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Search Results for: kids care

Leading with Heart: Transforming Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence

April 25, 2025 by angishields

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High Velocity Radio
Leading with Heart: Transforming Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence
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In this episode of High Velocity Radio, Stone Payton interviews Dr. Julie Donley, a leadership coach, author, and speaker. Dr. Donley discusses her mission to enhance leadership effectiveness and create positive work environments. She shares insights from her latest book, “Leading at the Speed of People,” emphasizing the importance of emotional intelligence, stress reduction, and the “CARE” leadership model—Communication, Appreciation, Respect, and Empathy. The conversation also explores the impact of artificial intelligence on leadership roles and Dr. Donley’s personal journey, including her background in healthcare and her passion for coaching.

Julie-DonleyDr. Julie Donley is a leadership expert, author, and former Director of Nursing with nearly 30 years of experience helping professionals navigate high-stress environments, manage conflict, and lead with emotional intelligence.

With a background in behavioral health and organizational leadership, she specializes in helping leaders shift from emotional reactivity to intentional leadership, fostering stronger teams and healthier workplaces. Dr. Donley holds a Doctorate in Organizational Leadership, an MBA, and is a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation.

An award-winning author, her latest book, Leading at the Speed of People, explores the power of self-awareness and emotional mastery in leadership. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she provides actionable strategies to help leaders reduce stress, improve communication, and create more productive, people-centered organizations.

Connect with Dr. Donley on LinkedIn and Facebook. Julie-Donley-logo

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • Self-leadership as the foundation for leading others
  • The CARE Leadership Model(TM) –Communication, Appreciation, Respect and Empathy
  • Leader’s role in reducing friction and stress
  • Navigating conflict with empathy and respect
  • The importance of Self-Awareness

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Stone Payton: Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show, where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Dr. Julie Donley LLC, the lady herself, Julie Donley. How are you?

Dr. Julie Donley: I’m doing great, Stone. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Stone Payton: Well, I’m excited to have you on the show. I’ve got a ton of questions. Uh, I think I’ll start with this one, though. Uh, how would you describe briefly? Mission. Purpose? What you’re really out there trying to do for folks, Julie?

Dr. Julie Donley: Yeah. So my mission is to help leaders be their best so that they can help other people be their best. Um, I really passionate about developing good and positive leadership experiences. And, you know, so that’s what I’m all about, making the world just a little bit better place.

Stone Payton: So what is the primary medium or mechanism for the work? Are you working with individuals, groups, speaking, writing or a little bit of all of that?

Dr. Julie Donley: Yeah, all of it. Yeah, you nailed it. So I am a leadership coach. I’ve been coaching for 20 years, 20 plus years. And, um, I work primarily with leaders. I also am an author. I’ve written just my third book in about six months ago. It’s called leading at the Speed of People. And, uh, I am excited about that. I have a couple more books up my sleeve, so I’ll be working on those in the coming years. And I do speaking, I do individual coaching and I do group coaching. So it’s exactly what you said. All of the above.

Stone Payton: So I’m getting a little experience here because we’re doing this coaching series, and I guess some of it’s rubbing off on me. At least I know the big the big buckets, I guess.

Dr. Julie Donley: Yeah.

Stone Payton: So I, I really do want to dive into this, uh, third book. But before we go there, I would be interested to know and I know our listeners will as well. What compelled you to write books in the first place, and maybe speak a little bit to the the process of sitting down, committing your ideas to paper, putting it out there for the world to enjoy, maybe poke at what was that process like for you?

Dr. Julie Donley: Yeah. Oh, that’s such a great question, Stone. Um, so for me, my first book, I just felt like I had so much to say. I, I had a really rough time coming out of childhood. My parents divorced at a very pivotal moment in my life, and really, I hadn’t had parenting in several years, so I really had been on my own since I was like 12. Um, in the home with them until my dad left. And so I, you know, childhood was hard. And then coming, coming out of childhood, I should say as a young adult, I had no support whatsoever. And so when I finally kind of got settled and became a nurse and had some career and had some stuff behind my some life experience out there where I kind of had my crap together. Um, I, you know, I’d been writing for publications, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t written, and I just had a lot that I wanted to pull together about, you know, and for that book, that first book, which is called The Journey Called You. It’s really a book about self-awareness. How do you become okay being you in a world that is constantly telling you who to be and how to be and all of that. And so that’s what that book is, um, this latest book. And of course, I’ve been writing for years. I mean, I wrote I have had several columns for publication and a newsletter and, um, so I’m kind of think that way.

Dr. Julie Donley: That’s how my brain works. Uh, this latest book, similar to the first, it was like I have been coaching for over 20 years. I have been I spent almost a decade as a leader in healthcare, as a director of nursing. And so I wanted to pull together a philosophy, my philosophy of leadership, because we seem to have gotten off track with how we function in the workplace, with the levels of burnout and stress. And, you know, people are just so unhappy, and it doesn’t have to be that way. And so, um, so that’s what compelled me to write this book. And again, I have some other books. I have some things I want to say to help people to navigate this life knowing better, more confident about their choices and their path. And so. So that’s what it’s like for me. I can’t speak for anybody else. Um, when I dive into a project, a writing project, I do have a process that I follow. And so, yeah, and that excites me. It I think writing more than any other activity is where I find flow, and flow is, you know, where you just I sometimes feel like I’ve plugged into the universe and there’s just this stream of consciousness working through me, and I love it. I just love it.

Stone Payton: So do you find in your writing and maybe in your speaking, but we’ll confine it to writing for the moment that, while it’s certainly no doubt is serving other people, do you find that going through that exercise also kind of solidifies your thinking, helps you crystallize your thinking, helps you articulate some ideas and you come out of that process, maybe even a better practitioner and even more equipped to serve people, because you took the time to sort of really think it through and explain it in a way that the most people can understand it in the most beneficial way.

Dr. Julie Donley: Yes. Thank you. That is exactly correct. I mean, we write books for ourselves too, because we do change in the process. We change a lot. And, um, so absolutely, it, it, uh, it solidifies your thinking. It makes things come together. All of this stuff that all this information that I’ve collected after all these years, and it just kind of brings all of that together. And if you have a question, I do the research and I find out, um, so yeah. And I just love that process of learning and, and growing and teaching others what I’ve learned.

Stone Payton: Well, I know you’re a life learner because I was, uh, stalking you a little bit earlier in the week, because I knew I was going to get a chance to have this conversation. And you’ve got a doctorate in organizational leadership. You have an MBA. You’re professionally credentialed coach. Uh, I mean, you you are definitely a life learner, aren’t you?

Dr. Julie Donley: Yes, I am, and I the things is, you know, knowing ourselves. Well, I mean, that’s the path that I’m on, right? It was my first book. Um, but I think one of the things that I do is that because I love to learn, I love to know stuff. Um, I’d like to pull all that, those things together and simplify the complex, all that stuff which gives people the gift of clarification. You know, other people are interested in other things. They don’t go to the lengths that I go to to learn what I, you know, am interested in. And I don’t go to the lengths that they do. So I read other people’s stuff. Right. And I think, um, That’s what I feel like is part of my gift, is just clarifying these topics for people and making it more digestible and easy to understand.

Stone Payton: I learned so much in these conversations and I just wrote this down. The gift of clarification. Um, so you may hear that phrase on the air and I’ll try to give you credit, but, you know, over time I might just say, you know, like I always say. No, that’s fantastic. All right. Let’s talk about this book a little bit. What are some of the the key topics that stand out, uh, for you that, that you knew you wanted to include in this because you were seeing it reflected in the work?

Dr. Julie Donley: Yeah. So. Well, there’s a couple, right? Um, the first of which is that, um, people are stressed, and so it, I wanted to find a way to speak to, um, how leaders can make life less lust, or work less stressful for themselves and for those around them. And in the book I speak about that as reducing friction. All of the things that get in the way, or make it difficult for people to just do their greatest work, right. If that’s the mission, is to for leaders to help other people do their best work and unleash their potential, then we have to make it easier for them to do that through training and resources and whatever those things are. Um, but in order to get to that, we I had I started the book talking about the issues of the day. Right. This how we learn how to become leaders, leaders. Leadership is a skill set that we’re often not taught how to do. And if we are taught how to do it, we happen to have a mentor. We still have to do trial and error because what works for one person, we have to adapt it to. We have our own style, but a lot of people are promoted because, hey, that sounds like a good idea. And so we wind up with these huge gaps in our knowledge of how to lead well.

Dr. Julie Donley: And a lot of leadership is I mean, yes, there’s a specific skill set, but it’s also contextual, right? It depends on the context and the industry. And you know, how you adapt to the and the level of leadership you’re in. And so I speak to that as well. Leadership starts with leading yourself. And if you’re not able to lead yourself well then it makes it harder for other people to want to follow you. So so that’s how I start the book. Then I dive into that friction, because that is a big part of we want to eliminate the friction points that we may be contributing to. I do speak to toxic leadership or ineffective leadership and how, um, that creates friction. So part of our job is to make sure that we’re not we’re not contributing to people’s difficult stress and their friction that they’re experiencing at work. And then we move into work environment. In the last part of the book, I introduced the Care Leadership model, which is a model that I actually wrote about like 18 years ago and published. And when I wrote it at the time, I’m like, oh, this is a book. This is good, you know? But the care leadership model is Care is an acronym for communication, appreciation, respect and empathy.

Dr. Julie Donley: And so there’s chapters on each of those things. And um, in order to be a great leader, we have to care to connect. And these are the ways in which we do that we have we have to recognize that we’re not leading, uh, robots. Although today, with artificial intelligence, there’s a lot of that in the workplace. But that does not, um, eliminate our need to recognize that people are people and we’re messy, and we have emotions, and we need to we want to feel a certain way when we come to work. People want to feel seen and valued and they want to be heard. Uh, they want to matter. And so we need to find ways to be much more people centered at work. And that is the goal of the book. So it’s written in a coaching approach. You know, I’ve been coaching for for 20, over 20 years. And when I went back to the workforce full time to be a director of nursing, I brought those coaching skills with me into that leadership role. And, um, that really informed my leadership strategy, because I already understood the idea of using coaching. And, um, you know, as a leader.

Stone Payton: That mental imagery of reducing friction. I find that very helpful because I have to believe, while certainly having an opportunity to practice leadership skills in a safe environment, learn new strategies, and that kind of thing would be incredibly powerful. I have to believe if I did nothing else tomorrow, but just wake up and say, okay, I’m leading this organization. Whatever I do today, I am going to focus it on reducing friction for the people in my organization so they can do the best job possible. I got to believe that would really move the needle just in and of itself. Just the the intent.

Dr. Julie Donley: Yep. Yep. You’re absolutely right. If you did nothing else. Like if you’re having a really bad day and you just want to keep your head down, if you could find one thing to make life easier for the people who work for you, you would be. You make their day. And, uh. And we don’t realize how many things, like, we have these grand visions, we have these grand strategic plans, but it is the simplest of things that can matter the most and make the experience of coming to work every day much more enjoyable. And, um, and they can be more productive if you just take away this one piece, you know, the equipment doesn’t work or, and a lot of this stuff I discovered in my own leadership. So, for instance, I remember one of the nurses, we had several nursing stations on a particular campus. And so one day the nurse comes down and she’s looking for something. I forget what it was, but maybe it was a pulse ox or something. And she’s like, where’s the pulse ox? And they didn’t remember which nursing station had it last. And she’s like, ready to run to the I mean, like, it took her an hour to find. I don’t even remember if she actually found it. And I turned to the lead nurse and I said, you know, make every single nursing station redundant.

Dr. Julie Donley: You should have five. If you have five nursing stations, there should be at least five of those. You know, of any piece of equipment that you need. That’s within reason. If it was really expensive, we might have one local place, but. And she to me, like I had three heads because nobody had given her permission prior to that. And it made sense, but nobody had given her permission to spend the money and do that. I mean, this wasn’t an expensive item, so they did. And over time, they they learned that that was what I was there to do. And that is part of our job as leaders is to because they don’t know. They’re just trying to do the best they can to take care of or do take care of the customer, or in my case, take care of the patients. Right. Um, so I went looking for ways to make life easier. And that was one of the things just making sure each of the nursing stations were properly equipped. So you’re not running all over the place wasting time and energy on just looking for something that you need to be able to provide high quality care. I mean, it was just to me it was a no brainer, but there were so many things like that that it really did make a difference over time.

Stone Payton: This is a little bit of a tangent, maybe, but, uh, it’s it’s it’s on my mind because I was invited to do a prerecorded little segment on utilizing AI to automate workflows for Or podcasting. And you know, I’m not an AI expert by any means. But as I got to talking with Lee, my business partner, and looking at our processes, we’re starting to play around with AI some and it’s already making an impact. Is AI touching your world at all these days?

Dr. Julie Donley: So that’s very interesting. And um, well, yes. Yes. And and a little no. So, um, as a writer, I like coming up with my own ideas, and I like, um, so. And I love to write, but I have begun writing with AI, like, I use AI to help bounce ideas and, um, even edit my work, which is great because it’ll put things in the right places. Sometimes I, you know, but so it saves me a lot of time. However, the big thing about AI where I can help the most is in automating repetitive tasks. Like, I wish we had artificial intelligence when I was working as director of nursing, because we would put together these long job aids to provide instructions. Again, we had I had, what, nine, seven nursing stations across three campuses. I mean, I had to like and then work around the clock to. So how do you train everybody without going to every single person and training them? And so we created job Aids, which you could do. I mean, I could have done that in an hour on using AI. It took us hours to put these together. And so those are the there’s going to be wonderful things happening with AI. But what it will not replace is the human part of work, the emotional labor.

Dr. Julie Donley: So dealing they don’t talk back. There’s no conflict with the machine. So dealing with conflict, any kind of dealing with people, they don’t suffer traumatic reactions. Right. They don’t have emotional outbursts. Well people do. And so all of the even politics at work. Um, so all of those things, growth and development, they still require people to be part of it. So in coaching, we are there are some advancements in, um, artificial intelligence for both therapy that’s new. Um, you know, they’re trying to to see if they can use artificial intelligence as a therapist, like a therapist adjunct. And the same thing is happening with with coaching as well. Um, I’m not involved in that. I haven’t chosen to get myself involved in that. But, um, but I am using I am using some artificial intelligence for the writing and just again, for more editing purposes. Um, you do have to be careful in my line of work because it removes all human emotion. Like it’s not a human. So it just gives you facts and, um, takes away your personality and that kind of thing. So, uh, so that’s what’s happening for me. Yeah.

Stone Payton: You touched on it briefly early in our conversation, but I’d like to dive a little bit deeper if we could. Your journey, your backstory. How did you arrive and end up doing this kind of work?

Dr. Julie Donley: Yeah. So my, you know, so my first job in healthcare, I, I, um, I mentioned that I really didn’t know what I was going to do when I grew up and struggled a little bit coming out of my, um, my youth. And so, um, my first degree was in business. I had no idea what I was doing with my life. And then I decided I was going to become a nurse. And a friend said to me, hey, there’s this new adolescent unit that just opened on this site, in this psychiatric hospital right down the street. And so he said, you should apply. So I did, and that was my first job in healthcare. So I, um, I started in psych and I loved it. I worked with kids and adolescents. Um, and it was wonderful. However, it was a really toxic work environment. It was not good and the leader was like the worst kind of leader you could imagine. And she didn’t communicate well. She was she was not a nurse. She was an administrator of the unit, which probably was part of the problem. She didn’t really understand nursing. And even, you know, the the techs, the people that worked with the nurses and, um, that experience really fueled, um, my desire to learn leadership. So I became a nurse. I went on to leave that place and went to another place. And I was always just fascinated in how leaders impacted the work environment and how that work environment would create results for us, either satisfaction in the, you know, for the employees or, you know, disengagement. And like that first experience. It was we had a lot of turnover. People were very disgruntled. And you know, I, I thought, why are the leaders letting this happen? Like who’s coaching her, you know? But anyway, so that fueled my interest in learning about leadership.

Dr. Julie Donley: I got my master’s, and then I wound up getting laid off three times in a row. And that third time. And I was a single mom back then. And that third time came right after I got my master’s. And that’s during that time period I found coaching. It was in 2001. And so it was a very early, you know, people weren’t coaching was new. And that’s when I started coaching back then. And so that’s sort of how I got interested in in all this stuff. And yeah, both leaders leading and coaching. Coaching was a great match for me because I’d already been in psych. And um, so in psych, you’re dealing with people who have become who have tipped right that that, you know, there’s so many people, um, who are struggling with addiction and depression and anxiety and other mental disorders, right? But they tip and they wind up in a mental hospital. Most people don’t. But because I had that experience, I’ve always been fascinated with people and I’m very compassionate. So I really that was a really good fit for me. And so when I transitioned to coaching, it was great because you’re dealing with people who are functioning, they’re great. They’re out there doing wonderful things and they want to do more. They want to do better and be better. And so it was really a natural progression for me to move from the psychiatric arena into the coaching arena, as a lot of therapists, actually, a lot of therapists do as well, because it’s a it’s a it’s a good fit on that continuum of, you know, just working with people.

Stone Payton: So in the early days of that transition, was the was the business side of coaching a little bit challenging, like just the sales and marketing and getting the business and taking care of all the business stuff. But you’ve also got to get out there and practice your craft. Was that a little tough to navigate in the early going, or did it come pretty easy?

Dr. Julie Donley: Uh, yeah, it still is. You know, but I mean, you know, I did have an MBA. I had a actually a bachelor’s in business and a and a master’s in business. So I kind of understood how to run a business. And you learn. Right. And that certainly that helped me when I became a director of nursing because I was kind of on my own. It was my own department, and I didn’t I didn’t report to a nurse. I reported to an executive director who didn’t know anything about nursing. I mean, you know. Right. So you wind up, um, transferring those skills into your life experience, you know, into your life. So, yeah, I mean, and I think that’s some people who start their business sort of forget. And the way I talk about this is there are three areas of focus. If you want to go into business for yourself, the first of which is you need to be an expert or develop that expertise in whatever it is you’re in, in whatever it is you want to deliver. So if you’re an accountant, you need to be a good accountant, right? If you’re a coach like me, I needed to get trained and I have my certification.

Dr. Julie Donley: I have a lot of certifications. Um, so you need that. But then you also need those business skills. You need to understand marketing and accounting. And how are you going to make those sales and what’s your plan going to be? What’s your strategic plan. All of that good stuff. But the third circle in a Venn diagram, if you wanted to put it together like that, is the, um, your personal development, because you will grow tremendously along the way. You still have to manage yourself. You need to learn how to manage your emotions. How are you going to stay focused? Um, you know, shiny object syndrome. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that. It’s where we get very distracted from our core business strategies. Businesses do this as well, and it’s not good at all. We don’t want to be distracted. So, um, so all of those things that to develop ourselves, we need to work on as well when we go into business for ourselves.

Stone Payton: So yes, on the definite yes on the shiny object thing. Uh, that is definitely one of my downfalls.

Dr. Julie Donley: Yeah, it’s very easy. And that’s why you asked me about, like, artificial intelligence. Yes. I am learning about artificial AI. I am scanning the environment to know what’s out there, what’s available, and I’m using it in to the extent that I feel appropriate, it’s appropriate for what I want to do. But because my focus is people about dealing with people, um, and, um, there’s not quite the fit for me to invest my time and energy into learning more about, at least not right now. And one of the topics of conversations that I’ve been having recently with leaders and other, um, professionals is this very topic, the the topic of AI. The introduction of AI into the workplace and the stress that people are experiencing with that in relation to that. So, um, yeah, I mean, knowing your limits, knowing what you can, what the organization you’re working for, what they, um, what are their boundaries around the use of AI in the workplace and how are they, um, are they teaching people how to use it, how they want it to be used? But, um, some people are jumping in there and getting excited and trying it out, and other people are scared and people don’t like change. So you have all of these factors. And again, these are people trying to use AI. So this is not an AI thing. You can’t you can’t. This isn’t robots. These are people. And you have all this messiness around around change and around new new processes and how well we’re communicating. And most companies don’t communicate that well. So I’m sure that that is contributing to the messiness of the introduction of AI into the workplace as well.

Stone Payton: Well, I can see one of the reasons you must be so effective in your work. I think your nursing background just had to contribute tremendously. Now, my, um, frame of reference for nursing or healthcare for that matter, is pretty much confined to what I see on on television. But I will say, even with that lens, it looks to me like the perfect breeding ground for stress and, and burnout and, and that kind of thing. I had not thought about a connection between AI and that being a stressor, but having that all that experience must really serve you well.

Dr. Julie Donley: I think so. I it’s one of the best decisions I ever made. One of them was to become a nurse. And, uh, and I loved working in psych. I mean, I’m retired now. I don’t I don’t work in the fields anymore. And I doubt I’ll go back. Um, but, um, it was a great career. And, uh, and today I’m really focused on bringing what I learned in those, um, during those psych years to the forefront. Because, like I said, I think it’s like 1 in 6 Americans struggle with some sort of mental health diagnosis. And there are many, many people struggling with, um, anxiety, depression, addiction, we know is a huge problem. And so, um, yeah, how do we function in our day to day? How do we work in the workplace alongside people who are struggling to they’re struggling as well. And again, AI is not going to fix that for us. We have to do that. That’s part of being human and learning to be good with other humans and navigate that emotional landscape.

Stone Payton: So I’m going to switch gears on you for a moment, if I might, because I’m genuinely interested and I think our listeners probably would be as as well. What do you do when you’re not coaching? Speaking, writing? What passions, interests, hobbies do you pursue outside the scope of this work?

Dr. Julie Donley: Well, I bet you can guess. I love to read.

Stone Payton: Yeah.

Dr. Julie Donley: But, uh. But yeah. So some of my favorite things, uh, besides just hanging out with my husband and family and the dog. Uh, we like to ride motorcycles. I learned to ride a motorcycle about six years ago, so I am loving that at this time of my life. Um, obviously have some kids, and and I just had, um, my one son had a baby, so I’m a new grandmom, and I love that. And, uh. Yeah. And I’m a big Grateful Dead fan. So 40 years. I mean, I’ve been listening to them since I was a teenager, so just got back from Vegas and and seeing the the dead and company in, um, in the sphere, which was so fun. I, uh, yeah, I got my husband into them too. So we have we have a great time doing that. And, you know, we just like to hang out. We like barbecues, we like hanging with our friends, and we love travel. So the more we can do that, we’re we, uh, we’ve really been enjoying that in this time in our lives.

Stone Payton: I love asking that question. You can learn so much about a person when you ask them that question, and it sounds delightful. Uh, before we wrap, I would love to leave our listeners with a little piece of counsel or advice. I call it a pro tip, kind of related to some of these topics that we’ve been talking, uh, about. You know, something for them to be thinking about, maybe it’s it’s reading and looking. The number one pro tip I have for you, uh, if any of this conversation is striking a chord for for you, uh, my pro tip is, uh, pick up the phone or get on the computer. Reach out and have a conversation with with Doctor Julie. But let’s leave them with a little something to chew on.

Dr. Julie Donley: Yeah, well, I think what I, what I would suggest is to look for the friction in your life because that really does lift your spirits. And so if there’s something at work that’s challenging, if there’s something that even someone is doing, you know, there are lots of things that you probably don’t even you’ve just learned to accept as is. But, you know, we don’t need to settle. We can we can. We have a lot more power to create our life experience the way we want it to be. So that would be the tip of the day, I think, given our conversation. And of course, if you’re looking for some assistance with that, you know, pick up a copy of one of my books, the latest of leading at the Speed of People, which, as I mentioned, is a people focused, a people centered approach to leadership. The coaching approach.

Stone Payton: All right. So what is the best way for our listeners to tap into your word. Get their hands on this book. Maybe have that conversation with you website whatever coordinates are appropriate.

Dr. Julie Donley: Yeah. Yeah. Well I kept it simple. It’s just my name. So it’s doctor Julie Donnelly. Comm. Um, email. It’s info at doctor Julie donnelly.com. Just spell the name. Right? Right. It’s, uh, it’s real simple. It’s d o n l e y is my last name. And I’m sure you’ll have that listed, uh, in the, um, in the information for this show, and, um, you know, so visit me online and send me an email and my, my phone number’s on the website, so feel free to reach out if I can be of service or assist you in some way. I’m, um, you can you can reach out for if you’re looking for a speaker as well. So I’m happy to be of service in some way. If you think of something here resonated with you.

Stone Payton: Doctor Julie, it has been an absolute delight having you on the program this afternoon. I’ve learned a ton. I know our listeners have as well. You’re clearly passionate and committed to to serving people, and we sure appreciate you.

Dr. Julie Donley: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s really been a pleasure chatting with you today. And, uh, yeah, I’m really excited to make some changes and and help people along the way. So thank you so much for having me and really grateful.

Stone Payton: My pleasure. All right. Until next time. This is Stone Payton for our guest today, Doctor Julie Donnelly and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.

 

Georgia Technology Summit 2025: Scott McMichael with Improving

April 24, 2025 by angishields

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Atlanta Business Radio
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Georgia Technology Summit brings together 1000+ Georgia-focused technologists to network, learn, and engage with the latest trends in Georgia innovation. This year’s summit was held at the Woodruff Arts Center, a stunning and iconic cultural landmark located in the heart of Midtown Atlanta.

Scott-McMichaelScott McMichael serves as Managing Director of North America at Improving, supporting the enterprises and having oversight of Improving’s strategic service offerings.

His primary focus is growing and positioning the company for greater impact across North America to positively change the perception of the IT profession. This includes business development, delivery excellence, plus attracting and growing technology professionals by creating a great work culture.

Prior to working with Improving, Scott held multiple leadership positions for consulting organizations – President and COO at Innovative Architects, which was acquired by Improving in 2019, and VP of Operations & Delivery at American System Corporation/Thoughtmill. As an energetic technology leader, Scott is passionate about assembling dynamic teams that deliver enterprise platform solutions.

He is a Georgia native, having served the client and his community of North Metro Atlanta for his entire career. He serves on the Alpharetta Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, and is an active member of Conscious Capitalism’s Senior Leaders Network. Scott is a graduate of Southern Polytechnic State University and resides in Milton, Georgia with his wife and four kids.

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Georgia Technology Summit 2025 at the Woodruff Arts Center. This is Business RadioX. And now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here broadcasting live from the Georgia Technology Summit 2025. So excited to be talking to my next guest, Scott McMichael with Improving Atlanta. Also on the Tag board of Directors and co-chair of today’s event. Welcome, Scott.

Scott McMichael: It is good to be here. And it’s an active scene here in the lobby, isn’t it, Lee?

Lee Kantor: Yeah, there’s a lot of energy, a lot of excitement. So many people, so many familiar faces. How has the event evolved since you’ve been involved with it?

Scott McMichael: So this year I had the opportunity to be co-chair, and about halfway through the process, Larry Williams, who’s CEO of Tag, said, hey, I got a great idea. Why don’t we get a head start and start planning next year as well? So we’re trying to to to get ahead of things for next year. But the when you think about the evolution, I think that, um, there was a topic out there in the world called AI, the quantum verse. How long were we going to be able to ignore that? Now no one’s running around a tag event giving you their tip top secrets or or sharing their intellectual intellectual property on, on fobs or or through through some sort of, uh, agent. But this is a this issue is a big economic issue. This issue affects how we see data centers coming into our local economy, this issue of how we tackle AI. Um, I’ll use the term inside of my own business. They who who, uh, harness AI win the day. And we’re in the technology business, so we have an obligation to help our clients understand at really every level of their business how they’re connected to AI. So as we look at it through the lens of tag, we don’t have a choice but to address this topic from really every single angle. And that’s how they’ve structured that content for our guest today.

Lee Kantor: Now, how do you help your clients kind of decide what should we lean into when it comes to AI and what should we say? You know what? This is a human to human interaction that we don’t want to, uh, avoid happening. We want more human to human interaction. So how do you kind of, um, I was talking to another guest, and I mentioned this, like, just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean everything’s a nail. You. Part of being smart about this is knowing when to use the appropriate tool for the appropriate work that needs to be done.

Scott McMichael: It is a great question, Lee. And and you can print this on a fortune cookie tag, but, um, make no assumptions about how the client and where the client places their intellectual value, right? So we’ve done business with a nonprofit to build a registration system that now incorporates AI to that, that organizes camps for kids. Well, it sort of seems like that’s been done or is available and off the shelf. And you could go to CompUSA and pull cellophane right off the shelf, right. But that interaction and how they work with sponsors, how they interact with parents, is what they think is their most special sauce, their most special intellectual property. So that’s what we really try to get to the core of is, is this what makes you different, or is this what you have to have? If you have to have it, then there probably is a hammer on the shelf. If this is something that makes you uniquely different, then how do we uniquely deploy this sort of product scenario that that separates you out in the market? Because without that differentiation, it’s just an expensive. How did we end up with this on our cap table?

Lee Kantor: And it’s one of those things like um, when it comes to at one point there was the technology of I’m going to call somebody and they’re going to route me five times through some phone tree, right. And at one point, that was supposed to be elegant, and at one point that was supposed to solve some problems, right? But it just frustrates their customers a lot of times. So how do you kind of prevent AI from being that?

Scott McMichael: It’s it’s the scenario was actually spoken about on our stage today with Brett Taylor, who’s an aficionado at this sort of user experience. Um, when I look at those differences, I sort of say, uh, the difference in yesterday’s technology or an IVR technology like that is, is something that you can draw out in a, in a serial process, right? We could workflow that we could understand it, we could comprehend it, comprehend it. We could, uh, put together the marketing people, the product people, the technology people. We all now understand that one comes before two and two comes before three. This isn’t how we think about things anymore in technology at all, right? That interwovenness that speed of experience is just expected from those clients. And so now when we think about, uh, artificial intelligence and these, uh, agentic workflows, doing some thinking for us, we really believe that some of that thinking is good thinking, that that ability for me to not have to go through three steps. Step two, step three, step four, but to be able to skip to step five and really get to the right best, uh, solution for my answer. Solution to my problem. And maybe or maybe not. Do I speak with an individual human? Um. Those humans, we hope, upskill and become more and more intelligent. More and more, uh, higher, high skilled, more and more knowledgeable of the thing that they’re trying to solve for us. You know, we’ve been talking about, uh, technology replacing human capital since I started in this business 30 years ago, just at the onset of the web. I’m not sure I’ve replaced any jobs so far, actually, but I hope I have upskilled jobs along the way.

