Franchise QB

Episode 34: Coaches Corner with Mike Grecky- Owner of Grecky Franchise Consulting

• Mike Halpern • Season 1 • Episode 34

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Mike Grecky, a Certified Franchise Consultant and Owner of Grecky Franchise Consulting, shares his journey from corporate sales to owning his own cleaning business and eventually transitioning into franchise consulting. 

Takeaways

Mike outlines the role of franchise coaches, consultants, and brokers in guiding entrepreneurs through the overwhelming landscape of franchise opportunities.

Due diligence and thorough evaluation are important when considering franchise ownership.

The characteristics and skills that make a successful franchise candidate, including relationship-building, sales experience, and business ownership background.

The advantages of service-based businesses in franchising, including lower investment, less risk, and scalability.

The gratification of helping entrepreneurs find the right franchise opportunity and realizing their entrepreneurial dreams.

https://greckyfranchiseconsulting.com/

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XlbD8oyl3uyeiqaM73poH67BX1jRRyCGR7l7qB-3Nz0/edit?usp=sharing. Also, you can view the Franchise QB podcast at www.youtube.com/@franchiseqb.

Contact me and my team with any questions along the way. www.calendly.com/franchiseguy
Mike Halpern, CAFC
mike@franchiseqb.com

This is the Franchise QB Podcast, where we empower entrepreneurs to win big in franchising. We huddle up weekly to educate our audience about the most successful small business model ever created. Franchise it! Welcome to the Franchise QB Coaches Corner. This is where we highlight franchise coaches, the unsung heroes of the franchising space. They go by coaches, consultants, and brokers, and they play a vital role in the franchising ecosystem. Similar to buy -side real estate agents, franchise coaches guide entrepreneurs through the overwhelming landscape of thousands of franchise opportunities. They assist with everything from franchise search guidance to FDD interpretation. funding strategy, to recommending franchise attorney for legal reviews, and much, much more. And most of them offer 100 % free services to the franchise buyer and will coach them step by step through the due diligence process. They assist with both franchise startups and resale acquisitions. Let's meet a franchise coach and learn how they are changing lives through franchise ownership. Joining us today in Coach's Corner is Mike Grecky, owner of Grecky Franchise Consulting and Certified Franchise Consultant with FranServe. Welcome to the show, Mike. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate you having me on. It is great having you here. So tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us about where it all started in business and take us through kind of the chronology of your background in business. Sure. Yeah. Coming out of college, I started out in sales with Procter & Gamble. And, spent a couple of years with Procter and Gamble. And, from there, I went and worked for one of the large ad agencies in Manhattan, Young & Rubicam. My primary client then was the Miller Brewing Company. so kind of, you know, my early career was focused on sales and marketing with consumer products, consumer package type, type companies. Are you the genius behind tastes great, less filling? Say that again. Are you behind the taste? I wish I could claim that that was that would really be dating me if I was if I was, you know, responsible for that one. Yeah, actually, I was I managed their sports and event marketing up and down throughout the Northeast. So I worked a lot with their motor sports properties, pro beach volleyball, the NFL, the NBA, things of that nature. Very cool. So there is a relationship between sports marketing and a company like Miller. I can see the relationship there. For sure. For sure. Very cool. So you were there in Manhattan and where'd you go from there? So then from there, I actually started working for a company that was based out of Michigan and was a consumer promotions company. And we also got heavily involved with school fundraising. And I was managing one of their regions and then divisions early on in the process. And then ultimately they asked me to come out to their headquarters in Troy, Michigan, which is about 30 minutes north of Detroit. And I ran a large division, you know, over a hundred million in revenue, about 500 employees. And I did, I did that for several years. And in that process, we moved the whole family out to Michigan and ended up spending. 