Franchise QB

Episode 110: Franchise Growth Secrets | The 4 Pillars of a Franchise | Former RE/MAX CEO Adam Contos

• Mike Halpern

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 34:08

Stop just selling franchises and start building a high-performance brand. In this episode of the Franchise QB Podcast, host Mike Halpern huddles with Adam Contos, the former CEO of RE/MAX and current CEO of Area 15 Ventures. Adam draws on his background as a SWAT leader turned executive to reveal the "magic wand" of franchise scalability.
We dive deep into unit-level economics, franchisee profitability, and the critical KPIs every owner must master, specifically prime costs like labor and waste. Adam breaks down his proven playbook for multi-unit growth, explaining the three profit levers: the core item, the upsell, and high-margin commercial/catering revenue.
Whether you are an emerging franchisor struggling with "founder ego" or a franchise investor evaluating brands like Port of Subs or Daddy’s Chicken Shack, this conversation provides a masterclass in strategic growth, leadership alignment, and operational discipline. Learn how AI in franchising is creating new efficiencies and why successful brands focus on building franchises over simple unit sales.

https://www.area15ventures.com/

Free Resource for Franchise QB Listeners:

The Franchise QB Playbook will guide you through the process of finding your perfect franchise fit.

Free Franchise Doc: 👉https://www.franchiseqb.com/playbook
#franchiseownership #FranchiseOpportunities #OwnABusiness #FranchiseSuccess #FranchiseQB

Contact me and my team with any questions along the way. www.calendly.com/franchiseguy
Mike Halpern, CAFC
mike@franchiseqb.com

Joining us in the huddle is Adam Contos, CEO of Area 15 Ventures. Welcome to the show, Adam. It's great to have you here. So let's start with your background. For the audience, bear with me because you have a very impressive resume. So you are a former SWAT leader turned executive with a proven track record of scaling global brands and building high performance teams. You were the CEO of Remax, the world's largest real estate franchise. Everybody's familiar with that brand name. You're on the board of directors for the International Franchise Association of the IFA and chairman of the board at the University of Denver's Lineger Center on Franchising. I think it's great when university programs have franchising specific curriculums. know there's not a lot of them, so that's really cool. You're a strategic advisor to executive teams of leading franchise brands where you're focused on bold leadership, strategic growth, and empowering the next generation of business leaders. And just like this podcast, you have your own podcast called Start with a Win with over 500 episodes. That is quite a nice milestone, so congrats on that. You're a partner. at Area 15 Ventures, which is the uh company we're going to speak about today. You have two concepts specifically that we're working on called Port of Subs and Daddy's Chicken Shack, which are franchise concepts in the restaurant space. So Adam, you've seen a lot in the franchise space. What separates the franchise brands that scale from the ones that just stall out and never get off the ground? I, that's a great question, Mike, because I mean, you know, it's kind of the magic wand of the space. What is going to make us work and what is not? I'm going to start with, I'll give you a couple of points, but I'll start with leadership alignment. You know, when you look at the franchisor versus the franchisee, and I say versus because there's always this, you know, inherent conflict in what goes on there. I think leadership alignment has to happen across the board. And Those that grow versus those that do not are really focused on two things. And they're collectively focused on two things and are in alignment with those. The first one is uh unit level profitability. So franchisee profitability. How do we get these people making money? Because when we have franchisee success and profitability, franchise or is gonna find success if they're managing their business properly as well. The second one is brand expansion. You've got to get them both working towards unit growth. We need to increase the number of units while we're working on franchisee profitability. So that's the first one, that leadership alignment. The second one, would say understanding your profit levers. Understand how your business makes money. And that has to be collectively done on both sides. But ultimately, you know, we have franchisors growing. They're like, we sell franchises. Well, you do both. You have to understand how to create that profitability within those franchisees and help them stay accountable to it. Another one, third one, unit level economics. I think that's really important to, you know, to talk about that. It's got to be something like every single day, you know, you step on a scale, how much do you weigh? Are you going up or are you going down? Are you exercising in order to improve that? Things of that nature. Same thing in your business. How are you exercising your business in order to improve the stature of where you're at? And then I think ultimately it comes down to there's a difference between selling franchises and building franchises. And I think if we take a look at those dynamics and we have that conversation on a regular basis, that's