The Secrets Behind Rapid Franchise Growth

So what you want to do is delegate everything except genius. Get everything off your plate so that you're working in that zone of genius. You're working your unique ability, you're working in stuff that's really easy for you, that you love doing, that's super fun for you. Hell, you do it for free, except you got to pay bills once in a while. Then everything gets simple. The entrepreneurs that are working hard, that are grinding it out, that are struggling, you're slowing your own business down, you're hurting your own profitability. So what you want to be able to do as an entrepreneur, as a franchisor that's scaling is not to be so busy that you're working, working, working, working. You don't want to be like that fly, trying to get out the window, working hard all the time. You want to have lots of free time to be able to sit back and think, to be strategic. Approximately 15 years ago, I was just leaving 1-800-got junk. And as you know, I'd been the chief operating officer from 1, 800 got junk from 12 locations up to 330 locations, 2 million to 106 million. I was in Atlanta, Georgia, and I was standing on a stage, and I came off this big stage to about four or five hundred people. And as I got off the stage, this guy walked up to me and he said, oh, my God, you're Cameron. And I went, yeah, why? And he goes, I thought you were a saying I was like, what do you mean? He goes, I thought you were like a bhag or a flywheel or like a core purpose. Like, I thought you were a thing. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he goes, for the last three days, all of these CEOs have been walking around this conference saying, I need a Cameron. And I realized that they were saying they needed someone like Brian Scudamore had the CEO of 1-800-got- junk, had you as his second in command, and they wanted someone like you. And I kind of cracked up about it. Almost every single entrepreneur out there needs their yin and yang. They need their counterpart. Every franchisor out there is going to grow. And that's why really, Brian scaled 1, 800 got junk so quickly as we were able to divide and conquer, I was that coo. I had also built two franchise companies. Prior to that, I had been the second in command for what's now called Gerber Auto Collision in the United States and Boyd Auto Body in Canada. And then prior to that, I was in a very senior leadership role for what became College pro painters. And I opened the west coast of the United States for them. So I had that kind of DNA and experience. You know, the way I've evolved is what I've done in terms of helping entrepreneurs. So my core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen or help franchisors make their dreams happen, like what you're doing. One of the ways I used to do that was I used to coach CEOs, I used to coach leadership teams. I used to. I still do some of that. I have a course that I launched called invest in your leaders, which actually have got some franchisors and big companies putting franchisees and managers through that invest in your leaders course to get the core skills that they need to actually scale and lead people and lead teams. So that's something I launched three years ago, that's having really big shifts in companies. And then six, seven years ago, I launched something called the COO alliance, which is a mastermind community, kind of like the international franchisor or the IFA for franchisors. This is an association where only the second in commands are allowed to join. No CEOs, and it's only the second in commands of companies from 17 countries. We've added about 35 new members in the last six weeks alone. So we have this great organization that I'm coaching them, growing them, and they're masterminding and connecting with each other, and that's helping these brands grow. I think where my shift is very different from most COOs. You kind of mentioned that. That very entrepreneurial as a coo, when you're looking to bring a second in command into your company, you have to make sure that the person you're bringing in is a good cultural fit for you. As the CEO. I would have been a horrible second in command for most of my members of the CEO Alliance's companies. In fact, I would probably be a horrible second in command for 80% of the franchisors that you actually work with or that are in your networks. Because I don't necessarily match the skills that that CEO is weak in. I don't necessarily match the areas of the business that that CEO wants me to run. Maybe I don't match their culture. Maybe they don't like somebody who swears once in a while or is so entrepreneurial. I was a perfect match for Brian for that six and a half years that I was scaling it. So it's a really kind of idiosyncratic role that people are looking for. Greg Nathan documented that about 20 years ago. And it's called the Six Stages of Franchising. I made sure that we taught all of our franchisees that in all the franchisor organizations where I've coached the CEO and coo, I've taught them this. It's basically the Glee fee me see? And we stages, I think they are so that it's very similar, actually, to humans. Every human has parents in the first one year that we are a child. We love our parents. They wipe our butt. They feed us, they put us to bed. They cuddle us. They kind of give us everything we need for that first year of our life. We all are in the Glee stage with our parents, and then all of a sudden, we're kind of in that terrible twos stage where we're saying no, and we're running around the house and we're driving our parents a little bit crazy. We're trying to kind of gained a