0 (2s):
Who’s ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like The Hustle Daily. Today we'll be breaking down the greatest wealth creation business model ever invented franchising. To drop these value bombs I brought to Jeff Dudan into EOFire Studios. Jeff is a serial business builder and founder of Homefront Brands, a property service franchise platform that inspires entrepreneurs to take action. He's also the author of Discernment the Business Athletes Regiment for a Great Life Through Better Decisions. And today's foundation will talk about franchising. We'll talk about why is the greatest wealth creation business model ever invented and so much more.

0 (47s):
And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Jeff and our sponsors.

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0 (1m 10s):
Marketing Made Simple hosted by Dr. JJ Peterson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing work. In a recent episode, Amy Porterfield shared her five email Marketing Secrets for long-term Business growth. Listen to Marketing Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcasts, eff, say What's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1 (1m 40s):
What is Up Fire Nation? This is Jeff Dudan and something that I believe that most people disagree with is that success is an iterative process. That one step follows the previous step. I think that you can cut out a lot of steps. I think you can go right at it. I think if you're willing and courageous enough to give back something that the universe has provided to you, that you can exchange it for something better, but you gotta have the courage to do it.

0 (2m 6s):
Fire Nation, Jeff's gonna keep dropping value bombs cause we're talking about the greatest wealth creation business model ever invented franchising. So I wanna start with that. Why, why is the greatest wealth creation business model that's ever been invented? Why is it franchising?

1 (2m 25s):
Franchising is accessible. It is accessible to almost anybody. There is a franchise for you out there if you are 20 years old or if you're 55 years old, if you have a lot of resources or you don't have any resources, it is accessible. It is a leverage model. You can learn things from being a franchisee that and, and, and doing it every day. You will learn more than reading a book about it every day. And that is, that is one of the reasons why. Another reason why is because it's a leverage business model. Because you can leverage a community, you can leverage a group, you can leverage a platform, you can leverage services, customer acquisition and all of these things.

1 (3m 10s):
And there's many examples throughout history of people using franchising to create massive wealth. So some people think that franchising that's, maybe that's not for you, but I will share. Jerry Richardson, the, the founder of the Carolina Panthers was the tight end to Johnny Unites and he wasn't happy with what he was getting paid. He tried to negotiate a higher contract. He didn't get it, I think it was $250 a game. They were paying them. He decided to quit there. He bought a Hardee's restaurant, he turned that into 2 3, 5 10, and ultimately 400 Hardee's restaurants and then purchased the Carolina Panthers, which by the way, most people don't know that the NFL is actually a franchise as well.

1 (3m 51s):
So there are many levels of franchising, everything from a window cleaning, exterior house washing business, all the way up to the nfl.

0 (3m 59s):
I love it. I mean, it's just so rife with opportunities Fire Nation. And we're actually talking to someone right now who is not just talking the talk, but he's walking the walk. So why don't you share your story, the Homefront brands story.

1 (4m 14s):
Sure. So real quick, I was, I was an athlete growing up. I got a scholarship out to Appalachian State. It was my third college. The first two didn't work out so well. So like most entrepreneurs are screwed into existence, I will tell you. And I needed money, I wanted to stay here. I had met my wife, so I started the painting business. We won the contracts to the student housing apartments from there, south Florida, hurricane Andrew, 1992, cut my teeth in the restoration business, started the business in 94, grew it to a very large national and international restoration company. Franchised it in 2009 after selling all of my company stores under the franchise model in 2006, seven, and eight.

1 (4m 59s):
So when I talk about throwing something away, I had a perfectly good large, you know, 20 million a year restoration business. We were working in Katrina, we, we were responding to disasters, we were doing government contracting. But for me, the value that I wasn't serving was I wasn't home. I was traveling all the time and I felt that I could take what I had learned, package it up and share it with the rest of the world. And that's what I did in a business called Advan Clean. So in 2006, seven and eight sold all of our company stores under the franchise model. In 2009, we launched to the marketplace and we ended up nine years later with 240 locations in 37 states. And I sold the business to home Franchise Concepts out of Irvine, California

0 (5m 41s):
Fire Nation. If that doesn't get you excited about some opportunities, I don't know what will, but let's kind of maybe talk a little bit about Homefront Brands and how you built it into what it is. I mean, you had a vision for it that was pretty special. Talk about that.

1 (5m 55s):
I dabbled in multiple franchise related businesses after I sold Advan Clean. So in 19 20 21, I bought a fitness concept called Rock Box Fitness. We grew that into a platform to include beam, infrared sauna. So we got a health and wellness platform that we own and that our partners operate. And then from there I looked at it and I said, you know, I, I've been doing these franchise related service businesses and fitness businesses and and wellness businesses, but I cut my teeth for 24 years and 11 months in the service industry. So about a year and a half ago, we created Homefront Branch, which is a, a property service platform. And we've acquired six franchise companies into it inside of 11 months.

