In this captivating episode of Eye on Franchising, join me as I welcome Chris Seman, President of Strategic Franchise Systems. We explore Chris's unexpected journey into franchising and his reflections on the challenges and rewards of the industry. Don't miss this engaging conversation on the A to Z's of franchising! - Unexpected journey into franchising - Vast opportunities in franchising - Benefits of scaling a business - Low-cost franchise opportunity with Caring Transitions - Specialized services in painting industry --- Ready to watch these great conversations? Come check out a few videos have have and give me a follow! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwoAdrkPZmveJt5AQRDk8WA --- Lance Graulich Franchise Consulting Services from ION Franchising Eye On Franchising
In this captivating episode of Eye on Franchising, join me as I welcome Chris Seman, President of Strategic Franchise Systems. We explore Chris's unexpected journey into franchising and his reflections on the challenges and rewards of the industry. Don't miss this engaging conversation on the A to Z's of franchising!
- Unexpected journey into franchising
- Vast opportunities in franchising
- Benefits of scaling a business
- Low-cost franchise opportunity with Caring Transitions
- Specialized services in painting industry
---
Ready to watch these great conversations? Come check out a few videos have have and give me a follow!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwoAdrkPZmveJt5AQRDk8WA
---
Franchise Consulting Services from ION Franchising
Chris 00:00:00 You.
Lance Graulich 00:00:02 Welcome to Eye on Franchising. Are you looking for business opportunities? Well, you are in the right place. We represent over 650 franchises and business opportunities. We will help you find your perfect franchise for free. We even have a free assessment on our website that will help us determine what the best businesses for you based on your investment level mindset, skill set, and life experiences. This is Ion Franchising, where we share our vision for your franchise future. I'm your host, Lance Graulich. Each week we will speak to fascinating folks from the world of franchising, franchisors and founders, franchise funders and franchisees. Are you looking to find your perfect franchise? Or perhaps you are an independent business owner looking to grow and scale your business by setting up a franchise. Either way, our team can help you ion Franchising, where you will learn the A to Z's of franchise. Welcome back. Another fabulous episode of Ion Franchising. I'm your host, Lance Graulich. Today's special guest is my friend Chris Seaman. He's president of Strategic Franchise Systems. We have a lot to talk about today, a lot of brands, a lot of good stuff going on. So welcome to the show. Mr. Chris Seman.
Chris 00:01:26 Hey, thank you so much, Lance. Thrilled to be here.
Lance Graulich 00:01:29 My pleasure to have you. So let's talk about how the heck did Chris get into franchising? People are always wondering. I don't know that people go to college and say, I'm going to be a franchisee or a franchise or even still today. But back in the day you've been in it a while. So talk about it. How did you fall into it?
Chris 00:01:48 Yeah, I started about 22 years ago and it was a total fall in situation. I had been working in a company, had went through a layoff, had moved into this up into Detroit area into this helping this industrial staffing company run their locations. And I knew it was pretty much a short term thing. So I was looking for something and I got approached by a startup franchisor out of Ann Arbor, Michigan in the Handyman industry, mr. Handyman. And they were looking for someone to coach a couple of owners. And I'm like, I can do that. But I was going know the corner office, the company car, and also now I'm in a cubicle with a tiny little laptop and I was on the road two to three weeks a month. I have young kids at the time and I thought, this is fun. Recharge my batteries, do this for a year, and then I'll go find my real career. And 22 years later, here I am because I fell in love with it and I never knew.
Lance Graulich 00:02:45 Sucked into it.
Chris 00:02:46 Sucked into it. I had no idea this even existed as an opportunity. I mean, if you had asked me 25 years ago what I thought franchising was, I probably could have named McDonald's and Subway and that would have been it. And I had no idea there was this whole other world where we're helping people fulfill their know. And you look in your career when you're always looking for what is it that's going to make me fulfilled? Because I got to do this. I do this more than I do anything else in the world. And to fall in love with something and to help people actualize a dream of theirs, say the most rewarding thing I've ever done. And it's kept me passionate about franchising ever since. And I'm two decades in and looking for my third.
