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- [00:00]
Alex Merznack
Foreign.
- [00:06]
Dan
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast. Normally, we're inside of an RV motorhome, but instead, today we are inside this $100 million mansion in Beverly Hills that Tai Lopez is hosting his event set. As we speak, some of his guests happen to be the people I was going to interview. So, bada bing, bada boom, we decided to take over his library to make this podcast episode.
- [00:27]
Alex Merznack
So.
- [00:27]
Dan
So, as you guys know, we cover three core how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. We're going to talk about all those topics. And keep in mind, when you're listening to this podcast, it's not always just for you. It might be for someone from your past, present, future. Meaning I might interview someone about real estate, owning nightclubs, a rapper, an athlete, a celebrity. And the topic that they're talking about may not pertain to you, but it might be for someone in your life from your past, present, future. So listen to these episodes. We keep them to under 40 minutes because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. So this episode will be under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure. So without further ado, I'm going to have two guests at the same time give you the quick two minute bio each so we can get straight to the money.
- [01:11]
Chris Wright
Hey, Chris Wright, co founder of the company Franzi. My background is in software and product and we're building a product called Franzi Think the Zillow for franchising. So we help people get paired with franchise brands that are a good fit for them and help them become entrepreneurs.
- [01:25]
Dan
Very cool.
- [01:27]
Alex Merznack
And I'm Alex Merznack, originally from Minnesota, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Now the other, co founder of Franzi and a serial entrepreneur. This is my third company. The last one we raised 35 million in venture capital for. It was a laundry and dry cleaning, pickup and delivery business. Eventually started franchising, part of that business, which is how I got into the world of franchising and saw just how broken and misaligned the franchise buying process is. So with Franz, you were hoping to disrupt the traditional broker model and democratize access to buying small businesses and franchise businesses.
- [02:02]
Dan
So the company you raised the 35 million for, did you stop? Did you get bored? Did you sell it?
- [02:07]
Alex Merznack
A mixture of all the above actually. So I was nine years into it. Yeah, Long, long, long journey. And we started at the advent of all the like Uber for X businesses. So you saw like Shipt and Instacart and Wag and Rover. I was like, someone's going to do this for laundry and dry cleaning. I'm going to be pissed if it's not me and someone else does it. So we started up in 2016, and the reason I think I eventually started to move on from it last year was we had pivoted into a business that had trucks and washers and dryers and eventually vertically integrated the business. And I was like, I don't know if I'm the guy that takes us from 30 laundromats open now to 300 or 3,000. So hired a CEO last year to go work on Franzi with Chris full time.
- [02:50]
Dan
Very cool. What about you?
- [02:54]
Alex Merznack
What about me?
- [02:55]
Dan
Yeah, last company. What did you decide? What happened there?
- [02:57]
Alex Merznack
Yeah.
- [02:57]
Chris Wright
So before Franzi, I was with a company called HRLogix. We helped provide tax credit software and HR compliance software to businesses. We grew that business from, I think, seven people when I joined in a couple million in revenue to close to 90 million revenue by the time I left. I had just had my first kid and we had been growing this business for about three years and it had gotten pretty intense. And I really enjoyed the people I was working with and the business I was building. But I wanted to take a step back and spend a little time with my family and really be present for the first six months of my son's life. Around that time, as I was kind of getting decompressed, Alex called me about this idea of Franzi.
- [03:33]
Dan
Sent the bad signal. Yeah, sent the bad signal.
- [03:36]
Chris Wright
We've been wanting to work together for a long time, and I was ready to jump in and start building frenzy alongside him.
- [03:41]
Dan
Did you guys happen to live in the same city or convert?
- [03:44]
Alex Merznack
So he was in Charlotte originally when we met, but then he'd moved to Birmingham for the HRLogix business. I was like, all right, come on.
- [03:51]
Dan
Come on back home. Very cool. All right, so let's talk about the make money side. When you're first getting into entrepreneurial career, someone out there listening, they dive right into entrepreneurship. So they go take a job, you know, work at a company first. Like, talk to us about your thoughts about the beginning of an entrepreneurial journey. When they're like 21, 22, 23 years old.
- [04:13]
Alex Merznack
Yeah. So for me, I grew up, my dad was a financial advisor and I think I got to see a little bit of that, like, eat what you kill mentality. And he'd always told me, like, there's three types of careers or, you know, paths you can take. You can either work for someone Else you can have the ability to work for yourself, which is what he was doing. Or you have people working for you and like that. That just always resonated and stuck with me. And I knew I needed to be in bucket two or three. And he's like, you'll live a probably more fulfilled, build a happier life doing that. And so I took that advice wholeheartedly and started a business in college. Loved entrepreneurship, was addicted to it. And through that kind of course, like seeing my peers, I think realized we're pushed frequently to get good grades in high school, to then get into the good college, to get good grades again, to then go work at the Fortune 100 company. And I just didn't want to do that. I knew that wasn't for me. And so my advice is, especially to people that age or that juncture in life, is to take the risk. Then you know, that's probably one of the best times in your life to do it because you don't have a ton of responsibility, probably don't have kids at that point, a ton of debt or bills or anything. And so I always say buck the norm and try that business and take that risk at that age.