little bit of independence. That's kind of like a franchisee, too. And then as teenagers, you were the same. I was the same. I thought my parents were idiots when I was a teenager. You probably thought your parents were idiots, right? And then all of a sudden, we move out of the house at 21 years old, and we're like, well, I don't love my mom and dad as much as I say. You know, I kind of do, but they're not as stupid as I thought I was. I'm not going to tell them they're not as stupid, but I kind of need to call mom and find out how to do laundry and how to make some food. Otherwise I'm going to die. So maybe that she's not so bad. I'm not going to pretend that. And then you kind of have your first kids, and you're like, wow, I get it. My mom and dad really tried their best. I think I'm going to try to rebuild that relationship with my parents. And then all of a sudden, you kind of mature and you're a little bit older and you're a little bit wiser. Maybe you're in your 40s or your 50s, and you really start to get that that relationship with your parents is pretty special, and you really want to start to reconnect with them. My parents have passed away now, and I really wish that I could reset some of the relationship issues that we had when we were teenagers. That's similar to the franchisee franchisor. The natural life cycle that a franchisee and franchisor goes through as you started with is every franchisee when they buy the franchise, is super happy, they're really excited, they're super pumped up. And then they get the manual, maybe in the mail and they look at it, they're like, holy. They start getting a little bit overwhelmed and then they realize it's a lot harder than they thought it was going to be. And they remember the franchisor saying it was going to be tough, but they kind of thought they were pretty special and they were going to be able to take it off really easily. And then they realize, wow, this is harder than I thought it was going to be. And they kind of want to start making it up on their own because they're kind of entrepreneurial. So they start reinventing the wheel and figuring out own systems and none of those systems are in the manual. And they start clashing with the franchisor a little bit. And then they're like, why am I paying you a royalty when I'm doing all the hard work? And they forget that the royalty is kind of like a 20 year tax because you can't charge the million dollars up front. But they're kind of a little bit frustrated around that. And then they kind of mature and they get older and wiser and they're like, you know, some of your systems are pretty darn good, but some of mine are okay too. But maybe, you know, they kind of go through that evolution. If a franchisee can very quickly get to the adult, the 40 year old adult, where they realize the franchisor is going to give them the best systems that they know the franchisor is going to try to be there to help them as much as they can. The franchisor really does have their best interests at heart. In fact, they the only way the franchisor really makes money is if your revenues grow. So they make more royalty. If you're making a lot of profit and revenue so that you validate well and tell lots of other people about it. If you're super happy and growing and you buy more locations so they're completely aligned with your success. Very similar to parents, they really want to grow you so you're a happy, healthy, independent kid and you can move out of the house and have your own children and they can be proud of you and you can be friends again, that's kind of the same job. So as soon as you can get to the stage where you realize if you can hold hands with your franchisor, take the best systems they've got, work really hard, try to be nice to each other, I think you're going to be much more successful as a franchisee. And if the franchisors can teach that, even if they take Greg Nathan's six Stages of franchising article, it's only like a two page article. I'm sure you've seen it. If you teach that to everybody, like I would reteach it to franchisees every six months. You know, keep remembering that that's what you're going through. It makes everybody's life easier. It's a long answer, but I think it's an important one. It's hard. I heard a Data point around 22 years ago when we were in our first probably 20 franchisees sold. I heard a data point that most franchisors never sell more than seven or eight units. And it's because they get their first seven or eight sold based on the dream and the vision and the excitement and based on that one location that maybe they were doing pretty well with. And then all of a sudden those seven or eight franchisees start struggling and they aren't doing very well and they don't validate very well, they don't sell very many more and everybody's frustrated and there's not enough royalty revenue to support them and it's hard to go to that next level. So kind of in that growth stage, from seven to maybe three, 30 franchises that are operating that are hitting profitability, obsess about making sure your franchisees are happy, obsess about making sure your franchisees are profitable. It's about less is more, right? The critical few versus the important many. Make sure that the franchisees are doing the basic things that are going to get them to success. And don't try to build more and add more. Keep working hard to help them get successful, because it's those core things that will build the foundation. I remember years ago, we had a franchisee, Mark Rubin in Washington D.C. call us and he was really wanting the next big marketing tactic. And I said, you know, are you