[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of the sales transformation podcast, where we dive deep into strategies, insights, stories that are revolutionizing the world of sales. And of course, I'm your host, Kevin, the CEO of Leadium. each week, the goal here is to bring a guest with actionable tips and real world success stories, sometimes failures.
[00:00:22] and industry leaders to help elevate your sales game, A good friend was a good client who became a friend. probably the best case scenario of a client turning into a friend, Marcus Mora, who is the co owner and chief development officer of, Amada Senior Care.
[00:00:38] Marcus, how are you doing? Great. Kevin, how are you? I am doing fantastic. it's good to finally have you on. Amada Senior Care, It's an interesting business because it's in the franchise industry, which I think a lot of, our listeners probably aren't too familiar with, the business back end of how franchise America works, but yeah, what is Amada Senior Care?
[00:00:59] What [00:01:00] are you guys doing in the space today? So Amada Senior Care, we send non medical caregivers to seniors homes. So when you think about the fact that. All of us, before we die, are going to need some level of care. Like if you need to go to the bathroom, eat a meal, get out of bed, and you can't do those things, you're going to need somebody to help you do that.
[00:01:20] Let alone, you're going to have surgeries or, or all the medical things, but the non medical things, go to the bathroom, take a shower, eat. You need somebody to help you do that. And so we send caregivers to seniors homes throughout the country to help them do that. That is the business. And the business is run by independent entrepreneurs throughout the country who own their own locations, much like the dude that owns a Jersey Mike's in your town.
[00:01:44] Same thing with Amada. Our entrepreneurs own Amada senior care locations throughout the country and they're independently run. Perfect. How, how do you get to that step? How does a business go from a single location to becoming a [00:02:00] franchise?
[00:02:00] And I know you're, you're a co owner, not a co founder, which is a good distinction for Amada, because I think that. Like most, franchises, that's kind of how it starts. How did you get introduced into the company and can you kind of share a little bit about that story? Yeah. So when you're talking about what, how does this happen?
[00:02:19] There's two ways that franchises really get started. One of them is somebody starts a business. They do really well. They're a great mechanic. They're a great sandwich maker. They're a great. roofer, whatever insert business. And then somebody comes along and says, Hey, teach me how to do what you're doing. I want to open your business in Wichita, Kansas, like in some other place or maybe next door.
[00:02:44] And the entrepreneur goes, I guess we could do that. And that's called a franchise, right? You teach somebody else how to do that. Sometimes there are businesses that are started with the goal of franchising it out, but that's very rare. Usually is a successful business. That's [00:03:00] why I started franchising.
[00:03:00] So I'd have been in franchising for a very long time. And the two guys that started a modest senior care here in Orange County, Tafa Jefferson and Chad Fotheringham. They're two college buddies that played football with each other. One was a quarterback. The other one was a center. So the quarterback ends college and becomes a pharmaceutical rep.
[00:03:20] The center finishes college and gets drafted into the NFL. That's Tafa, right? So Tafa goes to the NFL. He plays for a year, gets cut. Goes home. He's like, what the heck am I going to do now? His mom is a caregiver. His mom says, start a caregiving company. He goes, really? I should do that. She goes, yeah, it's awesome.
[00:03:36] So he starts the caregiving company, Amada Senior Care. He calls Chad and his old quarterback says, dude, let's get the team back together and let's start Amada Senior Care. These two six foot six big dudes, right? They started Amada Senior Care here in Orange County and they grow to like 8 million in gross buildings here in Orange County.
[00:03:54] just building the business. And then one day. There's a guy that says, Hey, I want to start one on a modest [00:04:00] senior care in Washington. That guy is Robert Christensen. Who's a dear friend of mine today. So Robert Christensen, he's getting fired from Pfizer and he wants to start something.
[00:04:09] This is so typical franchising. And he calls Chad, his buddy. Chad, you started a home care company. Chad goes, yeah. He goes, Hey, I want to, I want to do the same thing you're doing.
[00:04:17] I'm getting fired from Pfizer. I've got a severance. I want to open an Amada in Washington. And Robert goes, no, yes, you can start a franchise. So Chad and Taffa started thinking, maybe we should franchise this thing. And they knew my brother in law, Jared Turner.