Lee Kantor: Now, from an improving Atlanta standpoint, who is the ideal customer for you improving?

Scott McMichael: Uh, Atlanta is our local office. We are part of a now global organization, and we have found we have this conversation on a pretty regular basis. It isn’t based on an industry, a technology, a a choice of technology platform. For us, it is the innovators, the people who have already decided that they’re not just a, a, an organization who needs enabling technology, but they’re an organization that is a technology organization that whether they ship pallets or make candies or order, uh, or provide pizzas to parties, they’ve already decided that a technology connected supply chain is what will differentiate them. It’s in the core of their business. We don’t want to be fighting an uphill battle on. Are we sure we need an app? Did we ever need the website? If you think about prior, you know, major decisions. So for us it is. It’s the group that’s like we’re enthusiastic about making ourselves different and really of more value through technology, regardless of of industry or tech.

Lee Kantor: And then so what is that problem that they’re having that it’s just not working as well as they’d like, or they’re frustrated by some element of it where improving is going to be able to improve their situation.

Scott McMichael: It’s a good question. One of the first, uh, things that we find is people have a a good fear of technology debt lest don’t get behind the eight ball. Are we still, uh, staying competitive? Do we have the tool sets now that are at our fingertips, that only the largest fortune 1000 could have had access to before? Can we now be the right size fish in that right size pond and leverage enterprise technology and elevate ourselves? Let us sit side by side with the top fortune companies. And so those are great conversations to have.

Lee Kantor: So you focus on mid market. Is that kind of your.

Speaker4: I would say.

Scott McMichael: Upper mid market. Um but there is no client that has been too small or too large in the last uh in the last year. So uh, some of our competition has really focused in and decided that there is a, a profile of client. That is where they need to focus. It’s where they are best situated. It’s the right size problem, the right size budget. We haven’t made that step yet. In our business, you find that we are sort of what we call a global boutique. We want to deploy local, um, in-office if we can, collaborative product development and systems integration and a sort of in that boutique way, like you really are collaborating and arm in arm and building that next, uh, piece of technology, but then be able to deploy globally when it’s time or when it’s time for that total cost of ownership or when it’s time to get to some more, to maybe less innovation and more operational, uh, stages of your products development.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Scott McMichael: That’s a great question. It is always a pleasure to have Business RadioX present, uh, promoting what it is we do, uh, in, in the technology community across not just Atlanta, but across Georgia. I think that the more my sort of I see this as my sort of second career in tag, um, where I am in my career and where I am in my community is we want to make sure that everybody understands that when they send their kids off to MIT and these in Stanford and all these great, uh, institutions, that they know that that educational system is just as strong right here. Um, I think sometimes in our technology organization in Georgia, uh, the kids driving down the road would say, I have no idea what’s going on on the other side of that concrete wall. I believe that where you can help us and where we need to help ourselves, is to promote that vitality of the technology market that is right within our reach, a growing, booming leading technology market across Georgia.

Lee Kantor: And then, like you said, cast that wider net and not define technology so narrowly.

Scott McMichael: Well said.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to connect with you, whether it’s about tag, whether it’s about next year’s summit or improving Atlanta, what are the best coordinates for you?

Scott McMichael: Absolutely. Reach out anytime. Scott McMichael at improving. Com or hit me up on LinkedIn.

Lee Kantor: And then improving his website.

Scott McMichael: Improving. Com.

Lee Kantor: Well Scott, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Scott McMichael: Thanks, man.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor back in a few. At Georgia Technology Summit 2025.

 

Tagged With: Georgia Technology Summit 2025, Improving

Kenny Larson and Josh Priniski with Slumberland Furniture

April 23, 2025 by angishields

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Denver Business Radio
Kenny Larson and Josh Priniski with Slumberland Furniture
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Kenny-LarsonKenny Larson is the President & CEO of family owned Slumberland Furniture. Slumberland is a top 25 home furnishing’s company with 125 corporate and franchise stores throughout the mid-west. The Larson family is also heavily involved in commercial real estate with close to 4 million square feet owned and managed.

Kenny graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in Economics and Theology and then Arizona State with an MBA in Marketing. He joined Slumberland the fall of 1990 and held many positions before becoming President in 2008. Slumberland continues to be focused on developing strong people who understand the company’s mission, live out our values and execute on an excellent customer experience every day.

Kenny has been married to Monica (a very talented artist who teaches, collaborates & creates her own work) for the past 38 years. They have two boys one who is a chef in St. Paul and the other joined the Slumberland Marketing team in 2025.

Josh-PriniskiJosh Priniski is the Vice President of Franchise at Slumberland Furniture, a family-owned company with locations across 12 states in the heart of the country. A proud Midwesterner, Josh grew up in the region and earned his B.S. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh—a degree that laid the groundwork for thoughtful problem-solving and people-centered leadership.

With a diverse background spanning both retail and hospitality, Josh brings a practical, hands-on approach to business strategy and franchise development. He is particularly passionate about helping others achieve success and translating that success into meaningful contributions within their communities.

Outside of work, Josh enjoys life at home with his wife and two teenagers—who keep things lively. He believes that whether in business or at home, success begins with listening, learning, and leading with intention.

Connect with Josh on LinkedIn.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Coming to you live from the Business RadioX studio. It’s Franchise Marketing Radio. Ready to revolutionize your franchise with AI? Franchise now empowers franchises with advanced AI solutions, automatic processes, and enhanced marketing strategies. From personalized customer interactions to predictive analytics, we help you harness AI to drive growth and efficiency. Transform your franchise with the power of AI. Visit Franchise Now to learn more and take your business into the future. Now here’s your host.

Rob Gandley: Welcome back, everybody to Franchise Marketing Radio, where we spotlight the most dynamic minds and franchising leaders who are building brands, growing communities, and reshaping the future of business ownership. On today’s episode is no different. I have with me Kenny Larson, he’s the CEO of Slumberland, and I also have with me the brand’s VP of Franchise development, Josh Priniski. So welcome to the show, gentlemen.

Kenny Larson: Hey, good to be here.

Josh Priniski: Thank you.

Rob Gandley: So before we dive in, I always like to kind of tie things up for the audience so they really understand you. And we do have an audience across the country. And I know maybe your brand isn’t as well known in certain places, but certainly I know it is in certain states. So be good to kind of share with the audience a little bit about the brand. And Kenny, it’s been part of your life, right? It was started by, I believe, your father. So you could maybe tell us that the story, how this has developed. I know the franchising started much later than the original business, and that I think was 2008. You’ll correct me to get that right, but could you give us a little background and how this whole thing started and where this brand is today?

Kenny Larson: Yeah, super interesting story started in 1967. I think at that time it probably was the first mattress specialty store. So my dad and a couple other guys had a idea to do things a little bit differently. And so that we’ve made it. We’re now into our 58th year I think is really, really cool. And obviously being my dad, I was really young at the time but don’t know life without Slumberland. Through the years, I would say we’ve been very entrepreneurial. Started adding a couple of key categories. The first one was sleep sofas. Early on felt that brand names were really important. So coming out of the mattress business, we learned that lesson early. And Ken wanted to not just add recliners. It had to be La-Z-Boy. And so we added La-Z-Boy to the mix. There was probably a leap of faith on their part to say, we’re going to put our chairs in a mattress store, which there weren’t a lot of them at that time. But they did it. And, you know, one of the things that it speaks to Rob is we’re still with La-Z-Boy today. We’re their largest customer. So we have done since that time over $1 billion worth of La-Z-Boy.

Kenny Larson: And we we we continue to value that relationship along with some of the early ones like Sealy that has been there from the beginning. You mentioned the franchising piece. Actually early on we started franchising in the mid 70s. So Ken saw it as an opportunity to grow faster than he could otherwise. And as you know, mid 70s franchising was still relatively new as a concept and has built that out. And you know, real testament is we still have a few of our original franchisees still with us after changing store size concept and all of all of that over the years. Today we’re more of a full line furniture store. And if you walked into one of the stores, it would look like a more of a furniture store with a strong emphasis on mattresses. But that’s still our, you know, our key category, our heritage. You mentioned the footprint. We’re in 12 states based here in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, but we go as far west as Billings, Montana, down to Wichita, Kansas, and then up to Benton Harbor, Michigan and the 12 states in between that are where we’ve got our footprint today.

Rob Gandley: I love it, I love it. That’s America right there. That’s beautiful. So and I know, like you covered a lot of ground in that answer. Um, and I know I want to get in a little bit about the heart behind the brand. Right. So you you did mention franchising, and I was way off. I thought it started later on, but it started way back in the 70s. And yeah, that was like the the beginning of, like really formulating what is a franchise supposed to be structured as and how to do it right and make sure that and that’s why I love franchising because it is it is built for, you know, everybody to to kind of, you know, get the most out of the relationship and, and you know, so I think prior to that it probably didn’t have as much structure. But yeah, you’ve seen it all then you’ve seen it since the beginning. So but but before I dive into the community aspects and the heart of your brand, um, I want to understand a little bit about the decision to franchise. Like, what was that about you and your dad and your family? Because there’s that connection. Not only did you build an incredible company, right, and a brand and you mentioned things like these, these like La-Z-Boy being with you since the beginning, being their best customer. I mean, that that does say a lot to be anyone’s biggest customer and for that long. So from that side of things, you guys have clearly have a certain way, uh, to, to run a business. But what was it about the franchising side where you’re really extending that to other people to become part of this family? How is it in your dad’s mind and your vision of doing that? Like, that’s early on to, like, like talking about being an early adopter. So tell me more about the thought behind becoming a franchise and how that’s impacted the brand.

Kenny Larson: Yeah, I think, you know, Ken has always had a mind towards growth, mind towards continuing to ask the question of what’s next. Um, I think when we first began franchising and Rob, I was not part of those early conversations because I think I was ten years old, but I think he he really saw it as an opportunity that had something special with this concept of Metro specialty store and wanted to take it further out. So there. I know at the beginning a large part of it was growth. I do know one of the things that was really important to Ken was the, you know, the values of the company, which is everything from certainly honesty and integrity, treating people with love, dignity and respect. And one of the key questions we had to answer with that is how do we continue to grow, if that’s important to the brand, how do we continue to extend that with franchisees coming in? So there was a big part of at the beginning, making sure we were partnering with the right people that weren’t not only going to be good store operators. That was that was a for sure. But also we’re going to be aligned with those values and the way that we did it. So I think early on with Ken recognizing that those those values are still in place today and the way that we really try to approach the business. So I think just foundationally, you obviously need to have a business concept that works. You need to be able to support it. But I think you also need to have the, you know, the values associated with that to be able to continue to grow into into the future.

Rob Gandley: I love what you said because, you know, I think the number one piece of advice and I don’t specifically work in the franchising of businesses, but I have a lot of friends that that work in that side of it where they help a business owner like your dad way back then, you know, nowadays. Well, then he was a pioneer, but like, now it’s a hey, here’s how you do it. Here’s the pathway to follow. And one of the main pieces of advice that is always given to an emerging brand and a visionary, or an owner or a founder is you’ve got to take what’s in your heart and somehow, you know, get that over to the franchise owner and it has to be aligned. And if it’s not aligned, that is one of the biggest reasons franchisors can’t get past, say, ten units, right? Or just don’t get off the ground and don’t, you know, hit that level of success that you guys have hit. And just because of bringing people in that are aligned, just knowing that he thought that way originally is pretty. It’s pretty profound because that is one of the main pieces of advice we have to, you know, don’t just go for that first person or someone who’s ready to make the investment right. You really have to think about that. So that’s brilliant.

Kenny Larson: And I think with that, I’d love to tell you we were perfect throughout the years in identifying and making sure that that was in place. You know, there there there are times that that hasn’t been the case. But we continue to say that this is important, who we are. And some of the some of the transitions that have taken taken place have been because of that. There just wasn’t the alignment.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, yeah. You gotta, you know, it’s a pruning in the tree does happen. Things change too. Yup. And, uh, it’s just it’s just having that thing that that that thought process as a leader, I appreciate that. It’s why I love the industry. It usually works pretty well because of those reasons. So anyway, let’s dive into okay, being a franchisee, we’re going to talk more about the business side. But I really think the heart for a lot of brands that I talk to is these business owners really become connected to their communities. They become leaders. And it’s one of the fulfilling things about it is that, you know, if you’re running a sizable business like your operations and you’re in the community, there’s impact there, right? And obviously, being able to be proactive and and structure some ideas not only for your franchisees to think about, but just just in general, uh, just being a good business leader. But you do have some programs that you work with them on. And one of them, I think is 40 winks. Right. And I wanted to see Josh, if you could share more about that. But more than just the program itself, what’s behind that? And how do you try to use those types of programs and others so that the franchisees, the owners there in those markets can really connect with not only consumers in the market, but other businesses and make an impact.

Josh Priniski: Yeah, absolutely. I think I’ll let Kenny speak a little bit more to the history of how 40 winks got started and, and kind of the family enterprise behind that. But what I’ll say is on on the franchise side, we really do from the very beginning, make this part of part of our message, part of what we do overall, uh, as we bring talk to franchisees that are coming into the system and then make it part of our daily, daily speak ever, every day. Right. And so as we’re talking about giving to the community and connecting with community, and that’s that’s part of the beauty of franchising, right, is that you have, uh, you know, at Slumberland, right? We’ve got owner operators living in the communities. And so you, you work where you live and you make connections, and and being part of the community becomes just incredibly important. And so to have resources like 40 winks as a foundation to sort of lean on and say, this is something we can stand for, uh, to be able to give, uh, beds to kids and, uh, to, uh, to help in the community in the area that’s needed most. Uh, it’s just it’s incredibly impactful. But again, I’ll let Kenny speak a little bit more to the history of that.

Kenny Larson: Yeah, I would say Rob mentioned the values at the beginning. One of them is that, uh, we were we do give back to the community. We have an aggressive goal every year that it’s 10% of our profits go back to communities. And that’s something that has been in place from the beginning. One of the things that we recognized is that there’s a, you know, a tremendous amount of need with, uh, too many kids sleeping on the floor. It ties to our key categories. So we set up a foundation called 40 winks. The sole purpose is to give mattresses through different charities to kids that are sleeping on the floor. And, um, we want to make sure that that’s happening not only in the corporate markets, but also, give the opportunity to make that happen in the franchise markets, too. So, um, the Larson family takes care of all admin expenses, everything associated with that foundation. So 100% of the dollars that get donated to this foundation go back, go to a mattress so the kids, we can leverage that as much as we can. To Josh’s point, to Josh’s point on the on the franchise piece, one of the things that I should have said at the beginning, we do have corporate stores and we do have franchise stores. It’s about 55 corporate, 70 franchise round numbers, and we’ve got a lot of just phenomenal store managers, and they do incredible work every day. But I would tell you, they can’t have the same impact in the community by saying, I’m the franchise owner of this one. It’s just it’s just a different message. And we have a lot of our store managers that are active with 40 winks. They’re serving on the chamber. They’re part of it, and we encourage that as much as we possibly can. But I would just tell you, it’s different when you’re when you’re the owner of that location or locations and you’re part of the community. So I think it’s a it’s it’s a tremendous part that. Franchise franchisees need to leverage because it is it’s a tremendous impact.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, I look at it as this is kind of marketing. I like to do, you know, uh, giving back first, I think the, the uh, the previous, say, 30 years with all this technology that’s come into our lives very much it’s become, you know, a results in advanced world. And that’s just good marketing. Um, because of the change in the way we kind of give people like with software or even Google using Google search. Right? A tool like that, that’s. Yeah, it’s free. You know, just use it. Well, it’s not really free in a sense, But but that’s the way consumers think today. And so I think having programs that make it natural to just represent the brand in the way that you talk about those values, it kind of makes second, make buying furniture secondary. It’s like, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sure. Let me just find the right the right piece of furniture. But I absolutely love doing business with someone that thinks about kids first. Right. So I mean, it’s such a profound way to just be the right business owner. And you’re right, as a business owner, you do have the opportunity to to lead in your community in that way. So so it is a valuable business tool. Go ahead.

Kenny Larson: Yeah. And it starts within our mission. Um, you know, we really look to try to improve people’s lives and strengthen our communities. And with some of the products like mattresses, there’s a direct connection when we ask the right questions and get people sleeping on the right mattress. When you’re sleeping better, your life is better. I mean, that’s physically, emotionally, I’d say spiritually. There’s a lot of things that just come better with that. Um, but as we talk about strengthening our communities, we certainly there’s jobs and there’s great product values, but we want to have a piece that we’re we’re active and we’re trying to make make the community better. And one of our big ideas is we believe that a community, a city town is going to be better if there’s a slumberland there. So that’s part of what we’re really excited about. Every time we open up a new location, it’s just not another location because we’re, you know, we’re able to sell more. It’s we’re making another community better.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, yeah. And there’s a lot of a lot of wisdom in what you were sharing earlier about giving back and, you know, really being doing it with intention in the right purpose. Um, and, you know, 10%, that’s a that’s a big chunk to commit, right? And, um, but that’s, uh, that’s powerful. And I think that just helps everybody in the brand. So I’m glad that you lead that way. So anyway, let’s talk about growth though. Let’s let’s talk about we just talked about some very important. So then the question is how do you approach, you know, launching the next location and how can you kind of keep an eye on this quality, this, this integrity that we talked about and this mission? In other words, what you just said, you want the franchise owner to have the same exact feeling like, man, I can’t wait to make that impact in my community. So how do you scale your business plan for growth but also keep that balanced out? And I think, Josh, maybe you’ll maybe you could take and then Kenny, you could follow up.

Josh Priniski: Yeah. Happy to. Rob I think uh, it’s a great question. And I think that when you have core values that really are core to your business. Right. And you really do, um, you know, everyone in the organization believes that, you know, we need to lead with honesty and integrity, that we need to have love, dignity and respect, that we need to work with excellence. Right. These things that are just part of our core values, they end up becoming less of a hindrance to growth and sort of the roadmap for growth, right where you can you can lean on your core values and say, this is this is who we want to be. This is who we are. And so as we look to say, hey, we want to engage in adding additional franchisees. We want to make sure that we have the right people coming into our system. We look at that and we say, can can we be honest with with them and say, here’s where the opportunity is. Can we look at our supply chains and our marketing opportunities and say, hey, are we would we be able to work with excellence if we added these seven additional markets right, in these additional states? Right. Those if you if you use the values in those ways to say, you know, we’ll always check ourselves in those with those things to make sure that we are able to execute with love, dignity and respect in all of our conversations with our franchisees, both the ones that want to come on, but the ones that we’re that that are in our system now.

Josh Priniski: Right. Every every time you make a change, every time you add a location, um, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a big deal for the entire system. And to, uh, be aware of that and to be aware of the impact and to make sure that every, every, uh, change that we make and everyone that we bring on and, uh, is, is, is further furthering the mission and not just sort of, uh, making us a little bit like, alright, can we do this one? Can we do this one? How do we just keep grow, grow, grow. It’s like, no, we’ve got the values. And then we say, hey, you know what? Maybe, maybe in order to bring on the next 20 stores, we need to do x, y, Z in order to do it. Excellent. Right. And so then that, then that creates the roadmap, uh, to be able to do that. So it ends up being less of a hindrance and more of a, of a map. Right. A guidepost to how to, how to do that.

Rob Gandley: Yeah. So you have a lot of intention like with the way you expand, you kind of know where where the options are, what the best options are. It may take you a while to get there, but you already have the intention. Um, how how do you. So for anyone just zeroing in and listening, thinking about, you know, the idea of of getting involved with the furniture industry, how, first of all, what are sort of the criteria? What what would you be looking for if someone is listening, who is that other than the the the values part right and the alignment part? What are you looking for otherwise for a franchisee? And how do you how do you train them and bring them in either way when they come into the system?

Josh Priniski: Yeah, absolutely. We you know, the the one of the things we’ve seen with a lot of our, the franchisees that are in our system, as Kenny mentioned, we have a number of people that have been around with us from the very beginning. Right. And so we’ve got a lot of history, but we also have a number of people that have come into the system a lot of different ways. And, um, you know, I it you don’t have to have a furniture background, right? You don’t have to have a real estate background with a big, you know, 400, you know, four, four, 40,000 square foot building. Right? You, uh, you can come you can come into this, uh, really just, again, the values being important, but also the willingness and the desire to, uh, to, to to, you know, a lot of our stores are owner operated, right? So the really get into the business and, um, and actually manage the sales teams and engage with the customers and understand the operations and the. You know, there are a lot of, uh, complexities sometimes to owning a bigger retail retail store, right? Especially you sell it today and you deliver it tomorrow. And there’s all of those things. Of course, we help with all of that, right? As as the franchisor, we provide lots of really good systems. But someone coming into the system that’s just really hungry to learn, right? Really hungry to, uh, engage and uh, and to and of course, then, uh, engage with their community. Those become the become the roadmaps right there. There’s obviously plenty of opportunity for people to invest in the system and find a manager to do all of that for them. Right. But, uh, where we found really good success is to have people who are just really hungry, hungry to learn, hungry to engage and, uh, and utilize the systems.

Rob Gandley: Yeah. I was just thinking, as you were answering that, you know, just personally, um, and I’m not shopping as much as I have in the past, you know, for for my homes and different things, I have different lifestyles I’ve lived through, but I just remember raising my kids, and one of our favorite things to do was to go to furniture stores and just check things out. I like the environment. I like the environment of most of them. If they’re well done, you know? Uh, but I could see what you mean by wanting to be a part of that and wanting to be more involved with your employees and your client, your customers, and interacting with the community. Right. It’s a place, it’s community.

Josh Priniski: No, that’s exactly it’s such a fun space to be. Right. Because you walk into a furniture store and and, you know, again, it’s not a it’s not a, you know, fast food, right, where everything’s just quick, quick, quick, right. Like, let me get this. Let me do that. It’s a space to think about your home, right. You know, where are you going? To relax in your home. How are you going to to, uh, sleep better at night, right. These are these are all very aspirational things. And so, uh, whether you’re looking for something to take home today or you’re looking for something that’s going to sit, you know, you’re going to pass down from generations right in your dining table or, you know, like there’s there’s just a lot of aspiration, a lot of desire that people have when they walk into furniture stores and to be a part of that energy, right? And to be a part of engaging with customers and helping them improve their lives. Right. I think is, uh, it becomes a big part of it’s sort of just naturally dovetails into everything else that we do.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the yeah.

Kenny Larson: One of the things that we, we really try to think about with the, the products that we offer is to think as big as possible. So as Josh mentioned, the dining table, you know, it’s not just a place where you eat. It’s a place where some of the most important family discussions take place. It’s where Homework’s getting done. It’s where, you know, bills are paid. That may not be the most fun part, but, you know, it’s like it’s a big part of the family’s home. And the sectional isn’t just a place to sit. It’s like where families come together and they watch movies and they sporting events. And when we start thinking about it in those terms, it’s a real privilege to be able to interact with people and then literally come into their homes. We do the delivery and to be able to set that up and to see the impact. And it’s. I don’t know, it’s one of the things that gets me excited every day coming in.

Rob Gandley: Yeah. Yeah. It’s everyday life. It’s it’s such a big impact. Like you said, these things you use every single day of your life, some of them, and they become integral to your lifestyle. So it’s very cool. Um, so I want to I want to get into innovation a little bit because like, I don’t I don’t want to under I want to underscore a little bit the, I mean the, the undertaking that you guys, you know, you make it look easy, right? So we just talked about someone coming in. They really have a background in furniture, uh, running a furniture operation. So you’ve got the roadmap to make that happen. If they’ve got the right, uh, you know, call it DNA to, to do it. Um, but there’s got to be a lot that goes into that operationally. Right? You’ve got a lot of smart people and you guys have processes. So tell me a little bit about technology, a little bit about innovation, how you’ve used it, uh, through these years and how you plan to use it. Now, we we know there’s a lot of new technology in front of us every day. We hear about AI a lot. Don’t know if you guys how you’re thinking about that right now, but at the end of the day, thoughts on innovation? How have you do you have some specific examples, uh, that you could share that have really made not only it better for your franchisees, but better for your clients alike and customers?

Kenny Larson: I’ll go. I’ll go first. Josh, we can tag team this one. You know, coming out of the I’ll start in one key, which is just a a big challenge for the industry is supply chain coming out of the pandemic, uh, which blew up literally everybody’s supply chain. We took the opportunity to completely redo it. And today have built, um, multiple tools within there to make sure that we’ve got the product flowing that we need. Now, if we don’t, I wouldn’t say we’re perfect, but we’re really leaning into it and we’re really at the front edge as we’ve kind of built out not only the process for it, but the data that we need, where we’re going to be able to start leveraging some of the AI tools to do it even better. And I think over the last couple of years, we certainly haven’t had an eye towards our data to be able to get us ready for all the automation that’s coming. And I think the, the, the back end work is some of the, you know, the least sexy part of it. But if you don’t have really pristine data, the AI tools just don’t work like it’s going to just give you not only inaccurate but potentially damaging. So it has been a really a long roadmap over the last two, three years trying to get us to that point. And we’re really on the front end where we’re mentioned supply chain, where we’re going to be able to start leveraging some of those things. Josh has been involved in a couple of those those efforts too. So you want to share Josh?

Josh Priniski: Yeah, I’d, you know, even just dovetail um, of course supply chain has been a huge one. Right. But one of the things, you know, we, uh, you know, we don’t make any of our own of our own furniture, right? We partner with people like La-Z-Boy, right? People like Sealy. Uh, and so those connections within those, those supplier networks and those, uh, not only on the supply chain side, but also on the marketing side, right. And on the e-commerce side and on all of these different areas where, um, the building of the connections between the different teams and the different systems to make sure it feels seamless. Right. As you said, that kind of everything is, is taken care of and using that data right across systems to make sure that we can make not only really good, really good decisions within individual departments, but to really make it feel like everything is working is working together. And that, again, when you don’t own every part of the system, right? It really means that you have to you have to be, uh, responsible and really, uh, and take seriously what your, your role is in partnerships, right, with, with people that you bring into your system and that work alongside you and make sure that you’re open and honest about what you need out of that system, and how we need different partners to work together. Right, in order to, to, to bring these things together. And I think that’s one thing that we’ve been able to, to manage really well, and we’re continuing to be on that journey. But ultimately having that vision towards what do we want this to look like. So that way to your point, Rob, things, things will continually change, right? Ai is going to change a lot of things. Uh, technology is going to change, but if you’ve got the structure in place, then you just are able to sort of implement them going forward. And we really feel like we’ve got a good system that we’re that we’re building to be able to do that into the future.

Rob Gandley: Yeah. And I I’ll tell you, I, I wouldn’t necessarily say it this way, but I would say that Covid was probably a good thing in the sense that you responded in a way that then gave you a chance to clean it, kind of clean up, do some house cleaning, and actually get ready for 2022. When ChatGPT was released and I was someone involved in AI prior to that. Um, but I’ll tell you, that made it very clear very early on what companies would have to do. And it’s what you said. If you don’t have the data structured in a certain way, you can’t make it accessible and usable and, and make get the the impact that you would want to get for anything that is real internal, right. So you’ve got to start to restructure and look at your data and your integrations and your partners. And and now you’re taking the lead. You’re being a thought leader. And that’s what we need. I mean, for for those that are going to really transform at the pace where it makes sense, they’re the ones that are doing what you’re doing, right. The ones that are already already doing it. So it’s perfect positioning for you guys because you’ll be able to pivot as things start to present, you know, opportunities present themselves and make sense for your for your people. But what if you guys were to sum it up right now just on that one point of, say, AI, is there something you had on your mind? Let’s just take franchisee onboarding and training and support. Any thoughts there on how you might use AI? Or maybe it’s in marketing on the e-commerce site? Any thoughts there on how you might leverage some things? Or are you and have you been testing things or what are your thoughts?

Josh Priniski: Yeah, I’ll tell you. You know, there’s there’s a lot of really fun tools emerging around, uh, sort of training and onboarding and different capabilities that we’ve been looking at, um, sort of leveraging partnerships, right, to take advantage of, uh, to, you know, have we’ve got lots of training content, of course. Right. And lots of onboarding documents and lots of videos and everything across the sun. Right, to help people, uh, get up to speed with what we do, both on the corporate side and on the, on the franchise side. And, um, again, some of these AI tools that are coming out to be able to just get the question in the moment, right, to say, hey, help me see, uh, you know, I need to I need to to learn this real quick thing about this, this particular sofa or this particular process or how, you know, how far are my deliveries go or any of those sorts of things, right, to be able to, you know, ChatGPT style, right? Be able to go in, but look at the at the content and um, again, to Kenny’s point, it takes building that content over a long time and making it consistent, which has been on has been on our radar such that we can again, they’ll still work to do, but to be able to leverage those tools and put them in the hands of our franchisees. So that way they can again, there’s plenty that we’ll do here at HQ to leverage those. But, um, at the store level, um, and at the owner level, to be able to leverage those and to, to learn the systems really well and ultimately learn their data really well. Right. There’s a, there’s a lot and we’re, we’re we are, uh, continually evaluating those for sure.

Rob Gandley: Uh, it’s nonstop. Right. But believe me, you want to focus on the things that you could see that, okay. This can make an impact. It makes the franchisees life better. It makes the consumers better. Whatever. Can you see it? Because otherwise there’s a lot of noise and a lot of change. Right? But you’re hitting all the right things. And it’s about that data being structured in a certain way. Right. It can reference it. But if you don’t have great training data, then it wouldn’t be that good. Right, right. Give me the wrong answers to the outdated question, right? Or whatever. But anyways, yeah.

Kenny Larson: One.

Rob Gandley: Of.