- [05:31]
Dan
What do you think?
- [05:32]
Chris Wright
Yeah. I had two role models in my life earlier on when we were talking about kind of business and what I should do with my life and kind of how to get started. And I don't think that a lot of people really know who they want to be when they grow up. But I'm still kind of learning who that is for me. But that's right. My father in law is a serial entrepreneur and he encouraged me to kind of just explore entrepreneurship. And so I started my first business in college. It was an Amazon FBA business. I know a lot of people explore those at one point and we had gotten pretty big at the time and then took my dad's advice and went down the kind of corporate route and went to go work for Deloitte and Consulting and really enjoyed that as well. But determined that I really kind of want to be the owner of my own destiny a little bit. And so much to my wife chagrin, left and started a cleaning company. Was on demand Uber for cleaning similar to laundry. I got out sooner than he did. But I think that you really have to figure out what you want to build and how you want to build it. But more than anything, it's a really great time, like Alex said, to take risks when you have less responsibilities. I know that it was easier for me taking this risk having a kid Already because I had done it in the past. But if I was just starting from scratch at 31 years old and deciding to be an entrepreneur, I don't know that it would be nearly as easy as it was back then.
- [06:46]
Dan
So quick question on the laundromat side. Every article study I see because I talked to Cody Sanchez Alive showcases that laundromats are actually the lowest failure rate of any business to acquire. You guys know anything about that?
- [07:00]
Alex Merznack
Yes. I mean, we had 30 plus. We still have 30 plus of them open and going. I think it's because it's such an essential need. People have to have clean clothes. And so if you're in a lower income community or an area where there isn't access to a washer and dryer, you have guaranteed customers. And they're fairly simple businesses to run. There's no employees if you don't want to. It can be an unattended laundromat. And so I think that's why there's a lot of, you know, success in the model. Now, the size of that success varies, right? You could have a business that only kicks off 30 grand in cash flow year if it's a bad area or bad equipment. I've seen laundromats do 6, 700, 800K in cash flow with very, very few employees.
- [07:42]
Dan
Very cool. So the 30 laundromats, you guys are running those, owning those, how does that work?
- [07:47]
Alex Merznack
So some of them are corporately owned and some are franchise. So we started franchising the laundromats in 2021 under a brand called Laundry Lab. We sold 118 locations in 14 months. And that's the beauty of the franchise model is it can scale and just blow up. And you have other partners with you that have the capital that are building and developing a series of locations with you. And so we could grow the business pretty rapidly. The first six years we started, we had two corporate stores. And the following two years we started franchising. We had 30.
- [08:17]
Dan
Whoa.
- [08:18]
Alex Merznack
It speeds everything up and you bring those partners in.
- [08:22]
Dan
So I invested In Everbowl in 2018, there was 13 locations. Blinked our eyes. 2019, there was 21 locations. I raised $5 million for the company to help scale it. Seven seconds later was Covid. So we had to furlough the staff. We had at that point 25 locations open right around March, when the Closing day was March 2020. And then Jeff Fenster went on the full attack. Signed like over 300 leases, sold franchises all over the country. Drew Brees invested Jason Tatum, all these things like Kamar Usman, everybody started jumping in. And now a few Years later, there's 103 locations, one new one every six days. We're building for everybody else. We're building for Shaq, Mark Wahlberg, eos, and we're building other people's locations. And I think about that shutdown period of most people shut down. That's why it was called the shutdown, especially franchises. They were freaking out. They weren't. No one was willing to go sell franchises. And so that leads me to. Tell me about Franzi. Like, what do you. What is this? Why is this? Like, why did you decide to go down the franchise model?
- [09:29]
Alex Merznack
Yeah. So when. When we started franchising the Laundromats, we knew nothing about franchising. It was this crash course, like entrepreneurs do. It's a problem. Let's just go figure it out. And so we started franchising. We realized, how do we sell a franchise? You have to do sales and run ads and go on podcasts. And we worked with what's called an fso, a franchise sales organization that essentially acts as your internal sales team. And so that was effective. They helped a lot. They stood up our sales process with us. So we were. So. We were so focused on operating the stores and getting our new franchisees open, but we eventually crossed paths with business brokers, franchise brokers. And what a lot of people don't realize is those franchise brokers take a 60% commission.
