Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to create wealth through franchising podcast and Kim Daily TV. I am your host, Kim Daly. I want to educate, motivate and inspire your business ownership journey by interviewing CEOs, leaders, sales, coaches, and exceptional franchisees to learn their valuable insights and strategies that we can apply to our own business ownership dreams. Now onto the show.
Welcome back to create wealth through franchising podcast and Kim Daily TV. Today, our special guest has a very interesting story from all sides of franchising. I find the most interesting people to interview here so we can share all the insider knowledge and secrets in franchising. Chris is from Dallas, Texas. Chris Kobis, did I say your last name correctly? Chris Kobis, welcome to Kim Daily TV.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate being here.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: It's going to be a good one today, so hang on to your seats. All right, so, Chris, I'm going to have you just start telling your story because very quickly my listeners are going to lean in and realize why Kim Daley had to have you share her story on this show. So start when you were working, aka for the franchise or what problem you started solving for in your own life and where that took you.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Sure. So I was with a franchise or spent four plus years working through the foundation transformation of this incredible brand, ended up taking that brand public and spending a whole lot of time just enjoying the craft of franchising from the franchise or standpoint. But after 20 plus years in a boardroom and being in a c suite from marketing and big corporate marketing, we decided that it was time to do something for myself, for ourselves, my wife and I.
And then we started the search for the right franchisee, to be a franchisee, to find the right franchise or that fit into our lifestyle. And it was really checked off a couple of boxes, right? It was like, hey, the freedom of entrepreneurship. But then it also allowed us to do something either better for the community, better for ourselves and our family, or someone else's health. And so we were on a long search.
Well, I say long search took about 90 days for us to commit to the first one. And it was pause studio, which is Paul's wellness and studio. It's out of LA. And they enticed us and understood that it fit right into our sweet spot of doing something better for your health, both mentally and physically. And so then we got on board and we do a multi unit development deal here in Dallas, and we are currently starting that one in Southlake, Texas. And then through that process, we said, I think the know, we kind of got that little blood in the water, and we're like, we want more. We want something a little bit more. And got introduced to an incredible brand called Goglo. And when I was a franchiseor, I was a part of a brand that was a disruptor in a space. And being a disruptor in a space really allows you to think about things differently, but also just grow, share quite dramatically. And so the founder has an incredible story, and so decided to get on board with them and spend some time with Goglo. And then we also entered into a multi unit development deal here in Dallas, and our first one's already open.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: It's amazing story. Okay, so we're going to rewind the tape a little bit. So, listeners, did you hear what this man said? Even working for a franchise or was like corporate America, it was working for somebody else's dream. He had to solve for his own problem. But he was familiar with franchising, so he went and found a franchise. So, Chris, did you use a franchise consultant to help you find pause?
[00:04:22] Speaker B: We did.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: Oh, very good. Okay, so that's why it took you 90 days. Wank, wink.
I'm so curious. Right, so from the franchiseors insider Knowledge, where you lived for all of those years, what were some of the things that you thought were important as you started looking for your own franchise or partner to help you learn to become a successful franchisee?
[00:04:49] Speaker B: So the story of the brand was extremely important. So the what, the service, the what is it that we do was a big piece of it. I think that translates back to the founder story and understanding why the business was started in the first place. Second was the financials. Right.
If the financials don't play out, then it just didn't make sense for us. And it had to be something that had pause and Goglo are completely different business concepts, from a cost of entry to the potential upside on both of them. However, the margins had to be strong enough and support a pretty healthy PNL. The opportunity to get into this market disruption space that we all want to be a part of, something that is early enough, that has demonstrated results, but also has the potential to just grow. So one 2310 units. The white space is there from a market densification standpoint, but then also really the mission of the brand really kind of really put us into ease when we entered into the connection with both pause and goglo.
The corporate world allows you to kind of run that train, but when you're doing it for yourself, and I'm a big fan, and just coming from franchise world, you buy a business to work on the business, not in the business. And that's what we were looking for with Gogla and pause.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Hey, daily Coach fans, if you're loving this episode, please do me a quick favor and leave me a five star rating and a short review. Your feedback fuels my growth and rankings and shows others that this podcast is valuable. Now back to the show.
So your first pause studio isn't even open yet, and you're already getting antsy, and you jump over to another brand. I love this story. I wish I was your consultant.
