Transcript of The Underrated Business Model That Creates More Millionaires Than the NFL | Entrepreneurship | How We Profit | E3 | Part 1 New

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It's not Apple, it's not Google, it's not Nvidia. McDonald's has minted more millionaires than the entire history of NFL players combined.

Wow.

So there's been about 50-plus thousand millionaires created from the franchise business model.

Today's guest is Alex Miersnak. He's the co-founder and CEO of Franzi, a marketplace platform that helps people find and buy franchise businesses.

There is no better time than now to start investing in ownership, whether that's real estate or a business, whether it's franchise or not. AI is gonna displace 30-ish% of white collar jobs in the next 5 to 10 years, and this is the time to make yourself not replaceable.

I'm sure so many listeners They think they need to have a sexy business that they feel passionate about. What do you say to that?

My last company was a laundry business. I'm not gonna sit here and lie to you and say I was passionate about laundry. I think people listening, it's, you'll develop that passion. The more you put reps in, the more you get out of it, the more you put into it.

I bootstrapped my company, but I have friends that are VC-backed and a lot of them that are in industries that aren't AI are really struggling now to raise money. So what advice do you have for them in terms of like things to focus on?

If you are gonna raise money, this idea of seedstrapping, this hybrid of bootstrapping plus raising small chunks of cash, like we're actually doing that for Franzi. We raised a million bucks initially and then two and a half. We're about to close another $2 million round now. So it's these like micro rounds.

Yeah, nothing too crazy.

You're still getting good valuation increases each time. So that's one piece of advice. The second is—

Alex, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. I know it's a quick in and out, but I love the, the state of Texas and the, the city of Austin. So thanks for having me. I'm so glad that you're able to, fly out here and tell your story.

So you're joining us on one of the first episodes of the How We Profit series, which is a new series that really just like unpacks how businesses make money. And for you, you've got your own business, but then you also help people buy franchises. And so this is gonna be a two-part episode where we really go into your different businesses that you've started, how they've worked, how you've made money off of them, how you raised money, like all the things. Yeah. And then we'll go into franchise case studies and talk about different franchises that we can buy and what are the opportunities and the pitfalls that we need to be aware of.

Perfect. Yeah, there's, there's thousands of concepts out there and we've got all of 'em at our disposal, at our fingertips. So happy to break any number of businesses down.

So Alex is actually the CEO and founder of a company called Franzi, which is known as the Zillow of franchising. So tell us, what does that mean?

I guess the long story short, we built our own franchisor previously. It was a laundromat concept called Laundry Lab. There's actually locations here in Austin and, you know, all over the country now. And through that process, we realized how people buy businesses is kind of broken. It's not super transparent. There's a lot of fake listings on platforms like BizBuySell. And similar to what Zillow did to us looking at houses, whether it's a vacation home or a first home or you're moving, They democratized our access to all the housing data. We can now go to Zillow and say, hey, I'm looking here, what, here's my price point, number of rooms. So we've done the same with buying franchise businesses specifically. So Hala can be like, I'm in Austin, I've got $200K to invest, $100K to invest. Here's what I'm good at. Here's what I'm not good at. All these parameters. And then our AI matching algorithm starts to pair you with concepts and you can kind of like, thumbs down, talk to advisors and coaches for free one-on-one about. would this be a good fit for you? Can you afford it? Is there availability, you know, in your market?

So similar to what Zillow's done for retail, we've done for business buying.

Really cool. And I can't wait to go super deep on like how to actually find your fit. I know you've got 5 different steps and like you mentioned, you've got an AI tool in your platform that helps you and everything. So that's super cool. Who are the main players involved in Franzi?

So it's a marketplace setup for sure. And the hardest part about marketplaces is this thing called the cold start problem. If you don't have supply or things to look at and buy, demand and buyers don't want to come. And if you don't have buyers, supply doesn't really want to spend the time or the money to be listed. And so what we did is we pulled thousands of what are called FDDs, franchise disclosure documents, to create listings of the 4,000 franchise brands that are out there. So now we have supply. Yeah. And then demand side is just prospective franchisees, whether it's the corporate escapee who wants to go be their own boss and do their own thing. And they're looking for the first time all the way up to— we have guys that have 100+ locations already and they're looking for the, you know, 110th to buy a chicken concept they want to add to their portfolio, a fitness concept they want to add to their portfolio. So if you're looking for a business, whether it's the first or 100th time, Franzi has those listings and those opportunities.

Got it. So you actually didn't need to like do contracts with all the brands. You just have the information available and tell them like the steps they need to take to apply and— basically vet the opportunities. That's what you're doing.

Yep. So we'll pull all that data in, in that document. It's called an FDD, franchise disclosure document. They are required by law to have this document, has audited financials in it, how many locations are open and closed. But it's a 200-page legal document and it's as exciting as it sounds to read. So we've cleaned it up, made it sexier to look at pictures and who's the executive team and who are they and how much money can I make if I do this? What would it cost me to get into? So we've cleaned all that up and then we layer third-party data in. So testimonials from existing franchisees. So you get validation, how you would finance this lending information. And so it's all in one, you know, stop shop for you to figure out what you could be good at, what could be a good fit, how you'd buy it, how you'd finance it, etc. From all these different data sources.

Why do you think this is such a great opportunity right now with so many layoffs happening and AI, you know, potentially taking over people's jobs? Why do you think that this is a really great opportunity for people?

Yeah, so I think we've entered what I'm calling the bet on yourself economy. There is no better time than now to start investing in ownership, whether that's real estate or a business, whether it's franchise or not. I think AI is going to displace 30-ish percent of white collar jobs in the next 5 to 10 years, and this is the time to make yourself not replaceable.

Mm.

And so I, I think the timing couldn't be better for people to go out and take that bet, and franchising is just —of many paths that you can take to do that, but I think it's a de-risked path. It's 8% of our country's GDP, and franchising has a, about an 80% success rate over a 5-year period compared to a 50% success rate for independent businesses. So you're stacking the deck a little bit. You're getting a proven playbook, and then you're surrounded by a peer of other franchisees and a franchisor support system.

I heard a quote from you that you've been saying quite often, how Uh, franchising has made more millionaires than NFL players combined or something like that. What's the quote?

Yeah, so it's franchising has minted more millionaires than the entire history of NFL players combined. So there's been about 50,000+ millionaires created from the franchise business model versus about 23,000 millionaires made be playing football in the NFL. And so to me, I share that 'cause it's, the NFL seems like this highly unobtainable thing for the average— I mean, most people.

Yeah.

But here comes franchising that's minted more wealthy, successful people financially than this very unobtainable, hard, you know, thing to do. And so it puts into perspective that any— just about anyone can go do it. You don't have to have a ton of money. You can borrow SBA. That's what's great about America and the country we're in is there's all these programs to finance people that want to be entrepreneurial. It's the backbone of our country and what we do. And so I like this path to be as accessible. And that's what our mission at Franzi is, to make it more attainable for the average person.