[00:04:31] Jared Turner, my brother in law and I, we've been in franchising for a very long time. So they go to Jared and say, Jared, you know, franchising. He goes, yeah, yeah, I know franchising. And Jared's like, and by the way, home care is really big right now. People that's, that's a, that's a great industry. So, Jared says, we should franchise your company.
[00:04:50] Chad and Taffa say. Yeah, we should. So then we all came together. So Chad and Taffa, this is how franchises start. The founders, right, Chad and Taffa, they come [00:05:00] together with three franchise guys, it's me and my two brothers in law, and we come together and start Amada Franchise. And the first franchisee was Robert Christensen.
[00:05:11] now I'll tell you that first franchisee, they're usually crazy. they're usually crazy, right? Who wants to be the first one? Nobody wants to be the first guy. It's like. Yeah, I want to buy your franchise after you've got 10, 20, right? So you do need to find the crazy. And what I mean by crazy is, Robert, although crazy, had a lot of trust in Chattentoff.
[00:05:36] he knew that these guys were being successful. I mean, they were already a huge business in Orange County, right? And so usually that's kind of the first, second, third, or family or friends, right, that have the trust. And go and start the business. That was a lot of personalities. But again, I think that's what goes to show in the franchise space.
[00:05:56] it's a little bit different than, you know, Lydian, we're used to the B2B [00:06:00] space sales transformation of this podcast. We're usually talking to a lot of, B2B sales leaders who have one direct customer or, an ideal customer profile that they're selling to. franchises are a little different, right?
[00:06:10] Because the end customers, of course, your customer and who you're targeting in this instance, caregiving. So you're looking for those who are looking for caregiving services. But on the franchise side and on the franchise development side, your customers are really franchisees. So it's, it's a business opportunity.
[00:06:30] It's maybe one of the hardest sales, because it's saying invest in yourself, risk, you know, it's not starting a job, it's not buying a 5, 000 software, you know, invest your life savings potentially. how do you start to approach that conversation with somebody who maybe has never thought about franchising before?
[00:06:52] it's so different from like a software sale or a product sale. think about the fact that if you are trying to [00:07:00] infiltrate Wichita, Kansas, and you want to get your software in Wichita, Kansas, there are 500 businesses, a hundred businesses, or that you could probably target, right?
[00:07:10] With us, Kansas might be two entrepreneurs, maybe three, depending on what you're doing. So in franchising, you're looking for those three entrepreneurs or four entrepreneurs in a greater market who are going to quit their jobs. They're going to invest a lot of money, a lot of time and start a business.
[00:07:31] And that's a really difficult thing to do. it's a difficult thing for us to. Walk people through the process. It's a very difficult thing for that entrepreneur to take the plunge and do it. Usually what you find is the entrepreneur has been thinking about starting a business for a very long time.
[00:07:48] It's not like we tap somebody on the shoulder and say, you should start a business, and they go, really? I should? So selling the business opportunity, hardest, it's got to be one of the hardest sells, I think. yes, [00:08:00] territory based makes it even more difficult, right? Because not only are, you're almost looking for a needle in the haystack.
[00:08:05] talk about. How does that territory, how do you determine what's a good territory or not a good territory for a franchise? And then after that question, it really becomes, does all of your marketing kind of spin off from there? Are you marketing to individual territories or you're hoping to sell somebody from California on a Seattle territory?
[00:08:28] how does that work and how do you start to develop that plan? Yeah, it depends on the brand, right? So there are brands where you have a supply chain issue. So Culver's for example, started in Wisconsin. I think it was, it's, that's a restaurant. If you don't know what Culver's, it's awesome restaurant, fast food.
[00:08:45] And it is famous out there. Like people love it. And so they really grew through, Wisconsin was almost their entire growth. And then they started growing because they have a supply chain issue, right? They don't want to go into California if they can't provide all of the, the [00:09:00] recipe, not the recipe, but the, the, the products and raw materials that go into those burgers.
[00:09:05] with Amada, it's a little bit different. We noticed that we could open anywhere in the country. So with Amada, we decided we go after the entrepreneur, not the location. If there's an entrepreneur in Maine, who is going to be amazing, then we want to open in Maine. Now, obviously we're going to take a look at what are the licensee requirements.
