Franchise Success Secrets: How to Choose the Right Franchise with Aaron Harper

From Hollywood to franchising? That's Aaron Harper's story! In this episode of the Franchise Freedom Podcast, Aaron shares his incredible journey from the entertainment industry to building the world's largest powerwashing franchise, Rolling Suds. He reveals his franchise success secrets, including how he chose the right business to franchise and his commitment to responsible franchising. Learn valuable insights on franchise ownership, building a strong brand, and achieving rapid growth.

➡️ Connect with Aaron Harper: [Link to Aaron’s LinkedIn Profile (if available)]

➡️ Learn more about Rolling Suds: [Link to Rolling Suds website]

➡️ Explore franchise opportunities with Giuseppe: https://ggthefranchiseguide.com/right-fit/

➡️ Responsible Franchising Part 1: https://ggthefranchiseguide.com/podcasts/responsible-franchising-part-1/

➡️ Responsible Franchising Part 2: https://ggthefranchiseguide.com/podcasts/responsible-franchising-part-2/

➡️ Aaron Harper's conversation with Alex Hormozi: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-spent-10-hours-alex-hormozi-article-outlines-learned-aaron-harper-vfaoe/

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The Franchise Freedom: Discover Your New Path to Freedom Through Franchise Ownership, Book by Giuseppe Grammatico https://ggthefranchiseguide.com/book or purchase directly on Amazon.