Yeah.

The other thing that's wild that I read the other week is The Economist had an article. It was just like last Tuesday, and the title was Franchising Has Quietly Created More Wealth Than Anything Else in America or something like that.

Wow.

And so The Economist, everyone's always sending me this article and they're like, hey, you kind of said this thing.

Yeah.

And I was like, yeah, see, I told you The Economist is on it now., but they had a line in that article that said it's highly plausible that McDonald's has minted more millionaires than any other company in the history of mankind.

Wow.

And I was like, I had to read it twice. So if you think about that, it's not Apple, it's not Google, it's not Nvidia. McDonald's has minted more millionaires than any other, any other company.

I think that's a lesson in itself that it doesn't have to be sexy, right? Like it doesn't have to be a sexy business. I'm sure so many listeners listening in wanna be millionaires, they're not millionaires yet, and they think that they need to have a sexy business that they feel passionate about and that they need to have passion to start a business and to really love what they do. What do you say to that?

I think passion can be discovered and like built. It doesn't have to be this thing that's innate or you're just born with or like, oh, I loved music growing up, so that's my passion, so I should go do something in music. Sure, that's one way, but my last company was a laundry business. I'm not gonna sit here and lie to you and say I was passionate about laundry and I, you know, I had, I had some traumatic story as a kid that made me want to go do this. No, I mean, there was, there was nothing like that. It was really, for me, the pace at which I was learning things was way faster than when I was in corporate. I used to work for Ernst Young.

Mm-hmm.

The, the learning was way faster. The challenge was more exciting. I was a million times more fulfilled. And that's what it was for me. It could have been laundry, it could have been this widget, it could have been food, it could have been tech. I mean, it didn't really matter. Sure, there's some things I just don't want to do because it's boring to me personally or whatever it may be. But I think people listening, it's— you'll develop that passion. The more you put reps in, the more you get out of it, the more you put into it. Just find something that I think overlaps with your skill set. I think that part is important.

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/profiting. Go to shopify.com/profiting. That's shopify.com/profiting. What are the differences from somebody who wants to start a company from scratch versus somebody who wants to start a franchise? I know obviously there's marketing support, there's more of a proven recipe, but like what are their like qualities do people need for franchising or don't need? That people don't often think about?

Yeah, that's a great question. So one thing I saw in a Gallup poll was it was like 67, 68% of Americans have expressed a strong desire to be entrepreneurial or be a business owner.

Mm-hmm.

But the reality is only 5% actually ever go do it. So I start to question like, why is there this huge desire but people aren't actually doing it? And I think it ties into the question you just asked, and that's a lot of people think they need to have this completely original idea. They have to be the next Facebook, the next Uber. And the reality is those are called unicorns for a reason. It's 'cause they're mythical creatures and they rarely ever happen. But for the vast majority, you can go do very well owning an unsexy business or the local sign shop or the local cleaning franchise or the restaurant. I mean, there's so many things you can do. It doesn't have to be this original idea. And franchising has carved this path that I think gets overlooked often where there's a proven playbook. Mm-hmm. There's all this training, there's supply chain support, branding and marketing support. I mean, all these things that you get, you're starting on square 3 instead of square 1 within a franchise system. And for the vast majority of people, that's what they need and that's what they want. They don't want to have to do it all from zero or alone or with this original idea.

And so to answer your question, I think as a franchisee, you have to be willing to work hard for sure, but you don't need to have the— complete raw creativity to go from zero to something. You can start 30, you know, 30, you know, 3 steps ahead. For those listening that are hyper-entrepreneurial—

Yeah.

Who do need to do that and don't like to be at all told what to do, franchising wouldn't be for them because there is a system you have to follow and it works. Like if you are good at doing the work and still being creative, but also following a playbook, franchising's perfect.

Yeah, so if you're creative and like to put out offers and change things, you can't really have a franchise, right?

Some you can. So I, the way I describe franchising is like a buffet and there's these extreme ends. On one end you have Chick-fil-A where you're buying a job. It's a very profitable job. I think the average Chick-fil-A franchisee makes $600,000 to $700,000 a year for one location, but they're only allowed to own one. Very rarely does Chick-fil-A allow you to do two. And you have to be in there 30, 40 hours a week as the owner. You can't just hire a manager and go to the beach. Eventually you get more, you know, freedom and flexibility. But Chick-fil-A on the extreme end is you're buying a high-paying job. On the low end, you've got these emerging brands in franchising where, you know, Hala and Alex just started a fitness studio in Austin. We got a cult-like following. We wanna start franchising, but we maybe, maybe only have 2 or 3 locations open. They're taking a huge bet on us. We're taking a big bet on those people, but we don't have all the systems perfected and laid out. And so our first franchisees, are very much gonna be building those systems with us, being more entrepreneurial, having more of a say.

And so on that end of the spectrum, there's more risk, but there's more territory upside.

Yeah.

You probably get in for a cheaper price, maybe a break on royalties, and you get to be more entrepreneurial and have a say in what's going on. And then there's everything in between. There really is this massive spectrum of, you know, where are you on the risk scale? Where are you on the financial capability scale? Where are you on what you're good at and your skillset, you know, and your background? And then our job is to help you figure out where do those things all align.

You know, something that was so interesting to me when I was looking up these franchises, like I've been accumulating wealth, so I'm thinking about like, I want to buy some commercial real estate, I want to buy just real estate in general. And then when I was like learning about this, I was like, well, maybe I'll just buy a franchise. But then I was reading that it's really not very passive. Like there's really very few passive opportunities. Tell us why. I mean, when I think about franchising, sometimes I think like, oh, you just buy a place, you get a manager, and then it just runs. You got a playbook, right?

So that's one of the biggest misconceptions in franchising is a lot of people think it's like buying a stock in the stock market or, you know, it's mailbox money. It is not. It is, it is, you are running a business just like you and I are running our own businesses. It is a full-time job and then some, you know. Eventually it can become passive. The first year or two is not, I think just like any other business you're starting up, even though you're starting on square 3, you still gotta get to square 7, 8, 9, or 10. Mm-hmm. Um, and by the time you get there, you absolutely can become passive. I know a lot of franchisees who started with 1, they're now up to 10, 15. One guy I know started 7 years ago, he's up to 120 locations now. Wow. And so as you can imagine, his org, he's got thousands of employees. And so there's a second line of defense, a third line of defense, a fourth line of defense, and he can go to the beach and travel here and do whatever he wants whenever he wants., but it took him 7 years to get there and then it's passive.

So it can get there. The answer to those upfront, none of it's really passive. And if you have a broker telling you or some sort of, you know, franchise coach, et cetera, telling you, oh, it's semi-absentee, or it's— Mm-hmm. That is a very big red flag. There are some passive concepts, but very, very, very few. Almost all of them are gonna take some level of work. And if you're well capitalized, sure, you can maybe get out of the day-to-day faster 'cause you can afford to hire a GM sooner and burn some cash essentially. But for the most part, you're gonna have to roll up your sleeves and get after it.

