Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to American wealth in Franchising and Kim Daly tv. I am your host, Kim Daly. I want to educate, motivate and inspire your business ownership journey by interviewing business leaders, 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. In my studio today, all the way from Fort Wayne, Indiana to southern New Hampshire, I want to introduce my followers to my new friend, Paul Marengo. He is a Kill wins chocolate fudge ice cream franchisee. Paul, welcome to the studio of Kim Daly tv.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. It's kind of humbling and exciting to be here, so thank you.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: I'm so happy to have you here. I trip over the full name of Kilwins. I just want to say Kilwins because I'm like, everybody knows Kilwins, but everybody might not know that it's chocolate fudge and ice cream.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. It's surprising how many people don't know that name, but after they taste it, it's hard to forget.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: We are on a mission to help them know, but we are actually here to tell your story of how you changed your life by becoming a franchisee. Tell me what was happening in your life when you answered the call to franchising.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: The store opened on September 14th of 2021 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That's our Kilwins downtown shop. Just kind of the old fashioned Main street type of boutique chocolate fudge and ice cream shop. But our story to begin franchising began with Kilwins. And I can only speak from that vantage point, knowing the franchise life through Kilwin's eyes, because that's what we do. But it started probably five, six years before that on a family vacation in Petoskey, Michigan, where kind of the. The big chocolate kitchen is, if you will. And while we were on a family vacation and the kids were certainly younger back then, we accidentally ran into this like 40,000 square foot willy Wonka chocolate factory, which we did not even know existed in Petoskey. We were there for other reasons, but we stopped in, had an ice cream treat, saw a thousand other treats, tried a few other things, and picked up a little card. It became kind of a daily part of our vacation up there. And while we were in there, we picked up this little card that said, welcome to the Kilwins family. Fill out a little card to become a franchisee. To be honest, I didn't even know exactly what that meant other than, wow, wouldn't it be kind of cool to bring one of these to Fort Wayne, Indiana? And never really thought about it as being so much a life changing experience.
Had no clue what it meant financially even before that. I won't go back to 75, but prior to Renee and I starting up this franchise business venture, maybe about 15, 16, 16 years before that, we actually started a kind of a homespun home rental business. And we acquired over time, seven rental homes and got a little bit of business experience that way prior to that. And through the rental home experience. We're both educators, so we're retired teachers. Maybe the last 15 years or so of a 34 year career in that I was school principal for an elementary school and Renee worked with kind of reading and math special kids. So that was our life. Our beginnings are really humble and we were pretty naive going into this franchise inquiry. So we sent in the postcard almost as a joke because we never thought it could happen. And they called us back and they said, hey, would you like to come up to Petoskey and meet us? We would like to meet you. We didn't realize the biggest draw to us was the people initially and the core values that they shared, but also demonstrated whenever we were in their visiting, getting to know them. And they were kind of interviewing us as potential franchisees. So it wasn't just like you put your money down for the, you know, the franchise fee and you can become one. It was quite a long process of going back and forth. Now the other funny thing is that there might be some franchises that would go anywhere in the United States. And Kilwin's is such a specialty shop. They're very particular of where one sits and they care about our success as much as we hope to be successful. So that was a big part of the equation. And they actually told us in probably the second year of our inquiry that Fort Wayne was about between 15 and 20 years away from being a franchise site.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: I hate to say with where we're at, I'll just say we're kind of vintage people, we're retired and we weren't going to start anything. I'll just say in our late 70s.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: I want to make sure I got the timeline. I thought you said in the beginning that you opened your first store in 2001. Did you say 2021?
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Yes, 2021.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Okay. So you were doing this homework years before 2015, 2016.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: We started the process.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Okay. But your market wasn't ready for a Kilwin So they were like, we love you, but your market isn't viable for our offering.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: And then two years after that first. First kind of go around, I mean, we had already been approved. We loved Kilwins. We just appreciated that they wouldn't say go ahead and knowing it would fail or feeling like it would fail. Interestingly, Fort Wayne had a 20 year history of building the downtown development, riverwalk, riverfront apartments, retail restaurants. It was already in process, but Kilwins couldn't see it. They never heard of Fort Wayne, Indiana to begin with. And so when they Google mapped Fort Wayne, they saw the corner we were looking at and it was a parking lot and brambles are blowing around and, you know, it's like nothing. But when they came down physically, the CEO actually drove down to Fort Wayne to see why on earth would they consider putting something like that here. And after just a few go arounds of their leadership team, they said, well, their money, if they want to take a chance, we see more in person than we saw in Google Maps. And that's really the. That's how it started.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Okay, so let's go back. I want to fill in some gaps so that my, my followers can like really get into the juicy details of this story, because I want to. So you're teachers and you're building a real estate portfolio. I heard you correct, right? So you were already sort of in this. We want to make more money. We need more than we're getting in our W2 jobs. We want to move our money. We want to feel more in control of our financial future.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: So.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: So you're building, you're buying properties and renting them out. Now, today, do you still own those homes or have you sold off all of your rental properties?