- [10:13]
Dan
60.
- [10:15]
Alex Merznack
On the franchise fee.
- [10:16]
Dan
Wait, what?
- [10:17]
Alex Merznack
People don't know this? And, like, you'll get reached out on LinkedIn by these individuals. You're like, oh, this is a free service for me. They tell you they make money from the brand, which they do, but they leave out how much it is. That's leaving the system. That franchise fee should be reinvested in training and site selection and marketing. 60 and so I would go to these conferences with these franchise brokers, and I saw just how much money they were all making and how fat and happy they all were. And all the brands were like, I hate having to do this, but I don't know what else to do. I'm so focused on scaling the business that this is just. This is the way it is. And as an entrepreneur, you hear that, a bunch of upset people, one side that's very fat and happy. There's a problem here that could be solved with technology, using AI, better sales process. And so our goal is to democratize the process around franchise discovery, franchise buying and selling.
- [11:10]
Dan
So what stage of the company in now.
- [11:13]
Alex Merznack
So Chris and I started working full time on it last summer and the better half of last year was compiling the largest, most robust data set in franchising. We have over 25,000 FTDs Franchise Disclosure Documents across 3,600 brands. We've trained the LLM, we've trained the model to, you know, be very, very accurate at recommending the best brands for, for you as you come through. We soft launched in November, hard launch January of this year we've raised about 3.3 million in venture capital. We've started closing deals like crazy and helping people find the best fit franchise for them.
- [11:50]
Dan
So how do you make money so.
- [11:53]
Alex Merznack
Similar to a broker in that we get paid based on success?
- [11:55]
Dan
59%.
- [11:58]
Alex Merznack
No, it's a much, it's a much lower reduced flat fee. And so we tell our clients up front we make money from the brand, here's how much and it's a flat dollar amount so that we have no incentive to push one brand over another.
- [12:10]
Dan
In front of you.
- [12:11]
Chris Wright
It can be objective.
- [12:12]
Dan
Yes. So whether I want to get a gym or inevitable. It doesn't matter to you?
- [12:16]
Alex Merznack
Yeah. Versus a broker. They might only show you. The analogy I use is brokers today will only have an inventory of like 30 to 50 brands. But you again as their client don't realize that you think, oh, this person's going to bat for me. They're going to look at the thousands of brands. They're only showing the brands that have paid to play in the background 30 to 40k just to get into the group. And so it's like a real estate agent showing you houses that they're also the listing agent listings. It's crazy. No, you would never buy a house like that. So why would you buy a business that way?
- [12:46]
Dan
Okay, so I go to the website. Where's an app?
- [12:50]
Alex Merznack
It's a website.
- [12:51]
Dan
I go to the website, I say, I'm Dan, this is how much am I telling you my budget or telling my area? What am I telling you?
- [12:58]
Chris Wright
Yeah, you're answering around 10 questions, giving us interests, what industries you're interested in, your budget, kind of where you want to put the franchise Answer those few simple pieces of information. It feeds into our AI, which looks at everything we know about every single brand, which the model's trained on and then pulls back with nine or so recommendations. Then you're going to see a screen that'll have kind of Tinder style thumbs up, thumbs down, as you like different brands that then feeds in the algorithm again on the end of that that journey, you kind of get connected with our team members. One of our coaches is going to help narrow that list down and we spend a lot of time with prospects on the front end to make sure that they're as educated as possible, but also to make sure that they're getting matched with the right brands. We're not just rushing them towards a decision or rushing them to talk to brands. We want to make sure they understand franchising and understand what they're getting themselves into before they actually get to that stage.
- [13:49]
Dan
And so are there experienced brands that are going to come there or experienced investors or you think it's going to be someone that's just starting with one to three locations that wants.
- [13:56]
Alex Merznack
So, so we have, we have three main ICPs, ideal customer profiles. It's the corporate, you know, grinder. They've been working 9 to 5. They want to do something entrepreneurial but they don't.
- [14:07]
Dan
600K, same debt.
- [14:10]
Alex Merznack
So there's that group, then there's like the side hustler, you kind of hacker type that does short term rentals and.
- [14:15]
Dan
They'Ve got crypto mat.
- [14:17]
Alex Merznack
Exactly, exactly. And then the third group is your sophisticated, you know, operator. They own 5 units, 10 units, 20 units of a concept and they're looking to add to that portfolio and find the next Dave's hot chicken or new hot, hot concept that they're discovering on Franzi.
- [14:31]
Dan
So I go there, I discover it and you guys recommend Fit Body Bootcamp. Okay, now what?
