Art of Drawers Franchise - Kitchen & Home Organization Business with HUGE Potential

In this full episode of the Franchise Freedom Podcast, Giuseppe Grammatico interviews Spike Albrecht, Director of Development for Art of Drawers! Learn all about this exciting franchise opportunity in the booming home organization and renovation sector. Discover the ideal owner profile, growth potential, and support systems that make Art of Drawers a standout franchise. Considering franchising? This episode is a MUST-WATCH! Choose the right path at https://ggthefranchiseguide.com

DISCLAIMER: The information on this podcast is for general information purposes only. Franchising involves risk and careful consideration should be given before making any decisions.

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Transcript

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Well, I guess we can start there. My real name is not Spike just for everybody listening. My parents were not that crazy. So Spike's a nickname. Got the nickname when I was five years old. I got my first pair of baseball spikes growing up. Loved them. I was at that crazy little kid. I had two older brothers. So I was a wild child. I wore my baseball spikes to like school church out to eat. Everybody just started calling me spike now. I'm 32 years old and I just can't shake it, man. Now it may suck a little bit early on when you're out there in it, doing some of those appointments, but as I mean, like anything worth having it, it takes time and there's some hard work involved, but I do think there's a great opportunity to scale and remove yourself from the business quickly so you can focus on X, Y, and Z to grow it. Cause at the end of the day, we're not just trying to sell people franchises. We're awarding them. And we need them to be successful in order for us to be successful. 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 Grammatico, your Franchise Guide, the show where we help corporate executives experience time and financial freedom via franchising. Thanks for joining us. Super excited for our guest today. But before I introduce my guests wanted to thank the audience and everyone listening in we really appreciate your feedback. I know you wanted to hear from other people you know as opposed to just me and we were bringing on franchise companies. We're bringing on funding Attorney CPAs to give feedback as we know we polled the audience and a lot of you have told us that You are first time or looking to be first time business owner. So super excited This is all about education This is all about, inspiring people to look into hiring themselves and owning a business. Go to the website, ggthefranchiseguide. com, you can book a call there, you can listen to 220 previous episodes. Our guest today, I'm gonna bring him on here, is Spike Albrecht from Art of Drawers. Spike, welcome to the show. Yes, sir. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. I'm looking forward to it. I'm really excited give the audience maybe a little bit of a background, a little bit of a bio on how you got hooked up with art of drawers and maybe a little bit of background into your kind of franchise journey. Yeah, for sure. Definitely an interesting journey stumbled into the, to the franchise space, like most people. But born and raised in Northwest Indiana went to the university of Michigan for undergrad did grad school at Purdue university. I was actually fortunate enough. I played basketball in college. That was my first true love post college, bounced around was In the business world for a little bit, doing some medical sales, then got back into coaching was struggling to figure out what I wanted to do. Hadn't really done much outside of basketball for much of my life. So I reverted back to hoops cause that was really all I knew. And it was one thing I knew I was good at. So I was coaching for like four or five years, but ultimately decided that. And for those of you who are listening, who don't know, like college basketball is an absolute grind. It's nonstop. So I knew that's not what I wanted for the next 30 years, late nights, weekends. So I shifted to get back into the business world. I connected with a friend and mentor from the university of Michigan called john Rachi. John played football at michigan and he connected me with a group called the rep him group. Like he started introducing me to the franchise space. He works for a company called Fran Worth. So he had started connecting me with some different franchise consultants like yourself and then the development firms, after learning about the roles and responsibilities and what you were doing on the day to day basis, I was like, okay, this is something I could see myself doing and getting excited about. So I connected with rep I'm about a little over two years ago. We're a franchise development firm. We partner with emerging brands like art of drawers, and then I head up development for AOD. Have been working with them for about a year and a half now it's been an awesome journey. I love the space. I love what I do. I get to, work with great folks, probably like the many people listening in right now coming from corporate America, but it's just a really cool gig. I mean, it's very gratifying. I always say the who, not how, who do you know, Dan Sullivan wrote a book from strategic coach and it's who, it's leveraging those relationships. I have a son that's a junior in high school, looking to attend college. So introducing them to various people, just for exposure to learn about how