Episode 25: Mike Stone- CEO, CertaPro Painters

Mike Stone, CEO of CertaPro Painters, joins the Franchise QB Podcast to discuss the opportunities and success of the CertaPro franchise. 

CertaPro is the largest painting company in North America, with over 370 franchise owners and $700 million in revenue. Stone shares his journey with CertaPro, from starting as a sales rep to becoming the CEO. He emphasizes the importance of leadership and building a strong team in the franchise business. 

Stone also highlights the benefits of being part of the CertaPro franchise, including access to top-quality products, support from a dedicated team, and a tiered royalty structure based on performance.

Takeaways
CertaPro Painters is the largest painting company in North America, with over 370 franchise owners and $700 million in revenue.

The success of CertaPro is rooted in its focus on franchisee profitability, delivering an extraordinary customer experience, and providing a roadmap for building a large-scale professional operation.

Franchise owners in the painting industry have the opportunity to build big businesses and capture market share, with potential for double-digit growth every year.

CertaPro offers extensive support to franchise owners, including training, marketing resources, and access to top-quality products.

The franchise model allows for scalability and the potential for a high return on investment, with a tiered royalty structure that rewards franchise owners for building big businesses.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to the Franchise QB Podcast
01:11 Connection to the Philadelphia Area
03:29 Mike Stone's Journey with CertaPro
08:42 Vision and Growth Plans for CertaPro
09:34 Strategies for Achieving Growth
13:45 Opportunities for Resales and Partnerships
20:17 Labor Model and Relationship with Painters
22:34 Culture and Core Values of CertaPro
28:45 Ideal Franchise Owner and Initial Team Structure
30:10 Targeted Growth Markets for CertaPro
32:30 Tiered Royalty Structure and Return on Investment
35:17 Importance of Culture and Values in CertaPro
36:12 Future Plans and Technology Investment
37:06 Closing Remarks and Contact Information

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Mike Halpern, CAFC
mike@franchiseqb.com

Transcript

0:00

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 – franchising. Welcome to the Franchise QB podcast. I'm your host, Mike Halpern, a 20 year industry veteran and entrepreneur. My mission is for listeners to achieve their American dreams of creating wealth and independence through franchise ownership. Every week we speak with franchisees, franchisors, or vendors that support the industry. Thank you for joining us and let's get started. Joining us in the huddle today is Mike Stone, CEO of CertaPro Painters. Welcome to the show, Mike. Super excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Mike. Yeah, I'm really happy you're here. So I just want to touch on our connection to the area. I know you're in the Philadelphia area in Huntingdon Valley. I grew up in Yardley in Bucks, and it's an area that's near and dear to my heart. It's where my family is rooted. My folks are still up in Bucks. And... My grandparents, my great aunt and uncle, people that were just phenomenal people in my life, lived in the area. My mom went to Cheltenham, dad went to Abington. So that place is pretty special to me. So I'm glad that we have that connection to the area. Well, Mike, they always say in the Philadelphia area, my wife was born and raised in Northeast Philly. It's called Six Degrees of Northeast Philly. And it's the connection like six degrees of Kevin Bacon. That's right. It's unbelievable. I guarantee you because of where you grew up, it would take her five minutes and she will know somebody that knows somebody who knows you in some intimate way. It's really remarkable how it happens. I 100% agree. And to kind of accelerate that, my mom was a, she is a retired. Teacher in the Pennsbury district. So anywhere I go in town Everybody knows my mom because she taught in the district for 25 years. So totally get that. Well, let me introduce Exactly, sort of probes. That's what we're here to discuss today your company CertaPro Painters is the largest painting company in North America. It's really impressive founded in 91 franchised in 92 over 370 franchise owners 500 territories 45 states including Canada doing north of $700 million in revenue. Wow, that's really impressive. Soda Pro is in a $60 billion industry, subsidiary of First Service Brands, which does three billion in revenue, has household brands names like Paul Davis Restoration, California Closets, Fuller Coverings International, and Pillar to Post Home Inspection, as well as a call center that services 1,200 franchise owners. So. Mike, you've been with CertiPro for decades, which I love to see in a CEO. Someone's been there from the early days and kind of worked their way through the company, started in sales and biz dev for an owner, now you're the CEO. So tell us about the early days back in San Diego, how you got started on your journey with CertiPro. Yeah, Mike, 25 years, when you say it like that, and I look at the hair on my head and how there's not much of it anymore. Yeah, it's been an