But this is an hour south of Tampa.
So if you're looking on a map,
it's West coast of Florida,
Gulf, the Gulf side they call it.
Yeah.
And I've been here just three years this month,
born and raised in New York city.
Nice.
They say you moved to Florida
and the sand gets stuck in your shoes.
You can't leave.
Yeah.
That's true.
Yeah.
And how long have you been doing franchises for?
So I've been in the franchise industry almost 25 years.
I've owned and operated franchises.
First one was a great success.
You know, we'll talk about that.
All right.
Welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
With Jackson Calame, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building
fantastic visions out there.
What's up everybody?
And welcome to Vision Pros Live.
I'm Jackson Calame.
I'm your host.
What's up everybody and welcome into Vision Pros Live.
I'm your show host, Jackson Calame,
founder and CEO of First Class Business.
And I've got Tom Scarta joining me today.
Tom is a franchise veteran of more than 25 years.
And I'm excited to dive into the modern world
of franchising.
I love that he, when we were talking just now,
he talked about how this is not
your grandfather's franchise, right?
The franchise game has changed a lot
over the last several decades.
So understanding what that horizon looks like
in the here and now in 2023, super important to me.
We might be talking about the economy a little bit.
We might be talking about the pros and cons.
We'll see where that goes.
But before we dive into that, and I bring him on stage,
a quick shout out to a few of our sponsors.
We've got ColdClick.
ColdClick is a system we use
for helping with our LinkedIn automation.
And we've got a great connection rate,
if you're familiar with connection rates.
If you're not, I'll just kind of educate you a little bit.
Most people are probably getting between a two
and a 12% click through rate or connection rate on LinkedIn.
That's not very good.
I've had campaigns that get between that seven
and 15% mark when we just don't hit it right.
We're getting a 46% connection rate.
So having the right message to warm people up
and overcome the stranger danger aspect is super important.
Also having a team that helps you make sure
that you don't get put in LinkedIn jail.
That's another reason to be working with somebody
who knows the rules and regulations
and knows the algorithms to help keep you protected.
Simply fast websites.
That's another interesting entity.
Now we don't use this entity,
but that's because we've already established our brand.
If you go to firstclassbusiness.io,
you're gonna see a website that costs us thousands of dollars
to create in terms of energy, time,
monetary commitment and value to our web developer
and designer and beyond.
But if I were starting from scratch
and I never built a website before,
I personally wouldn't use Squarespace or Wix to do that.
I could, but I would rather have some guidance
from somebody who knows what's going on.
I would know that in $179,
I'm not gonna get the best website in the world,
but what a fantastic pricing point to start with
and get your feet wet with somebody
who has a passion for the industry.
So Shane Michael really impressed me
and I was like, this is great.
We have all sorts of people out there who need help
with growing their business.
I think COVID economics is a thing.
I think we're experiencing it as a world
and it just makes that climb for entrepreneurs
that much steeper to make it up.
So it's important to gravitate towards those
who are willing to help, who are willing to give,
who are willing to make a big difference.
So the Water Project, while our problems as business owners,
our challenges, our first world,
I also plead that you take a look
into what you can do to help out in the third world,
specifically these areas of Africa
that don't have access to clean drinking water.
And if you didn't have clean drinking water yourself,
you'd probably drink whatever you could to survive
or use the shower and et cetera.
And that can create all sorts of disease and problems.
It also means that instead of your kids being in school,
they're walking for miles at a time
to go get water for their community to help out.
And that probably leads to some disgruntled relationships.
It probably leads to stress, fear, anxiety
that we can't relate to with where we live.
So what can we do about that?
Well, we can give a dollar or five or 10,000
or whatever we'd like.
But what's really cool about that project
is they show you exactly what happens to those communities.
So if any of you out there like, dang, Jackson,
you always talk so much about this, get on with it.
I'm gonna say no.
Like pull your heart out of your butt and start
preparing to contribute and give back.
Don't ever forget about the people in this world
who suffer more than us, please.
That's my plea with you.
So now that I'm done chastising those of you
who don't like the whole give back thing,
I'm gonna move on to somebody who does like to give back.
We're gonna bring Tom on screen.
So Tom, thank you so much for joining me on Vision Pros, man.
And I look forward to tackling franchise with you.
Hey, Jackson, this is an honor.
I'm so excited to be on your show.
It's so great.
And the sponsors you have, man, spot on.
I love it.
The Water Project, we'll talk more about that later.
Okay, I'll make it.
We'll have to put a pin in that and come back to it.
