Why Franchises Are the Smart Investor’s Play 🏬 EP133

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast.

Normally, we're inside of an RV motorhome, but instead, today we are inside this $100 million mansion in Beverly Hills that Ty Lopez is hosting his events at as we speak.

Some of his guests happen to be the people I was going to interview, and so bada bing, bada boom, we decided to take over his library to make this podcast episode.

So as you guys know, we cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity.

We're going to talk about all those topics.

And keep in mind, when you're listening to this podcast, it's not always just for you.

It might be for someone from your past, present, future.

Meaning, I might interview someone about real estate, owning nightclubs, a rapper, an athlete, a celebrity.

And the topic that they're talking about may not pertain to you, but it might be for someone in your life from your past, present, future.

So listen to these episodes.

We keep them to under 40 minutes because the average workout is 45 minutes.

The average commute to work is 45 minutes.

So this episode will be under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure.

So without further ado, I'm going to have two guests at the same time give you a quick two-minute bio each so we can get straight to the money.

Awesome.

Hey, Chris Wright, co-founder of the company Franzi.

My background is in software and product, and we're building a product called Franzi Think the Zillow for franchising.

So we help people get paired with franchise brands that are a good fit for them and help them become entrepreneurs.

Very cool.

And I'm Alex Mersnak, originally from Minnesota, based in Charlotte, North Carolina now.

The other co-founder of Franzi and a serial entrepreneur.

This is my third company, the last one we raised $35 million in venture capital for.

It was a laundry and dry cleaning, pickup and delivery business.

Eventually started franchising part of that business, which is how I got into the world of franchising and saw.

you know, just how broken and misaligned the franchise buying process is.

So with Franzi, we're hoping to disrupt the traditional broker model and democratize access to buying small businesses and franchise businesses.

So, the company you raised the $35 million for, did you stop?

Did you get bored?

Did you sell it?

A mixture of all the above, actually.

So, I was nine years into it.

Whoa, yeah, long, long, long journey.

And we started at the advent of all the like Uber for X businesses.

So, you saw like shipped and Instacart and Wag and Rover.

I was like, someone's going to do this for laundry and dry cleaning.

I'm going to be pissed if it's not me and someone else does it.

So, we started up in 2016.

And the reason I think I eventually started to to move on from it last year was we had pivoted into a business that had trucks and washers and dryers and eventually you know vertically integrated the business and I was like I don't know if I'm the guy that takes us from 30 laundromats open now to 300 or you know 3,000 so hired a CEO last year to go work on Franzi with Chris full-time very cool what about you

What about me?

Yeah.

Last company, what did you decide?

What happened there?

Yeah, so before Franzi, I was with a company called HR Logics.

We helped provide tax credit software and HR compliance software to businesses.

We grew that business from, I think, seven people when I joined and a couple million in revenue to close to $90 million in revenue by the time I left.

I had just had my first kid and we had been growing this business for about three years and it had gotten pretty intense and I really enjoyed the people I was working with and the business I was building, but I wanted to take a step back and spend a little time with my family and really be present for the first six months of my son's life.

Around that time, as I was kind kind of getting decompressed, Alex called me about this idea of Franzi.

Sent the bat signal?

He sent the bat signal.

We've been wanting to work together for a long time, and I was ready to jump in and start building Franzi alongside him.

Did you guys happen to live in the same city or convert?

So he was in Charlotte originally when we met, but then he'd moved to Birmingham for the HR Logics business.

And I was like, all right, come on.

Come on back.

Very cool.

All right, so let's talk about the make money side.

When you're first getting into an entrepreneurial career, someone out there listening so they dive right into entrepreneurship so they go take a job at you know work at a company first like talk to yourself about your thoughts about the beginning of an entrepreneur's journey when they're like 21 22 23 years old yeah so for me like i grew up my dad was a financial advisor and i think i got to see a little bit of that like eat what you kill mentality and he'd always told me like there's three types of careers or you know paths you can take you can either work for someone else uh you can have you know the ability to work for yourself which is what he was doing or you're gonna have people working for you.

And that just always resonated and stuck with me.

And I knew I needed to be in bucket two or three.

And he's like, you'll live a probably more fulfilled, happier life doing that.

And so I

took that advice wholeheartedly and started a business in college.

A lot of entrepreneurship, was addicted to it.