important. We have a lot of lip service that happens in franchising. We'll get into that, I think probably in this conversation. But ultimately, a lot of people are like, I sold all these many franchises. But okay, that doesn't matter unless you're building franchises. So how are we focused on that? You know, a lot of that comes back to do we have the right operators versus entrepreneurs? You know, how are people looking at the business aspect, things of that nature? So I would boil it down to really those four key thoughts. And obviously those look at economics, growth, branding, things of that nature collectively. Yeah, and I think it's really good point you make that it makes for a good press release when you do a 30 store deal, but if one or two open and the rest never come to fruition, then what is where does that get us as a franchise system? So I think the idea of being responsible upfront on the development side and then also like keeping your eye on the ball as it relates to performance and keeping franchisees profitable and open. That's going to be a really good kind of dual focus for a successful franchise. Adam, from your experience leading remax and investing in multiple brands, what do franchisees Founders consistently get wrong in the early stages of their growth. Well, there's a lot Mike, but, but I, I'd start with founder ego. You know, it's, it's one thing about starting your first location or whatever. And typically, you know, the founder starts with one of something and that might be, you know, a home services type, business, you know, maybe they're a HVAC or a plumber or power washing or roofer or whatever it is. They're like, all right, I got successful at this, but Running one business is different than helping other people run multiple businesses. And your ego gets in the way a lot of times of, if I can do it, they can do it. That's not necessarily true because we're dealing with different scale, different mechanisms in order to create profitability. So we have to be humble as a founder. Anybody who's a founder in a business, and we had a bunch of different emerging brand founders here at our office not long ago to do a mastermind, you get them out of this founder. mindset and into an operator mindset in order to assist in the growth of the business. I would say another thing that we kind of get tied up in is over-engineering our business instead of operational simplicity. when, you know, what do you do? It's interesting. You should be able to just simply list the three things that your business does. What are the three ways that you make money? And if you're over-engineering this, talking about the you know, the technology and the AI behind how your funnel generates customer touch points or whatever. mean, come on, does it boil down to really the three things that you do in order to make money as a franchisee or a single unit and then scale it as a franchise or so, you know, we start to, especially when we make money at one thing, we get distracted and we start running after the next thing and try and make money and we over engineer it, we overdo it and we start confusing. our system and our franchisees are like, what am I supposed to be working on? And they always default to the easiest time wasting event that's out there and that's human nature. But ultimately it's because we've given options within the business model to do so. And then I would say the third thing is probably misalignment between franchisee profitability and franchise or profitability. So how do we, instead of continuously nickel and diming franchisees as a founder to try and add to that franchise or profitability, how do you help the franchisees make more money so then everybody wins together and you start scaling your profitability as a franchise or by helping your franchisees scale their profitability? So focusing on those things. Yeah, and I can imagine during your masterminds when you have these founders that come in and they're really good at what they do, but. you need to educate them about the difference between operating their business and being a great franchisor. And they're two different things, right? Like helping someone else succeed in a model you created is different than running the model yourself. So I can see how there can be a misalignment there. especially like having your guidance with what you've done with remax and other brands is got to be extremely critical to their success when they're getting their brands off the ground. So let's talk a little bit, Adam, about culture. Like how do you build a franchise culture where franchise owners actually want to follow you as the franchisor. Well, I mean, one of the first parts of culture is clarity. So, you know, people understanding really what is this culture? And I've seen cultures come out in different brands where they try to make it a win for everybody instead of a specific for their niche market and their customer base. So, um you know, it's really interesting when you start to ask a business, and I've done this in Mastermind, as you go around the room, you go, what does your business do? And if it takes them more than like five to 10 seconds to tell you what their business does, they're losing track of what's going on and they don't know what their culture is. know, it's, it's, you know, if, somebody said, we give a great environment of loving acceptance to everybody that wants to come