17 years in Michigan. While I was in Michigan, I eventually left the corporate world and started my own residential and commercial cleaning business. So how did you do that? I mean, were you currently employed at the time as a W -2 and you decided to launch this thing or did your employment relationship end and you're like, all right, let me start my own business? Yeah, I had left the... the employer that I was with who had moved me out to Michigan. I'd been with them for 13 years. I left and went with a smaller firm in the healthcare space, pharmaceutical space. And I was only there a short while and they got bought out by a private equity company and I found myself laid off. And so I used that opportunity really to do some research. I decided to start my own business. It's something that I've always wanted to do. I was in my mid 40s at the time. We had three kids kind of hit in the middle school age range. My wife wanted to get her career going. So it was a great opportunity to give me some more, more of a balanced perspective from a work and personal aspect and gave me the freedom to help with my kids, with our kids. So cleaning was a great way to enter into. into being a small business owner, relatively low barriers of entry, reasonable investment. And so that's what I decided to do. Did your wife join you in kind of launching that business and operating in that business? Or was that just? She was helpful in the early stages of, you know, the idea creation, forming the company name, kind of our processes of how, how we would structure and run the business. But. she had her own healthcare career that she was getting going independently. So, really I ran the business on a day to day basis. Got it. So back then, when you kind of created this business from scratch, had you known about like franchising and like brands that might be in that space or, and you kind of considered that, what was kind of the thought process there of going independent? Yeah, no, I mean, actually I did. I actually, my wife and I, we looked at franchising. And we actually were engaged. We engaged with a franchise consultant, with a coach who did a great job and really helped us look at some various opportunities. It just became our decision ultimately just came down to, we just felt at the time in that given industry that we chose that we would, we're in a better position to run the business ourselves. Okay, cool. That makes sense. So, fast forward to franchising. How did you then bridge the gap between your independent business and then find the franchising space? Cause obviously now you provide coaching consulting services. what was kind of the transition between your, your own business and getting into franchise consulting? Yeah. So I ran my own business for 10 years and then, I sold it and we moved from Michigan to Raleigh, North Carolina. And when we were in Raleigh, I decided to, I thought what I wanted to do was buy a business. And through that process, I ended up getting connected with a gentleman who is a consultant in the network that I'm part of today, that we're part of today. And he was terrific. And I ended up with through many, several conversations with him, just decided that one of the best fits for me right at that point in my career was, to start my own franchise consulting business. Who was that consultant? Give them a plug. Say that again. Who was the consultant that you connected? It was Gene Thurston. Okay. Yeah. Very cool. Gene's based out of Atlanta. And, and I had also, the original consultant I was involved with was Michael Lorsch. Okay. Out of Chicago. Very cool. So you've had this experience kind of interacting with these guys and you thought to yourself, you know, this might be something that I can excel out with my background in business and my, you know, the, the process. Yeah. And part of the, there were kind of two things going through my mind was one, I felt like I had a lot of really good corporate experience, you know, a lot of leadership, a lot of HR experience, a lot that I could bring to the table for candidates, but. The big piece was owning my own business, and even though it was an independent business, we structured and ran it like a franchise. We, from day one, we had processes in place, systems in place, we had an operations manual for every aspect of the business, and eventually when I sold the business, that was the comment from the buyer. He's like, wow, this business basically kind of just runs itself. You've got a, you, you, You have a guideline for everything you need to do from operations to sales, to marketing, to customer service. And all of those things, as you know, they are important and are instrumental to a franchise system. So having that background, the corporate background, having the ownership experience, having run it like a franchise, having... you know, managed a small business that had as many as 25 hourly employees. Those types of experience I thought prepared me well to assist my clients. You know, yeah. So that's my next question is like, how did all that experience translate into your current role coaching candidates that are new to franchising? I'm assuming that you will kind of share those stories with them about, you know, the fact that you left the corporate. Position you created your own concept and speaking to those, you know systems that you referenced It kind of gives you a huge advantage when you're in the franchise model. Is that a pretty common conversation you have with you? Yeah exactly and and the other thing I'll tell my candidates that you know when I was in the cleaning industry for instance there were a lot of my main competitors were franchises and They they did very well So it's a, I'm very comfortable. And I guess one of the things that I realized too, starting it independently versus really what I know about franchising now is that franchising gives you such a leg up to get your business off the ground, get it up and running and get it to a profitable level much faster than I believe I did running it independently. Yeah, that's a really good lesson