Lance Graulich 00:03:28 I love it. Yeah, it's interesting because the customers, our audience, everybody sees the restaurants and then they see great clips and super cuts and sport clips, all of the retail facing franchises. And they might catch a glimpse of home care service brands as a van drives by, but none of their locations or offices are retail facing in major shopping centers. They're hidden somewhere. So there's a whole world out there after all those restaurants out there. So talk about strategic franchise systems. You have five brands and we had Denita, who's the president of Pet wants on the show already. We had Brad, who is amazing franchisee, super successful from The Growth Coach. That's one of your brands, by the way. Brad had one of the best quotes ever on my podcast and he said, you know, when I became a franchisee and I started growing this brand, I more than doubled my corporate income and now I have time to attend kids soccer games and write my own schedule. Holy cow. Is that not the epitome of why people get into a franchise?
Chris 00:04:45 Well, you have that freedom and that control and you really get to be able to live to your schedule. If you're a crazy workaholic, go for it. No one's going to stop you from working the hours you want to work if you're going to get here and understand what it takes to be successful. And that's going to free up time to do things in the way you want to do them. Under your pace, under your dream, go for it. And it allows you to actualize I love that word because you have so many opportunities in franchising to control your destiny. You don't have to worry about a layoff if there's something issued with a customer. You go out there and stimulate demand and you get your business going in the direction it wants, it's going to reward the effort you put back into it. And then it's going to offer you up the opportunity as you scale your business and put the right pieces in place to make the income you want, but also to have the freedom and flexibility that we vision that business owners have. And once you get through that startup period, it's an amazing way to do that. Some people I know have been in franchising. I still talk to some of my original Mr. Handyman owners and they still work 60 hours a week because that's what they love. And then the other people, like Brad, have been able to do the things and go to see his kid play baseball, watch them go through the soccer lifestyle and all the other things that take up so much time that a lot of times when you're in corporate America, you just don't have the flexibility to do so. That's what's exciting about it.
Lance Graulich 00:06:10 Awesome. So let's talk about a few of the brands we didn't talk about yet. Let's talk about career Caring Transitions, for example. Caring Transitions is doing a great job. Speak to James fairly often. Great brand.
Chris 00:06:23 Yeah, I mean, Caring Transitions one really near and dear to my heart because that was the first opportunity I had to be a president of anything. I was brought down here to Cincinnati to be the president of Caring Transitions when it was about a three year old brand. And what we do there, which I just love, is that you really help families at a very critical moment in that family's existence. And that's when someone is no longer able to maintain, take care of their home that they have spent 30, 40 years in. And then most families get slapped by inertia. They don't know what to do. They know that mom or dad has to move into some sort of more beneficial living arrangements, whether that's senior living, assisted living, and yet they get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has to be taken care of for that to happen. The average family takes about nine months to make a clean out. After someone goes through this scenario, caring Transitions comes in and does the whole thing in two to three weeks. And so we can have your house on the market and your family moved. And the beautiful thing about it is because we have all these great liquidation options. We have an online auction platform, we have a physical estate sale that we can sell all the stuff that you don't need that no. One else in the family wants and help pay for any moving expenses, clean out expenses, get that house on the market, get that actual money out of that equity in that home so that you can pay the medical bills, you can pay the living bills, and then you can move on and really focus on what's important, which are the people.
Lance Graulich 00:07:48 Yeah. And that's a low cost franchise. I don't remember how much it is, but investments under 100 grand.
Chris 00:07:56 Yeah. Because what you're going to do is you're going to open it with yourself. You're going to get a part time networking individual who's going to help you network at senior communities and interact with real estate offices and places like that. And so you're not spending a lot of money on advertising because very few people are looking online to move their mom. They need an emotional, physical connection with someone that they trust. And you build that through relationships, through your referral partners. So there's not a lot of advertising expenses. And since we go home to home to home, there's no reason for you to have a big fancy office either. So you don't have a big office, you don't have a big warehouse, so you don't have a lot of fixed costs that are going to be associated with that business. You're going to have one van, you're going to have employees who work when you have customers, and you're going to have a person who helps you with the networking and sales activities so that you can focus on running the business.
