Alex Built And Sold A Boring $100M Business

Speaker 0: We went from 30 k a school year, 280 k in revenue the first year that we bought the business. Don't get into business with people out of convenience or people that have the same skill set that you have.

Speaker 1: You're not wealthy by getting into franchising. You have franchises because you're wealthy.

Speaker: She tells me that she tells me that she was in prison for two or three years for stealing money from one of her first employers. I'm like, and now you're a controller? Like, I don't think it gets easier to go do that thing that you've really wanted to do. And I would just really challenge people to say progress is better than perfection and take the educated risk and the educated gamble and surround yourself with people that have done it so you derisk it further for yourself.

Speaker: That's the lesson I took from this.

Speaker 2: Welcome, and thank you for joining

Speaker: us for today's episode of disruptors where millionaires are made. Today, we have Alex Smirznick with Franzi, and Alex flew in from Charlotte, North Carolina to talk about how he built and sold a $100,000,000 business. And the one thing that everyone is overlooking right now, guys, I wanna mission create millionaires. The information on the show alone is enough to help you become a millionaire in the next five to seven years. If you'll take consistent action, you will become one.

And right now you got a 100,000, 250,000, maybe more to sitting inside your CRM. Resurrect all your old and dead leads with the with the objection proof AI calling agent, text cash to the phone number 33777 to unlock the money that's just hanging out inside your CRM. Alright. So we're promising here how you built and sold a $100,000,000 businesses. Kind of a, $100,000,000 business.

Kind of a crazy statistic. So before we get into all that, like, let's talk about your origin story. Like, how did this even begin? What was your life like before this journey?

Speaker: Yeah. So I grew up in a small town, Red Wing, Minnesota. It's 15,000 people. Our claim to fame is Red Wing shoes.

Speaker: Oh, that's

Speaker: Red Wing boots, and that's Okay. That's where they're from.

Speaker: That's a pretty good claim to fame.

Speaker: Outside of that, it's just a hallmark town in the Mississippi. So I grew up there. My dad was a financial advisor and that's what I think sparked for me

Speaker: In that small town?

Speaker: In that small town. So he was like a big fish in a small pond. Okay. And he taught me, you know, there's three kinda career paths you can take. You can either work for somebody else, you can work for yourself, which is what he did, or you can have people working for you.

Mhmm. And I noticed he would golf all summer long, and then with six months of brutal winter, he'd be just grinding away. I was like, how are you able to not really work in the summer? And he said those three things. And he's like, well, I'm in this middle rung.

And if you ever want this type of financial freedom or freedom of your time, you have to be in one of those last two buckets Mhmm. Working for yourself or having others work for you. Yeah. And so that stuck with me. I go into college.

I go to Wake Forest, which is how I end up in North Carolina. I'm like, I wanna do something entrepreneurial. I like these classes, but I wanna do something hands on. And so I started a laundry and dry cleaning delivery business my freshman year of college and very quickly got to, you know, three, four hundred k in revenue and learned more doing that than any class I took away and sold it for mid 6 figures when I graduated college.

Speaker: Freshman year of college. So right out of the gate.

Speaker: Right out of the gate.

Speaker: I mean, that sounds pretty easy. So let's talk about this. So freshman year. So you're 19? 18.

'18. And when was this?

Speaker: 2010.

Speaker: 2010. Alright. So you're in college. Did you graduate college?

Speaker: I graduated from college. Okay.

Speaker: So you did all this and you still graduated college, which is admirable because, like, when you got all that money coming in, it's kinda hard.

Speaker: Go do so. I was in my classes working on this business. I'd be in spreadsheets, like, alright. What if we did this? What if I was at a finance major.

Yeah. I remember we did this Monte Carlo simulation where it was, like, how many passengers can you fit on a Boeing, you know, seven forty seven? And I was, like, how many bags of laundry can I fit in a, you know, 2007 Jeep Liberty? I would change the, you know, the case that we were working on

Speaker: to fit the business I was building. Of course. Of course. Okay. So, like, first semester freshman year?

I mean, this is we're getting really, like, kinda nitty gritty, but like Yeah. Yeah. Like right out of the gate?

Speaker: So the the details are so I actually worked for another student group that did this at first. They were graduating. I was like, I wanna buy this business from you. I've seen how much you've learned, everything that you're doing.

Speaker: So they had a laundry business.

Speaker: As a classroom project. My second semester, I bought it with two other, students. Mhmm.

Speaker: So we

Speaker: figured out how do you do an acquisition? How do you do seller financing? What's a DCF, a discounted cash flow analysis. I knew none of that. And so we went to the the business school, and we just started knocking on, you know, professors' doors.

Mhmm. Hey. We're not in the business school yet, but we wanna buy this small college laundry business. And at the time, they were doing, like, 30 to 40 k a school year in revenue. And so we ended up figuring out how to buy it, how to structure because we're

Speaker: 40,000 a year.

Speaker: School year. Yep. In revenue.

Speaker: In revenue.

Speaker: And it was high margin, though, 70 ish percent because it was a Yeah. Subscription model.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And surprise, surprise, kids aren't your college kids aren't cleaning their sheets every week or every other week even or maybe even every month.

Speaker: But you saw a business doing 40 k a year, and you're like, I want that business.

Speaker: Just yeah. Because I thought, hey, this is a resume builder. I think they're leaving a ton of potential. I think this could be a $3.04, or 500 k a year high margin business that doesn't take a ton of a ton of work. Yeah.

That's exactly where we ended up building it to. We bought it, and we got Bought

Speaker: it on seller financing.

Speaker: Seller financing mostly 10 k down.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: And then we went to the university and said this should be a checkbox option for all incoming freshman parents and their kids. And they gave us a booth at orientation. And Steve, we would sit there like the ShamWow infomercial guys, like, step right up. This is the premier laundry service on campus. And moms felt The premier or only?

So we would say premier and only. And they were like, wait. How can it be both? And they would come up to us. And I think, one, they thought it was kind of cute and fun that college kids were doing it.

But then, three, the fear, I think, set in of, oh my gosh. Susie's going away for the first time or Timmy, and they're gonna have to do laundry on their own. And this is, like, a little treat that I can do from a way to take something off of their plate. Mhmm. And we went from 30 k a school year to it was, like, 280 k in revenue the first year that we bought the business because of that partnership with the university.

Speaker: Yeah. So you convinced them, the dean or the

Speaker: The dean of, residence life and housing.

Speaker: So you go to him and say, hey. Here's something that everyone should have this opportunity.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: And then he's like, yeah. Sure. Whatever. Just go get a booth.

Speaker: They we had a lot of support from the the, you know, academic part of the university because they wanted to be able to say, look what our students are doing on campus. Yeah. And that gave me rose colored glasses. I thought, oh, you can navigate these things throughout life this easily. Yeah.

We tried to expand to Chapel Hill, to Duke, to other colleges in the area, shut down immediately. Bureaucracy red tape. You can't do this. There's liability, and you're accessing the dorms. And it was just, like, no.

No. No. No. No. No.

No. And I look back on it. I realize Wake really wanted their students to have these, like, cool success stories that they can put in the Wake Forest magazine Yeah. And online.

Speaker: Yeah. They had a vested interest. So okay. So, right out of the gate, so you and two people

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Put in 10,003 way. Yep. Hustle here, knock it out of the park. Challenges along the way?

Speaker: The biggest challenge, the biggest lesson was there was four of us at first, and it was my first learning on picking the right business partners, not out of convenience or because they're friends or family, which many people do. But I also learned I think there's a caveat there. You hear people say, don't get into business with friends and family. And I think that's wrong. I think it's don't in don't get into business with people out of convenience or people that have the same skill set that you have.

Right. Because it what's the point if you have two Steve's or two Alex's? You're gonna butt heads because you're like, I think this is the best way to do the finances, and this is the best way. And so we had a fourth that, you know, it it wasn't the right person, and it was purely done because we're all friends, and it was out of convenience. And he didn't end up working out.

And thankfully, we're all friends now still, and it was fine. But that caused a lot of friction and tension and this kind of hiccup and bump in the road that

Speaker: Confident resolution probably wasn't your strong suit.

Speaker: No. Not at all. Not at all. Yeah. At least not at the time.

It's getting better.

Speaker: Yeah. Okay. So February first year. What happened after that?

Speaker: So we tried to expand other universities, got shut down three, four, five different times. And then we tried doing joint ventures with students of those universities, and they would then, you know, pitch the Mhmm. Their dean of residence, life, and housing. But they very quickly sniffed out, wait, there's this other off campus group involved. And, like, we don't want them taking advantage of our students and I don't know.

It just became a, alright. This is gonna be a huge headache to scale this way. Yeah. Let's sell it to because we're graduating around this time as well. Let's sell it to the next group of students on campus because we learn so much from this.

It may it materially changed the direction of all of our lives.

Speaker: Of course.

Speaker: And so, like, well, let's have other students have that same experience and, you know, let's sell it for 10 to, you know, 10 ish times what we bought it for. Mhmm. And in order for a group of students to come up with that amount of money, they needed eight or nine students to buy it instead of, you know, three. And so they all did it. You know, it was eight or nine students.

They collectively came up with the money. Now all of them got to learn. They took different pieces. Hey. We'll run it this semester, or we'll I'll do the marketing.

I'll do the ops. I'll do the finance.

Speaker: That's cool.

Speaker: It it it's now turned hands eight different student groups

Speaker: and it's

Speaker: still still going.

Speaker: Still going. So it worked out well. Yeah. Okay. That's not the business you sold.

Speaker: That's not well, I sold that was not the big one I sold. It was a small one I sold. I did that.

Speaker: It's like, man, like, that was cool. Like, you sold that for a $100,000,000. No.

Speaker: No. No. No. No. That was, like, like, mid mid mid 6 figures.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: And so then I moved down to Charlotte to do consulting at Ernst and Young. I thought, alright. Management consulting is gonna be as entrepreneurial as a corporate career as I could have. And it kind of was, but I hated it. I did not I love the people.

I learned a lot, but I just wasn't as fulfilled. I remember being

Speaker: Oh, you were using your degree. Yeah. Kind of. Right?

Speaker: Yeah. I was finance major. I was doing financial services consulting. Yeah. It was just boring to me.

It wasn't fast. There was a ton of waste. UI is a great company and a great brand, but I just didn't see my I I saw the partners there and their lifestyles and what they were doing. Many of them had made a ton of money, but you could tell they weren't super fulfilled all the time.

Speaker: And I

Speaker: was like, I was, like it was elect it was electric building this laundry thing. It's boring of a business as that is. It was so much fun. Mhmm. And I felt the only place I'm gonna get that is if I'm building something else again.

Speaker: Well, also, it goes back to the reason why you started that or bought that company is because of your dad's advice.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: And now you're over here doing this thing where you're not following your dad's advice. Right.

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Speaker: And so I thought, like, I need to go do this because that's what, like, society expects of me, and I got this degree, and I should go do it. And I got I did learn a lot of good skills, but I only lasted a year and a half. And I was, like, I gotta go build again. And this was in 2015 when you saw the Uber for x businesses popping up. So Instacart, Shipt, Wag, Rover, DoorDash.

And I thought someone's gonna do this for laundry and dry cleaning on a national scale. Why don't I take what I did in college and do this way bigger?

Speaker: Going back to the well.

Speaker: Going back to the well. Double dipping. Okay. And so we started a company called two u Laundry in January 2016. The idea was we're gonna do the same thing Instacart did, DoorDash, etcetera.

Mhmm. We're gonna go city by city, and this is gonna become a delivery, you know, our marketplace type business where we pair demand with supply of existing dry cleaners and laundromats. Mhmm. And out of the gate, we had a ton of success. We thought it would be busy professionals.

Turns out it was busy families, and it was mom making the decision Mhmm. You know, to buy the service. And we went from 10 k a month to 30 a month to 60 a month That's

Speaker: gotta be clear.

Speaker: 80 a month.

Speaker: You thought it'd be busy business owners.

Speaker: It would

Speaker: be the avatar.

Speaker: Like, lawyers, consultants, bankers. We thought it'd be busy professionals.

Speaker: That's who you thought was your customer. Yep. But you found out it was actually mom. Yep. So walk me through that.

So then it was, like, your first marketing bit first marketing pieces were all geared towards, like, lawyers and so on? It was going to, like, law firms?

Speaker: It was because I think it was my back like, our background was, oh, we're young professionals who, you know, would pay we have this money now that we would pay for someone to do things for us. And there's there was some of that that ended up being 20 ish percent of our customer base.