[00:09:23] Is there any healthcare changes or anything like that? And there's not, usually with our business, you can do it anywhere in the country and we've proven that it's okay to do it anywhere in the country. In fact, the entrepreneur in Maine, his name is Pete Light.
[00:09:35] He had been in car dealerships his whole life, started selling cars and then went into the management of car dealerships. here's a guy who sold cars his whole life, finds Amada and decides he wants to start an Amada Senior Care in Maine. And he is, I think, a record holder.
[00:09:56] He does like 2. 3 million in revenues his first calendar year of [00:10:00] business. in Maine, and he had zero experience in this. So you go after the entrepreneur. now, even if you have a supply chain issue like Culver's, Culver's still goes after the entrepreneur, right? You can't just expect that any entrepreneur, as good as they might be, Is ideal for Culver's or is ideal for Amada, right?
[00:10:25] You have to have kind of the analogy of a car and a driver. You have to have the right driver in the right car. That's when the magic happens. You put me in a Ferrari, as you know, I drive horrible, crappy cars. Kevin, Kevin is always mad at me because my cars are terrible and dirty. Kevin's got really nice cars.
[00:10:46] We're a perfect example of that. I don't want your cars and you don't want mine. people, I think it makes total sense. I mean, everyone knows of this kind of quote unquote term, ideal customer profile today, especially in the B2B [00:11:00] space. That's how you built a company and a product.
[00:11:02] Who specifically are you targeting? Who's your best next customer? Let's build out everything to find them. Not every customer's. Your best customer and in the B2B and tech and SaaS and manufacturing, you want to get rid of a lot of customers because they might be, you know, low paying, but occupy a lot of your success teams, time, and a lot of headache versus a lot of enterprise clients, et cetera.
[00:11:24] What you were just explaining hearkened me back to, the McDonald's. You know, Netflix documentary, I think it was, or whatever the movie that they made where there was the one scene where the first franchisees when they started to franchise McDonald's were investors, and I think he stormed the golf course saying, Hey, your quality is crap.
[00:11:45] And, the place not clean and you're selling products that aren't on our menu. Why are you selling chicken? We don't sell chicken. And then he had that aha moment later in the day where he found that entrepreneur, somebody who is going to, you know, live and [00:12:00] breathe the brand and, make it their life and not somebody who was looking at it for a quick return on investment.
[00:12:06] And how can I rip it up? Made me immediately think, hey, after, you know, what is it? 60, 70 years, even from that moment, as much time has passed, your formula for finding the best franchisee hasn't changed. It's somebody who kind of has that ethos. let me ask you though. So you got brought in, you're obviously, a co owner now, you're the head of development.
[00:12:29] So your responsibility is really trying to identify and bring in those entrepreneurs who can, carry the torch into another location. how did you get the first 10? Like what, marketing strategy did you use for the first 10 over, a decade ago or whenever? we used the very painful method.
[00:12:48] I should write a book about the most painful way to grow a franchise. It's what we did. So the first two franchisees that we awarded were friends. So there wasn't a lot of [00:13:00] sales there. they flew out. they met with Chad and Taffa. it was a very, very open discussion, very trusting discussion.
[00:13:07] even though we had zero systems, it's not like we had everything we have today, right? And most franchises don't when they first start. But what we had was, it didn't matter what they needed. We would get on a plane and get out there. One of them was in Washington and that was Robert Christensen.
[00:13:22] The other one was in Colorado. So man, it didn't matter when the phone call came in. It didn't matter what they needed. We were on it and we, there was no way those two guys are not going to be successful. Not only they were friends of ours. we also wanted to prove that this thing could work in Washington and Colorado or anywhere.
[00:13:39] So we did everything in our power to ensure that they were successful. Now, they were also incredible. They worked their asses off. Like they worked crazy. they really built amazing brands in Colorado and Washington. So that was the genesis you, and you have to have that in a franchise.
[00:13:58] You have to have those [00:14:00] stories early on. To show that you're not just amazing in your market. And there's no way anybody could do this somewhere else. and that there's longevity. Those two, entrepreneurs who bought the first two Amada senior care franchises, have just renewed for the other 10 years, their kids are working in the business now.