And through that kind of course, like seeing my peers, I think realized we're pushed frequently to get good grades in high school, to then get into the good college, to get good grades again, again, to then go work at the Fortune 100 company.

And I just didn't want to do that.

I knew that wasn't for me.

And so my advice is, especially to people at that age or that juncture in life, is to take the risk then.

That's probably one of the best times in your life to do it because you don't have a ton of responsibility, probably don't have kids at that point, a ton of debt or bills or anything.

And so I always say buck the norm and

try that business and take that risk at that age.

What do you think?

Yeah,

I had two role models in my life.

Early on, we were talking about kind of business and what I should do with my life and kind of how to get started.

And I don't think that a lot of people really know who they want to be when they grow up, but I'm still kind of learning who that is for me.

But

that's right.

My father-in-law is a serial entrepreneur, and he encouraged me to kind of just explore entrepreneurship.

And so I started my first business in college.

It was an Amazon FBA business.

I know a lot of people explored those at one point.

And we had gotten pretty big at the time and then took my dad's advice and went down the kind of corporate route and went to go work for Deloitte and consulting and really enjoyed that as well, but determined that I really kind of want to be the owner of my own destiny a little bit.

And so much to my wife's chagrin left and started a cleaning company was on demand, Uber for cleaning, similar to laundry.

I got out sooner than he did, but I think that You really have to figure out which you want to build and how you want to build it.

But more than anything, it's a really great time, like Alex said, to take risks when you have less responsibilities.

I know that it was easier for me taking this risk having a kid already because I had done it in the past.

But if I was just starting from scratch at 31 years old and deciding to be an entrepreneur, I don't know that it would be nearly as easy as it was back then.

So, quick question on the laundromat side.

Every article study I see, because I talk to Cody Sanchez a lot,

showcases that laundromats are actually the lowest failure rate of any business to acquire.

You guys know anything about that?

Yes, so I mean we had 30 plus, we still have 30 plus of them open and going.

I think it's because it's such an essential need.

People have to have clean clothes and so if you're in a lower income community or an area where there isn't access to a washer and dryer, you have guaranteed customers.

And they're fairly simple businesses to run.

There's no employees if you don't want to.

It can be an unattended laundromat.

And so I think that's why there's a lot of

success in the model.

Now, the size of that success varies, right?

You could have a business that only picks off 30 grand in cash flow a year if it's a bad area or bad equipment.

But I've seen laundromats do six, 700, 800K in cash flow with very, very few employees.

Very cool.

So the 30 laundromats, you guys are running those, owning those?

How does that work?

So some of them are corporately owned and some are franchised.

So we started franchising the laundromats in 2021.

under a brand called Laundrilab.

We sold 118 locations in 14 months.

And that's the beauty of the franchise model is it can scale and just blow up.

You have other partners with you that have the capital that are building and developing a series of locations with you.

And so we could grow the business pretty rapidly.

The first six years we started, we had two corporate stores.

And the following two years we started franchising, we had 30.

Whoa, that's a good thing.

So it's just, it speeds everything up and you bring those partners in.

So I invested in Everbull in 2018.

There was 13 locations.

Blinked our eyes.

2019, there was 21 locations.

I raised $5 million from the company to help scale it.

Seven seconds later, it was COVID.

So we had to furlough the staff.

We had, at that point, 25 locations open right around March when the closing day was, March 2020.

And then Jeff Fenster went on the full attack, signed like over 300 leases, sold franchises all over the country.

Drew Brees invested, Jason Tatum, all these things, like Kamar Usman, everybody started jumping in.

And now, a few years later there's 103 locations one new one every six days we're building for everybody else we're building for Shaq Mark Wahlberg EOS we're building other people's locations and just I think about that shutdown period of like most people shut down that's why it was called a shutdown especially franchises they were freaking out they weren't no one was willing to go sell franchises And so that leads me to, tell me about Franzi.

Like, what do you, what is this?

Why is this?

Like, why did you decide to go down the franchise model?

Yeah.

So when we started franchising the laundromats, we knew nothing about franchising.

It was this crash course like entrepreneurs do.

It's a problem, let's just go figure it out.

And so we started franchising.

We realized, how do we sell a franchise?

We have to do sales and run ads and go on podcasts.

And we worked with what's called an FSO, a franchise sales organization that essentially acts as your internal sales team.

