Franchise QB

Episode 107: Recession-Proof Investing: Building a Commercial Security Empire with FlyLock Franchise

• Mike Halpern

Share episode

This conversation explores the journey of Flylock Security Solutions, a franchise that evolved from a family locksmith business founded in 1946. Co-founders Barry and Brett McMenimon discuss the significant turning points in their growth, including the transition to franchising and the recent rebranding from Flying Locksmiths to Flylock Security Solutions. They highlight the company's focus on commercial security services, the importance of training and support for franchise owners, and the unique advantages of their national account management system. The discussion also emphasizes the collaborative culture among franchisees and the ideal profile for potential franchise owners, along with insights into startup costs and the family-oriented nature of the franchise system.

Free Resource for Franchise QB Listeners:

The Franchise QB Playbook will guide you through the process of finding your perfect franchise fit.

Free Franchise Doc: 👉https://www.franchiseqb.com/playbook
#franchiseownership #FranchiseOpportunities #OwnABusiness #FranchiseSuccess #FranchiseQB

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

Joining us in the huddle today are Barry and Brett Mcminneman with Flylock Security Solutions. Welcome to the show, guys. Absolutely. So Barry and Brett, your brothers, your grandfather founded the Flylock, which was formerly the Flying Locksmith concept, way back in 1946. and you're the co-founders of the franchise system many years later. Take us back to the very beginning. How did Fly Lock's journey begin? What were some of the biggest turning points that helped it grow from a family shop to what is now a national franchise brand? Sure, yeah, I can do that. I so it's kind of interesting. My grandfather was in World War II, came back and he was working as a locksmith and a pilot. so he called himself the Flying Locksmith. uh I guess locksmithing was paying the bills better than being a pilot back then. So he stuck with the locksmithing thing. And he was just, he was... He was a guy's guy. was just working out of his truck, working with his hands and getting the jobs done, leaving the poker table, doing a lockout, rinse and repeat. He ended up passing that down to his four sons, one of which was my dad. And then two went on to do kind of their own thing. One became an attorney, a lawyer, and one actually started an access control system company before it was like a big thing. And he did very well for himself and sold it. And so it was just my uncle and my dad running the locksmith business. I jumped right in out of school and I actually went and got my bachelor's degree in business, but hopped in a truck and started making service calls myself like grandpa and Brad and my dad wanted a little bit more time to golf. So I started running the show a little bit and then Barry saw how much fun we were having and said, how do I get in? Because I think you were doing what property management at the time. Yeah, so. He wanted to get in and so did my cousins and it was just not a big enough pie for all of those family members. So we actually looked at acquiring a business north of Boston because we resided right south of Boston. We actually got as close as me to meet an offer and I got bought out by a door company. And so we were kind of back at square one and Barry, my less attractive, less athletic brother came in and said, Hey, what about franchising? And we're like, get out of here. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I mean, you gotta imagine, we're just, you know, we're some guys from Boston who run a locksmith company. We do not know anything about franchise agreements, FDDs, any of that stuff. So, you know, we just said, get back to work. You're dope, get out of here. And the more we thought about it and the more we went out to dinner and chatted and everything, it... it started to make a little bit more sense so we uh... we hooked up with Dennis Morganon and he kinda held our hand through a lot of it well actually before we even started he came out and kinda fell in love with our business he was always telling us no one asked you about pricing they just ask you how quickly you can get there and we were always like boom yeah that's the world we live in we need a teleporter to get to the jobs because we're never close enough and uh... it's can we be there yesterday and uh... he eventually got to the point with us he said look if you don't do it i'm gonna find someone who will So we jumped in and I think we had 10 franchises our first year and then 30 the next year. And it was just, hey. Steve, was telling me how the growth just took off and it was like 30 agreements this year, 40 agreements this year. It was just pretty impressive. And it's like not a lot of franchise systems have the kind of tenure and track record like 1946. mean, this thing's been around 80 years. I mean, obviously it's a tried and true. Concept but as you guys have learned like being a franchisor and operating a locksmith business or two different things. So um So one thing I wanted to ask obviously I've led with you know, the brand was originally the flying locksmiths You explained kind of your grandfather's kind of attachment to that name with his service And now the new branding is fly lock security solutions What led to the decision