Speaker: Because that's what I would expect. Busy professionals? I pay for laundry service, but my wife hates it. So that's what I would expect.

Speaker: What unlocked for me was, like, we were 24 at the time. Like, none of us are married. None of us have kids. And so there's this whole part of life ahead of us that we've never fully tasted or experienced before. Yeah.

And as soon as mom started signing up and I had just a few phone calls with them, one of the moms was you could hear her crying on the other end of the phone. She's like, you have no idea. I work. My husband works. We have three kids.

I come home from work, and there's always a load or two of laundry to do. I was, like, every day? She's, like, every day. She's, like, it never ends. And as soon as I get through it, there's another load waiting because we are just dirt we have sports and after school activities and this and that.

And I was I just never lived through that because I was a kid.

Speaker: You haven't experienced it. No.

Speaker: And so then they all come in droves and they're like, we're given referral codes like, hey, you know, Jennifer, would you post in the Charlotte mom group and, you know, in this Nextdoor channel and that just spread like wildfire. We started growing like crazy within the mom group. And then we changed our branding a little bit and our messaging and our tone to make more sense to that group versus a bunch of 23 year old guys and Yeah. Trying to appeal to, you know, business professionals. And it was funny.

I was spoiled in college when we went from 30 k to, you know, 280 k Mhmm. And basically overnight. Because I thought every business should grow like that. That's that's

Speaker: Of course.

Speaker: I had that and so this one goes from ten to, you know, 25 to 40 to seven. It was good growth. And I remember being like

Speaker: A year?

Speaker: Per month. Every month.

Speaker: Every month? Okay.

Speaker: And so it's still growing good, but I remember saying, why are we at, you know, 200 k a month yet or a 150 k a month yet? I just thought, like, this it should just go like that. And in hindsight, enough investors told us, like, no. That like, that's great growth. That's phenomenal out of the gate to get that much traction and to figure it out.

And so then we started on the venture path. We started raising venture capital. Over that eight year journey, we raised $33,000,000 at its peak. It was at a, you know, little over a $100,000,000 valuation.

Speaker: You raised money for your laundry delivery service.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Awesome.

Speaker: And again, at the time when you saw, you know, WagonRover dog walking Mhmm. Technology startups raised a $100,000,000, $200,000,000, $300,000,000, GoPuff raised a billion dollars, you know, Uber obviously, Instacart raising billions of dollars. And so we just thought this is another services based Mhmm.

Speaker: That's cool.

Speaker: Tech enabled marketplace.

Speaker: So you're you're you're scaling too slowly. You're frustrated. What were and, obviously, you know, you got you got some advisors, people, to look up to or ask questions if they're able to give you the guidance. But, like, what were the, like, the biggest problems you were solving to scale it when you're you're frustrated to eventually be be be sellable? Like, what were the biggest challenges that you had to overcome?

Speaker: Yeah. So that fir I mean, a number along the way. The biggest first one was we had a hypothesis that we could just outsource everything to existing dry cleaners and existing laundromats. That worked on the dry cleaning side because most of the places we go drop it off, they're not actually cleaning at that location. They bring it to a big wholesale plant.

Mhmm. We've got all this equipment, good process, a whole team of people there. They loved taking our additional kinda wholesale volume, so that worked great. On the laundry side, there's never been a need for mass volume individualized laundry before. So Cintas or AllSCO who do uniforms, they're dumping 600 pounds of the same queen sheet set from a hotel into this massive washer that's the size of this

Speaker: whole room. Doesn't matter which one it is.

Speaker: But Steve might want hypoallergenic detergent, and I want scented. And so we have to keep all these kinda, like it's like small batch brewing almost. We have to keep everyone's stuff separate. And the only infrastructure that exists to do that is out of mom and pop coin laundry, you know, coin laundry. And so we'd go to those owners and say, hey.

We're gonna double or three x your the revenue of your business. And their eyes would light up. Their ears would perk up. Like, yeah. I can do it.

They're like, alright. We're gonna bring you all this volume. A month goes by, and they go from zero employees or one or two at most to 10 to 15 to do all this volume. And what was basically a landlord type of business model to a very active owner operator, like, I'm in there running this business model, and they didn't know what they were doing for the most part. Quality would slip.

They were trying to find ways to not have to be there even though there's a whole process you have to run out just like the dry cleaner. Yeah. And that was our first big hurdle that we got wrong was we couldn't outsource the laundry piece. So we were dead in the water. We're like, this we can't scale this because it's not working at three or four stores in Charlotte.

It's not gonna work at 400 across the country. We're on the same problem everywhere. What do we do? And we noticed laundromats generate 70 ish percent of their revenue Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Monday through the first half of Friday, dead.

Everyone's working. People aren't doing laundry at 10AM on a Tuesday. They have jobs. Yeah. For the most part.

And so all this this asset base is sitting here underutilized. And so he said, why don't we run out your off hour capacity? We'll hire our own labor to come in and do it. You don't need to be the operator anymore, but now you're collecting you know, more money So

Speaker: they're landlord again.

Speaker: So they're landlord again. They loved it. Yeah. Not weird to deal with a ton of labor though now, which was not initially part of the plan. Yeah.

And so we're building technology around how do we tag things and mesh bags and get the cleaning preferences right based on what you want and your family wants and all these other families and what they want. We got really good at it, and we built, you know, technology that that obviously didn't do it for you, but put controls and gamification in place for folding and sorting for the team where they could earn more money the faster and the higher quality that they produced. So it really forced us to learn, like, deep operational processes. We did that. That worked really well.

Speaker: What's gamification of laundry?

Speaker: So we would have instead of paying employees $12 an hour, we'd say, hey, Steve. You get a base rate per hour plus 20¢ per pound you process, because we're weighing everything constantly. And so we'd showed up on a screen. Here's Steve, the leaderboard. Compared to that

Speaker: Steve's crushing it. He's got the most pounds of laundry

Speaker: going on. Yeah. He's making the most money. But there was also a QA check. So if you did it too fast and it got sent back, you're not having to do rework and your, you know, hourly rate's going down.

And so it became they wanted to go fast with high quality, and then they could get out of there earlier too. A lot of people you don't wanna stand on your feet and fold hours or fold close for eight hours. Yeah. They can do the same volume in six, but make more money than they would have at eight. Let's go.

Right. And so that really was eye opening too. Like, how the labor models that exist today, it's like maybe a flat doll hourly rate isn't the best way to do it. Is there a more innovative way to do it? Sure.

So that was a big unlock. And then we outgrew four or five locations that we were sending our own staff into because laundromats are 1,500 square feet. They're small. They're not built for this mass

Speaker: volume production.

Speaker: And so then we hit the other roadblock of capacity and space and how are we gonna do this at hundreds or thousands of laundromats across the country. And that's where we had our stroke of luck and timing. Electrolux, they're a multibillion dollar appliance Mhmm. Company out of Sweden. They own brands like Frigidaire and and and others.

Their North American headquarters happened to be in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Speaker: Oh, that's great.

Speaker: It's like, can't draw it up any better. And we've gotten a meeting with them, and they said, yeah. We've been following. We really like what you guys are doing. It's an approach we haven't seen any of the because there are other kind of San Francisco based Mhmm.

Like, startup darlings that were backed by more prominent VCs than we were. Now we've been following them. We don't really like the model. We like what you guys are doing. We control the, you know, the quality, and you have all this volume.

If you go into your own laundromat, you can now generate revenue two different ways. You have walk in in customers and and you own the whole thing. Why don't you guys own your laundromats? Like, we're glad you asked. We don't wanna use venture capital to buy a building and equipment, and we're all twenty five years old and aren't bankable, really.

Yeah. Like, we'll be the bank. Let's go build a store.

Speaker: Electrolux would be the bank.

Speaker: Yeah. They were like, we'll we'll finance the first one. Our first building that we, that we bought, and we bought the land, the building, put equipment in, it was 6,200 square feet. It was an old McDonald's, and it was owned by McDonald's corporate. Mhmm.

As a 25 year old, the first real estate deal that I ever did was negotiating with one of the largest real estate companies in the world. Yeah. And thankfully, we have investors in my ear just telling me exactly what to say. So I can't take credit. Yeah.

But they're like, these are the type of terms you should negotiate and clauses and

Speaker: they're looking out for you.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. They're looking out for us. So we ended up buying this McDonald's, converted it. Now we have walk in revenue plus we layer the delivery business.

Speaker: Walk in revenue is still laundry. Yep. Okay.

Speaker: But it's like someone coming in and putting 0.25 into the machine.

Speaker: Oh, so it's a coin operated laundromat. Correct. Okay.

Speaker: So now you have customer base that has is on the lower income side that doesn't have their own washer and dryer coming in using this beautiful location, free Wi Fi, children's play area. We do financial literacy courses and free laundry events

Speaker: over that

Speaker: as well. So, like, really got to build the sense of community, which was great. And then you take the more affluent customer who has a washer and dryer but more money than time Mhmm. And wants to exchange that money for their time back. And we would take that laundry and we'd bring it to the same location.

Wow. This is brilliant. This could let's go build hundreds of these. Although, next constraint is these are not capitally, you know, efficient. They're million plus to build with all the washers and dryers and plumbing and electrical.

Oh my gosh. We need $100,000,000 to build a 100 of these.

Speaker: Or just go buy a bunch of McDonald's.

Speaker: Yeah. This is not this is how we're gonna do this. And so that's when we start toying with the idea of what if we franchise the laundromats and then layer the delivery business on top of the franchise locations. Okay. So how does that work?

So we knew very little about franchising going in. We knew this is a business model. It's a trillion dollar, you know, industry in The United States. It's generated so much wealth for so many people, but I always thought this was, like, McDonald's and and Subway. And so we started to learn the process for, you know, how do you franchise a business?

What does that look like? And in 2021, we wrote our what's called an FTD franchise disclosure document and started franchising the laundromats, and they were called Laundra Lab. And then two u Laundry was the piece that was layered on top.

Speaker: So you've got the your existing business and then, yeah, operations. So, like like, what were you franchising, and then what was like, how are you how are they fulfilling it, like, using your service?

Speaker: Yep. So we were franchising the brick and mortar, the four wall laundromat.

Speaker: Okay. And so

Speaker: what they got from us was discounts on equipment. So we were able to negotiate a massive and that's part of the value of of a franchise. McDonald's will get you 10¢ per pound burger meat versus you. Steve and Alex's burger shop were probably paying a dollar. Yeah.

And so franchising should lower your OPEX on consumables, you know, over time. There should be all these pieces of value that you're getting for paying a royalty. Yeah. Super Bowl ads that you're not gonna get on your own, technology you're not gonna build on your own, supply chain, you know, in, you know, efficiency that you're not gonna get on your own. And so for us, that was highly discounted equipment, help with site selection, help with training, help with local marketing.

And the value that I think has to exist in a franchise system is what do you do for the franchisee on an ongoing basis over the ten year agreement? Mhmm. If you think about a laundromat, we're not selling burgers. There's not consumables, soap, maybe some vending. It's really the all the value is upfront.

But then with the delivery piece, whether we're enabling them to do it on their own or we're bringing them volume via the delivery company Mhmm. That's ongoing customer and ongoing revenue. So that was our differentiator was we can bring you more revenue that might not otherwise be there or enable you to, you know, drive this delivery volume on your own with technology and marketing support to to drive those delivery orders.

Speaker: So if I was franchising from you Mhmm. I would have a location. It'd be a laundromat. I got all the washers and dryers inside this building. Yep.

And then you would support me with delivery service where you could drive additional revenue, but that's separate from the franchise.

Speaker: Correct. Yeah. We it's the the more affluent customer base. We'd go market to them. We'd go do customer support to them.

Mhmm. We'd bring you the volume. And just like if someone walked in off the street and said, hey, Steve. Will you wash this for me for, you know, dollar 20 per pound? Mhmm.

You'll do it for them. Our truck pulls up and unloads 30 of those orders Mhmm. And would pay you the same rate to to wash, dry, fold, and package those orders back up.

Speaker: Gotcha. Okay. So how was that? Like, let's do this franchise thing. How was your first franchise?

Speaker: Yeah. So we had two corporate stores open when we started franchising, and then we started selling licenses. So the way franchising works is you buy a territory. You might say, I wanna buy all of Charlotte. There can be seven of these locations here.

I wanna buy the rights to all seven. So then you pay a franchise fee to own the rights to those seven locations, and then you get a development schedule where you open them over, you know, a seven year period or an eight year period. Once they're open, you pay an ongoing royalty in exchange for the licensing of the brand, the technology, getting those customers, local marketing, all that that kind of business in a box support.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: So we started selling licenses, and we sold 118 locations in about fourteen months. Wow. We went fast. And there was good and bad in that. Right?