- [14:36]
Alex Merznack
Yep. So we, you have a coach that you can use as much or as little as you want. So you know, franchise advisor, they can help you with finding the right lending or capital structure. They help you with finding a franchise cpa, a franchise attorney, the right commercial real estate agent. Help you find the site if it's a retail business. And then if there is ability to negotiate with the brand, they'll help you be in your corner through that process as well. So they walk you through the whole franchise buying process to the day that you sign and then we're not done at that point either. We help you with all the things that the brand isn't already doing. The brand's going to do training and marketing and some of the site selection. We're all the business in a box type of stuff. Get your entity formed, we'll help you set that up, we'll help you with all those other things that every business has to do regardless of whether it's a franchise or not.
- [15:23]
Dan
And then what about the building? Like have you talked to Jeff Fenster? About we build to actually go build the locations.
- [15:28]
Alex Merznack
Yeah. So I was on Jeff's show probably a month or two ago and met Justin Sloan, who's your big operator in Texas. And yeah, we'll eventually pull rebuild in.
- [15:38]
Dan
For offering do that. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so I go there, you tell me fit by the bootcamp. I talk to my Coach. I've got 350k saved up, ready to go. Do I talk to you again? Do I need you anymore?
- [15:53]
Chris Wright
Yeah. The idea is that every step of the buying process, even if you hit a hiccup along the way in a brand conversation, we're having conversations with you, your coaches. Every single time you have one of those, there's debrief calls if you want to have them. Right. Depends on how much the prospect wants to engage. But has debrief calls at the end of each of your meetings with the brand. Helps you understand what came out of that meeting, helps you have new questions to ask at that meeting, and then walks with you all the way to Discovery Day, which is that kind of final step before you sign or don't sign, and then helps you make that decision at the end of the day. So they're there as much or as little as you want, but really throughout the whole process and then thereafter.
- [16:32]
Dan
How do people find you guys? Where's your clients coming from?
- [16:35]
Alex Merznack
Yeah, so it's three main channels right now. It's programmatic SEO that we're using. So we have all these very data rich articles on top 10 ice cream franchises of 2025 that have investment cost and revenue and Google my business reviews. So SEO, we're dominating in paid ads, podcasts and we're starting to put a ton of our own content out. We launched a show recently called How I Franchise this, which is a complaint on the NPR podcast or telling the story of like the normal dude. Right. It's not Colonel Sanders or Ray Kroc. We want to talk to Susan and Tim who left their jobs at bank of America. Now they run three, you know, fitness concepts and they love it. They've been more fulfilled doing that than anything else they've done. We want to tell the story of that average person, that average operator that went and did it.
- [17:24]
Dan
So someone saved up this money. They're working their core job. Maybe they sold some real estate. On the investment side of this podcast, I like to ask, like, how do people make decision like that because they can invest in the stock market, cryptocurrency, more real estate. There's so many different things s and P500. Why franchises?
- [17:42]
Alex Merznack
Yeah. So I think franchising is one of the most underestimated wealth plays of all time. I mean, it's 10% of our country's GDP and no one's talking about it. It's always like, oh, it's McDonald's and Subway and that's what it is. They don't realize it's hospitality and home services and fitness and health and wellness. So it really spans all these different categories. And then the success rate, which I think is important for people that are being entrepreneurs for the first time or the 20th time is the five year success rate on a franchise business is 85% compared to half of independent businesses failing after five years. And so that's the reason we're preaching about it, is entrepreneurship has changed both of our lives in a very positive, incredible way. But not everyone wants to go be a tech entrepreneur or a real estate entrepreneur. And this is a really good but diverse set of options to become an entrepreneur in a more de risked way.
- [18:39]
Dan
Interesting. What about for you guys personally? As you guys are making capital, what do you like to invest into?
- [18:45]
Chris Wright
I mean, we're both looking at more ways to invest in franchising as much as possible. Alex has invested in a couple of franchises and me personally, I'm trying to build out a franchise portfolio as well. We haven't. We're just kind of getting it off the ground. But I think that we want to put our money where our mouth is and invest in franchises because we believe it is a very de risked way to build out your own personal wealth, wealth for your family and generational wealth. It scales. It's got a playbook that's built in and it gives you the opportunity to build on a system and platform that's got support built in that you wouldn't necessarily otherwise have if you're building something from scratch or buying an existing business.
- [19:18]
Alex Merznack
Yeah, I'm doing five indoor golf simulators in Minnesota. It's called Another Nine. I like it because there's no employees, there's no food in Bev. It's like anytime Fitness. You fob in or use the app to get in. It's private bays though, so it'll be like a room like this where you can go with your family or buddies at three in the afternoon or three in the morning. There's, there's, you know, no employees there. It's fob access. And I really like this one bagel concept called Pop up bagels.
- [19:44]
Dan
Oh yeah, I follow that guy.
