Nick Friedman
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Nick Friedman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Awesome. So I'm the founder of College Hunks, Hauling Junk and Moving. We've got over 200 franchises, as you mentioned, started from really humble beginnings, a beat up cargo van that we borrowed when we were in college. I describe it as a 20 year overnight success. At the beginning, we were doing all the work, answering the phone, driving the truck, hauling the junk.
People would call to complain about driving. I'd be in the driver's seat answering the phone. So it's been a fun journey and we feel like we're just getting started.
So at the beginning, it was like I didn't even know what an entrepreneur was. It was actually my friend from high school. His mom had a beat up cargo van. She let us borrow it to stay out of trouble before our senior year of college. And she looked us up and down. She goes, you guys could be like college hunks who haul junk. And then that actually put the vision in my head.
As soon as she said that, I was like, that's catchy. That's a pattern interrupt. That's not what people associate with moving and hauling. It's more clean cut. It's funny. It's catchy. So from that point on, after we graduated college, I knew I didn't want to have a regular job. And we had very aspirational dreams really at the time.
We didn't want to be just two guys driving around a truck all day. So we envisioned, you know, imagine if we could land in another city and see our trucks driving around. And now today it's, you know, people are texting me photos of the truck anytime they see. I think I got a text from you as well.
And so I think having that lofty aspiration was part of the foundation of what got us really excited at the beginning. It got us motivated. And we actually pursued franchising as a way to expand. I think we had a little bit of a naive view of what that would mean. We thought it might be an easier path. There's no easy path in business.
And so we had to become students of entrepreneurship and just grind it out.
So I think anybody who starts a business, they have to learn very quickly how to work on the business, not just in the business. And in our case, like I said, we were answering the phone, hauling the junk. People would call to complain about driving. I'd be the one answering the phone in the driver's seat.
I think anybody who started a business can relate to doing every single thing from top to bottom. But if you want to grow a business and not just be self-employed by your own operations, you've got to learn how to create systems and processes.
And so we read a book called The E-Myth Revisited by a guy named Michael Gerber, talks about people not failing, systems failing, and creating those systems and processes so you can scale. And it talked about franchising and this franchise model. And I think a lot of people maybe have, like we did, a naive view of what franchising means.
Really what it is, it's a way to expand the brand without having to deploy your own capital. Because we didn't have capital, we didn't have a lot of human management personnel that we could deploy. but we did have this lofty vision of taking a brand and making it nationwide.
So in order to package up what we had made successful locally, we went down the franchise path where every time somebody purchases a franchise, we get a small injection of capital that we can reinvest into building out the infrastructure, the support, the branding, the marketing, and everything else that goes along with the business model.
And so that's the path that we chose because again, we wanted to expand the brand quickly. We wanted to give people an opportunity to own their own business. And we didn't have the capital to do it.
So I think what people don't say about franchising, though, is you need at least, I would say, 30, 40, 50 franchisees for it to make sense because the royalty stream doesn't really aggregate until you've got a critical mass number of franchise owners. And as the franchisor. Our responsibility is to help our franchise owners be successful because if they're unsuccessful, they're going to blame us.
And sometimes when they are successful, they might resent us because they're paying fees. And so it's almost kind of like the government. You've got to make sure you're providing the right goods and services that they can appreciate if they're investing in your concept.
I mean, you hit it on the head. I mean, when we first started franchising, our early franchisees were kind of the early adopters and we were still building the plane in flight. We didn't have it all figured out. And so they were kind of taking a bigger risk. And we actually had to give them a little bit better deal than we do now because we didn't have it figured out.
We didn't we were confident it was going to work, but we didn't know and they didn't know it was going to work. There's actually 3,000 different franchise opportunities out there across all the different industries and sectors that you mentioned. A lot of people think a McDonald's or a Burger King, but there's not just restaurants.
There's retail, there's service, there's aesthetics, there's real estate. And if somebody's got a great successful business of their own, they could become a franchisor where they develop it, but there's a lot of heavy lifting involved in that industry.
or if they're thinking about a business opportunity, like you said, they might invest, but spending the time talking to the existing franchise owners to see, would they do it again? What would they do different? Are they making money? Because there's a lot of sizzle out there, but you got to have the stake behind it.
Well, I kind of shared the startup piece. I will tell you when we started franchising was 2008, 2009 timeframe. And if you wanted to pick a time to launch a home services franchise, the start of the housing crash was probably not the right time. Right. But kind of to the example you just gave from your guys at the... Ever Bowl. Ever Bowl. Yeah.
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