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
Yeah, they're very discerning and disciplined as to who they'll align with because they want their brand to be upheld. They want everybody in those Chick-fil-A's to say my pleasure instead of you're welcome. And they want the experience to be different than your typical fast food experience.
A lot of people will come to me when they have a successful small business and be like, hey, can you help me learn how to franchise my business the way you did? And I'll actually spend maybe the first five, six minutes talking them out of that, saying, you know, listen, To be a franchisor, it does cost money upfront.
It costs a lot of headache and injury trying to get those first five, 10, 15, 20 franchises off the ground. And a lot of people don't make it to the other side where you've got 40, 50 to the point where the brand is recognized, the royalty stream is sufficient. So I sometimes encourage them, open two or three or four locations yourself, get the model proven,
and maybe you won't need to franchise or maybe you'll bring in some investor capital to go and open more yourself and you don't have to have that extra layer of complexity. So, you know, there's a reason In-N-Out or Starbucks maybe chose not to, they didn't want that extra layer of liability or, you know, people dynamics that has to be dealt with and, you know,
It's just really a crossroads, like an expansion strategy. Do you want to build these and own these yourself? Do you want to bring in investors to help you do it or do joint ventures? Like Outback Steakhouse, believe it or not, it's not a franchise. They have, similar to Chick-fil-A, a managing partner model.
So all their general managers of the restaurants have a percentage of equity of that restaurant, but they didn't actually buy the franchise, but they run that like it's its own small business.
Yeah. So early on when we were in the business, of course, I started reading different books. Robert Kiyosaki's Cashflow Quadrants was one that I read where he talks about elevating from employee to self-employed to business owner to investor. And so in my mind, I was always kind of like, that's the gradual elevation and transition that I want to get to.
So once we had enough capital, once I wasn't as active in the day to day business, I started thinking myself as an investor, my very first successful investments was real estate. And I'm still a big believer in that as an asset class. You know, one of the quotes I've heard and use regularly is don't wait to buy real estate, buy real estate and wait.
And, you know, obviously, you know, if you look at it year by year, it may fluctuate. But at the end of the day, it's an asset. You can rent it out. You can fix it up. You could sell it, live in it if you need to. And so we did that early on. We own
probably $20, $30 million worth of real estate at this time, maybe more at this point, but our commercial properties and our few residential rentals and so forth. I'll say when I started investing in businesses, I had some skin knee decisions. And I'll say the reason is because To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To an entrepreneur, everything looks like an amazing opportunity.
We're very, I would say, optimistic by nature because, and that's what helps us be successful when we pursue our own vision because we believe it's gonna work even though others may not or even though it may be against all odds. Now, when you're investing in other people, you have to realize you're not just investing in the idea, but you're investing in the person, too.
And actually, I don't think I mentioned this earlier. We were on the very first episode of the very first season of Shark Tank. Awesome experience, kind of maybe my first experience pitching to investors. We didn't end up taking a deal, by the way. And quick side note, we were pitching a sister company. We were going to call it College Foxes Packing Boxes. Really?
Yeah, the sharks didn't think that was a great idea either, but... That's another story. But nevertheless, I think what I did learn from that experience and what I've learned in talking to some of the sharks from the show since then is a majority of the deals they do on television don't actually take place after they stop videotaping. And the ones that...
do take place after they stop videotaping, less than 20% of those actually have been successful or moneymakers. I thought it was really fascinating. And so, you know, recognizing that early stage investing, small business or venture is very risky, and you've got to be willing to spread ships out across a lot of different, you know, ventures.
And also, I think it's important to invest in stuff that you know, stuff that you can influence or have a pattern recognition of, Like I said, I'm invested in some franchise concepts. I understand youth sports. I understand the franchise model. I have become versed in real estate. So I think those sorts of things have allowed me to have successful investments.
If I'm just sort of taking a, you know, writing a check on a tip, whether it be publicly traded or some private business that somebody told me about might do well. It's like going to Vegas and rolling the dice. You really don't have much influence on it.
Sounds good. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash flow is king. That's something I learned after a few years. We used to tout our revenue numbers. And yeah, even at the beginning of this, talking about what we're doing in Topline, it's exciting. It sounds like a big impact. But to your point, especially in the early days, you're plowing that money back in. Of course.
And you're making small bets and sometimes big bets along the way. Not all of them pay off.
Yeah, so the short answer is yes to all the above. All of those thoughts that you just rattled off is the stuff that wakes me up in the middle of the night and I got the hamster wheel running. It's like, oh, we could do this, we could do that. We should do this, we should do that.
There's a Jim Collins quote, I think, where he said, once companies hit levels of success, they don't die of starvation, they die of indigestion, trying to do too much. And so I think the idea is identifying that list, And we charted out on how much money can you make on one axis and how much heavy lifting, money, resources, time, distraction is going to be on the X axis.
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