And it's hard to remember later, but I love that idea.
Hold me to it, Tom.
So Tom, let's dive in hot and heavy.
Who should be listening?
Why should they listen to you specifically?
And what are they going to get out of today's show?
So anyone who is frustrated with their career,
thinking about making a change in their life,
someone who might be laid off,
or somebody looking to even just diversify investments,
there's someone who should listen.
The reason maybe they should listen to me,
and I don't know, maybe they shouldn't be listening to me,
but my background goes all the way back
to being a New York City subway conductor
working on the trains in New York City.
After 13 years, there was somebody there,
a kind of a senior person said,
hey, Tom, this is a great job
because you'll always have a shirt on your back.
He said, you'll never have a silk shirt,
but at least you'll have a shirt.
And I was like, wait a second,
that sounds like mediocrity to me.
And so I wanted to be a business owner
because as I looked around,
my bosses were not wearing silk shirts,
but business owners wore.
And so I realized that a franchise
is a business with training wheels,
and that's what I needed, somebody to hold my hand,
take me through the whole process
from learning how to even understand what a franchise is
all the way to building the business
and being able to sell it.
So I bought a franchise back in 2000.
In 2005, I sold it and sent me retired at 41 years old.
And then I bought a second franchise
just because I was cocky
and I thought I could do anything I wanted to.
I bought a second franchise and within two years it failed
and I lost almost my entire life savings.
That's what made me a franchise expert.
And that's why somebody should listen to me.
If they are thinking about buying a franchise
or getting into business at all,
is I can show you the ropes and how to avoid
getting in financial trouble.
Oh man, I love that.
I really do.
And I thank you for utilizing that story.
I mean, we as a society,
I think this is just in general human instinct.
We wanna follow the perfect path, right?
We wanna follow that person
who never made a mistake along the way.
But we forget that we make mistakes every day
and we're going to make mistakes, right?
We're going to have challenges.
So, I would much rather,
if I was gonna train to climb Mount Everest, for instance,
yes, I wanna train with somebody
who's been successful at it, but I would be stupid
to also not look for the advice and the training
from the person who did not make it
and find out why didn't they make it.
I mean, we should get multiple opinions,
but as we talk about the franchise academy,
we're gonna come back to that particular experience
of the failure probably have been hard in just a little bit.
So, what's your vision for those that you serve
in 30 seconds?
My vision is to help people get off their duff
and make a change in their life
because the world is waiting for them.
Everyone has a gift and I am trying to get it out of them.
And it's not just about franchising.
It's about making that change to get out of your own way.
Yeah, very good.
Okay, and I like this.
You've got this stance, you know,
this natural repellence to mediocrity.
So do I.
We get along on that big time.
So what about you?
What's your vision for yourself over the next 10, 15 years?
Well, I'd like to play golf as much as I can,
but I realized early on I wanted to, you know,
be on a grand stage and try to affect
all these different people in audiences all over the world.
And I realized that I could just affect people
one person at a time, and that has a butterfly effect
and a ripple effect throughout the world.
And so I do that.
I just want to be able to communicate with people
and help them, you know, get to levels in their life
that they would not have been able to get to
if we never met.
And so I'm all about, you know,
goals and vision for the future.
And I use the old Dan Sullivan, you know,
the strategic coach, his question about, you know,
if you think about your life three years from now,
what would have to happen so you could tell me
that you're happy and satisfied professionally
and also personally.
And so when I can understand where somebody wants to be,
then I can help them get there.
I like that too.
So, okay, so one of the things I really like
about your answer, Tom, is most people shy away
from any personal ambitions or pleasures
when I ask that question.
And you hit a head on.
And I think it's okay, like, I hope the world hears that
and says, oh, cool, like, he does want to balance.
He's not just giving me the elbow, elbow, hand wave pageant,
you know, I want world peace only.
I don't want to call it BS, but overcompensation, right?
I like golf too, you know?
Yeah, I could play a few more rounds of golf in my life.
I like the Spurs and basketball.
I'd love to go to a few more Spurs games in life.
And I like to spend time with my kids, right?
Those are certainly important things.
And I also appreciate that you talked about helping the one.
You know, your stage opportunities,
you know it, they'll come.
You know, you keep helping the one.
That's going to continue to lead to that.
But rather than just chasing the big ambition,
you know, it looks like you're also appreciating
the victories along the way.
And I think a lot of vision pros can learn from just that.
Do you have anything you want to add regarding that segment
before we move on?
Well, just that, you know, as I got older,
I learned just about myself and my faults.