incredible ride. And I honestly, to tell you, I'm blessed and more excited and vibrant about where we're going as a brand than ever before. And because of you said it $60 billion of opportunity, and we have a little over 1% of the market share. So yeah, my, my early days, I started out as a sales rep for one of the franchises named Stan Hutchins, and we both went to the university of Iowa. We are Hawkeyes, go Caitlin Clark. Really excited for her. The nation is behind her right now. Yeah, the whole nation is behind our famed athlete back there in Iowa City. So both him and I, Dan and I went to the University of Iowa and I was working for a custom home builder in Chicago a couple of years out of college and working with all the different trades. The last ones in the house, every project was the painter and they were basically fixing everyone else's problems in the house and I felt kind of bad for the painters. And my buddy who ran a college painting business and was making all kinds of money while I was bartending in college and he's sitting around driving a Toyota Supra and just having this great quality of life. And he's like, well, Mike, I'm leaving for San Diego. I'm going to go start this full time painting gig. And I'm like, oh, that's really cool. And it was the worst winter ever in Chicago. cold, miserable. He's like, and he was struggling to kind of get the business off the ground. He's like, man, you're really good in sales and marketing. I'm really good at operations. Why don't you come work for me and see if you can help me build this franchise up? And, lo and behold, I saw the opportunity. And to be frank, I'm in my mid-twenties. San Diego sounded really appealing. I didn't know what I was getting into other than I just wanted to get out of the cold of Chicago. Did you move to Pacific Beach like everybody else that goes to San Diego in their 20s? I moved to Mission Beach, but we hung out in PB all the time and had the lobster bisque at world famous. So if you know that area well. And Dan and I really flourished. We were one of the very first franchise to do over a million dollars in sales. Back in the 90s, you guys did a million in sales? Yeah. Yeah, it was huge volume for a painting company. And believe it or not, we were one of the very quickly, one of the most successful at CertaPro. And to be honest with you, Mike, I actually had visions of, dude, we can run a 10, $20 million painting business here. But I met my future wife, Kim, and we had just had, we had gotten married back in the Philadelphia region and just had a baby. And Dan and I, like, I really wanted to grow a very large painting. a professionally managed business and I wanted a sales force underneath me. And I don't know that he was not aligned on that, but he didn't want to grow at the rate I did. And I wanted more opportunity, more responsibility. I just started a family and we're really tight friends still to this day. And he still runs a very successful business. But my wife really wanted to raise kids near her family in the northeast, in the mid-Atlantic region. And so. The corporate offices said, wow, you are having a lot of success working in a franchise. What do you think about coming and joining the corporate team in Philadelphia and training our new franchise owners? And so that's what I did. I packed up my Honda Accord and our Ford Explorer and we moved east to raise our family in and around Philadelphia. And I joined the corporate team. And literally over the next... probably 15 years, I trained the new franchisees. I became an operations GM. I helped form the very first marketing cooperatives, which happened to be one in Washington, D.C. and then the other one in Philadelphia. The company invested in my leadership development, even Dan, when I was working in his business, they really pushed me to get better at goal setting and review and situational leadership and how to be a great coach of people. how to run effective meetings, and just really invested in the people because the widget we have is painting, but really a people business. And when you can get great results through other people, Mike, that's when then you can really build something of substance and equity and has real enterprise value. And so that's kind of the journey. I had just about every role in a franchise. residential sales, production, commercial sales. And I had almost every role on the ops operations and the training and marketing side. And about six years ago, the founder of the company said, Mike, take us to a billion dollars. They gave me the opportunity to lead the company and we're well on our way. And now we're casting a vision over the next nine years to get to two and a half billion dollars. And even then that'll be what a couple of 3% market share and the fragmentation in our industry is just unprecedented. And so we may be the largest player in our space, but the appetite and the ability to grow is really a product of a franchise owners willingness to follow our program and engage in the opportunity in their market in their DMA. So, yeah, sort of proves the largest. residential and commercial painting franchise, but has less than 5% market share, you mentioned 2%. So it's a highly fragmented industry. You just touched on your vision. So you want