Life as a Franchise Owner

One of the questions I get most often is how we balanced family, community involvement, and running the businesses for over 15 years. The honest answer is that it was never perfectly balanced. Some seasons the businesses took more. Other seasons family did. What worked for us was treating community and family as part of how the businesses stayed healthy, not as things that competed with them. Local community involvement was never something we squeezed in around the busine

This photo showed up on my phone today. It was taken four years ago in my driveway as I was leaving for my routes that day. I snapped it, declared myself the future employee of the month, and sent it to all my technicians. We were short-staffed, so I ended up helping with routes for a few weeks, just to keep us caught up. Nobody asked me to. Nobody was watching. You do whatever it takes to be successful, even when no one's looking. Business ownership has a lot of advantag

For 15+ years my wife and I owned and operated our franchise businesses together. The question we heard most: “How often do you fight? How hard is it to be in business with your spouse?” We didn’t fight. We got along better. We had different skill sets and almost no overlap. She was great with customers, payroll, and keeping employees and customers happy, including the angry ones. I handled marketing, operations management, and the numbers. We believed in the same

One of the things I miss most about owning our two franchises isn’t the routes or the equipment—it’s the people. Our fellow franchisees weren’t just business owners in the same system. They became family. We celebrated wins together, shared hard lessons, and leaned on each other when things got tough. That support was critical to our success over 16 years. I was especially fortunate to form a tight brotherhood with four other franchisees. For years we talked every Wednesd

Buying a franchise gives you a proven playbook. Success comes down to how well you run it. A lot of people romanticize franchising as “business ownership without all the risk” or a “turnkey operation.” The reality is more powerful—and more straightforward. Franchise systems work because the franchisor has already done the hard work: refining the model through trial and error, building brand recognition, creating operational systems, training programs, marketing frameworks,