2453 - Turning Businesses into Thriving Franchises with Big Sky Franchise Team's Tom DuFore

0:03Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free podverified score, free podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it's Tom DuFour. Tom, you are the CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. You're found on the web at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Tom, I'm excited for this conversation. I like what you have to talk about for our particular audience, but we're going to get into that in just a second. And Tom, before we do, you know, again, always love hearing what, you know, leaders do for fun or what kind of keeps them busy or what they're geeking out on outside of work. What's been keeping you busy, particularly with your two boys?

1:30Yeah. So what's been keeping me busy the last really couple of years or longer is coaching baseball. So I've been coaching my boys baseball. I actually just put a spreadsheet together to say how many teams have I actually coached. I'm coaching right now my 24th and 25th baseball team for my boys between rec league and travel baseball and summer sandlot seasons and everything in between. And so it's just been a blast. So starting all the way back to four-year-olds, and now we're up at 12U and 14U baseball. ball. Okay. I would imagine at that age, at the 12, you know, kind of 12, 14 year olds, is that, is that how old they are as well?

2:12Yes. What are, what are, what are some of the things that at that age, like you are as a, as a coach or as you are going to be constantly hammering this or that? What are some common things that you find yourself just really working with them over and over again. Well, it's as simple as this sounds. It's truly the fundamentals on defense. Keep your glove in the dirt. Don't let the baseball get behind you in the outfield. You know, keep your eye on the ball. I mean, at the plate, it literally seems like those fundamental things don't really change. It was the same thing we were saying to them years ago when they, when they were, you know, in six, eight, in 10U.

2:58How do you keep that message fresh so that your players are not like, yeah, yeah, yeah, coach, right? And also, I don't know if it's just constant drilling and just nothing but practice and just doing it over and over again. You know, again, how do you keep those fundamentals fresh so that the boys are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no. This is seriously where we should be focused, not on, you know, I'm going to learn the, you know, the, the, this little trick that I heard, you know, some sort of like, you know, they saw some social media video about like, you know, how to like, I don't know why I, not that I know anything about this, but like how to grip the ball, how to throw the ball in some kind of funky fresh way or something like that.

3:40Yeah. So for me, what I, there are three things that I like to do. The first is at the age where my boys are now, a lot of the kids that are playing, I've coached every team, what new season, whatever comes through, half the kids or more I've coached at one point or another, or I've been with them. So I have a sense on individually prioritizing or helping that kid, understanding how that kid works to customize it for him. The second thing that I do is I've always done leadership lessons with my teams. And so I take practice time and not every coach does this, but I do leadership lessons to focus on what are we learning out of this game of baseball?

4:20Because the reality is most of these players, most will never play professional baseball. Maybe a few go to college and hopefully some of them end up making their high school team. But the goal is to teach them some life lessons that they can take with them beyond that to help get their mind out of the baseball and start thinking of how this can apply elsewhere. And I found that actually helps them focus a little bit deeper onto the game. And then the third thing is just trying to change up some drills. So last night we ran a practice, and we actually just did essentially a live game with a pitching machine.

4:57So we had every kid go up, get a chance to hit 20 baseballs, 30 baseballs with live fielding out in the field. And so we don't do that very often. So that engaged them. And I thought for the most part it was 90 minutes of that. I personally, as the coach, that was kind of boring for me. And yet on the way home, I had a couple of kids in the car driving them back home. They said, oh, practice was so fun today. We really enjoyed it. I said, OK, that that that mission accomplished. Nice. Now, you're based in Atlanta or Georgia, right? Correct. Yes. Have you ever take now? Have you or the family or the boys have gone out?

5:33I've had Jesse Cole from Savannah Bananas. Have you have you seen a Bananas game or that league where they're? Oh, yeah, we sure have. Yeah, we've been down and gone to see at Grayson Stadium down there in Savannah. It was a whole lot of fun. Absolutely. Yeah, you know, to friends, you know, if you haven't yet seen the Savannah Bananas play, again, it's just such a great time. You know, even if you don't really, you know, you can bring family members that don't necessarily love baseball. I promise you, they are going to keep it so fresh that nobody gets bored. totally agree with that totally agree and tom thank you so much as well like i i think i agree with you like you know it's like you are creating um better men uh for the future when you're when you're coaching those boys and trust me when i say our boys need great role models and they need you know those lessons that you're teaching them so thank you so much for that all right so let's get into big sky franchise team give give us an overview yeah well at big sky franchise team our primary focus is to work with, we work with successful entrepreneurs and help them franchise their businesses.