to get, you know, eclipse that billion mark. And I think you said by 2032, get 2.5 billion. So how are we going to get there? Well, one, we got to continue to see our existing franchise owners continue to... drive their productivity and we have what we call a roadmap. It's called the path, a path, this roadmap or a blueprint on how to build a big, profitable painting business. And when I started out, there was no roadmap, but we've been able to work with franchise owners over the last 20 years. And, and really we know how to go from zero to seven and a half million. We've kind of got that dialed in pretty good. What, what are the leadership skills? Um, What are the hires? Do you need residential salespeople, commercial estimator, production people? What's the business mix need to look like? What is the, how do you recruit, retain, and elevate the skill? What's the technology needed? And we've kind of got that all mapped out. And so really right now, a typical franchise is a little over $2 million. If we just take our existing franchisee base and 500 territories, if they're doing the typical franchise to some of them are multi-unit owners are doing around 2 million. If we can add another 100 franchise owners, give or take, over the next five years, and then see the existing productivity of our core base go to four or 5 million, well, there's how you get to 2.5 billion. It really, and then... The most you might see is one franchisee who's dominating in their market. Okay, they might have 8% market share. That means 92% of the painting is being done by another professional contractor. Yeah, these guys are crushing it and there's still 92% to grab, which is unbelievable. And they're crushing it, Mike. The very best of our franchises are crushing it and yet 92% is being done by someone else. So give us a little bit of context. You guys are 700 million and growing. How does that compare with other players in your space? I know there's a lot of total independence, but in the franchise landscape, how does that compare to what you guys are doing? Yeah, first off, great question, Mike. So I think our franchise productivity is about 2.2. The next largest player is about six or 700,000. So we're about 3X what it was. another five star, a 360, a line painting might look like. Now, when I started out in this business 25 years ago, there was three painting franchise concepts. Now there's 19. Well, 19. And they're all gunning for sort of pro and we can't rest on our laurels. We have to practice continuous improvement. We have to continue to find ways to get better and to innovate. And look, now we're trying to fill out these secondary markets. Topeka, Kansas, Biloxi, Mississippi, Billings, Montana. Binghamton, New York, these markets. If there's three Sherwin Williams paint stores in a market, Mike, well, there should be a sort of pro there. Yeah, I was gonna say, follow where you get the paint and you'll find a really good opportunity because they know what they're doing when they open a location.$20 billion of paint they sell annually and they're not plopping a Sherwin Williams down in a market unless they can sell a lot of paint there. And so there's still 125 markets, territories. that we really should be able to fill out. We have some big opportunity in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We have some opportunity in Detroit and Toronto. We have some opportunity in Long Island. So those are some of the bigger markets where we still have open territories. But then it's those secondary markets. Now the cool thing, Mike, is every year, one of our franchisees, not just every year, but 20 to 30 every year, go, hey, I've had a great run. I built my business up. and I want to sell it and realize the equity I built. And the cool thing about that is that's happening. We're really good at helping them get a really nice multiple for their business and the people who come in and buy it, they're scaling and growing on average 30% in their first full year after they purchase an existing business because they get back to the basics, they follow the program, they're energized, they've got good capital and we've really seen our resales thrive and flourish. I mean, isn't that the beauty of buying a business? You get to realize the equity and sell it someday. Absolutely, makes perfect sense. That's what the- You wanna enjoy, yeah, you wanna enjoy that cashflow while you're building it up, but you wanna have that nice exit. And whether that's five years down the pike or 10 years, it's nice that you have kind of a system that supports that and promotes it. And I can see situations where existing owners wanna gobble up more territory because that's the path to least resistance. They already understand the system. But there's also opportunities to take it outside into the brokerage networks and get a really nice return for that seller. And the other thing to be frank is these businesses are kicking off so much cash flow is we've now gotten in as a corporate entity. We've gotten into the corporate owned business. So we're buying some of our most successful franchises as well. and forming partnerships with them. So they get to get a nice fight at the Apple, stick around and leverage our capital to scale their business even further. And