And so that was effective.

They helped a lot.

They stood up our sales process with us.

So we were so, you know, because we were so focused on operating the stores and getting our new franchisees open.

But we eventually crossed paths with business brokers, franchise brokers.

And what a lot of people don't realize is those franchise brokers take a 60% commission,

6-0

on the franchise fee.

Wait, what?

People don't know this.

And you'll get reached out on LinkedIn by these individuals.

You're like, oh, this is a free service for me.

They tell you they make money from the brand, which they do, but they leave out how much it is that's leaving the system.

that franchise fee should be reinvested in training and site selecting and marketing 60 and so i would go to these conferences with these you know franchise brokers and i saw just how much money they were all making and how kind of like fat and happy they all were and all the brands were like i hate having to do this but i don't know what else to do i'm so focused on scaling the business that this is just This is the way it is.

And as an entrepreneur, you hear that a bunch of upset people, one side that's very fat and happy.

There's a problem here that can be solved with technology, using AI, better sales process.

And so our goal is to democratize the

process around franchise discovery, franchise buying and selling.

So what stage is the company in now?

So Chris and I started working full-time on it last summer.

And the better half of last year was compiling the largest, most robust data set in franchising.

We have over 25,000 FTDs, franchise disclosure documents across 3,600 brands.

We've trained the LLM, we've trained the model to be very, very accurate at recommending the best brands for you as you come through.

We soft-launched in November, hard-launched January of this year.

We've raised about 3.3 million in venture capital.

We've started closing deals like crazy and helping people find the best fit franchise for them.

So, how do you make money?

So, similar to a broker and that we get paid based on success.

No,

it's a much lower, reduced flat fee.

And so we tell our clients up front, we make money from the brand, here's how much.

And it's a flat dollar amount so that we have no incentive to push one brand over another in front of you.

It can be objective.

Yes.

So whether I want to get a gym or whenever

it doesn't matter to you.

Yeah.

Versus a broker, they might only show you, the analogy I use is brokers today will only have an inventory of like 30 to 50 brands, but you again, as their client, don't realize that.

You think, oh, this person's going to bat for me.

They're going to look at the thousands of brands.

they're only showing the brands that have paid to play in the background 30 to 40k just to get into the group and so it's like a real estate agent showing you houses that they're also the listing agent they'll pluck those things out yeah it's crazy no you would never buy a house like that so why would you buy a business that way okay so i go to the website where's an app it's a website

i go to the website i say i'm dan This is how much am I telling you my budget or tell you my area?

What am I telling you?

Yeah, you're answering round 10 10 questions, giving us interests, what industries you're interested in, your budget, kind of where you want to put the franchise.

Any of those few simple pieces of information that feeds into our AI, which looks at everything we know about every single brand, which the model is trained on, and then pulls back with nine or so recommendations.

Then you're going to see a screen that'll have kind of Tinder style, thumbs up, thumbs down.

As you like different brands, that then feeds in the algorithm again.

On the end of that journey, you kind of get connected with one of our team members, one of our coaches, who's going to help narrow that list down.

And we spend a lot of time with prospects on the front end to make sure that they're as educated as possible, but also to make sure that they're getting matched with the right brands.

We're not just rushing them towards a decision or rushing them to talk to brands.

We want to make sure they understand franchising and understand what they're getting themselves into before they actually get to that stage.

And so, are there experienced brands that are going to come there, or experienced investors, or you think it's going to be someone that's just starting with one to three locations that wants to

have them?

We have three main ICPs, ideal customer profiles.

It's the corporate grinder, they've been working nine to five, they want to do something entrepreneurial, but they don't have to do that.

They've got 600K saved up,

so there's that group, then there's like the side hustler, you know, kind of hacker type that does short-term rentals, and they've got crypto.

Totally central by Legion Act.

Exactly, exactly.

And then the third group is your sophisticated opera.

They own five units, ten units, twenty units of a concept, and they're looking to add to that portfolio and find the next Dave's hot chicken or hot concept that they're discovering on Franzi.

So I go there, I discover it, and you guys recommend FitBody Boot Camp.

Okay, now what?

Yep, so you have a coach that you can use as much or as little as you want.

So franchise advisor.

They can help you with finding the right lending or capital structure.

They help you with finding a franchise CPA, a franchise attorney, the right commercial real estate agent to help you find the site if it's a retail business.