[00:14:18] they do phenomenally well, one of them is retired. The other one loves the business. He doesn't want to retire, but his kid is kind of taking over. you have to have that. But after that, we were so methodically maniacally, inclined to only award franchises to the absolutely perfect person that it took us a very long time to grow.
[00:14:38] We are at 200 units today and that's amazing. But it took us from 2012 to 2024 to get to 200 locations. You know how fast crumble Cookie, for example, went from zero to a thousand locations? Zero to a thousand, Crumble Cookie did it in like, I don't know, three years, four [00:15:00] years or something insane like that.
[00:15:02] That's quick. So It was painful. Two franchise partners the first year, five the second year, ten to thirty year. it really was a labor of love, but you know, I don't know that I'd want to change it. No, I would, I would, I'd probably want to go faster. It would have been better to go faster, but that was our history.
[00:15:21] we really want to make sure that it was the right entrepreneurs and we still do that today. we'll grow this year by, 30 new locations. While Jersey Mike's will probably grow by a hundred, it's crazy. nothing wrong with that, by the way, different organizations grow at different paces it's not necessarily a bad thing if a company is growing really fast, you probably want to take a look though and make sure, is this company going to be around if it grows that quickly in another year?
[00:15:49] They're just going to implode, right? Like fast growth is if you're a software company, Fast growth can kind of kill you, right? You got to be a little careful. 100 percent I [00:16:00] can kill you. And I mean, even through that journey, so the first 10, you probably manage yourself and then you hit a new fear sphere.
[00:16:07] And we were talking a little earlier, you said, Hey, your team that gets you started, isn't going to be the team that gets you to the next step. When you guys started to now hire a sales team internally, how did you undergo that process? what was that hiring process looking like? How did you determine who was going to be the right person?
[00:16:30] How did you Measure if they were successful or not, were they full service? Are they responsible for sourcing, you know, in this term, entrepreneurs who become your, you know, franchisees, or did you feed them leads? How did that process work as you went to hire your, your sales team? Well, that maybe that was one of the things about our company is we grew in almost every department except for.
[00:16:58] Our department, the [00:17:00] department of finding friends, just partners hasn't changed much until recently up to about, 150 locations. It's been kind of the same team. Here's the thing I had to tell entrepreneurs or people starting businesses, a lot of people worry about the scalability of what they're doing.
[00:17:18] They want to do things that scale, right? They want to be able to add that. And I look back into building a modest senior care. I did over a thousand webinars. And from 2012 till now, I used to do two webinars every week for the last 12 years, live, sometimes I had one person on the webinar and I'd be like, Hey, everybody, welcome to the webinar.
[00:17:41] Every, Oh my gosh, everybody's joined. It'd be like one person on the webinar, you know, sometimes there's five, sometimes there's 30, but I think that, when you're building that business and we just had a small team and there wasn't a lot of money to hire a bunch of people, we did things that didn't scale and, I was stuck to a webinar twice a week over a [00:18:00] thousand webinars, but it's what my process was, our process has changed now.
[00:18:05] And, to your question, we've been able to hire, I really wanted somebody better than me. I had, zero issues with how bad I am at several things. And I really, really wanted somebody who had more experience than I did.
[00:18:19] I've been at Amana Senior Care from 2012 till now. I've only seen what I, every idea that I've come up with is mine, right? It's like, I've come up with every idea. That's Not a good thing. So I needed somebody who had a lot of experience who had been in other companies, big companies, small companies that had gone through a lot.
[00:18:36] And in fact, we, and he was actually a friend of mine. So I just hired a guy by the name of Steve Kwan and Steve has been amazing. He truly a hundred percent is way better at all of this than I am. He's way better than I am. And I love that. I think that's so cool. I think it's awesome. and he has changed our process dramatically.
[00:18:56] and I probably should have done it sooner. it's been awesome. and [00:19:00] I think that was really the only criteria Kevin was, was I got to find somebody that's better than me. you gotta get to the point. Where, everything you've done, all the ideas you've had are great, but they're not going to get you to the next level.
[00:19:15] Unless you bring people that are smarter than you. 100%. in any business you're growing, it's so dependent on team and hiring the right people. unfortunately a lot of companies probably fail because they weren't able to hire the right team. as you guys build out that team, as you grow, as you hit that next step, how do you, and I've been fortunate to work with, Ledium over 1, 200 different companies, and I know that every company evaluates this answer differently.