Doing anything fast, you have to have systems built out, you know, resources for site selection, training, etcetera. Mhmm. And so all of us were, you know, learning as we're developing corporate stores and franchise locations. I mean,

Speaker: that sounds way more challenging than opening your first laundromat.

Speaker: A lot more because you now need systems at scale. Yeah. And so we had raised, at that point, a $20,000,000 series b to support the infrastructure and support

Speaker: You're already on series b. You already passed series a.

Speaker: Yeah. We'd already passed series a. So we were yeah. We had raised the series b.

Speaker: What was series series a was? That was about 6,500,000. But that was for the The delivery business. The delivery business. Yep.

But not the laundromat.

Speaker: Not the laundromat. Even though all these were under the same same parent company.

Speaker: Yeah. So series a was for the delivery business. Yep. Series b was this franchise thing, so that's pretty cool. So you you raised how much?

Speaker: 20,000,000.

Speaker: Okay. You raised 20,000,000 to do this. Because my understanding franchise is it's a completely different business. Like, it's the same company name, but this is a completely different business model.

Speaker: Yep. One's retail. Yeah. Retail operation. This one was a marketplace delivery Yeah.

You know, business. So what was each other incredibly well, but to your point, different operationally, different customer base you're marketing to.

Speaker: Who is involved in your company, like, in this in this crazy journey?

Speaker: Yep. So it's my original co founding team. We had a CTO, engineers building software for the marketplace business. And then as we started getting into corporate locations, we started hiring folks that had direct franchise experience, site selection experience. We worked with a franchise broker, which is part of why I'm working on, you know, what I'm working on now, Franzy.

But we work with brokers to help us sell initial franchise licenses. We hired some, you know, folks who had franchise marketing experience, and so we're building this whole team out to But you mean support this

Speaker: and raising the money from a series b. You're able to hire all the right talent

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: To go execute this.

Speaker: Correct.

Speaker: Gotcha. Okay. So then how was I mean, the first 10 franchises, like, was that pretty easy to sell? Do you have a waiting list?

Speaker: So we a lot of it was going on podcast and just talking about, hey, we own these laundromats. Here's what they're doing. Here's why we're franchising and and what our, you know,

Speaker: goal is. It's funny just saying that you're doing here. Exactly.

Speaker: It's super meta right now. And so we we just wanna get the message out. And even on then we we ran some Instagram ads as well. Mhmm. And we talked to the chief innovation officer from Carnival Cruise Lines from an Instagram ad, and he was interested in building laundromat.

People love laundromats, I think, because it's this kinda boring unsexy thing. Mhmm. And so there was a lot of interest in it. Laundromats aren't cheap, though. And so very quickly, a lot of people got filtered out based on net worth requirements and liquidity.

And we were really looking for operators that understood, hey, we're gonna do a delivery component of this as well. And so there's this isn't just like a passive mailbox money type of thing either, which was Yeah.

Speaker: Part of

Speaker: the issue we ran into with the legacy laundromat owner. So we wanted to learn from that mistake and make sure that we were filtering. That's what's beautiful about franchising is both people get to come together and agree on what does this look like and let's build it let's go build it together. It's not gonna be a perfect straight line, but we're gonna be entrepreneurial together as we as we figure this out, especially an emerging system like ours was Yeah. Where we don't have 50 locations open at all.

You know, everything ticked and tied and perfectly figured out.

Speaker: Okay. So you got the money. You got the right people. So then what were the challenges there in building this all out? I mean, because it was it's you said, like, a hundred and fourteen and eighteen months.

What was the number?

Speaker: Yeah. It was a hundred and eighteen and fourteen months.

Speaker: Crazy numbers. Yeah. About 10 a month. Alright. So, like, what were the what were the what was the pain you experienced doing that?

Speaker: So the pain that we had was we had relationships with real estate, you know, folks with general contractors, but not everywhere. And some of the locations that we sold were, you know, Vegas and, San Francisco sorry, San Antonio, Houston. And so we have relationships here, and we're still building them out everywhere else. So that was, like, a new you're starting over almost every time as you're getting new locations opening

Speaker: for like, what that market, is like? Yeah.

Speaker: And so we started trying to find national, you know, partnerships. But even then, like, Morro Hill or some of these large brands that do national real estate or commercial real estate or, general contractors. So even McDonald's has six or seven companies that they work with because there isn't one company that can truly do exactly what they need in every state. And so finding those relationships, finding who is good, who's not good was was a challenge. It was tricky, you know, you're trying to build a, you know, a ton at the same time.

Speaker: So the location was harder than the franchisees? Identifying the right location?

Speaker: Franchisees was easier than I mean, once you find the right partners, it's hey, we have to go execute now. I think execution is always where it comes down to. How well can you execute? And so that was the challenge of how do we provide enough support to each individual at the same time as we're scaling, and then layering that delivery piece on top of it. There was just a lot of complexity.

This was also in 2022 Mhmm. Post COVID. Yeah. Supply chains were going crazy. Mhmm.

And so the cost of a shipping container went from, you know, $2,000 to I think it was, like, $16,000 at 1.8 x. So equipment was coming from Sweden and from Asia. You know, equipment costs were going up real time, construction costs. Everyone started renovating their homes, their garages, their backyards. And so remember the cost of lumber went up 30%.

Something crazy. And it's like, that's happening, and then interest rates start to go up. So that was probably the biggest headwind was these three macro things Mhmm. That none of us can immediately influence or control. We weren't the only brand facing, like, any retail business was facing this.

Right. It was a really tough few years for franchising in general or anyone building a retail business because of the cost of build outs, the cost of capital was two to three x ing. And if you have equipment intensive businesses that aren't manufactured in The US, your equipment's also going up. And so the three main levers of your fixed cost basis

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Is all getting attacked in the wrong way. So that was if you ask, like, what's what the one or singular biggest challenge was was it was those macro.

Speaker: And how did you overcome that?

Speaker: So we started getting really clever on value engineering. Like, where can we strip cost? Do we need tile in the bathroom of a laundromat? Can we put, like, the stick on tile instead? Let's plumb the location for 30 or 40 washers and dryers, but only put in 20 to start until the business ramps, and then you can add more.

Like, so we started doing things like that where how do we strip costs out that Mhmm. Weren't there previously. And then we tried to get smarter on, you know, delivery. How do we drive enough additional revenue here that gets the business to profitability faster?

Speaker: Gotcha. So this whole time, we're running these laundromats that we're franchising.

Speaker: Mhmm. What was

Speaker: the name of that?

Speaker: Laundra Lab.

Speaker: Laundra Lab. But you have this other business, which is still its own business, which is the delivery business. And we kinda, like, haven't really talk talked about this because you went from two corporate locations to a 118 locations and it's servicing all of these franchises.

Speaker: Correct. Oh, sorry. So sorry. The 118 are people's licenses bought. Remember that, area development agreement?

So that might be some people bought the rights to four. Mhmm. That that all four of those are in that 118, but they're building one at a time. Sure. And so we had a 118 sold across, call it, 35 or so individuals.

So we're building 34 at a time. Mhmm. And then once that opens for a year, then they add their second one. They add their Sure. So that But you

Speaker: still had the skill Yes. To delivery service. To service those 35. Aggressively. Yes.

Right? I mean, it's great for the delivery business, but you still had to it's not like, hey. We're growing 30% a year. This is we're growing hundred, two hundred, 300% per year.

Speaker: Yep. Right? And that's what and that's part of this, like, venture treadmill as well as once you're on it, the expectation, right, is, you know, to grow two to three times two to three x a year. Mhmm. Most startups, they wanna see triple, triple, double, double.

Yeah. And so 300% growth, 300% growth, 200%, 200%, and then start to level off. But

Speaker: Yeah. So what were the challenges on that side? Because we've we've covered the franchise side. What about the delivery side?

Speaker: So on the delivery side, part of the reason that supply supply was always the constraint. We never had a demand pro or I wanna say never, but we we didn't have, like, a major demand problem. It was always

Speaker: You could always find more people that wanted laundry.

Speaker: Yep. It was we can't rely on the mom and pop laundromat owner. Okay. We solved that by doing it ourselves. Now it was well, we outgrew those spaces.

Now we have to have our own physical space. Okay. That was great. Now we outgrew that. We need others to come in and help open these stores fast enough so we can launch the delivery piece on top of them.

The franchising finally kind of unlocked that for the delivery piece. And then we'd launch new markets, and the customer acquisition cost would be higher than we thought. I think of other challenges. The customer acquisition cost was higher than we anticipated. I think we discounted just the, like, local, presence that we had.

Because we were in Charlotte, Atlanta, and Raleigh at that point Mhmm. From a delivery perspective. And I think we discounted us being in those markets and how much that helped. Yeah. Like, the relationships we had.

Right.

Speaker: So it's like white horse.

Speaker: Going yeah. Exact it was almost like that again. And we're like, what? Why can't we figure this out at the same speed we did here? Because here, we just went gangbusters.

And we did the exact same strategies. We'd go on the next door, and we'd get moms to be referral and ambassador partners. And it was just the market dynamics were a little different. And we had talked to so many market by market approach startups like Lyft and like Uber and birds like, the scooter businesses, and they came out like bird and, Lime. Mhmm.

And all of them ran into this, like, things are gonna just be goofy. Like, markets that you wouldn't think would do well are your best markets. And markets that you think should do well, like, a very populated

Speaker: Exactly the same as your home market.

Speaker: Will just be a dud. I'm like, why? How do you figure that like, there should be data that should they're like the local culture, the local, you know, personality of a neighborhood. People might, I wanna walk everywhere. I don't wanna ride a scooter.

And it's like, what? And it you know, or I don't same thing with the laundry. There might be in southern cities, there might be this kind of air of, like, oh, that's the responsibility of whoever's staying at home, whether it's the mom or the dad. And so there might be some guilt the further south you go. Yeah.

There was there's these things that you wouldn't think of initially until you're in the market and you start to talk to customers and you realize this is why, you know, it's harder. So that that piece was always a bit of a challenge. And I think as we looked in hindsight, the other Uber for X businesses all raised hundreds of millions of dollars. So even though we had raised $30.30 plus million dollars, a lot of money, it was still a fraction of what these others did. And they did that for a reason.

It's because it was all going into capturing market share and buying demand.

Speaker: Yeah. Okay. So, I just wanna touch on this thing you talk you keep saying Uber for x. And I know what it is because it became, like, so cliche. It was like a meme for a while.

But not everyone knows what Uber for x is. So what's what does what does it mean Uber for ex?

Speaker: Yep. So in 2014 to 2018, let's call it, everyone was trying to take the same success that Uber had. And, wow, we just created this, like, new way of doing something. There was taxi companies before, but this is this gig economy, this idea of I can become a taxi driver right now in this moment in less than ten minutes. I just get my own my own car, and I can now bring someone to where they need to go and make some money doing it to this two sided marketplace.

So then everyone wanted to become Uber, a marketplace for food or fitness for Zeel was one where they did Uber for massages. Like, oh, they'll just send a masseuse to your office or your house, and you can just

Speaker: get a

Speaker: massage on demand. Same with food. I want, you know, my groceries delivered. I'm gonna pair the supply, the grocery stores with the demand, people who don't wanna go, you know, do grocery shopping. And so the Uber Frecs was this really really just like this gig economy Mhmm.

And what other services or businesses could be Uberized. And so this whole wave of companies started in Silicon Valley, and venture capitalists loved it. They were pouring hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into these businesses because they didn't they didn't wanna miss the next Uber again.

Speaker: So everyone that was raising Uber for actually, you're saying we're raising hundreds of millions. You raised tens of millions. Mhmm. Was there a reason why, or you just that's just what you thought was right?

Speaker: I wanted to be a little bit I think the finance kind of brain or background in me is a little bit more conservative even though I don't mind risk you know, being risk seeking. And so I was a little bit more calculated, but at the same time, the pendulum I think we missed the window by, like, a year or two. Had we started in 2013 or 2014 and had the traction that we had, I think we would have been one of those companies that they're, like, here's a 100,000,000, here's 200,000,000, go. Because there started to become a graveyard of all these Uber for ex

Speaker: businesses That's why it became a meme.

Speaker: A ton of them. And I think we were catching, like, right when it was coming back to the, like, oh, these don't work. So then the next iteration was the managed marketplace model, and that's where you saw, like, ghost kitchens. Where it's, like, oh, we can do Uber for food, but you need to have a ghost kitchen. We need to own more of the supply.

