A Deep Dive Into Franchisor Best Practices With Franchise Entrepreneur And Author, Jeff Dudan

Entrepreneurs who want to expand their business rapidly should start thinking about franchising. Letting other people use your brand poses both risks and opportunities, and therefore you must know the right franchisor practices to follow. In this episode, Dru Carpenito is joined by Jeff Dudan, Author of Discernment: The Business Athlete’s Regimen for a Great Life through Better Decisions. He is a seasoned franchise entrepreneur who founded and exited one franchise company. Jeff takes us deep into various best practices for emerging franchisors. He unpacks his thoughts on why franchising is the greatest wealth creation tool. Listen as we explore his vast expertise in this episode of Franchise Masters.

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A Deep Dive Into Franchisor Best Practices With Franchise Entrepreneur And Author, Jeff Dudan

Welcome to the show. I am joined by somebody whom I’ve known for a long time and I’m happy to have on the show, Jeff Dudan. Jeff and I go way back. Jeff was the first guy I worked for in franchising and introduced me to this whole racket. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Dru, it is a pleasure and an honor to be on with you. I’m so much looking forward to our time together.

Jeff introduced me to franchising back in the day and probably gave me way more opportunity and experience than any textbook would ever tell you to do. It was fun. I’m glad to have you. You had such a good run in franchising. I can’t keep up with all the things that you’re up to. I’d love for you to tell everybody a little bit about yourself, your story, how you got into franchising, what the journey’s been like and what you’re up to.

I’d be happy to. I’ll start back a little bit because the decisions that we make in life, although we don’t understand the impact of them at the time we make them, bring us to where we are. As I look back on my life and the time that we spent together and before that and after that, it is the decisions that we make in our lives that put the right people in front of us and the right opportunities. It’s up to us to execute.

I’m a Chicago guy. I grew up there. I was a basketball player. I came to football late because we had a coach that came and said, “I want to throw the football. Who better to catch the football than a bunch of basketball players?” He came to the basketball team and recruited us. I gave it a shot. I wasn’t very good at it but I knew that I could go farther in football than I could in basketball so I decided to pursue that.

I wasn’t a great student. That limited my options. I ended up walking on to the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. I was there for a year. At the end of that year, there was some meeting in the hallway or somewhere that everybody agreed I shouldn’t come back for a second season. I dropped back to Harper Junior College outside of Chicago and moved back into the house that I grew up in. It was a football factory. It was one of those that people that needed some refinement, whether it be grades or something, came back to. I played there for a year and got a scholarship to Appalachian State University in 1989.

When I showed up there, I wanted to stay. It was my third college. I knew that I had to make the grades work. I was on a football scholarship so I had my necessities covered. I wanted to stay over the summer. I had met my wife, Traci, at the time, after a week of being there. She took the project on. We continue to have many things in common. Namely, we are both constantly working on me.

I wanted to stay there over the summer. I wanted to stay in the Carolinas. I was building a life there. My roommate and I started the painting business. We won all of the contracts to paint the student housing during the lease change. We recruited the basketball players, football players and wrestlers who were there over the summer taking classes to paint for us. The basketball players would cut into the ceilings. The wrestlers would do the base moldings. We went to the shop and built these huge 5-gallon buckets so we could roll the walls. We would do 15 or 20 apartments in a day. That was my first entrepreneurial experience.

From there, Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida in 1992. We had finished the painting season. I had graduated. I was waiting on my wife to graduate. My younger brother, Mike, had come out and taken over the painting business. He was putting himself through school, getting an accounting degree. My partner and I went down to South Florida and helped the people from South Florida that recovered from Hurricane Andrew.

In 1994, my three partners and I moved up to Central Florida and started a company that would become AdvantaClean where we worked together. I moved back up to the Carolinas in 1995 to start our second location. From there, we became an environmental service contractor. We did mold remediation, water damage, disaster response and air duct cleaning. We grew that to a sizeable business. We had projects in Hawaii, California, the Caribbean, Canada and all over the country responding to disasters. We also built a strong competency in government contracting over that time. It kept going that way.