[00:19:41] How do you evaluate, return on investment or success of an individual sales hire, whether it be your VP or whether it be your account executive? what KPIs are you looking at on the individual basis as you're trying to grow a business that you're not looking for a hundred [00:20:00] deals a year, you're looking for two or three or four, now it's obviously more, but in those earlier days, as you were kind of ramping up, how do you guys look at, is this person successful and how are you measuring them on success
[00:20:12] Evolve, you know, let me be honest with you. I'm terrible at that. Terrible, terrible. Cause here's, here's, again, the whole idea of, of, knowing what I know, right. And so, it was such a small team we, and I, I, I wasn't really running it based on a lot of data. and I think my partners kind of pushed for more data.
[00:20:39] So we implemented more data and we actually have a guy on our team who was really good at it. Yeah. But I wasn't so much data focused as much as, as results. Right. And so I'd kind of just back into, well, I need to award this many franchises this year, so I need to have this many leads and I need to have this many webinars and this many conversation.
[00:20:57] But I think everyone kind of has that. [00:21:00] Like, I think the most unsophisticated sales team most likely has some version of that. What we've done now, and this is so crazy that this is 12 years later that I've brought in Steve. Who really went, dude, you've got to be measuring way deeper data than that.
[00:21:16] I was like, really? He goes, ah, you gotta go way deeper and you gotta have way more checkpoints of your sales team. And I'm not embarrassed to say that that's been a huge lesson for me. is having this other person that had more experience than I did come in and revamp what we were doing.
[00:21:33] And it was cool too, because he was like, I love what you've done. It's awesome. But now let's add these things to it. And it's been amazing because by adding those systems in place, it's also removed a lot of friction. Because the data doesn't lie, right? If you didn't have X amount of contacts and, you, you didn't have all of the attribution that he is doing right now, it tells you exactly how that rep is doing or how your [00:22:00] VP is doing or how your dialer is doing.
[00:22:03] and you've got to put those things in place. But I'm not a detail oriented guy. I love talking to people. I think I'm a very good salesperson. I believe in what I'm doing and that carries me pretty far, but I'm not the right guy to implement the detail and Kevin, I don't think anybody knows that more than you, like we've worked together for a long time.
[00:22:22] It's not me. I'm not that guy. I'm equally there with you, which is why we prefer to stay a little bit smaller of an agency so that we don't have to focus on those problems. but even touching on that and as Steve comes in, as you've mentioned, and starts to build out more of a process. How does, a normal B2B company, and if you're in manufacturing or software, you're selling a product or even a service, like an agency, there, there's a kind of Xs and Os you're playing with in your sales pipeline, and it aligns with your ideal customer profile.
[00:22:54] How do you evaluate a sales team when [00:23:00] the one factor that they're trying to sell is, a future or a business opportunity and the type of lead, because I think in your organization, I think you mentioned earlier, they're not responsible for sourcing, leads to the, I think they're provided leads your sales team.
[00:23:17] So how do you evaluate, well, did we give them the right lead? Was that a missed opportunity because of the sales person, or is it just somebody who was. not prone to taking the risk or didn't want to invest that much or didn't like the franchise opportunity once it dispelled. How do you start to determine skill from a sales rep to, well, you're actually selling humans on business opportunity in a future.
[00:23:44] And how do you measure that even to Steve's point? So here's what I think I got really lucky, although I'm not detail oriented. I think it's, I'm 47 now. So I'm not shy of saying like what I'm really good at. I'm terrible at detail. What I'm really good [00:24:00] at is I think I'm really good at understanding an audience, how to reach them and knowing that that audience is ideal for what I have.
[00:24:10] So what we did a really good job at in Amada Senior Care is we knew deeply who our audience was that we wanted to attract. I did not want to attract every entrepreneur out there who is interested in home care.
[00:24:23] But what I knew is that my audience, if they just heard about us, if they could just get an email or a text or an email message from LinkedIn or something on Facebook, and they saw our business, Because I know them so well, I know their pain points, I know what they're going through, I know what they dream of, I know what pisses them off about their jobs, I know how much more money they want to make, I know them so well, that if I just get something in front of them, they will opt in, and it might be a little bit of a mess, but I'm going to get them through my process, and I'm going to hit them in the face, With like a two by four, like I'm hitting him with like a fricking two by four in the face and [00:25:00] they go, boom, and they're, whoa, and they look at the business and I can get him through.
