Jeff Dudan
speaker
309 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jeff Dudan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So now what I'll say is if you forward that to today, I've made a study and I made a point of partnerships and collaborations more specifically. And, you know, I have a great friend who has really made a science of collaborations. You don't have to just start a business by yourself to take advantage of a known market opportunity. You can create a collaboration. You can name that collaboration.
And now everybody gets the benefit. And if you look at it, and I know you were an investor and you made a lot of investments. And I also got into that after I sold my business. I mean, I got very diversified and lots of investments and partnerships. But the challenge was that some of them expected a lot of me because they wanted to trade on my reputation and my background.
you can be a partner, but you've got to be out front of this business because you're going to give people comfort that if they join this franchise, then it's going to be built properly. And that was never the agreement. It was like, well, you're going to invest and you're going to advise. So you have to get those clear expectations up front.
And you really have to be careful about the things that you get involved with to make sure it's something that you can carry it through. And then you have to do scenarios that say, if everything goes as worse as it possibly can, Who's going to step in?
I hired my first franchise attorney in 1997 because coming out of the hurricane, I realized that it was the franchise businesses that were dominating. And observationally, the ServPros, the ServiceMasters, the Paul Davis, it was really First General Services, which was a dealership model. Observationally, they were the ones that were able to bring the resources.
And I realized that that industry was very heavily controlled by franchise systems. So I'm like, well, then we should be a franchise system. We shouldn't join a franchise. We should be a franchise. So I hired our first one in 97, just got some education on it. I actually created our franchise company in 2000. But, you know, lack of focus leads to a lack of greatness.
Our company was growing so fast on the direct business side that there was no resources, time or energy spent on the franchising, number one. And number two, there was a lack of alignment with my partners. They were fearful. They were very comfortable building a lifestyle contracting business. And I was willing to do it for as long as it took to get us where we needed to go.
But that wasn't what I signed up for. In our second year, in 1995, I moved to Charlotte by myself and started our second location. And we became the thought leader. We became the innovator. We actually weren't operating under AdvantiClean at the time. We came up with the brand. We got the trademark. We said, we need to change our name now because we're going to be a franchise organization.
So all of that started happening around 2000. But when you have partners that everybody has to be aligned, until I bought my last partner out, we couldn't make any progress on it because there was just too much info. And honestly, the innovations that we came up with in our North Carolina location, which was probably 80% of the revenue coming through there. We created our commercial services group.
We created our government contracting division. 90% of the revenues were being generated by our office. And that office, the original office, was having a real hard time making the transformation over to the current business model. And ultimately, my last partner, who was a wonderful man, he was an incredible mentor. but he wasn't one that could deal with a lot of stress.
And he ultimately kind of got a little sick and just was like, you know, I need you to buy me out. So hurricanes hit central Florida in 2004. There was three of them that crisscrossed there. We ended up doing about $4 million worth of water damage in about 90 days. And that's very high margin work. And that provided cash for me to go to him.
And it's funny, I hired a mediator to help us negotiate the sale. We had real estate. We had multiple commercial buildings. We had lots of assets. We had the franchise business, which was nothing at the time. And then we had our operating business, which was significant.
And the guy's like, I've never been in a negotiation where the buyer was trying to give the seller more than he was asking for, and the seller was trying to take less. So we were inversely negotiating against each other. I'm like, Dan, you've built this. You need this money. He goes, well, I don't really, you know, that's a lot. You know, you're taking all the debt.
And I'm like, so it was interesting. And the guy's like, I've never seen anything like it. But I think that's a testament to that partner. His name was Dan. And he was just a really good guy, very giving. And then I'm not the hardest business guy out there. I care deeply about our franchisees' success.
Part of being a good franchisor, business is too hard, especially for entrepreneurs and first-time business owners to just go to the contract and beat them over the head with it when they're having a legitimate problem. understanding what they need to do or the stress of it. It's such a shift for them to put that entrepreneurial suit on for the first time.
And you really have to have patience and empathy and a real intent that these people are going to be successful. And sometimes it's tough love. And sometimes we make mistakes in a program or an advertising thing or something like that that has an impact on them. Sometimes they make mistakes that we've got to parachute in and help them resolve a lawsuit or a problem or something like that.
But when you're partners like that, like you're real partners and you have to really care. So franchising is difficult for that reason. And people that have had a lot of success or maybe they've been a high-level executive at a bank, And I've hired those people to come into my franchise organization. And after like a year or two, they're like, it's too soft. You can't just fire them.
It's a game of influence. And it's a journey and it's an entrepreneurial journey. And so there's a real nuance to really good quality franchising. And yes, it's execution. It's technical excellence. It's paying attention to the market. It's being agile and bringing new solutions to make sure that your franchisees don't get behind. And it's all the good business stuff that's there.
But then on the other side of it is you do the sunset rule, answering every call before the end of business. remembering people's birthdays, calling people when they have something that goes well. It's that stuff too. It's all mixed in there because it's really, it's a big partnership.
You have to. And I mean, if somebody gets in trouble and they do, then we will do everything we can, including waiving fees and everything to get them out and get them as not hurt. The nice thing about service businesses is that the investment's not that high. They don't have a big expensive lease or piece of real estate.
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