to rebrand? and what does Flylock Security Solutions represent that's different from the Flying Locksmith? I know it's a big deal because people know your brand name. It's gotta be pretty painful to go through that process, but hopefully coming out the other end, it's been a win. Well, it's funny, we were sort of dragged into that sort of evolution, would say, Brett, wouldn't you? Yeah, that was, you can thank the franchisees. That was their suggestion. I think the more they got involved in this business, the more they saw something that needed to be changed. And that was hard for us because, mean, shoot, the Flying Locksmiths was the name of my little league team. I was ready to get that thing tattooed on my shoulder or something, but they wanted to make a change. Locksmithing was not indicative of what we actually do on a day-to-day basis anymore. We don't do lockouts. If y'all lock down to your house, we just don't have the time to get there. If you're looking for a copy of your car key, that's not us. So as we evolved and realized we're doing way more access control cameras, door replacements, the term locksmith was just kind of, it wasn't right anymore. it took a long time, I think, for me and Barry to come around to it, but the franchisees said it's time. So eventually enough of them start telling you that, you start listening. And when did you actually make the switch? We started the process, I would say, about a year and a half ago now. But it's a long process. So many things that have to change. But the goal is to be completely, everything is gonna be switched to Flylock by the end of this year. So we got about a month left. Website actually just went up on Tuesday. we're getting, thanks, yeah, we're getting really close. Look, I mean, as a layman, someone that has no idea about the space, like I think it makes sense when you hear locksmiths, you think about like someone coming to your car, let you in and you guys do so much more than that. So let's kind of delve into that a little bit for listeners like me that aren't familiar with the space. Can you describe a little bit more about what Flylock does kind of on a day to day basis and how technology has kind of reshaped the physical security industry? Sure, I mean, I can start, you can finish, but I think 95 % of our work is commercially focused. And when you think of locksmithing, you sort of think of, I'm residentially locked out of my house, and that's not the world. What we do is we work with camera systems. So there's surveillance systems that you see on side of buildings. I everywhere is a camera now. There's no shortage of them putting cameras in every sort of... application from retail to hospitals to education to you know even the local nail salon has cameras to watch internal theft. We do a ton of that we do access control you know the key cards and biometric sort of you know for your fingerprints any sort of end sort of credential that gets you into a space or into a building that's sort of our world and all of that interacts with the typical door hardware so you know going to our traditional you know heritage it's the locksmithing part is is still a core part of our business where we We fix the doors, we put locks on the doors that all has to interact with the technology that we're leading with. But that locksmithing portion is still built into our offerings. Yeah. and it's a lot easier to call one company who will do the cameras, the access control, and the locks as opposed to calling three companies that you got to get to work together to get all those things kind of communicating and working properly. So it sounds like commercial is kind of the meat of the offering. I do you do any residential work or is it like 80, 90 % of what you do is commercial applications? probably low on that, it's more like 95 % at this point. at this point, I think it's probably 5%. It's it's you got to be right next door at this point. So when you have candidates that you guys are engaging with that are exploring ownership in the franchise space, what makes Flylock stand out compared to the usual service concepts they see? I clearly since pandemic, there's been a ton of activity in the home services space. You guys really are in home services. You're in more, you know, B2B services. what's kind of what makes you guys a little bit different? funny I think there's a couple of things but one of the big ones for us I think is the fact that we are commercially focused. I've heard so many candidates that you know they're coming out of corporate America and they don't want to work nights and they don't want to work weekends. I think there's a ton of concepts that they look at that are residentially focused where you know that's a big part of what they have to get into is they now have to you know visit customers on weekends or after hours and with our sort of business it's you know we're here Monday through Friday, nine to five. There's emergencies that come in, but it's handled by an emergency service line. It's not like the owner in our business is handling that sort of thing. It's project-based work where they can work, I think, their typical hours that perhaps they were working at a corporate job before this. So it's a little bit more, you know, with their lifestyle, I think is a big part of it. I mean, is there anything else that you think that I'm missing? think we're kind of a unicorn in the space. There's no big national