And then if there is ability to negotiate with the brand, they'll help you be in your corner through that process as well.

So they walk you through the whole franchise buying process to the day that you sign, and then we're not done at that point either.

We help you with all the things that the brand isn't already doing.

The brand's going to do training and marketing and some of the site selection.

We're all the business in a box type of stuff.

Get your entity formed, we'll help you set that up, we'll help you with all those other things that every business has to do, regardless of whether it's a franchise or not.

And then, what about the building?

Have you talked to Jeff Henster about WeBuild to actually go build the locations?

Yes, I was on Jeff's show probably a month or two ago and met justin sloan who's your big operator in in texas um yeah we'll eventually pull webuild in for

offering to do that yeah interesting okay so i go there you tell me if you buy the boot camp i talk to my coach i've got 350k saved up ready to go do i talk to you again Do I need you anymore?

Yeah, the idea is that every step of the buying process, even if you hit a hiccup along the way in a brand conversation, we're having conversations with you, your coaches, every single time you have one of those.

There's debrief calls, if you want to have them, right?

Depends on how much the prospect wants to engage, but has debrief calls at the end of each of your meetings with the brand, helps you understand what came out of that meeting, helps you have new questions to ask at that meeting, and then walks with you all the way to Discovery Day, which is that kind of final step before you sign or don't sign, and then helps you make that decision at the end of the day.

So they're there as much or as little as you want, but really throughout the whole process and then thereafter.

How do people find you guys?

Where's your clients coming from?

Yeah, so it's three main channels right now.

It's programmatic SEO that we're using.

So we have all these very data-rich articles on top 10 ice cream franchises of 2025 that have investment costs and revenue and Google My Business reviews.

So SEO we're dominating in.

paid ads, podcasts, and we're starting to put a ton of our own content out.

We launched a show recently called How I Franchise This, which is a complaint on the NPR podcast.

We're telling the story of like the normal dude, right?

It's not Colonel Sanders or Ray Kroc.

It's like we want to talk to Susan and Tim who left their jobs at Bank of America.

Now they run three

fitness concepts and they love it.

They've been more fulfilled doing that than anything else they've done.

We want to tell the story of that average person, that average operator that went and did it.

So someone saved up this money.

They're working their core job.

Maybe they sold some real estate.

On the investment side of this podcast, I like to ask, like, how do people make decisions like that?

Because they can invest in the stock market, cryptocurrency, more real estate.

There's so many different things.

SP 500, why franchises?

Yeah, so I think franchising is one of the most underestimated wealth plays of

all time.

I mean, it's 10% of our country's GDP, and no one's talking about it.

It's always like, oh, it's McDonald's and Subway, and that's what it is.

They don't realize it's hospitality and home services and fitness and health and wellness.

So it really spans all these different categories.

And then the success rate, which I think is important for people that are being entrepreneurs for the first time or the 20th time, is the five-year success rate on a franchise business is 85% compared to half of independent businesses failing after five years.

And so that's the reason we're preaching about it is.

Entrepreneurship has changed both of our lives in a very positive, incredible way.

But not everyone wants to go be a tech entrepreneur or a real estate entrepreneur.

And this is a really good but diverse set of options to become an entrepreneur in a more de-risked way.

Interesting.

What about for you guys personally?

As you guys are making capital, what do you like to invest into?

I mean, we're both looking at more ways to invest in franchising as much as possible.

Alex has invested in a couple of franchises.

And me personally, I'm trying to build out a franchise portfolio as well.

We haven't, we're just kind of getting it off the ground, but I think that we want to put our money where our mouth is and invest in franchises because we do believe it is a very de-risk way to build out your own personal wealth wealth for your family and generational wealth it scales it's got a playbook that's built in and it gives you the opportunity to build on a system and platform that's got support built in that you wouldn't necessarily otherwise have if you're building something from scratch or buying an existing business yeah i'm doing five indoor golf simulators in minnesota called it's called another nine and i like it because there's no employees there's no food in bed it's like anytime fitness you fob in or use the app to get in it's private based though.

So it'll be like a room like this where you can go with your family or buddies

at three in the afternoon or three in the morning.

There's no employees there.

It's fob access.

And I really like this one bagel concept called pop-up bagels.

Oh, yeah, I follow that guy.

It's blowing up.