[00:25:05] That's where I got really lucky. I think it's where our team got really lucky is that we did that for a very, very long time. and now what we, what we're doing is, is we are expanding our audience a lot more. We don't go just to my ideal, ideal audience that we had started with.
[00:25:23] And by doing that, we now have much better processes to walk people from other walks of life in through our system. Maybe you need to be in a sales role. You need to be good at one of those two things. Either you're really good at hitting people with a two by four in the face with your message, that they're just going to come in and go through the process with you and your process may not be that great, or you just put a lot of messages out there to all kinds of people and you have a really great process to get anybody to buy your product.
[00:25:54] I think those are two different things, right? No, two different things, and I think, you [00:26:00] almost have to be that unmeasurable measure where you can just tell if, you know, there's no direct KPI because of this or that reason, but if an accountant rep is doing this or that, you can just tell because of that human side and that experience that you have, which is Probably one of the other reasons to make it very hard to scale.
[00:26:19] Sometimes it is just that, you know, gut feeling from a manager on X, Y, Z reason, which is always the worst sometimes. I will say, you mentioned you're 47, you mentioned it, so I can harp on it.
[00:26:31] I think it's an interesting fact because, Modesty New Care's been around for a while, I think you guys mentioned 2012 and kind of that's where you really started to take off the franchise side of it. Obviously 2012 is getting longer and longer as I'm getting older myself. How has The senior care market changed even in the last 12 years as now America has a much larger aging population than it did 12 years ago.
[00:26:59] Is [00:27:00] that adding fuel to kind of some of the fire of signing on new franchisees and the opportunity and how much more opportunity there is, is because that market is just becoming so big. this is not a sales pitch by the model. I still feel unbelievably lucky to be in this business.
[00:27:20] Look, look at our data here. Here's what's so crazy. 2008, Chattanooga, Stark. Oh, excuse me, Chad and Taffa start Amada Senior Care here in Orange County. And they go from zero to like 8 million, 9 million in gross revenues from 2008 to 2012. Remember where 2008 happened? 2008 was the great recession, right?
[00:27:42] Everybody lost everything, foreclosures and the, the, and, and it was like a recession hadn't happened for Chad and Taffa. It just, they just explode, right? And then we start franchising and our franchisees, they, they do great. They grow. we have [00:28:00] partners that do north of 8 million, right. And so like, they're doing great.
[00:28:04] And then we get hit again with COVID and I remember thinking, Oh man, how could I have ever thought, right. no one could have called that one. and what do we do? We grow by like 20 percent year over year. We just keep growing. Was it difficult?
[00:28:22] and I remember we had like 8, 000 masks in our office that were shipping to offices throughout the country. It was a little crazy, but we grew by over 20%. It's really weird to be in a business that I still haven't found the thing that can, really give us a crazy challenge.
[00:28:39] people talk about, well, oh, is it hard, hard to hire people? Yeah. But this year we have, we have overhired, we had a goal of how many people we wanted to hire throughout the country. We've overhired, we're hiring more people now than, than we were hiring before The pandemic. People are going back to work, you know, and so.
[00:28:58] it is a business that I think we're [00:29:00] super blessed to be in. it's just growing by leaps and bounds and it's not going to stop. Now, I think a lot of that is you're in a market that's almost perfectly suited for your growth and expansion right now. it's also a market that has to do with healthcare and medical and obviously a lot of personal and sensitive information.
[00:29:21] How do you guys handle marketing strategies around just your brand? And are you limited in being able to do too much with. you know, images or information or data and who to target because of the personal nature of it. No, this actually is a great question. is that our business is non medical care. We are in health care, but, but what we're taking care of in the home is activities of daily living. It's helping you walk, helping you bathe, helping you eat. Those are not medical things. It's the same thing that if you hired a babysitter for [00:30:00] your toddler and you go out to dinner, you need somebody to come in and, you know, get your kid dressed for bed and, you know, Bathing, eating and stuff like that.
