Tell us just a little bit more about you before we jump into our topic today, which is how do you build non or just non mediocre franchising, right? Go ahead.

yeah so um and it's interesting you say that you know i know we talked a little bit before the show and um you know it's the thing about going to speak at other franchisors conferences is that i can say things to their franchisees that they they need to hear but it's difficult for you to say it to your own franchisees now interestingly enough i'm at a point in my career where i'll say it to our franchisees i just don't care anymore right because at the end of the day all i care about is their outcome We're here, we're going to use tools, tactics, but philosophies to help our leading owners win.

We want a smaller number of large franchisees.

So when you talk about things that franchise owners need to hear, there's a couple of things like it is your obligation, not your opportunity, but your obligation to be positively actively engaged in the system and you know and there's a great study by fran connect that has a um they over 800 franchisors and thousands of franchisees but a positively actively engaged franchisee will have 6.3 times the results of an actively disengaged franchisee okay so now there's three categories there's actively positively engaged There's actively disengaged, and then there's actively negatively engaged, right? You've got your naysayers.

And I do this all the time, and I talk to franchisors, and it's like, hey, 20% of your network is going to be the most incredible franchisees you've ever had, 20, 25%, right in there typically.

They're influencing and create, they're breaking the four minute mile.

They're providing leadership and they're influencing the next 70%.

Can you maybe break that down for us a little bit? How do you do that at Homefront Brands to really focus from the beginning on the outcomes with the franchisees? And what impact does that have on what you guys are building?

So we brought it back and we had

many, many, many of the owners were owners that we had placed in 2010, 11 and 12 and 13 and 14.

And then there was a couple of new, there's some new owners that had joined since we had sold the business in 2019.

And they are just doing extremely well.

So what we found was, which was really interesting because our other brands are so nascent.

I mean, they're less than three years old, a lot of operators, two years old, one year old.

I mean, they're still figuring out what it means to be a franchisee, to be a good citizen in the community.

So it's a really interesting thing to watch from the outside in.

Yeah

...

so I, um, uh, Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, and it was, you know, the first disaster that I did owning the company 100% myself.

We, we responded down there and did about $100 million worth of work over the next four years.

And then I was driving back in the middle of the night from Gulfport, Mississippi, where we were doing a huge government project, back to Charlotte, North Carolina, and I was driving back because I was missing my son's first football season.

So, you know, I had three children at the time, current- they're all grown now.

It's been a minute, right? So, uh, I'm an empty nester now, but I had three small children at the time, and I was missing s- uh, my son's first football season.

That's awesome.