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Your brand won’t sell for 9 figures if your franchisees are broke. And yet most founders scale like that’s the goal. Here’s what top M&A advisors actually care about when it comes to your exit 👇

Your org chart is killing your exit. CEO: You CMO: You CFO: You Operations: You IT: Also you I've owned 30+ businesses. The ones where I'm replaceable? 4-5x multiples. The ones where I AM the business? 1-2x if I'm lucky. That $300k/year business? Either a $600k exit or a $2M exit. Your choice. Stop being irreplaceable. Start building an asset.

Why Traditional FSOs Can Kill Your Growth as a Franchisor (Especially When Doing Their Job) Traditional FSOs see franchise sales as the end goal. That's literally what they're hired for. Reality check: It's just the START of your franchisor journey.

The biggest lie in business? That "Growth = Cash." Actually, growth eats cash. I see this with Franchisees and Franchisors constantly. Here is the "Growth Paradox"

AI just replaced the front desk (and did it better). Most leaders are chasing AI tools. The best operators are fixing execution. Brian Holmes from Franchise Ramp and AI Front Desk spotted the real problem: Front desks missing calls, ghosting leads, and leaking money. He built a better system. 1.1M+ tasks completed 65,000 hours saved 24,000 appointments booked $1K per month per location in labor saved And he’s not selling it to everyone. I tried to buy it and he said no until it was the right fit. “AI isn’t the silver bullet. Execution is.” If your front desk is still dropping leads, it’s not a people problem anymore. It’s a systems problem. Would you trust AI to handle your front desk? Full episode: https://t.co/9Ms6sYNAU9

Buying Brand #2? Here’s what no one tells you. Everyone loves to talk about scaling up. Few talk about the wreckage left behind when it’s done too fast.

Flynn Group just made their biggest Planet Fitness play yet. While everyone's worried about franchise saturation, smart money is doubling down. Consolidation creates opportunity...if you know where to look.

McDonald's didn't become McDonald's because franchisees improved the Big Mac recipe. They succeeded because every location executed the exact same system. Your job isn't innovation - it's replication. Are you following the playbook or rewriting it?

AI will tell you a franchise is a goldmine. Then it'll tell you the same brand is a disaster. Same day, same numbers. All depends on how you ask it. Talked to someone yesterday about where AI really fits into buying a franchise. And most people get one part of it wrong. AI made the information easy to get. That part's great. You can pull an FDD apart, compare Item 19s, check unit economics, all of it, in minutes. But it's only as good as what you ask it. Feed it weak questions, you get weak answers. Ask it to confirm what you already want to hear, and it will. The information doesn't tell you what to do. It just gives you the ability to make a good decision for you. I learned that one the hard way. I used to think I was the best in the world at picking franchises. Then I got into a few that weren't what I thought they were. How? I wasn't looking at enough unbiased information. I was deciding off old wins and a feeling that the grass was greener somewhere else. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn't. So ask yourself this. When most franchisees in a brand make good money, was that really a great pick? Or did the future just break the right way? Because when you buy into a brand, you're betting on a pile of things you don't control: where the economy goes where private equity money moves next what your competition decides to do what regulators decide to do whether a black swan event helps you or wrecks you whether the brand's leadership stays strong how fast the brand grows how the franchisor makes decsions if the brand attracts more better franchisees vs weaker ones Get most of that right and people call you a great picker! Get it wrong and the same brand looks like a mistake. Most of it was never fully in your hands. What you control is you. I talk to people in average and even underperforming brands who make really good money. They know they're the reason. The mindset, the capital, the right team. They watch their KPIs. They budget. They do what a good business owner does. And those same people would win in just about anything. A franchise. A boring service business. A mom and pop. Doesn't matter. Codie Sanchez is great at getting people into the boring businesses. Walker Deibel does the same with buy-not-build. Same audience every time. People leaving corporate, sitting at a transition point, wanting to control where they're headed. AI will give you every fact. It'll run every scenario on that list, the economy, the competition, the regulators, all of it. What it can't do is factor in you. And it can't factor in the learning curve. There's always a learning curve. Buying an existing business? Employees might walk. Can you handle that? Can you fire the ones dragging it down? Starting from scratch? Harder than you think, every time. I've done it. Buying a franchise? Easy to assume the franchisor's going to do the heavy lifting. Maybe you were told that. Maybe you weren't. Either way, a lot of people carry that expectation in, and it costs them. Franchise, existing business, or built from nothing, the result 9 times of out 10 comes down to the same thing. You. At least this has been my experience as I thought about it this morning, having my coffee on the front porch.