And my number one fault is my ego.
Oh yeah?
That's the number one thing.
I think we all fight that where we want to, you know,
if you are like an entrepreneur
and you're trying to get ahead, it's all about,
you got to think about what do you want to get ahead?
You know, and it's to please your parents,
to please your friends, you know, to show off, you know, why?
Why do you want to do this?
Once I did that for myself, I realized, wait a second,
I don't need all of, wait, I'm trying to do the wrong thing.
I'm coming at it at the wrong angle.
Let's think about, you know, what my mission is.
My mission is one person at a time.
That's good enough.
That's cool.
And there's a couple of synonyms with that word ego.
One of them is New Yorker.
One of them is Texan.
So we, no, you don't think so?
What do you mean by that?
I mean, as Texans, as New Yorkers,
we both tend to gravitate towards this grand feeling of pride.
And sometimes we overdo it a little bit
with the pride thing.
Is that fair?
That is very fair and spot on for sure.
And no, I see you,
I've seen you already in this conversation exercise
a lot more humility than most people
who are still working on that ego thing.
So we should probably dive into that
when we talk about the powerful lesson
is how do you make that transition
from somebody who's got a high ego or a big ego
and needs to figure out how to recognize that.
But before we do that,
let's dive deep and heavy into the dark subject
of what's your worst business experience ever
and whether that's a franchise loss or not.
So I think the worst thing was buying a second franchise
and then failing and the humility of that
and the humbling experience that was,
back then I was crying about it, literally.
Now, 15, 16 years later,
I feel blessed that it actually happened.
That was really an important event.
So now I could talk to people and say, I've been there.
Because there's a lot of fear when you're making this change,
when you make any kind of changes of fear.
And naturally, and I can say, hey, listen,
I'm the guy to help because I've been there
and it stunk, but no one died.
Let me put it that way.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
All right, I wanna ask you about this franchise
and what it was too.
But I gotta ask you first,
do the women in your life often tell you
you look like a better looking version than Robert De Niro?
Forget about it, of course.
You pulled it off, I like that, that's cool.
So anybody, anybody who agrees with me,
drop that in the comments too.
We have a small social following right now.
So you may not see the comment on there,
but I know a lot of them are gonna be thinking
that in their hearts, Rob, Tom.
So let's talk about this franchise.
What was it?
What was the deal?
Was it an ape shop before vape?
Yeah, I wish.
I might have survived then,
but it was something called Super Suppers,
which was ahead of its time actually.
What it was is a place where you come to our studio,
it was like a Tuscan style kitchen
and you make meals in bulk.
You follow our recipes, use our ingredients
and take them home and freeze them.
On days when you're busy, you throw it in the oven
and you have a home cooked meal in like 20 minutes.
So when you think about it, like on paper,
what busy mom, what busy parent, mom or dad,
would not love that concept?
And it started out with a bang.
And we were, and so this is 2006,
we were on literally the front cover
of the Sunday New York Times.
Below the fold, so it wasn't the headline,
but it was below the fold at the bottom
and it was an article about us and it said,
we're changing the way America eats,
the way Swanson TV dinners and McDonald's
did 50 years earlier.
And I was like, wow, we're gonna be billionaires,
let alone millionaires.
And fast forward 2008, a lot of things happened.
I mean, I wrote a book about it called Franchise Savvy,
which you could find on Amazon,
it's actually a best seller right now.
And so I wrote about my stories,
good and bad, to help people understand.
Like this book is not about the numbers
and you're not gonna find charts and all that,
but it's my stories of the experiences I've had.
And so I could talk a lot more about why it failed.
Now in retrospect, I understand what happened,
but I coach people to not make the mistakes
that I made the second time around
and do the things I did the first time around
when I was able to semi-retire.
Ah, interesting.
And I think I would like to talk some about that.
So again, powerful lesson stage,
I think we'll dive into that.
One thing that I will talk on now though,
is that it's interesting.
You're one of the first people that I've talked to
that of the people who went through the economic crisis
in 2008, some of my audience is younger
than having had that experience, but you went through that.
I didn't hear you leverage that as the end all be all,
only thing to blame.
External factor caused your failure, hint, hint.
You actually seem to take accountability
for that situation.
So did the economic impact,
was it a driver and force as well, the environment,
or was it not as big?
What percent of a factor do you think that was
on the failure of the franchise?
I think it was a mitigating factor.
I don't think it was a big factor.
I feel that we were one of the first casualties
that fell back then when the economic climate
was just collapsing and you couldn't get money,
you couldn't borrow money.
