The Evolution of Franchising: Decades of Growth with Steve Murphy

It's that lure of that big money payday that they think about the end result of being a franchisor and they forget that that journey from start to finish may be two decades long before they're going to be in a position to sell that. So you really got to enter this for the right reason. You can't be thinking about an exit strategy the day that you entered it.

Welcome everybody. I am Jeff Duden and we are on the Homefront. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Homefront Brand. Simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform. Encouraging entrepreneurs to take action to transform their lives, impact communities and enhance the lives of those they care the most about. All the while delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the Homefront where it counts. If this sounds like you, check us out@homefrontbrands.com today and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the home front. I will be looking for you here. And today we have an exceptional opportunity to learn a lot about franchising and big business and the resale industry. We have with us Steve Murphy. Welcome, Steve.

Thank you. Welcome.

This is going to be great. And really honored that you chose to be on with us. Steve is a graduate of Northeastern University with a sports marketing and management degree. Bachelor degree at Holy Cross in economics and Accounting science. Steve has 20 years experience in retail management. He helped lead Winmar corporation from a $40 million market cap to a company over $750 million. Now Steve is focused on participating in strategy and leadership opportunities through board of director or advisory seats. He's also the managing director of 10K Island Investments, which is a private investment company focused on minority investments in private equity, real estate and venture capital. Winmark Corporation, where Steve was the president of franchising, focused on sustainability and small business formation. Welcome, Steve Murphy.

Thank you. That's quite an introduction.

Well, you lived it. It's yours. I'm so excited to talk about Widmar Corporation. And people probably don't know Winmark, but they do know the brands. Plato's Closet, Once Upon a Child. Play It Again. Sports music, Go Round Style, Encore. A bunch of great brands that we see on Main street usa. Before we get into that, Steve, would you share a little bit about your background, kind of how you grew up and where you grew up?

Sure, sure. Born in 65, so I was one of the first Gen Xers and grew up in a little town called Hingham, Massachusetts, about 20 miles south of Boston. Graduated from Hingham High School. Did Pretty well in school, Played some sports, played lacrosse, captain the football team there, and then went on to Holy Crop where I was an economics and accounting major and spent four years at Holy Cross, as they say, up on the hill in Worcester, Massachusetts. Did not go into accounting. Realized by about my junior year I loved the school. I did not love my major. But later in life I look back and I think it was a great opportunity, a great major to have. Just couldn't see myself in the public accounting shoes. So like a lot of young people, I graduated and had no idea what the heck I wanted to do. So I went, did some traveling, spent four weeks in Russia back in 1988 and then spent another four weeks in China, which was very interesting. Settled back in at Boston and then was there for about a week. And a buddy of mine said, hey, do you want to move to California? And I had nothing else to do. I said, why not? Jumped in his car with him and we spent a month driving across country. And with all the things I've seen still, this is probably one of the most interesting places in the world to travel. And then I spent the better part of about three years out in California. I started a seafood wholesale business with a buddy of mine. We quickly became the number one importer of live main lobster in the Southern California area. When we began, just like most entrepreneurs, we, we had no money, but we had a lot of ambition, a lot of energy and so we, we began our deliveries on back to VW Rabbit. So we used to go to the airport and pick up the product and then we'd go out and we'd deliver it would park around the corner. We delivered all these high end left off the supermarkets and hotel chains and we would park around the corner because we didn't want to see. We didn't have a truck. And we would bring the product around in the hand carts. And we did that for the first year and we finally realized, okay, we better make some investments. We invested in our truck and try to professionalize it a little bit. But we had a lot of fun doing that. We did that for two or three years. He went on to Wall street, became an investment banker and I went back to grad school as you mentioned, and went to Northeastern. Got out of Northeastern and was looking at sports marketing. Thought I wanted to go into the agent world. Took a job with a small marketing agency in Boston and stayed on that side of the world. I did get a chance to work with the Nikes and Reeboks of the world and Parlay that into working at a bigger agency. From there, I actually ended up getting married, having a couple of kids, and then I got a call one day from a headhunter that had an opportunity out in Minneapolis, which is happen to be where my wife is from. So we just felt like it was a good time to move. I said, you know what? I'm going to take the chance and move. And went out and worked for this turnaround operation called Windmark.