Same with us owning the laundromats Or these flower delivery companies like the BOOX and I think even one eight hundred Flowers does this, but they started buying the flower farms in Argentina and South America and vertically integrating the supply chain. So that became more of a managed marketplace. And then the next iteration became, well, that's expensive. Is it really a venture backable thing, or is it just, like, a nice big business? Yeah.

And so then you started to see franchise native vertical brands, almost like Forerunner Ventures coined this, term d n v b, digitally native vertical brands. Mhmm. That's like Warby Parker. Okay. Where they start out online, they build a cult like following, and then they vertically integrate and start building retail locations Mhmm.

For returns and free to go try glasses on. And that worked really well because think about how cheap it is to build up a following and an audience online versus having to go build 300 retail stores.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And so, Forerunner and Warby loved this. They started looking for more concepts they could do the same thing with. Well, Forerunner, oddly enough, in '20 I think it was, like, '23, wrote another white paper that was titled franchise native vertical brands. And the same thought with the, you know, Warby type of model was, well, what if we franchise the infrastructure that's expensive because you can bring partners on with their own capital. Mhmm.

They're gonna operate them better than probably a paid GM would because they've got skin in the game and they care about it. And now you layer the tech piece on top or the marketing piece on top, and you get the same type of outsized return that we did with Warby in a franchise system. And we we were, like, a year ahead at finally, we're, like, we're two years ahead of the game. We, like, we had a we forced ourself into this model that, you solve for the capital constraints, solve for the operational and labor constraint by having franchise partners come in

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And then you layer the marketing engine on top. The part that got really hard was this wasn't just, like, digital marketing and, you know, orders show up online. This was trucks going from Steve's house to the one of these partners and then back. It still had this logistical complexity. And to this day, you know, still figuring it out.

Right? We have a CEO I hired a CEO a few years ago to Yeah. That that had more logistical operational experience. It is a tough nut to crack.

Speaker: Yeah. So what are you still involved in Laundry Lab or the delivery service?

Speaker: I, in 2023 and I'm I'm a very transparent person. My dad got sick that year. He's cancer free now, but he got sick in the summer of twenty three. My wife found out she was not a US citizen after believing she was a citizen her whole life, and so that threw a wrench in things. My COO at the laundry business had a heart attack and passed away, unfortunately.

Speaker: And then

Speaker: I ruptured my Achilles all within a, like, six month window. And so I went to our board and said that, you know, this is a competitive sport, and my head is like, these things are happening. And they're like, why didn't you say something sooner? This is not normal for you to try to work through all this. And they were like, go take a three or four month, you know, sabbatical.

And so I did that. I spent time time with my dad, time with my wife, and realized, like, I don't know if I'm the guy that takes us from 30 locations to 300 and beyond. The business has evolved so much from a marketplace technology company to one that now has retail locations and trucks and washers and dryers, and we should go hire someone that has this type of experience. So we started a search in 2024, found a great guy. I moved to the board at that point.

And simultaneously, I'd had this idea for Franzy, which I know we'll get into. But after seeing how franchising works and how kind of wild west it is, I thought there's so much of the ingredients for a very disruptive company to come in and fix how people access and buy businesses without being, you know, sold a bill of goods and smoke and mirrors and brokers and all these middlemen. And I saw that. I was like, I you know, an idea will come as an entrepreneur, then it goes away a week later, and, must not have been a good enough idea. This one just, like, kept popping up every week.

Yeah. And so simultaneously, I'd wanted to do that. Knew I wasn't the right fit over here. So I moved to the board, and until recently, just vacated my, board seat, and Franzese has been the primary focus.

Speaker: So are you still owner and other side? Mhmm. Okay.

Speaker: I still have equity. We sold some of our equity along the way. Mhmm. When we were around that that $100,000,000 valuation. Yeah.

It's not uncommon for founders to take chips off the table and sell some of their equity on the way

Speaker: up. Okay. So you didn't sell the whole thing. You sold some of it at a $100,000,000 valuation. Gotcha.

Okay. And so the franchising thing is still here and the delivery thing is still here. Yep. You're still involved in all of that. Yep.

Gotcha. Okay. But you got something else beckoning Yes. Calling you and not letting you go.

Speaker: No. Not at all. I thought about it for years.

Speaker: Okay. So and, yeah, like, franchising, I don't know. I I wouldn't say necessarily it's a dirty business, but, like, it seems odd. Like, some of the things that some of the stories I've heard Mhmm. Like, people buying things that they really had no business buying.

Mhmm. So what were the problems you saw in fries franchising that you sought to fix?

Speaker: Well, this is where yeah. I wanna flip the script a little bit. And when you think of the word like, just franchising, what do you think of is it a yeah. Yeah. What do you think of when you think of the word franchising?

Speaker: I mean, I think everyone says McDonald's. Right? Like, that's like I mean, we watched the founder. Incredible movie. Hate Ray Kroc, but then you read it later.

I was like, well, that movie kinda, like, made some, adjustments to the story.

Speaker: Yep.

Speaker: Right? But I remember I read a book. It was, Robert Allen, multiple streams of income. And it's like, you hear you have these concepts, like, the wealthy have seven streams of income. Right?

So I was like and that one is, like, MLM, which, like, even though most MLMs are crap, the concept of l l MLM still makes sense. So, you know, you can learn a lot from MLM, but the one of them was, like, franchise. You wanna get wealthy, like, own a franchise. I say, cool. Right?

And this is long time. We were talking decades ago. Right? Like, this is, when I was looking at franchises, like, 2005, 2004. And the only thing you could really franchise whenever you looked it up on, you know, I don't even know if Google was, like, the main thing.

I think it was using Google. It was Molly Maid. If it wasn't Molly Maid, it was something like Molly Maid, and it was all fucking in a map. It's all it was. And then I was like, okay.

Well, let me look at some other stuff. And, you know, I'm going to Jamba Juice. Like, so I'm reading the book. I go to Jamba Juice. I look in.

They always have this thing in, like, franchising, which, like, you don't see until, like, you think about franchising. And then you see that franchising packet, like, everywhere. Mhmm.

Speaker: Right?

Speaker: So I alright. So let's check out this franchise thing. This is cool. I like this place. I spent a lot of money here.

Let me buy myself a Jamba Juice franchise. And then I look at the qualifications, and it was you need to have a track record. I can't remember what was, like, 55 or 75 successful businesses. Like, who the

Speaker: hell has

Speaker: like, who yeah. Who has 55 or like, this is not a one percenter. This is beyond a one percenter. Yeah. Right?

So, like, 55 or 75 successful businesses, and you need a million dollars ready to go. Didn't have to be your million dollars, but, like, access to a million dollars. Like, it was, like, a 150,000 cash in hand and, like, be ready to spend a million dollars before the store is open. Mhmm. This qualification process is just absolutely insane.

Right? So I said, alright. This franchise model is stupid. I'm out of this thing. And, I got a friend, Todd, and he did, he had clients when he was working at GE Capital.

His clients were, like, McDonald's and Harley Davidson or whatever. He was telling me a story, like, there's a McDonald's, the first one you see when you drive when you when you get off the bridge to San Francisco, the very first McDonald's you see, a million dollars a month net. Right? Not gross net. That's what that guy is making every single month.

So in my mind, my experience with Jamba Juice, my experience with my understanding of people I've heard about McDonald's is that you're not wealthy by getting into franchising. You have franchises because you're wealthy. Like, that's that's the lesson I took from this.

Speaker: The gap between wholesalers who are winning right now and the ones who aren't is growing, and it's getting worse every single day. And you're not gonna like the reason why. It all comes down to how they're actually using AI. Because the information alone is not the problem. It's the time to figure it out that actually is, and we solve that.

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Speaker: That's very fair. I think I used to be not that you're saying you're a franchise skeptic, but I used to think the same thing. I was like, it's McDonald's and Subway and all the QSRs, the quick service restaurant franchises, or all these, like, snake oil salesman selling me vaporware that's Yeah. Not gonna make me any money. And what I've come to realize and learn is franchising isn't an industry.

It's a business model Mhmm. That spans every industry you can imagine. Food, health and wellness, hospitality, fitness, early childhood development, home services, you name it. It is a business model that people use to scale faster than they could on their own. That others will buy into because they're like, I don't know where to start.

I wanna be an entrepreneur, but I want I want some help. Is there, like, a I wanna say a cheat code, but is there a way for me to start on square three instead of square one?

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And, like, franchising is absolutely that. It's finding fit along the way. So Jamba Juice was the wrong fit for you. Right? Because you came in and you're like, this is this qualification is crazy.

Speaker: Intel. Like, I'm an engineer.

Speaker: So this is wrong fit. Right? And so that's part of the problem that I see is, like, it'd be like imagine buying a house if all you looked at were, like, $10,000,000 homes. Like, I I can never own a home Yeah. If that's all you thought there was.

But the reality is is there's homes that are, you know, 100 k all the way up to 10, you know, 10,000,000 and beyond.

Speaker: But at the time, again, on the websites

Speaker: no way to find

Speaker: this information. All Molly Maid.

Speaker: And even now, it it wasn't that good. And so this is what sparked, you know, this idea for Franzy, which is effectively Zillow for buying and selling franchise businesses. Yeah. And what I realized too seeing even people in our own system was it comes out of four things. It's what are you good at operationally, or if you're gonna be more passive and hire an operator, what are they good at operationally?

Is it sales background, ex military, good with managing teams of people? So there's the operational bucket. There's the risk tolerance bucket. Do you need a a sure thing where it's basically a job, Chick fil A? We can only get one of them.

Mhmm. But you're you're gonna get you're you're gonna make money. You're gonna do well. But you're gonna work forty to fifty hours a week selling chicken. Like, you're doing that.

And you probably won't have a second location. Yeah. A very very few. It is like hundreds of a percent Yeah. You know, get a second location.

Unless you're Aramark and you run food service at a stadium or, you know, airports. So there's that risk level of Chick fil A. Then there's the, like, where we were at Laundrelab, emerging brands where you're taking a flyer, you're taking a bet on that team, on the concept, and you're getting in early, which means probably more territory, discounted franchise fees, probably breaks on the royalties, and, like, you have a say. Yeah. And so that's the more entrepreneurial person, maybe risk seeking.

So there's that second bucket. Third is what can you financially afford? Is this a $5,000,000 swim school where we're putting six pools in and that's not cheap? Or is it this is a funny one. Card my yard.

Or you're just putting, like, yard signs in people's yards that are, like, happy birthday, Steve. Or, like, congratulations. It's a franchise. It makes 30 to $50 a year. It's more of a side hustle, but you only need 10 k to get into it.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: So all the 10 k up to 5,000,000. So what can you afford? And the last one I think is important is, like, why are you doing this? Is this a legacy thing? Is it a hobby?

Is it to make money? Is it to replace your income? Is it to build generational wealth? Like, what is the ultimate why and goal at the end of this journey? Mhmm.

And so we take all four of those tons of questions that give us a holistic picture on those four, and then no human being can sit there and be like, oh, the 4,000 brands. Like, this is on free and this is the beauty of AI. We can start to take those unique qualities and characteristics of Steve, and then all of the unique qualities and characteristics of these 4,000 plus concepts that are franchised in in The United States and start to show you, hey, here's, like, the top 10 to 20. Let's start digging in a little bit now. And now you get coaching from us and advising if you want it.

Others just go on their own. Mhmm. They're like, I don't like these five. I like these five. Here's why.

And it just gets smarter over time. I didn't like these because. I like these because. And it starts to get to a list of, is this the right fit Yeah. For you based on all those things that we just

Speaker: said. Gotcha. So maybe I gave it a little too early on the franchise idea.

Speaker: I think so. So. Like, I I'm developing a franchise now. I used to be a skeptic. And the more I peeled the layers back, I think this is arguably one of the most overlooked paths to wealth creation in America.

Speaker: Well, another data point I have. Right? So, like, I went to, Darren Hardy's, VIP. What was it? High performance forum.

Right? I think that's what it was. HBO High performance forum. I went to it. And, like, you know, hey.

What do you do? Like, I just sound like I'm a real estate broker, you know. Like, well, this person that does what that person does. And then you you look over here as, like, what do you do? It's, like, oh, I own subways.

Okay. Cool. Like, what does that mean? It's, like, oh, I got 65 locations. Like, again, that it just it just validated my my thesis of, like, you have money and then you buy franchises.