6:44And when we engage with folks or begin the conversation, most owners are kind of at a point where they're saying, what am I going to do with this business? Do I grow this? Do I sell this? Or maybe I'm tired of working in day-to-day operations, or I see an opportunity and I don't know how to get there. They want to make a bigger impact or leave a legacy. And so for those that are thinking about expanding or trying to figure this out, franchising is one of those options to consider. And so we take our clients through a journey of one, figuring out, should I franchise or not? Is it right for me? Is my business franchisable?

7:21How does that all work? And then if you decide to franchise, we help go through that with our three-step process that we take our clients through. All right. So who should be kind of sitting on the edge of their seat right now, really paying attention? And I kind of share maybe a little bit about, I mean, there might be some business types that are just much easier to franchise than others. and then as well, there's certainly a stage, right, where they get to, and they've kind of done a lot of the preliminary work that you would expect. In other words, they're not coming in starting from zero.

7:55It's always great to kind of start with the end in mind here, but who really should be sitting up and paying attention to what you have to say? Yeah, well, we typically look at three big checkboxes for a business to, when we look at franchisability, or is my business franchisable. So if someone's listening and you check these three boxes, you should pay attention. The first box is if you have a profitable prototype. And while that seems like a given, you'd be surprised with sometimes folks that will inquire or think about or be ready to franchise. But having that profitable prototype gives us a working example of a system and processes that are working.

8:36Number two is, do you have potential customers, preferably on a national basis, minimally regional and ideally internationally? Meaning if you're based in Dallas, Texas, do you have potential customers in Miami or in Philadelphia or Seattle, Washington that would potentially buy your product or service, whatever you're selling? And then the third piece is, are you willing, are you able to teach someone to run your business of operation? Thinking of this person as like training a general manager to take over and run daily operations if you're an active owner operator. And so if you can check those three boxes, then there's a good chance that franchising could be a fit for you.

9:23Doesn't mean it's the right fit or the best fit, but it could be a fit for your business as an option to expand. What would be some examples of, and I don't know if any come to mind, of maybe a franchise that isn't typical? I think, you know, old school when we think about franchising, I think we first think about restaurants and then service-based companies is another big one. Are there some businesses that have franchised maybe sometime in over the past five years that have kind of surprised you? Like, wow, look at that. Well, I do think that there are so many businesses that are franchised, so many industries, some that I find really interesting.

10:07I mean, I think I always find it interesting when some of these what appear to be mundane businesses or kind of relatively basic or boring businesses find great success. For example, an eyebrow-threading franchise that we worked with has well over 100 franchises in about five years. It's amazing. And it's something that someone would think, really? They have 100? If they can do it, I can do it kind of a thing. So sometimes the boring or what seems to be boring or simple or mundane is, I think, pretty interesting. All the way to something that I found really interesting, two different brands. One is a mobile pet vaccination clinic where they set up.

10:50It's owned by veterinarians and they franchise this business and are expanding and all the way to what's interesting is a brand that collects used grease from restaurants that they use in the fry machines and such and chicken fingers and what have you. and then they recycle that and turn it into usable oil that can be reused for other products. So it goes through a refining process. And so when you think of kind of this broad thing, it's like, whoa, all of those fit into the franchise world. Yeah. What are the things? Let's say someone knows that they're a few years off. Like, you know, listen, I'm not even going to really seriously entertain this for at least three years.

11:36What are some things that you would recommend they start thinking about earlier? And I hope you I think you like this question. Sure. Well, I would say one of the things one of the misnomers with franchising, and I've been doing this over 20 years. This has been my whole career I've spent doing this. One of the common misconceptions that founders and owners have is that franchising, because franchising is an electric growth vehicle, they think that franchising happens quickly. But the reality is it's going to take about two years by the time you actually go through all the documentation process of franchising and going through the initial sales process and then getting that first franchise sold and then getting that first franchise open.