[00:30:07] And so the same kind of restrictions you'd want, In a babysitting service, We'd have in ours as well, but we're not under a lot of the laws that regulate healthcare. We are not under, we abide by them. It's actually kind of a cool thing that Chad and Taffa, the guys who really started Modest Senior Care, they've always insisted on is people look at us as healthcare.
[00:30:30] People don't understand that although we have a babysitting level of responsibility, we should look like we are much more than that. So we abide by HIPAA. We do all those things and we're super respectful about people's records and information as if we were a doctor's office. but the truth is we're not under the same guidelines, which is really, really cool.
[00:30:52] We're also not under the scrutiny Of Medicare and Medicaid, not to get too healthcare y Anya, but [00:31:00] it's kind of open market. Like we charge what we need to charge. Clients pay us what they need to pay us. There's no like big Medicare who can come and say, you now charge this much or you don't get paid or, you know, like, it's, it's really the open market, which is a wonderful business to be in.
[00:31:16] Yeah. You're in that great middle area. I do know one question I wanted, I wanted to be sure to ask because obviously you're in charge of growth from a franchisee perspective and you run it for about 10 years, let's say, and I don't think it's any secret at that point you had private equity investment come in.
[00:31:36] how did sales and growth change? Cause I think in tech and in sales, it's usually when you take that private equity or that funding round, that everything changes. Now you're not growing the business as co owners. You are, you have responsibilities to shareholders. How did the sales department change for you when that [00:32:00] activity took place?
[00:32:01] For us, it was more fuel. And for me, it's actually really interesting. Looking back now, for me, it was difficult because I kind of had this, I felt like more of a fine dining type of process, right? I was very hands on. Our team was very hands on. We still are,
[00:32:20] But, when more fuel came in, it was the idea of, Hey, you can get a lot more resources. And I almost fought, I don't want more resources. I've got it. I know what I'm doing. and I think, for a while there, you kind of believe your own BS, right? That I felt for a while that I know what I'm doing.
[00:32:38] I've been in the industry for a long time. I don't need anybody telling me what to do. No one can do it better than I can. I did have that period of time. Totally did. And I think I was fortunate to have really good partners and a really good private equity company that. applied pressure and sort of said, well, what if you don't, [00:33:00] what if you don't know everything?
[00:33:01] And it's like, how dare you? Right. But it's been super healthy for you to question, your own beliefs, start questioning. How much do you really know? How good really are you? And I think it's super healthy. Like what athlete is able to get to the height that they want. If they're not being questioned by somebody.
[00:33:22] You can't just play the game for 10 years and play your own way and not get coached at all, right? And that's kind of what happened to me. I was not coached at all for 10 years. I just did my own thing. So it was tough. It was actually very difficult for me. And you were through a lot of that with me but I got to tell you, it has been very, very good for me.
[00:33:41] I had not grown this much. for a very long time. And it's not fun, right? when you're having that growth kind of imposed on you, but I gotta tell you, man, I am super, super thankful for it now. we are, I think a way better company, a way better team. We have a way better sales process.
[00:33:58] because I was able to say, Hey, maybe [00:34:00] I don't know everything. that's fortunately what that outside perspective can kind of add. And also re shifts kind of the focus. Obviously you guys were going, you talked about slow growth for so long. It's almost like that added fuel. Like, yeah, I kind of have an added responsibility now.
[00:34:17] We're not in that sweet spot of just. You know, not phoning it in by any means, that's the wrong way to phrase it, but when you're doing a role and we've been out leading them for 10 years, so it can almost go to you know, Groundhog's Day until you have something else now, that's added to it, fuel, new growth goals, new expectations, et cetera.
[00:34:35] I know we're running up against time. I, when we started this, I had asked you, before the call. What are three things as you went from zero franchisees to 200 franchisees? What are kind of three ways you went about that growth that I think other business owners, young entrepreneurs can kind of think about as they're trying to grow their business in the same capacity.
[00:34:58] And I know we say [00:35:00] 200, as if that's a low number. And I think in B2B SaaS, that might be a low customer account, but we're talking about 200 cities across the United States. We're talking about 200, families who have invested in our future. It's a big, amount of franchises. I think before you answer that question, just to give that perspective, how many franchises start that don't even make it to 30 locations?