[00:07:07] Speaker B: That is a great question. Because when we started the rental business, our goal is to get four. We have four children. We were going to do one rental home per child. Help that fund the future a little bit. Well, we ended up acquiring seven total. We have since sold four. You have three remaining. They're very low maintenance, very easy. But we used the sale of the rental properties to fund the beginning of the franchise business.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: This is where you went right down my little evil hole. Like I wanted you to go there. And there was a reason. Because I spend a lot of time talking to multifamily real estate investors who are looking for diversification in their portfolio. They're looking for the faster cash flow that a business can create. They like the tax savings. They like control. They want to build equity for the future, but they want cash now, so I love that. So perhaps you were in that same place like, you got a taste of, like, ooh, we're making more money and we can own it and control it. But when you applied to Kilwin's, was there also the thought that you really were trying to answer the bigger question of how do we build wealth for our family?
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Yes, it was kind of wealth. And also maybe because of our backgrounds, we did not have great aspirations for what kind of wealth could be grown through the franchise and through kill wins. We've come to learn what that is like, and we're enjoying it. We appreciate where we are. We don't take anything for granted. Any day someone comes in to buy an ice cream cone, we're thankful.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Are you both retired from teaching because you now can live off of your businesses?
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, absolutely. As a matter of fact, I don't know at what point might have been year two and a half to three.
And by that point, I'll just say year three of owning the Fort Wayne store. So a year into owning the Indianapolis store as well, I finally heard from Renee, my wife, without me compelling or, you know, being too excited about anything, that she is so grateful to not have to worry about bills, expenses. Like when you say, go back to the W2 paycheck, we were able to pay the bills and raise a family and do some neat things. But you have to work really hard to try to build a legacy or wealth. So the move into the franchise arena really opened up that potential to live without paycheck, to paycheck worries and give us a nice cushion. You still have to be smart. We just know how to live. We knew how to live frugally. So you run your business the same way and you try to maintain the. The controllable expenses, and there's enough cash through the business, thankfully, to handle the emergency or not unexpected expenses. And we've been able to do that, feel very blessed by that.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: So let's go back to when you were thinking about retiring from your professions and being just solely invested in your business, your family. Were they like, are you crazy? What are you doing? Or were they like, you're our heroes?
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Okay. I could tell you've been talking to a lot of people for a number of years because, like, you've been in our living room and at our family get togethers, and we have a pretty good size extended family, you know, and our family is growing with the four grandkids we have now, the golden gems.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: My mother tells me that, you know, you're good but children, you give me, that's what really matters.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, what you describe though is really dead on because depending on who the person was in the family, I'll just say if you're an optimist and I hate to say a pessimist, but just your perspective on things, many people in the family lean toward. Are you guys crazy? You're risking your entire future? Well, our future was a small pension, maybe a little Social Security and whatever savings or investing we had on the side, there wasn't much security in that. And I'm like, well, we're risking virtually nothing. Like if it doesn't work, we're going to have what we would have had anyway, which is a fixed income. The idea of being able to, like you say, kind of control that the future a little bit. And almost in a way you do have control of how you can grow your business a little bit and grow your profit, grow your income or conserve your income and grow the profit that way. So, you know, we had to learn all those things along the way and from the family perspective, we had a enough encouragers to take the leap. I'll say. You know, one is Renee's father, who has since passed but was an incredible ice cream and Kilwins fan.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: Oh, I love that. That probably made it a little easier.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And we actually have a picture with Renee's parents in their living room when we signed the franchise agreement and at that point just again, we knew nothing. We were just excited about doing it. So we hadn't opened yet, but we actually bought, went to another store and bought a 10 pound chocolate bar. And we have a photo of everybody sitting around a ten pound chocolate bar.
