Episode 125: He Built a 5-Unit Franchise While Keeping His Day Job Scaling with VAs & AI

Discover how tech-corporate veteran Sheetal Guttigoli scaled a multi-unit fitness franchise portfolio to a massive 4.5X EBITDA exit using AI-certified virtual assistants. If you want to learn the exact blueprint for semi-absentee franchise investing without quitting your day job, this episode is a must-watch!

Episode Highlight Extract:
"I had my day job for about six years into the overall process ... There was a time when I realized my brain was so full that I was not able to think. That’s when I realized I do need to delegate enough so that other people can do the things that I don't need to do. Hiring virtual assistants at a much lower minimum wage was an effective way for me to be profitable in a business as well as keep my sanity." — Sheetal Guttigoli

Key Takeaways:
The In-System Advantage: How being an active, successful operator opens exclusive doors to buy franchise resales before they ever hit the open market.
The First-Year Reality Check: Why "semi-absentee" definitions require heavy operational grinding upfront before you can truly take your foot off the gas.
Leveraging AI-Certified VAs: How delegating back-end administration, recruiting, and daily metric tracking to affordable VAs can protect your sanity and boost profitability.
Document Early to Replicate: Why writing your own hyper-local Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) alongside the franchisor’s playbook is mandatory for smooth scaling.

