I have often wondered why people write books. What motivated them, and how long did they plan to do it? Is it fulfilling a lifelong dream? I didn’t plan to write a book and didn’t know I was going to do so. But I benefited so much from great mentoring in my first five years in franchising, and I so enjoy being able to share ideas and best practices, that Brian Schnell, my dear friend, mentor, and attorney, recommended that I consider starting a consulting company to help franchisors “do it right.” That turned out to be the first step toward my writing Grow Smart, Risk Less.
With the thought of a consulting company still percolating in my mind, I headed out a few weeks later to deliver the keynote speech at Nova Southeastern University’s Emerging Franchisor Conference. Afterward, several attendees came up and said, “You should write a book. Take these lessons and expand them into full chapters.” With running a company and being a wife and the mother of twin five-year-old boys, I wondered if I would ever find the time to seriously consider the suggestions. About a month later, however, I found myself thinking about this idea once again, and that proved to be the second step toward my commitment to write this book. Our success has not been our own but rather the result of active involvement with the International Franchise Association (IFA) and the people I met in franchising who so openly shared their good and sometimes not-so-good experiences. Thinking of how much help I received from others during our successful franchise journey helped me decide to write a book to help other potential franchisors start strong and, most important, continue with business practices that will enable them to stay strong and start more businesses that create more jobs and spur much-needed economic growth during challenging economic times. At the end of the day, my goal is to help franchisors improve so their franchisees have greater support that enables long-term success. Without question, enabling business ownership for franchisees and focusing on their success is what characterizes the most successful franchisors.
The journey of BrightStar (referred to as “BrightStar” throughout to speak of the enterprise; if a position or program is exclusively for the BrightStar Care brand, then BrightStar Care will be used) began with our first company-owned location in 2002. My husband and I founded our company because we were passionate about delivering high-quality home care to those in need after having our own challenging experience with home care. We didn’t know how we would scale to serve families everywhere, but that was our desire from the beginning, which we included in our original business plan. To scale and offer consistent service and quality required us to have world-class technology, so we invested in proprietary software early. With technology and talented personnel in place, we began thinking about expansion. One of our main concerns was whether we would be able to keep our unique BrightStar culture if we raised money through private equity to open our own locations everywhere. We also wondered whether we could find employees in all locations to treat the customers as we wanted them to be treated.
Ask and you shall receive. Divine intervention forever changed our path as we took an opportunity in July 2004 to invest in two hotels and thus became franchisees of two different franchise systems. I attended new owner and manager training classes. I read the operations manuals cover to cover; I am most likely in a minority of franchisees in history to do so. I saw what I loved about being a franchisee and what I would change if I had a magic wand. I began to fashion my own magic wand and decided in October 2004 to apply it to franchising our business model.
As sometimes happens in life, we were thrown a curveball. We were pregnant with twin boys, and about five months into our pregnancy I went on doctor-ordered bed rest. Knowing my chronic workaholic tendencies, my dear husband, J.D., helped save my sanity by having a swivel table delivered so I could put a computer on it and work while in bed. My staff indulged me with weekly staff meetings in my bedroom. What do you do when you have a big block of time and you want to launch a franchise company? You write the operations manuals, and that is exactly what I did over the next five weeks. I filed our legal entity from bed on January 21, 2005. One week later, our boys were born at twenty-eight weeks: Luc weighing in at two pounds, fifteen ounces, and Mike at three pounds, one ounce. We now had beautiful twin boys in the NICU (Luc stayed there fifteen weeks and Mike thirteen), a newly formed franchise company, and two company-owned locations. I craved routine and needed to maintain some semblance of control, so I began getting up at 4:00 a.m., heading to the office where I would work until about 2:00 p.m., and then driving over to the hospital with J.D. and staying with our sons until about 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. I still work a lot because I love what I do. Occasionally an employee or franchisee will receive an e-mail at two o’clock in the morning and reply with a comment wondering how I can work so late into the night. The hours I keep now pale in comparison to those days before we brought the boys home.
With the boys at home in April 2005, we began preparing the legal documents (called an offering circular or franchise disclosure document) to offer our franchise for sale. We filed the offering circular in August. We sold our first franchise in December of that year and opened our first franchise location in March 2006. Five short years later, we have more than 175 franchisees and 250 locations and have invested heavily in technology and a “best in class” team to ensure continued growth and long-term success. We have prepared our organization to leverage our investments to expand domestically, internationally, and into additional brands (across multiple business segments). We continue to set aggressive goals by knowing how our competitors perform in each of the industries in which we will operate, and we then use that information to build our plans to meet and then surpass the segment leaders.
I have a CPA background, so I emphasize measuring and benchmarking and watching trends, areas that are frequently overlooked by many franchisors. For me, being a nerd is second nature, and I have had to spend a great deal of time learning sales processes, skills, and best practices. Most of us are strong in one area and have a second strength in another of the three legs of the stool—sales, operations, and finance. Through this book you will see my first strength is finance and my second is operations, which I hope will benefit those of you with different strengths, just as I have benefited over the years from the sales geniuses in franchising: Rob Goggins, Kurt Landwehr, and Joe Mathews.
In addition to helping you increase your skills and opportunities for ultimate success, I want you to learn from my biggest mistakes. Of course I am not proud of the mistakes, but in my frugal CPA way, I feel that sharing them enhances the opportunity to help others avoid the pitfalls I endured. Therefore, throughout the book I have indicated what I would do again (Bright Idea) and what I would change (Avoid This Pitfall), especially as we launch new brands. To weave in the core strengths that have led to our success—which include benchmarking at the franchisor and franchisee level, ensuring short decision cycles, and investing in technology to grow and scale effectively and efficiently—I have also discussed the key principles of our organization on improving franchisee unit economics, offering a breadth of revenue opportunities, providing high quality and quantity of support, and ensuring strong customer value essential to building and sustaining a strong global brand.
Our focus on culture and systems and learning the best practices of franchising have been the biggest contributors to our success, both financially and in the relationships we have built within the franchise industry, with our franchisees, and with our corporate team. Franchisors can be successful for short periods of time regardless of how their franchisees perform, but the franchisors who enjoy the greatest long-term success follow a model in which the majority of their franchisees can make money, can succeed, and are highly satisfied with the franchisor–franchisee relationship. In particular, the founder/CEO must have passion and commitment to a relentless pursuit of improving franchisee unit economics. This is not something that can be delegated, because the organization will take its direction from how committed the leader is to enabling franchisees’ success, to supporting franchisees, and to finding the win-win in the decisions that are made daily.
My goal is to help those of you who are interested in expanding your business through franchising or who are already in franchising—regardless of your role, your years in franchising, or the number of units your franchise system has. If you take away at least one particular idea to implement that will provide a positive return on investment (ROI) for your time in reading this book, then my reasons for writing this book will have been validated. Much of the content will provide examples from my firsthand experience in the service industry, specifically in healthcare, but I have also tried to call out where differences will exist for concepts in the retail, hospitality, and food industries. While there are industry-specific nuances, particularly with real estate considerations, the steps, the sequence, and the biggest factors in success—the team, the culture, the franchisee–franchisor relationship, the focus on the end customer and technology—are common among all franchise concepts.
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