Do you think it's doable? Like sometimes for me, I'm crazy 'cause I always like to start businesses and stuff. So like I wanna start like my own Pilates studio, my own spa. But then I was like, oh, well maybe I can do a franchise Pilates studio. As like a side hustle, but you, you think you need like full background.

I think if you brought, like, depending on the, how you financed it, you could hire a GM and an operating partner and say, hey, me and my, one of my partners on a separate venture are doing this in Minnesota with a, a bagel concept. Neither one of us, you know, can be day to day 40, 50 hours a week necessarily. So we're bringing on an operating partner who we'll give equity to, who wouldn't have had the capital otherwise to, to own these locations. So this is, a once in a lifetime, you know, opportunity for them. But they will take that day-to-day load off of my partner and I so that we can be more passive. Got it. So you could do that because you could say, hey, I'm gonna find someone, I have enough capital to, you know, finance all these locations. Yeah. And then put them in place.

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Okay, so let's talk about your story for a little bit. I wanna, I wanna go backwards, because you've been working for a long time. You've been an entrepreneur for a really long time, and you have a really cute story about entrepreneurship in college. So why don't you tell us about your first experience with laundry again and how you, you know, started that business. And actually it was a really cool way of how you acquired that business through seller financing. So I'm really interested in that as well.

Yeah, so I, I'm from Minnesota. I ended up going to school in North Carolina, which is where I live now. I went to Wake Forest, studied finance, was gonna go do the investment banking thing in New York. And then my freshman year I worked for this student-run, it started out as a student, like, project, a classroom project. And I worked for this group that did laundry and dry cleaning delivery. And I fell in love with it. Not again, the laundry piece, but I was like, you guys are learning a ton. You're making money. You guys are like 21 years old and you're doing all this. This is so cool. Are you going to sell it when you graduate? And they're like, yeah, this was just kind of like a resume builder for us. I was like, I want to buy it. What are you going to sell it for? And they're like $30-some thousand. My jaw hit the floor.

You're like, how are we going to afford this?

This is the most money I've ever heard of. Because at the time, like, I had, I don't know, maybe $1,000 or $2,000. I'm 18 years old. And I was like, I'll figure it out. I have like 1 or 2 grand saved up. Like, you're not even close. And then I found 2 partners. We got to 9 or 10K. So like, shit, we're still short. And so then we started knocking on doors at the business school. We're like, maybe these finance professors can help us. And we weren't even in the business school yet. And thankfully, these professors were so giving with their time and wanted to help us. And they're like, well, have you thought about seller financing? Have you run a discounted cash flow analysis yet to see if this is even the value? I'm like, what?

I don't know what you're talking about. You'll learn about this in 2 years.

I was like, no, we need to learn now 'cause we're gonna do this. So we ended up figuring out the true value of the business and then we said, oh, we could do seller financing where we give them a percentage of the revenue that we generate over the course of the 2 or 3 years that we'll run it. 'Cause then we'll probably sell it when we graduate just like they did. And we want the next group of students to have the same experience we had. And so that's exactly what we did. We went to them and said, hey, we can give you this, you know, 10, 11 grand in cash and then can we give you another, you know, 20% of revenue over the next few years? And you know, we did some math together and they're like, Yeah, this is pretty interesting. Of course, we knocked it out of the park.

Oh, great.

So we, you know, took the business from $40,000, $50,000 school year in revenue to like $220,000. So they got a great deal with the seller financing.

That's amazing.

We were like, crap, maybe we should have figured something else out. Yeah, capped it or something. But hey, lesson learned. And it opened my eyes though to just, there's a whole other path. I think we're all so conditioned to, get good grades in middle school to then get good grades in high school so that you can get into a good college where you get good grades again and then go work for a Fortune 500 company and do that for 40 years and then die. You know, it's like, there's gotta be more to life than this. And that little laundry thing in college completely changed the trajectory of my life.

One thing led to another after that experience. So you had a lot of learning lessons from that. You were able to like really maximize the amount of revenue that you guys got from it. So what were some of the key lessons in terms of like customer acquisition that you learned?

Yes. So we were on campus, we were the exclusive provider. I think Wake loved it 'cause it was a story for them too. Look what our students are doing.

And it's called like Wake Wash or something. Yeah. So you branded it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the school would write about it in their magazines. Like, look, 3 Wake students are running this business for Wake students. And, um, that, was like our primary source of distribution. They gave us a booth at freshman orientation, and most of our customers were freshmen because they're going off away from home for the first time. The parents, especially the moms, were like, "Little Timmy and Susan, they can't do their laundry on their own." So we'd have this booth that I don't know in hindsight why they gave us such prime real estate, but it was get your meal plan, get your parking pass.

That's amazing.

Here's the Wake Wash booth, which laundry was included in room and board. So it's not like they needed to do this.. And so they're, the parents are coming down, signing up for all these things, checkbooks out. And then I was there like the ShamWow guy, like, step right up, it's the premier laundry service on campus. And the parents, they're laughing cuz they, there's like, you guys are ridiculous. And they would shell out, you know, there was a subscription model, so they'd pay $800 for the whole school year, $500 for I think a semester. And then there was weekly and biweekly options that, you know, increased or decreased the price. And in that, one or 2-week window, we did $160K in revenue. And I just remember being like, oh my gosh, this is—

Yeah.

So much fun. Like every business is this easy, which made me, I had false expectations on everything I've done since. 'Cause I was like, oh yeah, every business should do $150K in its first week of, you know, being open.

Yeah.

Not the case. But so learned a lot about distribution and partnerships for sure. The university partnership completely changed it for us. Learned a lot about operations, learned a lot about customer service. You know, laundry is very personal. Things are going to go wrong. How do you handle it? And then learned a lot about picking the right partners too. Like we had 4 partners at first and we kind of did it out of convenience. Like we were all friends. And you hear that cliché like, don't get into business with friends and family. Yeah. And I actually disagree with that. But I do think you can't make the mistake that I did early on, which was don't do it just because they're friends and family. But if they are friends and family that have complementary skill sets to you, then it's like the best thing ever. You have this deep trust for each other. You can have hard conversations with each other. Yes, there's high emotions, but if you're good at ops and I'm good at marketing and we already have that relationship, it's so powerful. It is the best thing ever.

Nothing's better than working with your best friends.

It's so much fun.

You started your company, all your companies with your best friend from like 6th grade or something, right?

Yes. So the college one was fraternity brothers. But then when we sold that, when we graduated, I went and did corporate for— I made it a year and a half before I was like, I got to go do this crazy entrepreneur stuff again. But start up another laundry business when you saw all the Uber for X things popping up. So Instacart, Shipt, Wag, Rover, Uber Eats, DoorDash. Like someone's going to do this for laundry and dry cleaning. And so I'd called up Dan DiQuisto. He's been my best friend since 6th grade, but not because he was my best friend. He was at startups in Minneapolis, so he understood the grind and the culture and how hard it is and the work-life balance not being super, you know, balanced.