do I, let me learn a little bit about computer science or finance and things like that. So love, love that story. I guess, tell us a little bit about what is or what does art of drawers the franchise do? Yeah. So I'm the director of franchise development for art of drawers. AOD is a service brand. So we specialize in custom pullout drawers for kitchens, pantries, and bathrooms. We also do cabinet lighting and cabinet refacing. So what I tell folks is, we're merging two sectors. We're merging the home organizational piece, which if you can see my background, the drawers retrofit into existing cabinetry. So we grow, we go in and help folks re imagine their space, customers who are looking for, more organization, more accessibility, more storage. We help provide that through our custom solutions. And then we also do cabinet lighting and cabinet refacing, which is going to be more of the aesthetics that home renovation space. For folks who Want to get new cabinets or, transform the look and feel of their kitchen, but don't want to spend, 70, 80, a hundred thousand dollars refacing is a really good option along with lighting, because it just spices up, your space gives it a new look and feel, and it's usually a fraction of the price. I bring a lot of franchise companies on this is not necessarily to promote the brands in that, this is the brand you have to look at. It's really to give an outline as to the different types of franchise models. Not everyone, as we're going to dive into here in a second, is a good fit for every brand. Each franchise company is looking for an ideal franchise avatar. For example, that may be someone that needs to be full time in the business versus part time. So can you talk to us about, so someone is just new to franchising who is the ideal franchise candidate? For sure. Yeah, that's, I think that's the most important thing as you're evaluating brands, right? For us, it's definitely more owner operator or full time, right? meaning we want you to be involved in the day to day. I would say the different avatars and personas, we're looking for, it really comes down to two things because of the way that our business model is structured. You have to be comfortable and enjoy building and managing teams as an owner with art of drawers. You're putting together, a mini crew per se of designers and installers. They're both 1099, typically our owners start out, they run design appointments or sales appointments. And then you bring on an installer that is 1099. They're typically, a local handyman, kitchen and closet guy, whatever it is. But you're managing that crew and then there's also a sales and networking component. So for folks out there, if this space is of interest to you and you love getting out in the community, right? Attending networking events and working home shows, trade shows, art festivals. Farmers markets, things like that. This is a really great opportunity as with most service brands, being able to get out and do some of that networking and grassroots efforts on your own is in my opinion, I think that's what separates the top performers from the rest of the system. I love that. And I always tell people when you're looking at a franchise company like AOD Look at your role initially, but then look at your role, six to 12 months down the road. Initially, it's that learning curve, especially if you've never owned the business. You're just trying to figure out how to read maybe a profit and loss. Maybe that's something completely new to you or running a, a campaign on Facebook or overseeing marketing or whatever the case may be. So look into kind of what that initially looks like and then later on. What do you see? A year down the road what does the life of a franchise owner look like? Yeah, it'll look a lot different for sure. It's a very scalable business and most of the people that we're bringing on now and just a quick, background. Like we're at about a year and a half in, we got 27 franchisees for right around 95 locations. I've worked with them all and taken them through the process. So you're starting to see some of those traits and tendencies, the first three to six months, everyone's starting out involved in the business, learning and understanding our products, process solutions. Getting out and getting their hands dirty, but nine, 12, 15 months in, the ultimate goal is to step out and build the business. It's the old saying, spend time, on the business and not in it. And that's where we're getting to right now with a couple of our more tenured folks in the system. In 12, 15, 18 months in, it's more so managing and overseeing your team. Right. Doing like observation appointments, ride alongs, giving constructive feedback, things like that. But it's really getting out and doing some of the networking, connecting with realtors, home builders, countertop companies, flooring companies, creating your referral network, doing some of those things on the biz dev side, that's what we deem more of our empire builders. Like those are the folks who really want to get out and buy three, four, five, six territories, because they see the scalability. In the vision here, two, three, four years down the road. Now it may suck a little bit early on when you're out there in it, doing some of those appointments, but as I mean, like anything worth having it, it takes time and there's some hard work involved, but I do think there's a great opportunity to scale and remove yourself from the business quickly so you can focus on X, Y, and Z to grow it. there is something to say. I