“I just want you to show up as you are, not as who you think we want you to be, first of all. We do a very, very base level competency test—maybe a little Excel, maybe a little of this, maybe a little of that—just to make sure they’ve seen a computer and can make a couple things happen. But really, we want people with a demonstrated history of sales competency, people who aren’t afraid to get out there and make things happen. You can’t fake that relentless hunter mentality; you need to want the football. But it’s very difficult to measure someone’s heart or intent. At the end of the day, we look for people with skills and a real desire to contribute to the collective.”

“One of the things we do is move revenue activities before they come to initial training. For example, with our design-ery business, there are things that you can do before you come to training that’ll start building a pipeline and set meetings. We collaborate so that when you walk out of training, you’ve already got appointments. No latency between completing training and executing the model. Even when it takes months to build a showroom, we find ways for franchisees to be trading business before opening. Nearly all of them are doing revenue before day one.”

“Businesses are basically two things. They're people and math. In home service, your first 90 days involve 100 conversations with stakeholders, learning to articulate who you are and why you’re here. We say, ‘Start well to go well’—relationships that don’t begin well never end well. Beyond that, every business has an established dollars per person, so the more people you can align, the higher your revenue. There’s also the math: know your power KPIs, and relentlessly turn those numbers from red to green. Simple in concept—complicated in execution.”

“I did a lot of research looking at how AI might disrupt home services, but the sector is projected for 10.3% CAGR as far as you can look. There’s a massive housing shortage and infrastructure building coming, and all homefront brands participate in that upside. There’s no obsolescence in home services. Plus, you don’t have to steal customers—there’s always year-over-year new demand. Within our brands, we only enter where we can be first to market or bring a genuine competitive advantage. Sophisticated, well-capitalized owners are drawn in because there’s high average unit volume and the potential to build something of value, not just a job.”

“Franchising is one of the greatest wealth-creation business models ever invented. It’s scalable because of systems and processes. But it works best when a product or service needs to be delivered by a human locally—a burger, a paint job, a haircut. If you want to build tech, you don’t need a franchise. But if you’re about local services, franchises create leverage: faster ramp to revenue, lower investment, real equity—and rules you’ve got to follow. Private equity is buying up large franchise groups now, so you can start small and build real recurring income and outcomes.”

“People start franchise brands before they’re ready and without understanding the fundamentals. It’s all personal in the beginning—you have to take owners’ outcomes to heart. We scaled by focusing on relationship equity, and by being candid enough to tell franchisees what they needed to hear. Most importantly, we spend big up front to platform and support brands properly. If you cut corners or break the universal fundamentals, that’s when people get hurt.”

“There are three things we care deeply about: families on Main Street USA—because when a country loses its middle, you get collapse; children’s literacy, where we build reading rooms in schools; and helping U.S. veterans transition through our Operation Homefront partnership. If we can keep these causes at the top, focus on CARES values, and then compete and make money, we win.”