Yeah.

But he also was really good at marketing and sales. And my background was at the time especially was just way more numbers, finance, operations. I was like, I need someone like you and you need someone like me. And we love each other. We care about each other. We trust each other. We have shared values. We should do this. And we're 22, 23. And he quits his job. He breaks up with his girlfriend at the time, who's now his wife. So it all worked out.

Oh, good.

Breaks the lease on his apartment and packs the car and drives straight. He did it straight. Didn't even stop down to Charlotte. And we're like, let's just figure this out. We had no idea what it was gonna look like, but it ended up being the most fun, stressful, challenging, fulfilling thing, you know, we've ever done.

And that was your first franchise. So you took your experience from laundry from college and you're like, I wanna make this a franchise. Why did you, did you set out to make it a franchise initially?

I got excited about what Uber was doing to this like sleepy, like, oh, taxis have always been around, let's go make them better. And And in the same vein, do good for society. We're reducing drunk driving and all this other, you know, all this, you know, negative stuff that Uber was tackling. And how they went about it is questionable, and they could have probably done some things better. But I saw just the impact you could have by building a huge national venture-scale business, and I'd always wanted to do that. And so I thought laundry is something that everyone does. It's the most hated household chore in the country. What if we like Uber, you know, Uberized laundry. And so it started out as a marketplace business again, where we would pair existing laundromats and dry cleaners with those that wanted their laundry and dry cleaning picked up from their door, done for them, return the next day. Kind of like what we did in college.

Yeah.

And it worked really well in Charlotte. We thought it'd be busy professionals, which, which it was some of, but very quickly we learned just 'cause we're not our ideal customer profile doesn't mean someone else isn't gonna present themselves as the perfect customer for this business. Mm-hmm. And for us, that was mom. It was mostly women making the purchasing decision, ages, you know, late 30s to early 50s. And they would— we'd get calls, some moms audibly crying on the phone. You have no idea. This is the bane of my existence. I come home from work, there's a pile sitting there. I do one load, and by the time I'm done with one, there's a whole other mountain again. It's just constantly stressing me out. And we're like, we got you. We can do your laundry for you. Yeah. And so we, the goal was to build this national brand where we paired, you know, existing, you know, demand with existing supply. And boy, were we wrong. We were so wrong. The issue that we had was, you know, compared to an Uber Eats or a food delivery businesses, all these restaurants are already making meals. Delivery is just enabling them to do more for people that aren't gonna step foot in the restaurant.

So we thought, oh, that should work for dry cleaning and laundry. It did work for dry cleaning because they have these big plants that do the volume for the drop stores already. And so they just said, yeah, bring us more volume, we'll do it. Great. On the laundry piece, what we would do in our washers and dryers at home, there had never been a need for mass volume individualized laundry before. And so we would go to these mom-and-pop laundromat owners and say, hey, we'll double or triple your revenue, but we need you to do all this volume. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll figure it out.

And they couldn't handle it.

They couldn't, because if you think about a laundromat, it's a passive self-service business that people come into, put quarters into the machine, The owner doesn't have any employees most of the time, and if they do, it's maybe 1, maybe 2. We now needed them to have 15 employees per location to be good at operations, tracking errors, you know, fixing quality issues. They are not good at that. They're landlords essentially. And so we ran into the issue of messing people's stuff up, mixing your clothes with mine. We're like, if this is what it's like with 5 locations, what's it going to be like with 500 or 5,000? Oh no. This doesn't scale. Yeah. And so then we started going overnight into existing people's laundromats. So we were in our mid-20s at 3 in the morning at these kind of sketchy laundromats producing all of this delivery volume. And that perfected our process. We built technology around it, and then it became, we can't be doing this in other people's hole-in-the-wall laundromats.

Especially for like quality, right?

Right.

And just standardization of everything.

And just the quality of, you know, life for our employees. Like they're working in these tight spaces and, you know, they're, storing things in this, you know, shed in the back of the laundromat. It was just like, this isn't, this isn't gonna scale either. Even though the process now scales and the tech scales, the infrastructure doesn't now. So now what do we do? So we partnered with Electrolux. They're one of the largest appliance manufacturers in the world. They own brands like Frigidaire and others. And their North American headquarters happened to be in Charlotte. So talk about right place, right time.

Right, yeah, that's lucky.

Stars aligning. And so we had approached them and they said, yeah, we've been tracking you. We love the business and what you're doing. And we showed them our numbers and like, you should just open your own store. You're going to be more than profitable day one. We'll finance it. Because the issue we had was we didn't want to use venture capital to buy washers and dryers.

Okay.

Terrible use of capital. And we weren't bankable yet because we were two 25-year-olds in a business that was kind of mostly losing money or breaking even. So we weren't bankable. And so Electrolux said, we'll be the bank. We'll finance the whole first location. We believe in you guys. You already have enough revenue to make it work. And we bought an old McDonald's. It was the first building we bought, 6,500 square feet. I'm negotiating with McDonald's corporate at 25 years old. And McDonald's is like— I love that. One of the largest real estate companies in the world. And of course, we had mentors in my ear being like, say this, change this clause. And McDonald's is like, what? How did you— what? But it was such a fun, like, cool first experience. But then we built this hybrid facility that is open to the public for walk-in laundry 7 days a week, but Monday through Friday, most people aren't doing laundry at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday. They're working. And so that's when we would shut down half of the store and do all of our delivery volume, um, for the, the more kind of affluent, higher income customer.

And so now you have two customer bases being cleaned out of the same asset base and same infrastructure, and it really worked.

Mm-hmm.

And that's where the question of How do we open 100 of these? Came, you know, and popped up.

So that's the one that turned into a franchise.

Yes.

So it was the Laundrolab. Yeah. Is that how you say it? So then what did you do with the other business? You just shut it down?

So the idea was the whole thing is working in unison. It's kind of like we've, we've built, you know, McDonald's infrastructure plus the delivery engine like DoorDash or Uber Eats.

Yep.

We've done the same with the laundromat and the delivery mechanism we've built and all the process and tech. So like, we need more physical locations now. How do we do this? It's going to be, you know, $100 million to go at the speed and pace we want to go. Or what if we franchise the brick and mortar and then layer the delivery piece on top?

Got it.

Just like Uber Eats. But now this time around, instead of having legacy owners and small 1,000 to 2,000 square foot spaces, we get to hand-select the franchisee. They know upfront the intention is for us to do delivery as well as just walk-in. So everyone's on the same page that they're gonna have to be operators, not landlords. And we get to have control over the size of the store, the equipment mix, the layout, all the stuff that we need. But we get to partner with others now who can bring their capital in and allow us to build many more locations faster.

Cool. So Laundrolab is the franchise portion.

Yes.

ToYou Laundry is the—

Delivery.

That delivers. Yeah. And you, you were the CEO of that app.

Yep.