Lance Graulich 00:08:46 No. It's such a needed business. So to sum up, relocation, estate sales, caring Transitions is a very unique niche, and I love it, and I know James is killing it. That brand is exploding, right?
Chris 00:09:02 Yeah. We're very excited because we're going to actually go over 300 units this month once we go through October training. Wow. So for us, we're all over the country. We're going into Canada now, and we've really helped a lot of communities and a lot of families across the country. We have 600, 700,000 people go onto our online auction who are registered on our platform, so we can liquidate the stuff pretty easily to the people who are really in high interest of that item. And you get good money for your clients. Our CT bids customers get great deals on stuff they can't find anywhere else. And it's one of those things where it's one of those beautiful companies where no one loses. Everybody gets to win.
Lance Graulich 00:09:44 Yeah. Fabulous. Well, let's actually switch gears a little bit. Let's go to True Blue total Home Care, or House Care, as you guys call it, because there's some synergy there, right?
Chris 00:09:58 100%, because it goes into why do seniors move out of their homes? What did carrying transitions find? Why are seniors forced to move out of their homes? They reached an age where they can no longer do the physical maintenance in the home. What True Blue does is they can come in on an as needed basis, or they have a subscription service where they'll come in and do all that basic maintenance that keeps the house in livable shape so people are safe, healthy, and happy. 80% of baby boomers when surveyed said, where do you want to retire? They're not looking to move to Florida. They're not looking to move into a fancy condo. They want to stay in their home. But unfortunately, their physical health doesn't allow them to do that. True Blue steps in here, and we can help them stay healthy and happy in their home so that they're in a safe environment that their family is comfortable with and they get to live with their neighbors and their comforts and conveniences that they're so used to.
Lance Graulich 00:10:48 I love it. Again, another very focused niche. And what's the investment typically for true.
Chris 00:10:54 Blue going to run just a little bit higher than carrying transitions because you're going to have a little bit more advertising. But it is also another referral concept where you're going to talk to your home in home companion care companies like, say, a Comfort Keepers or Right at Home. And you're going to get a lot of your referrals through those organizations as well as real estate agents, as well as when it's done. And then we do, through regular advertising, do a lot of work for busy adults because the extra communications and services that you have to provide for seniors when they're given to a busy adult family, that clarity of communication just makes them feel like they got the service value that they deserve. So we're about 50% of our business is busy adults. 50% of our business is going to be active seniors or seniors who need help with their daily living arrangements in their home.
Lance Graulich 00:11:40 Yeah, wonderful. And let's talk a little bit about Fresh Coat. Fresh Coat is another great one.
Chris 00:11:46 Well, I love Fresh Coat because what we looked at is when you look at all of what strategic is really trying to do, it's trying to find a unique niche in a marketplace that's not being served at the kind of value and quality that we believe people deserve. And what happened with Freshcoat is it really was launched with we have our own employees. Our painters are actually employees of Freshcoat, which is unusual in the painting segment. They're usually subcontracted out. And the reason we do that is we want to be able to come into your home, and if you just need one room painted, we can paint one room because we control the employee schedule. We get them, they get paid the same, so they don't care. And we can do a lot of interior, one, two, three room type projects in your home. But as we've grown over the years, we've really expanded into where we do whole houses, we do the entire inside, we do the outside. And two years ago, we launched our national commercial division where we do national accounts. And we also train all of our owners in how to do Blueprint takeoffs, which allow them to do successful quotes of when they're working with that type of commercial customer. So it allows us to do this both on the residential side, both interiors and exteriors. And now we also do commercial work. And all the way the different steps you go through gives you a 360 view of the painting industry, and it kind of gets you in there in a unique way and again, goes back to what is the customer value, and then we're going to try to provide it in a unique way.