Transcript

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if. People continue to come into the franchise industry and sell a ton of units and not be able to get them open. It hurts yours and my business. It also hurts the franchise industry as at large. And more, and most importantly, it hurts the franchisees that buy into those, those concepts. A lot of people buy into a franchise with the wrong expectations. And so if you can set the right expectations of this is exactly how hard it's going to be. You're going to spend a lot of money, probably more than you think you are. And but if you do X, Y, and Z, here's the potential upside. the only thing that's more valuable than the money that you invest is the time that you invest. Welcome to the Franchise Freedom Podcast, where you can escape the corporate trap through franchise ownership. Here's your host, Giuseppe Grammatico, The Franchise Guide. Welcome to the Franchise Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Giuseppe Gromatico, your franchise guide, the show where we help corporate execs. Experience financial freedom via franchising. Thanks for joining us today. We have a very special guest We've been trying to get this one on the books for a while now Our guest is aaron harper from rolling suds aaron. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me I'm, really excited to get into step with you today. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, and i'm looking forward to this So we've been following i've been following you for a while now I just started working together and I was really really excited to To meet you in memphis a few years ago or a few weeks ago. Excuse me tell the audience a little bit, a little bit of background because you weren't always in franchising. So tell us a little bit about background and how you got into franchising. Yeah. It's funny. Like we say in the franchise industry, you don't find franchising, franchising finds you. So I was I was working in the Hollywood industry you know, doing the, Kind of actor and writer and director management working with their agents and managers and kind of helping facilitate a lot of deal flow. So that was a good experience. However, I just realized it's not something I wanted to do long term. And fast forward a few years, a buddy of mine worked in franchising and told me I should get into it. And I thought that franchising was McDonald's and like Chick fil A and that's it. And so, and he kind of talked about this idea of being able to build local service businesses with the franchise model and, and be able to generate wealth that way. And I loved the idea of being able to help people become business owners. And so, I emailed his boss Seven times in three months with no response. And then saw an opportunity and got the job. So started at a carpet cleaning business helped grow that one by about 200 locations in three years. Then worked at a drywall repair brand where we kind of did a turnaround of that, of that concept grew that by 223 locations in two years and then was offered to incubate a brand from scratch and get a title with the word president in it and be on track to probably make close to a million dollars a year. And I said, wait a minute, I can do this on my own. Much like many of the people who probably listen to this podcast, I was like, I don't want to do this for someone else anymore. I could find a business that I believe in. I could franchise it. And so I sought out across the country, looked at about two dozen different businesses in the service space, epoxy coatings, roofing, painting, flooring. And a variety of other ones met the founders of rolling suds in September of 2022 is the best business. I looked at it, checked all the boxes for me. The founders of rolling suds are just incredible people. So I raised capital. I acquired the brand in January of 23. We took the brand to market end of February of 23. And since then, you know, it's now August of 24 and we have added 197 locations in 27 states and have become the biggest powerwashing franchise in the world. That's amazing. Wow. That's so Frank franchising found you, right? That's a very common theme. It's a to your point, some people don't even look at franchising because they think it's all fast food and that's what we see every single day. So, that, that's very interesting because I hear that often and not knowing what else is out there. Like I didn't. Powerwashing franchises West, a pet waste removal. Like I hear all this stuff and people were like, I've, I've didn't even cross my mind to that, that they actually exist. So, so tell us a little bit more about rolling studs. So you mentioned powerwashing. So what, what else, you know, kind of tell us a little bit about the model. Yeah. So we do residential and commercial power washing. That's it. We do it better than anyone else. Over the last 34 years, my founders have perfected a process with certain equipment and a build of a truck that allows us to do jobs considerably faster, more effectively, and more efficiently. And then, then any other power washing company. So we can power wash four or five stories from the ground, do a 4, 800 square foot house in 2023 minutes. And that is on not something that, that other power washing companies can do. We lean heavily on the commercial side. So, we're the majority of our business is commercial. So, think water towers college campuses, shopping centers parking garages H. O. A. S. Property management company. So that's really like our sweet spot because with the equipment that we have in the process we have, it lends itself really nicely to commercial. Also it's just higher ticket items, less customers, higher margins. But we still do residential because the model still makes sense on residential. The opportunity is just much larger when you think about the commercial side as well. So yeah, that, yeah, I like it. It's a S a simple model. We we've spoken in the past. You can focus, you know, on the marketing, just about everything else, the simpler, the better. And then. I know the answer to this question, but how do you, how do you, you can prove that you did a home, a 4, 000 plus square foot home in 20 minutes. Not only can we prove it, it is online on our social media, YouTube channel. We live streamed it. Because we got a lot of hate online from a lot of people who we had an influencer post about us and he was like, yeah, this business can do a 3000 square foot house and under 25 minutes. And it got like half a million views and people were like, it takes me 12 hours and, and the six pack to, to, to get the house done and that, and like, so we we live streamed it on Twitter. And we did a 4,825 square foot house in 22 minutes and 13 seconds. That's crazy. That's crazy. I do. I've done my home alone and I think it takes me part of the summer because I'm doing it's a section at a time. So that's a, that's a whole nother story. But so When we, when we work with candidates, right, we, we look at certain characteristics, we, we work in reverse. So, you know, what, what does this ideal business look like? We're not looking at industry. We're not looking at specific brands we're looking at. What, what are, what is the, maybe the investment range, where are you located? Brick and mortar is something that can be run from home. So there's a criteria. There's a, what we call a franchise model. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, you looked at 200 brands. So what, what were the criteria? You know, in that model that, that, and that sure. Were you able to narrow it down to rolling? That was interesting to me. Sure. So I like businesses that are unskilled labor. So that was really important. The, my, it is my opinion that the more skilled the labor is, the less control the owner has on the business. Cause he's, he or she is reliant upon people that they can't teach to do the job. So they have to find those people. I wanted something that was super fragmented. The more fragmented an industry is, the easier it is to disrupt. The power washing industry is super fragmented. I wanted something that had a unique selling proposition. So something that was different than the you know, rest of the competitors and with our proprietary cleaning process, we're able to, to do that. Something with a massive total addressable market. So not just residential customers, also commercial customers. So we already talked about that. That's really important to me. Recession resistant. So something that has either withstood the test of time where I felt had the ability to withstand the test of time. 34 years really shows that that that that has withstood the test of time. Really good founders was really important to me. I think that anyone who's looking at a brand, if they don't believe in the leadership team or like the founders and then they shouldn't move forward with the brand, no matter what the model looks like. So that was really important to me. And then I really wanted the opportunity to be first to market in the franchise space. You know, as you know, there's, there's many brands in each industry in the franchise space typically. But if you can be first then you have first mover advantage. We had that with the drywall repair business. That was a part of, we were first to market and we grew that to 300. It's, I think they've got like 350 locations now. And we're, you know, so that's the same with, with rolling suds. Like there's. Kind of smaller. They've got, maybe they do like exterior cleaning and windows and gutter installation and holiday lighting, but like, we're really the only. Only power washing that we, all we do is power washing the franchise. And so we're able to kind of do what one 800 got jumped into the junk business in the early two thousands and really just professionalize it. So franchisees that come in now get to have first mover advantage in an industry where the brand has first mover advantage. And so, you can really accelerate growth that way. So those are some of the things that were important to me. And that's, and that's huge. And I, and I tell everyone, and you could be completely. Selective, you looked at 200 brands and I'm not saying you have to look at 200 franchises to make a decision on what to invest in. But having that criteria is huge. And that criteria could just simply be, Hey, I want to, this is the city and state I want to work out of that may not be available and it may be sold out. It may be, it may not be registered yet in that specific state. So having that criteria where, where we help people getting really clear. On, on what the ideal business looks like is is big. And that's where we spend, I think, a bulk of our time. So, so now I always tell everyone there's, there's four, just say, we'll round it 4, 000 franchises and, and just just about every industry, but not every franchise is built the same. You're going to get, you know, brands at different stages and brands that will offer you a lot more more support maybe than others. So we really, you know, emphasize. Responsible franchising, you know, you know, due diligence, you know, at the end of the day, the due diligence is on you to do, right? Some people will spend a lot more time than others, but ultimately it's, it's a two way street. You're looking for that match between yourself and the franchise or hence responsible franchising, because this is a, this is a lengthy, this is a 10 year agreement and other cases I've seen franchise agreements. Including the the brand I was with years ago, a 20 year agreement. So this is a long lasting relationship. So with responsible, you know, what this, this word, and we've been talking about for a while, this term responsible franchising has been, has been thrown around. You, you talk about it quite a bit. And ironically, this is actually a pretty cool story. I interviewed a good, you know, we became good friends over the years Lisa McGill recently came on board rolling sides. We did a two part series just on. Responsible franchising. So we'll definitely link those to this episode, but you know, what, what is in, in, in your own words, what is responsible franchising and why is it important? Yeah. I'll do why it's important first. So many franchisors when they launch, they don't know how to be a franchise or they're good at, I don't know. Epoxy coatings business or their pet business or whatever. And they've never, they've never franchised before. And I think it's really important for those people to understand that when they start a franchise, it is a completely different business that they know nothing about. And it's also important for the buyers of that franchise to understand that that person who's coming into it is learning a new business. So they're learning a new business, like the franchisee and the franchisor or is learning a new business. And so as you can imagine, there's a lot of mistakes that happen because that person is really good at youth enrichment, their youth enrichment concept. But they're not good at coaching and training and scaling a franchise system. And so what ends up happening is you have a lot of kind of fraught franchisee franchisor or relationships as a result. Now I, I haven't, I have experience in the franchise industry and there's other people in the industry who have experience in franchising and they, they incubate brands and they kind of come at it from a different approach. I honestly think that, and obviously I'm biased, but I honestly think that's the best way. And if you can find a brand that. Has experience in franchising as, and has experience in kind of the, the, call it the widget of whatever it is in our case, it's power washing. You need both. You need the intellectual capital of the franchise side and you need the intellectual capital of the way. And a lot of brands don't have that. It's also important because if, if. People continue to come into the franchise industry and sell a ton of units and not be able to get them open. It hurts yours and my business. It also hurts the franchise industry as at large. And more, and most importantly, it hurts the franchisees that buy into those, those concepts. And in the last, let's just call it five to seven years, there has been this proliferation of the kind of sales engine of our industry. And it's, it's very focused on sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. And