It was tough economically, but we had other problems.
The problem, and this is like,
if you're looking for a franchise,
it was a brand new concept that had never been done before.
So there was no market to figure out
if this is gonna work.
It would have been great if it was during COVID time,
because it would have been perfect for COVID.
Right.
But we were ahead of our time, I think.
You were in the blue ocean,
and every article writer loves to write
about the quality of the blue ocean.
And I'm like, nobody's in the blue ocean.
That's the problem with it, is you don't have a market yet.
Right, right.
Like I think about the folks that created things
like Uber or Airbnb.
It's like, you gotta start from zero.
There's nothing there.
You have no idea if this darn thing is gonna work or not.
That's true entrepreneurship, right?
But that's scary as all heck to me.
A franchise, like I said, is a business with training wheels.
So it's been done.
And so people ask me all the time,
like, what's the hottest franchise and all that,
but is there something great that's in the green economy?
And the short answer is no, there's not.
And the reason why is that the green economy right now
is cutting edge, it's brand new.
And franchising doesn't do brand new things well.
If you think about it, McDonald's did not invent hamburgers.
Amco Transmission did not invent transmissions.
And the fitness gyms did not invent
going to the gym and working out.
What they did is they systematized
and brought it to market and brought it out
to the suburban areas of the country
and internationally for those that are listening
internationally, that's what franchising is good at.
So you wanna get into something that people use every day.
And people say, oh, but this competition,
yeah, this competition because people use it.
It's a market, that's the difference.
Exactly, and let's take a look at this together
to drive your point home.
Uber, right?
How much funding did they start with, right?
They started with a funding round of 1.3 million.
Now, that's not a lot of money,
but that's more than most of you raise.
And if you're in a blue ocean, a new concept,
then this is something you need to consider.
Let's go down a little bit further though
and see the truth behind how much they raised.
Uber funding round, Crunchbase, how much?
Uber has raised $25.2 billion.
Okay, I'm not sure that Crunchbase
has this information correct,
but I have heard that they've raised over 100 million.
So you'd have to look through this.
Whether it's 100 million or 25 billion,
both those numbers are beyond what most people consider
when it comes to tackling a market.
But if you're gonna tackle a blue ocean market,
oh my goodness, the amount of awareness you have to raise
for what's going on, the amount of hoops
you have to jump through, politics, et cetera,
it's insane.
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry, I cut you off.
You're good.
Okay.
I'm all for it.
Yes.
I was just gonna say, on that note,
I hold nothing against the franchise company.
I made the choice to buy it.
I could have maybe sued somebody.
That never even crossed my mind.
I wanted to really, so the point I wanted to make is
you gotta get into something that is tried and true.
And what we learned with Super Suppers is that
not only did I do the, I had to do marketing and advertising,
but I had to do educational advertising,
which is just, it costs a lot of money.
So people would come into the store,
they'd be going to Walgreens or something,
and they would stop in and go, what is this?
You would take five minutes, explain it,
and they'd be, oh my God, that's brilliant.
And hopefully they would come back
and make some meals with you.
But that's one of the problems right there,
is the amount of educational marketing.
You need a lot of time and money,
which also is the main point that I make in the book is
we had to change people's habits.
And when it comes to food, it's hard to do that.
So it makes a lot of sense to come to our location
and make meals, right?
You're doing it with your own hands.
If you don't like onions, you leave them out.
I mean, it's totally your meal.
And you take them home, freeze them, and it's great.
But what happens is after you run out of those meals,
it's easier just to go to your local supermarket
and buy like a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad
and call it dinner and you're done,
instead of making an appointment to come in with us
and make your meals in bulk.
So that was a big problem is changing people's habits.
Yeah, absolutely.
That is not easy to do.
I'm also glad that you brought up educational marketing.
For most people listening in,
marketing is marketing is marketing is marketing.
Like it's all the same, just like sales is all the same
and it's either bad or good, depending on how you look at it.
On the flip side with marketing, there are others
more educated along the path that understand
that there's branding and there's conversion marketing.
And usually when they start to find out about that,
they gravitate towards one or the other,
make people feel good and believe in the brand long-term
or get people to buy and get people to buy
as much as you can, as fast as you can.
But you talked about one of the gaps in the middle
and there are many, that is that
educational marketing component.
It's not easy, we're not gonna dive into it right now,
but any of you that are listening,
I'm just kind of rehashing these things
so that you can take better notes
and think about looking this stuff up on YouTube.