- [19:45]
Alex Merznack
It's blowing up the, the Average unit volumes are crazy. It's like $2 million in revenue off of Bagels.
- [19:51]
Dan
Really?
- [19:52]
Alex Merznack
And that's like one of the. It's the simplest thing. One of the genius things they did is they force you to buy three. You can't buy one.
- [19:58]
Dan
Can't buy one.
- [19:59]
Alex Merznack
You can only get three, like groups of three.
- [20:01]
Dan
And that's so interesting.
- [20:02]
Alex Merznack
That's the thing. And the cost to get in is like 450 to 650k. They've sold all of Maine to Florida, all of Texas, all of California blowing up. It's like the next. I'd say crumble cookies, but for bagels.
- [20:15]
Chris Wright
Bagels.
- [20:16]
Dan
Interesting. Yeah. I was wondering why I follow that guy. There was something about it that made me compelled by it.
- [20:21]
Alex Merznack
They're doing new flavors every week and cream cheese, Crazy spice flavors and cookies and cream. And that's why I think people are getting hyped up about. It's the Crumble playbook. But for bagels.
- [20:34]
Dan
Yeah. I mean, Crumble's got multibillion dollar valuation now. It's just staggering to watch what they're doing. Okay, so also on the investing side, how can people invest into learning? Like, how do they learn about franchises? They can figure out, do I want a pop up bagel, Do I want an ever bowl, Do I want a Fit Buddy Boot camp, Do I want a laundromat? Like, where do they study? How do they invest in themselves?
- [20:59]
Alex Merznack
So there's a lot of good podcasters out. There's Brian Beers, there's Fran Dogs and the Wolf of Franchising or good newsletter resources. We have our podcast where we tell stories of people getting into it, how they got into it, how they financed it, how they identified the.
- [21:12]
Dan
What's your podcast called?
- [21:14]
Alex Merznack
How it Franchises. And then on Franzi as well, we have all sorts of franchising 101 guides. So what is an FTD in the first place? And what section should I look for? And then a lot of our software process is to help with that education, to get over that first step of fear, because that's where most people get hung up, is I don't even know where to start, so I'm not going to. We want to make it as easy as looking for a house on Zill. Make it fun, honestly, where you can go look and see. Like, I could see myself doing this. It fits me. It's a 97% match, et cetera. So we have tons of educational content on the. On the site as well.
- [21:48]
Chris Wright
Then our coaches as well. Right. There's no Obligation. If you start talking to one of our team members, there's no obligation to move forward, even if it's just to understand if franchising is a good fit for you. We sometimes tell people franchising might not be a good fit for them, which is part of what we believe in is transparency and objectivity. Right. We don't want to recommend one brand or the other because one brand pays us more. And we also want to make sure that we're transparent with people on how the whole process works and can educate them whether they become a client or not.
- [22:16]
Dan
So as you're considering investing into the business, raised 3.3 million and growing. Why does the company go raise $3 million? Why is that part of the process?
- [22:26]
Alex Merznack
Yeah, so we, we bootstrapped initially and we're like, oh, let's take some of the money from previous businesses. And then we just, you know, we see this wave happening right now of AI starting to displace more and more white collar jobs. It's people that would go buy and run a franchise. And we want to capitalize on the wave that's happening. There's also the silver tsunami happening with the boomers transferring 15 trillion over the next decade. And so our thought was we could either bootstrap and go a little slow or we can raise money, accelerate product development, accelerate, go to market and be more aggressive on marketing and driving awareness for what we're doing. Because there's a lot of things out there that you could do. You can go to biz, buy, sell, you can go, you know, consume Cody Sanchez's content. There's all these other ways to buy a business and we want to grab our piece of that mind share of, hey, franchising is a very viable way to get into ownership and raising capital helps do that better and faster.
- [23:21]
Chris Wright
To Alex's point earlier about franchising making up 10% of the US GDP, but no one seems to really talk about it. You can either buy a business, you can start a business from scratch, and then you maybe have a friend or a cousin or somebody who does franchising or is an in franchising somehow. We want to make franchising as mainstream as possible. And one of the best, quickest ways to get there is to invest more capital and making that story told at a more broader scale.
- [23:45]
Dan
Let's talk about investing in people. Let's say I am the doctor or accountant, lawyer that did save up half a million. I can put in 350k into this thing. One of these franchises. I don't want to run it or I don't know how to run it. How do I invest in people? How do I go find somebody to run this thing or partner on this thing?
- [24:02]
Alex Merznack
So not yet, but at some point Franzi's gonna pay our capital with operators. So part of that survey, I was.
- [24:08]
Dan
Not seeing that up.