So. So I tell my children that everybody needs an adventure in their life. And you went to Europe, then you took a flyer out to California. Did your family have a history of moving around like that? Was it just kind of wonderlust or you had a buddy that had an idea and you just said, I'm going with you. But that's. That's fascinating, really developmental to be able to take an opportunity to travel like that at a young age.

Yeah, I. It's funny, I. My family was. Had no history of that. I had never been west of the Mississippi. I'd been to Florida. I think once, you know, you were going to go in school, to school in New England, you live your life in New England. That's really kind of how they. They showed. Very influenced by my friends, A great group of guys growing up and one friend in particular that really loved to travel. When we did the European thing, we actually had looked into it, and the travel person that we're going through was on one of those, you know, 28 countries and 40 days kind of Europe tours. And. And he said, well, if you bring along some classmates, we'll commission you for everyone you bring. And, you know, we, we. We bartended all the way through college. We, we always love money. So we said, well, we think we can scrounge up a few people. And we ended up getting about 40 of our classmates.

Oh, you guys went for free?

And we went for free. Actually, we. We ended up with an extra about $10,000. I was ready to start my life with some money in the bank, and my buddy looked at me and he said, what are you talking about? No, we're going to keep going. That was the bug. I mean, once I got bit, you know, I. To this day in my life, this is still the majority of what I like to spend my time doing is going to a different part of the world. I just got back from Uganda and Rwanda, seeing as much as I can, and I try to impress that upon my boys as well as, you know, we've got a very small world, really, and especially in this day and age. With the ability to travel on the Internet and all the things you can learn is I just never stop, just keep going until you can see every part of this planet that you can.

So Winmark Corporation, you show up there and you described it as a startup. What was going on?

They had actually been around for a little while. They had some really good brand taking the idea of buy, sell, trade new and used stuff and applied it in a number of different kind of vertical channels in retail. Some of them worked extremely well. Some of the others, as they, as they attempted to grow, didn't work. They also got into doing more corporate locations. They acquired a couple of brands that had a large number of corporate locations and that really wasn't their area of expertise. They were, they were franchise or they were better at franchising than they were running retail outlets. And they kind of got a little bit upside down. They had gone public. In their zeal to grow, they had taken on things that didn't work out. Cash flow was becoming really a difficult challenge. And they were good at selling the franchises, but maybe not as good at supporting them. And so because of all those reasons, they got themselves into some trouble. And at that point in time, a fellow named John Morgan, who became the chairman and CEO of the company, came as an investor. And as he kind of peeled back the onion and saw what was there, he changed up the board, he changed up the management team, and when we came in, it was really starting from scratch again.

What were some of the first things you identified that needed to be fixed?

Well, the first thing was nobody was doing the same thing inside the four walls of any of our locations. So no consistency across the board and really no plan from the franchisor. We had to go in and literally just kind of peel it all back and say, okay, let's number one, make sure that the model that we're selling here as a franchise is working. Once we got that peeled back and took a look at that, and we took a look at what of our, those that did have success, what were they doing? And once we kind of realized, okay, we've got really good models, then it just became a whole rewrite of the training, the operations, the support, marketing, everything else that went along with it.

You know, it's interesting. I was first exposed to franchising and dealership models in the mid-90s and I had went down to Hurricane Andrew and cut my teeth in the insurance restoration business. And after about 18 months I was trying to decide was I going to join one of these groups or was I going to start my own business and I went to a day or two of training with one of these dealership models and the manuals were at least 20 years old. I mean these things were from the 70s. I could just tell by the size of the lapels. When you see a light blue suit with a lapel the size of a pancake and bell bottoms and white shoes, those. That was not, that was not current. Those pictures were not current.

Hairdos too, right?

Oh, yeah, it was everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pork chops everywhere. But more importantly, the training didn't reflect the reality of the business. But I don't think it was untypical. I think a lot of franchise models back then that a franchise was a business card, a three to five day training. Good luck, we'll see you maybe at conference or maybe we won't.

Yeah. In fact, that's a great way to put it. They felt like once they got the initial training, everybody would be done and the relationship would basically be a holiday card and a hello at conference. And maybe you remember their name, maybe you didn't, but you know, you want to make sure you got that royalty check every week. Technology's actually changed for the better, but also to make it even more challenging for franchisors, the expectations now are different because of that as well. The expectation is that this is really a 24, 7 world that we live in and you need to be available to your franchisees either via live or via technology at all times. There's a higher bar now to cross.