1 (6m 37s):
And we set out to do a few things. So, so we talk about iterating, we talk about going right at things in building my first franchise business. Over all of those decades, I realized there were things that we did well and, but not great. So with Homefront Brands, what we did was we created a model from a technology perspective, from a territory perspective. And we really borrowed, from what I had learned was the best in the industry to create an opportunity for Empire Builders to buy and to join one or more of our franchise concepts. You can stack these businesses right on top of each other. So we are attracting sophisticated investors and first time entrepreneurs alike into the Homefront brands.

1 (7m 21s):
So we do everything from mosquito spraying to a fencing franchise to designer Kitchen bath and Closets to window hero, exterior house washing and incredible business called Temporary Wall Systems, which is containment, temporary containment in construction sites, hospitals, airports, all that kind of stuff. And, and a home inspection franchise called Built Right Home Inspection. So whoever you are, and, and if you look at this, it's, it's a, it's a wealth building opportunity. People, these businesses are set up in such a way that they can add 'em to their portfolios and that they can, again, they're, they're stackable. It's a stackable franchise platform that runs all on the same operating system with incredible support from the home office.

1 (8m 5s):
And that's under Homefront brands, you know, we are looking at this as a company that, that we've spent 25 years getting ready to build and a company that ho a brand and Homefront brands that's gonna be here a hundred years from now.

Ziprecruiter (8m 18s):
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0 (11m 7s):
Jeff, we're back and I wanna talk about emerging brands in the franchising space. You have your finger on the pulse, you are in this world, what are you seeing?

1 (11m 17s):
There are more emerging brands now and and a lot of it has to do with the focus and the intensity that's come to the franchise space. Private equity has, has caused a lot of that focus. And not only acquiring brands, but acquiring groups of franchisees. So we're providing an opportunity for people to build portfolio companies here with us inside of Homefront brands that will, you know, have market value for them. But from an emerging brands perspective, one of the things I've learned, and I've actually over the last three years in, in doing the things that I've done, I've, I've worked with, with hundreds of emerging brands, consulted with these people, spoke to these people, answered LinkedIn requests and, and, and got into conversations.

1 (12m 3s):
And there's really four things that I learned. Number one, you've gotta have a business that's good for people. You know, when you're, when you're creating a franchise concept, it's gotta be a business that can be operated by anyone. You don't need to build jet airplanes that are so difficult to fly or, or hard to operate. They gotta have the proper support, the pro proper training. There has to be a market for them where there's not gonna be massive resistance for them to acquire customers. So a business that's good for people is important. Number two, you've gotta look at the leadership, especially in emerging the inspired leader who's done it before, who can answer all the questions, who can stand tall in the pocket and lead that brand into the opportunities and create a dream that's big enough for other people's dreams to fit inside of it.

1 (12m 48s):
That's the leadership piece of franchising. Franchising is heavy, heavy leadership, heavy influence. Think about it, you're not building a company with a thousand emPodopoloyees in it. You're building a company that has a hundred families that have invested materially something that matters to them and committed their lives to build this business with 10 emPodopoloyees. That's how you get to a thousand, you're dealing with a hundred families. So the leadership burden is heavy, the obligation and responsibility to do a great job and to lead these people in the right way. So you need inspired leadership. The third thing is franchise expertise. You gotta look at the team that you're joining. If you gotta look at the brand, do they have around the table the people that have done it before?

1 (13m 29s):
If you look at, you know, you look at the people over at ServPro came from ServiceMaster way back in the day. If you look at the people from Orange Theory, they might have come from a massage concept we did in in rock box fitness. Our fitness concept I accomplished in 15 months with that brand would've took me 15 years to do with my first company just because we knew what to do in the order to do it and how to get it done and, and what do we needed. And then the fourth thing, you need capital. So you need to make sure that if you're joining a franchise system or you're starting a franchise system that you're properly capitalized. The three types of capital, intellectual capital, human capital, and then Capital.

1 (14m 9s):
Capital, the Greenbacks

0 (14m 11s):
Fire Nation. I hope you're taking notes. I mean, you need to have a business that's good for people. I mean, I love how that's number one inspired. Leadership, franchise expertise, capital. These are all critical things in the franchising space. A lot of good talks here. And I wanna move on to your book, Jeff Discernment, the Business Athletes Regiment for a Great Life Through Better Decisions. What is this book all about?