[00:12:13] 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 InquireimDaily TV. My services are totally free for you. That's Inquiry Inquire im Daily tv.
Now back to the show.
Such a good family story. Well, it's a very. I bring it up to your point. I have spoken to thousands of people over 20 years and you're fortunate that you had enough supporters in your corner because whenever you're stepping out on the edge into the unknown, you're separating yourself from a lot of times the people in your life because they've never stepped out. And so if you are lucky enough to be surrounded by people who also have their own goals and dreams and who have stepped out or taken a risk, they may be in your corner, but the vast majority of people around us often are not. Not because they don't have good intentions, just because they don't know what they don't know. And so you have to sort of have your own kind of like, blinders on and conviction that this is what's in my heart. We're being called to do this. We're believing in ourselves. We're believing for more. And when you're able to make that leap and it works out like it has for you, Paul, for Paul and Rene, you know, the people behind you then all of a sudden think you're the hero, right? Like, and if not, they're like, oh, we should have told you. We tried to tell you, Paul. Right? But, like, you know, oftentimes it does work out, especially in the franchise. So what I really want to now talk about is the skill set. The listener out there may be thinking, so what do two, like, educators know about running a chocolate shop? I'm like, how does that go? And how do you get comfortable doing that? So walk us down that path a little bit, Paul.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Well, the skill sets that I think we brought to the table were the people skills. And again, I finished out with, like, 15 years in administration, doing a lot of hiring and evaluating staff, that kind of thing. So those skills transferred over to the hiring process, Building a team, coaching a team, leading, holding team meetings, things like that. That a lot of times, if people just jump in a business, like, without the people part, you're almost stuck a little bit because your team is so important to the success of the business and to give you some freedom, being inside the store or inside your business 24 7. This is really bad, or maybe it's encouraging to a lot of people out there. We were clueless when it came to running a retail business. And I mean clueless. So I've watched a few of your other podcasts and they are inspiring. First of all, I encourage people to go back in your library because I've learned a lot since kind of meeting you through Ashley Clark a few months ago. But the reality is what the franchise business brings, which is the only thing we would consider instead of creating the wheel from scratch, was to go with a proven, systematic business model that we felt we had the support behind us to learn. We didn't know anything. But the franchise model Kilwins, has been amazing. The support structure, the systems. I don't know if this is applicable right now, but in this podcast, we invested the first 12 months of our lives in the business to learn every aspect of the business. So we came in with a very hard work ethic and determination to be successful and do every minute little thing we could in the business to know what we're teaching others to do. After that 12 month period then we began to train and get other team members, team leads, supervisors, assistant store managers to basically run things except we control still the strings where that it affects like expenses that are controllable and inventory ordering things that we know either cost us money or make us money. We still are very involved in that and we do work the stores periodically, but our life is just very. Our schedules are so different now than what they used to be and we kind of control that. As a matter of fact, we finished a little 10 day family vacation up in Michigan. We just got back from it and went right back to truck delivery this morning. So yeah, that's where we're at now.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: Let's kind of bring this to a close. Let's talk to the listener who is like you and Renee, like looking for options, trying to figure out how do I really break free from the 9 to 5?
What's the best course? Should I be in real estate? Should I invest in a franchise? You've done both, Paul. So with the lessons learned, what advice do you give to somebody who's looking for like, I really want to build wealth and I want to build a legacy.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: Well, probably the first thing is kind of check yourself and what your own skill sets are. Or maybe ask a very close friend who will be honest with you about what your qualities are. And the only person, I guess is yourself to know if you have the grit to work through some challenges, you need to have some perseverance. I'm just going to say on the startup, be willing to learn everything you can about the franchise you're interested in and the business.
And the best thing that we did was look to those who kind of went before us. We went out to previous or other franchisees who have been in the business for several years and then Kilwin, my gosh, we learned so much because they were so gracious and willing to talk to us about not just the systems that the franchise provided, but kind of wisdom from experience on how to maximize efficiencies within those systems and be willing to learn. You have to be humble. You should come, I think with certain franchises, service oriented franchises come in with some social skills we call being smart socially with others. And you've got to be hungry to put the effort in to run the business. Like at least from our Standpoint, I would not want to invest in a business that I did not have a personal interest in its success. We're not hands off people, but we're kind of working on the business more from the outside than we did the first 12 months.