parking all of your trucks in high visibility areas? He goes, no, but I know we have to, but I need the next marketing tool. And I said, are you putting out signs all over the city on the weekends? No, I know we have to, but I need the next marketing tool. And I said, are you putting out five door hangers on each side of every job you do and 10 across the street? No, no, but I know we will, but I need the next marketing tool. And I said, I'm not giving you marketing tactic number four until you're doing the first Three every single day. And it was about kind of having a little bit of that tough love and reinforcing those initial systems that we knew worked. That was core. The second one was, I think it's important in college pro painters, we said we had to have our hand in the paint can. We had to be painting houses like our franchisees were. It's very, very critical that franchisors operate their own corporate locations in a couple of different markets. And I want you in a tough market. I want you in a winter market. I want you in an expensive market. I want you in an African American market. And your systems need to work in all of those markets to high levels of profitability, only following the proper systems and the proper budgets and the proper P and L that you expect your franchisees to. And if you can nail that, they're going to be successful. The third part, and this is a story I think I've only ever told once before. You really have to listen to your franchisees and really, really, really listen to them to understand their problems. Brian and I got a tip one day. We only had about 20 franchisees, and we heard that they were very, very unhappy. They were in that stage where they were pissed off. They weren't getting what they needed. They were struggling. They were the terrible teenagers that were trying to bust loose and say, you know, know, fu to mom and dad. And we heard they were doing a conference call, so we hopped on the conference call, and one of the members of the conference call said, I think there's 11 people on the call right now. And Brian and I were like. And then all of a sudden, that person said, no, it must be the conference call line. I think we can proceed. And for one hour, Brian and I said nothing. And we listened to. We really, really freaking listened. And we got off that call with 10. I think it was 10 core things that the franchisees were really pissed off about. Most of them were pretty legit. A couple of them were like, you know what? You guys are idiots. But they were things that they were frustrated about. So Brian and I made a list of all the things that we could do to very quickly take care of the 10 things, including the couple that we thought they were crazy about. And we took care of them. And we never told the franchisees that we knew about the call. We never told the franchisees. We were listening to the call, and all we did was listen and care and do what they wanted that would help them be successful. That's really aggressively. It's kind of like a Parent who's eavesdropping on their kids inside the bedroom. There's nothing illegal about it, and you're doing it for the good of the kids. But that's how much listening you have to do as a franchisor. So that's probably the second time I've told the story. I don't think I've ever told the story publicly. Think. We called it Project Red Dog. I don't remember why we called it Project Red Dog, but it was all about obsessively caring about how happy our franchisees were going to be so that if they were happy, if they were profitable, then they would scale. And most franchisors won't do that. Most franchisors will blame the others. They'll say, my kids are idiots. My kids are stupid. My kids aren't doing what I tell them. And they forget that it's a partnership. In fact, it's such a partnership that we never called them franchisees. We called them franchise partners. We didn't even call them FPS. We called them franchise partners. Like, we wouldn't reduce it, we wouldn't shorten it. It was always franchise partners. And we never thought of them as our customer. Some franchisors think of the franchisee or the franchise partners or customer. Our customer was the homeowner or end user that was getting the junk removed or getting their house painted or getting their car fixed. Our partner was the franchisee. In taking care of our customer, I think it's critical. I think that you know the English language or any language that we speak in is intentionally designed to communicate what I'm thinking to what you're receiving. I was listening to Elon Musk talk about neuralink and how what's happening now is we're going to be able to transfer exact data back and forth without any confusion. I think it's critical that you call someone, like, mean what you say, say what you mean, Call them a franchise partner. We wouldn't shorten the name 1-800-got-JUNK. We never called it got junk. We never called it junk. We didn't say gj. We spelled it out. Even when I type a text message to Brian, to this day, and I sent1 about two weeks ago, I still type out 1-800-all caps, got all caps, junk, question mark. Like it was all intentional. And I think it's intentional is, do you care about the people if you care about them, right? If it's, you know, college pro painters, our core values will respect the individual pride in all you do Deliver what you promise. Those were our three core values. Well, respect the individual and pride in all you do meant I would call them franchise partners, not those people or, you know, whatever. Like it's intentional that it's how you show up. First off, you know, 1, 800 got junk. Today is a $750 million company still wholly owned. No private equity money, no outside investors. But it takes a long time to get to the night before you become an overnight success story. Right. People think if going to be really easy. I joined Brian in October of 2000. He had 12 franchises sold. He was doing $2 million in system wide sales. Okay, October of 2000. How many years do you think he'd been in business before October of 2000? 