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My friend James went from a burnt out employee to making over $879,000 last year by owning a business. Here's exactly how he did it. And you can do too. James had been in medical device sales for over seven years. He had a great job. By all accounts, he was making like $200,000 a year. But he wasn't happy. He was constantly traveling. He had the stress of hitting his quotas every month, and he knew that he could do a lot more. So in 2020, he started to go down the rabbit hole of buying an existing small business to not only replace his income, but give him an opportunity to earn so much more. He found multiple businesses for sale, earning 750 to a million dollars a year. That sounded amazing, but the problem was they're asking 3 to 4 million dollars to purchase them. With today's rates, that would put his monthly payment at $40,000 a month. And it's all good if the business has stable cash flow. But what if you lose some major customers? What if key employees quit? What if the business is way harder than you expected to be? And James just couldn't stomach taking on a ton of debt, putting his house on the line for his very first business that he knew nothing about. Plus, he'd be relying on the seller to train and support him. And while he may agree to all that stuff, after a few weeks, he's gonna be on the beach somewhere drinking margaritas, ignoring the calls while the place is burning down. And so then he thought, well, maybe I could start my own business from scratch. But then he realized, like, he's not a zero to one type of guy. There's a lot that's involved to identify a problem, come up with a solution, create everything involved, put it all together, build the team. He realized, like, what he was really good at was following a playbook that someone else wrote, because that's what he did his whole career. He didn't invent any medical devices. He didn't, like, solve any new problems, write any of the marketing material. He didn't even go out to find the customers. He was given the playbook and then trained on the process of what to do, which allowed him to focus on one thing, which, which was execution. He decided to explore franchising, which would give him the playbook, training, support, and all that he needed to be able to go. I'm not talking about, like, McDonald's or chick fil a or like Planet Fitness here. Franchising exists in hundreds of industries. In home services, senior care, pet care, salons commercial services, like almost everything that you could imagine there's probably a franchise for. And he realized that he could get into a high quality franchise for one tenth of what that acquisition loan would be, but like 300, $400,000, which would put his monthly payment at a much more manageable $4,000 a month. And the SBA, you only need to put about 20 to 30% down. So he could get into a new business for like eighty to a hundred thousand dollars. Understand that business is starting from zero. There's definitely a lot more risk involved, but you also have way less debt and have the ability still to build a massive business. So there's pros and cons to each one of them. But for him, it was worth it because he knew that he could build the business he knew he could sell. But with thousands of franchising, it's easy to get overwhelmed by all the options. How do you know which ones are good, which ones are shit, which ones would fit him? He came up with this checklist of like the perfect business model for him. And he wanted something that was sales driven because that's like in his wheelhouse is what he does every day. He wants something with existing demand. Like he didn't want to have to explain or educate people on what the hell he was selling. He wants something that was timeless, so had been around forever and will continue to exist for the dawn of time. And he wanted something in an unprofessional industry because he thought like it'd be way easier to stand out if he goes there, wears a, wears a shirt like polo shirt, has an iPad, is professional, they show up on time, they do the same things they say they're gonna do in service based businesses. Many of them aren't professional. And so this is actually one of those areas that franchises can really kill it. It's the same thing when you go to buy a house, right? Like you have an exact model in your head of the perfect house. How many bedrooms, how many baths, what type of neighborhood, if it has a pool, a sidewalk, lighting, you probably know what school district you want to be in. You probably know what like zip code, if not specific neighborhood are on your watch list. And this is what leads people to buy houses sight unseen is because they've already been thinking about this for years in that house, hits every single item and they just know they're going to love it. And you got to do the same thing when you're buying a business. There are so many options, especially with the franchising. And so it's super important to think through all these different factors. There's a lot more to consider too that, that I help people with, which is like, do you want to be in a B2B or B2C? Do you want retail versus mobile? Do you want something that has emergency services or not? Do you want to work with low skilled, high skilled? Like, there are endless things that you can get in. And I have a, I have a resource below. I'm going to link it. If you want help coming up with that checklist, I can help you with that. But based on his criteria, he landed on a fencing franchise. And in 2022, he quit his job and decided to go all in on this new business. And you may be thinking to yourself, man, that is so risky. Like, you're throwing away this 200k job to bet on yourself. But when you think about it, the risk was actually relatively low. I mean, he was starting with a proven model with a proven brand that had been around for years. Tons of training, tons of support. They have a community of other franchisees. So, like, he would not be doing this thing alone. And the concept he picked didn't require a huge investment and it didn't require like signing a big lease, a personal guaranteeing, like all this stuff. And he realized, like, if it all goes to ship, he can get out, he could sell at a loss and then he could easily get another job in medical device sales. It's what he did his whole career. He had lots of connections, he was very good at it. He could easily call up some friends and get another job doing exactly what he's doing today. The