The average unit volumes are crazy.

It's like $2 million in revenue off of...

bagels.

Really?

And

it's the simplest thing, one of the genius things they did is they force you to buy three.

You can't buy one.

Can't buy one bagel.

You can only get three, like groups of three.

That's the

thing.

And the cost to get in is like $450 to $650K.

They've sold all of Maine to Florida, all of Texas, all of California.

They're blown up.

It's like the next, I'd say Crumble Cookies, but for bagels.

Bagels.

Bagels.

Interesting.

Yeah, I was wondering why I followed that guy.

There was something about it that made me compelled by it.

They're doing new flavors every week and cream cheese.

you know, crazy,

you know, spice flavors and cookies and cream.

And that's that's what I think people are getting hyped up about.

It's the Crumble playbook, but for bagels.

Yeah.

I mean, Crumble's got a multi-billion dollar valuation now.

It's just staggering to watch what they're doing.

Okay.

So also on the investing side, how can people invest into learning?

Like, how do they learn about franchises?

They can figure out, do I want a pop-up bagel?

Do I want an Everbull?

Do I want a...

Fit buddy boot camp?

Do I want a laundromat?

Like, where do they study?

How do they invest in themselves?

So there's a lot of good podcasters out there's brian beers there's fran dogs and the the wolf of franchising are good like newsletter resources we have our podcast where we tell stories of people getting into it how they got into it how they financed it how they identified what's a podcast called uh how i franchise this

um and then on franzi as well we have all sorts of franchising 101 guides so what is an fdd in the first place and what section should i look for and then a lot of our you know software our process is to help with that education to get over that first step of fear because that's where most people get hung up is i don't even know where to start so i'm not going to we want to make it as easy as looking for a house on zill make it fun honestly where you can go look and see like i could see myself doing this it fits me it's a 97 match etc

so we have tons of educational content on the on the site as well and then our coaches as well right

there's no obligation if you start talking to one of our team members there's no obligation to move forward even if it's just to understand if franchising is a good fit for you we sometimes tell people franchising might not be a good fit for them

which is part of what we believe in is transparency and objectivity, right?

We don't want to recommend one brand or the other because one brand pays us more, and we also want to make sure that we're transparent with people on how the whole process works and can educate them whether they become a client or not.

So as you're considering investing into the business, raise $3.3 million and growing, why does the company go raise $3 million?

Why is that part of the process?

Yeah, so we bootstrapped initially and we're like, oh, let's take some of the money from previous businesses.

And then we just, you know, we see this wave happening right now of AI starting to displace more and more white-collar jobs.

It's people that would go, you know, buy and run a franchise.

And we want to capitalize on the wave that's happening.

There's also the silver tsunami happening with the boomers transferring 15 trillion over the next decade.

And so our thought was we could either bootstrap and go a little slow, or we can raise money, accelerate product development, accelerate go-to-market, and be more aggressive on marketing marketing and driving awareness for what we're doing.

Because there's a lot of things out there that you could do.

You can go to biz, buy, sell.

You can go,

you know, consume Cody Sanchez's content.

There's all these other ways to buy a business, and we want to grab our piece of that mind share of, hey, franchising is a very viable way to get in donorship, and raising capital helps do that better and faster.

On to Alex's point earlier about

franchising making up 10% of the U.S.

GDP, but no one seems to really talk about it.

You can either buy a business, you can start a business from scratch, and then you maybe have a friend or a cousin or somebody who does franchising or is in franchising somehow.

We want to make franchising as mainstream as possible, and one of the best, quickest ways to get there is to invest more capital and making that story told at a more broader scale.

Let's talk about investing in people.

Let's say I am the doctor, accountant, lawyer that did save up half a million.

I can put in 350K into this thing, one of these franchises.

But I don't want to run it or I don't know how to run it.

How do I invest in people?

How do I go find somebody to run this thing or partner on this thing?

So not yet, but at some point, Franzi's going to pair capital with operators as well.

So part of that survey.

I was not teeing that up.

We're not there yet, but that's one of the product iterations we want to make is because I ran into it all the time.

You get these really, really good operators that ran five McDonald's for

a wealthy family or individual who just doesn't have enough money saved up to go buy their own restaurants.

They would be a great candidate to go pair with Dan, who's maybe saying, hey, I've got capital, but I don't want to run six Dave Top chickens.