11. He started in 1989, had grown the company to 2 million in 11 years. So people think, oh, I'll start a location, I'll franchise it. 18 months later you have no business franchising your business. After 18 months you need to be extraordinarily profitable. You need to have everything documented. You need to have tried and failed and opened in multiple cities. Most franchisors start franchising because they're not making enough money off one location to run enough corporate locations. And they're doing themselves a disservice and the franchisees a disservice. Brian has been in business for 11 years, operating multiple trucks in multiple markets. One summer he did a test In I think 12 cities hiring. I went into a college pro painter's office and hired Paul Guy away from college pro to come and work for Brian to oversee I think 12 franchises in the summer markets as the rubbish boys. And he operated these 12 summer markets and proved he got 10 or 11 of the 12 to be successful in four months. He proved the model. Then he started to franchise and he got Paul Guy and Garrick Ladorante to be his first franchisee. They were both former college pro painters franchisees. They've done it before, they've proven it before they drove across Canada and opened up Toronto. Paul Guy is now about $50 million in system wide sales. He owns all of Australia and New York City and all of Toronto. But he had proven experience. I, as a franchisor, I don't talk about this very often, but I had been a franchisee for three years before I started working at the auto body business and before I started with Brian. So I understood the franchisee's pain, I understood the franchisee franchisor relationship. I was so terrified of failing at 20 years old when I bought my first franchise that I read the 360 page operations manual and I did everything it said obsessively. I was a complete monomaniac. If it said yellow keychain, I had a yellow keychain, man. If it said like, brown bracelets, I'm wearing brown bracelets, like, I didn't care how stupid it was, if the manual said it, I would do it because I was so terrified of failure. But out of 365 franchisees in Canada, I ranked number three or number four in that first year because I was so scared of failing that I just did what they told me. And I was entrepreneurial, but I didn't want to try my own systems because I knew that their systems were going to be the best they knew about. And I kind of trusted that if something new came along, they'd tell me because they would want me using the next best system because. Because it would grow the revenue and grow their profitability. Right. Like, kind of made sense. So I was so scared. And I think if franchisees can embrace that and trust that you're in this partnership, a franchise partnership, I think you'll be so much more successful. And I think if franchisors would obsess about their franchisee profitability. So here's one of the things I did in the first two weeks I was COO at 1-800-got junk. I told Brian that he wasn't making money, the company wasn't making money, the franchisees weren't making money, and the guys in the trucks weren't making money. I said, we're raising prices by 40%. Everybody thought I was crazy. I had leadership team members think we were going to go bankrupt. I'm like, we're going bankrupt anyway. So we're going to raise our prices from $338 a full truck. We raised our prices in one day from $338 a full truck to $478 a full truck in a single day. And that gave us the ability for everybody to make money because I knew that franchisees were going to work really, really, really hard. And if they couldn't get to a cash flow, break even quickly and get to profitability quickly and replace their corporate income quickly, they weren't going to be happy. So we had to become that premium. So because I obsessed about them, one last lesson on this one of the first month or two that I was at the company, a franchisee in Ottawa, Canada, Pierrette Raymond and her husband Luke were really struggling. They hadn't yet hit profitability. Both of them had quit their jobs and were trying to run the business. They weren't making ends meet. They had two very young kids and they were terrified of failing. So every day Pierrette would phone me at 8am or 7:30am Vancouver time, and she would give me her top three goals for the day, marketing wise, things that she was specifically going to do for that day. We called it the kick ass marketing program camp. And every morning she'd give me her top three marketing goals. @ the end of the day, she would call me and tell me where she hit or failed on the goals and I would coach her on what to do the next day. She'd think about it overnight and in the morning she'd call me back and commit to her top three. We did it for one month and then we started doing it weekly for about three months. And Pierrette Raymond is today, 24 years later, a very successful franchisee for 1-800-got junk, millions of dollars in revenue. But it was because I cared about her to the extent that I was going to coach her twice a day for a month and every single week. That was way outside of what the normal royalty revenue would pay for. But I knew that if I cared about her