then private equity will come in and buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. And and there's this kind of like obsession with this idea that you can like buy a franchise and you don't have to work in it. And and that is hurting all of us candidly. Now there are operators who can come in with intense capital and are willing to you know, invest in not having to get money out of the business. And, and willing to reinvest and reinvest and rebuild their team if they need to, and maybe they've built businesses before that's kind of a different. Thing I'm talking specifically about the buyer who works at Oracle and makes 150, 000 a year and has 400, 000 in their 401k and wants to start something on the side and has no experience or business running a business. That's the person I'm worried about. And the promises that are made to that person is what I'm worried about. And it seems proliferated in the industry that that person can start a service business that they don't have to ever learn. And that's why it's important. Now, the responsible franchising term has become, in some circles, perceived as negative. And I think it's largely due to the fact that it's very difficult to define. And so if something's very difficult to define, anyone can use it. And if anyone can use it. It becomes a vapid turn that actually isn't helpful, right? Now I do think it's good that it's started a larger conversation about what it is and what it looks like, right? Now I particularly when I started writing about this, which was about february of last year I proposed four kind of like core concepts that I believe have to do with like responsible franchising and And I'll just kind of tell you what, what they are. And, and we can, you know, dive in deep to whichever one you want or however deep you want to go with this. Like I said, you and I could talk about this for right now. So number one, setting clear expectations. A lot of people buy into a franchise with the wrong expectations. And so if you can set the right expectations of this is exactly how hard it's going to be. You're going to spend a lot of money, probably more than you think you are. And but if you do X, Y, and Z, here's the potential upside. And here's the downside. Now, the issue with that and why some people don't do it is you're not going to sell a lot of franchises. If you're completely honest about how hard it's going to be, I would rather be honest and turn people away. Then bring in someone who has the wrong expectations because I personally now have to deal with that person for the next 10 years. So I'd rather that person come in and know exactly what to expect. The second is capital adequacy, and that's both on the franchisee and the franchisor side. Franchisors need an immense amount of capital to support franchisees properly. And if they are giving, if they are working with, let's just say an outsourced sales organization, they need even more capital. Because when they sell the franchise, a lot of that's no longer going to exist after that transaction. And so they need to be really well capitalized, which means they need to raise millions of dollars, which a lot of franchisors aren't doing. In addition to that, franchisees need to have more capital than they think they need, because there are a lot of reasons businesses fail. Having too much money is not one of the reasons that businesses fail, right? This, the third of the tenants that I've proposed is choosing the right franchisees. So a lot of people will just kind of take whoever it is that's willing to write them a check. We turn down more franchisees than we bring in. And it's not just because they don't have enough money. It's because they're not the right fit for us. Every brand should know exactly who their avatar is, what skillsets they need to have, and they should be diligent about turning away everyone who is not. And then the fourth is sustainable growth. So not selling you, you need to sell the amount of units that you can feasibly open. I have a lot of emerging brands that reach out to me and they're like, Aaron, how much money do I need? I want to join an FSO. What, how do I get franchisees? And I always ask them the same question before, before we talk about how you're going to sell franchises, how much capital do you have? Right. And eight to nine times out of 10, it's less than a hundred thousand dollars. Which isn't enough, right? It's not even close to enough. They need at least 10 times more than that, especially if they don't have experience in franchising, and especially if they're hiring an outsourced sales organization. So those are kind of the four things that I proposed that I've written about. And I think that really gets us started in the conversation. I don't think it encompasses it, but I do think that those four things really help us identify. All right. Is a brand doing these four things? And if not, we might need to push them out of the conversation. Out of the limelight, you know, and that, and that's, you know, with, and that's going to vary based off the brand, right? So like, for example, the, the avatar, so you want to make sure that, you know, if you are looking for someone that is extroverted, that needs to go out to networking events someone that's introverted that just wants to look at KPIs and not, you know, be a cheerleader for the brand may not be a good fit. So being very clear, especially in the Initial stages is crucial because that's your base. That's your base of franchisees. And, you know, so, so the franchisor gets like, you know, as you were saying very clear on kind of the investment range, right? Who, who is the ideal person? What is an ideal day look like stuff like that. And that can all be, you know, we, what we talk about in the due diligence process is that you're not just speaking with the franchise franchise or equally as important. You want to speak with franchisees. You can see, Hey, you know, what is your experience been? What makes in your opinion, a success, you've been successful, what's been. The key to your success. You know, what, what, what skill set do you have? Because you, you don't need to be a power washer, right? You don't need to experience in the actual widget or the service, right? It's more of what's that transferable skillset that you're bringing over for maybe wall street or, you know, working at Oracle or, or, you know, a technology brand. What are you bringing to the table to make this work? So yes, money, you know, investment is, is important, but the role in the business, if you don't have that skillset, it's going to be, Just this ongoing struggle. So that this is part of. The due diligence and where I see people, they'll do a ton of people that have made, you know, kind of purchased a franchise on their, on their own. And I'm not saying all franchises are this way, but they'll skip the validation. They'll, they'll go right into, let's learn about the brand to you know, visiting the brand or, or, or signing without even speaking with a single, or maybe speaking with one franchisee and getting some decent feedback and moving forward. So each stage is equally as important. You want to