Did you use the same consultant for both?
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Yeah, she's fantastic.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: That's good. Okay.
And both of these being pioneering, you know, since you live in the number one market in the country for franchising, Dallas, Texas, it speaks to, you have to be a pioneer in order to jump into anything, right? Especially if you want to be South Lake or Frisco. I know you bought all the good dirt for go glow because Dallas is my number one territory. They're like, oh, we just sold it to one guy. I was like, I don't like that man.
Now here you are on my show. Okay, so with go glow, you mentioned it's already open because did you enter into the salon suite model? Is that why?
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Perfect. So we've had Melanie, the founder of Goglo, on the show. We've also had. Is it Jeff Ono? Pause. Yeah, we've had Jeff. I didn't want to say his name. Jeff, on the show a while back. So my listeners may be familiar with these brands, but this episode is less about the brands and more about the strategy. Right. Because you're taking a man who worked as a franchiseor, saw franchisees build a brand from small all the way to selling it. Did you say doing an IPO?
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Yes, we ipoed in 2021.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Yes. And so that's a massive run. And now he's out solving his own life problems, building his own dream business, but with two different brands. So how did you know that you could have the bandwidth to do a pause and a glow glow when your pause wasn't even up and operating yet?
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Yeah. The business model for pause is a pretty asset light business. Meaning there's not 500 people that we have to hire. Right. So we looked at other big concepts, indoor amusement park concepts. But you're spending a bulk of your time hiring and taking. There's nothing wrong with them. But I knew from our lifestyle and what we wanted to accomplish in both our personal lives and our professional lives that we wanted to have something that we could manage, a smaller staff. And also, the reason why we chose pause and go glow was they're not skilled labor, meaning they're very skillful when we get them in there and we put them in our training. But they're not someone that has to have a significant amount of licenses to be able to execute it. And so allowing that strategy, and if we think about our corporate strategy, it's like we hire and engage and train and create.
I talk about it all the time, is about the relationships you take in the community. Well, you're still making the same connections and same relationships. When you have a business that they're not competing businesses, they're maybe adjacent people that love beauty, love self care, also love this product called goglo, and then also love to make sure that their health and their mental capacity is at its top notch. Right. And so that's how we chose these businesses is because they weren't selling hot dogs and car washes. They were actually pretty adjacent in their arena as well.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: And why did you enter the market with multiple units for both?
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Well, my wife and I are pretty competitive.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Comes out. Okay, wait, so you are going to run the pause and she's going to run the go glow?
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Well, maybe a little bit of both, but we're also really competitive in a sense of, I'm going to spend all this time, our background is marketing. I'm going to spend all this time building our business unit, and then definitely not, I'm not going to let someone come in 3 miles from me and draft behind me. I want the whole market, because first off, we believe in these concepts so well that the three or four that we're going to open up in the first tranche is not going to be the end of our journey. It's going to be the beginning of how we build this business and how we continue to grow from a multi unit development deal, whether it's here in Dallas and continue to expand out other cities. That's our plan. That's our business plan of how we are engaging our business model.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: And would that be, Chris, because the wealth is created through the scale?
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Very well done. But, yes, that's how I look at it. Like, if you can open up one and run it well, and you can do three very well, then 712 kind of seems like that scale kind of.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: Builds appropriately as I educate my candidates, I always say it's sort of like having children. Right? Do you have children, Chris?
[00:11:53] Speaker B: I have three children.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Okay, so the first one changed your life the most right? Like, what the heck happened to my life, right? Number two, it's a little more work, but not really that big of a change. By number three, number four, nobody really cares. Just fall in line with the other kids.
I think raising multiple units of the same franchise feels much like that. Right? You take your learning curve from number one, which is the biggest. All the things you did wrong, you want to do right and do better the next time. And you launch number two, and it goes easier and faster. And then number three, and it goes easier and faster. And then you have this awesome economy of scale where maybe you can bring in one general manager to manage all three stores. Maybe you can even shift your staff around if need be from multiple stores if they're in an adjacent area. Correct.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: That's 100% our plan.