ran my business full time. My franchise, when I first got started. And you tend to learn the business much faster, managing it from afar. Just learning every aspect. Maybe I wore the hats, all the hats too long. And that's a mistake I made 20 years ago. I got a better appreciation of how long a job should take and, the different types of marketing, I've worked for a major investment firm. I never had to do marketing. It was all done for me. We just worked with the clients assigned to us. It was really nice and you get that better appreciation, but I think you most importantly, you get to figure out. I have certain skill sets, but these are the roles I really enjoy in the business. Like some people, maybe they don't like going on a sales appointment. They'll do it the first year to get it up and running, but they love the networking aspect. Yeah. The chamber of events and things like that. So are you seeing that people going and maybe envisioning one role and then switching over and doing something else? Yeah. I think, until you get in, you never really know, Until you start playing around with it and figuring out what you like, what you don't like. With our model, a lot of the feedback I've gotten early on from franchisees it's so important, I think with any business, is finding good people and how do I hire and keep in retain top talent. So a lot of people early on, with art of drawers, they're like, all right, I want to remove myself as quickly as possible. Let me just go out and grab a couple of designers installers. Cause it's a fun gig. People are interested. So you'll get. These 1099 folks but until you do a little bit of your, of it yourself, and you really know and understand the business, you might not know what you're looking for. So I do think to your point, like getting out there, doing it, whether that's design, our folks aren't doing installs. Like we're not having our owners install drawers and whatnot, but they come to training along with their installer. They learn it, right. It just helps from a credibility standpoint. And it just changes, it drastically improves that learning curve and it just helps you recruit, that much better in, in my opinion, based on what I've seen. Right. That makes a lot of sense. Conversations that I have, so I'll tie in. So for everyone, anyone listening in, I like to tie in, I don't, I, everything is private. I don't give people's names obviously, but share conversations I have because not everyone is you think you're isolated. I'm the only one with this question, for example, I listened to the president of the IFA. I did a podcast, I think it was about a month ago and he was talking about, I think three quarters of people out there have expressed interest in owning a business. This is a survey done, I believe in the U S I'm not sure if it included Canada, but we'll just say the U S. And then three quarters of those people never actually move forward because they don't even know where to start. And so I like to tie these things in and say, Hey, there is a process to learn, but if the process is not to learn, if the brand is a good fit for you, we need to make sure a franchise is a good fit. Right. And then if a franchise is a good fit, what is this? Ideal business look like. And we talked about expectations from your brand, who is a good fit and things like that. So in all the conversations we're having it's all about reverse engineering, figuring out what you want, why you want the business, your access to capital, the time you can spend in the business. So I want to just encourage everyone to take that step back and really, give that some thought and. Use going back to who, not how speak with, if you're speaking with a, another franchise, he asked them about their feedback or whoever your franchise consultant is, if you're working with a consultant ask those questions. I always like to ask, where the business is going. So can you talk about anything new and exciting? I'm not sure what you can share, but I always ask, talk to the captain steering the ship where is the brand kind of moving towards anything you can share would be great. Yeah, for sure. Up till about last year. Our core products and I would say most of our sales and revenue came from, the custom pullout drawers that you're seeing in my background. So we added the refacing and the lighting. About a little over a year ago. So that's definitely still a little bit new, still working out some kinks and fine tune in that process, but that's really new and exciting. For folks who aren't familiar with refacing and what that is, that's the drawer fronts along with the hardware and hinges. That's much bigger tickets. It's a much more popular sector as well. So that's something that franchisees are really excited about. Obviously more money, less jobs gets people pretty excited. But also the technology. So our founder, Alan Young is very forward thinking when it comes to tech. So we just rolled out a new 3d design software that we'll use for our in home consultations to improve the customer experience. It's interactive. We rolled that out in Q4 of last year. So that's built into our proprietary software. And I know he's super into AI and leveraging chat GPT and all those sorts of things. That's a little bit over my head. I'll leave that to Alan to explain, but we are, having, we are leaning heavily into AI and chat GPT in terms of sales calls and, role playing from a sales training aspect. I think we got a lot of new and exciting things on the brink moving forward. And Alan's an