so that's just another path. We've seen these businesses sell to outside entities. We've seen them sell to their existing management teams or leaderships that they built within their teams, selling to them their own people. And now this third opportunity is they get to sell to the corporate entity themselves. So. Yeah, that's a really good sign of health in a system early in my career going back maybe 20 years I worked with five guys burgers when they were launching and they had a handful of units in Northern, Virginia And they're now at 1500 stores but there was a point in time where they started gobbling up all of the franchise units in the greater DMV and that was quite a few and the owners were happy and corporate was Capitalized and ready to have a bigger footprint of corporate own units to kind of test things and whatnot. So I can see that being a real benefit to owners. It's like, hey, I can also talk to corporate about something like that. So let's get to the base of it. I mean, I'm sure this is a common question, but out of all those different options, you mentioned 19. What makes CertiPro a great franchise opportunity for a candidate that's looking for something, maybe in the painting space, maybe not? Well, so let's talk about the painting space first. Largest, most organized, our focus is on franchisee profitability, success. We deliver an extraordinary experience. We give you a roadmap and a blueprint on how to actually run a successful, not painting business, but a large-scale professional operation. We expect our people to come in and be great leaders of men and women. So painting, you'll never in your life get to be the... Largest, most recognized, most organized, and with the best resources, 85 support people, your own in-house ad agency. Those are all the benefits you get at Assertifro. And you're in an industry where no one owns markets. So if you said, hey, I want to go into some business and you're worried about it, you know, could technology change the business? I mean, There's no painting robots yet and they probably will be in our future to be clear, but it's still 25 years away. This industry is strong, the most cost effective way to beautify and protect someone's home or business is with a coat of paint on their property. I've been through two recessions and a global pandemic and every time we come out stronger, bigger, better than when we went in. And that's just a testament to the space that we're in. and the fortitude of making sure that our franchise owners are fiscally responsible, have strong financial acumen. We teach them the skills how to get great results through others. And this industry is hearty. So those are some reasons why. Yeah, that makes sense. And I can also imagine that the relationships you have with Sherman Williams and Benjamin Moore and other companies that purchasing power rebates the additional training, marketing content. There's a lot of stuff. I'm sure it comes along with those relationships that you guys have cultivated over the years. Yeah. I mean, we're the largest purchaser of paint from Sherwin Williams in North America. So, as you said, I mean, we get access to the best products at the best prices. But more importantly than even that is we get inside Intel on our space, our industry trends. And we're always a step ahead of what's going on. And we're able to effectively communicate that to our franchise body. And I could tell you, there was a lot of people that were freaked out during the global pandemic and the very first round of the PPP money that was going around. I'm sure you've heard about that. Sure. There was people saying, I don't know if we'll even get it. 100% of our franchise owners during the first pass in the United States were able to reap a benefit associated with that. And that's because we were at that we were way ahead of what was going on and how to, how to navigate really difficult times. And, uh, you know, that also is a testament to us being part of first service. You know, I have my own board of directors with other presidents and CEOs in the home and property services space. And, and, and we get to collaborate and, and get Intel about industry trends again, way before people even see, uh, subtleties in their own business. Right. Very cool. Thanks for sharing that. So let's talk about the labor model. So a franchisee, my kind of understanding is that the majority of the franchise owners are using subcontractors. I know there's a few states that require W-2 employees to be working for the franchise owners. I also know that a lot of independent contractors might be looked at as competitors, but in fact, they love to do wholesale work for franchisees because they don't have to do the marketing and the client acquisition. They just show up and do the work and paint, which is what they like to do. Do your sort of pro owners find that to be the case? You you, Mike, you said it perfectly. Most of the people, when you have that much fragmentation, a typical painter does about one hundred thousand dollars a painting a year. That's what they do. And they probably make about 60 grand. That's what a typical painter might do. Now imagine if I could provide enough work for a painter where he could do $250,000 worth of work a year. Yeah. Um, maybe