And that app just like funnels to different Laundrolabs basically to do the deliveries. Correct. Really interesting. Now let's talk about raising money for an unsexy business.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, that was like early on. It was, it was kind of sexy, like, oh, delivery app, because there was a delivery app for everything.

Yeah, delivery apps were hot.

Like dog walking, flower delivery. There was like on-demand massage, Zeel, I think it was the name of it. They'd come to like a corporate office building and do massages that were— I was like, wow, this is wild. Everything was getting Uberized. And so that space was kind of hot for a little bit. And so we rode a little bit of that wave, but I think we missed it by a year or two as well. And so then when we started vertically integrating and building physical stores, it was a little tricky to raise capital 'cause it's like, what are you? Are you a franchise retail thing? Are you a tech delivery thing? And we're like, we're kind of both. They, the ecosystem fits in. And so we'd have to have different conversations with different types of investors to really get them there. And eventually when we started franchising, you know, we had just raised $6 million right before COVID had happened. And that was to go, we're gonna do a corporate, own at that point. We're like, let's just go and see how far we can go with just corporate locations. COVID happens. Our board is like, we should shut things down or shut markets down that we just launched because they're not going to be profitable for a year.

And the foresight that they had, it was January of, I guess, what would that have been, 2020. They're like, whatever is happening in Asia is going to happen here eventually. Like, we're going to have stay-at-home orders. There's going to be no weddings and all these things. And I remember the guy on our board saying this and I was like, I was like, it makes so much sense, but the rest of society is just pretending like, ah, it's over there. We're gonna be fine. Like no one responded. And sure enough, come April is when the NBA went to the bubble and all that. That's when we as a society started responding. But we were talking about this in January. I was like, it took 3 or 4 months for like our government and the rest of the— but anyway, a lot of learning at that moment.

Yeah.

So we shut down the nonprofitable parts and that's when we really developed the franchise concept. We ended up selling 118 locations in 12 months. People wanted laundromats. They're sexy, boring businesses. And off of that, we ended up raising about a $20 million Series B, and that became more private equity. And hey, you guys have a trajectory here. You have a pipeline of stores to open, plus you have this interesting venture tech piece on top. And yeah, we like the whole, whole thing combined. But it was not easy. I mean, many rounds of capital where We had 2 weeks left of cash before we weren't gonna, you know, be able to make payroll or, or, you know, entirely run outta money. And it's a rollercoaster.

Yeah, it is. I bootstrapped my company, but I have friends that are VC-backed and a lot of them that are in industries that aren't AI at this point are really struggling now to raise money. So what advice do you, do you have for them in terms of like things to focus on instead of the industry that they're in?

Yeah, so I think if it's not a non-AI thing that you're building, I would try to bootstrap as much as you can now. And it's easy to say that, hard to do that, but it's easier to actually execute that today than it's ever been. Our software team that's, you know, building what we're building today is a fifth to maybe even a tenth of the size of what it would have needed to be 3 to 5 years ago. So you can just do so much more with so much less with all these different AI tools. Um, so I would encourage people to like really get creative and scrappy on like, what do you actually need to build? And can you do it with Claude Code and with these off-the-shelf tools? And how far can you get? Uh, and maybe hire one engineer that can use these tools instead of 3 or 4 or 5, which requires you to raise money and get on that treadmill. Um, so that's one piece of advice. The second is if you are gonna raise money, this idea of seedstrapping is, is like this hybrid of bootstrapping plus. Yeah. Raising small chunks of cash.

Like, we're actually doing that for Franzi. We raised $1 million initially and then $2.5 million. We're about to close another $2 million round now. So it's these like micro rounds. Yeah, nothing too crazy. You're still getting good valuation increases each time, but we're not going to raise the $20 million round and now you have to spend it and the expectation is to grow.

3x.

Yeah. So that's the advice too, is like be super thoughtful about the cap table and how you raise money and who you raise it from and like even more deliberate and intentional than you would've had to be historically.

Yeah. So you started Franzi, you decided to also step down as CEO, and tell me the real reason why. Was it because you wanted to start something different and do something more exciting, or was it because you felt like you weren't the right person to scale Landro Labs?

It was a combination of things for sure. So in 2022, and I'm an open book about everything. Yeah. Um, so in 2022 we'd raised the $20 million. Um, and then in early '23, uh, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. He's good. He's cancer-free now.

Oh, great.

Uh, he has to track it, you know, every couple months and go get tested. But they live in Minnesota. They had me when they were older. I have two older brothers. So my dad's 74, I'm 34, and I had already been thinking about, all right, I go home 2, maybe 3 times a year. He's 74. Average life expectancy is 85.

Yeah.

So 10 times 2 or 3 is like, I got 20 to 30 more times to see my dad.

I think it's the same. I think about that all the time.

All the time. And I read this article right before he got diagnosed with cancer and it had you enter your age, their age, how far apart you lived.

How many times see him?

It spit out baseballs for some reason. Like baseball's the infographic and mine had like, oh, 24 baseballs. And I was like, what? Like, this can't be right. I was like, so then I made a very intentional effort. I was like, I'm gonna double that or triple that. I'm gonna go home more. I'm gonna have them come down more. And then he got sick, so that really weighed on me. My wife found out that she was not a US citizen after believing she was one her whole life. And so that created—

Oh my gosh.

That created a wrinkle and, you know, it was a really challenging thing. My COO had a heart attack and passed away unfortunately. And I ruptured my Achilles all within a 3 to 4 month window.

Geez.

And so I tried to hang on. I was like, I've been through hard stuff. You can do hard things. You can, I was like trying to be tough. Yeah. And I just found myself eventually for no reason crying, like almost— well, I guess for reasons. Yeah. But every day, like, I could drop a pencil and that would, like, set me off. I just like, I give up. I can't do this. Like, the pencil just fell. Like, every— I was like, all right, I think I'm depressed or something.

Yeah, something's different.

So I went to our board. I just said, look, this is a competitive sport. We're at the height of opening stores and everything going on. Just, you know, the worst time to have someone with as much personal stuff happening, going on as I have, trying to lead this thing. I was like, I tried the last 6 months, but I am clearly not in the right headspace to do this. Yeah. And they're like, why didn't you say— like, their response was, why didn't you say anything sooner? You're 100% right. Like, you're human. You need to take time. You need to take a break regardless of what's happening in the company. And so the lesson for me there was like, if things are getting tough, talk to your partners, talk to your board. They're not going to punish you. They're there to help. And so I went and took a 3 or 4 month sabbatical and did a lot of thinking during that time and just realized the business is drastically different than what it was when I started. I thought this was Uber for X, a tech company.

Yeah.

And now it's one with trucks and washers and dryers and physical laundromats. And I don't think I'm the guy, and I don't know if I want to be the guy that takes us from 30 physical laundromats to 300 or, you know, 1,000. And we should go hire a CEO that has some level of retail experience and understands logistically intensive businesses because that's what this has become. So we did a CEO search, we found him, he's great. And it allowed me, you know, part of the answer is also, yeah, I've had this idea for Franzi and it was sitting there, but it gave me the space to go think about that and like, what am I going to do next? What did I like about the business we had built? What did I not like? And can I go find or come up with the next thing that has those characteristics of things that I'm good at, not, you know, and not the things that I'm not good at.