In 2004, I bought my last partner out. In doing that, I had been talking about a franchise program for a while but when you have a growing business, the demands of the business and the urgent things take over the important things. I wasn’t able to get them both going. When I bought my partner out, I hired my first consultants.

As entrepreneurs, it is hard sometimes to pull our heads up, look around the room and make sure that we have the right people sitting around the table that we need to inform our thinking. There is always somebody out there that have done what you’ve done and who’s done it before. Most people, if you ask the right way, are willing to help you and share their experiences so you can inform your journey with theirs. We hired some consultants. It was the first time I ever heard purpose, vision, mission and value. I don’t know if you remember this but we had a seven-page document that was about how we were going to build this company and what we were going to do. With that, that informed our thinking.

Franchisor Practices: There’s always somebody out there who has done what you are doing. If you ask them the right way, they will be willing to share their experiences to guide you in your own journey.

We put together some campers some equipment and some vehicles that could travel. Sure enough, preparation met opportunity. Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. We went down there for the next four years and did a storm response. I’ll never forget it. I was driving back in the middle of the night in one of these rented RVs. I had been down there setting up that storm response for three months. I was driving through Atlanta. I was trying to get to my son who was seven at the time. It was Zack’s first football season, which I was missing.

I made a decision to sell all of our company stores under the franchise model and to burn the boats. I made a decision to take a perfectly good restoration business and risk it, throwing it away to create what I believe to be a better life for me, my family, our business and all the people that were involved there. That’s what we did. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, it was about that time I started working with a young man named Dru Carpenito. You came on in maybe ’05 or ’06. We started banging our heads together. You might have come in ’04. Was it ’04?

No, it was 2006.

I know the building we were in. I couldn’t figure out franchise development and all that. Dru had several enviable tasks around the building but ultimately, Dru figured out how we could take this company to market. We did so in 2009 by launching Entrepreneur Source, which was a broker group. I remember a Facebook post that came up not too long ago. We had 130 territories by 2013 when I was speaking at Springboard. Ultimately, we sold the business on January 1st, 2019 with 240 locations in 37 states. That was an incredible run for 24 years in 11 months. It was a great outcome to a long journey.

My brother who had come over and taken over the painting business ended up going to work for Arthur Andersen. He then went to work for the Carolina Panthers. He ended up as the CFO of the Carolina Panthers. He helped lead the sale from the Richardson Group to the Tepper Group at about the same time that I sold AdvantaClean. We got back together after that. We were trying to decide what was next.

We were going to take an investor’s posture. I knew that we wanted to be in and around franchising. We got involved with some service businesses, franchise sales organizations and some other things like that. We also bought a fitness brand called RockBox Fitness with two locations open and a few sold and then COVID hit. We built a fitness concept right in the face of COVID. We’ll have 57 open this 2022 and about 160 sold. We partnered with those founders. They have a platform called Thrive More. They have been Light Sauna in them. We have that.

A few years ago, after being involved in various aspects of the franchise industry, my son joined the business. He has got Economics and Finance major from Elon and had worked in some cell site advisory. We decided that we wanted to build a property service platform. There are things that we did well with AdvantaClean and there are things that we didn’t do as well as we could have.

Our vision for Homefront Brands is excellence in all of the six pillars of franchising. You need human capital, intellectual capital and capital to make things happen. We’re at a time in our development where we want to do something material and something significant. We want to do everything the best we can do it. We want to take the best from this brand that we’ve observed over the years. We want to take the best from this brand and build a brand where we inspire impactful, transformative actions by our franchisees. We do believe strongly that small business and entrepreneurship are paramount to the health of this country.

In Middle America or wherever they live, small business and franchising is the greatest wealth creation business model that’s ever been invented. By us doing this and putting great brands together with incredible support and fantastic leadership, we believe that we can be a part of shoring up the middle class and making an impact in people’s lives.