So alright. So Well, so

Speaker: in that same vein, one thing I wanna talk about too is so some people were born into, like, their dad had three or four of them, and, like, they started from zero. Like, starting at three to four is enough to start then going six, seven, eight. Now I've got this thing kicking off a couple million a year. Well, now I can go buy up this guy that owns three. Now I've got 12.

And, like, it's one of those things the bigger you get, it's you're too big to fail and it starts to snowball. Encompass. For those that are starting from scratch, and I know plenty of people that started there's a guy I know. His name's Cal. He was an investment banker, so he did have some level of money, but not enough to go buy five, six, seven of these.

But he knows how to put deals together and raise capital. He started with a butcher shop that wasn't a franchise in New Jersey just as his first operational, you know, foray into do being an operator. He said, that was okay. It didn't do bad, but it didn't do great, and I don't know. So then he was at an Orangetheory as a as a member, a customer.

Mhmm. And he's curious. He's just like, how how how much money does this make, and does it do well? And so he goes to the owner, and the owner's willing to share with him how much he does.

Speaker: The owner as a franchisee? Franchisee of an Orangetheory.

Speaker: Yeah. And Cal said, you make that much off of two Orangetheory? He's like, I make that much off of one Orangetheory. And Cal was like, I need to buy some of these Orangetheory. So he got an SBA loan, so he can go get loans to do this as SBA is perfect for this.

And he bought one and then a two shortly after Orangetheory's, and it started working. And my advice to people typically is if this if this is a path you wanna take, you just need to get in the game. Because once you're in, you're learning operations, you're learning what to look for, what you're good at, not good at.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: But then all the deals, they share with each other. Once you're, like, in the franchise club Mhmm. You're hearing about brands before anyone else does. It's like backdoor, you know, email chains and text. Like, oh, hey.

There's this taco thing that's really taken off in California. They're starting to expand. I'm in Texas. You wanna go in on this together? Let's go raise some capital and and do it.

So you start to be in those conversations, which I think, like anything, your network is your net worth and you wanna be around it. And so he goes from two orange theories, to four or five to, you know, more and more. And, eventually, within a seven year period, he has a 112 ish locations. Not Orangetheory's, but across Marco's Pizza, Pop Up Bagels, Dave's Hot Chicken, Restore Hyper Wellness. He sells his Orangetheories, you know, because they were at one point training at 20 times EBITDA Mhmm.

Which is insane. Yeah. But I asked, like, did you own a 100 how do you have enough money to keep doing all this? It's not it can't just be from the cash flow from the business. But, no.

What I'll do is I'll raise money from connections I have, relationships now that I've I'm in this game.

Speaker: And proven himself.

Speaker: And has proven himself as an operator, where he, in some cases, might only own 30 to 50% of, you know, these 20 units. He might own 60% of these 15. He might own 70% of this one, but he's big enough now where he's making enough money as an individual. Mhmm. Everything he's doing now, he owns almost a 100% of the later portfolio.

Yeah. But there's still 60 units where he might own a blended 40%. But if you do the numbers on this portfolio, let's say, 70 units for restaurants for the most part, the average unit volume of these locate these franchise locations is two 1.5 to $3,500,000 per. So we could sometimes a lot more, sometimes a little less. So he's running a couple $100,000,000 a year revenue business.

Mhmm. I'd take 30 to 40% of that all day long. I mean, granted he has 3,000 employees, and he's got directors of operations and this whole system built out now, but seven years isn't that long Yeah. To build that big of a business because franchising, I think, gives you these rails and the structure and a playbook that's super repeatable.

Speaker: So this might derail the conversation or maybe go the wrong way. But what's the difference between licensing and franchising?

Speaker: Yeah. So licensing is you're using a specific asset. So maybe a technology or you're licensing the logo or and you're paying a monthly fee for that. Maybe a licensing software fee, a licensing brand fee, whereas franchising is the whole kit. You're it's all of the assets they have plus the playbooks, plus the training, plus we're gonna dictate how you run this business.

Whereas licensing, it's like, Steve, use this software, but if you start doing other stuff on the side, like, we don't really care. As long as you pay us the $100 a month per seat for this software, you know, this

Speaker: Well, because, like, for myself, a frustration and I should just get over myself. Right? But a frustration is, like, I'm at Barnes and Noble, and they have a Starbucks.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: But they won't honor, like,

Speaker: the app. Right? Interesting. Because it's a licensed

Speaker: because it's not they don't own the Starbucks. Right? Starbucks is in the store. They're using Starbucks coffee. Right?

They have almost a 100% the same menu, but it's not quite the same menu. Like a Starbucks, but it's not a Starbucks. Right? Or or hotels. Right?

Like, you'll have a Starbucks inside hotel, but it's still,

Speaker: like, no. You can't It's licensed and not a corporate store.

Speaker: Yeah. So anyway, that was just

Speaker: curiosity. There's some of those gray areas like that where yeah. They they they might be licensing 90% of it and then the the, you know, parts the same, but that's the part where you can't use the the loyalty app. Exactly. Interesting.

I never even thought about that.

Speaker: Yeah. Okay. So then, how long has when did you start Franzi?

Speaker: We started working on it in 2024. Mhmm. And similar to what Zillow did to the MLS. So the MLS was the underlying, you know, real estate database of all the houses and Mhmm. Prior sale prices, tax assessments, etcetera.

Before, you or I would have to have a real estate buddy that had access to that to see what was going on, or we had to go through a real estate agent. Zillow just democratized access to data that we all now love to go dream up and look at

Speaker: and Just quick point out here, as as a realtor, even though I haven't done a transaction in years, my position is that, the realtor association completely sold out all their realtors. They do it. Handing this data to Zillow. It was the most like, I know I have over a million members paying me all these dues, but I'm gonna go ahead and sell them all out. And just

Speaker: I don't know how they pulled that out.

Speaker: All this data over to Zill. It was the most it was the craziest thing. And, like, we're all watching it as a realtor association. Again, I'm not a practicing realtor anymore, but it's like, what are you guys doing?

Speaker: Like I wonder what the deal I would love to know what the deal was because that is a like, Zillow doesn't exist without it.

Speaker: No. And and, like, that That is where this money is where the money's at.

Speaker: They're a startup at the time. Granted, the founder had started Expedia. So he's a very seasoned, like, very good entrepreneur. How did he convince them to be like, hey, can't promise this is gonna work? And if it doesn't, you're gonna piss off all these people for no reason.

Yeah. But you should do this and give me all that. Yeah.

Speaker: Give me all your data.

Speaker: How did how did he do that?

Speaker: Yeah. Betray your entire

Speaker: user

Speaker: base. Anyway, so sorry.

Speaker: So that that's what created supply. Like, any marketplace has what's called the cold start problem. Mhmm.

Speaker: If you

Speaker: have no supply, demand doesn't wanna come by. If you wanna do an empty store, you wanna go.

Speaker: So this is but this is a marketplace problem. Right? So, like, because, like, not every, what's the word I'm looking for? If it's a if it's not a marketplace, you know how to find buyers and sellers. No.

For here, because the marketplace and I'm I'm saying this, I'm just in the middle of reading blitzscaling.

Speaker: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Reid Hoffman. Right?

Speaker: Yeah. So I'm middle of reading that. So, you know, I'm trying to figure out how I can solve my company and they're like, you need to read blitzscaling. I was like, okay. Cool.

Right? And so it's how there's a marketplace problem. Yep. The marketplace problems you gotta find you gotta create the supply and the demand. Yep.

So So, anyway So if

Speaker: you don't if you don't have if you have zero supply, imagine you're going to an empty retail store, you're gonna walk right by, like, there's nothing for me to buy. Yeah. And vice versa, if the supply has no demand in that area, you wouldn't build a retail store in the desert. And so marketplace has this issue of you need to build up both at the same time because no it's like a chicken or an egg thing. And so how we propped up supply, similar to Zillow, they went and pulled the MLS data to say, hey, here's all these homes you can look at supply.

And now demand's interested what their home is worth and what is available in the neighborhood next next one over. Yeah. For us, it was we need all this data on real franchises that you could buy and what their revenues are and what they cost to get open and what the royalty is and is there litigation or bankruptcy. All this information you'd wanna know. Mhmm.

And the good thing is is franchising is regulated by the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, and they're required to write these 200 page legal documents called FDDs, franchise disclosure documents. And they're as exciting as they sound. No one wants to pour through that and figure it out. And so what we've done is we scraped it took us, you know, a half a year to a year, 30 plus thousand FTDs. And there Right.

30, like, four or 35,000. There's there's 4,000 businesses. 35,000 is we have all the years. So 2016, '17, '18, '19, '20 of because now you can see trends. Is the revenue growing in this business system or going down?

Are their stores opening? Are they closing stores? Which for you and I looking at Jamba Juice or whatever it may be, we wanna know that. Is the system healthy and growing or is it contracting?

Speaker: Yeah. We're whenever my friends and I were talking about at one point, like, hey, like, Quiznos is cool.

Speaker: No. No doubt. There's things that we help when we use AI, I get to No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No.

And so we we've compiled all this data and it looks very much like Zillow. We can go to Chick fil A and you can see the trend data, how many stores open, close Yeah. How much revenue they do. And that's where we then start to amazing, Jim.

Speaker: Like, this is just public data.

Speaker: It's public, but it's super hard to find. Yeah. Like, it is, like, in these honey holes of registration states, and we have to buy some of it and partner with other groups to get it. It's A

Speaker: lot of data.

Speaker: It's a ton. And they're, thankfully, somewhat structured documents, but a lot of unstructured data too. Because the the item 19 is one of the most important parts. It's the audited financials. Mhmm.

But you know how people get with financials. Oh, adjusted EBITDA Mhmm. Or they just show this is just the top quartile of locations revenue and Yeah. So, you know, people play those tricks and we have to identify them, which AI is good, but it's not that good yet at being super surgical on identifying what kind of tricks the company might be playing to hide certain, you know, revenue stories.

Speaker: Yeah. Okay. So you scrape 35,000 FDDs. Mhmm. And then you're feeding this into franzy.com?

Speaker: Into franzy.com. Similar to Zillow, free to create an account. You can go and say, hey. I'm in this market. I'm interested in these things.

Here's my risk. All those four things I mentioned earlier, risk, what you can afford, and start to see what fits. And we start to give a score for each brand. It's called a frenzy fit score, and it's what is the best fit business for Steve based on everything we know about you and everything we know about these businesses.

Speaker: Gotcha. Okay. So you start in '24, and then right out of the gate, you're scanning all this information?

Speaker: It took us six to twelve months to, like Yeah. So we're building in stealth and not having any real traction until we got the marketplace stood up.

Speaker: And then you raised a lot of money with Laundry Lab. And, what was the the name of the, the delivery service?

Speaker: Oh, 2U Laundry. 2U Laundry. Yep.

Speaker: Did you raise money for Franzy, or are you doing Franzy on your own?

Speaker: So we were gonna bootstrap and use some of our own money just to, like, get the marketplace built. And then this is what's interesting the second time around as a, you know, serial entrepreneur. Soon as people heard what we were starting to work on, I wanna Alex is smarter and wiser, and he's made some of the silly mistakes in his twenties now. He's in his early thirties, and, you know, I like this idea. It's a bigger market, and I wanna back it.

So people started approaching us, but you take money. Mhmm. And the valuation was good and the terms were good. We're like, oh, let's take some money and go faster and Yeah. That's the reason you never do it.

A lot of people are very polarizing like, don't take money ever. Take money all the time. And I'm probably more of a if the money unlocks growth that would take you five to ten plus years otherwise, like, go ahead and do it. I'd rather have a slice of watermelon versus a whole grape.

Speaker: You know? Right. And so

Speaker: we took a million dollars that really allowed us to get get to market probably in, you know, half or a fourth of the time if it would have taken him. We just kept bootstrapping. Mhmm. We get to market. We launched in late January of last year, '25.

Really started building up the team, the sales process, the marketplace making it more refined and intuitive just by getting traffic to the site and testing. We went from 5,000 unique users a month to 10 or up to, you know, fifty, sixty thousand unique visitors a month coming to the site. And then we sort of catch our stride on where qualified leads coming from and people that wanna be entrepreneurs but don't know where to start or are already entrepreneurs, but they wanna diversify. They own commercial real estate. They own, you know, short term rentals.

They maybe own an independent, you know, ice cream shop. Yeah. But they wanna get into other stuff now, and they wanna get into franchises because it's just a different asset class or different type of the biz you know, you you read the book with the seven types of

Speaker: Seven streams of income.