you can kind of convey to people exploring the space. So do you specialize in a certain franchise category such as home services? I know that's a huge segment of franchising currently or fitness or do you work across all industry categories? I would say for the most part I work across categories primarily because I feel like my initial responsibility is to really get to know my clients, really understand who they are. I try to ask a lot of questions and do a lot of listening in the early stages of working with them. So I don't go with any, in any. any preconceived notions like, hey, this is the franchise that's right for them because I don't know them well enough until I get the chance to spend time with them. Having said that, I would say that I am kind of biased more towards service -based businesses, whether it's B2B or B2C versus brick and mortar, mainly because, well, for multiple reasons. One, I feel like there's lower, It's typically a lower investment. I feel like there's less risk. I mean, if you think about COVID, for example, most service businesses were still allowed to operate, whereas obviously the restaurants and retail, they were all shut down. And you can, they're often a service business, I feel like is often easier to scale because you can typically scale by adding vehicles and crews. versus having to add locations if you're going to take the brick and mortar approach. So I just think in many ways there's a lot of compelling reasons why you'd want to go service versus brick and mortar. Yeah, and I think especially for someone's first foray into franchising, their first franchise investment, once they kind of realize that they can thrive in the model and work within the guidelines and the guard rails of a franchise. Maybe that second one, they level up and do something with a little bit more capital and more risk and more liability in terms of the lease. But I tend to do the same thing. Unless someone has expertise in that particular category or a ton of capital to deploy, then home services or any service business seems to be a pretty good place to start. So what attributes do you like to see in your franchise candidates that give them an advantage in their search? Is there a certain... kind of characteristic or personality type that when you kind of interact with them, you're like, you know what, they're going to be, you know, really easy to work with or they're going to be receptive to coaching. Yes. I mean, as a general rule, I would say I like people with a sales or biz dev background. I love working with business owners, either former owners or current owners, because they, they understand what it's like to. to run your own business and what that all entails. But as a general rule, it's people who have good relationship building skills, people who can interact with their employees, with customers, with vendors. There's no, you and I work with the franchises we work with, there's no complicated business models out there. They're all pretty simple, pretty straightforward. The franchisor will teach you the business. but they're not gonna teach you your skills. So you need to come to the table with those. And I just, I find that people who have those strong relationship building skills, enjoy being out in front, enjoy being out in the community. I feel like they tend to do the best. Yeah, no, it's good advice because, you know, like franchising is... kind of presented as a business in a box, turnkey, whatever the word is at the time. And the reality is these systems are time tested, they're proven, but it's up to the individual owner to implement them. And some are like highly motivated and they're scrappy and they're gonna get out there and get it done and others aren't. And that's the difference between the top performers and the bottom performers. So let's talk a little bit about your process. When you engage with a candidate, and you see that the timing's right, they're ready to make a change, or they're a business owner and they're looking to diversify. What is the process that you take a new candidate through to really determine if franchising's even right for them? Yeah, so I like to have, the initial call for me I think is really important. So with my clients, my candidates, that call I really take the time to... Try to understand them as best like I can. I'm asking them questions, you know, getting to understand their background, what their skill set is, what their strengths are. And then ultimately, you know, want to really understand what their goals are, both personally, professionally, what kind of work -life balance are they looking for? What kind of personal interests do they have? And, you know, what are they looking for in a business? What are they looking to get out of it? Not just... both financially as well as some of the other aspects that business ownership can provide. And then, toward the end of the conversation, I always need to understand what their financial situation is, what they have available to them from a capital standpoint, what they're willing to invest, what they're looking to finance. cause obviously that's essential, for me to, to aid them in that process. Yeah. I could see that starting with funding is always the best path because, you know, it's like, you don't go out and buy a house without understanding what you can afford in a