Be willing to do that. And you can't be a control freak, but at the same time, you have to be engaged in your business and be honest with yourself.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: If 10 years ago someone had said to you, Paul and Renee, 10 years from now you're gonna be multi unit franchisees, living your dreams, no longer tethered to teaching and education, and got you a certain point, but now your financial future is your own, would you have been like, what are you talking about?
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Yeah, 10 years ago, it would have been a stretch for me to imagine where we're at today. It sounds like a commercial, but I don't mean it to be what we have been blessed to be a part of. We can only look back and be grateful for it. And the future, I mean, the future looks very bright as well. I couldn't have imagined it 10 years ago. I would just say we're extremely grateful for the kind of freedom we have now. A lot less stress. And that could be because we're in a franchise that has a bit of a history of success and a good brand, a good brand name because you.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: Put in the time and you did the work.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: You have to do that. If I were going to shy anybody away from opening a franchise, it would be if you're not willing to invest on the front end. You just got to jump in and do something you enjoy. If you're just like assessing franchises from here's the profit margin or whatever. And we did it backwards probably. I think one of the representatives up at Kilwins asked us, so how much money do you think you will make? Rene and I looked at each other and like, oh, I have no idea. I know that the average from the fdd, we did our homework and we said, I know you get like an average of 12 bucks per transaction. You know, back in 10 years ago, eight years ago, we kind of figured things out and we used their percentages and we thought we could get by. But it has been a much greater blessing than that. We're just grateful to be where we are and glad we took that. I'll just say a franchise leap of faith.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: It's amazing. It's why I love this podcast, because I love to share these inspiring stories of the people just like Kim Daly, whose lives have been changed forever because of Franchising. Paul, you're so inspiring, and I just love everything you said. And I want to summarize it because I don't want it to go unmissed. So they were educators. They had never owned a business. What did he say it required? People skills. Right? Now he had some administrative and hiring and training skills, and even those can be learned, right? So he talked about perseverance. He talked about putting in the time. He talked about being willing to learn. He talked about being humble. Everything he said was so spot on. And nothing that he said should scare anybody who's listening to this to believe that his story can't be your story.
That's the beautiful thing about a franchise, is that there's a franchise opportunity out there. And that's why you have a friend in Kim Daly, because I can help lead you to the best opportunity for you. It may be this one, but it may not be this one. The goal of this episode, of this show is not to sell you on a particular franchise. It's to sell you on the idea that business ownership through franchising is for you. It's a viable way to change your life, to build a future that you get to own and control, to build a legacy for your family. He started out as a real estate investor with the idea of one home per kid, ended up selling some of those, and now he owns two stores. Are you looking forward to owning four stores?
[00:22:15] Speaker B: Well, we've got two, and I've actually got a commercial realtor looking at one or two other spots in the area here. So, yeah, we're open to the idea.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: And so we from a market that in the beginning, the franchisor says isn't even viable to a market where now he's talking about more than one store. So life changes. And one thing that you said so beautifully, and Steve Jobs was the first person that said this, and it's been quoted anyway, I'm sure Jesus of Nazareth said it before that, but you can't know the how. Looking forward, he didn't know the how. He just dared to get in. So as he looks back, he said, I'm so grateful. And as he looks to the future, he's excited. He doesn't know how it's all going to go. He just knows he's willing to do the work, to build and to be grateful for the opportunities that come his way. And those are the key lessons and insights that I want every single listener of Kim Daly to take away. The world is your oyster here in franchising and Kim Daly can lead you to some of the best, best franchise opportunities out there today. So if you're as inspired by Paul's story as I am, I want you to follow the link in that description right now. Because honestly, I can't wait to meet you. Paul, thank you so much for being our inspirational story of the week and for sharing your heart and your amazing story. And we wish you the very, very best. I want you to have one store for every kid and one store for every grandkid.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: We love it. Thank you. Thank you, Kim.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: God bless you. Thank you so much. And until next time, thank you all for watching until the end or listening. Don't forget that my name is Kim Daly and I can't wait to be your franchise consultant and 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 matched to you, please email me right now at inquire at KimDaily TV. That's inquire at KimDaily TV.