Yeah. So you came up with Franzi. What were the first steps that you took to validate the idea?

Yeah, so I had been thinking about it for years and I joke with people that starting a business is almost like getting a tattoo. And hear me out, this will make sense in a second. My brother gave me this advice. I only have like one or two. And he was like, think about the idea of what you would get and then wait a year. And if in a year you still want to go do it, you must really care about this tattoo and think it's so important and whatever else. So then do it, but don't do it on an impulse. Don't do it that week, that month, whatever. Wait a year. And I think starting a business is similar. I think you might have this idea because you had a hard day at work or you saw some problem, but it might actually be that someone else is doing it or that you were just upset that day about that thing and it wasn't actually that big of a deal a week later. So I tell people, give it 6 to 12 months. And if you're still thinking about it, then go and start it.

Take the leap. I felt that way about Franzi. I'd been thinking about it for years and I kept seeing the pain point over and over. I kept seeing all the misalignment, people buying businesses they shouldn't have been. And so to validate it initially, we just went and talked to a bunch of brands and said like, hey, we're thinking about doing it this way. Instead of a 60% commission, it'll be a flat rate. It'll be this open marketplace. What do you think? And the brands all loved it because it didn't cost me anything. I'm not paying per lead. I hate paying per lead. 'cause it's $40, you know, lead and I have to sift through 400 of them. So I'm now, you know, all this money in and time now to sift through mediocre to crappy leads just to find one deal. So like, I like that. So brands loved it. The big question mark was would prospective franchisees find value in this? And the proxy for us was they're all using brokers. So like we still provide that level of service. So—

Yeah.

We know they're gonna value that. They want access to data, which they don't have really. There's all these Google searches, there's data that shows that, that, that exists. So they clearly want stuff that isn't really there. And more and more, I think just in society, people want self-serve options. Like, think about Zillow. Like, we like to go—

Yep. It's like a pastime.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, people just do it for fun. They're not even looking.

Yeah, a person goes like once a week to Zillow. It was something like that. I can't— don't hold me to that. But I remember reading that and being like, really? They're just like online shopping, dreaming about houses and stuff.

I have friends that they just like look up an address on Zillow because they're curious of what it's sold for and—

All the time. And so our thought was like, if that's true for houses and cars and Why not businesses? So we went and did like a very light version of the site. We pulled some data in and we just, we put it out in the Charlotte market. We did some LinkedIn posts and people started going. We started getting a couple thousand a month in traffic, 10,000 a month. We were up to 60, 70,000 unique visitors a month now and helping—

That's awesome.

Helping a lot of people become entrepreneurs either for the first time or the 20th time. You know, they're buying their 20th thing.

Talk to me about how much it took to start Francie? How much money did it take? You mentioned that you didn't have such a big development team. You started it in 2025?

No, we started working on it late summer of '24.

Okay, so like AI was like just coming out. Like, I don't know how much was out there with AI. So how much money did you end up spending to like build this platform?

So I remember, and the first thing was like find a good co-founder. Again, I don't wanna do anything on my own.

Mm-hmm.

For a number of reasons. It's way more fun to me to do it with someone else.

Yeah.

And that complimentary skill set, I think just speeds everything up.

So found my co-founder quicker than I thought.

In my head, I was like, I'm going to give myself, you know, 6 months. I just left this business that I built and I'm going to take some time off.

Yeah.

And sure enough, the stars aligned. There's a guy I've known forever in Charlotte, very complimentary to me, and he was transitioning too. So I was like, all right, maybe we do this 6 months sooner than I thought. So found him and we were like, we're each just going to put like $20K into this. And honestly, that will probably get us far enough to get an MVP built. There were a lot of AI Okay.

Okay.

Not as sophisticated, as good as they are now, but still pretty good. And so we used some of those tools plus offshore developers at first. Like, let's just get a basic thing out to see. So we were only in like $20 or $30 grand to get our MVP out. And then we started getting enough traction. They were like, let's raise money. Because I had talked to a few of our old investors and two of them were like, we love the idea. It's way more scalable than what you were doing last time. You're now a veteran. Not really, but in their eyes, like, your second time around, you have some of the battle wounds and scars that'll make you better, faster, etc. And they, like, sight unseen, were like, we'll put $1 million in. And I was like, you know, we don't even know, like—

We don't need $1 million.

And I was like, all right, well, this is a huge market opportunity. It's big. Let's take it. And we were off to the races. We started cruising from there. When you get that money, you spend it, right? And so The joke that I've heard from other entrepreneurs and investors is regardless of whether you raise $1 million or $50 million, you're going to spend it in 18 to 26 months.

Yeah.

Like you'll find— like, not that you want to find ways, but like opportunities will come up. We could acquire this company, we could build this feature that we were going to wait on. And so these things come up. You have to be disciplined to say no to a lot of it. But good opportunities do come up. And if you have the war chest to capitalize on it, that's kind of the whole point. And so we did that the first year, officially launched February of 2025, and it's been one of the fastest, like most exhilarating things I've been a part of it. I've heard other entrepreneurs tell me about lightning in a bottle and I feel like we've—

Yeah, I think, I mean, it's such a cool idea. Like learning about it, it makes me be like, oh, like I want to go research franchises and options and just like, it's just a really cool way to actually standardize the way that people buy franchises, then it's a real problem because brokers will sometimes lean into the opportunity that they'll make the most money on, not necessarily what is the best fit for the customer. So there was a real problem that you were solving.

Yeah, it is insane, honestly. Like, I'll stay off my soapbox for a little bit. Go on your soapbox, that's why you're here. Not for too long, but we, when we were selling the laundromats, we worked with brokers And the more I got into how it worked, the more I was like, how is this legal? You know, to buy a house or to, I'm sorry, to, you know, help someone buy or sell a house, you have to be licensed. You have to disclose how much you make, what percentage. You have to do coursework. There's all these, you know, things to be registered in that state. To buy and sell a franchise or help someone to buy and sell a franchise, boom, you and I are legitimate. Anyone can do that. We can go sell whoever's listening, you know, a concept. And so that's a big problem 'cause it attracts bad actors 'cause there's no hurdle. There's, there's the barrier to entry is zero. And you're helping people make, I would say just as big of, maybe not as big, but close to as big of a decision as buying a home. It is a multi-hundred thousand dollar decision, sometimes half a million, sometimes multiple millions of dollars.

And so you're working with this person who's not licensed, not legally required to tell you how much they make and how they make money. And so the incentives are very misaligned, but you as a, you know, the person working with them think, oh, this person has my back. Why wouldn't they? It's the ethical thing to do. And it's probably like buying a house and they, you know, probably are regulated like that. They're not, which is crazy. And I hope regulation comes. I'm not usually a huge proponent of regulation. In this case, it needs it. But then they also make a 60% commission on the franchise fee.