Kenny Larson: The things we’re wrestling with too, and it kind of goes back to our values. Rob, you know, our the experience we create with our customers is really important to us. We use Net Promoter Score. Uh, today we’re maintained over 85. I think we’re one of the best in retail. And that’s for our home delivery or for our, um, salespeople, our contact center. But as you think about AI, there’s a lot of extensions now into the contact center. And we’re we’re trying to understand that we’re playing around with it. We’re doing some testing with it, but it would be one of those if we took a step backwards from our customer experience of what they’re getting, that it’s not as good. I don’t doubt that it’s going to get there at some point, but I those are the things you need to say. What’s important to you as a company? And for some people, the customer experience, the way we’ve defined it may not be as important. It may be more transactional and that’s okay. There’s lots of ways to. There’s lots of ways to do business. But we know the things that’s really important to us, and we just need to make sure that it’s in alignment with that.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, I bring up sometimes, uh, there’s a quote, Jeff Bezos has a quote, um, I’m not going to get it. All right. But it’s just basically someone asked him, you know, oh, this high tech stuff. And, you know, Jeff, what do you think in ten years will be the big thing or the important thing? And he’s like, well, I don’t know what it’ll be like in ten years. But I know what won’t change in ten years. And that is why our customers want their packages faster, you know, or they you know what I mean? And that’s if we can keep doing that, then whatever it takes to do that. So it’s not so much the tool, it’s the impact. That’s right. Yeah. And I think relationships are still like no matter what happens in the coming decades, relationships will still be there. It’ll. In fact, I hope the idea of all this is that I can remove some of the burdensome administration and just the grind work of things, so that you can literally spend more time out on the floor and literally talking about things like you said, like, hey, let’s talk about kitchen tables. And, you know, kind of get in the mindset of, why would you eat? How are you going to use it? And I know you guys probably do that anyway, but I mean, there would be no shortage of time if you could remove some of the other things.

Rob Gandley: And to me, again, it’s all about relationships. So that’s what I like to see. Yeah. Well great. All right. Well, let me, uh, as we kind of approach the end of the show, I want to make sure we have plenty of time to talk about how you guys are leading your brand. Right? As you said, it makes a big impact. It’s making an impact in all the owner’s lives. All the all the employees, all the all the people in the communities, all the children, which is pretty cool. Um, tell me a little bit about leadership. Um, what do you think? You know, if you could. And I’ll start with you, Kenny. Is there anything you can point to in your, in your career as as being CEO that you’ve learned, right? Any, any any one thing that you look back on and say this is this is tried and true for me, and I always follow this.

Kenny Larson: Well, that’s a big one, Rob. So I’ll I’ll.

Rob Gandley: Be a lot of them. Maybe pick one good one.

Kenny Larson: A lot of them. You know, I think one of the things that’s really important is to. Understand who you are first. That self-awareness piece. And to lead through that to the best of your abilities. I think it’s really hard to do some things that, um, don’t resonate with yourself personally. So I had a unique challenge coming up, following my dad, who was maybe one of the best people persons ever. Um, he just was he was really, really strong. And we have really a lot of similarities, but there’s differences too. So one of the things I had to figure out certainly was my voice in terms of how we do that. But also, I knew I needed to be aligned with the values that were set. Like, I didn’t have the ability to just change those because that wasn’t. So I had a decision to say, can I? Am I aligned with that? But now I need to figure out what’s the best way for me to articulate those. And I think that’s one of the things that I would encourage any leader that it needs to be from a place that’s genuine with conviction and that you can lean into it. And as I said before, there’s lots of ways to be successful. There’s lots of different values that you can identify, but they need to be yours. And then you need to figure out building out your team and having the right people part of it. Because I would be the first. First to say it is not all about me. I can’t be everywhere. I can’t do everything. But I need to set the stage for the for the leaders like Josh to be able to do the work in their areas.

Rob Gandley: Yeah. Yeah. And I and I gotta say, I haven’t known you long, but I’ve noticed in our interactions you’re very much that way as a leader, and the way you interact with Josh and the way you, you know, you guys do things together. It’s very much about empowering others around you. And I, I think the best leaders in the world are surrounded by really smart people, and they kind of like, look at themselves like, man, I’m lucky. Yeah.

Kenny Larson: Absolutely.

Rob Gandley: And you must, like, I’ve heard from a lot of, uh, CEOs of brands like. And Josh, you probably feel the same way. It’s like the franchisees you get to work with, right? You bring some of these people in and and some of these businesses, you learn from them too, right? And what a what a powerful way to keep growing. Right? Right. I mean, Josh, what are your thoughts?

Josh Priniski: Yeah, absolutely. And and I think the when you get to work, you have the opportunity to work with franchisees, with independent business owners. There’s just a wealth of knowledge there. Right. And and expertise and and to Kenny’s point, right. When you when you know who you are, right. And you get a bunch of business owners that also know who they are, right, They bring lots of different perspectives to the table. And, um, the beautiful part about being a franchisor is you get to, you know, sort of leverage all of that knowledge and work together and, and figure out how to grow the brand together. And that’s and that’s amazing. And, and I would say one of the biggest things that I’ve learned through that is to is to always assume whenever you’re communicating with people and you’re having conversations, you know, you’re not always going to agree with everyone all the time, right? You know, that’s the part about about leadership is it’s not always it’s not always, you know, just straight cut and dry. It’s not a straight path all the time. Right. But when you’re having any conversation to both listen actively of course.

Josh Priniski: Right. But also just it’s always healthier to assume best intentions. Right. Assume that when you’re having conversations with people that they’re coming at it from from a place of goodness, right, that they’re really trying to achieve, well, right, to do the best by themselves, their family, their community, right. Their business. Uh, and again, you may not always agree, but when you assume best intentions and some of those roadblocks that end up, that sort of sit in the way of future growth and future conversations. They sort of move out of the way, right? Because then you can come at it from the same place. And I think, you know, again, you can’t can’t lead anybody if there’s no one following. Right. So you have to you have to make sure that you’re, that you’re understanding that everyone, everyone that you’re talking, whether you’re leading directly or you’re just helping to kind of bring everyone together, that you’re just assuming that we’re all coming from the same spot. Uh, and then you and then you. It’s much easier to move forward.

Rob Gandley: I love that. Thank you. Thank you. Because I do think, I mean, obviously you have to work through conversations, but I and I think we all experience this where, you know, you have these conversations with folks and there’s this sort of wall, there’s this sort of, you know, blockage of, you know, we’re animosity or what have you. And it’s like, no, don’t approach it that way, approach it from we all want the same end goal, which is to be successful, help the customer be, you know, be better at what we do. So at the end of the day, get their focus there. And that that would make any conversation a bit easier to get through just approaching.

Josh Priniski: Exactly. And when you have things like core values and missions that are just, you know, they’re they’re set in stone and it’s what you do, right? It makes it easier for everyone to just come back to the source. Right? Because we all know where we started, right? And so then it makes it easier to just assume that we’re coming from the same spot, even if we don’t agree in the moment. Right.

Rob Gandley: I love it, love it. So I wanted to just ask one quick question, uh, before we do wrap things up officially. But I want to make sure because I know this type of business is a big operation. You said earlier that, uh, you know, it could be different types of people, right? It’s not necessarily someone who has previous experience in retail or in furniture industry. Is there something that you want to make sure that anybody’s out there thinking or wondering, you know, is this a fit for me? Is there anything you want to remove, or just make sure there’s no preconceived notions about how they could get into it? Also being very transparent at the same time. Is there anything that you find when you have your initial conversations that is usually not known by the other party, and you kind of clear it up real quick. But is there anything you want to make sure that you clarify about the opportunity and and so that no one has any preconceived notions like, oh, I could never do that. I don’t want to have these limitations when they shouldn’t be there. So what would you say to that? Yeah.

Josh Priniski: Yeah, I would say, you know, we’ve we’ve, uh, we’ve we’ve had lots of opportunities to have these, you know, we go to franchise shows and different things, right? And people walk up to the booth and say, oh, owning a furniture store like that seems like a really big endeavor, right? And, um, and and it’s true. Right. There’s there’s some complexity to that. But, uh, one of the beauties is you’re not opening a furniture store alone, right? That’s why you become part of a franchise. Right? And so, um, while there are complexities about, you know, how do you get the furniture and how do you how do you get it into your customer’s home? And how do you know what to sell and what customers? You know, what’s inside this couch cushion, right. And all of those things, frankly, you don’t need to come with any of that knowledge, right? You you just need to come and be willing to work with customers, be willing to engage in your community. We take care of getting the furniture to your store. We take care of sourcing and supplying and providing marketing and doing all of these things. We handle it right. And so while you need to operate your business right, you don’t really just need to be willing to be engaged and willing to learn. But it’s not necessary that you know how to go source product from overseas. Right. Or or figure out, you know, like none of those things, like, we take care of all of it. And so really, that’s where I said people can come from, from all different backgrounds. And as long as you’re willing to engage and willing to learn, right. Um, the, the again, it’s a big square foot. Right. But it’s ultimately it’s really just the process of taking care of people and, uh, and taking care of your own people and taking care of customers in the right way. And and we do really try to help with, with most everything else.

Rob Gandley: I, I’m just thinking about myself. So I do the podcast as you’re on it right now. So, you know, if you said to yourself, I’m going to start a podcast or be in a podcasting business, it’s obviously one of the things is you don’t mind talking and meeting people, right? But I feel like that very same essence would work in a furniture store environment. You know, it’s really that sort of connection, right? More than the other obvious things like, oh, no, I don’t know what to do to source the furniture kind of thing.

Kenny Larson: Right. Yeah. We’re going we’re going to talk to you right after this wrap about opening one in Colorado.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, we need one. We need some competition. So, yeah, it’d be good. Well, that that’s tremendous. I wanted to kind of just make sure that the audience knew how to get Ahold of you guys or the brand, but. But, Kenny, before. Before I let you go is there. I like to ask leaders like you this question. Is there anyone other than your dad? And maybe it’s your dad, but who who is one of your mentors? Or is there anyone in franchising? Is there a lesson that they kind of left with you, that you kind of hit you and you kind of still think about it today sometimes?

Kenny Larson: Um, yeah. There’s been a lot of people over the years. Rob. It’d be hard not to point to my dad because, you know, obviously from the beginning was there watching it. And I would tell you, I’ve got three brothers and a sister, two are involved in the business, two are not. There was never any pressure that you had to be part of it. And all of us are wired really differently. But I would just tell you, for me, growing up in it and watching it, I knew at a young age this is what I wanted to do. So I’ve been doing it for a long time now. And it’s been it’s been it’s been awesome. I think one of the things that Ken just did a great job with is, you know, creating that environment to say, be here if you want, but also then the opportunities. So over the years, I got exposed to all sorts of things, probably earlier than maybe I even should have given what my title was. So between whether it was people on the marketing side or research side, people that were on the, you know, the, um, I’ll say the business improvement and the operations or process side, I did get exposed to a lot. And, you know, I I’d be the first to say there were tons of people that, uh, gave me a lot of, uh, gracious leeway as I was coming up.

Rob Gandley: Yeah. That’s beautiful. So what would be, um, the the best way if someone is now now that we’ve tipped them over the fence. Right. What’s the best way to get Ahold of you guys? Uh, if someone would be interested in learning more.

Kenny Larson: I’m happy to. I’m happy to talk to anybody. But Josh can give on our website. There’s an easy way on Slumberland. Com, there’s a franchising piece to it, too, that if there’s anything there. But, uh, feel free to give them my mobile number. Rob, when we’re done. I know I love talking to people.

Rob Gandley: You got it? You got it. Well, and then slumberland is a slumberland.com, right I think.

Josh Priniski: Yeah, that’s that’s exactly right. And I’d say check us out. Right. Slumberland com. It’s just as, as the retail site. You can see what we’re all about. You can see what we offer and all of those things. And then of course, there is a franchising page right on the home page, right in the upper left hand corner. You can get to franchising opportunities. And all of my contact info is right on that page as well.

Rob Gandley: I appreciate it. Thanks guys, and I always encourage folks to reach out and learn more because again, that first level of consulting that all of you guys are generous enough to give, you know, for anyone that says, I think this might be for me, it’s always great to talk to people like Josh, so take advantage of that can help you understand the big picture of his industry and others in the franchise world. So, uh, it’s been great having you guys on the show. I really appreciate it.

Kenny Larson: Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks, Rob.

Josh Priniski: I appreciate it.

Rob Gandley: Thank you. Just want to thank the audience as well and encourage you to share the the episode if you found value. And bye for now.

 

Tagged With: Slumberland Furniture

Mochi Magic: How One Woman’s Vision is Changing the Culinary Landscape

April 22, 2025 by angishields

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Women in Motion
Mochi Magic: How One Woman's Vision is Changing the Culinary Landscape
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In this episode of Women in Motion, Lee Kantor interviews Pei Tung Wu, CEO and founder of Mochi Foods. Pei shares her entrepreneurial journey, discussing the cultural significance of mochi and her mission to innovate and popularize this unique food product. She explains how Mochi Foods simplifies mochi preparation through easy-to-make mixes, targeting both families and businesses. Pei also highlights the challenges she faced, her marketing strategies, and the growing recognition of her brand. Additionally, she emphasizes her commitment to empowering women in business and balancing her entrepreneurial pursuits with family life.

Pei-Tung-WuPei Wu is the visionary founder and CEO of Mochi Foods, a company dedicated to bringing the chewy, delightful texture of mochi to kitchens and businesses worldwide.

Born and raised in Taiwan, Pei grew up surrounded by the rich flavors and traditions of Asian cuisine, which deeply influenced her passion for food. After moving to the U.S., she recognized a gap in the market for high-quality mochi-based products and set out to share the taste of home with a broader audience.

As a mother and entrepreneur, Pei has mastered the art of balancing family life with running a rapidly growing business. Under her leadership, Mochi Foods has expanded from a small venture into a recognized brand, offering mochi donut, pancake, waffle, and bubble waffle mixes, along with a variety of Asian-inspired dessert ingredients.

Her commitment to innovation and authenticity has earned Mochi Foods recognition on the Inc. 5000 list, partnerships with major retailers, and features in Hawaii Business Magazine.

Pei’s journey as a female entrepreneur in a male-dominated industry has been marked by resilience and determination. She proudly leads a woman-owned business, recently achieving WBENC certification, and actively supports other women in food and entrepreneurship. Mochi-Foods

Whether developing new products, mentoring aspiring business owners, or expanding into new markets, Pei remains dedicated to her mission: making mochi an everyday indulgence for people everywhere.

Follow Mochi Foods on LinkedIn.

Music Provided by M PATH MUSIC

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios, it’s time for Women in Motion. Brought to you by WBEC West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of Women in Motion. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women in Motion, we have Pei Tung Wu, who is the CEO and founder of Mochi Foods. Welcome.

Pei Tung Wu: Hi. How are you? Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: I am doing well. I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Mochi Foods.

Pei Tung Wu: Mochi Foods is a company. I do innovation work where I create the mochi texture, and then push it, trying to innovate, and then come up with the easy-to-make mix, so every family, household or business owner, restaurant, bakery can have this unique texture mochi put it into their menu, adding to their table, and then be a great new innovation to the baking industry.

Lee Kantor: Now, for folks who aren’t familiar, can you explain a little bit about mochi? What is it? Like, where did it get started? And then, how did you get involved with it?

Pei Tung Wu: I grew up in Taiwan, where mochi is a very big of our food culture. The texture is very unique, like little chewy, soft and satisfying. After moving to Hawaii when I was 18, I missed those flavor and texture. Then, I also saw opportunity. Like, people love mochi, but they didn’t always know how to make it at home, to make it in different ways. So, that’s why the idea to come up with Mochi Foods start. I want to share the taste of our home and make it easy for the people to enjoy. It’s fun and creative way. That’s how I started Mochi Foods.

Lee Kantor: Now, in Taiwan, is it something that people make it out of the house or do they typically like go to a place and just buy it from the mochi person who makes it?

Pei Tung Wu: The traditional way is steam the mochi rice, and then you will pound it. Like pound it and let the glue come out. And then, you can use that to make it to like a mochi ball, mochi can dip it with sauce, or you can wrap it with some sweet bean paste, or wrap it even with the meat inside. So, mochi have a lot of different applications in oriental culture.

Lee Kantor: So, is it dessert, or is it a part of the entree, or it can be used in many ways?

Pei Tung Wu: Yeah, can be used in different way. It can be used in dessert, it can be used in end of the dinner, or it can be used in a savory way too.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you started the business, was it always to make kind of a mix to allow someone to just make this easily at their home or did you start actually selling kind of mochi products?

Pei Tung Wu: We started with the mix. So, the first, I create that mochi pancake, mochi donut and mochi waffle. Those three are our first launch, the three items.

Lee Kantor: And then, were you selling that like to grocery stores, or who was buying, or selling it digitally online?

Pei Tung Wu: We started selling to bakery, The Donut Shop. So, like a bakery, they have donut shops. So, we launched this mochi donut first in Honolulu, Hawaii. And then, also, the pancake, we have mochi pancake to the restaurant, to the grocery store, and even to Costco for now.

Lee Kantor: Oh. So, now, it’s just any kind of retailer that sells food products, now, that’s a place where you could possibly sell it?

Pei Tung Wu: You can or to eat it at my customer’s restaurant, and then the mochi donut shop.

Lee Kantor: Oh, wow. So, your customer is very varied. It seems like in a lot of different potential markets for you.

Pei Tung Wu: Yeah, we have from mochi donut shop, to bakery, to supermarket chain or to the grocery chain.

Lee Kantor: Now, is that just something that slowly evolved over time? You were able to sell it to more and more people because I guess it’s kind of a unique offering, right, from, like-

Pei Tung Wu: Yeah.

Lee Kantor: Do you have a lot of competition in this space?

Pei Tung Wu: I think, I create the mix. All my product is top premium rice flour. So, every batch, when you make it, it’s good. It’s to the excellent. So, you can use our mochi donut mix to make mochi donut and decorate to beautiful color and then coated with chocolate, or you can simply serve the mochi pancake at home with your family or having a mochi waffle or mochi chicken together in the restaurant.

Lee Kantor: Now, how do you kind of get the word out to let people know that this product even exists? Is that a big part of your business is just kind of telling people about it?

Pei Tung Wu: Pardon, I didn’t hear the question.

Lee Kantor: Is it difficult to kind of like… How do you market the product? How do you get it to people? How do they know about it?

Pei Tung Wu: That’s why I’m calling the mochi movement. When I founded the company in 2016, nobody knows what’s mochi. Even at the National Restaurant show, myself with my booth says Mochi Foods, and people will say, “Oh, is that your name? Is it Mochi?” I was laughing like, oh my God. That’s why my goal is to get this mochi movement to the world. So, I slowly launched store by store, working with a lot of chefs and come up with different recipes, and then test it out with the grocery store, and to get this mochi to the world.

Lee Kantor: So, how has the journey been, this entrepreneurial journey? Had you done anything like this before in your career, before you started with the mochi?

Pei Tung Wu: I believe I do. I always entrepreneur. I own [??] store, I own a bakery, and then I own… I’m always in this food industry. That’s what my passion is about. So, it’s never easy, you know, just like how to launch a business, but I believe in the product I’m launching and I believe the process. And then, just learning by doing every day is a little step.

Lee Kantor: And then, is there any kind of obstacles that you’ve overcome that you’d like to share about?

Pei Tung Wu: Of course. Launching with different channel, coming with the right packaging, study about the nutrition, and then hiring the right person, trusted partner to work together in every channel, it’s always challenging. To make sure every step is correct and then to talk to the right customer is always a challenge too. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: Now, when did you kind of get the feeling? Like you mentioned when you started, people didn’t even know what mochi was. Have you gotten to that tipping point yet where people are familiar, and are kind of seeking you out, and looking for ways to partner and work with you? Has the education about what mochi is and what mochi could be, has it spread?

Pei Tung Wu: Yes, I definitely believe so. We definitely spread this mochi movement from… we always call that smiling line from the coast to the center part. And then, we even launched Canada too, and then Europe. And then, we are growing slowly from… Mochi donut is the key. And then, now we have mochi pancake to the household with the launch with Costco. And then, next, we have more innovative product. We’re going to come out like a ready-to-eat mochi product down the road. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there any advice you can give other entrepreneurs when it comes to your leadership skills and building a team?

Pei Tung Wu: I would say, it’s always be a passion. Surrounding yourself with good, supportive team. Be patient with yourself and keep moving forward. I would say I believe woman is very powerful and we are all capable more than you think.

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for your firm to become part of the WBEC West community? What did you hope to get out of it and what have you gotten out of it?

Pei Tung Wu: I’m always supporting powerful women in business, and I want to encourage this entrepreneurship in every industry. I mean, I’m me as one. And I would like to help more women down the road to be part of this journey to entrepreneur in different area. So far, the experience has been very exciting. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: Now, can you share maybe some of the challenges of balancing your family life with running a business that seems to be just exploding in popularity now?

Pei Tung Wu: Yeah. I am single mom, and then I have three kids. Balancing work and then the business world is always not easy. But I always cook for them, family time, cooking for the kids. Always remember, for me, cooking, the smell is always a memory. The moment you together share with the kids, it’s fundamental in our family. And then, when I work, I put on my 100% working hat on, and then do what I can do. Yeah, but of course, being an entrepreneur, I can be able to manage my time better. Yeah, that’s a plus.

Lee Kantor: And your role modeling how to be an entrepreneur to your children. That’s a gift you’re giving them.

Pei Tung Wu: Yes, yes.

Lee Kantor: Now, it must be so rewarding to have taken something from your culture, and then now you’re sharing it with so many people who weren’t familiar with it. And now, people are falling in love with it all over the country and the world.

Pei Tung Wu: It’s very exciting for me to, yeah, get this mochi movement going.

Lee Kantor: So, now, if somebody wants to learn more about Mochi Foods, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect with you or somebody on your team?

Pei Tung Wu: Our website’s mochifood.com. You can email us. We have website, Instagram, Facebook. Can always email us at mochi@mochifoods.com or can reach out to me. I’d be happy to look at the… Everybody’s different. Either you are a food services, want to open a store or want to create another adventure, we are always here to help on each step.

Lee Kantor: So, now, like, do you have an ideal client profile in terms of who would be the best fit for your product? Is it bakeries or is it retailers? Like who do you want to meet more of?

Pei Tung Wu: I will say bakery, for sure for food services. Right now, we’re trying to launch more retail, have our mochi pancake to be available to more retail stores. It’s our next go-to. And then, to launch some restaurant, bigger restaurant to launch mochi pancake as a breakfast menu, healthier uh, lighter version. Yeah. It’s just a different texture. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: Well, Pei, congratulations on all the success. You’re doing amazing things. And we really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story.

Pei Tung Wu: Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Women in Motion.

Tagged With: Mochi Foods

Troy Morris with Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program

April 18, 2025 by angishields

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Houston Business Radio
Troy Morris with Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program
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Troy-MorrisTroy Morris is a Project Specialist with the Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program (SATOP), where he connects small businesses, entrepreneurs, and inventors with engineering firms to provide free technical assistance. Through SATOP’s 40-Hour Technical Assistance initiative and university capstone projects, Troy helps bring innovative ideas to life using existing technologies.

In his conversation with Trisha Stetzel, Troy shared how SATOP and its related SayTop program support small businesses by offering expert engineering guidance at no cost. They discussed real success stories from the program and the powerful impact of these partnerships.

Troy emphasized that the program—funded by the Texas legislature—is actively seeking new alliance partners and encourages businesses to take full advantage of this unique opportunity to accelerate growth and innovation.

Follow SATOP on LinkedIn.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. I’m so excited about the guests that I have on today that was introduced to me by Amy Reed. You guys probably heard her show just a few weeks back, Troy Morris with, uh, the Saturday program, which is the Space Alliance technology outreach program. Troy is a project specialist with the Space Alliance technology outreach program. Um, he works with various engineering firms to provide free technical engineering assistance to small businesses, entrepreneurs and investors. Yes, you heard me right. This is administered administered through a 40 hour technical assistance program and through a university capstone program. Troy Morris, welcome to the show.

Troy Morris: Yeah. Thank you for having us or having me, I should say.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. I’m so excited to talk about this program when when you and I were having a conversation about. It’s been about a month ago. Uh, I was so excited because I’d never heard of it. And you probably get that all the time. Like, how do people not know about this program? So I said, Troy, you have to come on the show so we can talk about this program. Before we get started, though, I would love for people to learn more about you. So who is Troy?

Troy Morris: Yeah, so I’ve been with the program for, uh, a couple years now. Prior to that, actually, my background is in is in the tax business. I spent about ten years, uh, in Houston, uh, working with various, uh, engineering firms with their tax businesses and their tax models. And so I kind of got a foundation of the different, uh, firms, you know, Jacobs, KBR. All those guys and, um, kind of built some, uh, connections through there. And then, uh, kind of when that part of my career came to a close, uh, I learned about satop and, uh, what they’ve been doing because they’ve been around a while, actually. But, uh, prior to me coming on, I hadn’t heard of it either. And traditionally it was just in the, uh, it’s just been the Houston Bay area. Uh, but now Satop is a program is expanding across the whole state of Texas. So, um, really, what I’ve been doing is kind of leveraging my contacts with the various different engineering firms and, uh, using that to, uh, promote Satop as a program and how it can benefit all the different small businesses.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. So give us the basics of the program, and then we can take a deeper dive into some of those areas.

Troy Morris: Yeah. So Satop is a program, like you said, it’s, uh, it provides free technical engineering assistance to small businesses. And we do it, uh, a couple different ways. So, uh, like I said, traditionally, Satop was just in the Bay area of Houston. Uh, but actually, it’s been around for about 20 years. And when it first started, it was a national program. Actually it was. We had offices in, uh, gosh, New York, uh, Florida, New Mexico. And one by one, each of those, uh, branches of the program just ceased to exist. Texas is really the area where it’s just continued to remain pretty stable. And, uh, there seems to be a need here for it, especially with the small business climate of, uh, the state. And it is, uh, state funded. So it’s funded by the Texas Legislature. And, uh, that money is used, uh, to bring aboard engineering firms to help small businesses and also to market and promote the program. So what we do is we leverage a network of what we call alliance partners. Uh, NASA is one of them. We have some larger engineering firms. We also have some smaller engineering firms as well, some of which are just one man shows who are trying to get their their name out there. So it’s a different variety, and it doesn’t cost the alliance partners anything to join.

Troy Morris: And they don’t have to work on any projects that don’t seem interest of interest to them because different, uh, engineering firms have, you know, different areas of expertise. And so, uh, with us, it’s about acquiring, um, pretty much as many alliance partners as we can to cover different areas because, um, there’s really no, uh, drawback for them joining because they don’t really have to work on anything that doesn’t make sense for them to work on. And so we leverage this network. And, um, what we do is we submit proposals to them that these small businesses are giving us and with their approval, obviously, first, we, um, send this to different alliance partners to work on. If they agree, then we coordinate a meeting between whoever the requester is of our program and the alliance partner so they can hammer out the details, make sure they understand what the scope of work is. Uh, just make sure basically, we’re managing expectations. And from there, uh, they, they will provide, uh, up to 40 hours of their time of free engineering assistance, whatever that might entail. These projects are all very different. So sometimes it’s, you know, material selection, sometimes it’s design, sometimes it’s quite literally just their, uh, technical input, their advice, their expertise.

Troy Morris: Uh, the idea is that these small businesses, um, either don’t have the resources to go pay a large sum to an engineering firm to try to hammer out whatever, uh, prototype or product they are working on or they, you know, don’t have the technical background to tackle that challenge themselves. So this is this program is meant as a bridge to connect them to the expertise at no cost to them. Um, and once that 40 hours has expired, that’s kind of the the end of that project. Um. Obviously nothing. Well, not everything can get solved in 40 hours. Some projects are just very large. So when we, uh, initially meet with these requesters, we, uh, kind of do an analysis of their project. We just, uh, you know, look at what all they’re trying to tackle. What’s a priority for them? And if a project is deemed very large, has multiple facets to it. Uh, we do have the avenue of university capstone program. And what that is, is where a team of, uh, senior engineering students at a university, usually it’s a 4 to 5 of them, uh, and their last semester or last two semesters of school will, uh, work on this project or whatever this prototype is as a capstone course and obviously under the guidance of a faculty member.

Troy Morris: They work on this project over the course of a year. Currently, the university’s we partnered with is A&M College Station. They’re the largest one we’re with right now. We’re actually I’ll be up there next month for their engineering capstone where they showcase a lot of these. We’re just got through wrapping up about a dozen projects with them. Um, we also partner with Texas State University in San Marcos. Um, with Sam Houston, State University of Houston-clear Lake, and also A&M Galveston as well. We have a few projects with them, and really, that’s a year long project. They spend two semesters working on it, and the small business owner, uh, will meet with the students, give them their overall vision of the product, what they’re kind of expecting. And it’s up to the students at that point to tackle the project. And it’s really cool because they get really, really into it. And the idea is that it gives the students real world, um, you know, experience dealing with a potential client in whatever engineering expertise they’re going to go into. And the requester, you know, gets to see what their, the overall product, uh, that they get out of the program is. And again, it’s a no cost to them.

Trisha Stetzel: That is that’s just amazing. Like my mind is just completely blown. I don’t know about it. And I’m guessing that most of the listeners have no idea that setup even exists. So I’d like to start from the beginning. An entrepreneur has a project. Talk to me about the types of people who are applying, or the types of entrepreneurs that are applying for these 40 hours of technical assistance, or even moving into the university capstone program.