I think that's fair. In the early days of Advantaclean, we have something called the 5Es and it was, you know, engagement, education, empowerment, emulation. And all of them had to do with being a high engagement model. Meaning when we considered rolling something out, whether it be a call center or how we were doing our marketing, tried to consider whether it would increase or decrease engagement. And we wanted a lot of touch. We did want to make sure that we could hear the whispers, we could keep a good pulse on the network. Of course. Now impress upon our franchisees that we need their feedback every month and it's critically important that we get it that way. So you're at this $40 million market cap. A company that's got a $40 million market cap is probably already burning a lot of calories just staying compliant. Being a publicly traded company, that's very expensive to do and it puts a strain on small businesses when they go public too early. So I don't know why they were public or what led to that. So what are some of the things along the way that made the biggest difference?

Well, I think some of the first things we found actually were the challenges and not having any experience in the franchising world prior to that. We went in thinking that you set out a plan, put the capital behind it, you communicated that plan you executed, and the franchisees would follow. What we didn't realize was there was a history of plans that have been put out there before, and the franchisees had put their capital into those plans and they hadn't worked. And so we, we were probably about a year and a half to two years into it and we had, you know, franchising. You always have your top 10 or 20%, that they're your leaders, they're, they're going to jump on board and follow. They were, they were extremely excited about new management coming in. So they were, they tended to follow a little bit closer to what we were talking about. But then there was the middle 60% that really, they'd seen it, they had heard it before, they were not going to jump on board. They were going to wait and see if it worked. And so they were kind of sitting on the sidelines. And the bottom 20%, you know, they weren't going to listen to what you had to say anyways because they had already heard that and wasted their money. So they were really going to be the last ones to come along. And we were about 18 to 24 months into it and we realized that was the situation. And, and so we actually had to almost slow down a little bit and say, you know what the first thing we need to do is, we don't need to give them a plan. We need to build trust and we need to build a relationship. Because if you don't understand their motivation and why they came into the business, how are you going to help them achieve the results they're looking for? And we would say, okay, we're going to go out this year and we're going to accomplish these two or three things. And then we would try to deliver four or five. If we could over deliver, we could build that trust a little bit faster. And so that's really how we kind of started. And, and a lot of it was really kind of fundamentally getting back to, okay, what are the things that are holding us back right now? And there's no business, I think, out there that's that difficult to figure out. What are the things that really drive this business financially? There's a lot of things emotionally connected to a business, but if you really strip away all of that, you'll find there's two or three things that really drive the financials. And we had to get in touch with what are those things and what are the things that are inhibiting us from getting to that stuff. In the first few years, really it was all about how do we make everything about this business about acquiring more used inventory so we can get more sales. And there was a lot of things that layers underneath that that were challenging. We had franchisees that didn't have the capital to go out and acquire that inventory. So. So the challenge there was to dig into their operations and say, you're doing a lot of things right, one of the few things you could be doing better, and then how do we help you guys grow? And that was really about the first, probably eight to 10 years we were in the business was just buy more and then help them grow more. And then it became after that a lot more sophisticated.

So rolling out four to five new deliverables initiatives, what did you learn about how to roll something out successfully?