12:21That's a two to three year process. And so my what I say is franchising tends to be a get rich, slow kind of a program. So for someone who's thinking about this, if you're coming in with this get rich, quick mindset, franchising is not that it can be. There are those exceptions. Right. In every industry, there are exceptions that take off and it explodes. but it usually takes a long time for this to happen when you do it the right way and you want to take the correct or the best steps that you can to do that. So that's one thing that I would say is that exploring it sooner rather than later is better.

13:00And that's why we've always offered free consultations. We have just a plethora of free resources, podcasts, webinars, all kinds of free info for someone just to start learning about it. And in fact, recently we had someone I met over at a small business expo nine years ago. We had a great conversation. We met. And nine years later, she said, I'm ready to have that to start looking into franchising my business. And so I recognize that sometimes it takes a while before someone, before someone, if the owner is actually ready themselves or before they think that the business is ready. I neglected to mention you have a podcast.

13:43It's actually quite popular. It's called Multiply Your Success. And again, you can get to that. You just, if you're in your podcast app right now, just go ahead and search for that right now. It just, it's called Multiply Your Success. And, or you could go to it from bigskyfranchiseteam.com. So what do you talk about on your podcast? I'm, I'm going to, I have some speculations, but I'll let you share. Yeah, we try to be this world that lives in between a successful owner building a business and franchising. And so we interview franchisors to talk to them about what has been successful. We had this week's episode, there's a CEO that has over a thousand franchises in his system.

14:26And we said, how are you finding success? What are the things that you're doing to help your franchisees find success in the program? all the way to just simple practical applications on whether it's marketing or a little best practices for running a small business. So it's kind of it's a bounce between each of those with different guests that are coming on each week. What when you are talking with a potential client that you can help, what do you normally talk about in discovery? What questions are you asking? Yeah, we want to find out and look at how long has the business been in operation? What kind of staffing is involved?

15:12We take a look at existing websites or marketing. We want to find out the overall profitability of the business. How much does it cost to launch or an estimated startup cost to start getting a visual of what we can start thinking about what a franchise model or a franchisee would look like operating the business? And what's interesting, Josh, is that we generally discount the success of a founder when we start applying that business to a franchisee. Because my experience is that most founders would be in the top 10 % of their system. If they had 100 or 1 ,000 franchises, they're going to be in the top 10%.

15:53So I can't expect every franchisee that buys in to have that same momentum and volume that a founder is going to have. So we said, well, we try to discount a little bit, say, well, where would that 50th percentile franchisee be? And so we start looking at that and then building that out to say, OK, if we do all of those, if a franchisee were to do that, can that franchisee find success? because ultimately the franchisee is the customer of the franchisor. So that becomes your customer. And how are you helping the franchisee find success? And that's one of the beautiful things I love about franchising is when the franchisee finds success, they find success, right?

16:37They're successful. And then the franchisor benefits from that as well. So motivations tend to be aligned. It's not perfect, but it's a great alignment there. I love it. Bigskyfranchiseteam.com. When somebody goes there, Tom, what would you recommend they do? I know, by the way, I would click on the resource tab. I'll start you off there. I'll let you go from there. Yeah, the resource tab is great. Podcast webinars. We have a free franchise quiz. We have a white paper called Nine Pitfalls to Avoid Before Franchising Your Business. so lots of things for you to take a look at so wherever you are on that journey if you're early early on just take a look at some of the information if you're ready for a first step schedule a free consultation no obligation no pressure super easy just to have a quick chat to see what this thing's all about tom dufort uh big sky franchise team on the web at big sky franchise team.com.

17:40You can also just click and start listening to multiply your success. Tom, you're the host and you've been a great guest. Tom, thank you so much for sharing everything. Thanks for having me.

17:52Thanks for listening to the thoughtful entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue and build authority without gimmicks. This show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you wanna turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com.

18:28You can start for free with your Podverified score along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder. These tools are built to help you get booked on better shows, deliver stronger interviews, and convert audience trust into revenue. No more desperate sales. You truly can enjoy all the business you like by generously sharing your wisdom. Everything we offer is built by podcasters for guests with a focus on trust, organic growth, and long-term business success. Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time. We'll be right back.