking about is owning the results. Like, did you sell the job or not? At the end of the day? Like, yes, you made so many calls. Yes, I did all these things, I said the words. But at the end of the day, what doesn't matter is did you complete the tasks? Not did you do the checklist? It's did you get the result that we're seeking? And if you didn't get the result, it's not being the victim and making all these excuses, but it's really taking ownership to say, I didn't get the result, I failed at this. And then figuring out what I have to do better and next time to get it. Right. You know, other times I talk to people, man, they make all these excuses and they blame everybody else versus like looking internally and saying, well, what did I do wrong? What do I need to do to fix this? Because no one is coming to save you. At the end of the day, you're the business owner, it is your business. You have this community and all these people around you to help you. But it is a business and is up to you to make it successful. And if you can't handle that, that's probably not the right fit. Okay? And finally it is. You have to kind of shift this mindset from I do the work to I build the team that does the work. So maybe you come from like a very hands on type of environment. And in the beginning when you own the franchise, that's okay, like you should learn all the things. But ultimately to make it grow, you have to build the team around you. It can't be just you, otherwise you've ultimately bought yourself a job which is probably not what you want. Right? You're in this because you want to build a team. You want freedom, right? You want more purpose, you want more impact. The only way you get that is you build a team. How you build a team, there's a whole nother video on that that we can dive into another time. But you have to be able to think about how I do the work to how I build the team that does the work and I'm the that leads them. So back to my original question. Are you wired to be a franchise owner? Do you have what it takes from personality, from a skill set, from a mindset shift to become a franchise owner? And if so, the best time that you can start is today. The change of AI. A lot of white collar jobs are going away and blue collar service based businesses, things that franchises thrive in, are going to be rising. There's no better time than today to get started and to work with my team in doing that. There's a link below in the description. You can book a call their team, we can hop on, it's totally free. Free. There's no cost, there's no obligation. And just to talk to you about where you're at today, what are your goals are and if there's a way that we can help. I would love to help you build an eight figure business and franchising. I'll see you on the next one. Cheers.