Hmm.

I know a ton of salespeople I've never heard of a commission that low. Yeah, that's very, very high.

Yeah. It's usually 15, 20%, 30.

Yeah. And so like that high commission without regulation, again, it's a perfect storm of attracting bad actors. There's a lot of great business brokers. I don't want to trash the whole model. There's a lot of really good, ethical, super helpful, you know, very moral, morally aligned people, et cetera. But for every one of those, there's 10 bad ones because of the Wild West nature of it. And so we looked at the opportunity to say, hey, we can build Franzi and let capitalism do its thing and bulldoze a path through the brokers and say, we'll charge a flat fee. So it's super aligned with the individual and the brand because we don't care which brand it is. We get paid the same amount of money.

Okay.

So we have no incentive to say, hey, holla, this brand is way better for you because their franchise fee is $60K and this other brand that actually is a better fit for you, the franchise fee is $30K. As a broker, I make twice as much money by pushing this one in front of you. Yeah. That's a huge incentive. We're not talking about a couple thousand more dollars. We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars more. And so we said, hey, it's a flat fee. So we rip out that incentive. We also disclose like a real estate agent would upfront. Here's how we make money, here's how much so that you know as the prospect. And we also explain to them how the broker world works traditionally, like, wow, I can't believe that was allowed. And then the brands love it because they're also paying less overall. And again, it's a line. The, the best brand has to win, and that's how it should be. It shouldn't be the brand that pays to play the most.

So you are contracting with the brands.

Brands do pay us the platform fee.

So you're also trying to recruit brands, right? All the time.

Yes. So we have 4,000 on the platform, which is the whole universe because we have those documents. But then we have what are called verified brands. So it's like a purple check mark or, you know, blue check mark on Instagram. So we've vetted them at that point. They've claimed their profile like you and I can claim our houses on Zillow. And so it's the same way. It's free for them to do. It doesn't cost them anything. They can update the data though, once they claim it, they can see leads coming in. And so our incentive to the brand is we have all these eyeballs looking at, you know, your concept. They want to come talk to you.

Yeah.

We gatekeep a little. We're like, hey, you know, they can go direct to the brand from the platform from there. But the brands really want to come on because we've built all these tools that make their sales team more efficient. Yeah, more insights. And then prospects love it because they're getting all this free education, support, handholding, access to the best lenders, the best rates, entity formation, CPAs, attorneys, etc. Yeah. So it just makes it easier for them. They don't really pay anything for it.

There's so much to unpack in what you just said. So why don't we start with how you make money on the transaction?

Yep.

So Brains don't pay you, but you—

Only if a deal is completed.

So they only pay you when a transaction actually happens and you get some sort of a fee that's transparent to everyone.

Yes. So we call it a platform success fee and it's typically $20K to $25K. So there's a little bit of variance depending on the brand's franchise fee because we don't want them, if it's a very low fee, to be, you know, unprofitable on a deal. Yeah. So we'll give a little wiggle room, but it's not this flat percentage. So we'll kind of put 'em into buckets. If your franchise fee is $0K to $40K, it's X. If it's $40K—

And what's a franchise fee?

So if you and I were to go buy Jersey Mike's together, they might say, hey, you guys get the rights to 3 in Austin to preserve or reserve those rights for us, we're paying a franchise fee. We're saying, all right, for 3 of them, it's $40K for one territory. And they usually scale down as you buy more. So $40K for one, $30K for the second, $25K for the third.

But that's not how much it costs to open up a franchise. That's just like the cost of getting the brand.

Yeah.

Okay. So it's just a ticket.

Your ticket in line. We now, if we buy those 3 Jersey Mike's territories, we pay our, call it $100K to reserve that, right? That's our, you know, zip code or that's our 10-mile radius that only we can develop a Jersey Mike's in. No one else can ever do that. We own the rights to that now. We then have to go pay however many hundreds of thousands to develop and build the Jersey Mike's and, you know, get the store, you know, footprint ready, etc. So the franchise fee, and every franchise has it, is basically your right to develop that territory or that market. Got it.

So you charge a flat fee depending on how much their franchise fee is, and that's the only time that you monetize in the transaction.

Yeah, with the brand. Now let's say in that same example, you and I go and we're like, we need $1 million to go do this, to develop these locations. We have hundreds of lenders that we, that some love food, some hate food, some like fitness, some hate fitness. We pair you with the right lender and if we borrow that million, Franzi makes another 100 to 200 basis points.

So you're also adding like additional services that they're going to need anyway. So you can be like an all-in-one platform and then you're monetizing on those additional services. Is there any other services that you're kind of baking in?

So CPA, so you need to form an entity and get your standard chart of accounts done. So entity formation and getting your books ready.

Okay.

We refer attorneys, but they can't pay referral fees. That's just us being the one-stop shop and wanting to be value accretive. Brands will pay us kind of sponsorships. So we do a ton of our own content as well. We have a podcast, we've got a bunch of educational content we put out, short form, long form YouTube series, et cetera. And so brands will pay us sponsorships as well to do commercials and those things, um, uh, or to be referenced more often in my LinkedIn posts and things like that.

Do you think there's a world in which brands will start to pay you to get like featured in your app or promoted? Or do you feel like that would be bad for incentives?

I think if it's done tastefully, because what I want to avoid is the same thing that happens with the brokers was kind of this like pay-to-play thing. And so almost like a paid Google ad where it's very clear in a Google search, it's like— Sponsored, like Zillow does. Paid sponsor. Yeah. If it's like that I think it's like oh, this brand paid to be here. It's not necessarily what Franzi is saying is the best brand because we want to be very clear on remaining unbiased and objective about it.

Something that's really cool is all the data that you're collecting about all these franchises and that's how people are actually further vetting the opportunities, right? So how are you getting that info? Is that just like the available data or are you collecting it in some way?

It's a combination of honestly like 4 or 5 things. So these FDDs, we have 26,000 of them going back 5 or 6 years. Each year a brand has to do a new FDD, and that's franchise disclosure document. And so we can see the trend of the stores they've opened, closed, shut down, which is important. And so If you look at one in isolation, it tells a little bit of a story, but it's a dot on a, you know, you've heard that story before. Yeah. Like, you know, lines tell stories, a dot, you know, is less useful. And so we start to put and plot where did revenue go each year, where did stores open or close or shut down go? And we start to surface those insights to people on the platform. So the FDDs is a huge source. Brands, when they claim their brand on Franzi, they give us a ton of additional information. So that is another source. We pull in other third-party data like traffic patterns and Google My Business reviews. We have millions of reviews that we've surfaced to say, hey, in this market, this brand, this is the perception of the local consumer.

Because you, as someone buying it, you might love the team and you might have heard from your friend in New Jersey that this concept is great. But in this market, maybe the, you know, Chick-fil-A is just dominating. So like Raising Cane's isn't going to make sense there.