in from the community in order to fulfill their needs and feel and look better. mean, what does that place do? Can you tell me? mean, it, It could be great clips, right? But why don't I just say care, there's a lot of things that could be. Right, mean, how about saying we cut hair or we give massages in a great environment, know, whatever it might be. But the reality is I think people, they become unclear in what their culture truly is. If you're a franchisor, here's what your culture is. It's I sell or provide this in order to create franchisee profitability and grow this brand. And I mean, if you start convoluting that, people are going to lose track of it. If you're super clear on it, then everybody knows, you know, our job is to, you know, put shoes on people. You know, it's we're a shoe store, whatever it is. I don't know what, but, but we have to be super clear on our culture and you can add some things in it. You know, you should have ethics and standards and values and things of that nature. But ultimately the culture should be something that everybody knows what it is. They can recite. Here's what we do. And when an employee goes to work and at any day or night, they go, I don't know my job is. It's simple. So, um, you know, it's, when we start losing track of that, that we start wasting time doing other things. And when we do other things, besides make money for the franchise, that's when we all start losing the other, you know, we want to win together. That's the idea behind it. And, uh, having clarity is, is the way you do that. Having leadership, the franchise or. And the franchisee both saying the same thing, like you're singing from the same page of music, imperative to define that culture. No, I think that clarity and that simplicity is going to take you far in this business. So that makes a whole lot of sense. Um, so Adam, in your view, what are, let's talk performance. What are the most important KPI is key performance indicators that every franchise or should obsess over. then conversely, what's a waste of time. You shouldn't be paying attention to it. Yeah, that's a great question, Mike. You know, when you start to ask somebody, all right, are you making money? And they're like, no. And you go, why not? What do your costs show? What do your revenues show? And they're like, I don't know. We got a problem. If somebody doesn't know what their KPIs are, they got a problem. And what do those KPIs look like, I guess, is really, you know, that's the root of this question. And ultimately, it starts with, the two key aspects of running a business. So we have, let's get rid of fixed costs and things like that, like your rent, the electric bill, phone, whatever it is. And let's talk about the things that you can control the most in your KPIs. And that's gonna be essentially labor and cost of goods sold or cost of materials. So those are called prime costs. And this is used heavily in the restaurant space. That's where you look at what should our prime cost be. They should be, call it 60 % to 65 % on the high end. If you can get push it below 60%, great. So your prime cost should be that amount of your total revenue. So how do we adjust that though? When you walk into a store, are there a lot of people in training? Are there a lot of people standing around doing nothing? Is your labor cost too much? And when people are struggling and losing money, generally their labor costs are one of the first things where they're spending too much. There's typically found money when you can get your labor right. Now you can get your labor right through understanding your, you know, the flow of customers. How many people do you need to do something? How fast are they doing it? Things of that nature. And a franchisor should understand this and be able to articulate this to the franchisees of here's what your labor should be and here's how you measure it. And here's how you get it right. So what causes labor to rise? I mentioned too many people in training. What causes too many people in training? High turnover. What causes high turnover? Poor management. So management's responsible for probably 70 % of bad expenses, expenses that you can do something about. And a great deal of that is because you're pissing off all your employees and they're leaving, and then you have to train new people and hire them, and then you have this massive overlap of labor. And instead of having three people work in your store or work in your business, you have six or you have five or whatever it is. Cause you have people that are shadowing other people. That's the first problem. The second one I talked about cost of goods sold or cost of services. There's something that we should understand about that. And that's waste. How many times does it take you to make a sandwich to get it right? How many times does it take, you know, how many gallons of detergent are you using to clean something? and are you overusing it? Are you bringing in too much food and not doing your inventory right and you're throwing some of it away because it's going bad, things of that nature. So waste is caused typically by not understanding your needs and by having uh employees that don't care about being efficient and doing things right for that matter. So. you know, when you, when you look at the KPIs that are the most important, I would say start with those two labor. Is your labor, right? Or is there too