- [24:10]
Alex Merznack
We're not there yet, but that's one of the product iterations we want to make is because I ran into it all the time. You get these really, really good operators that ran five McDonald's for a wealthy family or individual who just doesn't have enough money saved up to go buy their own restaurants. They would be a great candidate to go pair with Dan, who's maybe saying, hey, I've got capital, but I don't want to run six days off chickens. So let's find the operator, give them some sweat.
- [24:34]
Dan
I don't want to run them.
- [24:36]
Alex Merznack
Exactly. I want to eat at them and own them, but not run them.
- [24:39]
Dan
I want to post about it. Definitely don't want to run it. So my life is designed where I will not do a project without a quarterback. I don't care how much money you tell me. I don't care who this, that I don't, I don't care about any of that stuff. If I don't have a quarterback, which is a CEO to run that company, I will not do the project. Even if someone offers a boatload of capital, there's a war chest. Here's $12 million. Dan, do this tequila brand with me. No, I'm not gonna run it. You're not gonna run it? Who's gonna run it? I don't wanna find out later. I don't wanna go just hire someone off of LinkedIn or monster.com or hotjobs to go try to run it. I need to know who the quarterback is or I am not in ever under any circumstance. It comes up every week I'm pitched. Well, every day I'm pitched, but every week I'm pitch like, like something that's fully capitalized. Just be my partner, just be the advisor and I just say no. Yeah, I leave a lot of free money on the table, but I know the long term effect of it is. And the short term, if there's not a CEO, if there's not a quarterback around this thing, there is no chance at all. At all. Can it get off the ground? Maybe. Can it get to xyz? Probably. But like without someone running the day to day to day, not possible.
- [25:50]
Alex Merznack
You need someone who's like Blood, sweat and tears and time. Like the man in the arena that's constantly obsessing over it, thinking about it.
- [25:58]
Dan
The way I described it is called Ride or Die. So I'll give you a quick example. Let's say there's two girls that are pitching right now to invest in their companies. One girl, she went to Harvard, she got summa cum laude, blah, blah, fanciest degrees you could imagine. And she's selling red cups. And these red cups are going to be 299, very comparable to the other price point of other the solo red cups that everyone knows at every grocery store. But she's got the pedigree. She's got a business plan all set. This girl over here is selling green cups. These green cups are biodegradable. She donates a percentage to saving the elephants and the manatees. And they're a little bit more expensive than $3.99 because it is more expensive to make these green cups. But this is her passion. She's been studying everything. She knows that they're, you know, combustible, compatible, whatever you heck you call it, and they can be replanted. And she does. She has all the things. Every time you buy one of her packs of green cups, a tree is planted. She's got it all. Who do I want to invest into?
- [26:58]
Alex Merznack
Green cup.
- [26:59]
Chris Wright
Every single time.
- [27:01]
Dan
You know why? Because a red solo cup girl gets an offer from Gary Vee or Microsoft to come work for her, she's out of there. Yeah, oh, yeah. We'll give you 800k salary plus equity. You see a puff of smoke, she'd go work for them. Because she doesn't care about the red cups. It's just a business. I can interchange red cups with flowers, cans, books. She doesn't care. It's just. It's a widget to her. She just knows she can run a business because she has the pedigree. This girl with the green cups, you can't offer her a million dollars to go leave or 800k to go leave. This is her life. She wants to save the elephants and the manatees and plant seeds and, you know, planting trees. Like she cares deep in her soul about this thing and the money is a default byproduct of it that she might not even care about. She might. I hope she has. I do want her to care about it from that revenue perspective, but I want to know that she cares about the thing. And I will pick her every single day. And she might not have any college degree. She might have left High school as a sophomore. And I don't care about that part because I can build a team around her. I can go get the Harvard girl to go work for her. That I would love to. I would love for that girl to be the president. But I want the Green Cub girl's passion to be the owner. I want her to be the, what I call ride or die.
- [28:10]
Alex Merznack
I remember when Pop, we were talking about Pomp earlier, invested in our first company. He was like, you're not going to leave in like six months and go backpack across Patagonia, are you? And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, I've had a bunch of investments where the founder just, you know, didn't have that heart, didn't have the passion into it. And I get why he was asking that now. But at the time, I was like, what do you mean? No, this is like, this is it. This is all I do and think about. I work most weekends. And you have to have, I think, that desire to win and be competitive and pour everything you have into it.
- [28:40]
Dan
That's my biggest fear, is the founder leaves. Whether they leave for personal reasons, they leave because they were lured away, they leave because it got hard. That is my fear in investing in a company, because I'm betting on them, not the product. Yeah, the products are all interchangeable. I always joke about Jeff Fenster. Memorable. If he was selling pillows, I would have invested the same amount of money. I say that same sentence all the time because I would. He's ride or die. Morning, noon and night, he's on airplanes, trains and automobiles, figuring out to scale his business over and over and over. No matter what, the good stuff, the hard stuff, the whole world shuts down. When the freaking world shut down in 2020, he went on QVC and started doing $150,000 an episode.