We’re building a company, not with a 3 or 5-year time horizon. We’re building a company that we want to be here in 100 years. That’s the way we’re looking at it. It’s going to be the last and best thing that I do in this industry and I’m going to stick with it as long as I am able to do so. That’s what we’re up to and that’s what I spend my days doing.

That’s a heck of a ride and journey. We worked extensively together to figure out the franchise thing. That was a nice plug but I’m not taking that one. It was a team effort.

You would say, “This doesn’t work,” and I’d say, “Try something else.”

We were trying to figure out the lead gen thing. That was the first thing. It was about how you get in front of good people whom you want to partner with. That took a long time, which a lot of other emerging franchise brands go through. It is a lot harder than a lot of people think to find the right people that you want to partner with and then help them be successful. Figuring out how to get in front of those people is a big thing. I remember. It was you and me sitting in maybe Raleigh or Charlotte. It was Michael Mudd, not Mike Mudd.

He was with Relax The Back. We were right between him and Eric Wexler on one side. Michael was on the other side. We showed up and were like, “How does this work?”

We didn’t even have a banner. We were like, “A booth? A table throw for a table?” We were fundamentally learning. Those guys helped us. We were nice to them. They liked us. That was it. It was getting connected with the right people and not being afraid to ask and listen.

I was doing a panel and somebody asked me, “What’s the biggest mistake you ever made?” I used to think it was a badge of honor that we figured it all out ourselves for so long and that we didn’t have anybody from the industry. That was probably a mistake. We’ve accomplished in RockBox in the first 15 months of owning that business which took 15 years to figure out in AdvantaClean.

In Homefront Brands, we’ve acquired 6 companies in 11 months. We’re more fundamentally sound than anything that I’ve ever been a part of. It’s because there’s no lack of clarity with what we needed to do. We’re properly resourced to say, “If this is what a $1 billion platform looks like, then we want to have it now.” That is because we never want to go through the switching cost of technology platforms or things like that. You have to set owners up for success.

The more that you can centralize, the more that you can do to make the business easier to run and the more visibility, transparency and metrics that you can give franchise owners so that they can focus on the smallest number of critical things, train and execute on those things, the better probabilities of success that you’re going to have. Anything can go to zero. Nothing’s 100%. The decisions that we make every day determine our success and our velocity of winning.

I am curious because you threw it out there. Are you comfortable talking about what some of those learnings were as you have built out and grown multiple franchise brands since you have the 100% focus on AdvantaClean? For young franchisors reading this or even folks that are investing in a franchise, it gives them a couple of things to think about and look at of any of these franchises they’re looking at. Are there 1 or 2 learnings that you look back and you’re like, “Knowing what we know now, I wish I would’ve done this a little bit differently.”

There is a lot. The four reasons people bought into AdvantaClean were 1) Culture and this is what they would report. 2) Marketing and lead generation. 3) The booking appointment capability that we had. 4) Technical expertise. Let’s talk about the four things that emerging brands need. You can have fifteen units and still be operating as an emerging brand. I know some people that have done very well with getting people to get excited about the story of a new brand and buy-in. Yet, the franchisor is not fully built out in terms of things that they need to do. Number one, you need to make sure that you have a business that’s good for people.

David Barr speaks at these conferences. This is a direct lift from him. I’m not trying to put his words in my mouth. He says that an average person on an average day putting in a good effort can have predictable revenue and profit. You can’t build jet airplanes for franchise owners to operate. You’re reducing the number of people that are going to be in that top 20% or that are going to be great and increasing the number of issues that you’re going to have. Have a business that’s good for people.

Franchisor Practices: An average person putting in a good effort on an average day can only have predictable revenue and profit.