make a little bit less per job, but not have to ever worry about where the next job's coming from. He doesn't have to work nights and weekends and do estimates and worry about payroll and do all these other things. And he just gets to do what he or she loves to do. And that's to take something that's stolen lifeless and make it beautiful again, with a coat of paint. And there's 500,000 people that fit that model in the United States. And guess what? When you treat people with respect, you understand their culture, you give them steady work, you show that they're part of something bigger and you dial into their community and their needs. And it's, it's remarkable. Our franchise owners have right now we have capacity. to do a billion dollars worth of painting, we just need to get more work. So that's a unique spot that sort of grows in that a lot of other people who are really struggling with the labor forces is not in. That's mostly because we've built a great culture and relationship with the painter communities we serve. Yeah, let's delve into that a little more because painting is kind of looked at as a messy business. Painters don't enjoy a great reputation like they do elsewhere in the world and they're kind of... viewed as craftsman, but here do you feel like professionalizing the space with your proven system at CertaPro kind of brings a new feeling of dignity and pride to these tradespeople that work with the CertaPro owners? My mission, it's right here on this card and I'll leave it up there. I don't know if you can read that for a second. Okay, let's see here. Read it out loud, Mike. To lift up painting. We aspire to transform the contractor space by making Certapro painters the work. Is that? Workplace. Workplace of choice. Michael Stone, I love it. Well, that's, I didn't even know you made that sign. How would you know I made that sign? But I think that's really, you said something really fascinating to me there and that was. If you go to Italy or France, a painter is revered as an artist or craftsman. So this year we'll, we'll complete 125,000 paint jobs in the United States and Canada. Like, and when you, when you take somebody and, uh, and really deliver an extraordinary experience to them by painting, um, you make them smile. And every time we have a raving fan. a net promoter of the brand of CertaPro. That painter actually lifted up the painting industry. And when they do it wearing this little logo right here, CertaPro painters, they make the world a better place. And when you make people smile and you make the world a better place, and we get to do that through the widget we call painting, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to lift up the painting industry, have it more revered. You'll be blown away. If I told you that there's probably 500 painters that work for CertaPro that made more than six figures paint for us. Love it. Like actual painters? Like not... Actual painters that made more than a hundred thousand dollars because they did it. And these people are now buying $80,000 trucks. They're purchasing homes. They're going to become franchise owners themselves. We've had a couple become franchise owners themselves. I don't know how that doesn't lift up the painting industry and attract and draw more people to our space, right? If a painter working for a franchise owner is making a hundred grand, think about how much money that franchise owner might be making. That's exciting. Very cool. So, you mentioned the team, you build it to 85 support staff. So what does that look like in terms of if you just do the math? Is that like one home office rep for every? Four owners, five owners, six owners, something like that. Well, 85 divided by 370. So yeah, we're less than five to one is the ratio right now. And I would, I would say in terms of support in franchising, I think we're at the very top. Uh, that's an awesome ratio. I've heard 15 to one. So five to one is really. Yeah. Now that's all of our corporate staff, but, uh, if you, we, we probably have 30 people on the operations team. We have a ginormous, uh, leader. leadership and development. So our training team is, is 10 deep. Uh, so, uh, we, you get, uh, your own in-house ad agency, you get your own marketing success manager. So you're going to have your own bat phone to a marketing expert and consultant. We have incredible vendors that go beyond that list of people, uh, that help you with your digital marketing, uh, with your radio, your TV, your co-op buying, uh, for, for media placement. Obviously, we have incredible direct mail vendors. But at the end of the day, I'll put Certipro's training and support up against any brand, including the likes of McDonald's, in terms of what we invest to ensure we position a franchisee for optimal success. And we have a little triangle. And it's our strategic anchors. There's three things on our strategic anchors. Financial success. Market share. and brand experience. You gotta have all three. You gotta create financial success for the franchise owners. If they're not making money, they're not gonna invest in their people. Their painters aren't making money. They won't wanna work there. And it's okay for us as a franchise or to make money too, because that means we get to invest in more