innovator, like he's always looking to implement and test out the latest and greatest. So we'll see what he's got cooking up for the remainder of 2025. I love that, reinvesting back in the brand, helping the franchisees become more profitable. And those additional revenue streams I think is big in any brand Some people are already talking about second brands and I said, well, you may not need that second brand if you're able to, there's so much more to offer. You already have that customer. The upsell is much easier than bringing something completely different. Build, building that relationship is going to be priceless. And then obviously that customer, if there's less vendors, less touch points, less invoicing, it just makes the the experience so much more pleasurable makes it much simpler. what advice would you give to people in that initial stage, trying to figure out if a franchise ownership is the right fit. Yeah, not just trying to plug you here, but in all honesty, I would start with, you got to use a franchise consultant in my opinion. I mean, there's just so many different brands and so much information to sift through. I was new to the franchise space two, two and a half years ago, and I was probably in the same boat as a lot of people. I didn't know what the heck it was, Like I didn't understand the franchise consultant side development, all the different brands and concepts out there. So I do think you guys do a great job working with candidates and helping them narrow down their search based on, strengths and weaknesses and getting them aligned with the right brands. that's the most important thing, at the end of the day to help them be successful. But then as you start going through the process, you guys will get them lined up with a couple different brands I always tell people this when I'm taking them through our process with Art of Drawers. I think the most important thing is you got to talk to current franchisees and then you got to talk to the leadership team, right? Like I, I think we have a great group of franchisees, but you got to hear from them. I tell people, obviously, I'm the sales guy, I'm heading up development. I love art drawers. I'm going to tell you the brand's great, but you got to talk to the current franchisees to hear. What they like, what they don't like. Was there anything, that they didn't realize going into, the conversations leading up to buying the franchise, I think those are all super helpful, conversation. Cause at the end of the day, we're not just trying to sell people franchises. We're awarding them. And we need them to be successful in order for us to be successful. And I know that's how I think of it. I know that's how you think of it, Alan and the leadership team at art of drawers. So I would just take your time, do your due diligence. Hone in on a couple of brands and then just really do a deep dive and see if this is the right business for you. Yeah. I like that. And it's everyone's situations different. It's not just one size fits all. You want to make sure that the fits there really, a lot of people get really fixated on the widget. What's the shiny object out there. I always try to bring people back and say, don't worry about the widget. Let's figure out what ideally that business looks like from the standpoint of. Do I want a retail location or do I want to, work this from home? Do I want, a hundred employees or a big group or something smaller? So what would be your advice for people looking at the widget or, they're looking at and saying art of drawers and kitchens. I have no experience. I worked, I was, I'm a doctor or I worked on wall street. What do you say to those people that just are so fixated on the widget or feel like they need experience? Yeah, I would say, I mean, I think most importantly, what do you want your day in the life to look like and then what's important to you in terms of, freedom and flexibility, do you want a business with brick and mortar or low overhead, do you want full time employees or 1099, right? I think there's pros and cons to both. So that helps with the risk assessment in terms Of what you're looking for. But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't get fixated on the shiny new object. Take your time. Do your due diligence and then really go through the process. So we touched on a little bit about, what, you want your roles and responsibilities to be within the business. And then for the other part, you mentioned about, people who are worried about not having experience, within that certain industry or sector. That's why you franchise, right? Like we have all the systems and processes. We have the playbook to support you. I can tell you with Art of We have 27 franchisees. I'm not sure if any of them came from the home service space or have a background in design or, in installing drawers, right? Like that's part of putting that team together. I can't speak for every brand out there, but I know with Art of Drawers. If you're passionate about helping people get now in the community and networking and you're comfortable building and managing teams, right, that's a great fit for us because we don't want you to be the world's best designer or the world's best installer. We want you to learn it in the first 2, months to really get a firm grasp around the business, but then, you recruit, you help coach and train and mentor folks and you put the pieces in place and focus on what you're good at, which is typically, managing folks, managing teams, and then sales and networking in the community. Yeah. And