profitability, she'd validate well, everything would be happier. So I was worried about them more than I was worried about us. They were mad at us because they expected more. They expected that we'd run national marketing or national advertising. And I had to explain, we're broke. We don't have any money. Like, we can't do this. And we never promised it. So I had to really hold the mirror up and make sure they could see it. And I had to give them the things that they could get success with on a daily basis and work on. The other thing that I did was I really worked hard to grow the capacity and the mindset of our franchisees. So I remember Paul Guy again from Toronto. When I joined 1-800-got junk, he was doing around $800,000 in revenue. He was doing about 40% of the system wide sales of the company. Of the 12 franchisees, I think nine were open at that time. And I said to Paul, what would your business look like if you were doing 5 million in revenue? He's like, you are crazy. There's no way I could do that. You're insane. It'll never happen. So I sent him this very simple Excel spreadsheet. I said, just for fun over the weekend, just for sh t and giggles, pretend that you were running a five million dollar Business and kind of map it out using this model and come back Monday and let's talk about it. Maybe we can get you to 2 million, but let's pretend you're doing 5. He came back Monday morning and he had the model for 5 million sketched out using the budget template that I gave him. And he said, I think it's possible. Can you coach me? So because I raised his mindset and raised his vision, I raised him to be open to me, coaching him. Sure enough, Paul Guy not only got to the 5 million in revenue a few years later, but he's doing about 50 million today and he's making about $10 million in profit every year because we cared again about him and his growth and his mindset. And it was all of the systems that are in my invest in your leaders course that I coached franchisees in. They weren't systems that were in the manual. These were systems that I created or I'd been taught years before at other companies. But it was stuff that if I cared about helping them, they were going to be successful. And I think again, the franchisors that think of their franchise partners as partners, they'll really work harder to make sure they're successful. And if the franchise partners, remember, the franchisor is there as your partner, they're not there as your parents, they're not there as a cop, they're not there as your adversary, they're not trying to screw things up, everybody's going to be more happy and more successful. So at CollegePro Painters and again, what most people don't know about College Pro, College Pro operated for 50 years. It closed down last year because they couldn't find enough franchisees. All the franchisees were university students. And all university students that are running businesses are doing online businesses and crypto and flipping stuff now. So they had to go out and find 800 franchisees every year. So in four months, College Pro would find 800 franchisees. And in one month we trained the 800 franchisees to hire 8,000 painters. So the complexity of that business was all around interviewing, recruiting, onboarding, and the training of people. The training of the franchisees was critical. Remember, we only had four months to train 800 franchisees on how to build a business, start a business, run a business, sales, marketing, operations, hire 10 people each, do time management, project management, negotiate conflict management. Like we had to train them to be leaders of companies. And then four months later they shut the business down after we do 60 million in revenue. So we became operationally world class at Training young managers at how to be very skilled leaders. I took all of those skills and bundled them into now what is called the invest in your Leaders course. It's investinyourleaders.com it has the 12 core skills that anybody who manages people, whether it's a CEO, a coo, vp, franchisee, whatever, they need to be really good at and nobody gets trained in. So it's stuff like interviewing, coaching, delegation, time management, situational leadership, handling, conflict, email management, communication. It's like the core skills that we need to be good at. And I bundled that course up with me teaching the video content, some written content, pre and post tests, and then there's a LinkedIn certification that you get when you've gone through all the modules. And it's priced at only 740 bucks per person. So it's kind of a rounding error in terms of the value that you get. That's the same content that I trained Kimbal Musk in in 1993, a year and a half before he and his brother, Elon Musk raised their first round of funding for Zip2, when they had one employee. And they were funded based on Kimbal Musk leadership experience at College Pro Painters. And because Elon had never done anything, so those skills are proven, I also trained his cousin, Peter Reeve, who went on to build SolarCity, in those same 12 leadership skills. So we actually created a system the year following that so that we could proactively gather feedback from our franchisees and our employees and our customers. And we used the Net Promoter score. So the Net Promoter Score is a survey that you send out, typically to customers, and you ask one question. On a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiastically would you recommend our service to a friend? So with franchisees, we would send out one question. We would say, on a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiastically would you