way he thought about it was his downside is in a couple years, he returns to the exact same job and income level that he is today, right, Minus some financial losses if, if he had to sell the business at a loss. But the upside is unlimited income, unlimited freedom, the self worth that you gain by pushing yourself to this new level and having this challenge that you overcome, it becomes this asymmetric risk. I think that's what they call it, where the upside is like way bigger than the downside for the right type of people. Now, entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, but for some people, it is the only way that they're going to truly be happy. He said, screw it, I'm in. I want to give this thing a shot. And he decided day one, he's going to be in the weeds. He said, I'm going to wear every hat in the beginning. So he sold every job, he managed every project. He did the books. And almost every successful franchisee I know follows this path. They start in the I do it phase where they work their ass off in the beginning and they learn everything. Because once you do it once or twice and you get it down, it's really easy to know what it's like. And then you can call bullshit when you have other employees who tell you that it can't be done. You were like, listen, man, like, I know what it takes, right? For him, it was six months in this phase, just like working his butt off. And then he brought somebody on and he moved into the we do it phase. Now this is where, you know, you start to build a team and like, we are going to do it together. This first sales rep started taking over a lot of his estimates and sales. She was actually really, really good and closing at the same rate as him. So now he was able to work on some of this higher level things, right? Some of the bigger relationships, the bigger jobs, and he was able to remove himself from that daily grind. And the business just exploded. In 2023, that was his first full calendar year, he sold $4 million, generated almost $700,000 of profit, as you can see by this P and L that he, that he graciously shared with me. And in 2024, the business continued to climb 5.4 million, generating $879,000 in profit. Now his goal for 2025 is to break over 1 million. Now this is all within the same four territories in his hometown. This is all within $100,000 investment. Cash payment is now making over a million dollars a year in the near future here. This is just getting started. Like, there's no limit to what James can build. There's no limit to what any entrepreneur can do. I've encouraged him to expand into new markets to buy out low performing franchisees and keep doubling down on the business. This is exactly how I grew mine from, you know, two franchises that we owned in 2016 to over 40 here in 2025. That will do like $50 million in revenue. That's the thing about franchising. Like once you get into a system, once you learn the business, it just becomes this rinse and repeat process where you go from the I do it to we do it to they do it right now. You have a team of people and they're able, like do everything without your daily involvement. It's just a matter of execution back to what we talked about earlier. But the biggest thing that will hold James back, the biggest thing that honestly held me back for, for many years was just belief in myself, right? And I was afraid that if I grew into another market that I would fail. I was afraid that if I couldn't be there every day, if I couldn't touch everything, the business wouldn't do as well. And for many, many years that kept me small. And I would probably have 50, 60 locations today if I did not have that fear. But once you kind of get over that and you realize, wait, if other people do it, I can do it. And that like none of it's rocket science, it's just a matter of, of getting comfortable. There's no limit to what you can do. And so then he can get in there and he can build relationships with other franchisees because at the end of the day, those franchisees want to sell to other franchisees. You know how hard it was for him to try to buy those independent businesses because there's like a lot of competition and the prices are high and all this stuff. But in franchise business it's kind of the opposite where the prices are relatively low. In comparison, franchisees really want to sell to other franchisees. So there's like a limited buying pool which allows you to build relationships, get seller financing, tons and tons of great opportunities. There's synergies that get created when you're able to buy other people and eventually just build your internal company. You may think of that negatively and say, well, if I want to sell one day, I won't have as many options. And you know, maybe that's true, but like, I'm in this business for cash flow. I'm in this business to make a million dollars a year or more. I don't really care about what the equity multiple at the end of the day is. Right. I'm not in it for a payday in the future. I'm in it for business cash flow every single day. And so even if I have to sell it at a low multiple, like to me, I don't really care about that if the business can hit the financial cash flow goals, because that's what I live my life on. The bigger that he can build his business, the more payroll budget dollars he can allocate to building out a leadership team. So eventually he can replace himself as a general manager to $150,000 a year as an investment. Now that person frees up even more of his time to focus on those bigger multi market growth that allows him to focus on maybe getting into other brands or just continuing to work those very, very high quality commercial leads and that investment ultimately gives him the freedom that he's seeking. Right? Because the only reason you buy a business is to have freedom, is to live a life that you want to live. If you get into a business and you can't achieve that and you're just working double or triple amount of the time, and maybe you're making money, like, defeats the purpose a little bit. Right? I help people every single day, like James, find great franchises. And if you want my team's help, there's a link below. You can book a free discovery call, we can hop on, we can talk you through that checklist and all these options to help make it easier for you. And if you're not quite ready for that, just hit that subscribe button and follow me for more on learning how to build an eight figure franchise. I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.