make sure to. Gather that information and maybe talk to people in the infancy stages, talk to people that have been doing it for a while to get that, that full picture so that you can make at the end of the day, that the best well informed decision. And, you know, at the end of the day, the franchise or rolling suds and whoever the brands are have to award you the franchise. They have to meet as a team to make sure it's a good fit. And in what I'm seeing in responsible franchising is that I'm not saying, you know, you get to the finish line, everyone gets approved, but in that process, if there are some red flags, those red flags are addressed. If there's a change, you know, where a change in capital you know, bankruptcy all of a sudden is filed that needs to be addressed because maybe the timing isn't perfect. So, I appreciate that because there are, there's, there's different level, different stages. And, you know, part of this is, you know, the franchise or it's going to lay out as much as they can, but you have to still do your own due diligence in order to make that the most well informed decision. And this is not an area to skimp on, right? It's you got to do it, you got to spend the time. What advice do you have someone looking to you know, a lot of the, a lot of people listening in our corporate execs. So maybe five, 10 years out of, out of school, making a decent income, but just not happy looking for a, for a change, you know, what, what's one solid piece of advice you can give to a corporate exec that's, that's thinking about, you know, potentially owning a franchise. Do not. Buy, I would recommend, and this is just my personal opinion based on my experience is to not buy a franchise if you cannot leave your job. So what that means in practice is save enough money and or pull from home equity or 401ks or other things that you could liquidate. so that you could be comfortable to actually get the business started. And I say this because the only thing that's more valuable than the money that you invest is the time that you invest. And oftentimes I see people buy into a franchise and six months later, they end up having to leave their job anyways. And they just burned cash that entire time because their general manager quit after a month or whatever. And and so I would recommend it, like going into a franchise full bore. Is the best way that you're going to get a return on your investment. And it's one thing to like, start, let's just say your own power washing business on the side. Cause there's less risk associated with it. You can go theoretically, you can just go buy a 300 machine and do some nights and weekends and. You know, whatever. And if it works out great, you leave later with a franchise. You're signing a 10 year contract. It's a mortgage agreement. In fact, it's probably stricter than a mortgage, which means that there's going to be minimums and timing and development schedules and really kind of some heavy duty level commitment. So I would just recommend whomever's listening to this. If you're making 150, a year, leave. And I mean, I, I, and I, I did that. You know what I mean? Like I was offered enough money to probably retire at 44, make a million bucks a year and just like be fine. And I was like, I actually want ownership. And so franchising gives you that, but you have to go in and execute the playbook and follow the model. Got it. Yeah, that's it. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta be well capitalized. You gotta, you gotta follow the model. I too. You know, I, I leave this up to the, the individual and the brand as far as running it full or part time myself, I ran it full time and the advantage is there's going to be some huge advantage there, you know, you know, having that extra cost of of a general manager, if you're running it full time, but I went from wall street to building services and 30 days. Wow. I w I felt like I was an expert in, in that area. It is amazing what you can learn that for first month, get up and running. And then figure out, you know, if you want to hire a general manager or what your growth strategy is. Another benefit is you get to figure out just because you have a sales background doesn't mean you have to be the the Full time salesperson in the business. You may find out. Hey, i'm great at sales I'm i'm better at maybe hiring a sales team where I can focus more on the kpis and you start to kind of Decide and figure out. Okay. These are the components I don't maybe like going on the sales appointments as much as the networking at the chamber of commerce event So that you won't know until you actually do it and experience it because it's going to be different than You Selling at a selling on wall street than you know, actually going out on appointments, for your franchise so experiencing it Nothing that you can you can read about it You can talk to a million people ultimately doing it every day is going to make all the difference So I appreciate that this was this is extremely helpful I'm thinking about on a future episode diving a little bit deeper on some of the aspects of responsible franchising I want, I want to leave off. So really cool thing right before our episode. And we were talking about this and we'll, we'll link this in the, in the show as well got to, you got to sit down and meet with Alex Hormozy, do a full review kind of, I think you spent 10 hours in one day getting to getting to speak with their team and. Doing a full review any quick, quick takeaways. I'm, and I'm going to link the articles. I honestly haven't even read the article yet. So any any takeaways that people can maybe benefit from if they're, if they're listening in, I mean, I would just say if you don't follow Alex Hermosi currently, you're missing out. Right. If you know, if you follow him you know, you know how much value is, is provided from, from the content. I spent 10 hours in a room with him talking about rolling suds and business and franchising in general. And just the knowledge that I was able to kind of glean from that. I don't want to say it's just one specific thing because there was so much. So I would urge people to read the article. It's about a 10 minute read or so. There's a lot of good stuff there. And and, and hopefully my writing is, is, is good enough to where it's enjoyable to read. But yeah, I mean, just a ton of good stuff that I learned and it was a dream to be able to sit down with him.'cause he's like, he's like a hero of mine. Awesome. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm excited to check it out. It was literally right, right before we started recording, I saw, I saw the the LinkedIn. I have it up on. On my second screen here. So, well, listen, Aaron, I, I know we could definitely, you know, get into more detail on certain areas. I'd love you back invite you back on the show. I appreciate everything and looking forward to chatting again very soon. Yeah. Likewise. Thanks. Thanks again. If you want to learn how to make the transition from corporate to owning your franchise, join Giuseppe on the next episode. You can also follow on all social media platforms and achieve financial and time freedom today.