1 (14m 41s):
Discernment is taking models of thought that somebody has accumulated throughout their experiences of a lifetime and applying those models of thought to current circumstances or scenarios. When you think about somebody that has wisdom, typically it's somebody that's been around that has done something generally, might be an older person and, and you would say, well, they have great discernment in in the advice or the experiences that they can share. I can inform my journey with their journey. So what I've done, and it's my second book actually. I actually, when I came off the road and I, and I chose to franchise my business, I wrote a, i I coached over 30 years of my kids' sports teams.

1 (15m 22s):
And man, we, we had a formula for the kids to play fast and loose and happy and we always in a play for one another. And it was, and we had this formula, how we accomplished that over and over again. We took whatever kids they gave us, we always had success at the end of the season and we did it with a set of values for parents and coaches and players. And really when I was, when I was doing that, what I realized was the same thing applies to business. So, you know, and I, I wrote a book called Hey Coach at the end of that, to put all that, I wrote discernment when I was in the process of selling my, my franchise businesses that I had built for 24 years in 11 months.

1 (16m 3s):
And what I wanted to do was I really wanted to share with people, young people or anybody who's looking at a pivotal point in their life, changing their career, starting a business. And I wanted to give them all my models of thought around it. So first of all, the quality of your decisions determines the quality of your life. I used to tell my kids I coach, you got 99 decisions to make every day, starting with whether you make your better or not and the probability of success, because we've learned through Enron or Arthur Anderson, anything can go to zero and nothing is a hundred percent, your decisions are what create the probability to tick up by two points or three points or down by two points or three points.

1 (16m 45s):
So really your outcomes in life are a function of probabilities, which is a function of the decisions that you make. And bad decisions today are a debt on your future time, energy, and money. And you look at it and you say, man, if I wouldn't have done that, or for example, I was driving through, I was, I had responded to Hurricane Katrina and it was 2005 and I had been gone for three months and I was missing my son's first football season. It was seven years of years old. And as I was driving in the middle of the night in this rented RV trying to get home for an eight o'clock game, I was driving through Atlanta back up to Charlotte and I'd made that decision at that point, I said, I'm gonna sell all of our company stores under a franchise model.

1 (17m 27s):
And the filter that I used was, I used my values, I knew, you know, your, your true values are what you tolerate. And I know we've, we've all heard that, but man, that is absolutely true. So that decision, when I look back on it, I I, I deconstructed it and I said, how did I make that decision? That ended up being such a great decision and I realized that it was a function of of, of my values. Other things in the book, you know, what are the types, if your life is a balance sheet, right? And what are the equities that you're trying to create and how do you create them? Relationship equity is key with a spouse, with a family, with your friends and our situation with our franchisees, there are things that we have done that were mistakes.

1 (18m 12s):
And you always have to have enough relationship equity in the tank to overcome those things. Your health equity, your, your financial equity, your reputation, equity. What's the value of a reputation? Because our name goes farther than we ever do and people will talk about us or people will ask about us if they're thinking about doing business with us, and what will people say and how important is that? Because you'll never know the deal that you didn't get because your reputation equity wasn't intact and you didn't do things like that. So all of these things fall inside of this book Discernment and people that have used it and read it, they come up to me and they've, they've highlighted, you know, 25 things in it and there's three or four that really landed with them.

1 (18m 55s):
So, I mean, it's not a, it's okay, maybe it's not a great read, but there is a lot of good tidbits in there if you're of the right mind and the right place in your life.

0 (19m 4s):
Fire Nation, lots of value bombs with what Jeff just shared. One that I really wanted to go back and just repeat was, the quality of your decisions determines the quality of your life

1 (19m 16s):
And the velocity of your business

0 (19m 18s):
And the velocity of your business. Fire Nation. If you can live that quote through and through. I mean, think about it, the quality of your decisions. Are you get getting up every morning? Are you hydrating? Are you moving? Are you exercising? Are you eating the right foods? Are you meditating? Are you saying things to your family and loved ones that you wanna be saying, your gratitude? Are you showing love? Like all these things that you're doing? And then of course then you get into your business, are you doing those things in your business as well? That every day is the right things that's moving that business forward. So Jeff, you shared a lot today. What is one thing of everything we talked about that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our entire conversation?

1 (20m 5s):
First of all, John, I want to go back to what you just said and, and the things that you listed. Man, that is a mouthful of truth. That's, that is, thank you. That's absolutely a mouthful of truth. I I can't say that enough. You know, I think I, I I think if, if I could impress people upon anything is, is don't be fearful and, you know, take action. I mean, you know, and, and know what you stand for. So, you know, as long as people are, people are always fine, as long as they know where you stand, as long as they know where you stand with them at Homefront brands, we are extremely interested in helping our country shore up fundamentally the middle class through small business and entrepreneurship.