recommend this franchise opportunity to a friend? And we would take the percentage of people that give us a 9 and 10. They're the promoters. You subtract the percentage of people that give you a 1 through 6. Those are your detractors. And. And you end up with a result of somewhere between negative 100% and positive 100%. In my second last year at the company, we were rated the number one franchisor in the world by the IFE. We had a positive 97 or 98% net promoter score at the time. But on the thank you page of that survey, this was the gold. On the thank you page of that one question survey, we had. Thanks for your result. What's one thing we could do to make this an even better franchise opportunity. For others, we took the most common things that they said and we would put that in place. We did that survey twice a year. The second time, we did the survey each year. So the first time we said, what's one thing we could do to make it a better franchise opportunity? The second time. So you usually asked it in January and July. On the July question, we would say, what's one thing we can do that doesn't cost money? And listening to the franchisees gave us all of the answers. It's kind of like when we're little. If you're, if you grew up in like a family that celebrated Christmas, you'd write a Christmas card or Christmas note to Santa. Like, dear Santa, I would like these three presents. And you'd walk down to the mailbox, you'd mail the letter to Santa and six weeks later the presents are under the tree. Like, Santa read my letter. It's like, no, your mom read the letter. Like, Santa doesn't even exist. Mom and dad read your letter. They bought you what you wrote on the letter. So for us it was like, let's just ask. Instead of trying to figure out what they want, let's ask them what they want. It's like, hey, what will make you more profitable? What will make you happier? What will make you more successful? Take the wisdom of the crowds like Malcolm Gladwell talked about and just do what they want. So we systemized that process and we did it twice a year for employees, for franchise partners and for customers. When you should be ready to hire a COO and is when you have got the need for a coo. So really what you're looking for is a head of operations or a second in command. It's going to be your counterpart to the entrepreneur. So it could be a coo, it could be a vice president, operations, it could be a director of operations, could be an operations manager. It's really the person who's going to take all the operations off your plate. So for me at 1-800-got junk, I ran franchise sales, marketing primary. At one point the call center reported to me corporate operations, field operations, franchise training, all. And Brian ran it and finance. So when I originally came into the organization, my title was vice president, operations and then it changed to COO, a C level person. 20 years ago. To get a chief operating officer title or a chief marketing officer or chief financial officer, chief Information officer, chief Technology officer, you need to be a major player at a major company. Really what you're looking for is a basket of things that need to get done and what are you willing to pay for that? So a true COO today is someone who brings in a lot of strategic insight into the company. Like I brought into Wendy Henry got junk, right? I'd already built two franchise companies and I built a third organization. The fast growth that we took public. Someone who has good P and L responsibility. Again, I built three organizations, had P and L responsibility, could understood the budget and balance sheet. Somebody who actually has a huge level of autonomy so they can just come in and do their job. For the first four years, I was showing Brian what I was going to do for the year and he's like, great, go do it. I don't know how to do any of that. He wasn't delegating to me, he wasn't managing me, he wasn't holding me accountable. I was coming in saying, I got it, here's the plan, you just show me the vision. So there's that level of autonomy. The fourth is that the person comes in with a level of insight and people that they can bring into the organization. So I was recruiting people into 1-800-got junk. I was recruiting people away from college pro. That's a true kind of C level person. And then lastly, it's based on the roles and responsibilities they have and the metrics they have and the amount of money that you're willing to pay. When I was the chief operating officer for 1, 800, got junk. 20 years ago, I was being paid over 300,000 a year. So if you're not going to pay someone $300,000 a year today, they certainly aren't a COO. Maybe they're a director. Like if you're going to pay 150, they're probably a director of operations. If you're going to pay 250, they're probably a vice president operations. If you're 350, they're probably a true COO if they're also doing those other things. So don't put a title, and I talk about this in my book, the second in command for all areas of the business. Don't put a title on the person until you understand the strategic P and L roles, responsibilities, metrics and what you're willing to pay and then put the proper title on the person at that time. I am old school man. I got the gray hairs. Like, I still have a huge desire to have the person in the office with me. So this afternoon I'm in Kelowna, British Columbia, I'm interviewing the second in command for Dan Martel. So Dan Martel runs Martell Media and the SAS Academy. And I'm in Dan Martell's offices in Kelowna, British Columbia. I can see the mountains in Lake Okanagan right here. And his co, Todd Melnick