Well, the first thing was we made sure that the ideas that we generated, the initiatives we undertook, were not just solely the initiatives and the thoughts of our team internally. You needed to get buy in from the franchisees or you needed to take the idea right from the franchise system. So talking to your franchisees, talking to your franchise advisory council, making sure that they knew you were asking of them what, you know, what it was that they were thinking was what was needed and then getting behind that and figuring out how to bake that in and then how to recommunicate that to the system, that, hey, this is what we're going to be going out and doing. That was really, you know, the, probably the biggest challenge. And then I would say secondly was, you know, learning from your franchisees. We went out and actually we said, the model is working in bits and pieces, but nobody's doing it perfect. But there was a group at the top that was doing it as close to perfect as we could see. So it's really going out and studying that top 10% and then taking some of those ideas and saying, okay, now before we put it out to the system, we do need to test it. We tested that in the corporate locations we had and we tested that with a group of franchisees that, you know, a lot of your high performers that you knew would execute well, but also some folks from that middle 60% that we knew that would execute probably closer to the reality for what our average franchisee would do. So we could see what the results look like and figure out what was the best way to kind of refine that. Then before we rolled that out, one of the other things we learned, which was, which actually probably had the greatest impact and that was as we rolled out these initiatives, we would commemorialize them in a just a kind of one sheet that we showed every year at conference. And we would say, okay, in this year, we rolled out these initiatives and we bucketized them. We put them in an operations bucket or a marketing bucket. And we wanted them to learn that these were building blocks. You can't jump in in year four and then decide, I'm going to jump on board now and start doing what Woodmark's telling me to do. We wanted to show them the history to say, if you're not doing the things from year one to three, then you're really not executing the model at the level that we're expecting to execute the model. And that worked very well because every year we roll up the new initiatives, we would start that conversation by showing them what we had already rolled out. And we could point to franchisees in the crowd that would support that to remind the franchisees that, hey, these are all building blocks and we want to be doing all of these things really well. And it's not to inundate them with things, but it's to give them a roadmap to say, start with this stuff that was a low hanging fruit. Make sure you're doing this really, really well, like it would be in, in, in any sport. There are some real basics before you get to that advanced swing that you really need to have those fundamentals down. And we wanted them to have those fundamentals because at the end of that we began to then take all the things they were doing operationally and we monetize that by tying it into what they were getting in terms of financial results. And we could then say, okay, we can help you make another $30,000 a year because this is one of your issues. Here's the three or four initiatives we rolled out in the last 10 years to help you get better here. And we can help you improve your gross margin, basis points or whatever it was by pointing those things and saying these things you're doing well. These things may be okay, these things you're really not doing, but here's the programs we're going to institute now to help you. Tying all those things together and continually reinforcing what you had already done was important to get them on the same page.

So what is the trends in the resale industry today. The gig economy is growing. Franchising is accelerating. More things are becoming franchised. As all that happens, I have to think that the resale industry is expanding. Is that the case?

Yeah, there's been a lot of changes over the last decade, especially with some of the business, they're going online. At Winmark, our franchisees were concerned. I sit on a board now, as you mentioned, of a company called Basecamp Franchising with two great brands in of themselves with Uptown cheesecake and kid to kid. A lot of those franchisees were met brick immortal world. When things moved online were concerned. Everybody was talking about, oh, if you're, if you're not Amazon and you're in brick and mortar, you're dead. And I think the number one thing to do was to make sure that we gave them the confidence that the business that we do each and every day is not going away anytime soon. People still love to come out and shop. In the retail world, especially people come out and every time they walk into a resale store, most of that inventory is changing up every single day. Every day you walk into an uptown sheepskin or a kid to kid or any of Winmark's brands, all of that merchandise or a lot of that merchandise may be new on the shelf. So it's that whole idea of that treasure hunt of getting those people back in. The one thing we knew was people are still going to have kids, those kids are still going to grow. They're going to outgrow that stuff before it's used up. And you have a younger generation now that's really into the recycling, which is great. And as long as a person in the resale business is executing bringing in that fresh inventory, buying that used inventory that they know is good quality, resellable inventory, every year they're going to grow their sales. Now they're seeing resale as these beautiful retail environments or beautiful online environment. And the merchandise they're buying looks brand new, but they're paying half the cost. And I think we're just finding out that we're creating a much smarter consumer, that they don't have the same hesitancy to shop secondhand as they did before. And that just begins to perliterate over time.

I would agree. Supplements, protein shakes, I'll subscribe and save and I'll just let them come to the house and let Amazon drop off a box. But I don't buy clothes, I don't buy shoes. The things that I want to touch and feel and see what the fabric's like, see if it fits. Actually, in our family, we've gotten very good about cleaning out our closets and taking it to Goodwill or. Or somewhere else so that other people can have access to it. I do keep all of my fat, medium, and skinny clothes because I. I vacillate between all three phases.

Yeah, we have to. At this age. I just.

I just rotate them. I got different color hangers for the, you know, my large, medium and, you know, whatever. And then we go back. But look, that's. That's just. That's just life.

Yeah. Yeah.

So moving over to franchising in general, private equities had an impact in franchising. And my old econ professor, I remember what he said was, well, any. Anytime anybody ran over somewhere in an open field and started waving the green flag of profits, that everybody would then run to that flag. So maybe that accelerates franchising because we can now talk with franchisees about outcomes that I couldn't have 10 years ago. What impact have you seen on the industry in terms of franchising?