that's crucial, management. And that's something the franchisor is going to teach you. You're going to come with that skillset sales. It depends on the role that you're going to be playing in the business, but that's super important. And you'll notice. Just from working with other companies and speaking with them, when you look at a franchise and you back away six, six to 12 months, a lot of the roles are going to be similar. It's going to be oversight of a team. You may have a general manager in place. It's reviewing KPIs. It's networking at chamber. So you're going to see a lot of. Similar kind of characteristics as to what your role is going to be. Not saying the brands are going to be similar, but just your role in general, some brands will offer you more, some will offer turnkey marketing without a call center, So those are things that to dive into and say, what is going to be, because that's going to also affect your investment. It's going to affect your head count, how many people you're going to need in the office, if there's an office involved. for us, we're not brick and mortar. So art of George is definitely a little bit of a lower overhead type investment. There's very few fixed costs within our model. We do have the turnkey marketing that you mentioned. We do have the call center, so we help run their digital and print, we do all the SEO PPC, we run their print campaigns. We have the call center that's in house that handles lead gen customer service. The model's built for you guys to focus on sales and growth, right? And then it's done very intentionally so that we handle a lot of those day to day operations. So you guys don't get bogged down with that. That folks can get out there and grow and scale their business. And do what they want to do, which is make money. I'm going to go to training, get super excited. And I get back to the office and all of a sudden I'm like, wait a second, What do I do here? All right. I need retraining. So what does support initial support, ongoing support look like? Yeah, we do the initial support and, pre training, probably similar to a lot of different companies out there. We'll get them queued up for their onboarding. They'll come out to Atlanta. They spend five full days with us in person. That's franchise partner training. We do three days of installer training. So that's also in person. They have to go through the sales training, all the different design and processes there. And then there's the ongoing virtual training. So we do a weekly huddles or, zoom calls within the whole system. And then there's bi weekly check ins with the marketing team, but considering, and I know, this considering that Art of Drawers is still more of an emerging brand. They're getting a ton of support from the corporate team. And home office in Atlanta. Folks in our system aren't just a number like they have direct access to Alan Young, who's a founder in the whole C suite team, Leslie Josh, who's our chief marketing officer. So there's a ton of support there. And then, it's nice that our founder, this is his second time building a very successful franchise brand. he started a similar concept back in 2008. Similar to art of drawers grew that to over 200, 250 locations and then sold it. So this is really his second venture in the franchise space within a home service sector. Having a a leader and a founder who understands how to grow and scale, but most importantly, support franchisees and make sure that they're successful. He's willing to go above and beyond to make sure that we provide the support need there. I love that. Yeah. I always say, learn about the captain steering the ship and this is not the first rodeo. And they've done this before. Looking into track record, even with an emerging brand has done it in a very similar space. The end of these shows, I always like to wrap up and to end off with a fun fact. Oh boy, fun fact. We'll keep it PG. Yeah, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. No, for sure. Fun fact about Spike. Okay. Well, I guess we can start there. My real name is not Spike just for everybody listening. My parents were not that crazy. So Spike's a nickname. Got the nickname when I was five years old. I got my first pair of baseball spikes growing up. Loved them. I was that crazy little kid. I had two older brothers. So I was a wild child. I wore my baseball spikes to like school church out to eat. Everybody just started calling me spike now. I'm 32 years old and I just can't shake it, man. So I'm still going by spike. Hey, it's memorable. It stands out. Right. Yeah. And I didn't, I mean, obviously you send us the notes, but yeah, it's like, I didn't know, I didn't know that story prior to us scheduling the podcast. That's funny. Well, listen I hope everyone found this super helpful. As I mentioned, I'm bringing on other franchise companies. We're going to have brick and mortar concepts. I want you to experience exactly a day in the life, what it looks like, your roles and just about everything else. And I hope everyone finds this super helpful. we poll, and ask questions to our audience. Instead of me figuring out what I think is important, I want to know what your questions are. This show was created because of that. We really appreciate your support. Spike. Thank you again. For joining us today maybe we'll do a follow up with updates end of year. And yeah, really appreciate everything and we'll definitely talk soon. Yes, sir. I appreciate it. Thank you. Take care. 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.