Semi-absentee isn’t a strategy. It’s a stage. If you skip the work to get there… you don’t step back. You collapse. 🧵 Here's what I learned the hard way:

Why Traditional FSOs Can Kill Your Growth as a Franchisor (Especially When Doing Their Job) Traditional FSOs see franchise sales as the end goal. That's literally what they're hired for. Reality check: It's just the START of your franchisor journey.

Your brand won’t sell for 9 figures if your franchisees are broke. And yet most founders scale like that’s the goal. Here’s what top M&A advisors actually care about when it comes to your exit 👇

Buying Brand #2? Here’s what no one tells you. Everyone loves to talk about scaling up. Few talk about the wreckage left behind when it’s done too fast.

The biggest lie in business? That "Growth = Cash." Actually, growth eats cash. I see this with Franchisees and Franchisors constantly. Here is the "Growth Paradox"

AI just replaced the front desk (and did it better). Most leaders are chasing AI tools. The best operators are fixing execution. Brian Holmes from Franchise Ramp and AI Front Desk spotted the real problem: Front desks missing calls, ghosting leads, and leaking money. He built a better system. 1.1M+ tasks completed 65,000 hours saved 24,000 appointments booked $1K per month per location in labor saved And he’s not selling it to everyone. I tried to buy it and he said no until it was the right fit. “AI isn’t the silver bullet. Execution is.” If your front desk is still dropping leads, it’s not a people problem anymore. It’s a systems problem. Would you trust AI to handle your front desk? Full episode: https://t.co/9Ms6sYNAU9

Semi-absentee isn’t a strategy. It’s a stage. If you skip the work to get there… you don’t step back. You collapse. 🧵 Here's what I learned the hard way:

AI will tell you a franchise is a goldmine. Then it'll tell you the same brand is a disaster. Same day, same numbers. All depends on how you ask it. Talked to someone yesterday about where AI really fits into buying a franchise. And most people get one part of it wrong. AI made the information easy to get. That part's great. You can pull an FDD apart, compare Item 19s, check unit economics, all of it, in minutes. But it's only as good as what you ask it. Feed it weak questions, you get weak answers. Ask it to confirm what you already want to hear, and it will. The information doesn't tell you what to do. It just gives you the ability to make a good decision for you. I learned that one the hard way. I used to think I was the best in the world at picking franchises. Then I got into a few that weren't what I thought they were. How? I wasn't looking at enough unbiased information. I was deciding off old wins and a feeling that the grass was greener somewhere else. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn't. So ask yourself this. When most franchisees in a brand make good money, was that really a great pick? Or did the future just break the right way? Because when you buy into a brand, you're betting on a pile of things you don't control: where the economy goes where private equity money moves next what your competition decides to do what regulators decide to do whether a black swan event helps you or wrecks you whether the brand's leadership stays strong how fast the brand grows how the franchisor makes decsions if the brand attracts more better franchisees vs weaker ones Get most of that right and people call you a great picker! Get it wrong and the same brand looks like a mistake. Most of it was never fully in your hands. What you control is you. I talk to people in average and even underperforming brands who make really good money. They know they're the reason. The mindset, the capital, the right team. They watch their KPIs. They budget. They do what a good business owner does. And those same people would win in just about anything. A franchise. A boring service business. A mom and pop. Doesn't matter. Codie Sanchez is great at getting people into the boring businesses. Walker Deibel does the same with buy-not-build. Same audience every time. People leaving corporate, sitting at a transition point, wanting to control where they're headed. AI will give you every fact. It'll run every scenario on that list, the economy, the competition, the regulators, all of it. What it can't do is factor in you. And it can't factor in the learning curve. There's always a learning curve. Buying an existing business? Employees might walk. Can you handle that? Can you fire the ones dragging it down? Starting from scratch? Harder than you think, every time. I've done it. Buying a franchise? Easy to assume the franchisor's going to do the heavy lifting. Maybe you were told that. Maybe you weren't. Either way, a lot of people carry that expectation in, and it costs them. Franchise, existing business, or built from nothing, the result 9 times of out 10 comes down to the same thing. You. At least this has been my experience as I thought about it this morning, having my coffee on the front porch.

Your org chart is killing your exit. CEO: You CMO: You CFO: You Operations: You IT: Also you I've owned 30+ businesses. The ones where I'm replaceable? 4-5x multiples. The ones where I AM the business? 1-2x if I'm lucky. That $300k/year business? Either a $600k exit or a $2M exit. Your choice. Stop being irreplaceable. Start building an asset.

Flynn Group just made their biggest Planet Fitness play yet. While everyone's worried about franchise saturation, smart money is doubling down. Consolidation creates opportunity...if you know where to look.

McDonald's didn't become McDonald's because franchisees improved the Big Mac recipe. They succeeded because every location executed the exact same system. Your job isn't innovation - it's replication. Are you following the playbook or rewriting it?