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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The Home Service Expert Podcast · Mastering the Art of Franchising with Jeff Dudan · 25 Apr 2025 podcast

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Look, franchising – like let's think about like retail-based locations. OK, if you want to make real money in franchising, if you're in a retail-based location, it's hard to do it because a fitness studio or a sauna or something like that might have $500,000 of revenue. So if you want to do what some of these – now there's a lot of big multi-unit owners in there.

inside of these retail. So they'll have 100 or 200 or 300 restaurants or Hardee's or restaurants, things like that. So you can make real money in retail-based franchising. You can build a big team to support all those things. And people do it all the time, especially in food, haircuts, retail, all these lash lounges and things like this, all these retail services.

The service side, on the other hand, well, before I get off of retail, think about the risk and the investment of just doing one. Because you've got a $500,000 to $700,000 build-out. You've got a $500,000 to $700,000 lease guarantee. You've got a business that might do $500,000 to $700,000 in sales.

And if you hold your mouth right and do everything perfect, you're going to make a certain amount of money on that.

So the standard is a good franchise should be able to demonstrate a 30-month payback. 30-month. Yeah, 30-month payback, cash on cash. That's what you're going for.

That's retail. But, I mean, I think it applies to everything. So when private equity comes in, that's one thing that they're looking for. So think about what's happened with construction costs over the last few years and cost of leases and things like that. So you've got a business model. that is inelastic in what it can charge. I mean, people will, fitness is funny, man.

Like you go from $129 to $149 and, you know, people are going bananas, but then they'll go spend $400 a month at Starbucks and spend $400 a month on supplements. So it's different, but yet they want 30 or 40 hours of service from you for that $129. So it's very inelastic. So you can't really raise price, but now your cost to get into business has gone up. So So that's a big challenge.

But that's why I love service franchising. I mean if you look at some of the big platforms like Neighborly or like Authority Brands, there's a great example of a kid that was 28 years old in central Florida and bought an electrical franchise, first time in business. And eight years later, he's 36 years old. He had a $70 million electrical franchise, right?

And what's happened is private equity has gone – first of all, private equity loves franchisors.

Yeah. So think about it, the diversification of risk. You've got – Hundreds or thousands of families that are out there. They're deeply invested in the business. They're deeply invested in their communities. They're working hard. And, I mean, it's hard to kill a franchise system because everybody's out there with the ownership mentality right at the point of attack.

So once at scale, franchise systems are very profitable. They're very durable. But the great thing about property services, and I mean like you've proved it to an extreme, is that these businesses can get large every year by taking more market share. And I mean our businesses cost $150,000 to $200,000 to get into. So it's not – and there's no big lease guarantee.

So people can get into business in a home front brand and they can liquidate their investment relatively quickly. And then really it's this monopoly game, right, where – and you'll see it over time as we evolve and you'll get people that are buying their neighbors or they're stacking more than one home front brand on top of each other, building $5, $10, $15, $20 million businesses.

And when I first started franchising really in earnest in 2006 and 2007, there wasn't a big private equity market for the boxes. But now if you can cobble together some amount of EBITDA and some amount of top line, they love it being in a franchise system because of the leverage and because of the systems and that.

So it's really – and I guess that comes down to like – I mean I sold my business in 2019. I was a restoration contractor there. built a national and even international restoration business and then decided to franchise it.

It was a personal family decision because we were working in the Caribbean and Hawaii and Canada and all over the place and I had three small kids and I decided that I wanted to be home. So I decided to risk all of that and really turn it into a franchise system and then we ended up over nine years.

We had about 160 owner groups operating 240 markets and I sold it to Home Franchise Concepts in 2019. But, you know, coming back to operate again, it's it is all about being outcome focused. Right. So I'm sitting here in 2019, 20. I'm comfortable, which I fight every day. I'm comfortable. I'm doing investing, advising.

Yeah, it was good.

Yeah, I had plenty of money. But I'm sitting here and I'm like, all right, do I want to take my chits and run off to the golf course and to fishing? Or do I really want to? I'm looking at the country and I'm looking at everything that's happening in 20 and 21. And I'm like, you know, capitalism and families need businesses because they're a high class asset.

And we're looking at 100 to 150 million more people in this country by 2050. There's increased migration.

Yeah, 339, I think, or something like that. So there's a housing shortage in all of these hot markets where the markets are growing. Yeah. So there's going to be massive home building. There's going to be retail. There's going to be hospitals, infrastructure, all of this stuff. So you'll never find a home front brands nestled comfortably between a Blockbuster and a Curves, right?

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