Balancing Family, Community, and Franchise Ownership
Updated: 4 hours ago
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 businesses. Those relationships with customers, referral partners, and neighbors were how the businesses grew. Showing up felt natural because it was useful, not forced.
At home, the boys grew up around the businesses. They saw the early mornings, the calls, the wins, and the tough stretches. We learned to protect certain windows and to be realistic about what full-time ownership actually looked like day to day. Perfect work-life balance was never the goal. Sustainable rhythms were.
What I tell candidates now is simple: if the franchise model you’re looking at requires you to disappear from your family or your community for years, it probably isn’t the right fit, no matter how good the numbers look. The systems that worked best for us were the ones that still left room for both. (Picture from 2012)
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