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

Transcript

0:43

Joining us on the huddle today is Sheetal Guttigoli multi-unit franchise owner and founder of Seamless Assist. Welcome to the show, Sheetal. Thank you, Mike. Great to be here. Yeah, it's great to see you. So walk us through your franchise journey. You first became a club Pilates franchise owner in 2017. That's a nationwide brand has household name recognition. You built that all the way up to five locations between multiple brands within the portfolio of fitness. What drew you to franchising? And what did that ride actually look like in practice? Yeah, no, great, great question. So I am sure like many others, my franchise journey began because I got laid off from my day job. So I was in tech, my wife's still in tech, and back to back, first I got laid off and then I eventually found a job, but then she got laid off. And then that's when we realized, hey, the corporate world is not something we can rely on. fully all the time. So we began to look around and invest, to look for an investment in a business that we could run on our own. And that's how I got into franchising. I actually went through a franchise consultant here in the Seattle area and got into club bodies. uh So back in 2017, back into it. Yeah, my wife is a Club Pilates member. It's huge here in Northern Virginia. I know you're all the way on the West Coast, but that's a really great solid blue chip brand in the fitness space. And you and I met several years later when you were looking at a resale opportunity with another brand called Row House that's in the portfolio. Tell us, like, take us back to 2017. I mean, that's a huge leap of faith. You're getting out of corporate. You're investing in this thing. You're going through a lot of the emotions that a lot of candidates that I work with go through. So talk a little bit about that process. I mean, I know it's really hard to sum up eight years of ownership. no, no, happy to. So I didn't actually quit my day job. So I had my day job for about six years into the overall process. But my overall process began with a meeting with my franchise consultant. He walked me through a few different brands based on what my wife and I and our schedules allowed. So we landed on semi absentee and the type of things that we both like to do. And our final three were, I think like a dry cleaner and another fitness brand as well as Club Lottie's and we both drew ourselves to Club Lottie's. Fitness was something that we could both be partake of and enjoy and talk to our families about it. So that was an easy choice for us. That's awesome. Yeah. And it's a, could be a slippery slope because sometimes when you take a passion like fitness and you parlay that into a business, it could take some of the joy out of it. But I'm imagining you weren't an avid Pilates guy before you got into club Pilates, right? You just like fitness. So then it's like how there's this great business model that's proven successful and there's an opportunity to develop it in my market and you guys just ran with them. Right. I had actually never done Pilates at all. but I did try it just before I went and purchased a license for it. I was an avid yoga fan. I've done yoga since I was 10 years old and it's not similar. is similar and not similar. Reformer Pilates is very different from what people think of stretching and yoga. as an owner. get to, um, you know, your company Seamless Assist, but I still want to learn a little bit more about the journey because I know there's a lot that goes on when you're thinking about getting from that first location, getting through the construction project, getting it staffed, you still have your day job and then you get into location two and location three and it's not linear, right? I know the timelines change based on leases and opportunities. So take us a little bit through that process when you guys were like, all right, we're now a franchise owner. Yeah, so our first. So construction we we had a we didn't even know where to go to for construction right? We were that early on in the process, so we used our residential construction guide to build out our studio. Don't do that. uh Find a find a proper construction person. So the first year was rough, so we both still had our day jobs. And. I think as I've added on locations, I've realized until you get all your operations set right, you're going to spend the time in it to learn the business and get things the way you want them to be for what your life wants to be, right? of semi-absentee was different than reality. Yeah, yeah, and I think that's true for the first year. After that, once things got into a more comfortable position, then things became more easy and it was truly semi absentee. You know, I didn't spend more than 10 to 20 hours a week, which is technically what the definition of semi absentee is in some of the franchises. But the first year was rough trying to get up to that mode where I could then take my foot off the gas. So when, was the moment where you decided that we're going to kind of convert that second license into an actual studio? So I actually had only one license and my first, know, Pilates, when I got into Pilates, it was still early in the days, right, 2017. It took about three years before it really became a flourishing studio. Right now, if you open up a Pilates studio in three months, you're up and running and profitable. Right at the three-year mark, which was January, February of what, 2020, somewhere there, COVID hit. And so we shut everything down, but at that point we knew we had a successful studio. So a location owner nearby wanted to sell his studio and he approached me and said, hey, do you want to buy it? And I said, sure, why not? And this happened to be... Luckily, very close to our house and where we lived. And because we went. of how you got access to an opportunity simply because you're in the system. Like he went to you first before he put it on the open market because you're in the franchise. You have a relationship with the local owner and that opened up a door for you. That's right. And all my locations were purchased like that because I happened to be in the system and just people just knew me because I'm in as part of the system, right? So that was the second location. The third location was similar. In this case, corporate actually approached me because I was a successful franchisee in the area. And again, during COVID, I got another franchise at a reasonable cost. because studios were struggling, gyms especially during the COVID era were struggling. So I was fortunate enough to actually acquire that. I did struggle through it though, while we were going through that