is in the same office. I was hiking with Todd or two days ago. I don't think you can replace that in person. The beta share, going back and forth, being around the same culture. I think if you truly, truly care about an organization, you want your leadership team as close to the queen bee, as close to that buzz and hive as possible. And I don't think you can do that remote. I'm okay with having remote employees with fractional with remote team members, but I truly think the leadership team has to be as close to the buzz as possible. And I think you want franchise partners coming in and seeing that and feeling that as well. Brian and I were best friends prior to me joining Brian as his COO at 1-800-got junk. He was my best man at my wedding three months before, we would go for runs together every Tuesday and Thursday. We'd go off site to our tennis clubs together and just sit and do work on Fridays. We lived seven minutes apart from each other. You can't replace that synchronicity and that the communication and the connection and the trust that happens. So I don't think you're going to get anywhere close to as good a connection and results with the remote hire as your second command. First off, it depends on the state or province or country that you're in. But there's something called constructive dismissal. And when you change a person's title or you change a person's roles and responsibilities, there can be legal ramifications for you as a company. So you want to at least make sure that you have something because the person quit their job or joined you or took a position or dedicated themselves based on the title and roles, responsibilities and comp that you gave them. If you made a mistake, oops. But you kind of sometimes have to ante up for that mistake. So I would check to see if there's anything around constructive dismissal. If you're going to change the title either way, I would still change the title. So I was coaching a company in Florida one year, actually. I coached them for four years from 40 employees up to 600 employees. It's called Blue Grace Logistics. And when we got to about 600 employees, we realized that there were a bunch of people that were there in the first Year or so that were early stage employees that got VP titles that once we got to 600 people, they weren't VPs, they were like director level with VP titles or they were VP titles that weren't being paid enough. So. So in a single day, we took all 600 people in a spreadsheet. We looked at roles and responsibilities, comp metrics, they were responsible for strategic insight, P and L responsibility. And we retitled 600 people at once. And with some people got the same title, some got increased to C level, some got dropped to director, some got moved to manager. But we had clarity around managers, directors, VPs, C level. And we retitled everybody. We ripped off the band aid. So I think if you made a mistake, we rip off the band aid and you can go and sit with the person, say, hey, when I hired you, this is what I thought. This is what I now know. I love you, I want to keep you. But we're retitling and explaining and sometimes it's about being a little bit strategic, but you have to rip off that band aid and do it now and then. I think employers can't be as sloppy as we used to be. Employers are often a little bit sloppy, like, oh, titles don't matter, really. Titles really matter because a person is now sitting at their desk going, well, I'm a COO. Let me look at, indeed at what COOs are paid. Let me check on Glassdoor, what COOs are paid. Let me look at Google. CEOs are paid. Oh, CEOs are paid 400 grand a year and they do this and the CEO is going, yeah, but you're not really a coo. Then why did you give them the title? Mean what you say and say what you mean. Put the title on people based on their roles and responsibilities, metrics. Right? Exactly what we've gone through. And yeah, I think everything gets easier. This is why franchisors need mastermind communities and need coaches and need advice. You're going to make all of the mistakes. And by the way, I can't stand the whole thing of failing is good. Forget that, man. We. Why would you want to fail when I've learned all these mistakes already and I can save you from all that agony and all the mistakes and all the legal and all the issues and all the problems. Do what Eric is teaching you. Do what Greg Nathan's teaching you. Do what I can teach you. Do what's in the Invest New Leaders course. Do follow what's in the second command. Don't learn from mistakes. Learn from the people before you that have already figured it out. My R and D stands for rip off and duplicate. I just do what the best people were doing. The reason I was so successful at Money Tender Got Junk was was I did everything that I used to do at Collegepro Painters. College Pro was the largest residential house painting company in the planet. Then we built Gerber Auto Collision and Boyd Auto Body, which became the largest collision repair chain on the planet. And then I was the COO for 1-800-got junk, which became the largest junk removal company on the planet. There were 17,000 independent junk removal companies when I joined Brian. So it's by ripping off and duplicating and taking the best of what others are doing, it's going to help you be successful, including anybody watching or listening today. So what happens is when you're working in your zone of genius or unique ability, you kind of discount it. You're like, oh, it's not that big of a deal. It's kind of like the quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys who just throws a long bomb, 55, 60 yards, like, yeah, no