It’s also got to have a market size. You do have to look at trends. I know what you do is you do extensive research. You help people look at trends. You analyze the size of the market. You look at the competition. You look at who’s going to be competing for those dollars. I know that you use those types of things to advise your clients in that way. There needs to be a market to be made there and then it needs to be a business that’s executable for a normal person to do. They don’t have to be the number one seller wherever they came from to be able to do it.

Number two, you need inspired leadership. When you’re a multi-billion dollar brand, it probably matters less. I will tell you that. In terms of the number of franchisors, they are relatively small with 100 units or less. You need inspired leadership. They’re going to buy into the people and culture from somebody who’s done it, who’s authentic and who can answer every question about the business.

That goes to the technical expertise that we had. There was nothing that a franchisee was ever going to face that we didn’t have the people on staff that had done it many times before. They’re looking for that in terms of joining a system. You need to have the answers or a process in which to figure the answers out. You need inspired leadership that shows up every day. Part of being a leader is being accessible.

The third thing is you’ve got to have what I call a franchising guru or some franchise expertise. Building a franchise business is counterintuitive. It’s a lot more expensive than some of these vendors would lead you to believe when they’re setting you up with franchise documents and things like that. Doing the exact right things in the exact right order with quality is important. You don’t have time to waste. You don’t want to guinea pig your franchisees. Knowing what to do, when to do it and how to do it, all that information is available.

You probably have to show up at a few places or find a way to get that into your business. 95% of the time is spent on defining the problem that you have and 5% is implementing it and doing the right things. Put great people. Find a way to put some people around your table that are going to help you. Take some money. You have to invest, especially early, a little bit ahead of revenue unless you’re one of these rare companies that you open up a location and you’re selling cookies. Fifty people come in and say, “I want to do this.” You have organic sales and you fund it through that. That is the exception, not the rule. You have to make sure that you have a mechanism.

At Homefront Brands, all of our brands have been in business for at least five years. They are up in the high level of sales. Everything that we have, they’ve worked out all the problems. They had all the systems in place. All but two of them had multiple locations in multiple cities. They’ve already figured out how to support remote locations. There are two things, which are territory and technology, that we did better. Some brands will go strict population with their territories. Some territories will be good. Some will be less good. Some will be great.

We spent the money on a couple of other best-of-class franchisors to do the demographics. We might not have 1,400 territories in a brand. We might have 300. Some of our brands have 600 or 700. In our opinion, we’ve done the best that we can to make sure they’re all good at hitting what we consider to be the minimum economic level that’s going to make it a very attractive brand. There is no lack of clarity around what the market potential is in a territory. If you look at our territory maps, we have a lot of places in the country that are our territory. We’ve done that.

The other thing we did is most of the businesses we acquired were between $5 million and $10 million in sales. They were small enough that we could migrate them all onto a single operating platform. For example, if you run our Window Hero concept, it’s going to have the same territories as our mosquito concept, which is called Mozzie Dome. You can lay those businesses right on top of each other and run them on the same screen. They’re both recurring residential customer businesses with very good AUVs and high profitability.

You don’t have to drive geographically wide or long to build a bigger business while our white space is available. It won’t be like this forever because we’ll fill in. We have a lot of white space in the country. People can get in and stack a couple of our businesses on top of one another. We have a repair and remodeling set of businesses and then we’ve got a recurring service set of businesses. We got this interesting, neat temporary wall system, which is commercial-based rental containment. It is neat. It sits by itself out there but it’s strong enough to do so.

That was some wise sage advice that you dropped there for any young emerging brand or anybody looking at emerging brands. Those are some of the criteria to look at to make sure that they have all the stuff behind the scenes and a foundation in place. What’s the vision for Homefront? How many brands are you trying to get to?

We don’t have a set number on it. We’re constantly evaluating brands. We don’t have a set number but I’m sure that there will be more brands that come in if we find the exact right fit, there is market space available and we think that we can be number 1 or number 2 in the space. Those are the types of things that we’re going to continue to pursue. 