competitor of ours. At least, I don't know who they are. There's competitors in each market, but I think our footprint and our size and the ability to scale on projects, I mean, we have so many national customers where they can call us and say, I need a job done here in Boston, and then I also need the same thing done at another site in Phoenix. the same process is followed at both locations. And I think that's huge for a lot of customers. Yeah, and it's awesome that you guys have the scale with your franchise system to be able to do that because pre-franchising it's like, well, we don't have anyone in Phoenix that can help you out. But now it's like, yeah, we can just kind of, you know. rinse and repeat, copy and paste, and you can kind of apply the same thing. Plus you have all the pricing worked out and yeah, that's really cool. So let's talk about like entry into a new market, right? So you guys find a great candidate. They're like, Hey, Fly Locks my brand. I like B2B. This thing makes a ton of sense. How do you help the new owners hit the ground running? Like what does training and the early stage support look like? So we have actually, before you come in for training, we have an online university to kind of just get you to know, we're not expecting our owners to become technicians, but just to hear the verbiage and learn some of the lingo. And they can do that at their own speed online, so by the time they come in for training, they're gonna spend about a week with us here in Boston. They're actually gonna bring their technician with them, and we're gonna teach them our systems. The technician will go out with our Boston techs. and learn how they do things like the right way, how we interact with customers. And then we bring our whole team in and we do a whole training session on a multitude of different things. And then after training is complete, Steve Quinn, who you've met, will fly out to their site and do three days of just basic sales activity. you're going to be tired by the end of those three days because Steve will go out there. mean, when I met him, he sat down at a table and he's like, here are the here's the church I just visited. Here's the bit I the guy walks up and on the street knocking on doors and landing deals. It's he's an animal. It's funny. I used to tell them, I'm like, hey, we got to do more like email marketing or text. And then I started realizing, I was like, everyone just deletes that stuff. The old school Steve Quinway is the way to go. Just go knock on the door, hand him a business card. And we always tell everyone too, this isn't like you're not walking in with a widget saying, would you like to buy this? You're just walking in and saying, I'll be the guy that you can call when you need help and I'll be there. And that's, it's just relationships. You're just managing relationships. someone says, what are you doing in here, Steve? He's like, well, clearly you need to upgrade your security because you You say that all of our franchise owners when they get together they share Steve Quinn stories on you know Yeah, he brought me into the back of some you know medical facility I don't think we're supposed to be in there, but he does he makes connections, and it's a you know a connection sort of business Yeah, but it's good that you're teaching that like grassroots kind of, you know, guerrilla marketing because everyone can turn on the Google and the meta and all that and do the digital footprint. But it's nice to have like the combination, especially when you're playing in the B2B relationship space. um so let's touch on something you guys mentioned a little earlier about national counts. How does that program work? How does that help franchisees generate revenue? Like even before their local marketing ramps up? Yeah, I mean, we've we kind of were thrown into national account management early on because I think the fact that we were the only one out there that could do what we're doing, certain accounts started to come to us and say, all right, you know, I just want to use you guys. I mean, to put it harshly, was they were looking for a one throat to choke. And when the industry is sort of so fragmented, you know, that didn't exist. It was almost like we were inundated with national accounts just coming our way simply to. Service their sites. I mean you think of a Starbucks manager is baby's got six thousand different coffee shops and he's got you know possibly as many vendors in each and you know six thousand different vendors and across the country trying to manage all of that we sort of Kind of built a team in the last ten years where it said alright Let's take that those accounts that we know our national accounts Service them go get work for our franchisees that they don't have to so when you come on board I mean we've got probably a hundred different national accounts in our system that I'm basically saying it worked all over the place. uh there's two different types. There's two different funnels there. We have our own national accounts where they're just direct customers of us and we maintain relationships with We call them NSP's national service providers and it's almost like a third party for a lot of companies I'll just use like really like Starbucks necessarily and I'm just making this up, but I don't want to throw away our customers here But like if Starbucks doesn't call us directly they call a third party who also would call