business is that same thing. I mean, that analogy holds true. It's like, what is best for the candidate in terms of their total investment capabilities. And then let's show them brands that are commensurate with their interest. capabilities, comfort level, et cetera. So that's cool. So is there an aspect of your franchise coaching services that's the most gratifying for you? I think the, I mean, the most gratifying part is obviously if I can help them find the right opportunity, the opportunity that excites them, you know, that they're really, anxious and looking forward to get started on their entrepreneurial journey. I mean, if I can successfully do that, I mean, that's, that's the part that's, that's really gratifying. Very cool. So what advice do you have for someone that's considering? franchise ownership, but is completely new to the space. Well, I think there's two things that I think about. One is really be committed to doing your homework, asking a lot of questions, engaging and talking with other business owners in a franchise system. My experience is that small business owners love to share, talk about their business, love to share their knowledge of the business, of the industry. So really, you know, doing your homework, really taking the time to thoroughly evaluate the different ideas that you're looking at. And then the second big piece of that is being honest with yourself from a financial perspective, meaning in franchising, as you know, there will be information that the franchisor will provide from an investment standpoint, what they're... belief is that's needed to successfully launch a business, but I always feel like it makes sense to have more than that, to have enough so that when you're in and getting your business running and you're operating it, you're never afraid to be aggressive from a marketing standpoint, for instance, because you have enough capital and you know that you're going to need more, not less, to get the business going in the right direction. So I think. doing your homework and feeling comfortable that you've got the right capital, the right investment structure to handle the startup of the business. Yeah, that's a really good point. And one that is great when it's shared by a coach and it's also shared by the franchisor, they're working in concert to educate a new franchisee or a prospective franchisee that it's just better to be overly capitalized so you don't get in a pinch and make bad decisions. because lack of capital can lead to bad decision making and knee -jerk decisions and bad outcomes. So that's really good advice. So outside of your franchising expertise, Mike, tell the audience something interesting about you, Mike Grecky. Well, there's so many things that are interesting about me. Yes. Well, I'm a big... Can I just pick one of them? I'm a... I'm a big sports guy, very active. Growing up, it was football, basketball, baseball. I was a hurdler in track. And in college, I switched and played rugby. Fortunate to go on a couple of tours to Ireland and to Wales and play rugby overseas. So that was something I'll never forget. And today I'm an avid skier, golfer, and a hiker, I guess would be the... three main things. So just, I guess you like to compete because you love to be out there competing in different sports throughout your life. So I'm thinking that competition is you like to be the number one guy you like to win. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, this has been great, Mike. Anything else that you want to share before we wrap up the segment today? Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it. You know, for anyone who's listened, I would just like them to know that I'm I really love what I do. I love helping entrepreneurs, existing ones, as well as those who are aspiring to be entrepreneurs. I just love getting to meet so many different people. Everyone's got a different story and I love trying to help and assist in helping people realize that entrepreneurial dream. It's something I really enjoy and would welcome the opportunity to help anyone. who's thinking about business ownership. Very cool. Well, thank you so much, Mike, for taking the time to join me in Franchise QB Coaches' Corner. If anyone listening would like to connect with Mike to learn more about becoming a franchise owner, contact Mike at Mike at Grecy, G -R -E -C -K -Y, Franchise Consulting, or contact me. I'll get you connected. I'll also post his contact information in the notes. So thanks again, Mike, for taking the time to get in the huddle and discuss Grecky Franchise Consulting with us. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate it. You got it. Thank you for listening to the Franchise QB podcast where you're at the helm of your future as a franchise owner. If you enjoyed the content, please rate the show and recommend it to anyone that might be interested in franchising. Make sure to visit FranchiseQB .com to subscribe to my newsletter and for an actionable playbook to go from walk on to legend in your new business. Follow us on Twitter @QBFranchiseQB and join us every week for a new episode. See you next time. Visit FranchiseQB.com to take the next step of your journey towards wealth, independence, and franchise ownership. And remember, when working for the man gets old, you must do something bold. Thank you for listening.