much or is there not enough and you're missing out on the ability to have more sales and you should be able to figure that out. then secondarily, is there waste waste in, you know, cost of goods sold or cost of services, typically supplies, whatever it might be. So, um, two huge KPIs take a look at. Yeah, it's interesting. It brought two anecdotes to mind. I used to work with a client in the pizza space and he would I went in the back kitchen with him and he showed me a 20 pound crate of tomatoes. And he put it on a scale and it weighed 18 pounds. And he's like, you know, I just lost two pounds of tomatoes because my distributor shorted me two pounds of tomatoes. And if that happens at my 20 stores, think about how much money I just lost in terms of product. And I would never have known about it. Um, so those are the kinds of things that kind of trigger in my mind, like how can we keep the prime costs low? It's like, we'll stay on top of your stuff. And yesterday I was speaking with an automotive franchise owner and he was thought he should be having a $40,000 week and he was having a $25,000 week and he's like something's wrong. So he goes in the shop and he over listens to the guys that are taking the phone calls and he had four technicians standing around. And, you know, a call came in to come in and do a break job and the guy's like, well, can you come in tomorrow? And he's like, my God, my guys are not, we have availability, we have capacity and they're pushing the jobs till tomorrow. So like it's a management issue. They have to get the right people in the right seats because there is money being left on the table. So, you know, I appreciate your insight on that. And so let's talk about when there are issues, like what is your playbook for turning around a struggling franchise owner and help them become a top performer? in the system. It's a great question. mean, the first one, obviously you have these conversations. You're like, do you know your numbers? Tell me what those are, what your labor look like, what your, you know, your prime costs look like, things like that. But ultimately it comes down to having permission to have that conversation first, because this is a coaching conversation. We used to call them spicy conversations when we were having them with franchisees, because ultimately there's a lot of emotion. There's pushback. There's, you know, oh, you're just attacking me, whatever it is. but it comes down to witnessing what's going on instead of judging what's going on. So we have to let the franchisee know from a franchise or perspective. And we have to be training our people as a franchise or to coach. And there are specific skills on how to coach businesses. know, obviously the first one is gaining that trust and then having clarity of expectations, but also having the permission and in witnessing what's going on and explaining to the franchisee, I'm not judging you. I'm not calling you a bad business owner or anything like that. Stop. Don't think that, please. I wanna uncover where we're at here so we can help you make more money. Would you agree that that's the thing we wanna do? So getting the coaching and accountability piece together and then talking about how do you make money? And I always talk about the three profit levers in business. The three profit levers are essentially what is your core item? So if you should cut hair, it's a haircut. If you sell tires, it's... attire, if you're a sub sandwich shop, it's a sandwich. What is your core item that you're trying to sell? And how are you selling that? And kind of dissect that. Are your ticket times right? Are people spending too much time on stuff? Is there waste? Is there labor excessive? Things like that. So get that right. And then let's talk about, okay, what is your upsell? Because every business has an upsell. If, back to the haircut thing, if it's a haircut, then it might be a shampoo. Mm-hmm. You know if if you're your power washing somebody's driveway it might be there your power washing their house and their windows or whatever it might be But what is your upsell and are you offering upsell? Constantly everybody in your store should be trained to offer an upsell and take a look at that That should be in your your point-of-sale system of how many upsells you're selling and I bet you it's gonna be below Probably 20 % if somebody's struggling. This is where you start making money is with this upsell So are you losing money? Probably if you're having this conversation or you've got a really ambitious person who's like, how do I make more money? Okay, let's work it on the upsell. So you've got the upsell, that's the second profit lever. The third profit lever is your highest margin piece. And that is how do we create commercial business? Commercial repeat, know, long-term business where I'm not going out spending money on, you know, customer acquisition cost, CAC. The customer's there, they've agreed for me to do this 20 times over the next year, whatever it might be. And this could be a commercial deal like, you I mentioned power washing. This would be your power washing a strip mall at 2 a.m. So you don't have to deal with traffic. You're not driving from house to house to building to building or whatever. You're there, you're doing the whole thing. You make the most money, highest margin, best use of your time, things of that nature. What is that? For restaurants, it