And then these business units do that. They allow you to kind of mix and match your staff, but they also allow you to reward and promote the staff that are doing the best for you. Right. And so as you grow, they might start as a spray tech at Goglobe, but then continue to roll into a district and regional managers back to our original mission. If we can provide vocation and provide a career path for someone in our community, then fantastic, that's a win for us and that's kind of our good.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: Okay, so let's kind of talk about some of the things you learned, the juicy details when you're on the franchiseor side and you're watching all of these franchisees, some be successful, some not as successful, give us like a couple of juicy insider secrets from the franchiseor side about what really makes. Because you see it all in a company as big as that company was, what are the successful people doing that the franchisees who are not successful are not doing?
[00:13:49] Speaker B: I think the number one is know your business. Right?
If you don't understand the KPIs, if you don't understand what's moving your business one way or the other, whether it's from marketing, from your cost of goods to your labor consumption, if you don't know your business, you're not going to be a successful franchisee. Quite frankly, you're not going to be a successful business owner at any right. But from a franchisee, you can't look towards the franchise or to give that for you. Now, many franchiseors provide you all the tools. You just got to look at them and use them, but some don't. The other side is you got to know your staff, you got to know your people. You got to know the people that are engaging with your customers day to day. I'm not saying that you have to be working at the front desk to be your franchisee, but you do need to understand what is the pains and the challenges that your staff's having so then you can solve them for your customer. I'm a big fan of customer experience, and I would even argue in the last several years, companies can do significant growth by just providing simple, great customer service. How many times have you gone into a store or a restaurant and you're like, if you would have just spent a couple of moments to get to know me or understand my challenge, you would have had a customer for life. And so that element of it is like, well, how much time? Questions always asked. How much time do you spend in your center? I haven't been there in three weeks. Well, could be why your financials are performing the way they are.
And then the final piece of it is, from a franchise or standpoint, where it gives us a lot of confidence in the business model, is that it allows you to have someone that's invested their own capital in a business. So from a franchise or standpoint, you're not talking to folks that can run down the street because someone offered them $0.50 more an hour. You're talking to people that actually care. So if you get past the challenge of they're challenging you and just understand they're only coming from a place of understanding and trying because they really care about their business, then that magic between the franchiseor and the franchisee just really becomes something special.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: I love that. It's all the things I say, but sometimes somebody else saying it who's been on the franchiseor side of things, people hear it differently. Right? Just like mom says something, kids don't hear it, coach says it, and now. Right, right. I'm like, all right, as long as you heard it, I'll put my ego aside.
Yeah. And there is a lot of feeling, I think, when you're a candidate in the process of exploring a franchise, there's an awareness that has to happen that the franchiseor is not the enemy. They're really in this for your success. And I don't speak for every franchiseor out there because I don't work with every franchiseor out there. And there are franchiseors that are better than others, but the ones that I speak for, they really do care about your success as a franchisee. And so we're not like two parties on opposite sides of the table. We're two parties sitting side by side. Right. Learning from each other, growing with each other, helping each other build this business that we call our franchise. So I like that a lot, Chris.
Okay, so now let's fast forward. Let's pretend you've got a couple of your pause studios open. You've got a couple of your go glows open.
What does your life look like? What are those goals that you and your wife aspire to achieve in terms of time, freedom, quality of life? How do you see this unraveling for you or coming together for you? Maybe a better word.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: Yeah, coming together is definitely our intention, right? No, we will continue to engage. Right. As our business grows, we will continue to engage our team. Right.
I don't pretend to be an HR professional. So when we get to a size of a business where we need to have someone that is professional in that space, we will same with the CFOs. And so we will continue to grow our organization. Because I have found from a franchiseor standpoint, the most successful franchiseors, franchisees are the ones that actually have the staff and the people that can grow at a scale. If my wife and I tried to do it all ourself, then that quality of life that we're seeking by being in franchising kind of goes away. And because we're now working 20 hours a day, just my nature to work a whole lot anyways. However, that's not the reason why we're doing this. It's not the reason why our future is to spend more time with our kids, spend more time with our family, and do the things that we want to do.
It's hard work to do that, to get there, but we're planful in our business plan to make, to understand at what point we continue to build our team and our staff. Because ultimately, when you have multiple units going back to the quality of life and our employee satisfaction scores, it's all about them having the right resources for them to be successful.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Hey, daily Coach fans, if you're ready to begin your own journey to find the perfect franchise, please email me right now at inquire at KimDaily TV. My services are totally free for you. That's inquire at KimDaily TV. Now back to the show.