Lance Graulich 00:13:12 Sounds fabulous. So across all your brands, who do you look for? Like, when you talk to your team, you got a big team. When you talk to the team about who the ideal people for your brands are. I know there's some unique synchronicities and cultural aspects across the brands that might be a little bit different, but across strategic in general, how do you educate your team as to who is right for a franchise and who is not? Because call me crazy, I want to eliminate the people that are definitely not right right away.
Chris 00:13:47 Yeah, it's funny. I'll start with the very I'm sure everybody who's in franchising starts with this particular one. But it's like we first we look for someone who's passionate about being in the business for themselves and hopefully they're passionate about the category as well.
Lance Graulich 00:14:02 But by the way, isn't it okay that they're passionate enough to be in business for themselves and the industry doesn't so much matter because a lot of them could learn to really love being their own boss, period 100%.
Chris 00:14:16 When I came to Carrying Transitions, I didn't even know middle class people did estate sales. It wasn't even on my radar. So I couldn't come in here and say, wow, I was passionate about estate sales. No, but what I was passionate about is successful businesses and successful people running those businesses. And so you get that passion for business. If they like the category, that helps, but it's not necessary. Like you said, Lance, that's a great point. And then from there, though, what we do is we structure our process because there's difference between a crazy entrepreneur and someone who's successful in a franchise system. Because one thing that franchise systems are great at is collaboration. Your ability to pull information from your franchise or your fellow franchisees and you're willing to give back to that environment builds everybody and everyone gets a revenue growth and a profitability growth by working in that collaborative environment. But in order to be collaborative, you also need to be able to follow some kind of what we say versus like a restaurant and home services. Sometimes people look at home services and say, well, you don't have the rigid lines. Restaurants, the food has to be exactly the same, every service is different. So we don't have that. But we do have guide rails. And maybe you can bounce back and forth a little bit between those guide rails in your own initiative, but for the most part, you got to stick within those guide rails to be successful. We have tested this. We have franchisees doing this right now in the field. And if you can stay within those lines, color within the lines, so to speak, but the lines are you're going to be more successful, you'll get there faster. You'll avoid the pitfalls that we've already learned from and you'll have seen the opportunities that we've also learned from that might not be so obvious to you when you're coming from the outside. And once you merge those two things and you really take off, that's going to be a successful franchisee. And then the last thing that we do really try to test people out. So if you go through our process, we're going to give you a little bit of additional activities to really work on, because what ultimately determines if someone's going to be successful in business or not is do they have perseverance. You're not going to have all the answers. You're not going to have all great days. Things are going to arise for you. How are you going to get through those? And
Chris 00:16:22 if the first time you get a barrier put up in front of you, you just stop and quit, well, then business ownership might not be for you. And since we live off your success, I need people who are driven to success. Doesn't matter if you've been in business before. It doesn't matter if you're well, you don't have to have millions of dollars in the bank in order to be successful at this, but you do have to be willing to keep finding a way around that wall or knock it down.
Lance Graulich 00:16:49 Yeah. Perseverance or stick to itiveness.
Chris 00:16:53 I think a lot of people like to use the word grit anymore. If you want to read, I was.
Lance Graulich 00:16:57 Just going to tell you grit. Grit is one of the words that seems to come up all the time with franchiseors, is that grit? That tenacity. And look, for those of you listening that are looking to start your own business and never had one, especially so you don't necessarily know yet until you've experienced it. But working hard and focusing on a business, in this case a franchise following a proven model is the way to go. You're going to save money and time when you pick the right franchise for you. So back to that, Chris. Picking the right know, I would imagine sometimes when people come to you and they're talking to you about one brand, your team or the individual might be tempted to look at some of your other brands. How do you handle that situation? It's a good problem to have, right?