would be catering. How do you get, you know, six months or a year of catering contracts with somebody or even like two months to start with. But you should be working on this because you've got the customer, they're buying more product, larger order, and you can manufacture it quicker or provide the service at scale where you normally wouldn't. So, you know, we have to take a look at those things and say, all right, how do, how am I exercising all of those levers of profitability? And then we get into, all right, What about local store marketing? How's your local store marketing or LSM being spent? You know, how is your leadership in the store? Things of that nature. So there's, there's a lot to turn around though, those struggling franchisees, but ultimately it comes down to how are we making more money? The maximum amount of money that we can make with the people that we have on hand and the supplies that we have available to us. If you can't answer that, pull it down into the three profit levers. How are we marketing? in order to continue the flow of people that customer acquisition and then, you know, truly are we leading our people so that they're most efficient and they're taking care of that waste and they own the jobs that are coming out and they're trying to get higher reviews online and things of that nature. So a little bit of an extensive playbook, but I think just focusing on that section of our conversation will help somebody make. Yeah, and it's interesting you mentioned power washing as the example in the analogy. I hired a local. pressure or power washing franchise to come out and do like a whole house wash. They did our driveway. They did walkways. They did the deck, the whole thing. But, that's their bread and butter. That's their core competency. But that same franchisee, when I talked to him was saying that he now does commercial drive-throughs at restaurants. You you don't think about it, but like think about all the throughput that happens at that drive-through and it gets dirty. you know, either they have an employee that goes to Lowe's and rents the little thing that you fire up or you get a professional to come in once a quarter. knocks it out. So it's like, to your point, way of thinking outside the box, bringing on some commercial work and having a pretty predictable ticket. And by the way, those commercial tickets are pretty lucrative. So how do you, Adam, like evaluate whether a franchise brand is worth investing in either as a private equity play or as a franchise owner? think first of all, you have to take a look at the talent. If you sit down with a franchise founder or the key leaders in a business, the C-suite, and there's a lot of ego, there's a lot of, we know how to do this, you don't know our space, we're the ones who do this type thing, I don't think you're in the right place as an investor. You want somebody who says, wow, I wanna partner with somebody who's gonna help me. We're very ambitious to grow. yet we're also very transparent in our needs and we're willing to listen. We're humble and we're hungry. And just like this sign behind me for anybody who's watching, stay hungry, stay humble. I mean, if you can find a business that has those aspects, you can have the conversations of how do we scale this? And that's where you truly want to look when you're investing in the businesses, what's a scalability? I mean, they might've hit their head and I've looked at businesses where they go, yeah, all right, we're doing great, but they're not necessarily franchisable because you can't start dropping franchises because then you start eating away at their overall profitability. Maybe they're just working giant commercial deals around the country and it takes them in order to work those giant commercial deals instead of a smaller franchisee. I mean, you gotta look at the business itself and figure out is it franchisable? Are the people the right people to franchise it? And then, you you start unpacking a little bit of where the cracks are in it, the risks, things of that nature. But um without the elimination of ego, there's no sense in even having the second conversation. Yeah, it makes sense. So let's talk about for someone out there that's considering franchise ownership, but they're also contemplating, Hey, maybe I should just, you know, skip paying a royalty and a franchise fee and do this on my own. Why do so many entrepreneurs in your opinion choose the wrong path? Do they just get in their own way and they're just too stubborn or what is it? I mean, well, mean, the right path, it's the follow the yellow brick road type thing. Do we go left or would you go right? You know, that type of thing. But ultimately it comes down to, is the business franchise a bowl? And entrepreneurs who are operating a small business, they're putting in the grind. They're out there, typically if they have one location, they're doing most of the work. If they have multiple locations, a lot of times they're, know, the headquarters. and they're managing the stores that are putting in the work or the trucks or whatever it might be. But oh can you franchise this to begin with? And then do you want to? And then would a franchisee buy it? Put yourself in those shoes. I think you just have to scenario play this whole thing out and from a very non-skewed perspective, understand the difference. I will say this, a founder will do things