I always say go to YouTube and when you have a new subject,
look up the videos that are two to three minutes long,
and learn those and let the experts handle the rest,
but go after those two to five minute videos
if you don't know a subject
and make sure to bring yourself up to speed with the basics.
Let's talk about your best experience in business.
What does that look like, Tom?
What was your best experience or what is?
You know, a lot of people might say
and my mind sort of went to,
well, when I make a lot of money, you know,
and that was not the best thing.
What the best thing was, believe it or not,
and as you're asking this question,
because you didn't prep me with these questions,
so this is awesome to talk about.
The thing that comes to mind
is providing people with a job,
because the average franchise when you start
will create 20 jobs, 10 directly and 10 indirectly,
so 20 altogether.
And there was a couple who met at my business,
got married, had kids.
So I think, you know, like the sliding door stuff
where if I never opened that business,
where they have not met and created this family.
You created a family.
Well, you didn't, but the environment cultivated
that experience.
Right, so that's the kind of stuff that gives me chills
and that's what I love about it.
And that's why I say I try to get people off of their doff
to do something, because everybody has,
I'm not talking about franchising at all.
I'm talking about following your dream to, you know,
people have a gift and they just stuff it down
and don't do anything with it.
And you always have a low hum of frustration in your life
if you're not doing what you're meant to do,
what God put you here to do.
Yeah, man, so there you were.
You were working in the subway.
A gentleman, you know, ultimately was excited
to help you catch the vision of the blessing you guys had,
which he did.
You know, hey, you got a shirt on your back.
This is great, right?
And at the same time, you had something calling you.
You had something deeper calling you
and it wasn't necessarily about the silk shirt either.
What was going on?
What was driving you back then?
You know, and what were some of those thought processes
that took you from that conversation
that had been nagging at you to get you to think,
I gotta go do something bigger?
You know, it's hard to pinpoint it exactly.
So, I mean, when I grew up, my parents were civil servants,
my dad was a New York City police officer,
and my mom worked for the New York City Board of Education.
They never told us to go to school, me and my brothers.
They told us, get a job with a pension.
That's, get a government job, get a job with a pension,
which is good advice for a lot of people.
And for my brothers, for me, I felt like there was more.
I had like a creative itch.
Something was, and I can't pinpoint it to this day,
but I wanted to do something more.
And then, you know, my wife, we're married 35 years now,
but back then-
Congratulations.
Me, Tony Robbins' first book,
like when he first came out in 1991, I think it was,
I could be wrong with the date,
but early on, nobody knew who this guy was.
And I was like, this is awesome, man.
And I started getting into more and more
of that kind of reading.
Like you, the listeners probably heard of Rich Dad,
poor dad, if you haven't, buy that book immediately.
Bing, bing.
You can do that.
Right, and there's so many like that.
We could probably spend a whole podcast
just talking about business books that changed our lives.
But, so I remember very clearly sitting on the train
reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
One of the reasons I'm here today is because of that book.
And so you start getting that kind of,
when you start feeding your head that kind of information,
it comes out in different ways.
So it came out in me buying a franchise.
And I tried different things prior to that.
I tried multi-level marketing.
I tried to start like a marketing business.
I didn't know what I was doing.
But that's when I realized, hey, you know,
I went to some seminars and I read books about franchising
and realized that a franchise is a business
with training wheels, as I said earlier.
And that's what I needed.
That I needed the systems, I needed the process
because I didn't know what to do.
And most business owners don't.
And that's why starting from scratch is very, very difficult.
Even if it's something that's tried and true,
some auto mechanic, it's, you know,
the thing that you realize when you get into business
is that the business, they're like fixing cars
is 10% of owning an auto shop.
It's all the other back office stuff,
employees and taxes and marketing and you know,
you know how it is.
Yeah, I do, I love that.
The franchise is a business with training wheels.
I'm gonna pull that up on the screen while we talk.
Just drop it right there.
And let's have in the next question.
So, you know, that alone is a massively powerful lesson
for those who are ready to hear it.
You know, for those who aren't, it can feel,
again, that ego can come in and like,
I don't want training wheels.
You know, I'm not a baby, I'm not a child, aren't we all.
But going towards that, the next powerful lesson,
if there's one powerful lesson you could share
on this podcast, it was your last opportunity
to share a lesson, what would it be?
The lesson I would share is like,
this was the last time anybody was gonna hear from me is,
don't become infatuated with a business concept.
Keep your mind open.
What you think might be the right thing may not be.
So research it, know what you're getting into,
understand every aspect, write a business plan,
write that business plan over and over until you got it.