So let's find the operator, give him some sweatshirts.

I own them, but I don't want to run them.

I want to eat at them and own them, but

not run them.

I don't want to post about it.

Definitely don't want to run it.

So my life is designed where I will not do a project without a quarterback.

I don't care how much money you tell me.

I don't care who, this, that,

I don't care about any of that stuff.

If I don't have a quarterback, which is a CEO, to run that company, I will not do the project.

Even if someone offers a boatload of capital.

there's a war chest.

Here's $12 million.

Dan, do this tequila brand with me.

No.

I'm not going to run it.

You're not going to run it.

Who's going to run it?

I don't want to find out later.

I don't want to go just hire someone off of LinkedIn or monster.com or hot jobs to go try to run it.

I need to know who the quarterback is or I am not in ever under any circumstance.

It comes up every week I'm pitched, well, every day I'm pitched, but every week I'm pitched like, Dun dun dun, like something that's fully capitalized.

Just be my partner, just be the advisor.

And I just say no.

I leave a lot of free money on the table, but I know the long-term effect of it is and the short-term.

If there's not a CEO, if there's not a quarterback to run this thing, there is no chance at all.

At all.

Can it get off the ground?

Maybe.

Can it get to XYZ?

Probably.

But like without someone running the day-to-day to day, not possible.

You need someone who's like blood, sweat, and tears and time, like the man in the arena.

Yes.

Constantly obsessing over it, thinking about it.

The way I described it is called ride or die.

So I'll give you a quick example.

Let's say there's two girls that are pitching right now to invest in their companies.

One girl, she went to Harvard, she got summa cum blah, blah, blah, blah, fanciest degrees you could imagine, and she's selling red cups.

And these red cups are going to be $2.99, very comparable to the other price point of other, the solo red cups that everyone knows at every grocery store.

But she's got the pedigree, she's got a business plan, all set.

This girl over here is selling green cups.

These green cups are biodegradable.

She donates a percentage to saving the elephants and the manatees.

And they're a little bit more expensive.

They're $3.99 because it is more expensive to make these green cups.

But this is her passion.

She's been studying everything.

She knows that they're

combustible, compatible, whatever the heck you call it, and they can be replanted.

And she has other things.

Every time you buy one of her packs of green cups, a tree is planted.

She's got it all.

Who do I want to invest into?

Green Cup.

Every single time.

You know why?

Because if Red Solo Cup girl gets an offer from Gary Vee or Microsoft to come work for her,

she's out of there.

Oh yeah, we'll give you 800K salary plus equity.

You see a puff of smoke, she can go work for them.

She doesn't care about the Red Cups.

It's just a business.

I can interchange Red Cups with flowers, cans, books.

She doesn't care.

It's just, it's a widget to her.

She just knows she can run a business because she has the pedigree.

This girl with the green cups, you can't offer her a million dollars to go leave or 800K to to go leave.

This is her life.

She wants to save the elephants and the manatees and plant seeds and plant trees.

Like, she cares deep in her soul about this thing.

And the money is a default byproduct of it that she might not even care about.

She might.

I hope she has some.

I do want her to care about it from that revenue perspective, but I want to know that she cares about the thing.

And I will pick her every single day.

And she might not have any college degree.

She might have left high school as a sophomore.

And I don't care about that part.

So I can build a team around her.

I can go get the Harvard girl to go work for her.

That I would love.

I would love for that girl to be the president.

But I want the green cup girl that's passionate to be the owner.

I want her to be the right, what I call ride or die.

I remember when Pomp, we were talking about Pomp earlier, invested in our first company.

He was like,

you're not going to leave in like six months and go backpack across Patagonia, are you?

I was like, what are you talking about?

He's like, I've had a bunch of investments where the founder just, you know, didn't have that heart and didn't have the passion into it.

And I get why he was asking that now.

But at the time, I was like, what do you mean?

No, this is like this is it this is all I do and think about it work most weekends and yeah you have to have I think that desire to win and be competitive and pour everything you have into it that's my biggest fear is the founder leaves

whether they leave for personal reasons they leave because they were lured away they leave because it got hired that is my fear in investing in a company because I'm betting on them, not the product.

The products are all interchangeable.

I always joke about Jeff Fenster, rememberable.

If he was selling pillows, I would have invested the same amount of money.

I say that same sentence all the time.