resources to support them and grow as well. Market share. I already told you we have less than 2% market share. We expect every franchise owner to... grow at double digits every single year. That is the standard, that's the expectation. If you don't have an appetite for that sort of growth and when there's that much opportunity in your market, in your territory, then this is not the place for you. And then the third and just as important as those other two is we wanna deliver extraordinary brand experience to our painters first and foremost, because when your painters love working for you, they will always take great care of our customers. And we have world-class net promoter scores in the 80s consistently year over year. That's better than Southwest Airlines. That's better than Ritz Carlton. That's better than USAA. That's better than Zappos. It's better than some of the Apple. We're talking about iconic brands and we deliver in our space, that sort of customer experience. Yeah. You're describing what Herb Kelleher said in regards to take care of your employees in your team, they will take care of the customers that will then take care of the shareholders and it just goes on from there. So it sounds like you're implementing a similar model that's working really well for certain. Mike, you said that I can't believe you brought up Herb Keller because in 2003 I met him at a speech in downtown Philadelphia at the union and I was blown away by what he said. He said exactly what you said is Our job is to take great care of our people. Everything else will take care of itself after that. And when I became CEO of this company, I made a pivot. We would always have been a marketing and lead driven company and said, we're gonna focus on just customer acquisition. And I pivoted on the stage. I'm a basketball player. And I said, throw me the basketball. And I showed everyone, this is a jump stop and I'm gonna pivot. And we're gonna pivot towards making sure that we focus on our people first and foremost. and the rest will take care of it. And I want us to start with focusing on our painters and our painter community. And since then, our customer satisfaction has continued to skyrocket. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that story with us. So, as you mentioned before, Certapro franchise owners are not painters. They're leaders, they're team builders. Explain what you guys look for in an ideal franchise owner, what their role is, and kind of what their initial team looks like when they kind of start. a new territory? Really good question. So you have to have an aptitude to want to lead and are inspired to get results through other people. So there's a personality profile test you take that will kind of give us a leading indicator of that. But engineers, bankers, mid-level managers from Fortune 500 companies, officers in the military who may be put in there 20 years and want to start a new life. senior leadership people in fire departments, police, you know, EMT, those sorts of people who've done shift work and maybe are looking for an organized way to get more involved in the trades. Those have all been really successful walks of life with CertaPro, but you have to have urgency, you have to have tenacity, you have to have an entrepreneurial spirit, you have to be able to communicate in a direct and confident manner. And you got to be hungry, humble and smart. We don't know it all. You got to be hungry, humble and smart. And if that's the case, then you're going to find our culture, our values as a really good home and being a part of the sort of program. So you mentioned some markets before. What are your targeted growth markets and where new owners can come in and build really big business and capture some market share? Well, I... I'll reiterate him again. I think there's huge opportunity in Toronto. That's a really, uh, high wealth area. A lot of people, a lot of dwellings. That's a big opportunity. Metro Detroit. We've got a couple of really viable territories there. And if somebody wanted to grow and add more, there's multiple units available in both those markets. Um, we, uh, California is the sixth largest economy in the world. We have. incredible household wealth in San Francisco and LA. So we have some territories available there and we have some really successful owners in those markets that they just can't serve all of that area. So we're sold out in San Diego and Sacramento. So I'd like to finish filling out those two markets. And then most of Metro New York is sold out except for Long Island. And so those are the surprises. And that really surprises me as well. So we have like five or six open territories in that area. So those are the hot markets. But as I said, every major DMA is probably got a resale. So if somebody is like, hey, I would love to buy an existing business that already has some cash flow already has some infrastructure and I want to scale a mature business and get it much bigger. Detroit. I mean, I'm sorry, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia. Dallas, Denver are all markets, you know, where there's probably an opportunity to purchase an existing business and see that thing grow. And what does a typical startup have? A franchise owner, a sales rep really quickly, somebody