Troy Morris: Yeah, absolutely. And what’s really the main kind of projects we handle is physical prototypes. Every now and then we’ll get some, uh, requester who will, uh, kind of reach out to us and say, hey, I already got a prototype. I need, you know, a thousand manufactured or something of that nature. And we’ll refer them to an organization like Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center or something like that. And what we’re, uh. What really what our aim is, is, uh, product development. And so if someone has an idea that they’re trying to get off the ground of some sort of prototype or product, uh, what we’ll do is we’ll, um, refer them to our website. Uh. And we have a request form right there, and it’s pretty basic. It’s like 5 or 6 lines and just their name and what, their, uh, challenges that they’re facing. Just a brief summary, and they’ll hit submit on our website, and it gets sent out to myself and all of our team. Uh, we have about five or we have about six employees on our team. So, uh, we’re all monitoring, uh, our emails, and we’ll reach out either the same day or the very next business day. We don’t make it any longer than that. And, uh, we’ll coordinate a meeting, either in person or over zoom and, uh, talk to them and try to get a little bit more detail from that meeting. Uh, we’ll have them fill out what’s called a request for technical assistance.

Troy Morris: And it’s similar to what they did on our website, just a little bit more in depth. Uh, you know, what’s your expectation for this product? What do you plan to do with it? And again, we just kind of hammer out what exactly the scope they’re trying to deal with is whether it be, um, some sort of design issue or they already have a design, but it’s some particular piece of that that they’re trying to get figured out. And once that form is submitted to us, we’ll draft what we call our proposal. It’s just a one page, uh, um, just a one page, uh, proposal we fill out. It’s, uh, brief summary of the scope of work, preferably the picture of a prototype if they have it, and with their approval first. That is what is distributed to our network of alliance partners. And from then on, one of our alliance partners will reach back out to us. Usually they do within a few days or sometimes a week. Some of the larger organizations take a little bit longer to reply because they have to distribute it to their internal network. So we try to give them a little bit of time to reply. And once they do, we uh, usually we have a few different, uh, firms or businesses replying to us. So we kind from then we vet through and look what makes the most sense.

Troy Morris: Who benefits the most in terms of both the business and the the requester. And so from then, we’ll coordinate a initial meeting with the small business owner and the, uh, whichever engineering firm is working on the project. And, uh, we’ll have them meet each other and they’ll hammer out the details of the project as well. Make sure we’re all on the same, same page. Uh, it is important to note, uh, the whole purpose of that proposal we drafted is. So we have something in writing that shows this is the scope you are working on. We’re not doing anything outside of that. Uh, just manage expectations here, and usually that’s not an issue at all. Uh, again, we get the small business owners, uh, approval on that scope of work first before we send it. But from there, uh, the engineer will, uh, spend 40 hours working on it. They can meet however often the requester would like. If it’s a university capstone program, will distribute that that same proposal to our network of universities. And we have a contact at each one and their engineering department. Uh, and I mean, they’re all awesome. They’re they’re great. They love getting these kinds of projects. So I mean, we love sending it to them. We just want to make sure that the scope of work makes sense for the students and that everything’s very crystal clear. Um, and they’ll reach back out to us and say, oh, yeah, we’ll send this over to, um, computer engineering, or we’ll send it over to our manufacturing, you know, engineering department.

Troy Morris: I mean, some of them are kind of smaller, but then in the case if we’re sending it to A&M College Station, I mean, they’ve got a gazillion departments there. They’re they’re just huge. But, um, from then, a faculty member will reach back out to us and we’ll coordinate a meeting between the faculty member and the requester. Um, with the university program, though, it is important to note, and we try to explain this to the small business owners first, that you are on the university’s timeline. If that’s the case, meaning whenever the fall semester starts or spring semester starts, I mean, it’s just it’s going to be a two semester project, and it’s whenever the semester starts because that’s when the students start the class. So once that starts, they they meet with the students, uh, usually once a week or once every two weeks, uh, over zoom or however they want to do it. And the students will just always come back and ask questions and they’ll say, oh, yeah, I kind of want this or this looks good, this doesn’t look good. And they’ll keep going. And with the university capstone program, the first semester will always be the they call the design phase. And then the second semester is actually assembly and prototyping of the project and everything.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh my gosh, this is so exciting. So, um, give me some examples of a 40 hour, uh, engagement. Like what kinds of things are entrepreneurs asking for in the 40 hour program? And, and then what are some examples of the the capstone university programs or. Yeah, projects.

Troy Morris: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, for example, we uh, had um, gosh, we’ve had a few this past year, but uh, one individual, without giving away too much information, was working on a, uh, it was a simple, uh, almost like a sun visor for an automobile and it attached to, like, the windshield. And when he first came to us, we were kind of thinking, really? I mean, why don’t you just put the, uh, little mirror down or something? But he had a he actually had a very big client base that was looking at it, a professional trucking industries were asking him about it because apparently when you’re driving in Texas, uh, and the sun’s coming through the the the windshield. You still get, you know, sunburned and everything. And apparently whatever’s in the trucks isn’t quite covering them. And he he already had his design. He just he noticed the material he was using wasn’t cutting it. It just wasn’t stopping or it was stopping it to a degree, just not what they were expecting. So we had one of our, uh, professors, uh, or I’m sorry, I’m saying, professor, because he’s a retired professor and he owns his own consulting firm now. And we had him, uh, look into it. And he did basically spend 40 hours researching different materials that, uh, the guy can use in his prototype. And it was successful. He, uh, he’s already started marketing it out to a different, uh, logistic distribution companies who have already been interested in it. In fact, we need to follow up with them again. But he yeah, he’s already had some success with that. It was one of those projects that was simpler than you would think. But, um, yeah. The professor gave him a very detailed, uh, gosh, I think it was like 75 pages of recommendations.

Troy Morris: Wow. Thrilled with it. And it was at no cost to him. Um, so, I mean, that was a great project. That was, gosh. Um, uh, last summer, uh, I think it last September, uh, uh, last August. But, um, that was a really great one. Um, with the university capstone program that’s been a very popular lately with these requesters. Um, because, I mean, they go with the understanding that, yes, it’s going to take a while, but what we’ve noticed is a lot of these small businesses have been working on these prototypes for years now. So another year they don’t seem to mind at all. Um, but they do go in with the expectation that these are students. Yes, they’re under the guidance of a faculty member, but these are students, at the end of the day working on this. It’s not, um, to be blunt, free labor. It’s, uh, you know, it still, it needs to be an academic experience for them. And you need to, be available to participate in meetings. And we explain all that to these guys beforehand. But, um, actually, we were very proud because, uh, uh, this last semester in, uh, yeah, in the fall semester, um, we just wrapped up a project with A&M College Station, and at each at the end of each semester, they have what’s called an engineering capstone, uh, showcase, uh, where all the different teams, uh, showcase all the products they worked on and everything. And, gosh, they have about I think they had over 400 this last semester, and one of our projects got second place overall. So we were happy about that.

Trisha Stetzel: Awesome.

Troy Morris: Uh, it was a couple individuals who have, uh, they created a machine that fills sandbags, basically is what it does, but it’s all automated. And they were having multiple issues with it, with the hydraulics in it and all sorts of mechanical issues. And so A&M took the project and they said, yeah, let’s give it to our, uh, mechanical engineering department. And I think they had a team of six students work on it, actually. And, uh, they worked on it starting, uh, spring of 2024 and then concluded in fall 2024. And those those kids really got into it. They did a they did a great job. Uh, I mean, they they had a full blown prototype by the end of it that was filling sandbags at, uh, I can’t remember the exact rate it was doing, but they were filling them very quickly. And those guys were, I mean, ecstatic about about it. Uh, they lived over in Waller, Texas, and the students were traveling from College Station to Waller to kind of to meet them constantly in person with questions. It was really cool. And actually, they just from what I understand, because I was just talking to this guy a couple weeks ago, they they just got a contract with US Army Corps of Engineers for, uh, a bunch of, uh, because they like their technology with filling sandbags, apparently with, uh, disaster relief and flood control. They were very interested in that. Uh, so they had a lot of success with that. But I mean, again, I’m going to keep saying this. It was at no cost to them. It was it was it was free. All it cost was their their time with the students. And um, it was great. And obviously we were happy because they won second place had like 400 teams.

Trisha Stetzel: Yes. That is amazing. So are there any qualifications that the these entrepreneurs or these business owners have to have pre requesting help from startup.

Troy Morris: They just need to operate in the state of Texas. Uh, it’s a state funded program. So the idea is that we’re investing the money that’s given from the legislature back into the state to help the overall, uh, economic landscape of Texas. The idea is to help these small businesses grow. Um, give them a leg up with these prototypes that they’re trying to get off the ground and running. And a lot of what we’re discovering is that, uh, a lot of this technology that these businesses are trying to figure out or trying to apply, uh, actually already exists, and these engineers are looking into it and saying, oh yeah, you know, there’s something with this that we used on this project, you know, six years ago here. And they would apply that as well. And, um, that’s actually how the program started, because NASA worked on a lot of these projects, and they applied quite a bit of technology from the space program and applied it into the commercial sector. Um, and I was I’ll give one more success story, if that’s all right. Uh, because it was, uh, it was a very, very early project. Uh, so it was actually before my time with Saturn.

Troy Morris: But I always loved reading about it because it was just so cool. But, uh, they, uh, it was, uh, it was actually for a hospital, and, um, it was for, uh, infants that were born prematurely and transporting them in ambulances. A lot of the turbulence was proving to be very troublesome, uh, potentially, you know, uh, very, very dangerous with transporting these infants, especially because they’re so tiny. And so they were looking for a way to either get rid of the turbulence altogether or drastically reduce it. And we actually had a two NASA engineers looking at it. And, um, on the International Space Station, they have a treadmill up there that the astronauts use. And, uh, they actually applied some of that dampening technology from the treadmill in the International Space Station to these, uh, transporters that they’re putting on the ambulances to transport infants to, you know, various hospitals or various different sections. And actually, they got rid of the turbulence altogether. That was probably like 15 years ago, but they’re still using it. Actually, Texas Children’s Hospital still using it today. And it was just so crazy because that it was a very simple project, very quick fix. But who would have known?

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. Oh my gosh. So the website again guys is say top space. So go to space and you’ll find the application and the information that Troy’s been talking about. Troy, if anyone has any questions, what’s the best way for them to reach out?

Troy Morris: Yeah. If they have any questions, they can always go to that, uh, inquiry form on our website. Uh, that that Trisha just said. And just fill it out really quick. It’ll send an email to the entire team and, uh, we’ll reply with either the same day or the very next business day. If you want to reach out to myself directly, feel free. It’s Troy at Bay area houston.com. Um, we are a program that is administered by the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership. Uh, we’re just a street down from NASA over in Clear Lake. And, uh, up top, like I said, has been around for quite some time, but now we’re expanding across the entire state of Texas. So just to qualify, you just need to do business in the state of Texas. Uh, you don’t necessarily need to have a formal, you know, business license or anything if you’re just someone trying to get the ground up and running. We may look into maybe some DBA options for the business or something, but I do want to clarify that that’s certainly not something that would prohibit you from using our program if you don’t have a license.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow. Okay. You guys, if you didn’t catch it already, you get 40 hours of engineering assistance through these alliance partners and or depending on the project, maybe a full year from a university capstone program. All right. So we still have a few minutes left together. And I want to focus on the alliance partners, because there may be people listening who want to get involved or engaged from that perspective. So how do you you said you need more partners. So how if people are wanting to get engaged, what are you looking for in an alliance partner and how do they get engaged?

Troy Morris: So with the alliance partners, really, there’s, uh, yeah, there’s not really a constraint to apply. Now we’re pretty much open to anyone. We would obviously meet with them first to see what their, uh, you know, expertise is and what they would cover. So we know what kind of projects to, to send them. Uh, but there is no, uh, no limit to what they can work on there. There’s nothing in a contract or anything that says you have to work on this many projects, you know, for this year or something. They can work on whatever they want. And, uh, the requesters who work on this are informed of that as well, that this is essentially a. Relationship with us in the alliance partner. And they do not have to work on anything that obviously does not make sense for them to, to work on. Um, and they also are in the understanding as well that these engineers are, uh, they have their daytime jobs as well. Now with the Alliance partners, if they’re working on a 40 hour program, say, top does use the money to compensate them $100 an hour for the 40 hour program, and that money is used, uh, intended to be used back into professional development for the for the company. That’s, that’s using it. And so they can they can use that however they, they want obviously.

Troy Morris: But um, with alliance partners really they would just sit down, meet with us, uh, explain what their expertise is and, um, we’ll just, uh, see what kind of projects we have and if anything makes sense to send them their way. That’s what we’ll do. Um, it just depends, because there are so many different, um, you know, aspects, you know, anything involved with sensors that’s such a niche section of engineering or fluid dynamics. That’s another very niche set of sector. So, um, and it’s kind of it’s pretty cool because we, uh, you know, we have some bigger names like Jacobs and, you know, KBR and some of those guys in the area. But we also, uh, we just signed on an individual up in Austin, Texas. Uh, I met him, gosh, at an event in San Antonio, I think, uh, last year, but he owns his own engineering consulting firm up in Austin. He’s a one man show and he has been phenomenal. He’s he’s already taken so many projects and he’s done a fantastic job. And he loves working with these small businesses. So if anyone is interested, feel free to reach out. Again my email is Troy at Bay Area houston.com and I’d be more than happy to meet with you. We’re always looking to expand our network of alliance partners.

Trisha Stetzel: Fantastic. So engineering firms, uh, even these solo, uh, engineering companies, consultants, universities, uh, any aerospace companies, any other industries that might be interested in being an alliance partner?

Troy Morris: Yeah. Well, uh, aerospace companies as well, whatever their, uh, engineering expertise is, uh, uh, what we found is, uh, a lot of these different, um, uh, products that we’re looking at. Uh, like I said, the technology already exists, and they can apply it from the aerospace area or the space program into these projects. Now, despite the name um, Space Alliance Technology Outreach program, these products do not need to be space related. I just want to make sure I make that very clear. That’s a question I’ve gotten very often. Um, we’ve done everything from medical devices to agricultural projects to beauty products. I mean, it’s it’s been all across the board. So it’s any kind of prototype that you’re looking at. We do cover all industries. And, uh, with the engineering firms, it is pretty much all areas of engineering. Uh, I mean, we’re in Clear Lake, so we’ve got all of these different, uh, we got, I mean, axiom down the street, Intuitive Machines, uh, Egis is another one of our alliance partners, and they’ve done some projects for us as well. And, uh, we do also have professors from community colleges like, you know, sand Jack down the street who who work on 40 hour projects for us as well.

Trisha Stetzel: Fantastic. Troy, this has been amazing. Thank you for coming and talking to me about this program and for the listeners, I hope you guys got some really great value out of this. It is a program we need to take advantage of. So if you’re struggling or if you’re starting up, this is a great place to go. If you really need some help figuring out this product, right, that you want to put in front of people. So again, if you want to contact Troy, it’s Troy at Bay Area houston.com. Or you can go to the website at the top. I’ll put all of that in the show notes so you can point and click if you happen to be sitting at your computer. Troy, thank you so much for being on with me today. This has been fun.

Troy Morris: Thank you for having me.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s all the time we have for today’s show. Join us next time for another amazing episode of Houston Business Radio. Until then, stay tuned, stay inspired, and keep thriving in the Houston business community.

 

Tagged With: SATOP, Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program

John Erlandson with Youth Athletes United

April 18, 2025 by angishields

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Denver Business Radio
John Erlandson with Youth Athletes United
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John-ErlandsonJohn Erlandson is the Co-Founder, President, and Chief Revenue Officer of Youth Athletes United, a leading youth sports franchising platform that encompasses brands such as Soccer Stars, Amazing Athletes, TGA Premier Sports, JumpBunch, and Little Rookies . Since its inception in November 2021, Youth Athletes United has expanded to over 280 locations across 36 states and two international markets, aiming to impact the lives of over one million children annually through sports and fitness education.

Before co-founding Youth Athletes United, Erlandson served as President of Amazing Athletes. He also held prominent roles at Authentic Brands Group, including Chief Revenue Officer and Executive Vice President of Sports, where he played a key role in scaling the company’s revenue from $100 million to $8 billion over seven years . His earlier career includes leadership positions at Product Central Software Inc., Sportcraft, Fitness Quest, and Horizon Fitness, focusing on product development, marketing, and sales.

Erlandson earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Kinesiology from Temple University . He is known for his passion for youth development through sports and his commitment to empowering children by teaching them the fundamentals of athletics in a fun and inclusive environment.

Connect with John on LinkedIn.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Coming to you live from the Business RadioX studio. It’s Franchise Marketing Radio. Ready to revolutionize your franchise with AI franchise now empowers franchises with advanced AI solutions, automatic processes, and enhanced marketing strategies. From personalized customer interactions to predictive analytics, we help you harness AI to drive growth and efficiency. Transform your franchise with the power of AI. Visit Franchise Now to learn more and take your business into the future. Now here’s your host.

Rob Gandley: Welcome back to another episode of Franchise Marketing Radio, the podcast where we spotlight the brands, brains and breakthroughs shaping the future of franchising. I’m your host, Rob Gandley, and today is no different. I want to welcome John Erlandson, and he is no stranger to building beloved brands. He is the co-founder and chief brand officer at Youth Athletes United. He’s helped lead a portfolio of purpose driven youth sports franchises that combine national scale and local impact. And we’re going to jump into that today. I can’t wait. But with a background that blends corporate, brand building and entrepreneurial spirit, John is on a mission to positively impact 1 million kids annually through fun, foundational sports experiences and other positive events. His leadership focuses on franchise empowerment, community connection, and digital first marketing strategies, all the while maintaining strong values and strong values based approach. So with all that being said, John, welcome to the show.

John Erlandson: All right. Thanks. It was a big intro. I feel like, uh, like Muhammad Ali.

Rob Gandley: You are the intro.

John Erlandson: Titles there.

Rob Gandley: And for anybody that hasn’t, it can’t see us right now. He was up there shaking his body and his hands out. He was ready. That’s supposed to be a good thing for you to do. But anyway, listen, the first thing I love to ask, and you know, it’s always a great way to frame the conversation, but, you know, how did you get here? I know your journey was interesting. I know I’ve taught you a little bit about it, but I’d love the audience to hear more about how did you wind up in this place? And I know you’ve got a little bit of a history that got you here, so could you share a little more?

John Erlandson: Yeah, absolutely. You know, a lot of times people, people start with, well, my background was this and I was doing this for years. But, you know, the genesis of this story kind of starts with hurricane Sandy. And I just I’ve been in a company called Sport Craft for probably six years, and I was in my background was in fitness and games and physiology and product development. I did a lot of sales along the way, so I was making treadmills and things like that. Loved, you know, exercise, sports, all, all things, you know, kids, families. And I’m at that company. I’m doing great. I’m executive vice president and the company goes bankrupt. Didn’t see it coming. I just bought my first house, had my first baby, and I literally am out of a job. No health insurance, I have no money. I don’t have family with money. There was no one I could call. I’d put all the money into the house, and I’m scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. And all of a sudden, hurricane Sandy comes through new Jersey and six massive trees fall on my house. And I’m like, at the low of the low of the low of my life, in my career and everything. And I had this boss tell me it was a good mentor of mine. Guy’s name was Mike Nalley. He was probably my first real business mentor.

John Erlandson: He’s like, listen, always do what’s right. And I had just screwed all these Chinese factories over, telling them that they were going to get paid. And I just didn’t know the bankruptcy was coming. I wasn’t on the board and so I just started calling and apologizing to every one of these factories and saying, hey, you know, I I’m sorry. I was just there. I didn’t lie to you. And all of the owners were like, listen, John, we trust you. Just out of curiosity, if this company is bankrupt and no one’s watching the trademarks, can you start calling retailers and selling all this inventory I have? And I was like, I don’t know, give me five minutes. So I started dialing up, uh, retailers. I’m like, all right, I sold 5000 footballs. You know, I can pay the car payment this week. You know, I got 20,000 ping pong balls. And so through that kind of entrepreneurial scramble, I ended up at a company where I met my business partner, now called Authentic Brands. And I was very lucky because that company went from 0 to $8 billion. I was the chief revenue officer, and I worked alongside serial entrepreneurs, and I always had this passion about being an entrepreneur, and I wanted to do it on my own, and I just didn’t know how to do it, which is a lot of the story of many, many franchise owners, right? They work these career jobs.

John Erlandson: They always wanted to do something entrepreneurial. They, you know, families, they haven’t saved enough money. And so my journey mirrors so many of our franchisees journeys. And so while we build up authentic brands, early stage employees had stock options, did very well there. A lot of it was fashion. And you know, I just don’t care about women’s handbags. Like it just didn’t get me out of bed in the morning. And one day, Adam and I are in Japan. He’s my business partner now. And we came up with this idea for youth athletes United on one fundamental principle. What could we do where money is a wonderful byproduct of changing somebody else’s life, right? And so we started asking that question and just going, okay, well, well, there’s kids sports. We both have exercise physiology degrees, which are pretty useless degrees in case anybody’s kids out there are thinking about it. Talk it out. Talk them out of it. Um, but, you know, that was our passion. That’s what pulled me out of bed every morning. And so we started looking at the youth sports space noncompetitive, focused on kids under eight. And we realized there was amazing content, amazing brands, amazing people, but not a lot of really sophisticated business skills. Not a lot of investment in technology.

John Erlandson: And so Adam and I were like, man, this this just feels like we could put all this together. And so we founded Youth Athletes United as a platform. And, you know, take the year and a half of Covid out of it. We hit 90% of everything we said we were going to do in that initial business plan we’ve done. And it’s all rooted in let’s get an incredible group of people together that have this ideological passion that still have to make money, but they believe that money is a wonderful byproduct of changing somebody else’s life. And so we are having an unbelievable amount of fun doing this. Like, it is just so great. I’m working 24 hours a day, seven days a week and I love it. Like I can’t stop, you know? And so yeah, I mean, that’s that’s kind of my story. It started from just this train wreck of a being in the basement, wife screaming, baby screaming. Trees were falling everywhere. You’re thinking the house is going to collapse to. You know, what has been the peak of my business career and you know and that that story plays out over ten years. It feels like an overnight success story with ten years of just grinding. But the grinding was was kind of magical because it wasn’t about money. It was just about doing something you loved.

Rob Gandley: Yeah. And I you know, we were talking recently about energy. It was a recent episode, and it was like the one attribute of an entrepreneur that needs to be there. And you have it. I can feel it, right? But but that energy comes from your conviction and belief to and kind of when you tell that story, what I feel like is we all hit those crossroads in life where you could look back and say, this happened to me, right? These things happened to me. Or you can look forward and say, how am I going to fix it? Right? What what is what is the opportunity put in front of me? And also, I love that you did the right thing and it produced the opportunity to fix the problem, right. Even if it may not have been perfect, it wasn’t what you expected. But when you called those manufacturers that put it the seed in your mind to move forward and solve a problem. Yeah. And, you know, and it’s because you wanted to do the right thing. Right? And just telling what was going on. But I just love that.

John Erlandson: That skill is stuck with me. So I call it being an ostrich. So one of my things is every time you feel you’re in a negotiation, a tough conversation, an email where you’re batting the ball back and forth, a text message, and you just want to ignore something and put your head in the sand. You need to fight that urge. It is so easy, especially like if you do a lot of deals where you’re negotiating with somebody, it’s so easy to be like, oh, that person just forgot about that point. Let’s not bring it up and I’ll slip it in the contract and we’ll deal with it later. Right. And that’s just putting your head in the sand. All that’s going to happen is it’s going to come back to haunt you later, or not wanting to have a tough conversation with an employee or a franchisee or you know you did something wrong or something isn’t working, and not just raising your hand and just taking the beating now and getting it out of the way. And so I found, like, there are some people in life that they just have every skill. The the second mentor I had, Jamie Salter at Authentic Brands, really taught me how to be like a real scrappy entrepreneur. And he went on to be a billionaire and, you know, one of the point one percenters in life.

John Erlandson: But what I realized is nobody could replicate that. You were born like that. But 90% of the mechanical things he did, you could teach to anybody. And one of those big mechanical skills I learned was like, listen, just take the beating. Now get it out of the way. Go have the fight now. You’re kidding yourself if you think it’s not coming later. And what that allows you to do is just build a lot of trust with people. Even if you’re not always having fun conversations, you’re having productive conversations. And people love that. People want to be around other people they trust. They know you’re going to get things done and you know you’re going to get to the next result even when it’s hard. And so that that tool has served me very well. I try to teach it to all our young people. And, you know, I think it started with that lesson of calling the factories because, man, I that was that was the hardest thing to do because they’re all in China, right? Like you could easily have disappeared. And I just, uh, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So and again, I’d say it changed the entire course of my life.

Rob Gandley: I think that shows a lot about your character, man. That’s why you are who you are, though, too. That inner, that inner, you know, voice said, you gotta let these people know. And that was a good that was a good.

John Erlandson: But you know what for for everyone listening out there and trying to, you know, take some a learning away from it, even very rock headed people that seem like they always want to do stuff like that, deep down, they really don’t. Like, you’re still you’re still fighting yourself internally every day. And the difference between person makes stuff happen and the person that doesn’t is you get through that fighting yourself first before you go out and kind of, you know, challenge the challenge, what you got to do in the world. So yeah.

Rob Gandley: Exactly. To have the inner game is key. So so I wanted to kind of just frame your brand, your platform company and you know, so that is youth Athletes United. And then you have three brands. I wanted to just the audience to be very clear about what you’re running here. And it’s three distinct brands. But there is a unified sort of strategy. And you’re the chief brand officer. It’s one of the hats, right? You’re the co-founder, but.

John Erlandson: I’m more the chief revenue officer. So that that the marketing side really sits more with my business partner. We we co-run things very, very well. Um, but he is the marketing brand visionary. I always say, listen, left to my own devices, uh, we’d be bankrupt. So, like, we’re yin and yang in that way, where I’m always the revenue. What’s next? What’s the. I never saw an idea I didn’t like. And he’s always like, think through this, like, you know. So in that push and pull, uh, we’ve actually been pretty productive.

Rob Gandley: So that’s great. Well, so like when you are a platform company and you have, uh, these different brands. And so tell us a little bit about the strategy of that. So what that means and how, how do you keep a brand ethos sort of intact when you have this platform strategy?

John Erlandson: There’s upsides and downsides to being on a platform. I say it every day. And so everything in life is a weighing scale. Nothing is good or bad. Usually most things are not good or bad. It’s just you stack up all the good things and you stack up all the bad things and one side wins. So when you’re on a platform. We felt like if you looked at the industry that we focused on noncompetitive youth sports, especially with kids under, let’s call it the age of eight, is the majority of our revenue down to like one year old the the size of the business. Because if you look at the number of kids that are available per unit of time, per unit of geography in any given marketplace, it’s just not the same unit economics as like a McDonald’s, right? Because a one year old and a 99 year old can eat a cheeseburger 24 hours a day, right? Where that’s not the case when you’re trying to take a one year old and a parent in soccer class, you got like two hours in the day when that works really, really well, right? So our thesis was for somebody to revolutionize this part of the industry, you needed to stack a lot of revenue so you could reinvest in tech and intellectual capital. Right. So we could get we could get more sophisticated marketing people, business people, branding people, entrepreneurial people, and we could dump a ton of money into tech so we could have an Amazon type experience for mom and for our franchisees.

John Erlandson: Well, the only way to do that and to solve that problem is to stack a lot of royalties, right? And if you only focus on one brand, it’s a lot harder to get that level of scale and those level of unit economics. Soccer is probably the biggest of our brands, so youth Athletes Unite is the parent company. Soccer is our fastest growing brand. It’s called Soccer Stars. Uh, started in New York City. It is the largest operated soccer. So think of like the units I own soccer company in the country. Then we have, uh, amazing athletes, which is the largest, call it preschool PE program in the country. It’s about 2000 plus locations. And then we have play TGA, which is one of the very few companies that brings tennis, golf and pickleball. We do some other athletics, but the majority of the revenue sits with golf and tennis. We bring real clubs, real hitting, max play safe ball, and we teach golf in a noncompetitive and a non-intimidating environment. I like going to a golf course is a very hard place to learn golf. It’s intimidating. Yeah, right. It sucks. And so to for us to be able to do that at the school level. So every one of those businesses shares a lot of the same ideology and a lot of the same, um, back end operations.

John Erlandson: They’re all mobile businesses. We don’t own facilities. We don’t run facilities. So very low initial capital investment. We borrow space. So wherever there is kids time and money, we go to there and we deliver the content, we deliver the sports. And they are all content first brands, meaning we don’t send a coach out to come up with their own curriculum. We are very, very particular. I joke all the time on the franchise calls. We’re the In-N-Out burger of soccer, right? Like the content is so juicy and it’s so good and it’s so well thought out, like for, you know, on this podcast, you can’t see me, right? I’m a bald guy with a beard. To a three year old, I might as well be a serial killer, right? Like, total stranger danger. So I got on the field to coach for the first time. And one of the senior, you know, um, executives in our company, Dean Simpson, pulled me aside. He’s like, listen, just do this eye level. Get down on your knee. Sunglasses off. Smile it at the at the kid. Go. Hi, buddy. What’s your name? I’m Coach Marshmallow. As soon as I do that with any three year old, they burst out. They takes a second to process because they’re expecting you to say I’m Coach John. And then they hear I’m Coach Marshmallow. They burst out laughing. And now I’ve got a friend in the class.

Rob Gandley: Oh that’s.

John Erlandson: Great. Thousands, I mean thousands of those little techniques we have built something that that is just very unique. And everybody asks, well, I could just go buy sports equipment and start coaching this, right? And it’s like, yeah, you could, but to scale it, to do it at the highest, highest level of quality, very hard because it took people 20 years to come up with all these little innovations. And so the future of our platform, we are laser focused on owning the mobile space and watching the child because kids move through sports, right. Go through this journey with youth athletes united every step of the way for any sport they want to play.

Rob Gandley: That’s so. So let me connect it with a question I was dying to ask, which I love that you have this goal of a million kids, right? Impact. And so tell me more about that goal. And how has franchising in this experience. And I don’t know when that goal came in. Like I know that was very at the beginning. Or as you started scaling and realizing the impact. But how does franchising give you that platform, I guess, to achieve that type of audacious type of goal.