And the owner that you start out as is not the owner that you need to grow into or be when you have a much bigger operation. And I think for those listening, when we're trying to get all of the information we're ever going to need before we can say yes or feel confident that this is the right thing, I think that's what trips a lot of people up, I once heard it said by a self help person in the same context. It's like trying to eat all the food you're going to need in a year. Today, you don't need all the food you need in a year, right? You just need enough food to sustain you today. And there's faith that there will be food for tomorrow. And the same thing kind of happens in business ownership. The skill that you bring to the table on day one will evolve and adapt and grow, just as you will evolve and adapt and grow as an owner. And so you have to have that faith and the growth mindset that the business is a journey that you're entering into and that you're in it for the growth and you're going to keep becoming more and putting more into it in order to continue to strive to reach your milestones and to be the owner and have the quality of life that everybody starts out wanting, but not everybody's willing to go through the growth to get there. A lot of people just. You must have seen this as well, Chris. A lot of people seem to want it all right from day one. And I'm not going to tell you you can't have it because it's on you. Maybe you can, but it might be like, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And know more money and more time in the beginning and building that foundation will set you up for more success and freedom later on. Would you agree with that, Chris?
[00:21:18] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%.
When you're engaging in a disruptor or I'd say a newer franchise or someone that doesn't have 1000 units plus, right. Even 100 units, someone's in the 20 to 50 units. You got to understand you're not buying McDonald's, right.
When you sign that franchise agreement, that's when the work started. Before that. But when you sign that franchise agreement, the work starts. And when you first open your doors, like when you first open chick fil A or McDonald's, the drive through has people coming through it just because of virtue of so many years of success, right.
When you open up, say a go glow or a pause, the work starts because you create the relationship and you are the one driving that brand and that business into a market that we're the first ones here now. We're not the first ones to ever spray tan or the first ones to ever do an amazing contrast therapy. I argue we do it better than anybody, but an amazing contrast therapy. But you've got to introduce them to the why you're opening. Why are you there? Why does goglow in this market? Why is pause in this market? It's because there's a gap and you need to get people to feel that. So if you're able to do that, that's that hard work outside of the actual day to day work of getting it done. And I'll always resort to my marketing background is like your job is to drive business. And whether it's through working with smart digital ad people or out there and creating relationships and meeting other small business owners and engaging in their business, so that way they understand who you are and why they want to go and support your business.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So great. And people have heard me say that the reason that brands like Chickfila enjoy the moment they're in today is because for the 30 or 40 years leading up to this year, their franchisees have told the same story with such precision. Right. And delivered on the principles from their leadership with such consistency that we know what Chick fil a is when we're not even standing in a chick fil a store. We know how it's going to feel, we know how it's going to smell. We know how we're going to be greeted. Why? Because that's a brand. That's a great american franchise brand. Now, everybody wants that. But the downside is there's probably no more good territory in your area, right? Because it's already come and gone. So Chris and I today are speaking about coming in on the beginning side of that and riding that wave up and potentially positioning a brand to be able to sell it when the world wakes up and everybody wants one, and there's no more locations, as we've talked about with massage envy and orange theory fitness, some of the sister companies to the brand that you were a part of, right? Where we watched people cashing out for huge multiples. Because when everybody woke up and you had the most established location in your market and there was no more for sale, then you could raise your hand and go, you can buy mine, pay me six times what I'm making, and you can have it. Right? People were buying it, people were paying it, and people were.
So it's such a fun story. It comes full circle. I love that. Chris, thank you so much for sharing your story, your insights, your knowledge from both franchisor and now emerging franchisee. Thank you for being my guest here today.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: You're welcome. Thank you for having me and I truly appreciate it.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: For those who are inspired to begin your own journey, whether it's with pause or Goglo or you just don't know. That's why you have a franchise consultant in Kim daily. So please follow the email on the screen right now or email me directly at inquire at Kimdaily TV that's inquire at Kimdaily TV. And until next time, my name is Kim Daley and I want to be your daily coach.
You can find more content just like this on my YouTube channel at Kimdaily TV. And if you're inspired to take the next step to explore franchises match to you, please email me right now at choir at Kimdaily TV. That's inquire at KimDaily TV.