differently than a franchisee. Because a founder's the one who had to put in the effort, the trial and error, things like that, the franchisee doesn't quite understand what actually got this thing off the ground. They haven't lived it. But they're trying to find a system. an entrepreneur, I will say an entrepreneur and a franchisee do have a lot of differences. There are a lot of similarities. They wanna be in business for themselves. We put in the whole, not by yourself part. They wanna have somebody to lean on. And that founder didn't have somebody to lean on generally. So they're willing to make different decisions, make different judgment calls, take different risks. They're typically, you know, they're in it all in it for good, regardless. And I think that's a little bit different. So you want, you know, it's this operator versus owner type mindset. I think owner, you know, wants somebody else to do the operating forum. Operators, the one who's willing to put in the effort. If you're both, you're like, okay, my checkbook's at stake and I have to do the work, I know that. It's a conversation to balance all of those things out and determine who do I have and are they capable of doing this? But I think there has to be clarity. It's not just, hey, do you want to buy your franchise? So. Well, we spoke earlier, Adam, about some of the mistakes that emerging franchisers make when they're coming out of the gates. You've been with massive franchise powerhouses like Remax. What are some of the biggest leadership mistakes that franchisers make when they cross that 50 unit, 100 unit, 500 unit mark? What are we talking about once it becomes mature and it kind of gets to royalty, sustainability, and profitability as a franchise system? Gosh, I would say the first one is leadership. And I'll tell you, the people you start with aren't the people you finish with. So when we start growing, you have to take a hard look at all of the talent. You might have a team that's great at running 10, 20, 50 stores, whatever it might be, but they suck above that. And I mean, there's gotta be scalable talent. There has to be a level of sophistication that continues to increase with the business. There has to be a hunger for growth amongst all those people. And it's like going from a high school football team to college football team to a pro football team. You're looking at it, you're like, OK, very few people make it to the pro football team level. Same thing with large franchise organizations. You might work in a small one. That's great. Good for you. Stay in the small one. If you can't scale yourself and what you're doing, leadership is huge in that scalability. Being able to speak to a large group of people. Being able to tell stories and help educate them on this growth process and inspire them in a manner where they're like, I will go to the end of the earth for this brand. I'm loyal to this brand and the leadership here. If you don't have a present charismatic leader who can grow with that, you're gonna be missing out on a lot of good opportunities. you know, there's a lot of scalability everywhere from the CEO or the founder. all the way to the accounting team, to the legal team, to the contracts team, to the franchise development team, to the marketing team, whatever it might be. The reality is you gotta continuously measure your people. You have to continuously upgrade your people. So people development, absolutely huge. I would say also operational discipline is a big thing. Focus on your operational discipline. Constantly look at your operations manuals. What's working, what's not working. Are we chasing squirrels or are we staying firm in what we're doing yet we're evolving with the times? Because you look at AI, AI is changing all sorts of stuff across franchising. Are we adapting and growing with that or are we losing efficiencies because we're failing to do so? there's a lot of things that you have to take a look at. What's saturation in a franchise business? One of the big problems I do see This is a good one. You and I have talked about it, People thinking that the franchise brand is larger than it truly is. And that is where they're like, yeah, we sold 27 or 30 stores. We sold three 10 packs. But you get a couple of them to open. This whole sold not open or snow concept out there. I think people need to be careful about that because this artificial idea of excitement, while it sounds good, is not super productive. Now here's how I would say that though. We have sold a territory and they have committed to grow on a development schedule. You know, something of that nature. But on those development schedules, usually what you're doing is you're, you know, okay, open one. Great. You open one. They're going to find out how hard truly running a small business is. Hopefully they'll get to another one. Hopefully they'll get to a third. If they can get to a third, you'll know they're probably going to get to their 10. But ultimately, it's going to come down to stop lying to yourself about how many franchises you truly have. Like Port of Subs, have called 130, 135 open. We've sold a whole bunch of territories, but I'm not running around going, I've sold 500 franchises, because that's not right. I sold a bunch of territories, and we're developing those territories with the region developers. But ultimately, it comes down to what are they going to open? And that's the real