- [29:22]
Alex Merznack
Crazy.
- [29:22]
Dan
He was selling 150 grand every 11 minutes of frozen acai. All right, let's talk about the charity side of things. Why do you think it's important for companies, whether it's for their employees, their investors, their partners, their clients, or front facing, to have some type of charity component to their business?
- [29:38]
Alex Merznack
I've always been a huge believer in, like, do good while doing well. And I think without getting on the soapbox too much, if you think of, like, where the center of, like, power used to sit in society, at one point it was very much religion. Like, the church had a lot of influence and control over society. And then I think it shifted to government for a long period of Time. We very much operate in a society now where that power and that influence sits within businesses. Yeah, we have the government still, but all the businesses are in pockets of politicians and have a lot of influence on what we all consume and do. I think businesses have a huge responsibility to have that element as part of of their culture and their mission of doing good while doing well. And part of the reason our mission at Franzi is to help the next million entrepreneurs is they have that influence and the biggest propensity to positively impact society and the communities that they operate in. So I think it's wildly important, and I think there's good ways to do it through entrepreneurship, whether it's job creation or you're creating a ton of revenue to pay a ton of taxes on it. Those taxes hopefully get used appropriately to get back to that community that you're in. But then beyond that, what other things can you do? So at our laundromats, for example, we put read, play, learn centers in each location, or it's free books and a kids play area for families to come in because it's a lot of single mothers and dads going into laundromats and we get new books every month and you could, you know, the kids could take them home and we just restock them every month. But it's things like that that don't cost the business a whole lot, but could drastically change the life of an individual or a company customer experiencing that.
- [31:12]
Dan
What are your thoughts?
- [31:14]
Chris Wright
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that to Alex's point about where the power lies, I think at the end of the day, right, money can do a lot of good, and it can also provide for a lot of people. Right. I think the more that businesses can give back, the more that, especially in a space like franchising where one owner can own 15 units, 15 units could be 15 communities that are being built around that unit. And the ability that they have on a scale is much larger than most individual business owners. So they have the opportunity to give back. And I think that in all rights, we all should give back as much as we possibly can help those less fortunate than ourselves. We share a lot of the same philosophy on that topic.
- [31:56]
Dan
So there's one main question I ask on every single episode, and I've never asked this question to two people at the same time, and I've never gotten the same answer once out of 200ish episodes. All right, so you build this company up, you exit it four years from now, hundreds of millions of dollars into your next company, build it up hundreds of millions of dollars. But at the end of the time, let's say, hopefully, God willing, 100 years from now, it's finally time to pass away. But if you accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars of net worth and you both have these brand new children, what percentage of your net worth you leave to those kids?
- [32:37]
Alex Merznack
That's a really good question.
- [32:38]
Chris Wright
That's a really good question.
- [32:39]
Dan
The only question I ask on every.
- [32:40]
Alex Merznack
Episode, I don't know what the exact dollar amount or percentage is, but once one thing, my dad, my dad grew up really poor. And I think he did a good job instilling these kind of values in my brothers and I, where it was like, when we got a car, for example, he's like, I'm not buying you a car. Like, whatever you save up on your own by the time you're 16 years old, I'll match. So if you got 200 bucks, you're getting a $400 car. Go figure it out. If you got two grand, I'll give you another two. And you got $4,000 car now. And so I think about things like that a lot of, like, it could be worth a billion dollars. I wouldn't want to have, you know, my children be super entitled or everything's just kind of handed and you don't understand some of the sacrifices that you have to make and the work ethic you have to develop and build on. And so I think my number and my percentage would be centered and focused around that. It's like, what do they need to, you know, survive and you have a happy life but without it, I think not setting them up for success as an individual on their own. And so it's very small. I plan to give whatever money I make away for the most part.
- [33:36]
Chris Wright
Damn, that was a good answer. That was like very similar to where.
- [33:39]
Dan
My head was going.
- [33:42]
Chris Wright
Yeah. So both my father and father in law similarly grew up relatively poor. And one thing that my father instilled in me in my younger years and my father on later on is the ability, the hard work, and basically being the one who always shows up, who gets in early, who leaves late, can, can provide for you and your family. One thing they both believe in is making sure that the next generation doesn't have to struggle as much as your generation did. However, making sure that those values of working hard and what showing up and leaving late can, can build in yourself and your family and build those ethics. Similarly, I don't know the exact percentage. I do want to give away a lot. I. I literally was thinking about this as you're giving this answer. But my goal would be to make sure that my kids have to work hard for everything because I don't think that handing them things is going to be a good, good value for them in later parts of their life. I think we're built in the hard moments, not in the easy ones. I think character comes from the hard moments. So if you're giving too much to your kids and I don't want to give too much to mine, I want to make sure he works hard for things. But it's safe, right?