John Erlandson: So if you think about it from a standpoint of we originally didn’t have a big franchise vision. We had an operating vision. And so you start to like, logically think through the problem and you go, okay, so I’m going to create a workforce that to get to a million kids, we probably would need about ten. I’m guessing 5 to 10,000 coaches. Right. It’s a massive number spread across 40 states. And so you go is that logistically possible to from New York City manage a workforce that large that is part time when, you know, 90% of those people are just almost like gig workers and they have to not just show up and drive a car. They’ve got to deliver an incredible piece of content to another human being, to a group of human beings. They have to be able to interact with the parent that is in charge of the child. And be able to interact with the location manager. Who is the preschool director or the elementary school director. Do we really think sitting in New York City, I can hire somebody that makes 25 bucks an hour, that’s going to do that at the highest level of quality. And we tried it. And the conclusion we came to is the reason why no one’s ever done it is because the math doesn’t work. You need somebody who has an ownership link in the market that that lives and bleeds their community and will go above and beyond, and they can do all three of those things.

John Erlandson: They can take a lot of young people in coaching and teach them life skills and build a community, take them out to the bar, do a kick around on the weekend, like build that that culture because that culture is what makes your product unbelievable on the field. Then they got to build relationships with all the directors, all the schools, right? Because the schools and the parks control all the space. So we got to go work with those guys, and then they’ve got to be able to walk on the sideline, talk to mom, talk to dad. How’s Billy doing? Take a customer service call. You were never going to get that level of sophistication trying to hire, you know, regional managers all across the country. We tried it, and it just. You couldn’t get people that were bought in enough. Now, there are some regions where we have been able to get enough scale in cities. So we still own four regions. So we have New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco. Those units have so much scale that the four people that are running, those are seasoned executives that are living and breathing the business and delivering on that level. But but it was built over 15 to 20 years.

John Erlandson: I didn’t build it. I bought it, right. And so to rebuild that and go through that journey in every state in the country, it just wasn’t economically feasible. And so when we bought Amazing athletes, it was already franchised, fell in love with the concept of franchising. I loved the franchisees. I love the people I like as much as I love kids in sports. What gets me out of bed every morning is helping an entrepreneur go on that same journey that I went on, maybe minus the trees falling on their house and the hurricane. But everything else, right? Like, you know, like all that. All those other parts of like, man, you know, you start that business, you come out of the gates, it can go really, really well. But no matter how well it goes, you think it’s going to be on paper. There’s always something where you’re like, oh man, you got to solve a problem. And to me, when when we’re done solving problems, I might as well be dead. Like, what’s the point? Right? It’s kind of like you go on vacation in the Bahamas. By day, you’re like, all right, what am I doing on Earth? Like, this is a great use of my time on this planet. And so I think that that that part is really what gets me excited, you know, about business. That’s my.

Rob Gandley: That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah. And so here’s a good follow up then. So like in the marketing or sales side of things, you’re dealing with one audience that are these folks that really want more purpose and meaning in their life. And they also want obviously Potentially to earn as well to be able to earn and have financial freedom. Um, so you’re talking to that audience, and then you’re also in a position where you’ve got to build a business model where these same people build trust with parents and children. So or at least. Well, I think pretty much all the models. Right. So so you got marketing on one side that says we want to recruit the right kind of people for that model. So they have to represent this trust link with these parents. But your marketing and all that wrapping around the branding. How do you do that. Like that’s the two big things you got to do. You got to show them show we want people that care about. Yeah making money. But making an impact has to be the first, the leading of that. But you probably don’t when you recruit. I got to believe you don’t talk to people that say they hate kids, right? That’s the first thing.

John Erlandson: No. And I’ll tell you what. If somebody gets on the call and the first thing they go is, you know, how much money can I make off these kids? We’re generally like, this isn’t the right business for you. We’re going to end the call, right? We do. Right? Like we’ve been very fortunate enough. You know, myself, my business partner. Like our houses are paid off, right? So, like, I don’t have to do anything for money, I don’t care. Not that I could retire either, but, like, I don’t want to do anything that’s in the life. Too short column to add people to this platform that are that are not sharing the same mission. Now, that being said, do we relentlessly focus on people making money? Absolutely. You got to make money for a business to be successful so you could do good things, right? But it’s all about that ideology of the underlying kind of philosophy. From there, as much as the brand is the brand in the market, we expect the entrepreneur and the owner to also be the brand in the market, because this marketing is still very like 1975. A lot of it is going out to a playground with a flier and a business card, knocking on the local coffee shop door.

John Erlandson: Can I put this stack of brochures here? And talking to your local preschool, we do door to door sales, which most people that come in have never sold anything and they hate it. They think sales is a dirty word. And the more we start. That’s where I spend a lot of time during franchise training is I teach a whole 3 to 5 hour course on sales. And basically it’s like throw everything out of your mind of what you think sales is. This is about just being human and making sure that that person likes you, and telling your message in a real passionate way and starting a conversation. And the minute we get people to do that and they realize, like, this is the brand is radiating off of you. That’s where we start to see that magic happen. And after they get over their nerves for the first 4 or 5 of those calls, they’re like, wow, this is amazing. This is awesome. I’m building my business. The the movie montage that was in their head when they bought that franchise is actually starting to play out, right. And that’s that’s pretty cool that that gets me out of bed every morning I love it.

Rob Gandley: Yeah. Well, that’s amazing that you framed it that way and explained it, because I feel like that is a key to success for a business owner, for a new franchisee to get to that place. Right? First of all, you do a good job in the beginning recruiting, telling, being transparent, being clear about what the opportunity holds. Uh, but they create that vision in their mind, which you want them to create, right? I mean, that’s part of sales and marketing. But then when they come in, if you can achieve where they start to feel it and see it happening unfolding in front of them, to me, if you can do that in a certain period of time, in the beginning your success rate would be extremely high because that is the spark, right? That’s the also the disconnect. I feel right in a lot of brands where I’m here six months later, I feel like I had a breakthrough at 90 days. It’s not what I thought or see, you know, and that’s where the momentum gets lost and that’s where the challenge can be for certain brands. But that was brilliant. The way you phrased, is that how you guys look at it too? Like, let’s get them to see that.

John Erlandson: More upstream with the person. So what has been shocking to me in franchising is the number of times. And as we get in, um, community groups and we get to know other franchisors, Cause how often people will kid themselves in life and we all do it. I’ve done it to myself a million times, right? Like you, you believe in your head. You really want to own a business, and you want to get out there and you want to work it, and you love the details of it. And then we watch every now and then every 6 to 8 months, we’ll watch an owner buy a business and never show up. And they don’t want to do any of the hard work. They don’t want to knock on the door. They don’t want to do anything that makes them uncomfortable. And so early on when we were selling franchises six years ago, you know, when we were on these, these, uh, interview calls for franchisees, you know, I came from a sales background, so I assumed we should be doing a lot of selling today. I do a lot of trying to talk you out of it. And the reason is, we are not. It’s not like I’m your boss. We’re in a car together.

John Erlandson: There’s a seat sitting next to us. Right? And the whole team, the. Your team is driving the car, and that seat is empty. And we want you to get in the car. But I don’t want you to complain when the car goes 100 miles an hour, because I told you we’re going 100 miles an hour. This is where we’re driving. We’re pulling hard left turns. We’re pulling hard right turns. Right. Like we’re going on this adventure together. And I want to talk you out of it. Because if my words scare you, then you ain’t right for this. I don’t. I don’t want you bitching the whole time you’re in the car seat next to me, right? And so we explain that now, the other place I watch people kid themselves. And this is just like a public service announcement. If you were thinking about buying a franchise, even it has nothing to do with mine. Don’t kid yourself that. If you have a marital problem, a health problem or another business problem, that this is going to solve it. Because when you are getting started, you are the salesperson, the accountant, the coach, the manager, the CEO, the the, you know, the equipment manager. You have to do it all. And so if you were being distracted by life’s challenges, it’s like having a baby thinking it’s going to save a bad marriage.

John Erlandson: And you will watch people on franchising kid themselves like that all the time. And so we’ve gotten very good at really trying to talk people out of it. And at the end of me talking you out of it and I say the same thing, listen, weigh all the good and the bad. Here’s all the hard parts about this business. Here’s the things that will give you so much joy about being in this business. And it’s worked really well, man. The group of people we have in the system, at the speed that we have grown, private equity firms, um, other franchisors, other consultants in the industry are just shocked. They’re just shocked at the level of success we’re having. And our FBR review’s franchise business review, it’s an anonymous survey that they put out independently or through the roof. Now, are we perfect? Absolutely not. We screw things up every day, but it’s not bad intentioned. It’s usually because we’re trying to do too much, too fast. And most people that are in a franchise system, they can deal with that as opposed to a franchise owner that’s asleep at the wheel.

Rob Gandley: Exactly. Yeah. You know, no one expects perfection, but it is some degree of that, that vision in your head playing out. Right? No one said it would be perfect, but it is playing out and and it is moving forward. And I think that’s the key. Um, and I love the way like your it is near impossible to, to solve certain problems like on a national scale if you don’t have the right level of talent. And so another example of a business model is in the senior care space, very much a similar idea where you’re you’re getting a lot of benefit in helping people, making a big impact in your community, helping families and such. And it’s very much about that. But you look at the ways that people get help in that space. Without a franchise model, it’s very hard to get the help. You don’t get the hand-holding. You don’t because there is no one you can hire to do that type of work at the level you need them to do it, just like you said about the coaches. If you try to outsource the coaching, that’s you just can’t do it. Yeah. And so franchising is the solution. Like you couldn’t do it without the franchise model and the distributed ownership model. Right. That’s what I’m saying. That’s amazing. And you guys saw that. But you saw it.

John Erlandson: It comes back to the people though, I gotta tell you, we have the most wonderful, wonderful group of franchise owners like it is. I feel incredibly lucky by the fact that, like, they’re just good people. They are people first before they are business owners. And it allows you to solve problems. And I will I will tell you the best system in the world. The best system in the world will fail. If you have bad people on the other end, or you have the wrong people on the other end. And so what we have worked relentlessly in this to to create these systems. We have this philosophy of just get the right person, take a lot of notes because they’ll tell you what they need, right? Like everybody’s like, you know, what was your vision when you came in and took over? Amazing athletes. I’m like, I have a vision. I sat down with a notepad and said, bitch to me about everything you hate about this system, wrote everything down, right? Took all my notes. I’m like, all right, I got my five year plan. Thanks, guys. Like, we just bucketed it in and we just started executing, right. And so you build a little bit of trust and you build a little bit more and they’re like, oh wow, these guys care, right? My cell phone, my business partner, our executive team, they’re all in our in our email signature.

John Erlandson: I tell people I am available till midnight on Easter time. And then after that I’m probably asleep. And if you want to talk to somebody at 6 a.m., call my business partner. He’s the morning guy. But like, we are always, always available. We’re always on. But it’s not like it’s work. We’re just we’re having a blast. Like it’s just great. And so but it’s only great because you have people that are aligned with the vision And that that is what makes it fun. That’s what makes it possible to roll new things out, screw them up, get them fixed, get a lot of mulligans from your from your franchise system because everybody sees this, this North Star that we’re all driving towards, that you know you’re never going to get to. But that’s that’s part of the fun, right? The fun is the journey up the mountain. Like you’re at the top that it’s fun for about five seconds. You’re like, well shit, what do I do next? You know, like so another mountain.

Rob Gandley: Yeah.

John Erlandson: Yeah. Right. And that that’s been the secret sauce here so far over the last six years.

Rob Gandley: I love it, man. I love I thank you for sharing. I, I just love the way you articulate that, that idea of alignment. I feel like, again, like you’re saying things that most people don’t see, like. Yeah, recruiting great people. People are great. Yeah. No doubt. And I know what you mean. Exactly. Like franchisees are some of the best people in the world in every way, right? It’s like you couldn’t hire them and they’d be too expensive from that point of view. And then just the quality of the person. Right. But the idea of alignment is, again, you said that really quick, but I feel like, my goodness, if you get alignment, you can get a lot of average people doing really well, like the whole brand, just like the rising tide lifts, lifts, all boats. I just felt Lyman has a lot to do with that, where everybody is in that similar mindset of kids first, right? You have a franchisees first. I wanted to ask you about that philosophy. I think you kind of articulated it a little bit. So before I go down there, I do want to have some time to talk about technology though.

John Erlandson: Well, so.

Rob Gandley: Before you have before. Yeah. Go ahead.

John Erlandson: One kind of thing. I actually learned this from our private equity guys. So we raised money to start this platform. And, uh, we were we were negotiating because you have to negotiate with those guys on your deals, your terms, all these things. And there’s a lot of negotiating while you’re negotiating to buy the first company to get started. So I like to call it the cycle of misery because it’s just highs and lows when you’re trying to get something closed, right. You got to just put your quarter in and ride it and enjoy the ride. But, um, it was really interesting where we got to a place where we were kind of disagreeing on something, and one of the senior guys at our PE firm, he was just like, you know, do you feel like we’re aligned on this? Because I totally disagreed with with whatever point. I don’t remember what the point was, but I do remember him vividly asking me, go, does this feel aligned to you? Like, we both win if this happens and if this happens. And the minute he said that, I was kind of like, no, you’re right. And I’ve used that as a tool in the toolbox. Again, we can’t all be born Steve Jobs, right? Like it’s just not going to happen. But there were a bunch of mechanical things that these really successful people do that you can take those, put the tool in your toolbox and use it to some degree. And so every time I’m negotiating with an employee, right, maybe on a salary, on a raise, on a bonus.

John Erlandson: We ask the question of like, is this aligned with the company and the mission? Same thing when I’m negotiating with a franchisee who’s asking for special treatment, or they’ve done something really unique and we want to figure out how to partner on it. And that tool has been one of the most powerful tools I probably have used over the last six years. It’s really, really good. And and I would highly recommend everybody to use two. There are two mechanical tools that I feel like reset me mentally whenever I’m, you know, if you’re you’re debating anything, you’re arguing anything. It’s all over the board. There’s too many variables. So the alignment tool is number one I use. And the other one I use is ask yourself where you are trying to land the plane. So you get a room of 20 people debating something. And there’s arguments that are really good, but they’re they’re kind of all around like they’re all in like a circle, but nobody ever stops and goes, hang on, guys. Somebody just answered me where we are landing this plane and we can work backwards, because I don’t think we’re all trying to land it in the same spot. Are we debating how we fly into the landing zone, or are we debating where the frigging landing zone is? Right. Like, let’s start there. And so those two tools we use all the time in this company to kind of reset those debate conversations and it’s really, really good, really productive.

Rob Gandley: I love it. I think I think those two tips are brilliant because I know how that plays out in conversation and in decision making. Right? And it is about having that confidence and knowing, you know, this is the way we should go. This is this is what I need to do. Um, and you’re right, you could spend and we’ll talk about technology now. And that’s one area where you could spend so much time going in circles. It’s like, wait a minute, we all want to do this. Why are we talking about this over here? Like the color of the plane? Like we just want to land it, right? So.

John Erlandson: Yeah, the tech side has been interesting, right? It’s, um. It’s really, really hard when you get started and you start just plowing money into tech. Sometimes you put more CapEx in than you had Ebit to come out, and you could sit at those board meetings and just go, man, we could redeploy that capital into acquisitions. We could redeploy that capital into dividends. We could we could, you know, there are so many things we could do that do with that money. And we have watched some competitive platforms come along. And their view is I’m building a conglomerate of things and that doesn’t make them right or wrong. But their view is I don’t care about a seamless tech experience. I’ll let every one of these little things kind of run in their own tech bubble, and we’ll kind of just mine the data and we’ll use that for marketing. And they they’ve blown past us in terms of size. But I truly believe and I fundamentally believe the game we’re playing is the long game. It’s kind of like looking at Amazon early on and going, you know why they could have made so much more money if they stopped building distribution centers and they stopped upgrading their tech and just that relentless, Less relentless focus on what are basically our two customers when it comes to tech, the franchisees experience. We say we want more green time and less screen time. That doesn’t just apply to our kids, right? That applies to the franchisees. And we are also looking at it from, you know, is mom getting the Amazon experience? I don’t want to look at my competitors websites and hold that as the standard.

John Erlandson: I want to look at the best technology in the market and the best consumer experience and say, how do we model that? Right? Well, I don’t have $1 trillion to go invest in something, right? So how can we at least steal five ideas from the Amazon checkout experience and put them in here? And then you get them launched, you fix them, you make some bugs, you make some mistakes, you upgrade them and then rinse, wash, repeat, rinse, wash, repeat. And you just do that over and over. And what we have seen is every time we and we release tech features every three weeks. Every single time we release more technology features, we just watched the organic growth grow and grow and grow. And so it’s been incredible. Now, would we have taken on this journey if it was just, you know, uh, you know, myself and Adam? No, we had a we have a two other partners, uh, that are in the business that kind of came in as the initial for one of them has a degree from MIT. He’s a chief technology officer. He had built software in sports prior to coming here. So he was he was really the secret sauce that allowed us to kind of do this. Um, and, and it’s been it’s been spot on. It’s really made a difference. And, and there’s some new problems that have emerged as you’ve scaled tech. And I can talk about those in a minute, but it’s, uh, it’s been good.

Rob Gandley: Well, you know, one of the thoughts I had was, you know, obviously technology is there’s a lot of buzz around it right now with AI, obviously, and many other disruptive technologies. But I’d say AI is probably the most in the front of most consumers and people nowadays. And, and you know, so I mean for you guys it is still about alignment. I love that. Right. You just come right back to that thought like is this tool, is this capability aligned for vision of impacting a million children. You know what I mean. Is it getting us there and is it getting obviously you keep improving that right. You keep raising the standards as high as you can take it. So like how do you make those decisions like and right now, are there any places that you see that really like this from what you can see now would be, yeah, that might really help what we do, that piece of technology that really might enhance what we’re doing. Is there anything like that that you can point to or talk about?

John Erlandson: What’s super interesting is when you’re building your own tech stack. And I saw I went and I always look at other systems, and I was looking at one the other day and they’re, you know, multi multi-billion dollar conglomerate. And I was shocked at how clunky the interface was. I couldn’t believe it. And then I went back and I looked at our interface, and I realized what happens to a lot of tech companies as people, just continually it’s a never ending black hole of features that people ask for. And so the problem is, what starts out as a great, simplistic idea ends up with this infinite number of variable menu options, which starts to make it very complicated to find things. And so what happens is over time, you lose that pizzazz of like having time to really redesign the user interface. So it’s sleek, it’s modern because now all of a sudden there’s all these friggin submenus. And you end up with the exact opposite of the dream of where you started, which was more screen time and less screen time. Now I have double the screen time because I’m clicking all these freaking boxes, right? And so I think before we start talking about AI tools and bots and some of the things that are going on out there, and we’ve tested some of those We probably are at a place where we’ve where millions upon millions of lines of code.

John Erlandson: We’re going to probably take a quarter or two, pause and go back and re scrub the whole interface for speed and convenience. And why isn’t this obvious? Because I think if you don’t clean out your closet once every year, you just end up with a mess and you can’t figure out kind of what to wear. Right. And that fashion analogy I stole from somebody else’s podcast, but I thought it was great. So I’m using it here. And so, um, then you go, okay, now that the foundation of the house is perfect and the closets are clean and the house is organized on the inside. Now, how do we build two new things that are rapidly emerging technology, which is a combination of AI bots, really, uh, and a genetic AI, which are a little bit different. If you think of the bots, the bots are basically just asking questions, right? We’ve all dealt with the customer service bot An agentic AI bot can do a lot more. It can perform complex tasks on the back end, but it can also think through situation A and situation B, right? If the invoice doesn’t come in perfectly, it knows there’s an address somewhere on the invoice so it can read through the invoice, find the address, type it into the system. That’s the future.

John Erlandson: That’s where it’s going. I think what we found is the couple times we’ve tried to integrate AI, you almost have to look at it like bullets in a gun, right? So we’re being charged by a thousand zombies are coming and charging our position, and we only have 800 bullets, right? So you can’t just fire at every zombie. You see, you have to be smart about the ones you attack. And the problem is, that’s what AI is right now, is the expense of just figuring out the never ending landscape of AI can actually bankrupt you in a never ending black hole of spending and spending, and then it changes, and then you spend again. But as a small business, you can’t keep up with that. So what we found is, is we deployed a bot, we call it soccer bot, and it was supposed to do customer service just for the franchisees. Was it only answered about 50% of the questions. And it just kept every day creeping up and getting more and more and more expensive. You’re like, this thing’s going to kill us. So we shut it down. I think that the for a small business under $100 million like us, um, I think a little bit of a wait and see approach. Well, you use some very, very, very sniper shot off the shelf AI tools. So, for example, uh, a video editor that can do faster video editor editing, make it look more modern, but it’s 20 bucks a month, right? Um, just things like that.

John Erlandson: Like, you know, using ChatGPT to write, not just emails is everybody’s doing that. But, like, we’re in a meeting, you and I, and there’s all these action steps. And so what do you do? You write all the action steps down. You get distracted. You come back at night, you go to type it all into your CRM, and then you have to remember what you did right. So while we’re taking the meeting notes, we copy that. We’re like, oh, we need to send a letter to the franchisees. So we copy what just came up in the transcript or we’re writing it. We drop it in chat. The letter is done in the meeting right there. Yeah. Right. Well, that’s free to do. So those types of little techniques are where we’re implementing AI every step of the way. And we’re all learning it a little bit at a time. And it’s a very low cost high return way to to to go after it. And that I would recommend anybody that’s in a small business that doesn’t have a lot of bullets to shoot in terms of capital to apply towards this, that’s the best way to get in the game. And it’s working.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean that’s what we see. I think that, uh, the first step is looking at your people, looking at your people, your teams, and seeing what you can do to equip them better. As you said, like it could be these tools that just make them do their job way better than they were before. And that’s step one. If you do that well, I think you’re in the right place because, um, I do think that sort of thinking, if you’re not doing it, what if the other folks in your industry are. So at some point it will be more commonplace for employees to all be upskilled with various tools, right? So I love that analogy, like the video editing analogy. So that’s amazing. So we’re coming towards the end here. I know we set aside a certain amount of time and I know you’re you’re busy, John, and I appreciate the conversation so far. I feel like we could probably just sit here all day. Really. I think both of us love talking, so I know it’s our background, right? Um, so. But like, in terms of vision, I’m just. I’m just wondering, like you had mentioned earlier in the conversation about climbing, you know, kind of climbing the mountain. And a big part is the climb, right? It’s the journey. And there is that payoff, though, of the vision of seeing the top right. And that’s an amazing feeling. Um, I, I do, I do climb mountains. I live in Colorado and I do get that feeling, and I do love that feeling. And oftentimes I feel like there’s nothing else in that moment. Right? Like, that is the pinnacle. And so you want to keep recreating that feeling. So but tell me about your vision because you’re that you’re sort of you’ve climbed the mount, you’ve climbed a couple mountains, now you’ve seen some nice views. Tell me about your vision for this platform company. Where where do you see things going into the future, given the world we live into with all this change? What is your.

John Erlandson: Yeah, I think our executive team, all the leaders feel like the opportunity is infinite. And I think our franchisees do too. And this is why children are moving the old days of just your parents throwing you out in the fricking yard and being like, hey, come back when it’s dark. Like those days are gone, right? And so it’s it’s just not reality for any of us anymore. And so kids are just doing structured things nonstop and they’re kids, so they’re going to try an infinite number of things. And so there’s all these obvious things in sports tennis, golf, soccer, multi sport, cross whatever you want to do. Then that same child is trying the same thing in Stem robotics, science, fashion design. You know medical learning like money management like there’s an infinite number of contact content packages. And we like to say the brain is the biggest muscle in the body. Right. And so like why are we not having mom and dad bring their children through this trusted ecosystem every step of the way, lowering the marketing cost of acquisition for a customer for our franchisees. Right. Using that data not to shill. Right. They used to work the WWE a lot, and one of Vince McMahon’s big things was we don’t want to shill, right? We like we want to sell. We want to provide value, but we don’t want to shill. Right? So where’s the value for mom of her getting a text message that says, hey, Billy left the preschool.

John Erlandson: He’s now in elementary school X, Y, and Z. Did you know that his progress report said he was great at golf when he was five? We have a TGA class. Here’s a 20% coupon. We’d love to have Billy come try TGA and test some golf. Right. That’s the future of where we’re going. And we’re probably only about 12 months away from that being automated. Um, and everybody wins. Again, we talk. Let’s bring it back to where we started. Alignment. Is mom aligned in getting a value and is it something she wants? Yes. Is the franchisee aligned in terms of a customer moving from one franchisee to another? But they both win? Yes. Because they weren’t in a competing brand anyways. Is is the franchisor aligned in that investment and technology? Because ultimately they’re going to receive a royalty off of every one of those kids. Yes, absolutely. Is the school aligned because you took the kid off the teacher’s hands for a little bit, and the teacher is now happy and we take care of the facility. Yes. There’s no losers in this. It’s not like I sold you a lemon and you drove off the lot. And so again, when I go back to there’s like five core tools that you can use in every situation to bring your yourself back to center. You know, zero point attack this goal, make this happen and achieve your vision. And it is awesome when you get in that rhythm. And that’s what we’re doing now.

Rob Gandley: I just love that you’re sharing that because it there’s two things. One, it’s the knowing of it. It’s knowing to look for alignment knowing to think win, win, think what’s in it for the other party. Right. How does it impact them, and why is that good or is that bad? Is that aligned or not? Yeah, but you thought you thought about it through the whole network of folks, the stakeholders in the whole, you know, in that whole example. And I love it. It’s knowing that, but it’s also being willing as a business leader to run your business that way? Yeah. And because you can know a lot about all this stuff and still choose. It’s all about profit, right? And I know we live in that world to some extent. I’d like to think it’s a little different than maybe when I was younger.

John Erlandson: But even that I would tell you there’s nothing wrong with that either. Right there. I mean, friends that are in the industry that own, you know, um, I don’t know, plumbing franchises or home service franchises. And there are some, like, building out a garage. You could be really passionate about finishing a kitchen, you know, doing plumbing. You could be passionate about the industry and stuff. But it’s not like if there was no money, would you still do it? The number of people would go way down. Right. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. We’re in America, right? And there’s a certain type of person that should absolutely buy that franchise first. Our system we want you to like, if money wasn’t a thing, if the robots take over and we don’t have to do any work, would you still show up and do this every day? Then this is the place for you, right? That’s what has made this so special. And I actually we find that very easy. And if you do all the right things because the system is really good, the profits will come, right? They just come and do this. You do that. Profits pour out of the machine. And so it’s, uh, it’s just about how you, like, set your core methodology that really determines every single thing that you and your teams do day in and day out.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, absolutely. Now, I mean, it just comes down to, as you said earlier, the kind of model it is and being transparent upfront and and again, you’re in that model and I you made a comment about um about robots taking over. Well I mean, in my world I’m in the tech, you know, and I could tell you you’re passionate about it too, but it’s like, that is a real sort of idea, but not like, here’s what I think. I think the relationship jobs of today, like your business, like your brands, where you’re really connecting with other people, making an impact in their lives. Those are the they. They ain’t going nowhere. We’re still we have needs. We still are going to fulfill those needs for each other. Hopefully, it just means a lot of the grind of life that we had to do to just survive can be removed, and we can focus more on business models like yours. Like you said, there’s no real end to picking the phone up and adding value and helping a franchisee help a kid, right? I mean, that’s pretty much what you’re doing. And I think the future is still the future. That’s still the future, even with robots around. So that’s the cool thing.

John Erlandson: Yeah. We’ll we’ll be last in line to to. Yeah. I mean robots coach. You know, young kids soccer. But you know, if it ever gets to.

Rob Gandley: Maybe an assistant.

John Erlandson: Yeah. The whole the whole world’s in trouble. So.

Speaker4: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Rob Gandley: No, that’s that is key. So it’s been a pleasure, man. Thank you for spending the time. Um, yeah.

John Erlandson: Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Rob Gandley: And, yeah, the the insights were tremendous. I would recommend people relisten to some of these, uh, these answers you shared. I loved it. Thank you. Because I know when I walk away feeling like I learned a ton, which is most of the time, I must say, but not I gotta tell you, I just love. Last few interviews have been unbelievable. Um, I feel like I’m just. I’m getting the benefit of of of your coaching and consulting indirectly. But it’s really good stuff. And that’s why that’s why the brand has done so well. And and I want you to tell the listeners, where can they get in touch with you guys, with your brands, with your platform, with you. You seem like a great place to start. You you know, you’re the chief revenue officer, but how do people reach out if they’re interested in making an impact?

John Erlandson: You can look at youth athletes. United.com. Uh, it’s a good place to start. It’ll tell you all about the franchise system. Um, and then also you see us on LinkedIn. Um, I highly recommend doing your research. Right. There’s a lot of podcasts out there with us. There’s a lot of, you know, industry research ChatGPT us. I did it the other day, you know, what does the world have to say about John Erlandson? Right? Adam Geisler, you know, Dean Simpson, Carman, Khalil, all you can see our executive team, they’re all out there. Annie. Um, you know, so all of the the core people that that have really founded these businesses. So what is so cool is when you look into the history of our business, you know, some of the names I named and, you know, another executive, Bob Gibson, founded, like, just founded this business. They were the first people on the soccer side that started 20 years ago in the business. And they’re like the core founders. And to have all those people still surrounding us is pretty freaking cool. It’s really cool. It says a lot that we came in and we weren’t money guys. We really understood the value of human beings in this. And like, what this is, is like human Netflix for kids, right? We got to deliver that movie every week. You pay your subscription, everybody enjoys the movie, but you’re getting healthy and active. And at the end of the day, that doesn’t happen without incredible humans around you. And so, yeah, I mean, I would say start at youth Athletes United. Look us all up on LinkedIn chat GTP us. You know, go look at other franchisee podcasts. And if you’re interested, we’d love to talk to you. If not, you know, take these tips. And we made the world a better place. Whether we’re helping kids or we’re helping people. That’s great. Right. So beautiful. You know, that’s, uh, that’s who we are.