phase. But then as we got out of COVID, things really turned around and the three were really, really successful all the way through. in your circumstance to keep those day jobs because when COVID hit you couldn't operate those studios by mandate. So it's nice that have the other cash flows coming in so that you can seize those opportunities when other owners had to exit. That's right, that's right. And I think that kind of saved the day for us. My wife and I, we both had jobs. And even though those were the most stressful times of my life, we were happy to be going through it with jobs and we exited. Yeah. I mean, we don't have to talk numbers, but you did mention in the green room that you had a 4.5 X EBITDA exit, which is fantastic. It's what everyone kind of dreams about when they think about getting into business ownership, getting into franchising. So congratulations on that. So you exited the business after all these years of operating them. you went from running, you know, this, this multi-unit company and then decided to build a new company. uh which is the subject brand Seamless Assist we're gonna talk about today to help other owners do it better. What was the moment that kind of sparked that idea for you and made that pivot? Yeah, so while I was building out the three couplades and the two rowhouse locations, I listened to this podcast, a real estate podcast, and I saw that the guest was actually using a virtual assistant to actually help him run operations. And at that time I went, hey, why can't I do that? So I went through the internet. And I found a couple of virtual assistants myself. And basically had them as full time employees and taught them my system overall. What what what I was experimenting with turned out to be a very fortunate. Thing that happened to me. These guys were just simply fantastic. In fact, one of them is still with me. Through the through this company, right? So. I hired one guy as director of operations. I titled him director of operations, right? And he was managing the back end admin of all five of my studios. Which meant he did recruiting for me. He hired instructors as well as salespeople. He did all my business licenses. He managed my day to day in the sense of. Tracking work that happens on a on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis. He planned my monthly plan, my quarterly plan. He organized those meetings where we all met together and decided what we were going to accomplish for the month, quarter, and the year. So that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, really. It took a lot of work off my plate and allowed me to focus on the things I cared about. I then went about and looked at, where in the business can I improve? How can I improve my retention rate? How can I increase my sales? How can I get better about coaching in the business itself? So that thing really, really changed the thing in me. And then I said, hey, now that I've exited, why not take this and roll it out to other franchisees or simply business owners to have that same experience? Yeah, it sounds like you've kind of cracked the code and you know, think it's delegating those responsibilities to a VA is, you know, probably tough for a lot of people to actually do because they see their own value in doing these tasks, but you get mired down in these tasks and you realize that you're more valuable elsewhere in your business. And if you can delegate these to a VA, it's a, it's a really win-win situation. So should tell, us. a little bit about like when you did, you know, using the VAs and you grew from one location to two to three, like what actually happens, you know, that no one really tells you about when you become an owner that you discovered through ownership. Yeah. So, you know, one location, it's brand new to you. You're trying to, the franchise gives you a playbook, right? It tells you what to do, not fully how to do it. So you're building that operations manual, your SOPs, all of that yourself. Even if you don't physically write out a process, in your head, you're trying to figure out, that event happened. How am I going to do that next time it happens again, right? So that first location was really that about me learning what's actually happening in the system and how I should go about solving the day-to-day problems that come. As soon as the second one came along, it just doubled my workload, right? And so that's when I began to realize, hey, this is not how it should be. There was one moment also there where one of... the advertising agency I was working with sent me a daily tracker that really said, hey, these are the metrics you want to track on a daily basis. And that, once you track those and know what your numbers are, will eventually lead you to the successful owner that you want to be. So I took that to heart, and then I used my VA's actually to help write those numbers in on a daily basis. So when I looked at my system every day, I knew exactly what was happening in the system. So with your new company, Seamless Assist, who is an ideal client that can really leverage your VAs and transform their business? Who are you looking for that would be a great fit for this? Yeah, so one of the things that we do in addition to placing the A's all of our VAs are AI certified. Meaning they actually know how to use the new chat GPT and Claude now. Really, really well. What that does to a business is that it makes a person more effective than they were ever in the past. And if folks have not gotten into using AI, absolutely must. It is just amazing in the way it allows you to do things. In terms of our ideal customers, any really, any small business, any franchise that's running operations on a daily basis, we can go out and help, improving your sales lead follow-up, doing a day-to-day admin customer services basic. doing your KPIs, know, having that sheet that I mentioned earlier, which was a daily tracker that I manually entered numbers every day is now all automatically pulled and done with AI and it lays out beautiful charts in a Jiffy, know. yeah, AI certified virtual assistants and really any small VAs. We do focus on fitness, wellness studios, as well as real estate. but we are uh open to, in fact, we help franchise consultants do this as well. But yeah, any small business really. so basically someone that is just feeling that they're falling behind or there's just tasks that are not being fulfilled correctly. Like I'm assuming, especially with multi units, but even with a single unit operators, you know, they've, they've just outgrown the businesses outgrown their individual bandwidth. Right? So it's like, they can't replicate themselves. What they can do is find a virtual assistant. that can take some of the stuff off their plate. What was that moment for you as an owner? Like you went through it yourself. Was there just a day where you're like, hey, I need to do something. I need a change to really get myself above water. Yeah, so remember I had a day job. I was working a full 40 hours in a tech company and then going coming home in the evening and. And the weekends basically trying to run this uh multi unit business. There was a time when I just you know I realized my brain was so full that I was not able to think. Right, and your mind was just tired all the time. That's when I realized, you know, I do need to delegate enough so that other people can do the things that I don't need to do. I also needed the business to be profitable. That's why hiring virtual assistants at a much lower minimum wage than the Seattle $22 an hour rate was an effective way for me to be profitable in a business as well as keep my sanity, right? Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you kind of describe it as a feeling, right? Like I think a lot of people that are business owners can relate to that where there's just so much stress and there's so many things going on that you just can't form a thought because all you're doing is try to like playing whack-a-mole and just kind of staying ahead. So that's interesting that you got to that point and you're like, all right, you know, I'm going to do something about it. And I do want to touch more on AI. I know that's a, you know, it's used in every industry. You know, everyone's talking about, have two kids that are going to college and you know, it's like, well, how do they integrate AI? So when they're out in the workforce, they can use the tools correctly so they can succeed and they can interview well and be productive. There's so much noise, right? As you hear it left and right. What's your take as someone who's both operated franchises and now runs an AI operations company? What are your thoughts on, on AI? It is the most fantastic thing that has happened in the last couple of years, right? So I actually have worked in AI previously. So if you think of voice recognition, I worked at a voice recognition company 10 years ago, right? For a period of about seven years. And that's how something recognizes your voice and, you know, recognizes the patterns to say. You know, this is what Mike is saying, and so I can transcribe it, for example, right? The things that AI can do today are just so phenomenal. For example, I did a presentation for someone, took me five minutes. As soon as I had the data, I just gave it a command and it created a full on presentation. I built a full KPI dashboard in 10 minutes. As soon as we had the data, gave, it still takes A couple of commands and you need to know what exactly it is that you want, but. It is making life so much easier for everyone, especially business owners who are struggling with the amount of work that's coming at them. Having some automated systems that take away that burden, right? These systems just run on a schedule. You don't have to even tell them to run right once you know what you want, you just tell it hey. Give me this on this schedule. and it actually gives you like I get my daily briefing from Claude every day. It runs through my Slack, my tools, my CRM. It tells me exactly what's happening in my day, right? And what I need to be focused on for today and in the future. And that's just the simple things. it's almost like there's a fear of missing out, right? The FOMO, because every time you think you've got to figure it out and how I'm leveraging AI to make my business better and make my day easier, get my data more clean, then all of a sudden there's like, well, here's this other tool I should be looking at. So I think it creates this environment where you always feel like you have to be doing something to stay on top. But I'm like you, I find that You know, it's very practical in my business and it saves me a whole lot of time. and I also integrated with my CRM. use it with my sales funnel. use it with presentations to candidates, cetera. So it's definitely been really useful. so she thought what is one operational move that you wish you'd made earlier as a multi-unit franchisee? mean, clearly using VA's must be one since that's what you do now. in terms of your new business, but, you know, can you kind of touch on that? Yeah, so I think the. My first year I think I would have done differently, so even as a single unit owner. I think if I had to go back and redo it all over again. I know the franchise gives me a playbook and those are great by the way for any new person trying to jump into a business. Get go into a franchise. I highly recommend that you know. getting a franchise first. Don't try to do it all on your own. But building that system and documenting everything, the SOPs that say, hey, when a new person walks in the door, this is what my team has to do step by step. Because even if you just go tell somebody and train somebody how to do it, the next time somebody else is hired, that person needs to be taught all over again. So simply writing down everything in your system and keeping a book handy and operations manual handy, I think is the big thing you want to do. And a lot of those tasks now are done in AI. So having, building a system that can do all those things while knowing what you uh as a person can do as well is an important aspect of it. I think build that operations manual first, I think. Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's just a good practice to have your SOPs dialed in and do it from as early as you can. Because when you replicate, you want to replicate something that's proven, tested, has the franchisor stamp on it, and also has your culture, right? Because the culture of your business is different than a club plotty studio that's near me. um So she thought this has been great. mean, anything else you want to add to the mix today before we wrap up? You know, I would like to wish everybody the very best. Franchising has been a great success for me, and I think if you're considering going into franchising, absolutely, absolutely highly recommend it. uh Think about AI in every aspect of your life. And as a company, Seamless Assist, we're here to make AI easy for people. and their businesses. So that's it. Good luck. Well, thank you so much to tell and if anyone listening that owns a franchise or multiple units would like to connect with she telling his team to learn more about seamless assist. Contact me at franchise qb.com and I'll get you connected. Thank you so much for taking the time to get in the huddle with us today. Thank you. Thank you. It great being here. You got it.