- [34:46]
Dan
Yeah.
- [34:48]
Alex Merznack
So I don't know what's your answer?
- [34:50]
Dan
So it evolves over time. In my dream world, I'd give her all of it to utilize while still giving a big portion of charity. But she leads it right. I'll be adopting a boy at some point, so there will be two kids, but right now there's just one. But in my dream world I'm building her up to be the steward of capital that I trust in her. Not for her to have a zillion dollars because that would steal her chance of greatness. But if I teach her enough and she's in, God willing, she's in her 30s or 40s when I pass away, then I don't mind if I give it to her when she's 19, it's different. I give it to her when she's 44. You know, I'm not saying I'll still be alive then. Hopefully I will. And so I think it's a much different when we think about when you hand a child because when she's a 44 year old child, right. By that time she's probably had her third exit for all I know. You know, like and married with two kids. So I think I wouldn't be stealing anything from her if I all of a sudden gave her $700 million. I think that'd be fine. 44 years old, for example. So I think there's for me one, it would be in a trust format so she's not just getting handed at X time. And I also think no matter what, I would never give it to her all in one lump sum because there's no need for that. She's not going to go deploy it all. If I hand her 700 million for example, I'm going to go deploy it all in one shot anyways. I'd rather give it to her at 10, 20, 30, 40 million year, whatever that number is over the course of time and have her deploy percentages to Charity percentages to our family members and hopefully she's the leader of that because I built her up that way and my unborn adopted son. Same similar fashion. Right. Let them split it up assuming that they're both good kids and good stewards of capital. But I, it's an interesting because I didn't, we didn't have money when I grew up and it built me to who I am and so I definitely wouldn't want to take that from her but hopefully I'm still alive at that point. So I'm not trying to like, you know, but for some reason I pass and she's like 11 then yeah, it's going to be in a trust. She'll get it when she's you know, 18, 21, 25, 30, etc. In tranches so that she's not getting. I don't want her to be a zillionaire at 18 years old. That's not. Yeah, I know too many trust fund kids and no matter how much training you give them, you know, we watch NBA athletes, we watch rappers, we watch people grow up and they get handed a zillion dollars. You know, it's very difficult to explain this, the human psychology of what happens. A lot of their learnings go out the window or their non learnings don't, you know, aren't relevant at that point if they get handed this much money. So especially now with nil deals you've got 1718 year olds getting $11 million and they're, they don't have a driver's license.
- [37:44]
Chris Wright
Insane.
- [37:44]
Alex Merznack
It is crazy.
- [37:45]
Dan
So yeah, so the knowledge is a big thing that the age is a big thing for me but I would be comfortable with her having a huge amount of capital to deploy, not for her to go buy title as a mansion. Right. That's not the point.
- [37:58]
Alex Merznack
Yeah.
- [37:59]
Dan
All right. Where can people find you guys? Where can they find your socials? Where can they find the company? Tell us everything.
- [38:04]
Alex Merznack
Yep. So if you're interested or just wanting to explore buying a franchise, it's franzi.com f r a n z y.com youm can also follow me on Instagram, TikTok x etc Alex from Franzi we have tons of business tear downs, breakdowns and interesting business content that we put out on a daily basis.
- [38:26]
Chris Wright
Yeah, I'd say honestly, follow Alex. Honestly my socials are not dialed in or out but follow Alex and yeah, find us on Franzi. And honestly we're big fans of product feedback. So tell us our baby's ugly. The only way that we get better is by feedback from people like you. So please visit Franzi if you want to buy a business or if you just want to rip it apart and give us feedback. I'm here for that, too.
- [38:47]
Dan
All right, guys, we're listening to the Money Mondays podcast where we cover those three core topics. How to make money. I invest money. Had to give it away to charity with these gentlemen. It's very interesting because again, you may not want to buy a franchise, but your mom might, your uncle might, your friends might. Someone at a dinner or lunch six months from now might want to get into the franchise game. And you could be like, oh, you should listen to this episode, the Money Mondays with the guys from Franzi, or send them the website, et cetera. So it's not always about you. Think about the people in your world that you might not even met yet that might want to listen to episode like this. We grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's ridiculous we have to have discussion about money. But loans, accounts, taxes, should I borrow? Should I lease? Should I buy? There's so many questions about your normal daily life. Money is not the root of all evil. It's so much power and money, and it goes for your bills, your health, and everything involved in your life. So check us out here on the moneymondays.com and we'll see you guys next Monday.