You know, you could kind of recite it
and just don't become infatuated.
Okay.
And then back to some of these other powerful lessons
we were talking about.
So, I mean, feel free to hit whichever one
comes back to your mind,
whether it's you wanna circle back to the water project
or you wanna circle back to, you know,
one of these other elements,
or you wanna dive into franchise and what should we look for?
I know the audience is probably like
on the edge of their seat, like,
what are we supposed to do with franchises now?
So feel free to go in any of those directions.
Well, you know, we have limited time
and I wanna talk about everything,
but the one thing is like the water project.
I've heard of it.
I had no idea that you were involved.
I'm involved in a small way.
I'm a contributor like everybody else that contributes.
No, I hear you.
I mean, even cold click,
I wanna learn more about myself.
I mean, your sponsors are great.
Like for me, I have a little podcast
called the Franchise Academy and I don't have sponsors,
but when people come on the show,
I ask them to contribute to some humanitarian causes,
whether it's Make-A-Wish Foundation.
I have three or four right on my website.
They click through, money goes straight to them.
I don't touch it at all.
And that's, so my point is, like with the water project,
you're here, you're trying to like do stuff
and make business happen and customers
and marketing and blah, blah, blah.
And why are you really doing this?
And what you're doing is you're building a base
so you can help less fortunate people.
I can make a lot of money and buy a Ferrari.
That's not gonna do squat for me personally.
I mean, I'll be happy with it for like a day or two.
After a while, it's like, all right, I got a Ferrari.
But when you are helping less fortunate people,
whatever's ever on your heart, whatever's important to you,
that's what makes you get up in the morning.
And that's why you gotta know your why,
which is the sign I have behind me.
You gotta remember why you're doing it.
Otherwise, it just is gonna become stale.
Your customers will feel that it's stale coming from you.
So you gotta know your why and act on it on a daily basis.
Remember it, meditate on it, pray on it, whatever it is.
And that's kind of, I know it's esoteric
and a lot of people are like, oh,
it's not what I wanna hear on a business podcast.
But that's gonna drive you, man, I'm telling you.
That's gonna be the key.
It's huge.
And people may not wanna hear it,
but I hope they, again, pull their earmuffs off
and take the opportunity.
I think we do have, one, there are lots of people
who appreciate that, who are older in life.
We also have learned a lot.
If you look at Forbes and Inc.
and some of the studies out there,
the younger employees, they tend to appreciate
more of the experience, the aspect of belonging.
They wanna make a difference in what they do.
Certainly, they wanna create wealth,
but Tim Ferriss ultimately led the charge
for creating the NR, the new rich, right?
Which is experience rich, doing things with your time.
So I think there's a, the nice thing is
that's no longer a blue ocean.
That is the primary ocean that people go to.
They're looking for just that.
So words well said.
And to put some, but yeah,
to put some practicality behind it as well.
And I would ask a franchise, 2023,
what should we be looking at?
What can we expect from the franchise academy too?
Because let me give a couple of examples.
I do have a little bit of background in franchises.
One, I eat at them often, right?
So there's a McDonald's near my youngest daughter's house.
We go three McDonald's away in our case
because the experience is one, they're playing on shutdown.
But the one that's two McDonald's away,
the experience is awful.
It is horrific these days.
And so we specifically go three days, three down.
I don't know if it's different franchise owner or not,
but one of the challenges you face as a franchise owner
is taking for granted, you know,
that you have a responsibility to maintain that franchise
and try to be the best out of those franchises
if you want to really win.
Now flip side, my parents owned a twice the ice machine
that they sold with one of their businesses.
That's a pretty popular franchise right now.
They did pretty well with it.
They didn't do as well as they wanted to,
says every entrepreneur in every venture.
So they did really well
with that little franchise ice box machine.
What franchises though,
you've had your eye on the market as a franchise leader,
what should we be looking for?
What principles, what red flags,
how do you choose which one you want out of,
I don't know, is there a million franchise concepts
these days or a hundred thousand?
Well, great question.
And thank you for this question.
This is kind of my forte, right?
So there's 4,000 franchise concepts
that span 90 different industries.
89 industries have nothing to do with fast food,
which is always top of mind
because of the likes of McDonald's.
So almost anything that you,
any kind of skillset that you have,
you could probably employ it in a franchise.
So that's important.
Like I said, you may not,
so in my opinion,
a franchise is not the be all and end all
for your professional career.
A franchise or really any business
is a vehicle to get you what you want in life.