big deal. I do it all the time. No, it's a big deal. You're the Dallas Cowboys quarterback. No one else on the planet can do this. It's a really big deal. It's like the entrepreneur who's, like, so good at strategy, because that just comes easy to me. That's a really big deal for me. I've been rated as one of the best keynote speakers on the planet. I've been paid to speak in 29 countries. I'm a very, very successful business coach. And I kind of go, yeah, but it comes easy to me. I forget that it's not easy for 99% of the other humans out there. So what you want to do is delegate everything except genius, get everything off your plate so that you're working in that zone of genius. You're working your unique ability, you're working in stuff that's really easy for you, that you love doing, that's super fun for you. Hell, you do it for free, except you got to pay bills once in a while. Then everything gets simple. The entrepreneurs that are working hard, that are grinding it out, that are struggling, you're slowing your own business down, you're hurting your own profitability. So what you want to be able to do as an entrepreneur, as a franchisor, that's scaling, is not to be so busy that you're working, working, working, working. You don't want to be like that fly, trying to get out the window, working hard all the time. You want to have lots of free time to be able to sit back and think, to be strategic, to listen to podcasts, to go to mastermind events, to go through courses, to plug into books, to work with coaches so that you can see the business from a completely different lens and perspective, so that you can come back in with clarity and work on the right areas of the business and making people, making sure people are working on the right things. Do you know that Weinner got junk? For the first four years we were there, we only had probably five or six pieces of marketing collateral. That's it, five or six total. Because we were so clear that what we needed to focus on wasn't more of things, it was people using the right things. And it was that time that we had to just be clear. So, yeah, I think the franchisor that is worried, I don't really like, what am I going to do if I delegate all this? Well, the other thing is you'll have a better life. You'll have some fun, you'll reconnect with your hobbies. Because at the end of the day, this isn't just about making money. It's not about building a big brand. It's also about at the end of the day, we die. Right? I'm going tomorrow morning, I fly to St. Louis to a very, very close friend of mine of 17 years. His funeral, John Rulin. And you know, a 45 year old that dies and leaves four kids behind. I assure you he doesn't care what he was building with his business. Right. Nor does his spouse and little girls. A couple things changed. One is he was very good at proactively reaching out to his friends over video to just say hi. Sometimes there was an ask. It was like, can I get a referral? How can I love on your clients? But it was like this proactive, connecting with friends to just chat and say hi. And it was always over videos. There's a real human connection. So yesterday I called a mutual friend of ours, Kirk Drake, in Ashland, Oregon. I dropped in to see Kirk a month ago when I was driving through Ashland. I called in only the first time in my life I've done a video call with Kirk and I've known him for 17 years as well. So that's changed with me is wanting to connect with people. I think another thing is just the reality that truly none of this stuff matters, right? And how important friends and family and health and stuff is. Like, I'll be 59 in two months. 14 years older than John. And I'll be damned if I want to leave my two young boys, 21 and 23, and my wife. And I've already sold everything, right? I sold my home, sold my cars. We've been traveling the world for three years, loving as nomads. But yeah, I think that connection with friends and family and yeah, maybe just slowing it down, connecting with what's. Last night I went for a 45 minute walk before bed and took my shoes off and walked through the park in the grass and walked along the water and walked in the water with my shoes. I've never done that before. By the way, for everybody listening, go read the book Giftology. It's the book that John wrote. It will change you. Here's something weird. A friend of mine sent me a box of stuff two days ago. And it was like a bag and a hat and a pen and a cup and a shirt all with their company logo on it. I don't want any of your with your logo on it. John would never send a gift though, with his company logo. He would send you a beautiful knife with your name on it or he'd send you a beautiful shirt with your name on it. Like he understood the connection of people. Anyway, I'm rambling. I just miss him. It is too easy for people to start a franchise and sell franchises and they have no responsibility or business doing it. And it drives me crazy when I see people with average business and they're good at marketing and they're good at a brand and they have a business that sucks. And Quiznos is an example. So I was at their head office of quiznos. They had 5,500 units. And I knew it sucked. You could tell it sucked. And all of those are curves or like they're so good at selling masters and licenses and all. And then the franchisees have to hire their cousins and kids and everybody like sucked. Like, it just. I asked Fred DeLuca one time at the IFE 20 years ago, how do you handle your customer disputes or franchisee disputes? You know what he said? Litigation. He had 170 outstanding franchisee disputes at that time. That's not okay.