their electrician their plumber You know whoever else for maintenance, we make sure we're on the list with that third party. And what's nice is we have these systems that are so universal across our network, our invoices and our estimates go out to these third parties the same way. Again, same way in Boston that they do in Phoenix, that when we bring a new location on board, like, great, I got work in that area where I could use some help, because the person I am using doesn't get me this in time, or doesn't do this, or doesn't do that. we actually maintain those two funnels where our franchisees get a decent amount of work before even making a sales call. Yeah, it's good to be on those lists. mean, it's like if you are in restoration and a pipe burst, like the plumber is going to say, hey, I need a restoration company to come out of the insurance company when the consumer calls. It's good to be on those lists so that like you're top of mind when it comes, you know, and like you said, proximity matters. Like they want you out there immediately to do whatever job they need to do. So, yep, cool. we look at it for our franchisees. It'll pay the bills, go and get your own too. Yeah. And look, you got to condition your owners to go out there and win their own business, but it's nice when you have this as kind of a supplement, especially get over the fears of ownership. It's like, look, we already have a bunch of accounts that are going to be funneled your way when the time comes. So you guys talked earlier about like what differentiates you as a, you know, a brand within the service space. What, when you look specifically at the security and locksmithing space, why should a candidate bet on Flylock? What kind of separates you guys from other brands that are competing in the same space in the franchise world? I think part of it is the fact that security is not going anywhere if anything it's you know as far as security goes it's it's getting more everyone wants more secure facilities and especially when it comes to education and healthcare and that sort of thing but you know it's funny we are still unique as far as what we do you know there's there's access control companies out there there's locksmiths but there's no one that really controls the opening as as we do and that's sort of our I guess our unicorn ability here is the fact that we sort of take the account and we want not just the access control. ADT is a big player out there and they use us for subcontractor work all the time across most of our markets where they're a great, probably one of our top 10 national accounts. And they send us work because simply they can't do everything that we do. And that's what have been our sort of go-to plan is like, let's control the opening. I like it. Yeah, it makes sense. So it's interesting. My next question is to ask about like a success story that you guys have with a franchise owner where maybe you as the franchisor got better and made the system stronger. You've already talked about that in the branding, how like the franchise owners were like, Hey, we need a name that's going to better reflect what we currently do. But anything else come to mind in terms of like interacting with owners that have made your company better? Yeah, I mean, the one that comes to mind is the one we're talking about today, Brookdale. Brookdale Senior Living. You know, big senior living company across multiple states. But the very early on, you know, someone had a connection. And this is the great thing about our network is, you know, someone brings an opportunity in. We always look and say, you know, how does that impact the rest of the network? Can our national account team sort of take that and run with it and expand that? But the first one that came in was, you know, this is a I think it's, I read today it was a couple million dollar project or something at this point. So it went on for a while, but the first guy that took it on was, he was only two technicians at the time. And that's a, yes. unit of this facility. So you would imagine for someone else that's they're gonna be there for a year doing all this work. But we actually, I didn't mean to cut you off Barry. We just, we said, hey, who wants a piece of this? And he was willing to split it up and we diced it up and we brought in just a team from different places and got that done in a couple of weeks. And it was like, how cool is that? Because. If you're on your own doing this, you don't have those resources. You can't do that. Maybe you can find one buddy who could help you out. it was really neat to see the collaboration between the franchisees to just scale and get that project done. Yeah, it's awesome because they could be like selfish and try to take it off in themselves, but that's going to eventually hurt the client. It's going to hurt them. And like this way everybody wins. The job gets done quicker. There's a revenue share. There's kind of like rising tide floats the boats. mean that, that, that culture isn't like, you know, that's something that's learned because they're like, Hey, you know, I met this guy at convention. Like I want other owners to come in and help me out. We're all going to get better. And I think that's a really good, it's like cooperative competition. Totally. that's also one of the best parts about a franchise system is like we all have our territories so we don't have to compete with each other. It's not even on