Rob Gandley: It’s about doing good work and helping people and being an awesome business at the same time. So I think that’s amazing. It’s good stuff. I just want to thank you again for your insights. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. Please share this if you find it helpful. This is insightful, impactful stuff. Please share it and keep tuning in. And bye for now.

 

Tagged With: Youth Athletes United

Cliff Nonnenmacher with Franocity

April 18, 2025 by angishields

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Denver Business Radio
Cliff Nonnenmacher with Franocity
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Cliff-NonnenmacherCliff Nonnenmacher began his career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. After leaving his Wall Street career in 2003, he acquired a Master Franchise for New York and Connecticut, diving headfirst into the franchising industry.

Since then, Cliff has owned and operated various franchise businesses, including Cartridge World, Personal Training Institute, PuroClean, and Maid Right, as well as non-franchise companies. He has also developed well-known domestic and international brands like Four Seasons Sunrooms, Contours Express, Island Fin Poke, and Krak Boba.

With over 25 years of experience in franchising, finance, and business, Cliff has been involved in every aspect of the franchisor-franchisee relationship. Cliff now uses his extensive knowledge to assist corporate executives in building generational wealth, diversifying their investment portfolios, and navigating career transitions through franchise ownership.

Connect with Cliff on LinkedIn.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Coming to you live from the Business RadioX studio. It’s Franchise Marketing Radio. Ready to revolutionize your franchise with AI? Franchise now empowers franchises with advanced AI solutions, automatic processes, and enhanced marketing strategies. From personalized customer interactions to predictive analytics, we help you harness AI to drive growth and efficiency. Transform your franchise with the power of AI. Visit Franchise Now to learn more and take your business into the future. Now here’s your host.

Rob Gandley: Welcome back, everybody to Franchise Marketing Radio, where we spotlight brands, leaders, game changers that are shaping the future of franchising. Today is no different. My guest is a powerhouse in franchise consulting and the franchise consulting world. He’s been on both sides of the table as a multi-unit franchisee. As a franchisor executive and now as the founder and CEO of Franocity. And basically, he is redefining how candidates find their perfect franchise fit and how franchisors recruit high performance owners. He’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CBS, moneywatch. Cliff Nonnenmacher, welcome to the show. Good to have you.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Yeah, man, thanks for having me. I’m happy to be on. Well, no, you got well known, well known show in our industry that I’ve never been on, so I’m really happy to be here.

Rob Gandley: Very cool, I appreciate that. Well, I’m trying to keep making it known, so make sure you’re sharing it out there if you enjoy the conversation. I usually wait till the end, but I wanted to say that. So it’s great to have you listen. One of my favorite questions to start with is always. And for those listening that just kind of sit on the fence for a while about, you know, starting a business, you’re not only helping people get into franchising and start a career as an entrepreneur, but you are one. And so you had to do that thing. So tell me a little bit of how this all started and how did you wind up where you are today?

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, a lot of my clients are not, let’s say, lifelong entrepreneurs. They were in corporate America. I happen to be I was born a business person. Quite frankly, I knew as early as you can know what you want to do that I wanted to be self-employed. I started at a very young age, raking golf balls out of country club ponds and selling them and cleaning them and doing all random things. I actually started literally right out of high school. Uber Eats before Uber Eats even existed. So 1990, 1991 I created a food delivery company on Marco Island, which is three miles by six miles, and I delivered food using cell phone, pager technology and then ultimately cell phones. I say ultimately cell phones, because in 1990, 1991, you were between a dollar and $2 a minute to use a cell phone, and it was the size of a of a of a handbag. It was large. It was right. But but I actually had it. Believe it or not, my little island had a tower on it. So I don’t know if you know Marco Island. It’s just south of Naples, Florida. Yeah, you look like you know it. Okay, so I did that for years. I delivered hundreds of deliveries a day, I do believe, and I’ve said this publicly, that I’m the first subcontractor for McDonald’s in the US.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: I had a dedicated cash register just to me, uh, to that’s how many deliveries we were doing. Approximately 100 a day just for McDonald’s. We were doing 300 total. We deliver for Little Caesars. I made Domino’s Pizza change owners, I think 3 or 4 times while I was doing it, because remember, their whole value proposition is delivery. Well, when I was delivering, that’s not a value prop anymore. Remember John’s commercial today is, uh, remember, uh, grab a bucket. Remember the commercial with, hey, we’re speedy. Grab a bucket. The guy throwing a house fire and the and the firemen are like, hey, grab a bucket, grab a bucket. Well, guess what? With Uber Eats, there’s no more value proposition in delivering. So I started doing it 1990, 1991, started delivering auto parts, delivering prescription drugs. And then I got involved in the water sport industry because I was delivering to all the hotels and the Hilton and the Hilton Grand Vacation asked me to put in bids for parasail boats, beach concessions. So I started doing that. For years I had operations on the new Jersey, uh, the Jersey shore, which would be Long Beach Island, LBI. I had operations in Marco Island Hilton, and I had operations at the Hilton Grand Vacation and rented fleets of jet skis, catamarans, you name it, sold sundries. Uh, I mean, literally everything that you could possibly do at a beach.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Parasailing was one of our big, uh, operations because it’s just more involved. That evolved into making money at a young age, which evolved into trading, which took me into investment banking. And then from investment banking, I had an experience in corporate America. That’s my real first experience in corporate America. I’m now 25. Um, I’m in a group. We’re managing around 250 million. I’m with a group of guys called Comprehensive Wealth Management that operated within Salomon Smith Barney. Today is Morgan Stanley. And, uh, I had a moment with a boss, and it was kind of a weird moment where I asked him for a printer on our side of the building and said, if you want one, you buy it. So I bought it. It cost me $250 to buy a cartridge for it. So I figured out how to refill the cartridge for really pennies on the dollar. And then and then I found a company in Australia that reverse engineered printer consumables. The inks replicated anti-coagulation agents anti-corrosive agents. Gents chip resetting technology, where you put a little device on a chip on a cartridge and it would reset head, faking the printer into believing it was an OEM original original equipment manufacturer. Right. And I ended up buying the rights with a partnership to the entire state of New York and Connecticut.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: So I began my my my entrance into franchising began as a master for the state of New York and Connecticut. And then, of course, I owned my own locations. And then I scaled 36 locations and then sold it, moved to Florida and did it over again and started buying failing. Now my now my focus shift with my my now business partner Justin. My focus now shifts to buying blood in the street. I want to buy failure. Right? Because being an investment banker, listening to, let’s say, Warren Buffett, you buy when there’s blood in the street and you sell the bugles. So I’m like, you know what? I’m going to start looking for really fundamentally sound Franchise concepts that are bleeding, and I will pay them pennies on the dollar. I’m going to turn them around and I’ll sell them for a multiple. And that’s what we did. My business partner and I started buying gyms and then we bought restoration companies, water, fire, mold and biohazard, and we continue to scale from there. And then at that moment, Rob, we looked at each other and said, do you realize that we are buying businesses from people who had no business owning them to begin with? They think about that. It’s actually profound. And it was a moment in our career where we realized people do not have any adherence to due diligence.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: They lack discipline as investors. They are highly emotional and illogical. And and I say this not to be sarcastic, but it’s a it’s a term that I’ve come up with, which is this most people are broadly ignorant and narrowly intelligent. They’re really good at what they do, but outside of that, they’re kind of clueless. And I use the term ignorant, being uninformed, not stupid, right? So if you actually break down what I’m saying, it’s not to be mean. Most people are broadly ignorant, broadly uninformed. Right? And narrowly intelligent. And that’s what we learned. And then we realized we’re going to become we’re going to create a consulting company. We are not going to have commission breath, and we are going to advise people properly on how to navigate this process, even if it includes talking them out of it and saying, you are not a fit, you’re not a fit. And we we do that more. Unfortunately, I guess it’s the upside of being wealthy. We do that more than talking people into it is talking people out of it and saying, look, you’re not a fit. Like you don’t even have a voicemail recording. I mean, how do you you don’t even not only do you not have a voicemail recording, your spouse’s phone says voicemail is not even set up. Like, how are you? How are you? How are you doing this?

Rob Gandley: Yeah. How do you live that way in this world?

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Seriously, I it always blows my mind when someone wants to become a business owner and I’ll call them up, either a voicemail full or the subscriber you’re calling doesn’t even have a voicemail set up. And I’m like, what kind of business owner is this? Anyway.

Rob Gandley: That’s that’s classic.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: That’s my cliff note version of my journey. Rob.

Rob Gandley: That’s an amazing journey. Worth, uh, worth the answer. Thank you for for that. It’s amazing. I think I remember early on I told you my journey started in the 2000, and I think one of the concepts, I remember being very familiar with those concepts that would replace the inks and how powerful that was. Fairly new then. But, I mean, you sound like you might have been the first, like hooked up with the first group.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: I was.

Rob Gandley: But anyway, it was big.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Then tip of the spear. Yeah, I was I was a very early adopter of that technology because I, I personally I like to invest in two things solutions to problems and good feelings. My Paris up boats, my jet skis, my all that stuff. Like that’s all good feelings. You’re on vacation. Spend, spend, spend and enjoy life, right? And then there are solutions to problems, which is I literally just spent $100 on a black inkjet cartridge. It’s like, can this really be worth $100? And the answer is no. It’s like it’s like 90% water. Yeah. I don’t know if you know this. If you ever extrapolate black ink or or toner or, you know, uh, cyan, magenta and yellow inks, if you actually extrapolate them, you’re paying more for an inkjet cartridge than Chanel number five. Dude. It’s crazy.

Rob Gandley: It’s ridiculous.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: It is.

Rob Gandley: Ridiculous. Why? They just kind of arbitrarily set that market right. Those manufacturers are smart guys. They they wanted to make sure they had a nice little cash stream in there. Thus the problem. And you solved it. Love capitalism. Um, but, uh, yeah. So so you said something at the end of the last part of your answer that I think is kind of tease up my next question, and I want you to kind of I want you to share a little bit of what makes you guys unique at, you know, the way you approach, uh, the process, both from a franchisor angle. So when you’re talking with a franchise brand, your approach when you’re talking to them, this is why it’s important. And then when you’re talking to a candidate, as you said, your approach is unique for them and it revolves around the fit, right? It’s getting the right people in the right position. And so how does that work and how do you explain your unique process?

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Yeah, I would explain it. I think experience matters. And I think that our industry has a very low barrier to entry, where you could just say that you were a displaced, you know, corporate executive, and now you’re going to become a consultant and begin advising people on how to buy a business, when in fact, you’ve never owned a business yourself. You’re not entrepreneurial. You’re really don’t understand investing, right? So when you really unpack all of that. You’re like, wow, that person really isn’t qualified per se, to advise me on how to create wealth or how to create a legacy for my children or grandchildren, or really understanding even how to put the deal together. Rob, with my investment banking background. Right. Which was really extensive, and my entrepreneurial background and the fact that I’ve owned about 12 companies to date and currently have investments in two, uh, both in the food and beverage space. It’s it’s just a force multiplying effect for our clients. Like, wait a minute, man, this is great. You’re talking at a level that I haven’t even heard from other consultants. And all you do is ask questions. It’s seek to understand before being understood. Like you just keep asking questions to understand. What are my investment objectives? Why am I here? Do I have a working spouse? Do I have cashflow? What’s my financial situation? What’s my risk tolerance? Right? I mean, it’s so important. Where do you live? Where do you want to operate? What are the demographics of that community? Let’s look at discretionary spending. Nobody’s doing what we’re doing. Risk mitigation strategies, exit strategies, liquidity events. How many little birds do you have chirping in the nest versus being an empty nester investor? These are these are game changing questions that the average person unfortunately is not asking.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Here’s a perfect example right before today just meeting with you. It’s a perfect example. I met with a guy and he’s like, yeah, no, man, I, I’ve already spoke to like three consultants. I’m good. I’m like, well, you haven’t spoken to me yet, so let’s discuss what you’re trying to do. So he goes into he’s like, I already know what I’m doing. I’m buying this pressure washing brand. It was presented to me by a broker. I mean, really cool. They do some bizdev, they generate leads. I go, who’s involved in this business? Tell me, let’s just level set for a minute. He goes, oh, it’s me and three other guys. I go, so it’s four people. He goes, no, no, no, it’s three people. I go, okay, it’s three investors. And do you guys want to make a living? He’s like, you know, he laughs at me. I go, what is your earnings history? What what lifestyle are you accustomed to? He goes, all of us make 150 minimum a year. I go, okay, so the three. Yeah. You just went off camera. So the three of you are going to pool your resources. You’re going to invest in the lowest barrier to entry business called pressure washing okay. Which is a commoditized business mainly based on price, which means low price wins. Low price wins equals low margin equals good luck. And he’s like, Holy shit, I go, why don’t you be disciplined and say this as a starting discipline? Uh, as an investor, we are only going to look at businesses with a $1 million minimum item, 19 in the home services space like that right there is.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: I know to you, it may seem deceptively simple to you because you’re in our industry and you’re like, there’s nothing there’s no revelation there, Rob, To the average investor, that’s the difference between failure and creating wealth. Was that little bit of advice to say time out, slow down, stop talking about brands, and let’s start talking about you and what you want and what you like and what you need to earn. And it was like, I can’t even believe it’s like, I’m so glad I took your call. We had a very lengthy conversation after that about what’s trending in the United States, what he should and should not be looking at, and why. I like certain things and don’t. So experience, right? We live in a time now where millennials want to graduate college and be CEO. Like that’s what the time we live in. There is so much to be said for experience. I love a gray haired doctor. I love someone with battle scars, I love wisdom, I love life experiences and. And what’s that worth? You know, to me it’s it’s invaluable when you’re getting advice from someone that actually knows what they’re doing and is going to keep you and your family out of trouble. Yeah. So, Rob, I could do. I could make an episode out of the value that we add. I have a ton of experience negotiating commercial leases. And when it comes to brick and mortar brands, I could tell you that there is a gaping hole in brick and mortar lease negotiation in our industry. It’s actually disgusting. It’s disgusting. I go ahead.

Rob Gandley: Go ahead. No, I was just going to comment on, on I, I you had said a little earlier that, you know, it’s probably pretty obvious to me, right. Kind of thing. And I’m thinking, no, man, it the way I always I think math, the simple idea of understanding math and then being honest, like you said, you got three people that need to make a certain amount or would guess that you’d be more comfortable making and not the same amount. If you’re going to start a business, there’d better be some serious motivation there, because making the same amount will never get you through. Not in my experience, if that’s the goal. So like just understanding the math, and then you’re saying, okay, then that’s pretty straightforward. When you look at it that way, then you need $1 million business that that is, you know, and here’s an industry that is typical for that. And so brilliant the way you frame that because it was true. And honestly, you could fight that if you want. Uh, but you’re not going to you’re not going to be satisfied in the end. The broker that was brilliant.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Yeah. The broker is getting fired, right. The other broker is now fired, and it’s like they’re going to hitch their wagon on our firm, and we’re going to take them, hopefully to the finish line and advise them prudently and be good stewards. And I oh, I’m not a fiduciary, as you know, but I always act like a fiduciary because as an investment banker, I don’t know any other world to live in, but to behave like a fiduciary when you’re dealing with other people’s money, investments and advice. So that’s kind of how we act.

Rob Gandley: And it’s one of those rules that was invented for, you know, to to protect people doing the wrong thing. It’s not like you shouldn’t do that anyway. Like you the way what that means is you’re just really good at your job and you’re helping think for your clients. And and I would say, you know, no, I don’t when I interview or meet people in your space doing what you do. Not many have that background what you’re talking about.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: No, I agree with you and I’m happy to be able to share our story. Thank you.

Rob Gandley: And I do have a finance degree from from my undergrad. And so I did I did think about that pathway. I should have known you. I should have gone your route. I’m more like like your DNA. Not not a guy that sits around in front of a computer all day and I just go to Wall Street.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: You’re a beast. You’re the jack of all trades, man. You’re involved in everything.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s how I. That’s why I’m an entrepreneur, right? Anyway, you start to figure yourself out as you get older, and it does take some wisdom to actually get it right. So anyways, um, alright, so wanted to get your feedback, you know, you know, my background a little bit just in talking to me briefly is in technology and obviously a lot’s been going on in technology. It just seems to be, you know, propelling and increasing in momentum, whether we’re talking AI or get into all kinds of other technologies that could be disruptive. Um, and so and technology itself has been kind of a thing to think about in the 2000. Right. It was sort of, you know, building a little momentum. Maybe you’re thinking you need a website by the 20 tens, maybe some of the brands that we better get websites for the franchisees and so forth. Right. And then social media comes and mobile comes. And tell me about AI from your point of view, like you’re and, you know, as an investor, as a business owner, from every perspective you can think of, how do you properly filter the noise? How do you know where to focus that? Because we know it’s happening. We know that you got to be innovative, but how do you do it right? And what are you looking for when you look at a brand when you when you think of that.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Okay, so I love AI. Let’s start there as a blanket statement I love AI. It’s game changing technology. But I’m not going to be clueless to the fact that it’s going to displace hundreds of millions of jobs across the planet. There’s no doubt about it. Um, I am now using. So our industry uses a term unskilled labor. You’ve heard this term a million times. Unskilled labor. It’s used everywhere. I actually use the term skilled labor. And I’ve been using it for years. And people get caught off guard when I say de-skilled and they’re like, you mean unskilled? And I’m like, no, I mean de-skilled unskilled labor doesn’t mean that it’ll be replaced by AI or a humanoid or a robot. D skilled labor means exactly that. I’m buying into a franchise. Let’s say the head count is five. D skilled employees. That means in the future. The future is now. I have the opportunity to replace five employees with AI automation. Routine task. Humanoids. Uh, Tesla. Uh, Optimus bots. Et cetera. Et cetera. There’s a big difference between between saying, well, I trim trees. Right. That’s unskilled labor. So you have a guy that climbs up a tree, uses a chainsaw, and he’s.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: And he chops it down. I don’t see a runway in the next five years where Optimus is doing that. I just don’t see that happening yet. Right. So there are there are businesses that I look at where I truly feel that when you buy it within the next 36 to 60 months, you are going to grab operational efficiencies by replacing people with AI. Look, it’s another reason why we have a president that wants to bring all the jobs back. You know why he’s doing it? Because he knows no human beings are going to be doing most of the work. He knows it. That’s why he’s not worried about paying 14,000 for an iPhone, because it’s never going to happen. See that that that what’s happening right now and it’s not a political discussion. I don’t want to go there. But that move right there tells you that there is no expectation of human beings filling in those roles on manufacturing. They know it’s going to be automated, they absolutely know it. And we’re going to start to see that automation in franchising. Look at outbound, look at scheduling. You could do scheduling. Oh come on. They they speak.

Rob Gandley: Obvious.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Yeah. Rob they speak 120 languages. I mean can you imagine dialing the phone. And I say Rob, it’s Cliff. Hey, by the way, do you speak? Do you speak? Fill in the blank and you go I speak 128 languages. Please let me know which one you want to speak. That’s where we’re at. Scheduling confirmation. Basic things like giving an estimate, all this stuff. Now you’ve got. Instead of guys climbing on a roof, you have drones doing it. So there’s all sorts of efficiencies that are coming. Here’s what I tend to look at with my clients. I tend to look at businesses, Rob, that I believe have at least a ten year runway and anything involving the use of a tool, a tool held in a hand with some type of hand. Dexterity. Right, like HVAC, HVAC. I don’t see that being replaced. And I always refer to an optimist bot because I think he’s really close to having that thing pull up, and I really do. I think Elon, with his optimist, is very close to having a Tesla vehicle pull up in front of your house in Colorado and fix something in your house. I really do, I think we’re we’re we’re kissing the reality of that. So I’m looking for tools, HVAC, things that are more involved require some, you know, maybe some human, you know, involvement and decision making, uh, reasoning skills, communicating with the homeowner. I do like anything beauty, vanity, anti-aging. I love that category. I love anything involving, uh, the humanization of pets and animals. 150 $60 billion market cap. Whether it’s grooming, boarding, you know, training, daycare I. The silver tsunami I’ve heard on your show a million times.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: We all know what’s happening. I’m. I’m aging your agent. We’re all aging. But guess what? Our parents are older, and they need these services right now. And you and I will need them later. And again, there’s an industry that will. I guarantee you, I guarantee you that this age as well, there will be a humanoid that will show up to my house in the future to make sure that I’ve taken my medication to deal with a wound vac, to make sure that I’m getting up and I’m doing physical therapy or rehab. It’ll be a humanoid, no doubt. We don’t have the workforce today to deal with this issue. You don’t have caregivers, CNAs, Lpns RN’s. People don’t want to be doctors. They don’t want to become CPAs anymore. They’re all being replaced by AI. I mean, it’s it’s this is just happening. People don’t want to. They always want to, like, straddle the fence with this AI stuff and build like both arguments. It’s going to be okay. It’s not going it. It’s going to be very different world. And I think it’ll be the first time that we are living in a deflationary environment. Because products and services are cheap. They’re cheap. It’ll deflate. The kids will be able to buy a house, kids will be able to buy cars. They you know, it won’t be this whole story about $9 eggs, like all that stuff is going to change. So I think we’re at the peak of inflation. And I think as we introduce AI, robotics and humanoids and and oh, we didn’t even talk about quantum computing. And I won’t even go there.

Speaker4: No, no.

Rob Gandley: We have to come back.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: That’s exactly, exactly. So mind boggling is my prediction. Deflationary is my prediction. Focus on five categories. Anything involving the use of tools, anything involving the war on men. I put it in the same category. I call it the feminization of men in America. They can’t use tools. They have low t low sperm. Right. So disaster franchises, backfill solutions, anything involving the silver tsunami, anything involving the humanization of pets and animals, anything involving anti-aging, biohacking, peptides and testosterone therapy, and anything involving youth enrichment. I’m all in. I’m going along, and I think you have a ten year runway before you’re disrupted.

Rob Gandley: Yeah, that was beautiful. Thank you. I think we need to write. Write some notes down if you’re listening. Summarize this bad boy. Uh, but that that that really does sum it up. I’m. I’m paying attention to what you’re saying, and I it resonates with me 100%. It’s very much about relationships. When we think about, like when we think about franchising. And I’m going to ask you a follow up question here in a second. But when we think about franchising, it really is about this person, this idea that you want to do more right with your life. There’s a purpose. You have something you want to create, right? Something inside you. I feel like the future is you’re not going to have a choice. You’re going to have to figure that out. You. Because. Because you won’t have to do the work that. Is that the kind of work that most of us don’t want to do to make the world work, right? There’s all these types of roles we have to make the world work. Doing things that a lot of us don’t want to do so those things can be replaced. That seems obvious. The real question is what would be someone’s purpose? What would be the thing they do with the extra time? Or if there is a new economic structure where there’s money coming in and now you have more time, what will you invest in? Well, we still are people and our fundamental needs won’t be any different. That’s right. So we’ll have time to give back to that. Whatever that looks like. It will be an entrepreneur’s Paradise because it will require some great creativity. But we’ll have it. We’ll have the resource. So I’m excited, but it is a little unknown. I don’t know what it’ll look like, you know, but I wouldn’t hold on to those certain jobs. I always think, why would you want that job anyway? You know?

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Oh, totally. Yeah. I had a guy want to a tax accounting Franchise to put in class C space in a strip mall. And I’m like, man, you know? That like, that profession’s dead. It’s dead. Yeah. Like, I mean, TurboTax was just the beginning. The final nail in the coffin is going to be quantum computing meets a humanoid. Says, I could do your taxes and save you more money. Do it. Do it perfectly the first time. Like, literally perfectly accounting is a. And that’s why no one wants to get in the profession. It needs to be perfect. You I could I could misquote a word. I could misquote something. I could make a mistake right now on this call. Right. And then I could recover from it. It’s not a big deal. And it doesn’t hurt anybody. Accounting it like it needs to tick and tie back one plus one equals two. It needs to balance out. Accounting is a grueling profession. I have the utmost respect for people that enter that profession. But it is not an easy profession. And unfortunately, everything we’re talking about today is the first time in history that technology is not attacking a blue collar worker on an assembly line. It’s going after the smartest people in our society doctors, lawyers, CPAs. And I feel bad if you’re a teacher and I feel bad if you’re a professor. I mean, because I’m telling you, you’ve outlived your usefulness for about five years already. Honestly?

Rob Gandley: Yeah. It’s, uh. I love how I learned today. I I’ve always been a self learner, obviously, like yourself. And, you know, you kind of, you kind of learn things and figure things out as you go. And the internet created this opportunity in our lifetimes. Right. I got out of school, uh, in the early 90s. I won’t say exactly, uh, say 92. I’ll just date myself. That’s fine. But there was no real. Oh, there you go. So? So, like, there was no official internet. Really? Uh, when I left school, we weren’t using it like we were using, you know, computer processors to write papers and print them. And so here you go. As soon as I get out, we’re we’re now in this world of wireless and the internet emerges. And it was just it was for for someone who wants to learn and evolve. It was beautiful, right? And now I takes that to a level I can’t even. It’s amazing to me how much I can learn in such a short period of time really will benefit all those that know things. So people are our age, really have an advantage if they open their mind to it.

Rob Gandley: That’s what I share. I agree with you is that because it makes you smarter and but you got to kind of bring your own smartness to it still, and that helps create even better results. But anyway, big fan of it, but I wanted to circle back uh, to because you guys really you said earlier, you know, just because you’re a corporate executive doesn’t mean that maybe it’s still not a fit, right? There are some attributes, and I know for me, I learned it the hard way because I did get into the corporate world. I was in tech. I enjoyed that, but at the same time it was still a corporate job and I was in sales and a lot of those types of positions. So it was more of a do it yourself thing, but it’s not the same as business ownership. So it took me some time to kind of figure that out. Tell me when you’re getting to know a corporate executive or someone coming from that space, what do you try to find in themselves? What do you help them kind of see so that they know they can make the right decision?

Cliff Nonnenmacher: This this is probably one of the most popular questions. I’m sure you would agree on anything involving franchising and business ownership. The flip side to this would be how do you know how to hire people? Right. It’s always about people because it’s business people, product process. You just described business. So when I and I’ve listened to a lot of these podcasts, Rob, and it’s interesting that everyone really has the same answer. Follow a system. You got to be coachable. You have to be all these things. I’m going to tell you something I learned years ago reading a great book by Jack Welch, who I’m a huge fan of. Uh, Jack Welch has probably groomed and created more CEOs than any single person in corporate America history. He’s a beast. I love his teachings. I love his era and the way he ran his companies. This this is interesting. And I think the audience will will benefit, you know, from from this conversation. People have asked him, what do you look for when you hire someone? He goes, it’s simple. I look for the 4E1P principle. The first E is do you have energy? Do you know how many IT executives I speak to on a daily basis that can’t even finish a sentence? And they have sweaty palms just talking to me because they really don’t like talking to people, right? Yeah. They’re making a buck 50. Writing code for Amazon.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: They have zero energy. Zero. When you have zero energy, it brings me to the next e. How do you energize your staff if you’re low energy? So you need to be energized. You have to have the ability to energize others. You have to be able to execute. That’s the coach ability. That’s the follow the model piece. You got to execute, execute flawlessly. Here’s the blueprint. Here’s the roadmap. Follow it. Don’t change it right. Next is edge. Can we live in a time where we have silenced the intelligent? To not offend the stupid? You have to have edge. You have to be able to make difficult decisions. You have to be able to tell someone what if they’re not coming to work on time? If they’re not doing the right job, you have to be able to make difficult, edgy decisions in business. And last is P for passion. People, employees and others follow passionate people that speak with conviction they want. They will follow you off of a cliff and you to be a good leader, to be a good franchisee. It actually drives me nuts to listen to podcasts where industry professionals you need to be coachable. You need to follow a proven system. It’s like it’s like hiring a consultant. What was that famous quote? Even a broken clock is right twice a day. That’s like the broken clock thing, right?

Speaker4: I love it. You gotta.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Be coachable. Yeah. It’s like, no, you got to have energy. You have to energize your employees. You have to be able to execute flawlessly. You have to have edge. You got to make difficult decisions sometimes, and you got to be passionate. To me, that’s everything that that’s. I wish I created it, I didn’t. It comes straight out of the book winning by Jack Welch, and I’ve lived my life by it.

Rob Gandley: I think he is probably, at least in my lifetime. He probably was the most famous CEO, and I know a lot has evolved. Now we’re getting older. But when I was a young guy, you know, he was the guy.

Speaker4: So yeah, I know amazing about him. Yeah, yeah, I know.

Rob Gandley: And I but my goodness, like, I don’t think you need to hear anything else than what you just said. And the question would be that first one, if you don’t have the energy, maybe. Why? Why is that right? And that answer tells you if you can move forward. Because you got to change that, that one thing. And if you can’t change that, maybe you’re not interested enough. Maybe you’re not willing to take the risk. But you got to know, will you have that energy? And will you have that energy when you’re faced with the adversity of starting a business right the day to day.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Do you know how many times we we will refer a client to a brand? The brand will call us back. Hey, listen, I just spoke to Blank man. Not a fit. What happened? Really? Low energy. No questions. It seems like complete disinterest. Okay, you just heard what I said. Ready? We call the client. How did that call go with brand A? Great. Wait a second, I. I never understood this quote. These two stories can’t be true until you get in this business, right?

Speaker4: Yeah. So.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: So I’m like, wait, so you think it went great? Oh, I thought we had a great call. I scheduled my next call for next week I can’t wait. Listen, they think you have no energy. You have no enthusiasm. You ask no questions. Now we’ve got to coach this guy. And the. But here’s a here’s a lesson to everybody. The buyer’s attitude is wait a minute, I’m the buyer. Like, if I want to buy their franchise, I’ll buy it. I’m like, no, no, this is a mutual evaluation process. You’re looking at the brand, and the brand is looking at you. You’re looking for fit. The brand’s looking for fit. And so far they want to close your file and never talk to you again. Right. So when I tell you how often we have this conversation, it’s often because the people live in this consumer attitude where the customer is always right, the customer is always right, okay, that doesn’t exist in buying a franchise. It’s their brand, and they want to award a franchise to the most qualified person. So jack up your energy levels, show some enthusiasm, do some homework, do some research, and ask some really good questions to show them that you have a relative degree of business acumen and you can manage this thing. And it’s amazing how many people just go into this like I’m the consumer. He who has the gold rules. Wrong. Wrong answer. Yeah, man.