You mentioned something that I wrote down. I thought it was interesting. I’d love to dive deeper into it a little bit. You mentioned that you think franchising is the greatest wealth-creation tool out there. I’d love to unpack that a little bit, if you don’t mind, in terms of the why behind how you’re viewing that and why you think that’s the case.

The IFA comes up. I heard Matt Haller, the IFA President said that. All great knowledge is borrowed but I do believe in it. 1 out of every 8 people, I believe, is employed somewhere in this country in a franchise. 1 out of every 7 franchisees is a veteran. Those are statistics from the IFA. Take this example here. Jerry Richardson is a tight end and Johnny Unitas is a quarterback. They were working together. They were on the Colts.

Jerry Richardson wants $500 a game. They want to pay him $250. He decides to retire, take that money and go buy a Hardee’s. He works in that Hardee’s, grows it and buys a 2nd and a 3rd. Ultimately, he owns 400 Hardee’s. He used that money to buy the Carolina Panthers and many other businesses. If you are willing and you want to better yourself, where else can you pay a $50,000 franchise fee, finance the vehicle and some equipment and build a business or multiple businesses that you’ve got some guardrails to build and you can grow that business and sell it? You take a small pile of money and turn it into a big pile of money. You can take all the entrepreneurial wherewithal that you learned in that and apply it to your own business, another franchise or anything like that.

The SBA is looking for people. The younger you are in your career, the easier it is for you to get an SBA loan. Since you’re not complicated, it is not hard to sign everything over to the SBA when you don’t have anything. You can take it all. Complicated people have a harder time getting SBA loans but they still do get them. What a great opportunity for somebody. As a matter of fact, one of our founders was an AdvantaClean franchisee. He was one of the early ones. His name is Chris Stefanco.

Franchisor Practices: The younger you are in your career, the easier it is for you to get an SBA loan.

What business did he find?

Top Rail Fence. He left AdvantaClean. He was there for 8 or 9 years and they sold the business. He went into business with his brother-in-law and they started a fence company. They took everything that they had learned in AdvantaClean. He came walking in the door one day looking for some advice. I said, “Tell me what you got going on.” I was shocked to believe the size of the business and that they were growing it in multiple cities around the Southeast. I said, “Here’s an idea for you.” You hear that all over the place. Entrepreneurship lives inside the franchise industry. The great thing about it is you don’t have to wait. Wait is a four-letter word. You can get going.

Even if you have plans to do something else bigger but you don’t know exactly what it is or maybe you don’t know how you’re going to put the money together, I’m working with another person whose family sold a 93-year-old family business. It is a huge business. I had worked with him in the past. He called me up and said, “I’m probably going to do something like this. In the interim, I’m a great operator.” They had around 40 locations of their family’s business. He was like, “Why don’t you put together a package of Homefront Brands for me? I can start that while I’m working on this other thing that I’m going to do.” I said, “I can certainly do that for you.”

Why is it such a good model? Technology has made it a better model than it used to be. When I first started looking at franchises back in the early ‘90s and I looked at a couple before I started the company, you’d get a briefcase, some business cards and a convention once a year and then it was, “Good luck.” You had a binder with information. That was good because that’s what was available at the time. With The leverage that’s created, good franchisors create incredible leverage in growing brand equity, customer acquisition, technology systems and supply chain efficiencies.

Franchisor Practices: Technology has made the franchise industry a better model than it used to be.

There’s something we call the affiliation benefit that we measure. The affiliation benefit that a franchisee will get in a Homefront Brands will be many times any fees that they pay us if they had to do these things on their own instead of being part of a shared ecosystem. That’s nothing. All good franchisors do those things. There is the leverage that’s created and a certainty of outcome that can be created as long as the franchisee shows up and does what they’re supposed to do.

We say all the things that can be centralized, measured and done with excellence, we will aspire to do those things at our home office. Somebody has to hire a team, inspire a team, sell and fulfill the work. That would be you, Mr. And Mrs. Franchisee. That’s it. It’s a square deal for people that want to be a part of a community and want to go through life and leverage other people’s experiences too. A good franchisor creates leverage in the community and enables transparency, lateral communication, peer groups and all of those types of things.