Yeah, you know, and Tony, you. You and I come from an age where private equity wouldn't have even looked our way when we started out in this business. I think the one thing that probably was that green flag waving in the field was cash flow. You know, these guys saw that there was a tremendous amount of cash flow being created by these franchise companies, and private equity loves to buy cash flow. It was a trickle at first, and then all of a sudden the floodgates opened up, like with anything, you know, I think there's a ton of good that came from that, and then there's some real challenges that it's created for the franchise industry. And I think on the good side, franchise or is now have an outlet, you know, it's not just going public, maybe selling to a competitor. You know, they've got some real players now out there that can come in and. And we'll pay them a significant amount of money for that cash flow. And so if you're a franchisor and you do a great job and you can expect that, you know, you're going to. You're going to be a very wealthy person one day. You know, on the negative side, I do think that that kind of money is spurred on. Two other things going on in franchising right now. One is that private equity is coming in and buying these franchisors, maybe at times overpaying for some of that cash flow. They're going to look to try to grow fast. And sometimes that formula is not necessarily the best formula for their existing franchisees. You know, that's one influence of that money. The other influences, you've got a lot of franchisors that have jumped in with the goal of flipping and selling to private equity and they are coming in and doing a lot of things wrong. In the beginning they're, they're moving too quick, they're not building a strong foundation. It's that lure of that big money payday that they think about the end result of being a franchisor and they forget that that journey from start to finish may be two decades long before they're going to be in a position to sell that. So you really got as a franchise or enter this for the right reasons and you can't be thinking about an exit strategy the day that you enter there.

You are an advisory board member to Homefront Brands. I didn't mention that in the intro and we very much appreciate that. And when we start our meetings here with our team, we were very open that, you know, we're, we're making decisions as if we're 100 year brand and our management team is committed to 10 years to do it. Now that doesn't mean that we don't need to find a way to fund growth along the way, but we make long term decisions. I think the biggest impact of depending on when you get into a fund and what the, what the life of that fund is and how long they're going to hold the investment and what their targets are, that's what impacts some short term decision making that might be cash, cash flow focused and a lot of times those will have impact to the services that the franchisees are getting. So you got to have that pipeline and if you're in this reduction of services mode, that's a trend that you're going to have to invest more money to get back in the franchisees good graces to restore the support level. So.

Well, I think the other one of the things that I see you do, Jeff, and I really appreciate this in franchising is you put your money where your mouth is. Most franchisors are always chasing the dollar. They're selling tomorrow's franchise so that they can invest in the business today. And you know, the one thing I've noticed is that, you know, you're building the system first, which most franchisers, let's be honest, they don't start with a lot of capital and they started this very, very differently. So they don't have the means of the wherewithal to do what they need to do to really build it. They have a single unit or maybe four or five units that they've been running. They've got maybe some infrastructure in place. But there's a lot of things. We both know that when you become a franchisor, you need to add before you can take that out to the market and sell that as a business concept. And that's one thing I think I've watched you guys do, is to put those things in place first. That allows you to grow factor. You know, when you're adding 30, 40, 50 units in a year and you're a franchisor that doesn't have the means from a capital standpoint, that's going to be exacerbating your situation to the point that that might put you out of business. And that's really, I think, the most important thing for early stage franchisors to realize is it isn't just about what you're selling today, it's what you got to support tomorrow.

Look, I was there the first time around and yeah, you know, you would hire somebody who didn't have experience, but it was somebody that you could afford. And you'd say, I want you to be in this project manager role or this franchise business coach role. And you were trying to get people that you could afford and then make them into what you needed, which is extremely dangerous when you're at the executive team level or you're at the C suite. But I had to do it. Look, I'm hoping this person can get us 24 months down the road till we can afford a real president. And what that does is you've just given yourself a project, so now you're having to manage that person more tightly, hope that they can, you know, grow quick enough into the role. They're not clear and concise with the franchisees when they're answering questions, and it just, it creates this friction all around the organization.