Or your job will do the same thing.
However, your job is limited
and you're trading your time for money.
In a business, you're building a lifestyle
and you can actually buy time.
It's the only, they say time is the most valuable commodity
and it's true.
But with the right business,
with systems in place
and great employees that are working and doing,
you could buy time.
Meaning like, if I don't want to do task A,
I hire somebody to do it.
And that could be in your business
and it also could be back at home.
I don't like to go to the dry cleaners
and I don't like to get my car washed.
I pay somebody to do that.
I don't personally,
I'm saying you could if you're building wealth.
And by doing that,
you're also providing somebody jobs to help you.
And so it's a symbiotic relationship with your employees.
In the franchise world,
in a lot of cases, there's no barrier to entry,
but there's a barrier to scalability.
And that's what the franchise will help you with
is to scale it and get it really big.
Like a lot of people will buy,
start up a store or buy a store and that's it.
They got one, they chase their tail,
trying to keep it alive, employee turnover,
the whole thing.
But in a franchise, they teach you how to avoid
a lot of those potholes that people would run into.
So that's important.
The last thing I wanted to say is the title of,
this podcast we're talking about,
it's not your grandfather's franchise.
What I mean by that,
because we didn't touch on it yet,
is the fact that right now,
there's an enormous amount of money being poured
into franchises all over the country,
private equity money,
because they know that franchises are successful
for the most part.
And so we have, you buy a franchise,
it could be a simple house painting franchise.
I mean, you can't really get more simple than that.
Painting houses, like why would I need a franchise?
I could just go to Home Depot,
buy some brushes and go to work.
Well, yeah, you could.
But what the franchise provides is, as an example,
a customer-facing app.
So when I get a customer,
they can see my employee, see their background,
how long they've been painting for,
and they see them on a map driving to their house.
They see their background,
oh, they got a dog, they have a wife, they have a kid.
And so that kind of stuff is what makes a franchise
just kind of blast out in the market
and really kind of blot out the sun.
It's huge.
It's a laser beam of marketing.
It's a marketing machine for you.
And in addition to that,
let's look at the worst case scenario in these situations.
So I go get a bucket of paint, right?
And I go to paint a house.
When I get there, I paint the house,
and the homeowner hates the color,
even though it's exactly what they asked for, right?
And now I've got to figure out,
how do I handle this argument
with somebody who wanted this done?
And whoops, we spilled the paint bucket.
And the paint bucket ends up causing problems.
So now we've got to cover the costs and expenses of that too,
but we forgot about business insurance.
So we didn't get business insurance.
And so now we've got a lawsuit on our hands
and thousands of dollars in repairs.
And on the way home from that paint experience,
I had bought a magnet on VistaPrint for my car
to showcase my brand name.
And bam, I get hit by another car.
But because I have my logo on that car,
I am now liable, my company is now liable for that wreck,
because I also didn't have insurance
that covered the experience that occurs
as I'm traveling to and from those jobs.
And I've got all these problems.
And then you got taxes to pay and figure out.
You've got so, like you said, there's so many things
that as entrepreneurs we take for granted.
We don't realize, like, oh, we'll just figure that out.
And you can.
And you don't always go through, very rarely
do you go through all of those scenarios.
But there are so many scenarios like that
that you have to learn to overcome as a business owner.
And the franchise is there as the ultimate series
of mentors and I would say companions
that you can learn from.
You've got a built-in mastermind of people
trying to do the same thing, going
through the same problems and challenges.
I, as a business owner who's done it the hard way many,
many, many times, understand completely
the value of a franchise.
So well said.
Well said, Tom.
Thanks for getting me on my tangent for that.
Yeah, no, that's great.
And the other thing that I think,
there was something else that you left out
which would have made it a little bit even more or less
desirable to have your own business.
And it escaped me at the moment.
But the thing is, when you go back to the painting business,
you show up and there's competitors.
Look in, I'll say, the Yellow Pages or Google
Painters in your neighborhood.
There's a million of them.
Yes, sir.
When they come to your house, they're
coming in a broken down pickup or a broken down van.
They might have a baseball cap that says their brand name
on it.
And then they do their estimate.
They have a tape measure and then
they're doing it on this paper that they got from Staples.
When the franchise comes, it's a branded truck.
It's wrapped in the colors and the logo.
They're wearing the shirt, the uniform, the whole nine yards.
They have an iPad with a laser measuring thing on it.
And so they could measure your house.
They know the difference between how much paint it will take
to paint a six panel door as opposed to a one panel door.