Chris 00:17:48 Yeah. Well, one, we encourage and reward our sales team for transferring people to the better fit, so there's no financial advantage for them to keep them locked into their own brand. Because what we really do want is we do want to put you in the right place where you're going to be the most successful, the best territory for you, the best business model for you. All of our business models run slightly different, and some require different skill sets than others. We want to make sure we match your skill set with that opportunity. And since all of our people get compensated the same, whether you buy that caring transitions brand or you buy that fresh coat brand, we do that to minimize the human nature aspect of this it's like mine and free it up that you can go and figure out what's right for you. We find that most of our candidates have come through with a lot of research and they have a pretty good idea. They want to investigate this path all the way. But sometimes we just realize right away that, hey, maybe you're really more set up for this particular style of business. It's more of an advertising model. You do more stuff online and then you respond to leads versus generating the leads through your energy and efforts.
Lance Graulich 00:19:00 Why don't you walk us all through the journey of these candidates? So if I refer somebody to you myself, being a franchise consultantbroker, where somebody finds you online, what is the process? Including a Discovery day or Meet the Team day, validation, the whole nine yards?
Chris 00:19:21 Yeah, we go through it and our process that we like to work within is the first one is that first call is really about establishing your why? Why are you doing this, why now? Why Franchising? Why this business model? We kind of get all of your personal motivations and then we explain a little bit of the business and then we're going to walk you through all the standard stuff. How are we going to support you, how are you going to get customers, how are you going to grow this business? What are the success metrics that you're going to be looking for? And then that's going to be about three calls. And then we're going to get you into a full franchise disclosure document. The FDD, we're going to get you that exposure and get you understanding how do franchise systems protect your business and how we're going to help you be successful, how we're going to keep a franchisee from damaging the brand. And we get all that out through the FDD process. We do validation. At that point, we're going to hook you up with owners who either a match your personality and your business style or they're going to have different skill sets that are going to allow you to understand the areas that you're going to need in order to be successful in this business as well. And then we have what we call it depends on the brand, but it's either meet the team corporate visit or with Pet wants, we meet the pack because we're definitely animal lovers. So we go through all that and then we come out of that and we really put you through. We have a couple of programs that are really designed to reward that kind of persistence and grit that we talked about before. We have our Winner Circle program, which it allows you over a span of time to earn back your franchise fee by hitting certain economic metrics. And we do that by getting you to say, make a decision within a certain period of time. Because one thing I've noticed about successful business people is you make decisions. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong. But people who don't make decisions are always wrong. So we really like to encourage decision making. So we get you in our Winter Circle program. We get you launched. We have an onboarding program, and then we have our training programs. You're going to see until Training Week when you come to Cincinnati, most of our stuff is going to be virtual in order to accommodate your schedule and your family life and everything goes along. Though. We have an office here in Cincinnati. We
Chris 00:21:43 have conference rooms set up for it, and if you want to meet us in person, we bring in in person as well.
Lance Graulich 00:21:48 So is all the training it's possible to do all the training remote up.
Chris 00:21:53 Until that last week. And then we do get you into then, you know, for the brands we also like to do, once you leave Cincinnati, we like to send you out to one of our pre selected mentor franchise locations where they go through kind of like, here's what you learned in the books. Now I'm going to show you what it is in real life. And then they know the schedule. They know everything that goes along with it so they can get you exposed to real life things. So when you open your business, you're more prepared and ready to go.
Lance Graulich 00:22:21 Right. And you always have some sort of coach or business consultant along the way?
Chris 00:22:25 100%. Yeah, our structure is onboarding coaches until you graduate, and then you get your regular business coach at that point.
Lance Graulich 00:22:34 Sounds great. Talk about the marketing. How do you support all these brands? And I just got off a call with a gentleman and he goes, I'm scared to death to hire people because I haven't done that in a really long time, and I don't know anything about marketing. So will all franchise brands that you introduced me to really help me with the marketing? I said, absolutely. However, there are some brands that are better than others, depending on what your expectations are. So describe your reality and how you help with the marketing.