Because I would.

He's ride or die.

Morning, noon, and night.

He's on airplanes, trains, and automobiles, figuring out to scale his business over and over and over, no matter what.

The good stuff, the hard stuff, the whole world shuts down.

When the freaking world shut down in 2020, he went on vc and started doing $150,000 episodes.

He was selling $150,000 every 11 minutes of frozen SIE.

Alright, let's talk about the charity side of things.

Why do you think it's important for companies, whether it's for their employees, their investors, their partners, their clients, or front-facing, to have some type of charity component to their business?

I've always been a huge believer in do good while doing well.

And I think, without getting on the soapbox too much, if you think about whether the center of power used to sit in society, at one point it was very much religion.

The church had a lot of influence and control over society.

And then I think it shifted to...

government for a long period of time.

We very much operate in a society now where that power and that influence sits within businesses.

Yeah, we have the government still, but all the businesses are in the pockets of politicians and have a lot of influence on what we all consume and do.

And so I think businesses have a huge responsibility to have that element as part of their culture and their mission of doing good while doing well.

And part of the reason our mission at Franzi is to help the next million entrepreneurs is

they have that influence and the biggest propensity to positively impact society and the communities that they operate in.

So I think it's wildly important and I think there's good ways to do it through entrepreneurship, whether it's job creation or you're creating a ton of revenue to pay a ton of taxes on it.

Those taxes hopefully get used appropriately to get back to that community that you're in.

But then beyond that, what are the things can you do?

So at our laundromats, for example, we put read, play, learn centers in each location, or it's free books and a kid's play area for families to come in because it's a lot of single mothers and dads going into laundromats.

And we get new books every month and you could, you know, the kids could take them home, and we just restock them every month.

But it's things like that that don't cost the business a whole lot, but could drastically change the life of an individual or a customer experiencing that.

What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that

to Alex's point about where the power lies, I think at the end of the day, right, money can do a lot of good and it can also provide for a lot of people, right?

I think the more that businesses can give back, the more that, especially in a space like franchising where one owner can own 15 units, 15 units could be 15 communities that are being built around that unit and the ability that they have on a scale is much larger than most individual business owners.

So they have the opportunity to give back and I think that in all rights, we all should give back as much as we possibly can to help those less fortunate than ourselves.

We share a lot of the same philosophy on that topic.

So there's one main question I ask on every single episode and I've never asked this question to two people at the same time.

And I've never gotten the same answer once out of 200-ish episodes.

Alright, so you build this company up, you exit it four years from now, hundreds of millions of dollars.

You do your next company, build it up, hundreds of millions of dollars.

But at the end of the time, let's say hopefully God willing, 100 years from now, it's finally time to pass away.

But you've accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars of net worth, and you both have these brand new children.

What percentage of your net worth do you leave to those kids?

That's a really good question.

That's a really good question.

The only question I ask on every episode: I don't know what the exact dollar amount or percentage is, but one thing my dad, my dad grew up really poor, and I think he did a good job instilling these kind of values in my brothers and I.

Where it was like when we got a car, for example, he's like, I'm not buying you a car, like, whatever you save up on your own by the time you're 16 years old, I'll match.

So, if you got 200 bucks, you're getting a $400 car, go figure it out.

If you got two two grand, I'll give you another

$4,000 car now.

And so I think about things like that a lot of like, it could be worth a billion dollars.

I wouldn't want to have, you know, my children be super entitled or everything's just kind of handed.

And you don't understand some of the sacrifices that you have to make and the work I think you have to develop and build on.

And so I think my number and my percentage would be centered and focused around that.

It's like, what do they need to

survive and have a happy life, but without it, I think, not setting them up for success as an individual on their own and so it's very small I'm not planning to give whatever money I make away for the most part damn that was a good answer that was like very similar to where my head was going

yeah so both my father and father-in-law similarly like grew up relatively poor

and one thing that my father instilled in me in my younger years and my father-in-law later on is

the ability the hard work and and basically being the one who always shows up who gets in early who leaves late can can can provide for you and your family.

One thing they both believe in is making sure that the next generation doesn't have to struggle as much as your generation did.

However, making sure that those values are working hard and what showing up and leaving late can build in yourself and your family and build those ethics.

Similarly, I don't know the exact percentage.

I do want to give away a lot.

I literally was thinking about this as you're giving this answer, but...