Speaker: Seven streams of income. So they wanna get they wanna add the fifth of the sixth.

Speaker: Yeah. Alright. So you've been around it started 25, so over a year now. So what kind of traction are you getting on Franzy? Like, are people you find people coming in and buying franchises, or are they just, like, what's the what's what's been the track record for Franzy?

Speaker: Yep. So we've helped, a little over a 100 people become entrepreneurs or and that's, like, the metric for us is how many people are gonna go out and chase what I consider a dream. Like, it was the most fulfilling thing that I've ever done. Yeah. And some people wanna do it and they don't know how.

They're scared and they they want a path. Some of it's been that group of people. Others, it's like, this is my tenth thing. Just, like, show me what the right fit is and, like, they know what they're doing. You can tell.

Speaker: Plug right into my veins.

Speaker: And so some people just go. Like, they use our data in the site and they just go. Yeah. Others are like, hey, I wanna talk to one of your because we have coaches on our team or advisors and they are franchisees themselves or were, and they've been in this, you know, business model for ten, fifteen years. So similar to a broker, but the difference is instead of a 60% commission, which I was shocked by this $6.00, that we take a flat fee.

It's regardless of brand, we take the same amount from the brand. Mhmm. And so we have no incentive to promote one brand or one concept over another. Whereas a broker taking a 60% commission, what if the franchise fee of one brand is $60 and another one is 20? Mhmm.

Which one do you think they're gonna push in front

Speaker: of you? More incentivized.

Speaker: And you don't know this. So, like, unlike this is what's wild. You'll get this as a as a real estate, you know, expert. 3% is different than 60. Mhmm.

And on the 3%, you have to be licensed, coursework, registered in the state you're doing it in over here. Boom. You and I are franchise brokers on this podcast, and you can start selling them legally right now. There's no filter. There's no screening.

There's no education. And I think that attracts a lot of bad actors.

Speaker: Which goes back to, like, what I've stories nightmare stories I've heard Yes. Of these franchises, like, why they should not have bought that.

Speaker: No. Because there's no recourse for them, and there's no slap on the wrist. There's

Speaker: no license

Speaker: they can lose.

Speaker: Going the fact that how hard it is to franchise, going through the disclosure, my understanding is, like, just to get the paperwork started is, like, $25 to start a franchise. Just to start. Right, not to finish. Mhmm. I would have thought that since you're dealing with FTC, selling franchises would be heavy heavily regulated, but it appears that the business brokers are not heavily regulated.

No. This isn't like because I wanna go raise money. Like, hey. We're gonna I'm gonna go buy, an apartment complex.

Speaker: Mhmm. Right?

Speaker: You wanna invest with me. You gotta be an accredited investor.

Speaker: There's none of that. No. None. I, like, can't figure out why. And I'm usually not a big proponent of regulation.

Like, I love capitalism and, like, go build things and let's go. Regulation can slow you down. This is, like, a very clear, easy what are we doing? What's government? This is where you're supposed to do things to protect, you know, the average citizen, the average American from making a bad decision.

Because this I I would argue that this decision to buy a business, whether it's a $100,000 business or a million dollar business, is probably one of the top three largest financial decisions Yeah. You're gonna make in your life, and there's no oversight. Mhmm. I'd and so this is what's compelled me to go build this platform. It's like, if regulation, the government's gonna take five to ten years to catch up, let's go let capitalism do its thing.

Let's go blaze a path through the brokers and wipe the bad ones out. So there's good brokers for sure. I want them them to stay. I had a a a mentor tell me a while ago, if you're building something worthwhile, you should leave a path of destruction behind you. Mhmm.

And in this case, it's like, let's do the path of destruction of the bad brokers who are misleading people who are Yeah. You know, pushing you towards the higher fee thing for them without telling you and knowing that this may or may not work. But up to Steve to figure that out. Mhmm. I hope that's the case here and that's what we're working hard to do.

Speaker: That's cool. So, let's see here. I wanna talk about some of the other things you've done as far as other franchises. Right? Because, like, we talked about the Laundra Lab thing.

We talked about Franzy, but you have other franchises that you're also running.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: What else are you doing?

Speaker: Yeah. So I'm starting to build and develop. So I have one of those area development agreements with a partner in Minnesota for pop up bagels, which is a kind of a I wouldn't say quick service restaurant, but it's a food concept. Mhmm. Smaller footprint, thousand square feet, which makes it a much cheaper build out than the typical, you know, restaurant would be.

A Wendy's and McDonald's could be $34,000,000 plus to build out Yeah. Versus a pop up bagel is under 1,000,000, you know, less equipment, less square footage. You don't have, you know, seating indoors, etcetera. And the revenues are really good. They're, you know, multiple seven figures, and the margins are good.

And so I usually would stay away from food just because it's a lot of labor. It's capital intensive. I don't have that kind of, you know, liquid, you know, cash necessarily to go do five, six, seven of these. But a pop up bagels, the fixed cost is much lower. Revenues are still just as high as some of the other large food concepts.

Mhmm. Margins are better, and the head the labor and the staffing is, you know, a fifth or a fraction of what a normal restaurant would be. I had all these things where positive, positive, positive, you know, check, check, check, check, check. All these things that I wouldn't, you know, like about a restaurant, it has the opposite of. And so and it feels like this kind of generational brand.

Tiger Global's invested in it, this massive, you know, very smart, sophisticated investment group. They're selling to primarily multiunit franchisees. So there's this term in franchising called a Mumbo, a multi unit, multi brand operator. Okay. Those are the guys we're talking about.

They're on, like, sixty, seventy, eighty locations. Most of the franchisees in pop up are those.

Speaker: Gotcha.

Speaker: And so I think me and my partner were able to get in because of our background in the laundromat franchises plus what we're doing at Franzy. But for the most part, it's very it's like, again, getting in the game. We've been in the game, so we're we're around these conversations. Mhmm. And it creates the right place, right time, more often than it would have otherwise.

And so I think we're very lucky to have the opportunity to develop this brand, but that's what we're focused on now. And, eventually, I'd probably like to add more locations of that same brand and more concepts and become a Mambo. Mhmm. But Franzy is, you know, a 100% the focus and takes a lot of time already.

Speaker: So this is gonna sound kinda silly, but when you're describing Mumbo, like, I'm experiencing a loss of FOMO right here. It's like, that's cool. I wanna be known as a multi unit, multi brand owner. That seems like some sort of exclusive club.

Speaker: Right? They then there's a lot of them. There's way more than you'd think. There's thousands of them. Yeah.

And they're quiet. So, like, we have a podcast called The Exit Plan where we interview people that have left corporate to go become franchise, you know, entrepreneurs, business owners, or have scaled, you know, from three to a 100 in how they do it. So I've talked to so many of these groups, these individuals that have done it. They want a lot of them wanna just be quiet, because I think what they've realized is we've got it good. Yeah.

We don't need other people in private equity and, you know, other just, you know, sophisticated operators or individuals figuring out what we've got going on over here. Yeah. Because once they're in, like, it is so nice. They just go from 10 to 15 to 20. Like, it just starts to snowball, and I don't think they want to be known.

Yeah. Some of these guys one of one of the connections we have, when I first met him in '20 probably '21, it was five years ago, He owned forty three, 44 McDonald's. He would tell us the numbers. He's, like, yeah. Average McDonald's is doing, you know, $44,500,000 revenue.

Profits, 400 to 600 k. That's higher now. That was five years ago. We're doing the math on, like, a 500,000 per you're making $20,000,000 a year? And he's like, yeah.

And and I was like, that's like a NFL, you know, like, decent NFL quarterback at the time. I've talked to him recently. He's up to, like, 80 or nine. He's doubled the locations, and the stores are more profitable. He's close to, you know, $6,070,000,000 dollars in cash flow.

He's, like, paid better than the top paid NFL quarterback now forever. And it doesn't he's not wearing down his body. He has two planes. He's quiet. If you would have met this guy, super, like, salt of the earth, down to earth person, you'd never guess.

And most of these guys that have 50 plus units are exactly like that. They're very quiet.

Speaker: You're not doing them any favors coming on this podcast.

Speaker: I know. I I see, I'm like, I want everyone to know because I think this is the greatest thing ever, and I want more of it. I it's a great business model if done correctly and if you find the right fit. And so why not? Hey.

There's plenty of these locations to go around. There's, you know, there's there's literally a trillion dollar industry.

Speaker: Yeah. And then I I saw here in the notes that, you've also had, Harmozi invest. So do you work with him?

Speaker: Not direct. I've I've been to Vegas a few times, and I've met him in person there. But it's mostly his his team. Like, he has an investment team other for their family office. Yeah.

They will do kinda smaller checks and a few tech tech startups, and then they'll do large checks and brands that come through their process that they identify as businesses they wanna be very involved in. You know, thirty, forty, 50% ownership. But the reason we wanted to work with them was we're, you know, starting to build, like, a a media layer on what we're doing. As you can imagine, this two sided marketplace, you need people to come look and explore, whether that's they're ready on day one or just like Zillow, they're passively looking for a year or two before they decide. Time for me to do something for myself and own an asset and own a business.

We wanna be there top of mind, and media, as you know, is a great way to do that. And Hormozi's one of the best.

Speaker: He's not very well. And Branding himself.

Speaker: Getting to look under the hood. I was telling, you know, one of the guys on your team, he has, like, a 36 person content team. And it makes sense if you're I mean, you everyone, you know, listening, if you follow Hormozi, you see him everywhere. Long form, short form, mid form, YouTube, Instagram. Like, it's everywhere all the time constantly.

And that is a lot of work. Mhmm. And I didn't imagine 36 people being what it took to Yeah. To do it at that time.

Speaker: I wouldn't have thought 36, but I know he spent a lot of money on it.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Well, that part of that's because so that thirty six is also managing three, you know, three individuals. It's it's Alex, it's Leila, and it's Sharron now, the CEO that they just hired. And so, like, each of them gets 12 people to

Speaker: Even Sharron. His content's crazy.

Speaker: So good. Yeah. But it's like, they just have it down. They're such good, you know, marketing brilliant masterminds.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And so our goal is, you know, how do we surround ourselves with people like that so that we can learn and emulate even some of it.

Speaker: Brilliant. And then right now, there is an interesting time. I think you can argue perhaps in human history, we're going through some something interesting right now. And does that coincide with your belief that now is the best time to get out of working your nine to five and get into franchising?

Speaker: Yeah. I think there's like, things are things go in cycles. And my dad's advice, I think, still holds true. It's, like, you need to be working for yourself or having people work for you if you truly wanna be financially free. And I think we have a window right now that's very open that this is probably the best times to take that risk because I do worry, I don't know, 30 ish percent of white collar jobs are very much at if you're behind a computer, your job is so at risk unless you're one of the top 10%.

And at that point, you probably have to learn how to use AI incredibly well to remain there. And if not Yeah. Take that skill and go own real estate, go do explore ETA even though it's getting competitive and crowded. Look at franchises. I think just owning an asset of some sort and having a fallback plan and protecting yourself is incredibly important right now.

What's ETA? Entrepreneurship through acquisition. So that's where you use capital or you raise some capital to go buy an independent business. It could be a steel fabrication business. It could be a business that makes furniture or ships furniture.

It's basically buying any independent business, from one of the baby boomers or, you know, part of the silver tsunami that's starting to have all these businesses change hands. Mhmm. There is ETA in franchising too. So remember, franchising is a business model. ETA is just a strategy to buy businesses, whether they're independent or franchise businesses.

Yeah.

Speaker: Well, you're mentioning that investment banker. That's what he did. He went and raised money to buy franchise.

Speaker: E t yeah. It's just ETA has become the cool, you know, term and, you know, everyone's using as I become an entrepreneur through acquiring a business. So now ETA, I'm an entrepreneur by buying a business.

Speaker: Yeah. For whatever reason, that's not I've not heard that, expression before, but it makes total sense.

Speaker: It is. Like, all these MBAs are this is what they're doing. They're gonna get their MBA, and they're like, I'm starting an ETA fund. So they'll raise money. You know, someone will sponsor them, basically.

We'll give you, you know, a salary of 120 k a year while you go search. It's like a search fund. They'll go search for the business to buy, and then the the backer says, I'll put up to 3,000,000 into the business in equity you own. 40%, I own 60. We're kinda just, like, betting on this, like, jockey, basically.

Like, go, you know or like a truffle pig. Almost, it's like, go find the, you know, go find the right opportunity, sniff it out, and then I'll back you to go buy it and operate it. Yeah. There's so many it's super crowded.

