Franchise Ownership Wasn't What I Expected

This is a transcript from Episode 52 of The Franchise Champion Show.

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Alan Regala: There's a version of franchise ownership that gets sold on the internet. You buy into the brand, you follow the playbook, you turn the key, and you watch it run fifteen minutes a week while it makes money. I want to tell you what year one actually looks like, from someone who lived it. Fourteen years as a franchise owner, a great exit, and a first year that looked nothing like the sales pitch, and honestly, nothing like what most people picture in their head either. It wasn't eighty hours a week, it wasn't hell, but it also wasn't hands off. It was something more useful to understand before you sign anything.

The Two Versions of Year One (And Why Both Are Wrong)

Here's the version of year one that lives in most people's heads. You go through training, you open your doors, you follow the system, the franchisor supports you, the playbook works, and you hit your numbers. Or the flip side, the version people are secretly afraid of: you're working eighty hours a week, you're drowning, you barely see your family, and you're grinding through year one hoping to survive it so year two can be better.

Neither of those is what year one actually is. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through what really happens, from someone who's been through it. Not the marketing version, not the horror story, the real thing. Because the more accurately you understand what you're signing up for, the better you'll do when you're in it.

The Gap ShelfGenie's Model Never Filled

The first big surprise for me was this: the franchise model was good. The support was real. They wanted me to succeed. All of that was true, absolutely. But the model was also incomplete. I bought a franchise that installed custom shelving solutions in people's homes, and there was a sales process. It covered the mechanics of running a consultation, you knew how to walk into a home, how to build rapport, how to present pricing.

But what was missing was the actual design methodology. We were supposed to be designing solutions in people's kitchens, pantries, and garages, but there wasn't really a framework for how to design well, not really a methodology for reading a space, understanding what the real problem was, and building a solution that served people well. So I ended up building that framework myself, over years. And by the time I sold the business, fourteen years later, we still had monthly designer meetings, because I was still refining it.

And here's why I'm telling you this: most people assume the franchise model is complete, that whatever you need, the franchisor gives you. That's the pitch, and it's often not fully true. Every model has gaps. Some are small, some are big. Some are in the parts of the business that don't matter so much, and some are right at the heart of what you do every day. When you find a gap, and you will, you have two choices. You can wait for the franchisor to fix it, or you can figure it out yourself.

Now, I want to be clear: I never even asked ShelfGenie to build the design methodology for me. I don't think I ever brought it up, and not because I was trying to be self-sufficient just for the sake of it, but because I saw pretty quickly that there wasn't going to be anyone at headquarters who would build it. It was just going to be me, or it wasn't going to happen. And once I accepted that, I got to work.

I'd say this is probably pretty unusual, for something this core to be missing. But the bigger point here is that some things in franchising, you will have to figure out for yourself. Unlike an independent business, where you have to figure everything out on your own, a franchise does provide many of the systems and processes you need. But do expect that there are some things you'll still have to figure out. The mindset shift was probably the most important thing that happened in year one: that waiting is not a strategy. If something needs to exist for you to succeed, you build it. You figure it out.

Why He Stayed at 40 Hours a Week, Not 80

Here's the part that surprises people most. I wasn't working eighty hours a week in year one. I was doing probably closer to forty hours a week, sometimes a little more, and around home shows and big events, that number did go up. Those days and weeks were really long, but outside of them, my schedule was pretty manageable. I had flexibility with my kids' practices and games and all that fun stuff, and I did administrative work around family time. So I wasn't checked out and I wasn't absent from my life.

But let me be honest about why that was possible. I hired people from day one. I followed the plan that was put before me. A lot of first-time franchise owners try to save money by doing everything themselves at the start. They think, "I'll be the salesperson, I'll be the installer, I can do the marketing and the books, I'll bring people on later when I can afford it." And the problem with that thinking is that it looks like you're saving money, when you're actually spending the most valuable thing you have: your time. If you're behind the counter making the sandwiches, or in the customer's home doing all the sales or installing the shelves, you don't have time to work on the business. You're stuck in it. Every hour you save on payroll is an hour you don't spend on marketing, on generating new leads, on team building, on the systems that would actually let you grow.

I still did the work in year one. I went on sales calls, I visited installations, I was at the trade shows, I was at the home shows, opening and closing the booth because I couldn't trust anyone else to do it yet. But I hired people alongside me from the beginning, so the work wasn't only mine. That's how the hours stayed at forty for me.

My time in year one wasn't spent just on one thing. It was doing a lot of different things and learning all different aspects of the business. It was understanding the operational side, figuring out how the online systems work, making sure installs were smooth and high quality before I ramped up marketing. Because here's the thing: spending more on marketing when your delivery isn't dialed in is a big mistake. All you do is create more pain, more jobs that go wrong, more unhappy customers, more stress on a system that isn't ready yet.

So year one for me was mostly foundational. Get the delivery right, train the team, learn the sales process by doing it, understand the operational rhythm, then start turning up the volume on customer acquisition. That's what year one really is. It's not the year you scale, it's the year you build the thing that can be scaled later.