the big projects. Just we get busy. A job comes in and you can't get there. You don't have to lose the client. You can let your neighbor take it. They'll do it. And then next time that person needs something, you can do it. And it's just having those boundaries and having everyone work collaboratively on that is just for me. 10 years ago, I lose that customer because I didn't get there in time. good point. Yeah, thanks for sharing that with us. That's awesome. And so what kind of person are you looking for? Who thrives as a Flylock franchise owner? What makes this a really good fit for someone that's not like a blue collar trades guy that can come in and really win in your model? I would say, I was gonna say someone that's really business minded. The worst thing that we have is someone that wants to in and actually be a technician. That's not our model. We don't want to teach someone how to turn a screwdriver. You wanna hire those people and you wanna grow the business. mean, sales is always a great skill to have, but not a necessity. But someone that's capable of running a team, someone that can build a team, that's sort of something that I think we sort of always thought we've... was easy, you you meet enough people and like that's a skill in itself. And if people are capable of doing that, you know, this is definitely a team sort of building business where you got to work with the technicians, you got to work with your accounting staff and you got to keep on reinvesting in building that team. And that's sort of the, I guess, the general candidate we're looking for is someone that maybe has that skill already or is at least willing to kind of develop that skill. That's the, we see with the most successful owners we have in our system. That's pretty much what I was going to say. Just, we don't want anyone to get in the truck. That's not what this is. Someone that can lead teams that's not afraid to go out there and make connections, be the mayor of the town, that type of thing. Exactly. So what is the startup cost range and item seven to get started with a fly lock franchise? So currently it's between 146,000 and 397,000. Depends on how many trucks, equipment, things like that. Yeah, and normally when a franchise owner launches, do they launch with one, they launch with two, is it really up to them? You know, it's probably half and half. I've had a lot of people start with two. I've had some people start with one. It's really, it's like a, you know, the scariest thing is like what happens if that band goes down, right? It's so, some people are kind of more risk adverse than others. So it's really 50-50. it's nice to have a hedge. So if you have an issue with one truck, you can still do the jobs. I get that. How about item 19? Do you provide prospective owners with any guidance as to how they can perform? We do actually we we split that up into quartiles We used to put the the original locations numbers in there, but we actually don't do that anymore So we just put the franchisees numbers in there. It's all in the item 19 Yeah em mean, it's really great that they can kind of look at some historicals, talk to some owners and kind of see if the economics makes sense. know, Barry Brett, this has been great. I've learned a whole lot about Flylock. Anything else you want to add to the mix before we wrap up today? I say the biggest thing though is you we're looking for someone that you know values this opportunity the way we value it. It's been our grandfather's business you know since 1946 we're looking for people that are you know part of partners but also part of our family in a way. It's you know we don't have a large group we have roughly a hundred franchisees we think we'll probably get close to 200 when we sell out the whole country and we want the the next hundred here to be people that we can partner with. We work with everyone pretty much daily. weekly, you know, we know all our franchise owners by name and you're not just a number in our system. So it's important that, you not only that you have this opportunity, but we also like to meet the franchise again to make sure you're right for us too. It's definitely a collaborative sort of system. Yeah, it sounds like a really great franchise family. Brett, anything you wanted to add? I was just going to say, you know, one of the important things for us is we still run the original location. We are the franchise or people still call us corporate. I look over my shoulder and say, who are they talking about corporate? That's not me. But we still run the original location. Obviously, I have a general manager in place who runs the day to day, but heavily involved. And I think it's important for us to be a good franchise or we can't just talk the talk. We're going to walk the walk. So we're still we're still doing it. So to Barry's point, you know, the next. 100 people that come into our franchise system, we're gonna be doing it with you. ah awesome. You guys have your finger on the pulse of the local business. You've been doing it a long time. Now you allow other franchise owners to come in and participate. That's great. if anyone listening would like to connect with Barry or Brett to learn more about becoming a franchise owner with Flylock security solutions, contact me at franchise qb.com or on X at QB franchise QB and I'll get you connected. Thank you guys so much for taking the time to get in the huddle with us today. Got it.