Speaker: Well, a friend of mine just sold his business, and that's what happened.

Speaker: There was someone doing that.

Speaker: Someone doing that. Yep. I didn't know that was a thing.

Speaker: It is a huge trend right now. I worry about it a little bit. But Why? There's you'd think the amount of supply coming on from like, I mean, the greatest generation or the baby boomers are, you know, there's so many businesses changing hands where they don't have kids that wanna run them. So there is this huge influx of businesses.

You think there'd be an oversupply. The amount of people wanting to buy businesses because they don't wanna work for the man, they don't wanna, you know, do corporate is greater than this. I thought there's so much over here. No way. They're gonna these guys are gonna get good deals.

There is so much competition, and part of it's probably there's so much smart competition. There's so few really, really good deals that have no hair on them. I think every deal is gonna have some hair. You just have to figure out what kind of hair you tolerate.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: But what's happening, what I've heard from people is these guys are like, I can't find any deals because these guys are all, you know, selling for $10.11, $12.14 x EBITDA, which used to be 6 or seven. It's, like, literally double. And, like, does do the economics work over here doing that? In most cases, probably not. If I worry about that, it's like there's too much of this and it's driving prices up in a somewhat unhealthy, bubble ish way.

Speaker: Yeah. That makes total sense. Overpaying is very rarely a good thing, for these guys. That's great for these guys. Great for the silver tsunami.

Yes. And I think the other thing too is, and it's an existing business, so it it works. But, like, the entrepreneurship is not for everybody. Like, we push it pretty hard. Right?

Especially on Instagram. Let's let's flash what we have and and promote this. And I was one of those people that told everyone to quit their jobs, like, go start a business. But, man, like, business is hard.

Speaker: Super hard. And then we so that was the only thing I didn't like with about brokers. I was like, yeah. You you can just do this. It's just like they almost lead you on to believe it's mailbox money.

And, like, that franchising is an asset class. I'm like, no. It's a business model, which means you're running a business underneath this business model. Yeah. And that's not you can't just like, oh, I bought it.

I'm gonna go to the beach now. Like, the first year, whether it's an existing business with customers and employees and create a team, sure, maybe gives you a little bit of a head start. But the first year of anything you do, you're you're in it. Like, expect to be in it unless you're hyper wealthy and you're, like, I'm gonna overpay and burn money intentionally so that I can get my time back to go to the beach. I'm gonna hire an operating partner that I overpay and the business doesn't make as much money at first while it ramps.

Like, there is the exception, but the norm is you're gonna put your blood, sweat, and tears into whether you're starting it on your own from scratch, buying a franchise, buying an existing business, at least a year, you are gonna kill yourself. Like, and you there's no shortcut. There's no way around it. And what I don't like about some of the culture is, like, yeah, get rich quick or go like, I don't even wanna talk to those people that want to do that because if you find that, show me because it's sure that'd be kinda fun and nice to have that. But I wanna talk to the people that see there's a path at the other end and are willing to do the hard work the first year or two.

Mhmm. Because then you can get the point where you're going to the beach and someone else is running it. Our whole framework is, at first, I do it. I have to be in the business to learn it from the ground up. Then we do it.

I'm doing it with a GM or an assistant who's starting to learn the systems, and I get to pull out of the business a little bit to work on scaling and adding more, you know, maybe locations. And then it's they do it. You've earned the right to have they do it. I've hired a whole team. There's management.

They're running it. I can disappear for a month, and this thing still kicks off cash for me. Yeah. But that is not an overnight thing. In franchising, it can be a two, three, four year thing.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: You're still still gotta go through those.

Speaker: I know there's another thing when I was looking long, long, long time ago. The other options besides Molly Maids were, like, seven elevens. And, like, those were all awful. Mhmm. Every option is, like, it's $40,000 to buy in, and you get to make $40,000 a year.

Speaker: And there's some, like I I see some of these franchise on the lower end of the spectrum where I call them, like, sharecroppers. You know, like, they are purposely selling a ton of 5 to $10,000 a year licenses Mhmm. To these individuals, enough to max out a credit card, basically, knowing that 50% of those individuals will churn out. Mhmm.

Speaker: But they

Speaker: don't care because a new batch is coming coming in every year. And, like, that's what I also think would, you know, shy away from, but there's also 50% that's is making more money than they would have made otherwise. And so, like, I always want people to go in eyes wide open on, like, hey. Just so you're aware, this business's incentive is to sell as many, you know, licenses as possible, and they know half of you are gonna fail. If you're okay with that and you believe that you're in the half that's gonna make it, that's your decision and your prerogative.

Speaker: Alright.

Speaker: The issue is that no one's most for the most part, no one's telling them that.

Speaker: Come in with your eyes wide open.

Speaker: Yeah. You need to know the whole risk and just like buying a home, you have someone helping you think about, well, you need an inspection and you need this and you need that. It's just for whatever reason in franchising, it is the wild West, and that's why it gets a bad rep. And I wanna come in and tack that head on and, you know, highlight the good that is happening. Because there's a lot of really awesome success stories.

People that and we've helped people that moved from the, the Northeast down to Texas. He's about to make a million dollars in his first year doing a artificial turf business.

Speaker: That's cool.

Speaker: Like, that makes me feel so good. Yeah. That materially changed this individual and his family's lives. And he's he's happy. Like, he's like, I hated my job.

I felt like every day I'm going in to do this thing for someone else. Mhmm. Like, I don't know what happens. We got one life to live. Like, I want people to live it in a way that is good for them.

But to your point, not everyone's cut out for it, and our job is to help you figure that out too.

Speaker: Yeah. So, we've talked a lot about franchising. Is there anything we haven't talked about?

Speaker: Talked about AI. We talked about franchising. We talked about laundry. Talked about content. I think we've we've covered a lot.

Speaker: Yeah. I mean, I could say, like, I started using a laundry service, I wanna say, two years ago, and it was just I just went on Google. Right? Oh, it was. Like, I was on Google.

I found a service, and what I figured out pretty quickly was that they all like, the the the service I used, all it did was just shop at the seven different laundromats. And then the first one sucked. I complained. They sent it a different service, and then the other laundromat knew that this was just, like, a middleman. So they included inside my laundry their information.

Speaker: Trying to poach you away from the one

Speaker: And they did. So, like, I went to that one because, like, they did a great job. Like, you know, it's just, like, these little stupid things, was, like, you know, I please don't judge me. Right? So, like, you know, like, playing basketball, you get, like, these Nike dry fits and it has a left and a right.

Yeah. And I appreciated that the fact that this second one matches the left but the right. Right?

Speaker: Not two rights.

Speaker: Not two rights. Not two rights. Not two less. Like, that's it shouldn't bother me that much, but it does.

Speaker: Those those things matter. I mean, I can't I have so many stories of, you know, people's particulars you know, particularity around how their clothes are clean and how they come back. And that's another challenge that that business had of it's a, you know, $40 for the service, but that bag has hundreds of dollars of value in it. Mhmm. And then all the, you know, preferences on top of it.

It was such a challenging thing to try to solve.

Speaker: Yeah. And then, like, you lose your clothes every once in a while. Mhmm. So you notice, like, I used to have more of these. Right?

Speaker: Well, and we were always the first to blame. So we I think, one, mistakes do happen for sure. But other people would also lose a shirt behind their washer or in their closet. And you guys lost it. And we'd look we have everything on camera.

We doc so we had learned to get the casino style camera stuff. So, like, nothing was getting past us. And she'd be like, look, here's the we'd send the video, like, here's your bag. Like, this item you just described is nowhere in this, like because we spread it all out and, like, we make sure you can

Speaker: Oh, really?

Speaker: We were like because it got to a point where, like,

Speaker: You're you're like a blackjack dealer. Yeah.

Speaker: It's like

Speaker: You're like

Speaker: Yeah. We're like showing our hands, like, not no no cards.

Speaker: Eye in the sky.

Speaker: And we we'd send it to them and they'd be like, oh my gosh. I'm so sorry. I just looked behind the driver. There it was. The day for the first five emails they sent us were, like, you did this.

This is and it's always the favorite item. This was my favorite shirt all the time. Yeah. And they would apologize, but it was just, like, you're the you're the first to blame, which I get. It's understandable.

Speaker: But Well, since I never do my laundry in the last few years,

Speaker: I know for sure

Speaker: the best thing ever. It's for sure, them. So and they didn't have the well, I never really made a big stink about it. It's like, yeah, whatever. Like, it's just a cost.

Right? Like, I know if I'm paying for this service, it's a convenience.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Things will happen. Mhmm. And just accept that. Alright. So we've talked a lot.

You know, this is a very interesting journey you've gone through. What what is it that, like, what is it that drives you? Like, why are you doing what you're doing?

Speaker: So for me, it started out I grew up in a small town. I was very fortunate enough to have gone and traveled with my dad and my mom. And at the time, it felt like, oh, this is what everyone does. And the older I've got, I realized these are really formative experiences that a lot of people don't get. And so my goal for the longest time was, you know, I wanna have a family someday and kids, and I wanna give them half of what my, you know, parents were able to give me.

Mhmm. That that drove me even from the age of 16. I was like, it starts now. Like, this isn't a thing you just wake up. I'm like, I wanna be successful tomorrow.

I was like, I need to build these habits, be driven, be motivated, do the hard work now. Just like the first three years of a frame like, there's just no shortcut in my opinion unless you got lucky on crypto or gambling. But, like, is that fulfilling? Is that worthwhile? Like, I feel like you get, you know, poor in other ways if that happens.

Yeah. And so I just knew, like, I gotta build these habits now at the age of 16. Over time, as I've seen the power of business and entrepreneurship and the impact it can have, that has changed from, well, hey. I can take care of my family in that nucleus, but how do I impact positively others and have more reach? Not just maybe some of it's ego, but for me, it was I just wanna, like, help others feel the same thing that I've felt the last ten years because I know it's better.

I've lived both, and I know that this is more rewarding, fulfilling, likely to have positive impact on customers and clients and employees and teams that you build. And Mark Cuban has this quote that I love, and it was the biggest impact or the most, you know, legacy you can leave or impact you can have on society is by building a big fucking company. He's like, if you do that, you're gonna create a ton of jobs. You're gonna positively impact cost. Because if you're growing, that means customers like what you're selling, and so you're contributing to society via that commerce.

And you're gonna pay a shit ton in taxes, and hopefully, the government does the right thing with those tax dollars. Now that's up to them, and they don't always do it the right way. But I would like to believe that, hey, if I do my part and and everyone else is doing their part, they'll figure it out. And so that's really what's stuck with me now, what's driving me now is my family's been mostly taken care of, and I'm fortunate enough to be in that position. Now it's can I go bigger to impact others, their families, the communities that I'm in?

The I'm moving from Massachusetts to Dallas, you know, with his family and is now he's told me, he's like, I'm, like, 10 times happier than I was. And, like, that's my measures. Like, how do I make others happier than they were?

Speaker: Yeah. You have a different energy, though. Like, the, you know, I'm on the back working, catching up, whatever I'm doing right between between meetings, whatever. And I hear you talking to, like, my team here. And, like, you're very genuine.

Like, you were talking to them, not like because you had to. Right? Like, you had a genuine interest about what who they are or what they do. It's different.

Speaker: Small town Minnesota. Is that what that is? I think so. I but everyone's just so nice and friendly and waves. And, like, every other place I've gone, I'm still kinda, like, waving at Australia.

They're like, I know you. And I'm like, no. We could. We could get to I don't know. I just I don't know.

I not that I'm, like, super religious or anything, but I just at at the end of at the end of this life, I don't know what happens. And so I'm just like, I wanna live this one fully and help others do the same thing. Whatever that looks like for them. Like, to your point, some people don't wanna be an entrepreneur. I'm not gonna be like, you have to do it.

It's like the right thing for you. Like, if they're like, no. I really hate risk. I'm very happy. I'm like, okay.

Good. To me, the measurement is happiness though. Yeah. And my definite I always try, like, define complex things Mhmm. To make them simple if I can.

And for me, happiness, the definition is whatever your expectation was, the difference between that and the reality that you live in. Mhmm. So anytime, whether it's a relationship, a career, a business, a friendship, you You can always use this definition of that I expect more out of this experience, this friend, whatever that I'm getting, and you're probably a little unhappy if that's the case. But if you your reality was greater than what you expected, you're gonna be elated, super happy. And I've just realized that through business, I think people expect them to, like, I'm gonna go work for the bank, and I'm gonna, like, they you know, and they're kinda, like, but I always wanted more.