Sometimes, the best ideas and some of the most relevant and contemporary strategies are going to come right out of the franchise network. Being part of that is a good experience for anybody who is maybe a first-time entrepreneur or even somebody that wants to add some businesses to their entrepreneurial portfolio that are seasoned. People that are more experienced in building businesses tend to have a higher appreciation for the things that we do for them.

That makes sense because they’ve had to do it all themselves and figure it all out along the way. I agree. It is interesting because the non-food side of franchising, which is the side of the fence that we play on, you don’t hear about it in the news from the glitz and glamor as much as you do on the food side or the hotel side. It’s a very significant part of our communities and our economy in terms of how much money flows through any franchise in general but in particular on the non-food side.

More people are starting to pay attention to it. I’m seeing all kinds of folks coming to me that I haven’t seen in a long time. I’m getting a ton of real estate folks coming my way, which can be an interesting deal because they’re not used to operating anything. They’re used to plunking a bunch of money down and collecting that “passive income stream.” That is a little bit of a different conversation in terms of what it means to operate a business. There are a lot of different ownership models and operational models out there.

I’ve been doing this show for a while. I’m pretty firm. The few things that the best franchise owners do are all the things that the franchise company can’t do. It is the reason that the company’s franchising in the first place and willing to give up the bottom line profits to their business model in other locations around the country. People management is good on the people’s side. They can get people. They can cast a vision. They take time to understand people. They can put together a team of people. They’re not afraid to hire people and they’re not afraid to fire people either quickly.

They tend to embrace sales and marketing. They have savvy customer service and sales marketing bend to them because they understand the creative ways to get the business out in the community. They’re not afraid to spend money on advertising, which is an important thing. They’re relentless executors. They are willing to put in a couple of years of hard work to be able to build something that can enable them to maybe take their foot off the gas and be able to enjoy some of the more flexible opportunities through entrepreneurship. They do all that.

What a lot of people don’t realize is they have this asset that they can sell but that somebody would pay them for. That’s where the wealth creation comes in, I’m assuming, in what Haller was saying. There’s a lot to unpack there. Some people have made significant amounts of money as franchise owners with the most surprising businesses that are out there. You got to have an open mind too. That is one of the big things too. If you can have an open mind, franchising can be a lot of fun to take a look at from an “asset class perspective.”

Especially with what is happening in our economy. My son says, “There’s not a different asset class that I would rather be in now.” For us, talking about our service, our low cost of entry service franchise businesses can fill a gap and solve a problem. People can buy or get awarded. They can train next month and be out there the very next month. They’re replacing income and earning a living and doing so with the certainty that they bet on themselves. It’s great. I never get tired of it.

We had two discovery days. We had a consulting group and training going on. There were franchises everywhere and it was amazing. I sat there at lunch and we got these young kids as we had back in the day. They were right out of school in marketing positions. I looked at them and said, “I’ll never get tired of this.” They were so excited to be part of something and be growing something. I couldn’t agree with you more.

What’s next?

I’m very excited to continue to promote. The team that we’ve put together is incredible. I have fewer execution opportunities. I mentioned my brother is our CFO of the Carolina Panthers. We’ve got Michael O’Driscoll who grew up in the largest home-building franchise in Australia and New Zealand. He’s been in franchising for 35 years. He was the C-level executive of two multi-billion dollar brands. One was a courier service and the other one was a Rent-A-Center.

For nine years, he was with Citibank. He founded and rolled out their franchise finance program and did over 9,000 placements there. I met him a couple of years ago. He moved to the States. He’s our Chief Operating Officer. He informs me of my thinking about where we need to be as a company. This company is going to be much larger than anything I’ve ever run before so we need people like that. Our chief counsel started not long ago. He was with ServiceMaster in Valvoline. We also have Todd Bingham who was the president over at FranNet. Those are the two I see second in command over at Stellar Brands to Gary.