You know, for candidates that are out there looking though, all of that that you mentioned is, is really important. You know, when you're looking at a franchise to, to invest in, those are all of the things that you need to be very cautious of. Are you doing your own due diligence? You know, I think a lot of them think that it's an honor for them to be awarded that franchise, but they don't understand that that Discovery Day, that Meet the Team Day, is their opportunity to interview their franchisor and to ask all those right questions to find out what happens if you know, tell me about what this will look like. Tell me about, here you are today, tell me what you look like tomorrow and then three years and in five years, and what will that support look like? And all those things are incredibly important to getting a solid return on that investment. And so they've got a job to do as well. And their job is to make sure that they pick the right franchisor that fits them as well.

So the economy is cyclical. And you've been in this long enough to have gone through some recessions and some zero interest rates and now some higher interest rates. How do you think about franchising in the current economic climate where we have really confusing employment numbers, a confused stock market, high interest rates, how do you think about franchising and what do you expect in the next six to 12 months?

You know, high interest rates are never good when people are going in to find money. A lot of our franchisees out there are getting their money from small banks. They're not getting from big national banks. If there's any kind of restrictions now being placed on the money that they're lending out, if they're going to start tightening up credit policy, that's going to really make a challenge feature franchising. But I think at the end of the day, you know, if you look at it historically, there's always about 18 to 25,000 transactions a year in franchising amongst the 4,000 franchisors. And, and that number doesn't really change. It goes up a little bit in a recession because people are out of work. It maybe comes down to earth a little bit more in good times when people are, are happy in their jobs and they don't want to leave the comfort of that salary and not benefits package. But I think for franchisors, it's really always a game every year, regardless of the macroeconomic conditions. It's a game of being ready to compete. It's a game of you're going out there every day, you got 4,000 competitors in your league. If you break that down, you begin to look at who are the people in your industry, within the industry. You look at who are the people within my price point. That's really the folks that you're competing against. And you're going to say, this flu is going to get X number of transactions, I need to get my fair share. And the way you do that is be a great franchisor. You know, we may not hit our lofty goal and growth numbers because maybe we just have some pie in the sky numbers. But we will be just fine if we can execute at that level and bring that home every year and continue to make that our focus. I mean, again, we go back to private equity. You know, one of the challenges is the amount of time that they hold these things. If you're not holding these for a long time, you have a gun to your head on getting results in an early timeframe. And if you can take that away as a franchisor and say, the only thing I have to worry about is the next 10 to 20 years, you make smarter decisions along the way with that.

Well, Steve, this has been incredible. And if I was an emerging franchisor, I would have learned a lot from you today. And I really thank you for being with us today on the home front. Last question. If you had one sentence to make an impact in someone's life, what would that sentence be?

You know, it's funny, I, I've got two boys, I've got a 27 year old and a 24 year old, and I'm suddenly smart again. Jeff, I don't know if you. I was dumb for a number of years, I'm suddenly a little smarter today. But it's one thing I tell them. I know a lot of people say, follow your passion. You know, they're young men, they're graduates, they're out in the world now trying to find their own way. They're, they're not following my footsteps, they're doing their own things. You know, the first thing I tell them is, you know, find something you're really passionate about. You know, find something you, you wake up every day and you just enjoy doing that. And that's easy. A lot of people say that, but I think the other side of that is don't forget to stop and do other things in your life. Have a complete life. And, you know, for my kids, I said, you know, there's a number of ways to measure success and, you know, financial is only one. And financial is not going to be a guarantee of happiness in life. So you really have to have a lot of other metrics when you look at the bigger picture in life and say, have I lived a full life? Have I, have I lived a purposeful life? And I think if you are on your deathbed one day and you look back and can say, check, check, check, and maybe you didn't get all of them, but you got nine out of 10, you know, I think you're going to be a lot more fulfilled than the person that was just chasing that.

Dollar we are 100% aligned on that. Great wisdom. Thank you for sharing that.

Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me.

So if anybody's interested in reaching out to you for advising, investing or board member interest, how can people reach you? Steve?

Best way to reach me is find me on LinkedIn under Steve Murphy. Or you can reach me at my email. It's fa murphy0001ahoo.com awesome, Steve, thank you again.

Thank you for the impact that you're making at Homefront Brands and in franchising in general and for investing your time with us here today on the Homefront.

Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely, sir. And as always, this podcast has been brought to you by Homefront Brands, delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the home front where it matters. So if this sounds like you, check us out today@homefrontbrands.com and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty with us right here on the home front. I will be looking for you here and thank you for listening.