And there's, like, this, like, gap of, unhappiness, and I've realized entrepreneurship has turned this thing that used to be kinda sad and, like Yeah. Less fulfilling into, this is greater than I ever expected and I ever could have imagined. And I just want, like, other people to taste that.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. I completely get that.

Speaker: What what do you what

Speaker: do you struggle with most today?

Speaker: Most today? I think if I'm doing enough, like, my you know, in my family life, in my work life, like, in my there's no such thing to me as balance. It's like harmony instead. Like, am I getting them to overlap? And am I, you know, being what I need or being what other people need me to be is, you know, often as I can.

I think I struggle with allocation of time.

Speaker: I mean, you're running multiple businesses. I think that's gonna be a struggle. What is your superpower?

Speaker: I think listening and understanding what it is the people that I interact with, like, truly want and what their intentions are, what their goals, and the empathy really, and then being direct about, like, hey. This is great. This we could do something together or saying, hey. This is a waste of your time. I'm not trying to be mean or rude or whatever.

Just you shouldn't spend your time with me because I'm not gonna be able to help you accomplish what you're telling me you want to accomplish. Yeah. And so I think the superpower is, like, really listening before I speak. I'm the guy. Even though I'm the CEO of our company, I'll sit in the room and let everyone else talk and debate and kind of argue about what decision we should make, and I'm just taking it all in.

And then I wanna speak with intention.

Speaker: Yeah. You can be quiet the whole time.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: I'm surprised by that part.

Speaker: Because I have long winded. I know I can just, like, go go go go go.

Speaker: Yeah. And then, for I mean, you've done a lot. I mean, you started this was it 2015? When did you know when did you start Wake Forest in the laundry?

Speaker: 2010 was the college laundry business. 2016 was the out of college laundry business. And then Okay.

Speaker: Yeah. So you've been doing this for a while now. Like, which which failure? Because, like, we feel, like, you know, because, like, success, success, success, success. Right?

Like, which failure, like, you learn the most from?

Speaker: The first big one was hiring the wrong people. I was so bad at hiring people at first because I didn't hadn't done it. And I got lucky and went through Techstars, which is like a accelerator incubator for startups. And one of our managing directors was the chief of staff for Palantir. And Palantir hires some, like, the best people in the world because they're dealing with such sensitive classified information, high risk decisions, you know, for their clients.

And so I was like, how do you hire people for he taught us how to recruit and how to read people and, like, their interview style was like an FBI interrogation.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: But it for the right people, they love it. You're telling your whole life story, what you're good at, what you're bad at, works in the road, and why, you know, not necessarily regrets, but decisions that you would have maybe done differently, but they still shaped who you are. Mhmm. And, like, the right people are very self aware and high EQ, you know, emotional intelligence. The wrong people defend and lie and deflect, and you can tell they're doing it.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: And so at first, we hadn't had that coaching from him. And I would hire people based on a resume, and I I would buy into their lives even though my gut was telling me something was a little off. And people are the most critical thing to anything you do. Your family, your friendships, business especially, you need the right people in the right seat with shared values and a shared kind of drive and mission. Yeah.

And if you get that right, it's one of the most beautiful things in the world. You get it wrong, it is excruciatingly painful. It's expensive. It erodes the rest of the team's trust and belief in you. And so I'd hired a few of the wrong people, and then I was scared to fire them because they were older than me or they, you know, were wiser than me.

Speaker: I've been there.

Speaker: Yeah. And, like, that was the first big failure of just, like, I waited too long, wasted a ton of money, and, honestly, upset a lot. Like, ruined the culture, which is such an important part of any business by not having the backbone I needed to have to say this is the wrong

Speaker: fit and find you

Speaker: I hope you find something else, but it's not here.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: That was the first big one. And then, yeah, through that whole journey, I know it sounds like, oh, highlight, real highlight, real highlight. There's so many ups and downs where you wanna quit, you wanna give up, all that personal stuff that happened. Yeah. You know, I've made plenty of wrong decisions that cost us probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in in time as well.

There's so many lessons.

Speaker: Well, I might have to bring it back for part two for just the

Speaker: just for the hiring part.

Speaker: Because I think that is, if you can sniff out the wrong people, you can save yourself off.

Speaker: If you ever wanna talk about it too, like, some of the stories of the things that we've caught as a result of this method is, like Well,

Speaker: what's the craziest thing you found?

Speaker: There was a guy who, on paper, my whole team loved. He, like, was ex, he went to an Ivy League undergrad. I can't remember which one. Was, interning at McKinsey, like, one of the best consulting firms in the world. Great accolades so far.

Everything's amazing. Like, usually these people have the story. And my team loved him from, I think a lot of those reasons he was very good at. And if you think about high performers like that, they're good at winning. And an interview, in many cases, unfortunately, feels like something you need to win versus to me, that's the wrong way to frame it.

Is this the right fit for both? We should walk away and be like, I actually don't think this is just, like, I like you a lot. We wanna hang out then. You're clearly very smart. It's just this is a customer success role and you're like a financial wizard.

What are you I don't see where, like, the, you know, the overlap that you necessarily is. And so, like, he looked good on paper. He had all the right stuff and I think he was good at winning the interview. And then I get to him and I'm doing this whole it's called the a method. There's a book called the who that is based on on this hiring method.

Yeah. Super good. It's like we're digging in and I'm like, alright. You did the all these, you know, why did you go to this college? Was it your first choice?

Or I even asked, like, why did you go to this college? Was it your first choice? So I'm like, oh, I didn't get it. The right people are like, oh, I didn't get into my first choice. Well, why?

You know, I didn't study enough for this. Like, they own it. Mhmm. This guy, like, right answer, right answer, right answer. And we get to the McKinsey experience.

Oh, you interned there. Did you you know, most of those inter those internships are meant to be like a feeder program to then give you an offer at the end. I was like, did did you get an offer at the end? He's like, oh, I you know, I just decided consulting wasn't for me and, you know, after the internship, and I knew I knew I wasn't gonna be a consultant. I was like, well, I didn't ask that question.

I asked, did they give you an offer at the end? Well, no. They didn't give me an offer because they could tell consulting wasn't for me. We had open like, that's a pretty believable answer. Mhmm.

And I was like, I I forget what prodding question I asked. I was like, well, typically, like, you get, like, a, you know, debriefed. Did you have was there something else? Was it really just because you said you didn't wanna do it or was did you have issues there? Like, I kept just poking and poking.

Speaker: You wouldn't let you wouldn't let it go?

Speaker: I wouldn't let it go because I knew something was off a little you just he started to get a little cagey and deflecting. And he eventually looks at me. He's like, I haven't really had to process this at this level ever. He said, as I think about it, I don't think I got an offer because I'm kind of an asshole to work with. And he said that in the interview, and I was like, holy like, Tyler told me that Tyler's the MD from Palantir.

Yeah. He told me, he's like, you're gonna get people to say, like, very wild vulnerable things. Like, things that they haven't even admitted to themselves before if you do this right. Because you'll know you're doing it right if you have people making these, like, really kind of vulnerable self admittances, good or bad. Some are good.

And, like, oh my gosh. I didn't realize that, you know, one of my parents not being in my life made me do these, you know, and, like, they're it's, like, therapeutic for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's been shocking me. One other quick aside, there was a woman who was a controller of a business called Morris Jenkins, which is a massive HVAC business, and we were looking to hire her as a financial resource for us. And so she's managing and exposed to a lot of money. Through the interview, part that she probably skips over usually, but this a method made her feel comfortable enough to be open about it. She tells me that she was in prison for two or three years for stealing money from one of her first employers.

And I'm like, and now you're a controller? Like, you're hire you're, like, we're inter it's like, that's not a bad thing necessarily. She was in her forties. This was twenty, twenty five years ago when this happened. And she, you could tell, learned so much from it.

She was dating this bad influence of a boyfriend who could convince her to, like, basically steal blank checks, and they were cash I don't know. They were doing something with checks. And so she ended up getting a year or two in in prison for it. I think they stole, I don't know, 50, a $100,150,000 dollars. And so she goes to prison, but she totally rebuilt everything she had done since then, the way she talked vulnerably about what she'd learned from it, why she did it, and what she's done since.

She she's a great person and is fantastic at her job. And just because she made one mistake when she was 18 years old, shouldn't, you know, cast a shadow over her the rest of her life. And the A method also identifies that Yeah. And how they learned and how, like, what were the trends and the patterns of behavior through the course of a series of events, not just, you know, one incident.

Speaker: This is the who? This is Jeffrey Smart?

Speaker: Yes. I think it yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Speaker: Yeah. So kudos to you for having the discipline to do it all the way through. Because it's hard for me. I use it So I log in there? It.

I have it there. And I've used it. Like, like, hiring a high level person, I can make it through. But if they're not a high level person, I can't.

Speaker: It's too yeah. I agree. Like, the process is too much. That's where we've had to we've, like, made modifications that effectively accomplish the same thing, but

Speaker: in a condensed version and Yeah. But I'm hiring personally, like, like, frontline.

Speaker: Like, I can't. It's too

Speaker: yeah. It's

Speaker: you have to modify. I've tried. We, what I've found doing tons of these is the early life stuff matters so much. Mhmm. Like, how how they were in high school, what their parents did, what their early mentors did, and then, like, how they behaved in their first job or two.

Like, weirdly, once I get there, I kinda know what's happening from Right. From that point on. And that was that's been shocking to me. That's how we kinda condensed it all. Like, spend a lot of time on high school or college, and people are like, I haven't thought about this in twenty years.

Speaker: I know. It's hard. When they're in their forties, it's like,

Speaker: Then stuff starts to come out and they're like, oh, yeah. This. And I'm and you can, like, you can tell they're a little, like, this is different. Mhmm. There's the amount of times I get feedback at the end of I've never been interviewed like that in my life.

And I'm like, it's it's such a crazy approach.

Speaker: What's also funny is, like, when you hire high level people, they're like, I know these questions. Yeah. I've gotten that. I've had a couple people where I've interviewed. They're like, alright.

Like, I know that, like, I've I've interviewed this way.

Speaker: They get it. Yeah. Yeah. There's some of them for sure. A lot of people are surprised that there aren't behavioral I hate behavioral questions.

They're like, tell me about a time you were on a team and you failed. Because everyone just has their stock answer Mhmm. Ready to go.

Speaker: Oh, yeah. That's the interview prep, program. Yeah.

Speaker: I just I don't like those because you can tell you're getting, like, a canned response, basically, that they've just thought about and kind of perfected and just regurgitated.

Speaker: Practiced it over and over again. Yeah. So, we're wrapping up here. What is a message that you feel all my listeners need to hear? Right?

What should they walk away with? I mean, we've talked about a lot of different things. Mhmm. What's the last same message you wanna leave everyone with?

Speaker: Yeah. I think the last message is life really is super short. And if you've had the idea of going and doing something, it's not gonna get easier throughout life. Whether you're 18 or 30 or 40, I don't think it gets easier to go do that thing that you've really wanted to do. And I would just really challenge people to say progress is better than perfection.

Mhmm. And take the educated risk and the educated gamble and surround yourself with people that have done it so you derisk it further for yourself. But go and do it because the amount of people that I see wait and wait and wait and never do it and are unhappier in their forties, fifties, sixties, and regrets that they have, you're not gonna get to go back and do it again. And so I just I the urgency behind taking that educated risk, I think, is too important to ignore. Yeah.

Speaker: If someone wanted to connect with you, work with you in some capacity, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Speaker: Yeah. So I would say, you know, I I look at Franzi as a there's many types of dessert. Right? There's there's, like, ice cream, there's cake, and franchising is one type of dessert. Once you get there and if you decide, I want ice cream, and let's say Franzi's ice cream, then we can help you figure out which flavor and all that stuff.

But too many people jumped up, which flavor of ice cream am I gonna get? It's like, you need to figure out if you even want ice cream. So Yeah. If you're curious about franchising, like, go to Franzi. It's free.

You can create an account. You can look at all these businesses and data just like you would Zillow. So franzi.com, I would encourage people to check out. And then we have a podcast called The Exit Plan where we tell stories of people that have done it. Check that out.

And then I'm on TikTok, Instagram, all the things, as Alex from Franzy, and then on LinkedIn as my full name, Alex Smirznick.

Speaker: Awesome.

Speaker: All the things.

Speaker: Thank so much. That

Speaker: was awesome. Thank you. Awesome. Great conversation.

Speaker: Appreciate you guys for watching. We'll see you guys next time. Steve train. Jump on the Steve train. Disrupt us.