Before we get into the hiring piece, I want to mention something. If you want a fuller walkthrough of what to think through before you sign, I put something together called the Franchise Fit Playbook. It walks through what to consider before you look at a single brand, and how to evaluate options once you're in the process. You can grab it for free at athletetoowner.com/playbook.

All right, let's get back to it.

The Two Hiring Mistakes That Cost Him

Let me tell you about the hiring mistakes I made in year one, because this is the one you're most likely to repeat. I hired based on experience. That's what corporate professionals know how to do: you look at the resume, you look at the years in the role, you look at the industry background, and you make a judgment based on what someone has done before.

I hired a guy who was a sales manager in a different home services business. Great sales background, different industry, but sales is sales, right? I hired someone with a background in kitchen design. Custom shelving isn't kitchen design, but it's close enough, right? Neither of those hires worked out.

Here's what I learned. Experience can actually be a liability if it's the wrong kind of experience, because someone with a lot of experience often thinks they already know what they need to know. They resist being taught. They fall back on how they used to do things instead of learning your system. What actually matters more, especially in year one, is personality and willingness to learn. Someone who's coachable, someone who wants to figure it out, someone who doesn't come in with a fixed picture of how the job should be done.

And here's the second problem, one that was fully on me. Even if those hires had been coachable, I couldn't have taught them what they needed to know, because I didn't know it yet. I was still learning the sales process by living it. I was still building the design methodology. I hadn't done the reps to teach anyone anything at a real level. That's the hard part about hiring in year one: you don't fully know what good looks like yet, so you're evaluating candidates against a picture that isn't complete.

And I will say, of course, in a franchise system you're going to have lots of help from the franchisor and from other franchisees in the system, and they're going to give you a playbook on how to hire and what kind of people to hire. But again, if you're new to this industry and this business, you're still going to make mistakes.

The takeaway for you is this: when you hire in year one, weight personality and coachability much heavier than you think you should, and go in knowing you're going to make some hiring mistakes. That's not failure. That's just the cost of learning.

Why Mistakes Are the Job, Not the Failure

Let me be blunt. You are going to make mistakes in year one. Not maybe, but definitely: hiring mistakes, marketing mistakes, operational mistakes, judgment calls you'd take back if you could. And that's normal. That's the actual job description of a first-year franchise owner. You're learning the business by living it, and you can't do that without getting things wrong along the way.

And here's what matters: are you learning from the mistakes? Are you growing? Are you getting a little better each time? Because the people who succeed in year one aren't the ones who avoid mistakes completely. They're the ones who make mistakes, absorb the lesson, and keep going. This is where grit shows up, grit is one of the HiPer8 principles I coach on, and it lives right here in year one. You'll get knocked down and you'll need to get back up. You'll have to be able to have a sales call go badly and show up sharp for the next one. You have to be able to fire a bad hire, and then hire again, hopefully a little better.

If you're the kind of person who takes mistakes personally and lets one bad day become a bad month, who needs everything to go smoothly to stay motivated, year one is going to be pretty hard on you. But if you can hold the mistakes as data instead of judgment, year one is completely doable. Honestly, it can be fun, because you're building something. And building something means figuring things out, and figuring things out means being wrong before you're right.

I want to add one more thing, because it's important. I don't remember being stressed in year one. I remember being busy and learning a lot. I remember the ego hit when a hire didn't work out, but I don't remember the paralyzing stress that some people picture when they imagine business ownership. Part of that was that I had picked the right business for me. Part of it was mindset. Part of it was hiring people alongside me from the start. And part of it was not setting the expectation that I'd be paying myself a normal salary in year one, I was going to give myself leeway. But also, a big part of it was accepting up front that mistakes were coming, and refusing to make them mean anything more than learning.

The Real Reframe: Building the Foundation, Not Scaling

Here's what I wish someone had told me at the start of year one. Year one is not the year that you scale. It's the year that you build the foundation for scaling. That's it. That's the whole reframe.

You're not going to hit peak revenue in year one. You're not going to have a perfectly trained team in year one, and you're not going to have every system optimized in year one. What you're doing is laying the base. You're learning the business by living it. You're figuring out who you are as an owner, what you're good at, where your weaknesses are. You're making mistakes on purpose, and when you do make mistakes, what you're doing is building the muscle to make better decisions later.

If you go into year one expecting it to be a grand slam, you might be disappointed. If you go into the year expecting you're going to be building something, and that it's going to take a lot of work, then you're on track. And here's the practical version: set your business up right at the start, even if it costs more than you'd like. Hire the people. Spend on the marketing the franchisor recommends. Get the systems installed. Don't cut corners on the foundation. Because if you build the foundation right, year two and three can compound off of it. If you build a shaky foundation to save money, you'll spend years two and three fixing it instead of growing.

Waiting isn't a strategy. Hoping the franchisor fixes it isn't a strategy. Going out and figuring it out is the strategy. That's what year one is for.

If you're thinking about franchising and want to know whether you're ready for it, I built a tool called the Franchise Owner Fit Assessment. Fifteen questions on financial and ownership readiness, takes about five minutes. You'll find it at athletetoowner.com/fit. If you want to chat, you can book a free intro call with me directly at athletetoowner.com/ready.