And when they came to paint my house,
the first thing they said to me was,
what's one thing that we can do that will have you never
recommend us?
Great question.
It's like, leave the side gate open and let my dog out.
You will never be allowed on this block again,
let alone get a referral.
So it's that level of professionalism.
So the guy who's just a regular painter,
he's going to ask you for a 50% down payment.
The franchise company won't.
And the reason the non-franchise guy asks you for the down 50%
is because he can't afford to go to Charlemand Williams
and buy the paint.
So he needs that money so he can buy your paint
to paint your house because they're chasing their tail
because they don't know how to run a business.
They know how to paint the house beautifully,
but they don't know how to run a business.
Right.
And with that, they might know how to,
but they've also got to attract subcontractors.
You do in both scenarios.
And which company is going to attract the higher quality
worker, the Sherman Williams that
has a brand name benefits package,
infrastructure for hiring in HR, or the guy
who's trying to figure it out on his own
and can't provide you a whole lot of security about why
you should work with him.
Maybe he can kind of promise partnership
or some type of flexibility that you can't get elsewhere.
So if you hire workers who want flexibility,
another word for flexibility is inconsistency.
And so it's important to realize that there's
virtues and vices that often go hand in hand with each other.
And think about it from a restaurant standpoint.
If you were going to get a job at a restaurant
and you had the option between a hole in the wall where
you don't know the owner, you don't know the brand,
you don't know the culture, you don't know what to expect,
or Chick-fil-A. And at Chick-fil-A,
you got, again, all the benefits.
You get a great salary.
You get great training.
It's nice and clean.
They treat people with respect.
There's everywhere you go.
Chick-fil-A is almost the exact same in terms of their service,
bright flowers and the tables.
Which one is going to be more attractive in general?
I think it's an easy answer for all of us listening in.
And so whether they're franchise or not,
the core concept of having a model that is well followed
and well executed is just an amazing inspiration to me
and what I try to build at first class business the hard way.
I'll tell you, Jackson, a surprise to the listeners
will be that McDonald's does not sell hamburgers and fries.
And Chick-fil-A does not sell chicken and tater tots.
What they both sell is dependability and reliability.
Yeah.
Well said.
They do.
Dependability and reliability.
And we would do well as business owners, as visionaries,
to prepare for answering basic questions.
Not am I reliable or am I dependable,
but how can I be more reliable?
How can I improve my dependability for others?
We're constantly looking to improve that.
We've probably got a life well lived
to look forward to, to play a little bit with the past
and future tense.
So Tom, this was an absolute pleasure.
I do look forward to staying in touch.
We will definitely be recommending the Franchise
Academy.
Well, I've pretty much done that throughout the show.
I can't highlight enough for those
who are starting a business the importance
it is to take the extra few hours to look into it.
If you don't have another franchise wizard
in your corner, somebody to help you evaluate that,
then give Tom a call.
Look at what he's doing.
Listen to his podcasts.
See if that could be an opportunity for you.
Because going the entrepreneur, there's
a reason why I don't promote my business to new entrepreneurs.
I tell them, listen, I want to work with entrepreneurs
that have three to five years of experience minimum.
Because you're a massive liability
when you're trying to figure it out from scratch
and you haven't done this before and you haven't had
the training of a franchise.
And it's a dangerous game to play with.
So I hope somebody in this audience hears that today
and says, oh, man, I should do my research on this stuff.
If so, I feel like we've done our job well.
And Tom, anything you want to add here at the end?
Where can people connect with you?
Yeah, so thefranchiseacademy.com.
I have the franchise-savvy book.
If anybody's interested, because they're listeners of yours,
I'd be happy to send them a free copy.
Awesome.
My first book is called The Magic of Choosing Uncertainty.
This is really my pride and joy.
This book is about making changes.
It doesn't have to be, it doesn't mention the word
franchise once in the whole book.
Again, if anybody wants any of these books,
you could email me.
You could go through Jackson to get to me.
But it's just, I'm available at thefranchiseacademy.com,
and my email is there and all that good stuff.
I love that.
And The Magic of Choosing Uncertainty,
what a powerful title.
So definitely look forward to the books, Tom.
Thanks for offering that to the audience.
You heard him.
Feel free to sign up on that.
Let us know in the comments or send us
private messages on the social media channel of your choice.
And we will get back to you, of course.
And we'll let Tom know that you're reaching out as well.
Everybody have a fantastic day.
Thanks for joining us on Vision Pros,
and we will see you on the next show.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.
I'll talk to you soon.
Bye bye.