[00:35:25] Most, most franchises never get above 30 franchises. We're talking most like, I even number something crazy, like 90%. It's a 10 percent that are able to scale above that. So you're one of 10%. I know we're running against this. I don't want to run everyone over. So the 90th percentile, what are three traits that kind of got you guys there?
[00:35:48] What are three sales strategies or three things you got to think about as you're kind of growing that you guys kind of adopted? So the first one is, I actually had somebody approach me about a jewelry [00:36:00] business. Like I want to franchise my jewelry business. And the first thing I said is how much does it make and what is the net profit?
[00:36:07] and when they were telling me the numbers, I was like, that's not very good. And he's like, Yeah, that's why I want to franchise it. And I said, wait, what? Well, yeah, because that way I can have more of these. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. Like if your business sucks, do not franchise it. And I actually, some people do that.
[00:36:28] It's crazy. There are businesses out there where they go, Hey, we're not making it. So let's franchise it. And we'll convince other people to do what we do, which doesn't work. It happens. So first, make sure that your business. It's amazing. And it works
[00:36:43] I don't have the support of the manuals. You don't need all that. You don't need all that because your first franchisee, you're going to go live in that dude's city and make sure they're successful. You're going to create those systems with them. They're not buying your franchise because of the system.
[00:36:57] They're buying it because of you. They're buying it because you did something [00:37:00] successful. So make sure your business is successful. Number two, make sure your first 10 franchisees, are bad a mother scratchers. They have to be just, man, amazing. Do that selection process. Don't just sell the franchise for a franchise fee.
[00:37:21] Really go through that, what we call awarding process. You're making sure that they're right as much as they're making sure that you're the right business. And it has to be mutual. People say that all the time, but for the first 10 is absolutely, absolutely true. And then spend your time making sure they are successful.
[00:37:38] You can't just sell it and make, and hopefully they do it. You got to make sure, because that's your foundation. And if you have the foundation, everything else will build on top of that. If you don't, there are franchises that get stuck in 30, 20 locations. And it's exactly because of that, because they have a nucleus of French disease that are struggling.
[00:37:56] Even if they had a successful business initially, now they're [00:38:00] struggling and they can't grow. you got to work with the right people. Is, what I just talked about, which is, if you are a founder owner led team, and it's the same folks for a long time, you have to start challenging each other.
[00:38:15] You have to challenge yourself. You have to say that you don't know everything you have to be humble enough to bring the right people to the table. If you're at 30, you may have to bring the people to get you to a hundred.
[00:38:26] If you're at a hundred, you might have to bring, and it, and it, and by the way, you might have to get out of the way. You might have to get out of the way and you need to be okay with that. because there are a hundred percent, there are people out there who are better than you. There are many people out there that are better than you can do your job better than you.
[00:38:45] And that's okay. No, I mean, those were the best three. Sales is so interesting because you obviously you have a different franchisee is such a unique sale versus a SaaS company manufacturing service business like Ledium or what I have. but still the sales [00:39:00] strategies, lessons kind of overarched them are, you know, number one.
[00:39:04] Ensure your first 10 customers are successful. Like that's no matter what business you're running, right? Your first 10 customers are your case studies. they're going to tell you how you need to adjust and modify and your revenue model and your strategies and your product. They're going to be your early adopters.
[00:39:20] And there's nothing better than early adopters. If you focus on them, don't grow too fast. Obviously, we talked about that earlier. you got to grow your team internally. The team that's going to get you to, a hundred million in revenue is not going to get you to a hundred thousand in revenue.
[00:39:34] Those are different people, different entrepreneurs, different sales, because it's a completely different team. So you have to be willing to grow internally and know that as time goes on, you know, your team's going to adapt, you're going to grow, et cetera. where can people find you if they want to look more into a lot of senior care, whether they have.
[00:39:52] family or whether they're looking for a business opportunity, where can they find you? ModestSeniorCare. com is a great place to go. There's a [00:40:00] tab there for franchise. If you want to learn more about a franchise, I'm a very, not as active anymore, but I'm active on LinkedIn under Marcos Mora.
[00:40:08] When you put Marcos Mora, you're going to be taken to a bunch of Brazilians. Just find the guy that's in California and you're welcome to reach out there. Perfect. Marcos, always a pleasure. I'm sure we'll have a cell phone call probably later this afternoon, but, it was again, a pleasure to chat with you.