to manage the back office and a kind of a production manager. So that's kind of how we'd like to see. your leadership team structured by the end of your first year. So if you could have one or two of those hires within the first six months, and then by the end of the first year, you've got those other two hires. And that's kind of what we'd like to see out of the gate. Yeah, no, that's great. I appreciate that. And I wanted to touch on something that I noticed that I love, which is you guys have a tiered royalty structure for both the royalty and the ad fund. So you go from 6% down to 4% based on. you know, how the franchisees perform. So the owners are rewarded for doing volume. So as they build big businesses, they pay a lower royalty from a percentage standpoint. So to me, I like franchisors that do that because it kind of sets the example. Like you build a big business, you're going to pay a lower royalty percentage with it. I think it's the right thing to do. Yeah, probably one of the best things we ever did was creating a tiered royalty structure. I don't know anyone who likes to pay taxes, but I know that the more you make, the less you like to pay. And in this particular case, the more you sell or the more you produce, the less you pay us. And we think that model serves everyone really, really well. It will encourage them to get to the next level. It gives them the confidence to know that I'm gonna be able to keep a little bit more of my money, which means I might actually invest in more. leadership development of my team or add another staff member or invest in some more marketing dollars or it's okay also to make a little bit more money too. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, looking at the item seven, it looks like you can get into the deal for under 300 K. I always look at the high number just so that candidates are sufficiently capitalized, but that's a really great entry point to build that team that you mentioned working capital, you know, marketing budget, things like that is under 300 K pretty common to get someone up and running. Yeah, you even in the most expensive of markets that would be more than sufficient. I think 250 is in terms of the cash you need is ample, but to be absolutely safe. And you look at the return on that investment in our, you know, item 19, you can see that our franchise owners are making a really healthy living. Can't make any earnings claims on this call, but sure. just go look at the data itself and you will see. And the best sales tool we have is if you ask one of our franchise owners, would you do it over again? And 99 out of a hundred usually say yes. Love it. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, the, I looked at the item 19, awesome first year average sales, phenomenal averages beyond that first year and killer owner benefits. So anyone that looks at the item 19. you know, just on paper, it's going to validate. And then when they speak to owners, they can kind of dig in and learn a little bit more about their PNL. So like you shared a lot of awesome stuff with us today. Um, I really appreciate it. Anything else that you want to add to the mix before we wrap up today? Uh, yeah, I guess I would leave with this thing. I talked about being hungry, humble and smart, but the thing about CertaPro more than anything else is, is our culture. It's rooted in our core values. We deliver what we promise, which means we act with integrity. We have pride in what we do, which, you know, is really cool. You take things that are dull and lifeless. You make them beautiful again. We respect the individual, which means we value all people, our franchise owners and staff. We practice continuous improvement, so we're always going to be challenging everyone to get better. And I'm blown away. I never in a million years thought we could be where we are, but I know where we're going. So we're gonna embrace the possibilities. We're gonna invest significantly in technology to drive our franchise productivity up even higher over the next five years. It's amazing. I think there's gonna be a certain percentage of the population that's just gonna wanna self-serve. And that's gonna allow our franchise owners to be even more productive. And if we've got the tech to do that, we're gonna have a strategic advantage. So. Remember that when you're thinking about CertaPro, the culture and our values. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that with us. That makes a lot of sense. I'm excited to watch you guys cross that billion dollar mark by doing it the right way, by staying true to the core values and building around that culture that you've built there and really appreciate you hopping on today. If anybody listening wants to connect with Mike's team to discuss CertaPro franchising, contact me. at FranchiseQB.com or on Twitter @QBFranchiseQB. I'll get you connected with them. Thank you so much, Mike, for taking the time to get in the huddle and discuss CertaPro painters with us today. Thank you, really enjoyed the discussion and thanks for doing a ton of due diligence on me and the brand ahead of time. I really enjoyed it. Absolutely. That's my job, man. I gotta do it right, you know? Thanks, Mike. 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.