Rob Gandley: Totally totally wrong. And and and I’d still question why. Why are you there? Like, it’s hard for me. I always joke when I’m on the show. I’m, like, usually by the end of the show, if I’m ready to buy the brand, you know what I mean? Like that’s normal. I feel like this is an awesome business model. Like, I love talking to the CEO or whoever it might be because they’re fired up about their brand. I mean, you got to figure out, why aren’t you there? I just and I know the coaching can still be necessary for a lot of folks. That’ll be fine. But, man, you should almost have it out of the gate. And certainly you’re not going to affect anyone around you. And that’s a very difficult thing. In sales. It’s all about confidence. And as you said, you know, until someone proves until someone does make a mistake, most will listen and believe in you. Right. If you are confident and you can have that energy. Right. At least give you the chance to go a little deeper with with your conversation.

Speaker4: True. I used to tell my team.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: All the time, the prospect can’t get any more excited than you. It’s impossible. You set the tone. You’re setting the energy level. They know when you really like a brand and you really know what you’re talking about. And the prospect also knows when you don’t like a brand and you have no interest in it, and you’re uncomfortable presenting it so the prospect can’t get any more excited or disinterested than you. The the the friend dev director sets the tone. The broker sets the tone on the brand presentation. So I completely agree with you.

Rob Gandley: That’s so cool. Um, that’s what it’s all about. That’s why I’m in this business. I like energy. I need either need to get it or give it, but I do like to be around it. Um, so so with that thought in mind, you know, when you think about emerging franchisors and there’s probably a loose definition of that, I would say under 100 units, let’s.

Speaker4: Say.

Rob Gandley: You know, certainly there’s the kind that just getting started and that’s a certain equation. But what just keeping it however you want to answer in terms of emerging, but what do the emerging brands have to think about with sales and marketing to ensure they’re doing what we’re saying? They’re finding the right fit. They’re building the brand early on, right to get the right momentum. But what how do you advise franchisors when they’re hiring you to kind of partner with them? What are you looking for to make sure it’s someone you want to recommend and, and how do you kind of deal with these emerging guys that might be somewhat new, uh, to to what they’re doing?

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Are you talking about acquiring customers or acquiring franchisees?

Rob Gandley: Franchisees? Like when when you’re talking about franchise expansion and getting more franchisees. And they’re kind of in that, that that phase where they’re not quite all the way. They have to keep bringing in franchisees to keep things running. They’re not they’re not, uh, sufficient with just operational, uh, revenues. Right. So they have to recruit. And so there’s a little bit of a pressure there, right? And so but they have to. So what do you advise them on and what are you looking for before they’re in your portfolio. You know.

Speaker4: Yeah. I mean.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Right. I’m not under a hundred. I’m okay with. I, I have concerns with brands with less than 20. I think that, you know, there’s huge flags there. Most brands will never as you know, most brands will never see 100 locations operating in their lifetime. Um, a lot of brands will never see it. Like, ever. There’s just too much attrition. They’re just on a treadmill. It’s it’s five in. It’s seven out. Right. So a lot of brands will never get there. But if a brand has 20 locations, let’s say, and they’re scattered about the US. So we have different markets, different demographics, different climates, and we have proof of concept, which is another thing I’m looking for, which is proof of concept telling me you have a great brand and, uh, you know, Southern California with household income of 250 and a surrounding five mile radius, that that’s not exactly proof of concept that’s going to work anywhere in America. And I see these brands popping out. It’s like, yeah, we operate. We’re doing 2.5 million with massages in California. Yeah, put that in Illinois and you’ll drop down to 600,000, you know. So it’s like these certain markets, they just are not replicable across the United States. So I’m looking for brands with with tight leadership. I’m looking for brands that get it. And you know when someone gets it you could have a couple of conversations. And you know that these people are in franchising for the right reasons. And many people become franchises for the wrong reasons. You have to have an undying devotion to not only the brand, but to people who put up their life savings to buy it.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Right. It’s you should be sleepless at night when you have franchisees that are failing, literally sleepless. If you’re not, you don’t care enough because. Because here’s the difference. Franchisors that obsess over their royalty collection and top line, they need to pivot and start obsessing over the bottom line of the franchisees. And that becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy. And that’s when, you know franchisors get it. When it’s less promotions, less driving revenue. Revenue is great. Bottom line is better, right? I don’t need to do 10 million a year and net 100 grand, right. Give me a million with a 20% net and I’m happy as hell. So a lot of these brands just keep driving. It’s like you’re not focusing on efficiencies and all that stuff, which means you don’t have a tight ops department. You really don’t know what business you’re in. You only own one corporate store. You’re still not in the trenches. I love brands that eat what they cook, which means they own and operate the business that they’re selling. Nothing drives me crazy. Then when I meet a franchisor and I’m like, well, well, my place is 6000ft². Feet. Okay. What are you telling franchisees to do? A thousand. What is your revenue? We’re doing 2 million at a 6000ft². Right. And it’s like, what are they doing? Well, they’re doing for 4 or 500, but they’re ramping up. I don’t like brands where you’re selling something that isn’t what you created and doesn’t resemble how you’re making 2 million.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: I don’t like weak financials yet. And in this case, never. Um, I don’t like weak financials. I think a lot of new franchisors, uh, they’re not properly capitalized. Some of them are worse capitalized than franchisees that are coming in. The financials are audited. It’s on full display in the FD. And they’re weak. And they need to really go out. And someone needs to educate them on you’re going to need to get some cash and do a funding round, uh, because you don’t have enough money to add the infrastructure you need to add. As David Barr quite rightly says, you are in franchise hell from 0 to 100 locations. It is a very difficult place to be as a franchisor, and you better be properly capitalized to get through that, uh, that growth phase, right, where royalty collection starts to catch up. So, I mean, there’s a lot of things that we unpack just the, the executive team, the ops team, the training. And you want to know something, Rob, where we get really the best information is a term you’ve heard called trust but verify. So I’ll trust the executive team. But I’m going to verify everything they say with their franchisees and find out is this system healthy. There’s only 20 people to call in this example. Are these 20 people happy? Are they validating? Are they recommending people buy this franchise? Validation calls are some of the most powerful due diligence calls you could ever make. When you exit the franchisor, the system will tell you with blinding clarity and honesty how healthy the system really is. And I love that.

Rob Gandley: Absolutely. And that’s one of the challenges, right? Um, and that’s why what you said earlier is so blunt and so obvious and so right. And that is, if you’re in that, you’re in that stuck mode where, okay, there’s some mistakes and maybe some of your franchisees didn’t perform as well over the last however long that was. You have to invest in the business, right? To get over that hump. You have to innovate. You have to put the investment in and show the network that you’re doing it, and then tell the new candidates that’s what you’re about and move forward. Right? You can’t get away from that. Right? Because it is so obvious if things are going in the wrong direction. It’s very it’s very much amplified to anybody that’s coming, coming towards you. And it becomes very hard. But it just comes down to, you know, and I’ve been involved with brands that have turned themselves around because they invested. And, uh, that’s the bottom line. You just got to make it better. And if it wasn’t perfect, you can say, well, we weren’t perfect. We’re going to make it better. But you can’t just stay. If you do, then you’re one of the ones you’re mentioning. And that’s that’s good advice to be able to sort and sift the right ones for your candidates.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: So have you interviewed John Ritchie? Have you interviewed John Ritchie from Fran? Fran Worth?

Rob Gandley: I don’t I don’t know if I did I don’t know if I have.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: He said something years ago at a convention I was at, he was a panelist. And he said in my corporate office, I have a picture of every franchisee wrapped around the perimeter of the wall. He goes, and it breaks my heart. If I ever have to take one of those pictures down. And the way he said it, it was genuine. He obsesses over the success of his franchisees. It was eye opening to me and it’s like, that’s the attitude. If you want to become a franchisor, you want to get in this business. That’s the attitude you have to have. That really stuck with me. John is a great guy, great company, has surrounded himself with great people. Um, you should have him on your show. He’d do a great interview.

Rob Gandley: I’d love to. I’d love to. Sounds like he’d be. He’d be, uh. Again. Just enjoy the conversation. Um, but most of the guys I do interview, it is in their heart, like they’re one of the best upsides of becoming a franchise brand. A franchisor is the the the gift of helping other people change their life and do that thing, that gift that we just talked about coming from the corporate world into business ownership. That is a big deal for folks, right? Not to just talk about the financial side, but it’s a big deal and what they’re trying to do with their life. And so the franchisor should love that. And it should be one of their favorite things is when they see successes and breakthroughs and and yeah. And it pains them to take a picture down. So very cool. So as we wrap things up, I appreciate you. And I told you we’d keep things to an hour. We could probably talk for hours. So do enjoy it and we’ll have more of these. Um, but I wanted to kind of talk about your podcast, and I know that, uh, you know, you have some interesting guests on the show, and it’s, uh, I want to make sure I get the name Pursuit of Profit. Right? That’s right. And I wanted to just kind of say, you know, out of all the guests you’ve had, is there anything that you just picked up and thought, man, I love that. It was one of those. Anything you could think of that you want to leave with our audience? Uh, that just kind of. I’m sure there’s a lot of them, but.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: There is a lot of them going through my head. There. There are some standouts, you know, where, uh, I don’t interview franchisees. I interview, uh, founders or C-suite franchisors. If a franchisee comes on the show, they have to be like ten X-ing the item 19 earnings claim. Okay, so you got a visual. I have an opportunity to bring this couple on the show. I am I’m blown away by these two. They’re with express personnel, as you know, probably one of the best multi-billion dollar staffing franchises. These folks are doing 70 million a year. 70. And I have both of them on camera on the show. They are as. And I say this respectfully. They’re as ordinary right as you can get. It’s not like. Yeah, that’s because they’re from Goldman. Oh, that’s because they went to Wharton. Oh, that. No. These are regular people that that evaluated some franchise concepts. She she was already in staffing. She actually met her husband because he was an employer. And she would bring him donuts and stuff like that. And it’s like, how did you scale the business? And it’s like, the franchisor covers our payroll for 90 days. A lot of people don’t know this. It’s one of the reasons why most people in staffing fail. They can’t front the payroll to their entire organization and then carry the account receivables, waiting for the money to come in from the law firm. The accounting firm, the engineering firm. Well guess what? Express personnel fronts all of your payroll for 90 days so that you could get your invoices out. Yeah, that. And it’s like with that, we were able to scale our little business.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: I want to say there in Michigan, it was either Michigan or Illinois, uh, 70 million. And here here’s the assumption I go, I go clearly you’re number one in the system. They go, no, we’re not. We’re number two. I’m like, get the I go, get out of here. They go, yeah, there’s actually someone bigger than us. So people investors come in. I don’t want to pay more than 6% royalty. You’re looking at this all wrong. Price is only an issue. In the absence of value, I will pay a 30% royalty. If you could get me to 70 million a year as a regular husband and wife team, grinding it out somewhere in middle America. Come on. This is the greatest business methodology ever invented to create wealth. It is the single greatest model to collapse time and to create wealth without inventing anything. Nothing. You’ve invented nothing. You go from your corporate America job. Hate it. Boss Underpays you two hour commute round trip, you slip into a franchise. You have all the answers to the test and start scaling it. It’s the best. This is the best life ever. It is. It is the best life and best business methodology ever devised. And I echo your comments on capitalism and franchising and free market. I mean, come on. And I love my I quote and I know I people listen to me like you say this all the time, but it’s the truth. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, if you think becoming a millionaire in America is difficult, you haven’t tried. Period.

Rob Gandley: Yeah. And I love his quotes. Um, but, you know, to me, franchising is like America, right? It’s the American dream. It’s the middle class. It’s the, you know, uh, really most of the most of the economic output is from small business, right? We think it’s big corporate, but it really isn’t. It’s it’s the small business and franchising such a big chunk of that. But I can’t think of another way to get into business that actually works, right? Where you’re things like that, where they say, we know cash flow will be a problem in this business model. If we can solve that problem, give a 90 day float, solve that little innovation. I don’t know if that was from the very beginning. It doesn’t matter. But the point is, it’s innovative. But they knew that would be the stumbling block. That’s the beauty of franchising. And I always say it not only the innovative business models where they already know what problems you have to solve, but it’s also the network of people around you. And I know you’ve probably you’ve been in a lot of groups, a lot of business people. You’ve learned from a lot of people. It’s not free to get coaching or to be in a mastermind, or to learn from another guy that does similar things or can help you to be in a network like that with that kind of talent and to learn from it. Again, that’s what it takes to be a business owner. That’s what it takes to be successful. A lot of it is just baked into franchising, which I like because I like that people have a great shot. Again, if you haven’t tried, if you if you think it’s hard, you haven’t tried. So and work with a guy like Cliff because you do need to find the right model because it can be extremely hard. But if you do find the right one, there’s no better way than franchising, that’s for sure.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: I agree.

Rob Gandley: So all right, well, I want you to just if you could share with the audience, uh, how to get hold of you, how to get a hold of your brand, if they’re interested, uh, in taking this journey.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Yeah. You could reach me at go to our website. Com f r a n o I t y. Com and I’m Cliff Nonnemacher. I co-founded it with my business partner, Justin Guevara. Um, and if you want to just play in traffic and listen to different shows. The pursuit of profit. It’s similar to what you’re doing, and I think this is an outstanding show. And I went through a lot of your episodes. Uh, you have phenomenal guests on and I think this this this is a great you do a great job on this show, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to be on it. I think it’s excellent. So I appreciate you letting me plug my show. And I hope people do reach out because we could definitely help you navigate this process. I don’t know if we mentioned Rob, the services are free. Nobody believes free. So I do say it twice. We work. We represent the buyer for free. We’re paid by the seller at the seller’s expense. So the services are free. You’re not obligated to anything. And, uh. And I would not do this alone. It’s 4000 brands in this country. Many of them are not worth buying. You know, align yourself with a professional advisor to help you navigate it.

Rob Gandley: Exactly. It is the best industry in the world, but you still got to navigate. There’s there’s certain we we explained it earlier. So that’s right. I highly recommend it. I really appreciate you being on the show. I echo what you said. It was very. It’s fascinating. And whenever I walk away from conversations smarter and I absolutely did, this time in a big way. I appreciate you, man. Thanks for the work that you’re doing and thanks for giving back, because you could probably do a lot of things and you decided to kind of invest. And that’s why don’t be confused with the word free, because the value of talking with a guy like you is it’s not usually accessible. So take advantage. If you get a chance to talk with Cliff and his team. I appreciate you being on the show.

Cliff Nonnenmacher: Thank you Rob.

Rob Gandley: You got it. And so thanks to our audience again, if you found it, if you found the episode helpful, please share it and we’ll talk again soon. Thanks for tuning in. Bye for now.

 

Invest in Your Child’s Future: Why the 529 Plan is a Game Changer for Education Savings

April 17, 2025 by angishields

ABR-GeorgiaPath2College-Feature
Atlanta Business Radio
Invest in Your Child's Future: Why the 529 Plan is a Game Changer for Education Savings
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In this episode of Atlanta Business Radio, Stone Payton talks with Bethany Whetzel from the Georgia Path2College 529 Plan. They discuss the benefits and features of the state-sponsored 529 college savings plan, which helps families save for future educational expenses with tax advantages and various investment options. Bethany explains qualified education expenses, the importance of early savings, and the ability to gift contributions. Stone shares his personal interest as an expectant grandfather, making the topic particularly relevant. The episode also highlights sweepstakes for newborns and children, encouraging early investment in education.

Path2College-logo

Bethany-WhetzelBethany Whezel is the Treasury Program Director at Georgia’s Office of the State Treasurer.

She oversees Oversee the management, administration, and outreach for four core Treasury programs Path2College 529 Plan, Georgia STABLE Plan, Secured Deposit Program, and the Cash Management Improvement Act (CMIA).

She’s worked for a number of Georgia departments including the Georgia Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, the Office of the Inspector General, the Georgia Department of Corrections, and the the Georgia Government Transparency & Campaign Finance Commission.

Follow Georgia Path2College 529 Plan on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • About Georgia’s Path2College 529 Plan
  • How a 529 plan works
  • How the funds can be used for education
  • The advantages over other ways to save for college
  • What happens if you don’t use all the money
  • The Path from Pre-K to college sweepstakes

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Stone Payton: Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Atlanta Business Radio. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. This is going to be a good one. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Georgia Path2College 529 plan Bethany Whetzel. How are you?

Bethany Whetzel: I’m great. Stone, thank you so much for having me today. I’m glad to be here and to have an opportunity to talk a little bit about path to college.

Stone Payton: Well, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the broadcast. There’s so much that I personally do not know about this program. I want to inform our listeners, I want to inform me, and I will just share with you from a personal standpoint, I am on Grandfather Watch. I should have a grandson within a week. And so topics like this are very much on my mind for sure.

Bethany Whetzel: This could actually couldn’t be any more timely for you. Um, because we have some exciting opportunities for newborns that are born in the state of Georgia that hopefully, um, can maybe help your grandchild.

Stone Payton: All right, so let’s start with a little bit of a primer. Maybe, uh, share with us what exactly is the Georgia Path to College 529 plan? And then we’ll just kind of talk it through.

Bethany Whetzel: Sure. So, um, path to college is path to college. Uh, 529 College savings plan is Georgia’s one and only state sponsored 529 college Savings plan. So if someone is not familiar with the college savings plan, it is a vehicle for someone to save money and invest money, uh, for an individual’s education, future educational needs. And it has some very specific benefits. Um, there’s some unique tax tax advantages. It’s flexible and there’s really great range of investment options. And, um, really proud to say that Georgia’s path to college plan is the lowest in the nation as far as fees.

Stone Payton: Wow. I got a ton of questions about the plan itself. But before we even go there, I got to know what’s the backstory? How did you find yourself in this line of work, Bethany?

Bethany Whetzel: Well, really, I mean, by luck, this has been a great fit for me. I have worked for the state of Georgia. So past to college is, um, obviously it is the state’s, uh, 529 college savings Plan, and it is administered by the office of the State Treasurer. We are overseen by the Georgia Higher Education Savings Plan Board. The chair of that board is actually the governor of Georgia. Um, and so I work for the Georgia office of the State Treasurer. And previous, uh, previous to before I came to the office of the state Treasurer, I worked with numerous state agencies doing program administration and outreach, and, um, worked in a legal capacity. I have a tax background as well. And so this job in, um, overseeing the path to college, 529 college savings plan really kind of marries my, um, interest in taxes, compliance. But the wonderful and great part of outreach in helping, um, people, uh, reach their goals and make a difference in the lives of children and youth across Georgia who, um, who are planning for future educational opportunities.

Stone Payton: Well, I have to believe this must be incredibly rewarding work for you.

Bethany Whetzel: It really is. It’s been a great it’s it’s honestly been so great. And it’s been great, uh, seeing the children and, um, speaking really, even just to my peers or, uh, coworkers and other individuals when they say I had a path to college plan. And it helped me, uh, you know, go through college. I have, um, one friend that when we were discussing, um, my job, she said, you know what? I had a path to college plan, and I had a little bit of money left over. So when I had my first born, I deposited, I created an account for my first born daughter, and I deposited my leftover money. I transferred that over to her. So not only did it fund her education, but that little bit of leftover is going to go towards her daughter’s, um, future education expenses. So it just it really is great.

Stone Payton: Yeah. All right. So I’ve heard the term 529. That’s about where my knowledge begins and ends. End. So walk us through it a little, if you would.

Bethany Whetzel: Of course. So, um, it’s called a 529 plan because it’s authorized by section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code. And that code section allows, um individuals, it allows for certain investment. Um, accounts for you to put after tax dollars, um, in what a lot of people are more familiar with sometimes are, um, our IRAs or um, so those retirement accounts, this, uh, investment account is specifically for college and, um, education savings. So it’s called a 529 college savings plan. And what it allows someone to do the Internal Revenue Code, it allows someone to put dollars into a 529, uh, investment plan. So for Georgia that hopefully your choice would be path to college, and it allows an individual to put that money in there to select an investment option. And, um, there’s. And then it allows for, uh, two different tax benefits. One, uh, earnings earned on, uh, the investments that you’ve made, that money is tax deferred. And then the second thing that is, um, that is similar across the board of all path to college, excuse me, of all 529 college savings plans, is that if you, uh, take the money, if you withdraw the money out for a qualified education expense, then that is a tax free money. So that investment income you earn, if you withdraw it for a qualified education expenses, you’re not going to have to pay federal income taxes. But what makes the path to college plan so special is that if you are a Georgia resident and you, um, take that money out, you’re also going to get a third benefit, which is that you’re going to get a state income tax deduction. And that tax deduction is pretty generous. It’s um, $4,000 $0 for a single filer per beneficiary, and then up to $8,000 for a joint filer per beneficiary. So if you have multiple children and you’re giving, you know, $16,000. 8000 to 1 and 8000 to another, and you’re filing jointly, you can get an income tax deduction up to $16,000.

Stone Payton: Wow. That is encouraging. And so these qualified. Um, what do you call it?

Bethany Whetzel: They’re called qualified education expenses. So that’s kind of a mouthful.

Stone Payton: So what are some things that would qualify and what are maybe some examples that that might not qualify.

Bethany Whetzel: So the big the big thing that comes into mind when you think of a qualified education expense. And I think a lot of people this is just where it ends, is tuition at any accredited private or public college or university, community college, technical college, graduate school or professional school across the US. And also, um, many universities that are abroad. So that’s typically what you think of when you think of, okay, this is how I’m going to spend the money. But you also, um, for post-secondary education, certain room and board related expenses qualify fees, books, supplies and other equipment needed for enrollment and attendance are qualified expenses. Computers, technology. Um, so those are all qualifying expenses for post-secondary. And but then there’s a couple of special things is that you can use, um, money up to $10,000 a year for K through 12 expenses for certain K through 12 expenses. Um, and that would be a qualified education withdrawal. And, um, another thing is that you could repay student loans up to $10,000 in the lifetime per beneficiary. Um, that would be a qualified education expenses, something that would not be a qualified education expenses, even though it is related to attending college would be, um, would be buying a car for your child. Um, that would not be a qualified education expense. And then if you were just to withdraw the money just so you would have cash, that’s going to be a taxable event and would not be a qualifying expense.

Stone Payton: Okay. So let’s say that I did grab a little bit out of there and maybe even with the best intentions. And then I turned around and bought a boat or car or whatever that does it. Does that sink the whole thing, or I just have to pay taxes on that piece of it.

Bethany Whetzel: You just have to pay taxes on the piece that you withdrew.

Stone Payton: Okay. And I want to clarify something because I may just be hearing what I want to hear here.

Bethany Whetzel: That that happens sometimes.

Stone Payton: Yeah, it happens to me a lot. So, um, do they do does the kid have to go to a state school or in the state of Georgia? What are the rules on that?

Bethany Whetzel: There are no rules. It’s, uh, any school, professional school across the United States. And then again, some that are abroad. So just because you’re investing in Georgia’s 529 college savings plan, it doesn’t mean that you are limited to spending that money on a Georgia University college technical college apprenticeship program. It could be anywhere across the country that qualifies.

Stone Payton: And is this something you can get going with? Like, you don’t have to have a great big pile of money to get this thing set up right. You can just start seeding it a little bit with relatively small amounts of money.

Bethany Whetzel: Exactly. You only need to open an account. You only need to to have a $25 contribution that’s as little as as you need. And what we’ve seen is that no matter the dollar amount that you’re putting in, just the act of putting money in and letting a youth or a loved one or a child know that you believe in them and that you’re putting you believe in them so much that you are putting money aside, um, in an account again, no matter how much it is. That said, that is a huge confidence booster for a child to know that someone believes in them that much. And then again, the earlier you start saving, the better, because the benefit of a 529 college savings plan is that you’re going to get that compounded interest. So you’re going to, you know, you’re going to get earnings and then you’re going to get earnings on top of those earnings. The longer that you keep it in there. So any amount of money is better than no money for sure.

Stone Payton: So I’ve just experienced in the space of about 5 or 6 minutes, learning a great deal about something I didn’t know the first thing about which, which makes me think that a big part of your responsibility of day in the life of Bethany and her team is getting getting the word out and educating people like me that really don’t understand or know about this. Is that accurate?

Bethany Whetzel: That is that is very accurate. And so our office and our program administrator, um, we are available at any point, you know, if you have a community organization or group that has a would love, you know, for us to come talk and and present this program or we, you know, set up at booths and hand out information. We’re always available to take take, um, part of those opportunities because the more people that we know, um, the more people that know about path to college, the more people that are going to participate in the you know, we’re always looking in the state of Georgia to invest in the education of our workforce. And so, you know, a lot of times, the education opportunities that we have, um, for our residents and they’re going to stay here. Um, it’s only going to, you know, better the entire state.

Stone Payton: Is there a direct path where I can do this on my own? And or can I call my money guy? Not that I have one. I’m just making. This is hypothetical. Can I call my money guy and say, okay, Rochester, I want to do one of these 529 things like, what’s the path? What’s the best way to just kind of get things going?

Bethany Whetzel: Right. So we have a website. It’s. The number two college c o l e g the numbers five two, nine. Com that’s our website. And you can go to our website and open account there by yourself. It’s um path to college is what we call a direct sold plan. So you don’t have to go through a financial advisor to open an account. But if you have a financial advisor, um, that’s great. And they can assist you in choosing the investment option that you may want or what strategy to use. But it you do, it’s you do not have to have, um, a financial person to open the account for you. You can just head to the website, open an account. Doesn’t take very long. Um, all of the transactions can occur online. And one thing that’s really great about our program that I want to make sure that I, that I mentioned is that we have a platform called You gift. And so let’s say Stone that you open an account, um, for your grandchild and let’s say your grandchild has other grandparents as well that want to contribute it to it. You can set up this gifting page and send the link to those grandparents. And they can contribute through that link to your grandchild. Um, by Path to College 529 College Savings plan so they can have one big plan together.

Stone Payton: Oh, I love that. I’m going to start my email list right now because, you know, I might not be rich, but Mom and Dad are.

Bethany Whetzel: There you go.

Stone Payton: My brother. So I’m just going to put together this whole. I got a whole marketing campaign spinning in my my head right now.

Bethany Whetzel: There you go. And a lot of times, you know, a parent may want to would prefer that you put money in an investment account. Then give them, you know, a plastic toy that they they’ll only be interested in the box, um, when they get it. So I think it’s a great way to, to give a gift and, um, a lasting gift that really will impact the future of the beneficiary.

Stone Payton: And I’m jesting a little bit. I mean, I do study and try to keep an eye on, you know, how to make money with money and of course, invest some. But, um, it’s not like I’m just buying this and putting it in a virtual drawer. I’ve got some choices of some things or some vehicles I can invest in along the way. Yes.

Bethany Whetzel: You’re exactly right. So there’s really two primary investment, um, kind of paths, if you will, for a path to college. You can choose static investment portfolio portfolios. And those are people who generally are like a little more investment savvy and want to have a heavier hand in managing and choosing the funds that they are investing in. And then we have something that is our most popular choice. We have these enrollment year investment portfolios where you select the year that the beneficiary, so the child would be enrolling or be needing to access those funds. And then basically, um, the plan does the investment for you, where as you get closer to that enrollment date, it starts investing in more conservative options, because that’s when you’re going to start needing to access those funds and protect those funds more. So it’s it’s called a glide path. And so there’s enrollment your investment portfolios static investment portfolios. And um, the static take into account whether what your risk tolerance is. And on our website, you can actually take a little quiz to determine what your risk tolerance is. And it’ll kind of recommend plans relating to that too.

Stone Payton: So I likely don’t have the IQ points to actually do the calculation, but it is my understanding and candidly, my experience that if you will do something like this, that money will grow if you’ll leave it alone. This, this, this compound interest thing is it really is the the eighth wonder of the world, isn’t it?

Bethany Whetzel: Right. It’s just hard sometimes to be patient and to wait for it. But you’re exactly right. Um, that’s, you know, really basically, to some degree, free money. Um, at the end of the day.

Stone Payton: Okay. I believe I read somewhere in my, uh, notes something about a sweepstakes.

Bethany Whetzel: Correct. So from time to time, the path to college 529 College savings plan runs a couple of sweepstakes. We just closed our sweepstakes for We Care, which is a partnership with the Department of Early Care and Learning, where we award um for scholarships to students at a licensed child care centers. Uh, we award contributions of $1,529 to a path to college account, and then we do a corresponding award to each child care facility. So they have some free money to, um, continue to invest in those children. Uh, we also have a path from pre-K to college sweepstakes, which is for um, pre kindergartners that are attending Georgia pre KS and again for winners, um, in different regions of the state. And we award $1,529 to each of those winners and a corresponding, um, 1520. If you see there’s a pattern here of 500, $529 to kind of go with the 529 plan, but the one that you are going to be the most interested in stone is that we have a newborn sweepstakes. And this year we have expanded it to make sure that, um, two babies are going to be awarded a sweepstakes prize, and that award is $5,529. And, um, so we’re awarding two babies born in the state of Georgia, um, that in a path to college account to get them started on their, uh, college savings journey.

Stone Payton: Oh, I think that is fantastic, because you’re right. That is the one that I’m interested in. All right, so how quickly can I. I need to wait for this baby to be born. Is that when I can pull the trigger, or is there like.

Bethany Whetzel: That’s when you pull the trigger is when the baby is born. So it may be today. It may be tomorrow, right?

Stone Payton: It’s. Well, this this baby has been scheduled like a conference call, so we’ll see. But, you know, I think they come when they. When they want to. Okay. So you can begin as early as they are actually here.

