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
I just said, you know, if I'm going to do something else, I would like to have more capital and I would also like the headspace to be able to do it. And you sit in the CEO spot. So there's certain things that you can't do because it might conflict with what you're doing right now. So I thought it was a great time to provide an opportunity.
People did really well that had been with me for, I had nine people that had been with me more than 20 years. So it was an opportunity for them to get a check and other people to get a check and opportunity for us to really create some generational wealth and set up the vehicles for some dynastic things and to fund those things. You know, one of your roles as a parent is to provide.
So I'm like, okay, well that's done. And then it would give me the opportunity to do something different. So I really knew probably in 17, I took a few inbounds and, from some platforms and I just realized I wasn't the person to negotiate this deal. So I really needed to hire an investment banker and take it out to the more broad market and see who would be the best fit for it.
And that's what we did. And it was a good thing for a lot of people.
So Homefront Brands, after about two, two and a half years of investing and advising and really getting involved in fitness and wellness and pets and oil changes and sales organizations and all these different things, what I really came to appreciate very quickly was it's kind of like the Warren Buffett thing. It's like the very durable nature of property services.
You know, we're going to have a hundred million more people in this country by 2050. There's at least, and it could be much more than that, depending on what position we ultimately take on immigration and things like that. Some integration is definitely good. I mean, we need new people in this country and that's the way it's always been.
And then also there's an increased migration with remote work. So people are able to move to more preferable places if they want to and still maintain continuity of their career through remote work and those types of things. So anytime somebody leaves a home and gets into a new home, there's always work to get done.
And there's really a shortage of inventory of houses in some of these places that are growing so fast. So there's going to be new malls and schools. And I mean, somebody was in, what city was it? I know Nashville's been that way, but there's cranes everywhere in some of these cities that are growing. And it's just, they're growing so fast. in so many markets.
So it's the most durable of the 72 categories in franchising. I think it's really the most durable category. You'll never find a home front brands nestled comfortably between a Blockbuster and a Curves because there's no obsolescence in property services. So if somebody wants to really build a generational asset, and by the way, businesses are high class assets.
I bought my first home when I was in college for $62,500. And I bought the next two homes for under $100,000. And if you're a young person today and you're in where I live, you can't buy a starter home for less than $400,000. And that just doesn't work for people. It's very difficult, especially with interest rates such as they are.
Oh, I can't even imagine.
Your foyer is $400,000. Wow. So I used real estate all along the way to fund my business. That was my bank, commercial buildings, homes, spec homes, all this stuff we built. And that was how I would gain money to maintain 100% control of my business and fund it. So, you know, stock market, hey, we hit all new, all time new high yesterday. And it continues to go up. So that's great.
Dollar cost average in there. But if I'm a person right now that wants to create financial security, economic freedom for my family on Main Street USA, take advantage of the tax code. Businesses move with inflation. Businesses are the highest class asset. And I think more and more people in the work that you're doing at Leap is playing right into that.
People might be improving their careers, but they also... might be getting into a business. Whatever the next leap is for them, I don't know how you do it. I know what you do. So we looked at this property services because it was like, well, property services has played out, but I don't think so. And so we looked at it and we said, you know, there's this concept of,
okay, if we're going to do this, one of the challenges, if you start a single brand, brands take a long time to build. They're expensive to build because we only get paid pennies on the dollar on the back end. So until we have in a service brand, 60 franchise owners operating at some level of maturity, We're not even going to be a break-even royalty self-sufficient company.
So we have to get there. And the other side of it is, is if I want to attract the best talent in the industry that I could possibly get, I have to create an opportunity that's big enough for them. So I can't start with one brand and nibble at it. I'll be another 24 years. So we know that we had to start with somewhere between four and six businesses and
And to be able to have enough scale opportunity to invest the kind of money that I was ready to start writing checks for. I wanted the technology platform of the future and I wanted to invest in it. And I wanted to build it before we even started awarding franchises and inviting them to come in.
So that and to be able to hire a C-suite and to be able to get all the things going and to go out and acquire and buy the brands. Because we had to go and acquire businesses that had history and success. So I was like, well, if we're going to do it, that's the play. And that's what we have to do.
So we were very fortunate getting to meet some incredible founders that had built some one-of-a-kind businesses. I mean, we have a one-of-a-kind business. We got some fast followers, number two in the market, potentially. And then we got some that are table stakes type businesses, highly fragmented out there. But all of the brands meet our requirements of revenue.
revenue composition, residential commercial mix. We have one that's straight B2B. So then we said, all right, well, we don't want to go through the normal cycle of a bunch of mom and pops. And then eventually when they get tired, they get bought out by the bigger fish. Think about franchising like this. So think about it as a cityscape.
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