I didn’t know Todd was over there.

Todd’s over here running our Top Rail Fence. David Blue is the Founder of Blue Moon Estate Sales. He’s running our mosquito concept. My job is to promote the platform and continue to attract great people to join us to hold the standards of excellence and execution. Most importantly, things get wacky culturally. Maybe we’ve been a little bit of an enabler in some ways. Excellence in franchising also has to do with the ability to hold people accountable for the things that are best for them even though they might want something different at the moment because there is stress or anything like that.

It is about making sure that we are tightening up without getting uptight. We have a culture of accountability and a great sales culture by inspiring our franchisees to go out there and win and help them win together. Those are the things that I’m working on. I want to make sure that we get those things right. It needs to be a great experience for people. You know that I take it very seriously that we impact people’s families. We’re not here to award a bunch of franchises and walk away from it. We are serious about making sure that we build strong relationship equity with these people and we do everything we can to help make them have the best outcome possible.

You are focusing on the important things. Good luck with that. I appreciate you hopping on here. Do you want to plug it in?

If anybody’s interested in how we think about building businesses, I do have a book out there called Discernment: The Business Athlete’s Regimen for a Great Life through Better Decisions. You can find it on Amazon for a few shekels. What’s in the book is it is about the quality of our decisions impacts the quality of our life and the velocity of our businesses. When you think about wisdom and people that are wise, you usually think about older people or people that have had more life experiences. Discernment is models of thought that are accumulated over the course of your life and applied to present-day situations that when something comes up, you’re like, “This is what I’ve learned.” It is another one of those. You need to have strong beliefs held loosely.

When you start to be able to develop these models of thought and then you have these filters for making decisions for relationship, reputation, health and wellness, how do you make decisions about the outcomes in your life? Nothing is 100%. Anything can go to zero. In every decision that you make, is it going to increase or decrease your probability of success? In some businesses, it’s the tasks. The more tasks you do, the more of these you’re going to get. It’s about that. Other times, it’s about making the best and right decision that you possibly can at the moment. I know that especially for people that are young in their career and that have gotten the book, it has informed their thinking in these critical paths early in their life.

I don’t know if you remember when I walked back into the building. Maybe you weren’t there yet when I said, “We’re selling all these company stores.” That was the defining moment in my life. It gave me a chance for a bigger platform to impact more people. The more intentional we are about building a construct of thought around our decisions, the better off we’re going to be and the higher probability we’re going to get the outcomes we’re looking for.

That is well said. That sounds like that’s a good read. The book is called Discernment. I appreciate it. Thanks for hopping on. If people want to get in touch with you, how can they reach you?

It is Jeff Dudan on LinkedIn. It’s great. I am also on Instagram. I tend to do more there than on Facebook but I am on Facebook as well. You can go to HomefrontBrands.com. Reach out to us there and learn about our brands. If you want to check out some of my content, podcasts and things, you can go to DudanGroup.com. We also have some content there for you. Those would be the ways. I look forward to hearing from anybody that wants to talk about franchising.

Thanks for joining. It was great to catch up. I’ll let you rock.

It went by fast, Dru. You’re the best. I appreciate you.

It was good talking to you.

I feel the same.

Important Links

• Jeff Dudan
• Discernment: The Business Athlete’s Regimen for a Great Life through Better Decisions
• Jeff Dudan – LinkedIn
• Instagram – Jeff Dudan
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About Jeff Dudan

Jeff Dudan is a franchise executive with 25 years of experience founding, building, operating, and ultimately exiting a national brand. He is a published author, Podcaster, Forbes contributor, speaker, and consultant to emerging brands.

Jeff has served as a YPO Chapter Chair, is a member of CEO, and has served in various capacities with the following organizations: Novant Health, IFA Franchisor Forum St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and The Minority Wealth Commission.