My goal would be to make sure that my kids have to work hard for everything because I don't think that handing them things is going to be a good value for them in the later parts of their life.

I think we're built in the hard moments, not in the easy ones.

I think character comes from the hard moments.

So if you're giving too much to your kids, and I don't want to give too much to mine, I want to make sure he works hard for things, but it's safe, right?

Yeah.

So I don't want to explain.

So it evolves over time.

In my dream world, I give her all of it to utilize while still giving a big portion to charity, but she leads it, right?

and I'll be adopting a boy at some point so there will be two kids but right now there's just one but in my dream world I I'm building her up to be the steward of capital that I trust in her not for her to have a zillion dollars you know because that would steal her chance of greatness

but if I teach her enough and she's in

God willing she's in her 30s or 40s when I pass away then I don't mind if I give it to her when she's 19 it's different if I give it to her when she's 44,

you know, I'm not saying I was gonna be alive then hopefully I will.

And so I think it's a much different when we think about when you hand a child because when she's a 44 year old child,

right?

By that time she's probably had her third exit for all I know, you know, like, and married with two kids.

So I think I wouldn't be stealing anything from her if I all of a sudden gave her $700 million.

Like, I think that'd be fine with 44 years old, for example.

So I think there's, for me, one, one, it would be in a trust format.

So she's not just getting handed at X time.

And I also think no matter what, I would never give it to her all in one lump sum because there's no need for that.

She's not going to go deploy it all.

If I hand her 700 million, for example, I'm not going to go deploy it all in one shot anyways.

I'd rather give it to her at 10, 20, 30, 40 million a year, whatever that number is, over the course of time.

and have her deploy percentages to charity, percentages to our family members.

And hopefully she's the leader of that because I built her up that way.

And my my

unborn adopted son

say in similar fashion right let them split it up assuming that they're both good kids and good stewards of capital

but I it's an interesting because I didn't we didn't have money when I grew up and it built me to who I am and so I definitely wouldn't want to take that from her but I'm hopefully I'm still alive at that point so I'm not trying to like you know but if for some reason I pass and she's like 11 then yeah it's gonna be in a trust she'll get it when she's you know 18 21 25 30 etc in tranches so that she's not getting i don't want her to be a zillionaire at 18 years old that's not yeah

i know too many trust one kids and no matter how much training you give them you you know we watch nba athletes we watch rappers we watch people grow up and they get handed a zillion dollars it's you know it's very difficult to explain this the human psychology of what happens a lot of their learnings go out the window or their non-learnings don't you know aren't relevant at that point if they get handed this much money so especially now with nil deals you've got 17 18 year olds getting 11 million dollars and they're they don't have a driver's license yet

insane it is crazy so yeah so the knowledge is a big thing that the age is a big thing for me

but i would be comfortable with her having a huge amount of capital to deploy not for her to go buy title business mentioned right that's not that's not the point yep all right where can people find you guys where can they find your socials where can they find the company tell us everything yep so if you're interested or just wanting to explore buying a franchise it's franzi.com f-r-a-n-z-y dot com

you can also follow me on instagram tick tock x etc at alex from francy we have tons of business teardowns breakdowns and interesting uh business content that we put out on a daily basis yeah i'd say honestly follow alex honestly

my socials are not dialed in real, but follow Alex.

And yeah, find us on Franzi.

And honestly, we're big fans of product feedback.

So tell us our baby's ugly.

The only way that we get better is by feedback from people like you.

So please visit Franzi if you want to buy business or if you just want to rip it apart and give us feedback.

I'm here for that too.

All right, guys, we're listening to the Money Mondays podcast where we cover those three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity.

With these gentlemen, it's very interesting because again, you may not want to buy a franchise, but your mom might, your uncle might, your friends might someone at a dinner or lunch six months from now might want to get into the franchise game and you could be like oh you should listen to this episode the money mondays with the guys from franzi or something on the website etc so it's not always about you think about the people in your world that you might not even met yet that might want to listen to an episode like this we grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money i think it's ridiculous we have to have discussion about money about loans accounts taxes should i borrow should i lease should i buy there's so many questions about your normal daily life money is not the root of all evil it's so much power in money, and it goes for your bills, your health, and everything involved in your life.

So, check us out here on the moneymondays.com, and we'll see you guys next Monday.