So are people actually buying like franchise in a specific city with a specific location already, or are they just buying the rights to start one up themselves?

Both. So we have de novo, de novo development. So net new development where they're buying the rights because maybe the brand isn't there yet or they haven't sold out that territory. We also have resales where, let's use you and I and Jersey Mike's again, like we've been doing it for 10 years. We're like, we're sick of the sandwich business, let's sell it. And so now we list our Jersey Mike's on Franzi as a resale and now vetted buyers are coming in. They can't see all of our data until we've, on the Franzi platform, have determined it's a serious buyer because we don't want yours and I's sensitive data out there unless it's a serious person. And that's a newer thing we're developing. It's very manual today, but the goal is over time to have just as robust of a resale marketplace as we have a net new, you know, territory site today.

It's really cool. So you start, you launch it in 2025. How many transactions have you made so far?

Yep, so we've done just under 100, which is like the main metric that we care about because in our, when we close a deal, we call it, you know, like a new entrepreneur made.

Oh, cool.

And that's the, that's what I love. Like, again, it's changed my life. It is the most fulfilling thing I've ever done. And so when we have someone else do it and you can see how excited they are and like they're scared and they're nervous as they should be because they're about to embark on this wild journey. But that gives me like those warm fuzzies of like, all right, someone's going to go chase their dream now and build something. And I know how much they're going to learn. I know how hard it's going to be. Know how fulfilling it's going to be.

So do you have a way to connect with the franchisee after the fact to kind of understand how things have went and improve your process?

Yep. So we follow up every like 3, 6, 9 months just to see how they're doing. We're starting to work on software and AI tools to be with them the rest of the relationship. So right now, if you think about Franzi.com today, it's, it's the buy bucket, it's resales, it's existing or net new, it's lending, it's CPAs, it's attorneys, it's all that stuff. Soon as they buy, it's kind of like, well, our relationship's over. Yeah. Kind of. We check in like we do, but we want to be with you to make you a better operator now because there's a lot of terrible software that's not franchise-specific or purpose-built. And so we're starting to develop this AI intelligence layer. It's a single pane of glass is what we call it, where we're connected to all your other systems and serve up every day daily recommendations for you and your team to better drive profitability in your business. So then we'll be with you the whole journey. And then when you go to sell, we know everything about your business. You just hit list and it goes back onto the marketplace. So that is something that we're working on confidentially.

You can share this, but—

Yeah.

We're planning to go to market in September with that tool. Very excited about it. That's exciting. Then we will be with you the whole way. But for now, we're just checking in every 3, 6, 9 months. And some of the stories are phenomenal. One guy quit his job in— he was from New Jersey. Moved to, I think it was Waco, to do an artificial turf business and is already like, he's on pace to do over $1 million in his first year.

Amazing.

And he just is like, he's getting into content now, which like, if you met the guy when we first met him, he's like not like that kind of like, he's, I was like that, you know, as well. And I still kind of am, it's kind of quiet, reserved, calculated. Now he's like, all right guys, like I can make your backyard super safe, kid-friendly, pet-friendly. He's like doing it and it's working. And he's got some—

He's the ShamWow guy now. Yeah, exactly.

He's got Cowboys players signing up and like, he's couldn't be happier. And like, that feels selfishly really good.

Yeah, that's awesome.

To be like, hey, we were a part of that. And knock on wood, I think we might go on Good Morning America later this year.

Amazing.

'Cause they want to have stories like that where, 'cause we talked to them about a year ago and they're like, yeah, you're just getting started. They're like, come back and let's do a story when someone's like taken the leap, quit their job. Now they're a year or two in and they're like, on top of the world and, you know, there's a, a good success story.

There's so much opportunity and it's so interesting. And we are gonna have a part 2 of this episode where we're gonna go into some case studies and artificial turf is gonna be one of them because there's really low overhead but lots of upside. And so there's so many cool opportunities for people.

I had no idea. I used to, I think I told you at the beginning, I used to be a franchise hater. I think a lot of people are and you think, oh, it's just McDonald's, it's Subway. Or it's these like snake oil salesman type concepts that like aren't working and, you know, you shouldn't pay attention to. And so I used to write franchising off, and the more I've gotten into it and the more I've seen how much wealth has been created, how much happiness and fulfillment has been created, and how the average person again isn't going to go start Uber. I was like, I love this. If you find the right fit that complements your skill set that you can afford and that your risk tolerance aligns with, like, sky's the limit. You're in full control. And it's— I think it's what a lot of us want is freedom and control over what we do.

Yeah. As somebody who loves to start businesses, for me, it's like so tempting to want to start some sort of a franchise.

Well, we'll get you into one.

Let's, yeah, let's talk about it. Yeah, I feel like I should. And that's a wrap for part 1 of my conversation with Alex. The biggest lesson so far in this conversation is that you don't always need to invent a brand new idea to build wealth. Sometimes the opportunity is in seeing where an existing industry is broken then using better systems, better data, and better incentives to make it work. But we're not done yet. In part 2, Alex is going to walk us through the 5 things every entrepreneur needs to consider before buying a franchise. We'll also break down real franchise opportunities, including spray tanning, Pilates studios, coffee shops, home services, and so much more. And trust me, you are going to be surprised. So if you ever thought, could franchising be my path? Mm-hmm. To entrepreneurship, you do not wanna miss part 2. I'm Hala Taha and this is How We Profit Wednesdays. Hey, App Fam, we're about to launch something that might be my favorite thing we've ever done on the podcast, a brand new series called How We Profit. Now I've been doing Young and Profiting Podcast for 8 years and my listeners are successful.

We are real entrepreneurs with real businesses and a lot of you guys are crushing it behind the scenes. You may not be super famous, you may not be a billionaire yet, but you've got a business that you've learned how to scale, and we wanna hear from you. One of the best ways to learn as an entrepreneur is from your peers, and I found it super helpful to be in these peer entrepreneurship groups and learn from other entrepreneurs who are at my level, but just in a different industry. So that's what I wanna bring to this podcast. I want this to be our own peer group. but on the podcast. And so I'm gonna be interviewing people who are making anywhere from $500,000 to $10 million a year. They're not super famous, they're not the typical billionaires that are on my show. These are real entrepreneurs who are crushing it behind the scenes, and we're gonna uncover what they do to sell, how they get their customers, what their profit margin looks like, how they market, and so much more. If this sounds like you and you wanna be featured on Young and Profiting Podcast for our How We Profit series, just head to youngandprofiting.com/apply. Apply and share your story.

Let me know why you think you should be featured on the show. Again, that's youngandprofiting.com/apply. And who knows, maybe you'll be our next guest on Young and Profiting Podcast. Sehr gut, sehr gut, sehr gut.

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Cool. Wer sagt das?

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Such dir was aus. Mega. Aber das ist doch bestimmt kompliziert.

Nö, einfach Foto von der Lohnsteuerbescheinigung machen und fertig.

Klingt sehr gut.

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