Bethany Whetzel: Correct.

Stone Payton: But this also strikes me as one of those things that’s it’s probably never really too late either. Right. Because didn’t you. Maybe it was before we came on air, but I feel like you touched on being able to use some of these funds. Even if, you know, grandbaby one doesn’t use it, we can let grandbaby two use it. Walk me back.

Bethany Whetzel: Exactly, exactly. You can move funds to different beneficiaries at different times. Um, another thing, you know, a lot of people are concerned about setting up a path to college or any not just a path to college account, but any college savings account, because they don’t they think, well, I don’t know what my child is going to do in the future. Is college in their future? And, um, a great thing that um, happened, um, starting in January. January 1st of 2024. Is that 529 college savings funds could be rolled over into a Roth IRA. So if your child doesn’t use all their funds or they don’t go to college, if the account has been around, um, for 15 years, you can roll that into a retirement account for them. So it’s not that all is lost or you’re going to, you know, have to take the money out and have to pay taxes on it. There are some options. If that money, um, you know, doesn’t get used or you can put it to a different beneficiary for sure. There’s obviously tax rules surrounding that, but that’s basically the gist of that.

Stone Payton: I love it, and it’s not my nature to try to poke holes in things, but I if if it were my job to do it, I don’t know where I’d poke this thing.

Bethany Whetzel: Well, I’m glad to hear that.

Stone Payton: Oh my God, you must feel so good about the work you’re doing and truly enjoy it.

Bethany Whetzel: I do. Well, you know, it doesn’t hurt when you are educating people or promoting a product that is something that you believe in and you truly believe is a great choice for Georgians. And knowing that we’re managing it in a way where we are stewarding the, um, the, the money of investors, um, in a responsible way, and then also having the lowest fees, um, across the country. So we’re really making sure that everyone is getting a good return on their investment, if you will. Um, a good bang for their buck. And, um, so, yeah. So I do feel great. Honestly, I feel great every day I get to come to work. Um, because Path to College, uh, is a great program.

Stone Payton: All right, before we wrap, I’m going to switch gears on you a little bit, if I if I might, I don’t know when or where or how you would find the time, because I get the idea that you’re pretty consumed with this work and you clearly enjoy it. But I am interested and often our listeners are as well. Hobbies, interests? Pursuits outside the scope of this work. When you’re not doing this, anything that you, uh, really enjoy or have a tendency to to, to nerd out about and step away and get recharged.

Bethany Whetzel: Well, I mean, I would say that my big thing is I’m an I am an, uh, Atlanta dweller. Uh, I live in the East Lake neighborhood, and I have a great community and a lot of neighbors. And so really, what I do after work every day is I take my two dogs for a walk. I have a poodle. Um, she’s ten years old, and then I have a, um, a doodle, and he’s four years old, and we walk around the neighborhood and visit with our neighbors and, um, you know, hang out with the kids and watch watch them play basketball and soccer. And so that really is where my heart is. And what I enjoy doing kind of outside of work is just interacting with still interacting with people and just, um, finding community where I can and hanging out with my dogs. So.

Stone Payton: Well, you are clearly the right person for the job. And, uh, just based on my brief interaction with you, I bet that you’re able to create the same level of enthusiasm and commitment and passion within your whole team. The work you’re doing is so important and obviously incredibly helpful for those of us that are just, you know, we’re out there trying grinding it out, and we want to provide for for a safe and secure future for, uh, for our loved ones. Uh, all right, let’s I want to make sure that our listeners, uh, know how to get in touch with you or someone on your team or be able to tap into your work. So let’s leave them with a website or something. So that’s easy for them to, to learn more and and get on this path.

Bethany Whetzel: Okay. Um, so the best place to get started is our website. And so that is um WW 252.com. So it’s. The number 2COLLE the numbers 529.com.

Stone Payton: Bethany, what a delight! It has been a real joy visiting with you. I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I’ve learned a ton and I feel like our listeners have as well. Thank you for your insight and your perspective. This has been an incredible conversation. You’re you really are doing important work and we we sure appreciate you.

Bethany Whetzel: Well, thank you so much, Stone, and thank you for your time. And I appreciate the people who are listening. And if they have any questions, they can just reach out.

Stone Payton: Fantastic. All right. Until next time. This is Stone Payton for our guest today, Bethany Whetzel with Georgia Path2College 529 plan. And everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying, we’ll see you again on Atlanta Business Radio.

 

Tagged With: Georgia Path2College 529 Plan

Reimagining Leadership: Embracing Flexibility and Authenticity in Your Style

April 14, 2025 by angishields

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High Velocity Radio
Reimagining Leadership: Embracing Flexibility and Authenticity in Your Style
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In this episode of High Velocity Radio, Stone Payton interviews Chantée Christian, a certified facilitator, bestselling author, and television producer. Chantée discusses her mission to inspire change and growth through coaching. She emphasizes a holistic approach to leadership and executive coaching, addressing how personal challenges impact professional performance. Key topics include emotional intelligence, adaptable leadership styles, and the importance of community in coaching. Chantée also shares her unique perspective on goal-setting, focusing on intentions rather than rigid goals. The conversation highlights the transformative impact of coaching on both personal and professional lives.

My-Best-Shift-logo

Chante-ChristianChantée L. Christian is a 2021 Northern Virginia 40 Under 40 honoree; a multifaceted professional with a wealth of experience and accolades.

As a TV Producer/Host and a 3x Amazon International Best-Selling Author, she brings a unique blend of creativity and strategic thinking to her endeavors.

With two decades in the field of management consulting, Chantée has specialized in Program/Project Management, Organizational Change Management, and Strategic Planning.

As a certified facilitator, Chantée has developed and delivered diverse training programs for staff at all levels. Her academic journey includes earning a Bachelor’s degree from George Mason University and a Master’s of Business Administration from Webster University.

Chantée has a plethora of professional certifications that range from her coaching certifications to being a Professional Certified Coach (PCC). Notable certifications include being an MBTI Certified Practitioner; a Strategic Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Management Executive Certificate holder from Georgetown University; and a Certified Change Management Professional (CCMP).

Chantée is the driving force behind My Best SHIFT, an innovative coaching and consulting company. Chantée is the host and moderator of the award-winning conversational series, Unspoken Truths of Being Black, addressing crucial topics like the workforce, healthcare, and education in the context of heightened awareness.

Chantée is the host and producer of an award-winning podcast, My Best SHIFT. Where she shares insights intended to shift mindsets, provide enlightening perspectives and encourage listeners to take inspired action. Her diverse background, combined with her extensive certifications and professional achievements, positions her as a dynamic leader across industries.

Connect with Chantée on LinkedIn and Instagram.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • Project Management for Entrepreneurs & Coaches: Strategies for managing multiple initiatives efficiently.
  • Leadership & Conscious Leadership: How leadership styles impact business growth and team dynamics.
  • The Power of Influence & Emotional Intelligence in Business: How these skills impact client relationships and leadership success.
  • The Shift from Goals to Strategic Intentions: How business leaders can transform how they set and achieve goals.
  • The Journey of an Author & Thought Leader: How writing books can elevate credibility and influence.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Stone Payton: Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show, where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. You guys are in for a fantastic treat. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with My Best Shift, Chantée Christian. How are you?

Chantée Christian: Hello. I’m doing well. How are you?

Stone Payton: I am doing so well and I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. I am so excited to share you and your work with our listeners. Uh, maybe let’s start with, uh, kind of a brief description. Mission. Purpose. What are you really out there trying to do for folks, Shante?

Chantée Christian: Oh, I love that. Uh, so I like to say that my mission and my purpose are also the same for the company, which is to be a catalyst for change and growth through inspired action. And so we say yes to a lot of things that fall in alignment with that, which, as you can imagine, is a lot.

Stone Payton: Well, I know you’re a certified facilitator, a three time international best selling author, a television producer and host, probably a ton of other things. But tell us about the the journey, if you would. How in the world did you find yourself in this line of work?

Chantée Christian: Oh, yes. So I honestly, when I started out in college, which I won’t go too far back in those days, but when I started out, I started off as a business major, and then I realized that I maybe wasn’t cut out for that in undergrad. And so I was working in a, um, an office where I was in charge of the, um, the newsletters. Letters. And I was like, oh my gosh, like, I love doing this. And it sent me into this thing of knowing, oh, I could get paid to do this. And so I started doing a lot of comms work, and I changed my major to communications. And as I progressed into my career, I realized I wasn’t really using it in the same way. And so I got to a really pivotal point in my career where I was like, oh, wait, it’s no longer them that’s getting on my nerves. It’s me. Um, and it was because I wasn’t in alignment and I wasn’t doing things that really spoke to my spirit and all of those things. And so one of the companies I worked for, they had things that they called reinvestment into the firm. And I realized that everything that I loved doing from a work perspective wasn’t the 9 to 5 stuff, it was all of the extras. And so I all the extras is literally what my company is, is the coaching. It is the multimedia side of the house and those things that really bring me joy, which stemmed all the way back to business is cool, but it’s not really the thing that I that makes my heart sing.

Stone Payton: All right, so speak a little bit to the to the coaching work, the topics and competencies that you’re working through and maybe the mechanism for the work. Uh, talk a little bit about that. About that.

Chantée Christian: Sure thing. So, um, I do a lot of leadership and executive coaching, although I like to say I coach people, and I say that from a perspective of I like to think of it from a holistic perspective, but not the woo woo holistic, although I do believe in some woo woo things, but more so from a holistic perspective of if I’m having a challenge at home and I’m coming into the office, whether virtually or in person, and I haven’t worked through that challenge that I’m having at home, like arguing with my partner or something like that, then I’m going to bring it into the office, even if I’m not trying to, I’m going to have a little bit of an attitude and be a little bit more snippy. I’m not really going to laugh at all the jokes that I thought that I used to think are funny? Because I’m still dealing with something else on my mind. And so I really like to coach from a perspective of who are you and what do you need in this moment in order to make sure that we are fulfilling your needs and getting you to where you need to be? And so I like to think of coaching as a a space where we get to help people unlock their true potential and their desires. And that’s what makes it a little bit different from therapy, because a lot of people say, well, what’s the you know, they’re the same. And I would say that the biggest difference that I can think of, and I would say most of my community would agree, is that therapy is healing you from your past, where coaching is pushing you into action, which falls in alignment with everything else that. Um, my mission and my purpose is to help people with inspired action.

Stone Payton: Now, do you find that most of your clients, or many of them, come to you and want to work on a specific thing? I’ll, uh, make an analogy to sports. Like if I came to you and wanted to really work on free throws. You know, like, did somebody want to come to you and work on something specific, or is it usually broader than that? And they just they’re not it’s not feeling right. And they just want to and you’re even helping them uncover what they should be working on.

Chantée Christian: Oh my goodness. It’s so specific. It’s usually I can’t tell you how many times people have come to me and said that they wanted to work on their communication, or that they wanted to work on their executive presence and not fully understanding what executive presence is and or communication is. And so a lot of times people will say, you know, Chanté, I really want to work on my communication. It seems like if I send an email to the team, they still don’t do what I asked them to do. And one of the first questions that I asked when someone asked me that is, where else are you having this similar communication issues in your life? Because it’s not just at work. I’m 100% sure, right? And so when they start thinking about it. They’re like, oh, well, everywhere. Exactly. So let’s talk about maybe it’s not the actual communication, right? Maybe it’s what you’re conveying, how you’re conveying it. Um, the timing, the method and those sorts of things. So we really do sift through and work through that type of stuff.

Stone Payton: So in that kind of work, I guess this could be related. Have you identified over time a handful of different I don’t know, I’ll call them leadership styles for lack of a better term. But like, yeah. Does that impact any of this work?

Chantée Christian: Oh, I love that. Yes. Um, so I have an MBA. So I know I started off saying that I hate business, but I just I couldn’t get away from it. And so I have an MBA, and I tell people all the time that there are things that they don’t teach you in your MBA program. And because they teach you the the normal top four, top five leadership, um, styles. And what happens is what I see is that people try to fit themselves into those and not realizing that you’re not linear. You are so dynamic as a human that your leadership style ought to adapt to you, and not to just a textbook theory. And so what I see a lot of is people, um, really being in a space of not knowing and just taking on what their bosses are doing or their bosses, bosses or some amazing book that they read. And so they’re like, you know, I’m an authoritative leader, or they want to go the opposite direction of that and say, I’m a collaborative leader. And research has shown us that a lot of collaborative leaders lean so heavy on collaboration that their teams are still feeling neglected from having an actual leader to provide them with direction and make a decision versus it being, well, everyone gets to decide which we know in leadership, that’s not necessarily the case.

Stone Payton: How about another topic that seems to come up quite a bit in some other interviews, as we’ve been doing this coaching series, is this idea of, uh, of what like emotional intelligence is. Is that is that you finding that in your work as well?

Chantée Christian: Oh, absolutely. Emotional intelligence is so important because a lot of times we think about how others perceive us, and we don’t realize how we are perceiving ourselves and how we’re also showing up. And so when you think about emotional intelligence, it’s also it’s not just being able to read the room, but it’s also being able to self-regulate. It’s the ability to be able to process information in real time, and to be able to make decisions based off of that, where you understand the impacts of others and yourself. Right. And so it’s one of those things that so many people, um, so many people require a deeper dive into it to understand that it applies to every aspect of leadership, to management, and to just operating as a human being and not just, um, something that’s within the leadership circle.

Stone Payton: Okay. Clearly, a theme I’m picking up in this conversation is all the work you’re doing. While the frame might be to help me lead my organization more effectively, it really is. I guess it’s the pure definition of holistic. It’s it’s impacting. It has to because it’s sourcing from but it’s also impacting my entire life with the kids, with the spouse, with friends. Right.

Chantée Christian: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, because if you think about it, right, when you think about leadership and your own leadership, what are the top like three things that pop into your head when you think about it.

Stone Payton: Are you asking me?

Chantée Christian: Yeah.

Stone Payton: Uh, I don’t when I think about leadership, it’s it’s the idea of. I guess it is that clearly communicating where we’re going and why. And what I want to come out of those conversations is someone as excited, if not more than I am, about getting it done and feeling like, okay, you know, I can check that off the list. You know, Susie’s got that. She’s going to run with it.

Chantée Christian: Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so when you think about that, right, like when you were talking about the theme that can apply to everything, it doesn’t just apply to your your business. It applies to your family. Yeah. It applies to your children. You know, it applies to literally everything that we do. And I think a lot of times when we think about leadership, we compartmentalize that. And we don’t realize that in order to fully show up and to be influential and to be impactful, and for people to want to go along with what we’re doing, we’ve got to believe it, too. And that typically means that we’re just not believing it for a 9 to 5. We’re believing it completely and fully.

Stone Payton: So typically for you, the mechanism for the work, the the way you execute, is it a lot of one on one work? Is it group work? Is it virtual asynchronous. How do you execute on this?

Chantée Christian: Oh, I like that question. So um, because of the pandemic, like the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, a lot of the work went virtual. And what that was able to do for me was able to reach people that weren’t just in my city or, you know, within a local space. So, um, a lot of the work that I do is virtual and I do both. I do one on ones and I do group work. So a lot of times with the group work, it’s around team dynamics or um, so I use, I use some assessments at times, and sometimes those assessments help teams be able to communicate better, to be able to help work through conflict. Um, and just be able to understand, like, if I understand how you operate at a general and basic level, then I can actually understand that you’re not you’re not intentionally doing something against what my default, um, desire to do the work is. It’s just we’re coming at it at different at different lenses and at different angles. And so really helping people grasp that. And so I do that virtually. I do it in person now that we’re back doing things in person. Um, and so I do a little bit of both, but I don’t do asynchronous, um, so much.

Stone Payton: Well, I can see tremendous value in the one on one work, but I’m thinking, like in the group work, I’m trying to envision, you know, like me sitting in the in the air quote room, you know, the virtual room. I could see just virtually any topic being a catalyst and then letting people even apply it there, or go and apply it at work and come back to the next session. I could see them learning from each other.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Chantée Christian: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Because when we because that’s what happens when we bring people together. Right. They start to actually start picking up on things on their own. They’re like, hey, wait a minute. We’re not that different. One and two. I really like the way you handled that. I might tweak it a little bit. I’m going to go try it. Right. And so it’s it’s something about having the community and the people in the room that allow people to really glean from each other and be able to feed off of the energy that that they’re giving to each other. And it provides a different type of support system. Right. So I can be there to facilitate and to encourage the conversation. But when it comes to accountability and it comes to like that full cheerleader cheering them on mode, that’s where the community comes in.

Stone Payton: So when clients are first getting started, do you find that sometimes they have like some preconceived notions or maybe even in their mind, what you and I might consider myths associated with the coaching profession, that you sort of have to educate them around or through before you can really get in and do the good work.

Chantée Christian: Absolutely. Um, so often people either don’t know what it is or they’ve seen something on TV or social media and I’m like, forget all of that. Forget it all. It’s none of those things and a little bit of some. Um, I think so. I like to ask people if they won, if they’ve had experience with coaching before, because not all coaches coach the same way. You know, just like how you were talking with sports. Not every coach within a basketball or football team are going to coach each of their teams the same. Um, that doesn’t mean that they still don’t go out there and coach. Right? Um, and so we had that conversation. But I like to really ask them about the different modalities. So I like to do a word association, um, where I ask if you hear the word advisor, what comes up for you if you hear the word um, uh, mentor, what come up for you? If you hear a therapist or therapy, what come up for you. And then last but not least, when you think of coaching, what comes up for you? And I listened to what they say, and then I and then I in a debrief, I tell them, you know, well, one I tell them there is no right or wrong answer to this. It’s just what they believe and what comes up for them. But I like for them to think of it like a Venn diagram, how each of them have very similar components and concepts to them. However, they do have very distinct differences. And because of that, that’s why I want to make sure that we’re clear about what coaching is versus what it isn’t, if that makes sense.

Stone Payton: It certainly does. So at this point in your career. What are you finding the most rewarding? What’s the most fun about it these days for you?

Chantée Christian: Oh my goodness. I would say that the most rewarding is actually watching people live out the things that they said they wanted to live out. So, um, or like moving into that action. So I just had a Conscious Leadership summit, uh, last week. Well, I don’t know when this is going to air. So I just did a conscious leadership summit, and one of the things I love most about it was that as I was walking in and out of the room because I was coordinating and doing things, I could hear people literally saying, oh, I just wrote that down, and now I’m doing it. And it’s those type of moments for me that bring me the most excitement and joy, because it it’s a confirmation for me that I am walking in my purpose, and I’m creating these spaces for people to be able to, to grow and to do the things that, that that syncs to their hearts.

Stone Payton: Now I’m operating under the impression that some, if not all of these folks who come to you are, you know, they have some goals. There’s some things they want to accomplish. Uh, what has been your experience and what counsel, if any, do you have with regard to setting goals, achieving goals? What’s your slant on that?

Chantée Christian: Oh my goodness. I feel like you’re setting me up. Um, I would say the first thing is and as as someone who has spent almost 20 years doing strategic planning and project management and program management, I will say something that feels so off kilter from that, which is I really don’t like goals for person, for people. And I say it from a perspective of so often we set up, we set goals the same way that we would within an organization, and we don’t account for the work that it took to potentially get to the goal. And so when we don’t meet it, we leave ourselves feeling depleted and very defeated at times. And so I prefer to start off with intentions and then build the build out the actions and the tasks to get to those, so that even if we don’t fulfill the goal, I’m putting that in air quotes that we’re able to take note of all the work that it took to get to where we got to and then be able to assess, okay, well, what happened here? What is something that we can shift? And is this even something that we want to continue to do? Now for organizations, I don’t take that same approach.

Chantée Christian: I think I think that we have to talk about goal settings, but we have to be realistic about them, because a lot of times when we’re setting goals, they’re based off of a strategy from five years ago. And so we need to be clear about who’s in the organization, what is what the what the people are able to do and what the market will allow. And so it’s still kind of taking that same flip with my clients when they come to me saying, you know what? Um, like a common, a common one that comes up is that people want to move from, um, a certain level within the organization into the executive suite or into executive leadership. And so we have to get realistic about where are you at right now? What have your past performances looked like? What does it take from an organization perspective for you to get there? And let’s talk about where are your gaps. Right. So then it’s less of a I’m going to get you promoted in a year and more. So is your intention is to get promoted. So then we have to make sure that you’re prepared you’re ready and that you’re showing up like that already.

Stone Payton: Now now you’re a prolific writer. Apparently. You’re certainly a successful writer. Talk a little bit about the books. What compelled you to to write in the first place? And the whole experience of, I don’t know, man, committing your ideas to paper and putting it out there for the world to enjoy and or poke at.

Chantée Christian: Yeah, um, definitely scary and thrilling. So I’m a comms major and I love to write. However, I also like to keep things very private. And so with the first opportunity, I was asked to share what it looked like to lead through. Through the pandemic. And I was really apprehensive about that. So I said, oh my goodness, everyone’s going to know my business. Um, and honestly, one of the things that helped me get over that was that I knew that me sharing my story would help someone else who was either in it currently or help someone that was going through it. Right. Like someone being able to say, oh, I see me in this. I see that there’s an option. I see that there are a couple of options, and there are ways that I can continue to honor myself from an integrity perspective and still show up for my teams, the people around me. And so that one was really the biggest motivator for me. Um, the second one was around women in leadership, and I thought, how cool would it be to have an all women leadership book when the top ten leadership books right now still are all written by predominantly white men. And so I was like, how cool would that be to have a whole book of women talking about leadership? And so I said yes to that one without blinking. And then the third one is a little different because I was able to co-publish it.

Chantée Christian: And so I had this idea of being able to have people talk about what leadership looked like for them, when awareness was, when awareness was present. And so, um, they talked about pivotal moments in their lives when awareness was the was the primary shift in what they did different. And they talked about leadership in all different facets. So whether if it was professionally, mentally, um, through their families and all of them, they brought it all back to just how that shift really changed the trajectory of their lives. And so, um, that one was the easiest because I wanted to be a part of not just something that I was, um, cultivating, but I wanted to be a part of it from being able to tell my story in a way that I hadn’t told it yet. And so, um, I, too stepped out of my, my comfort zone to, to do that chapter in that book. But, um, I think that one of the biggest things for me is that you got to be the one to tell your story. And if you allow other people to tell it, they might not tell it the way you would have. And so being able to write it down and to publish it was really a way for me to make sure that my side of the stories are always told.

Stone Payton: Have you found in that work that some parts of the book come easier than others you really like? Some just really just almost writes itself and then others you struggle over for a little while.

Chantée Christian: Oh my goodness. Yes. I mean, you know, people talk about writer’s block and I don’t think that for me it is less of the writer’s block and more of the well, what do I say? Like what do I say and how do I say it in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m complaining, I’m whining, or, you know, something in a way that allows the the audience to feel connected. And so when you don’t know who your I mean, you have an idea of your audience in theory, but when you actually don’t know who’s picking up the book, you’re like, well, will they get this? Will they hear me in it? And so, um, it’s one of the most challenging things for me. I think the, the hardest part is always the intro for me, because I realized that a lot of people don’t read it. However, the few people that do it’s magic in there, and it’s an opportunity to show people exactly where my mind was when we created the project and where we want them to go in it. And so I like to say that I am an an ambassador of awareness and as your ambassador of awareness, guiding you through the book. And so I have a vision for it. But actually writing it a lot of times causes me much, much stress.

Stone Payton: Has it had an impact on your whole sales and marketing and education about like, does it help with the authority credibility thing, like so many say that it will?

Chantée Christian: Absolutely. Um, I can’t tell you how many times people say, oh my goodness, you’re an author, you’re a best selling author. How can I do it? Oh, I have a story. I’m like, I’m great. You have. I’m glad you have a story. And I hope that we can get you to it. But I think what happens is that it helps you become a thought leader, right? And so I tell people all the time, don’t write about something that you’re not willing to talk about 3 to 5 years after you’ve written it, because people are going to want to talk to you. They’re going to want you to show up at places to talk about it. They’re going to want you to remember what you wrote about it, you know, and that might not even be the you right now that it was, but you’re still going to have to talk about it. It’s almost like singers, right? They write a song and ten years later it’s a hit, and they’re still going to play that song at every concert. So it’s the same thing.

Stone Payton: So while we’re on the topic, how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a practitioner like you? Like, do you have to get out there and shake the bushes like some of the rest of us? Or is it mostly referral based at this point or. Yeah. How do you get the new business?

Chantée Christian: Yeah. Great question. Um, I think it’s a little bit of both. So, um, there was a time in my business where I only took referrals because I wanted to be very selective about who was coming in the door. Um, and then as I started to grow the business, I realized, well, there are a lot more people out there than just, you know, within my network. And so, um, I do almost like an application process. So if someone wants to work with me because I don’t know how they found me. And so I’m always curious about that, but it’s kind of like a it’s a slight application process because in order to do coaching specifically, you have to be ready and you have to want to do it and not need to do it right. A need is going to be a therapy type of thing. A want is more of a coaching. And so, um, I really want to assess upfront what does it look like to work with them. Um, but it comes from all different types of places. So it comes from speaking engagements. People hear me speaking or they run across my podcast, or they saw a article that I wrote. Um, and they’re like, or they know somebody who knows me and so they or has worked with me and they want to they want to inquire what that looks like. And so I just I do a little bit of that to weed out the process, because I used to get on the phone or get on a zoom with everyone, and I realized my time could be better spent.

Stone Payton: Did you just say a podcast? You have your own show?

Chantée Christian: Yes, I have a award winning podcast called My Best Shift because at that time in my life, everything was called my shift. Um, but yeah, I have a podcast. We’re on season five right now. Um, and it’s all about awareness, acceptance, and authenticity. I like to call them the Triple A’s. And so I interview people and we talk about their journey in one way or another, um, around those three things.

Stone Payton: Oh, I have to believe that you learn a ton and get to build some marvelous relationships. And you’re sharing some really important information for the listening audience. I bet you love doing that.

Chantée Christian: Oh my goodness. It is one of the things of my business that I love the most. I absolutely love it because it’s the opportunity to learn about people that I may know a little bit about or nothing about, and I let the conversation roll. So I only asked two of the same questions at the very beginning and at the very end. And outside of that, they’re all unique conversations. And I just I love that. I love learning from people. And you know, what I learned I love most is when someone says, oh, I listened to this episode and I’m going to start doing XYZ or, um, I learned so much, I took notes, I’m like, you did, you did. And so it’s like, okay, it’s worth it. It’s worth it because it’s a lot of effort. But it is. It is one of my favorite parts of the business.

Stone Payton: Yeah. Okay, so not long after this conversation that you and I are having right now, I am headed to Lake Allatoona. I’m going to hop on the boat. I might fish, but I’m at least going to watch the sunset this evening. That’s one of the ways that I step away and go have some fun. Hobbies, interests, pursuits. What do you what do you do for fun and relaxation when outside the scope of this work? When you’re not coaching and writing and speaking and podcasting.

Chantée Christian: With all my free time? Yeah. Um, I really do love a good spa. Um, I, I love going for walks and not like, I know it sounds, you know, not long walks by the beach. That’s not fun to me. Um, but I do like to go on, like, lowercase h, hike, type of walk. Um, and honestly, I like to just be in spaces with people where I can laugh a lot. I love to laugh. Um, and if it’s a space where it’s a little too stuffy, it’s probably not my idea of a relaxation Taxation in a good time.

Stone Payton: All right, before we wrap, I would love to leave our listeners with a little bit of overarching advice or a pro tip. Um, you know, in, you know, the tagline of the show is producing better results in less time. But within the context of these topics we’ve been talking about, uh, let’s leave them with a little something to to chew on and look, gang. The number one pro tip is, if any of this conversation is striking a chord with you, uh, reach out and have a conversation with Chantée. Start tapping into her work. Listen to the podcast, read the books. Uh, but, uh, between now and then, let’s leave them with a little something to to noodle on. Shauntay.

Chantée Christian: Oh, okay. Um, the first thing that I will say is, um, if you’re finding that you’re challenged with the work that you’re doing or the spaces that you’re in, then there may be a misalignment. And one of the things that I like to offer my clients is to do just a personal assessment of who are you? And it’s similar to essentially what we’ve been talking about, right? Where we’ve been talking about the themes on how you show up. And so one of those things is I would offer you all to just take out a piece of paper or a notebook, however you decide to take notes. And at the very top right, who am I? And then under that, I want you to write out all the things that you are not inclusive of your work title, not inclusive of your parental title, of your spousal title, but literally getting down to the nuts and bolts of who you are. So doing an exhaustive list. And when you get down to that list and you find yourself saying, oh, I’m a good friend, I want you to like, elaborate. What makes you a good friend? Right? And you’re a lot of my clients are like, But I’m a great parent. Okay, great. What makes you a great parent? And those qualities and those aspects are us getting down to who you are. And when you start looking at those, also look at, okay, well, what in my life am I feeling like I’m not actually in alignment with? And that’s where the work starts.

Stone Payton: What marvelous, pragmatic advice. I am so glad that I asked.

Speaker4: Me too. All right. So what’s the best way for our.

Stone Payton: Listeners to tap into your work, connect with you, get their hands on these books, listen to the podcast. Let’s give them some coordinates.

Chantée Christian: Absolutely. So you can find the books on Amazon if you look for my name is Chantée. C h a n t e e. And then Christian. Like the religion, you will find them. Um, if you go to my best shift.com, you can also find a link to everything that I have, um, including a, uh, clarifying session with me or discovery session. Um, the books, the podcast and any upcoming events or anything that I have going on there.

Stone Payton: What a marvelous way to invest a Thursday afternoon. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I know our listeners have as well. Thank you for investing the time and the energy to be with us, and thank you for the work you’re doing. Please keep up the good work. We’re going to continue to follow your story and we sure appreciate you.

Chantée Christian: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate this.

Stone Payton: My pleasure. All right. Until next time. This is Stone Payton for our guest today, Chantée Christian, with my best shift and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.

 

Tagged With: My Best SHIFT

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