Chris 00:23:06 Well, for every one of our brands, we come in with a very strong and structured marketing plan that you're going to start working with before you come to Training Week. And it's going to be whether you're a networking concept. We have our networking concepts. Even under networking concepts, we do have some marketing exposure through Google Play, Per, click your website, social media. We show you how to set all that up. And then all of our brands have the opportunity. For most of our marketing things, you can either do it yourself, or we have a third party person who works with our marketing department to do it for you. And that way they have all of our information, all of our keywords, anything that's critical in order to be successful in this particular arena. What we've learned we now partner with a third party person who can work with you on a daily and weekly basis. Our team of marketing is going to be between two to three people depending on the brand, 300 franchisees. We're not going to be able to work with you daily, so we have to set up training and we have to train you how to do it. And then we train our business coaches how to be secondary marketing people because that's one of the most important things in any business is how you acquire customers. And so once we get this group going, we do it with a mixture of online training, regular communications, your business coach, then you do have a marketing resource available to you internally and then you have our third party marketing people who will actually execute for you if you do not want to do so. In the networking brands, we actually have complete how do you hire salespeople, how do you train those salespeople and most importantly, how do you manage those salespeople and what should be their expectations to you? Coming from the sales background like you are right now, you know, there are certain metrics and sales you have to produce in order to be successful to return your investment. And then we want to make sure that our franchise owners understand that and have all those materials available to do that and train their folks so that they can hit their goals. Wonderful. A lot of different programs for each brand, and we could spread all over their ways, but we're trying to get that owner up to their goals, which I think a big thing we didn't really talk about is part. Of our training and onboarding is we talk to you about your goals and if they're realistic, sometimes we push you up, sometimes
Chris 00:25:23 we settle you down. But we're going to push you to that goal and so that you know what you need to do to achieve it. And that allows you to have that kind of industry knowledge that perhaps you wouldn't have doing it outside of the franchise network.
Lance Graulich 00:25:37 Yeah, I'm glad you just hit on that because clearly the old expression prescription before diagnosis is malpractice in the process. Like when I'm talking to candidates, like exactly when you and your team are talking to candidates, you have to understand what they're looking for and what they're not looking for, especially based on what they've done in their life. And it's not going to be always the same. There are plenty of people that try to put the same people with the same brands and it doesn't work. And that's when you have that awful mismatch and people that aren't either going to be successful or essentially set up for failure. So how do you guys avoid that? Obviously it's a long process, so you want to make sure people fit and at the same time you're going to have people that might have a teacher going into carrying transitions, you might have an attorney. That's my favorite question and I stopped asking it because I think my audience knows the answer already. It's. Almost in every podcast. If you looked at your top 10% of high performing franchisees, where did they come from? And the answer is everywhere. Right, Chris?
Chris 00:26:46 100%. I mean, you were just going to nail my answer right on the head, but it goes back into when I mentioned persistence. We talked about grit seems to be more important. Being of that flexibility, the ability to adapt and the ability to be persistent is more critical than what your actual background was. Because how did I get into Franchising? It's a little bit of a journey of discovery for me. I didn't plan on it. So is the rest of my life based on how I accidentally walked into a situation I didn't fully understand? And it might be the same for you, but you're now selecting that journey and you're selecting the destination. So that automatically gives you a step above what you would expect the average person is doing right now with their life. And then do you have those traits we just talked about much more important than background. And for us, we found out that making sure that it's somebody who can adapt to their strengths as well as their weaknesses and understanding that, hey, I'm putting you in a brand where social interaction is critical. We work relationships and you go, I work numbers, I work organization, I work structure. I don't like people. Well, okay. You have to be able to hire people, though. And this is what you're going to have to have to hire then to do that social interaction relationship component of that so that you can run the back end. And is that really the best fit for you, or is it better to find something where you're more an executor than a networker? And let's talk about that a little bit, and let's try to get you in the right space.