1 (20m 51s):
These are critical things. One out of every eight people in this country is either employed by or serving a company with a company that serves a franchise. Franchising is a huge economic engine inside of this and small business is where the majority of us work, where we live, you know, how we make our living, how we provide for, for ourselves and those that we care most about. So, you know, really don't be fearful of taking that leap to better yourself. There is not a better business model out there where you can invest $50,000 and, and, you know, get a loan on some truck and equipment and, and grow a business where you, you've solved problems in your life.

1 (21m 34s):
Like income. You're building equity in a business that you can, you can grow and that you can sell. You've got a job that you can't be fired from. Now you have accountability, you've gotta show up. But I will tell you, I have never, you know, we have a set of family values, man, and, and I will check. I, we had a big man, we had a, we had a huge decision with my daughter and it was going to be, you know, where she was gonna go to her post-graduate school. And, you know, we weren't, my wife and I were not aligned with it. And, you know, we have a set of family values. It's live fun, be humble respect to others, be a servant leader, trust yourself to take chances, fail fast and move forward.

1 (22m 16s):
Always do more than is expected. And, and those are the types of things that, you know, that we've made decisions by. I was an undercover boss and you know, when that opportunity came up, I had to go against, I couldn't not take the opportunity because we were fearful that something might go wrong. But, you know, we sat down as a family and we said, you know, we have to trust ourself to take chances and, and we have to do more than is expected. So, you know, understanding that, you know, taking action and taking a risk is a lot of what life is about. And, and, but doing that within the construct of a franchise system is, is a step that anybody can take If you're willing to show up every day and half a life is showing up.

1 (22m 60s):
If you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, even if it's a little bit of money based on the ROI that you can get out of it and you're willing to commit and contribute and to, and to join a community and, and buy into, you know, being part of the change and part of the economic engine of this country, then, you know, take the chance and step forward for us, you know, we, we en we always encourage our children to, to operate at the highest level that they possibly can, whether that was in soccer or whatever, if you can, you know, you could drop back, but we always encouraged them to participate at the highest level you can possibly qualify for.

1 (23m 40s):
And one of the places that my daughter wants to go to school, you know, we're concerned about the location, location of it and the safety of it. And ultimately though, you know, I, I believe that people need to make their own decisions in life. And ultimately, you know, we, we went back to our family values and we said, look, you're gonna trust your, you're gonna trust yourself to take this chance. You're gonna do more than it expected because if you can get in here, it's gonna be the highest level that anybody in our family has ever gotten to. And yes, we're concerned about it, but ultimately, you know, you are going to make the decision. And, and that's what we did. So I think it's the same in our lives, right? Every day we've gotta challenge ourselves to say, you know, what's, what is the, what is the, what is the best thing that I can do?

1 (24m 25s):
What matters the most to me in life? Let me keep that central right in front of my eyes. And then what am I willing to give up to get that

0 (24m 31s):
Fire Nation chills? Check your pulse if you're not currently like fired up right now. Jeff just dropped countless value bombs. I'm inspired. Jeff, how can Fire Nation get to this book? What call to action do you have for our listeners today?

1 (24m 48s):
Well go straight to Amazon. You can get discernment the Business Athletes Regimen for a great Life through Better Decisions. Check it out. I've got my reading recommendations in the back of the book categorized by what they are. So, so just a, a great book and also great recommendations on how to round out your thinking and inform your thinking and inform your decisions today. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, just Jeff Dudan or Instagram. Those are my two places that I do the most. Or you can go to homefrontbrands.com if you're interested in learning about the brands that we have there. If you're interested in some of my other content podcasts and things like that I've put out there, you can go to www.dudangroup.com.

1 (25m 27s):
So those two websites are where you can find us. Not hard to find and looking forward to speaking with anybody who is at a point in their life where they'd like to think about doing something different and they're not quite sure how to go about it. Happy to help. Always interested in the conversation.

0 (25m 44s):
Fire Nation, generous, generous offer by Jeff there. Take advantage of it because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with and you've been hanging out with JD and JLD today. So keep up that heat. Head over to EOFire.com, type Jeff and the search bar and find this podcast on Podopolo. Post a comment, start the conversations. Jeff, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

1 (26m 16s):
Thank you John.

0 (26m 17s):
Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Jeff for sponsoring today's episode, Fire Nation. What can 3000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book of the Common Path to Uncommon Success is a revolutionary 17 step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle that you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit uncommonsuccessbook.com. I'll catch you there. Or on the flip side.

0 (26m 58s):
The best podcast listening and discovery app in the world is here and it's called Podopolo. Visit Podopolo.com. Download the app, mention John Lee Dumas, my Podopolo username when you sign up for a free account and start listening now. That's P O D O P O L O.com. Marketing Made Simple hosted by Dr. JJ Peterson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing work. In a recent episode, Amy Porterfield shared her five email marketing Secrets for long-term business growth. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.