In 2004 I read Michael Gerber's The E-Myth and got interested in the idea of a business built on systems rather than on one person's heroics. We ended up buying a Dunn Brothers Coffee franchise in Stillwater, Minnesota, and then a second location in Hudson, Wisconsin. We were named Franchisee of the Year.
Two more followed. Great Clips, in Bonita Springs, Florida, where I bought a three-pack of territories and got two of my locations open by walking into businesses in the strip malls I wanted and negotiating lease buyouts nobody else could get. That's a habit I picked up in college selling educational books door to door in Wisconsin and Maine on eighty-hour weeks. I finished as the top rookie out of several thousand students that summer, and I've never stopped believing in showing up in person.
The third was Apple Spice, a box lunch delivery and catering business I launched with Tammy and my two oldest daughters. Then COVID arrived, and the corporate lunch orders that made up most of our business disappeared essentially overnight.
So we went and found the businesses whose people were still coming to work. FedEx. UPS. Pepsi. Kemps. We delivered across three shifts, around the clock.
Then, during the unrest in the Twin Cities in 2020, Homeland Security called and asked whether we could feed roughly seven hundred personnel. Three meals a day, plus a snack at three in the morning. I rented a refrigerated truck, called in fifty family members and friends as volunteers, and we did it.
I tell people that story not because it's dramatic, but because it's the actual job. A franchise gives you a proven system and real training. It does not give you a business that runs itself, and it will not tell you what to do the week everything changes. You have to be a problem solver. You have to be willing to work on the business, not just in it. If the unexpected energizes you, this can be the best thing you ever do. If it drains you, you should know that before you sign anything.
THE REST OF IT
Alongside all of that I spent more than two decades in medical devices. Dental and orthopedics first, then interventional cardiology, then the startup world, where I worked on first-in-human clinical trials. I identified clinical sites, recruited physician champions, trained them on technology nobody had used before, and stood in the room for the first cases. It took me to about fifty countries.
The high point was a company called Ardian, developing a catheter-based treatment for resistant hypertension. I led patient recruitment across Europe. Medtronic acquired the company for $800 million, and Tammy and I moved to Switzerland for two years to launch the product across Europe and Asia.
Somewhere in there I also finished a Master of Divinity. Not for a career, just because I wanted to study it. I read constantly. Business, history, theology, biography, and a fair amount of spy fiction to shut my brain off at night.
I read The E-Myth before I became a franchisee. I read Rick Bisio's The Educated Franchisee before I became a consultant. I don't like to act before I understand something. But once I understand it, I move.
WHAT I'M ACTUALLY FOR
For twenty years, whenever a friend or a family member asked me about franchising, I sent them to the consultant who had helped my own family find the right business. Eventually he pointed out that I'd been doing his job informally for two decades and should probably do it on purpose.
So here's what I think my job is. Not to sell you anything. To ask you better questions than you'd ask yourself, tell you the truth about what ownership demands, and either help you find something genuinely right for you, or help you find out that it isn't, before it costs you anything.