Lance Graulich 00:28:22 Yeah, awesome. So let's talk about buying an existing business. A lot of people out there, a lot of stuff on the Internet. No, I'm not going to do a franchise. I'm just going to look for an existing business. It's just easier. Yeah, in a lot of cases, an existing independent business that somebody doesn't know anything about. What say you about that tactic? It's all over the Internet. A lot of people are doing it. I know a guy looking for five years and he still hasn't found anything.
Chris 00:28:54 Well, I think you just hit the nail on the head with another I'm going to keep using that phrase today, obviously, for some reason. But as you go through here, the challenge with that is you're going to consistently be just hoping for a random business to come onto the market that meets your needs. And it has a good marketplace and an opportunity that you either can accentuate the business or you can accelerate the business, or it's such a good business that you're going to be able to buy into it. Well, one of the things is with existing businesses that are rocking and rolling and making tons of money. Well, they sell for tons of money, so you're going to need a much higher capital requirement. You're also going to have to find that business that comes in the marketplace exactly the right time that you're ready for it. If you go to Franchising, and I'm not talking about my five brands, there's hundreds of thousands of great franchiseors out there. So as you look at this, it's like, okay, at what point in time do I want to go into business? What do I want to do with my life? And how do I get all of that knowledge and information that doesn't disappear when the previous owner disappears? And that's one of the biggest thing people lose sight of. So I'm going to be able to do it under my timing with an established business model. And if I work it, I'm going to be successful. And if I have a problem, email, phone call, text, it's part of your relationship with your franchise, or they need you to be successful. They're not disappearing on you. Where you buy an independent business, it might work, and you might be that person that might be better for you. I'm not going to tell you no, but I am going to tell you what the downfall of that is and what are some of the upsides of it. And one of the biggest things you have is usually after a set period of time, that existing owner who's already checked out, that's why they were selling it, is going to eventually disappear from that relationship. And when something new arises that maybe happened in the past, but not when you were training happens, what do you do? It's not your industry.
Lance Graulich 00:30:51 You're all by yourself. You can hire as many consultants as you want on your dime to help you fix it.
Chris 00:30:57 Yeah. And you'd already have them already paying for them in franchising right away. And that's what we're here for, and that's what I look at. But I do always caution people. If you're a nutty entrepreneur and you can't stand collaborating with others and you think people are telling you what to do, yeah, look at that independent business, you're probably going to be happier. But for the average person, franchising gives you a better path if you're willing to bust your butt, set the business upright, and execute to the processes and plans that are in place.
Lance Graulich 00:31:30 Chris, you've given us some amazing information, lots of great stuff. Final thoughts, final words of wisdom from.
Chris 00:31:37 You know, I just kind of go into I know one of the things that people are talking about now, there's a poor economy in the world, interest rates are crazy, inflation is this, unemployment is this. And all I can say is what we focus on and what I would recommend everyone to focus on is adapt and adjust. There's business out there. There's opportunities out there. And if you set yourself open to learn and to grow, you're going to be fine. But it's when you get stuck in a path and you refuse to adapt and adjust and change, you're going to struggle. When? Every time. Let's look at the last four years. I got this job in 2019, and I immediately got 2020. We had COVID and then 22. We got interest rates, we had high unemployment, supply chain issues. And if you're not going to be flexible, you're not going to listen to others, you're not going to collaborate, it's going to be a struggle for you, but at the same time, reverse the coin, do those things, and you're going to be successful in this environment as well as any other ones that exist.
Lance Graulich 00:32:38 Chris Seman. You've been fabulous. Everybody heard it from him just now. Don't get stuck. So if you want to get unstuck, get a franchise. It's much easier. Chris, you're awesome. Look forward to speaking to you again soon. Strategic franchise systems. Thanks for being here.
Chris 00:32:55 Thank you so much, Lance. I really appreciate it.
Lance Graulich 00:32:57 My pleasure. Thank you very much for listening today. Please like follow and subscribe. This is Lance Grauli. Until next time.