number you got to look at instead of lying to yourself and going, I did this, or lying about your revenue or your profitability or something like that. Just be realistic. We're at this stage. you're totally right. mean, know, savvy franchise buyers will look at item 20 and look at the additional units that were actually added to the system and see the growth over a three year time horizon. And then they can size up. How many of these development agreements are actually translating into operating businesses? Adam, you touched on something a moment ago and I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about AI in your view, how does AI change the future of franchising and who wins because of it? I think AI is a tailwind to your operations right now. And it needs to be explored by everybody. If you're not taking information from your franchise brand and dumping it into AI and asking it questions about your franchise brand, you're missing out because it's going to help you uncover gaps and opportunities that you didn't know exist. Or maybe you knew they existed and they were right there in front of your face, like the stop sign you stop at every day when you're going to work, but you don't remember stopping at it. We only notice the things that matter. And this will help us uncover the things that matter that we haven't noticed. So, you know, the things that are right in front of our face. So AI is great for, you know, everything from your scheduling. We talked about labor waste or, you know, the different waste in your inventory and your cost of goods sold and things like that. Don't pull that stuff in AI and ask questions. Put your FBCs, your franchise business coaches, in AI and dump all your operations manuals in there and have time where you're saying, okay, I have a franchisee that has this challenge. Maybe it's a real challenge. role play this with me. Let's dialogue how to deal with this. Give me some good coaching questions to ask them. All of these things will help improve the amount of time and efficiency that you have. It will educate your people better and will prepare you for the next level of AI in your business, which is you're going to have AI powered FBCs. You're going to have AI powered local store marketing. You're going to have AI powered decisions made in your franchises. You might as well start working on it right now because you to get used to how these things operate and how they evolve. But ultimately, uh you know, we're taking a hard look at it in our brands and testing these things, but it matters and it will save you a ton of time and leaders who are really lonely and don't want to ask the next person in the office, hey, what do you think about this? Use AI for that as well and it will help you explore your different. perspectives on things that you're saying or doing. really good practical advice on using AI to build a better franchise business. So speaking of advice, Adam, if you were to give one piece of advice to a franchisee who wants to become a multi-unit owner and scale their business, what would that be? I would say get militant about your numbers. Those KPIs we talked about, the prime costs, the three profit levers, and what your business looks like numerically. And then understand, plug that stuff into AI and go, what can I do to scale? And that's what you're doing. Ultimately, when you become a multi-unit franchisee, you're reinvesting in revenue is what you're doing. So how do you maximize the revenue for the certain unit that you have and why does it get to that point? Know why. And then you'll understand what is the impact of another store and the synergies between those or another franchise and the synergies with those. And then what does a third look like? And next thing you know, you're building two at a time and you're adding to that portfolio. That's when we start to see people who have 10, 20, 30 stores or 30 franchises if you're mobile. You're doing that based upon those synergies of scale. Go back to the AI, continue to have an AI mechanism. You can start a GPT, just on chat GPT, where it's nothing but your business and you continue to ask it these questions and develop it. But um unless you know your numbers and you're hyper-focused on those, don't go after another one because you could fail your first one then and you're completely out of business. That's true. Good advice. Adam, this has been great. Really insightful. Appreciate your time. Is there anything else that you want to add to the mix before we wrap up today? No, this is is great, Mike. Thanks for what you do. We greatly appreciate it. And I would tell everybody, you know, if you need to reach out, you know, you can find any of our brands online, including the franchise, you know, be remiss if I didn't say, you know, friend dev is there's a link on all of our websites. And I'm at area 15 ventures.com if you need to get a whole Thanks Adam. And I will post all of those links with the audio and the video version of the podcast. And if anyone listening would like to connect with Adam in the area 15 ventures team to learn more about becoming a franchise or in their portfolio or franchising with one of their concepts, such as port of subs or daddy's chicken shack, contact me at franchise qb.com or on X at QB franchise QB. I'll get you connected. Thank you so much, Adam, for taking the time to get in the huddle with us today. You got it.