Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Inside a Senior Care Franchise Doing $21M in Revenue

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

In this episode, the hosts review the franchise disclosure document for Comfort Keepers and debate whether senior in-home care franchising is a scalable wealth builder—or a people-management headache best left to the right operator.Business Listing – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r5H1kMC9XeqI5RudHPEJGf4iD-7hcNCl/view?usp=sharingWelcome to Acquisitions Anonymous – the #1 podcast for small business M&A. Every week, we break down businesses for sale and talk about buying, operating, and growing them.Looking to build a professional website in minutes? Try Wix: https://wix.pxf.io/c/6898629/3115214/25616?trafcat=templateHubSpot is the backbone for how businesses scale without chaos. Try them out here: https://go.try-hubspot.com/OeG9Vr💰 Sponsored by:FRANZY - Thinking about buying a franchise instead of an independent business? FRANZY is a free platform built for acquisition-minded entrepreneurs who want to explore franchise ownership without broker bias. FRANZY matches you with franchise opportunities based on your capital, goals, and lifestyle—and includes free coaching from experienced franchise operators. If you're exploring ETA but want a structured, system-driven alternative, check out https://franzy.com/Capital Pad – A platform connecting accredited investors with vetted small business acquisition deals. Discover exclusive opportunities at https://capitalpad.comThis week, Alex Smereczniak joins the show to walk through something we rarely analyze: a full Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD). The focus is on Comfort Keepers, a non-medical in-home senior care franchise with over 600 units and decades of operating history. The hosts dig into Item 7 (startup costs), Item 19 (unit-level financial performance), and Item 20 (unit openings and closures) to evaluate the system’s health. Startup costs range roughly $100K–$160K, largely working capital. Mature units average well into seven figures in revenue, with top performers exceeding $20M annually. Closures are relatively low, and most franchisees have operated for 7+ years—strong signals for system stability.Key Highlights:- Senior in-home care franchise with 600+ locations and long operating history- Startup cost: ~$100K–$160K; revenue potential into 7 figures- Majority of units operating 7+ years; relatively low closures- Labor-heavy model with 25–100 caregivers per territory- Macro demographic tailwinds: aging population drives demandSubscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

Acquisitions Anonymous, Internet's number one podcast about buying and selling of small businesses. Today, we had a special guest who I will let introduce themselves in a moment, but they brought a pretty cool deal, which was something we've never done before. And I think it would be fascinated by where Heather and myself and our guest Alex ended up when we dug into it. Yeah, this is totally new and surprisingly positive. Yeah, yay me. All right, here's the episode. All right, here's the episode. Acquisitions and Auditors.

Hello, another episode of Acquisition is anonymous. We don't have 100% beers anymore. And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory line. One of the biggest risk in entrepreneurship through acquisition is buying a business with fragile systems. Unclear demand are a single owner who holds all the knowledge. Franchising approaches that problem differently. You are buying into an established brand with documented systems, unit level data, and repeatable operating playbooks. The hard part is knowing which franchises are actually worth evaluating.

That's why Alex Moresniak, form. former CEO of 2-U-Londry built Franzy. Franzy is a free platform that helps acquisition-minded entrepreneurs explore franchise ownership without broker bias. You answer a few questions, and Franzy shows you franchise opportunities that align with your capital, lifestyle, and long-term goals. You also get free coaching from people who have actually built and scaled franchise businesses. If you are exploring ETA and want to understand whether franchising fits your acquisition

strategy, visit franzi.com. That's F-R-A-N-Z-Y.com. And thanks to them for sponsoring today's episode. All right. Good morning, everybody. Heather, I have a special surprise for you today. Uh-oh. I'm scared. Well, we have a guest. Oh, okay, no, I'm not scared.

Yeah, Alex is here from Franzy. So, Alex, maybe get started, like, introduce yourself, and then you're the best guest ever because you also brought a deal, but let's start with you telling us about yourself. Yeah, let's do it. Well, thank you both for having me on. My name's Alex. I'm a serial entrepreneur, originally from Minnesota, but basically. here in Charlotte, North Carolina now.

Backgrounds been in tech companies ranging from laundry delivery, so the Uber-FREX category when that was popular. Scaled that up to about $100 million dollar valuation, $18 million in annual revenue, raised $33 million in venture and eventually hired a CEO and started my next thing, which is Franzy,

which is a Zillow-like platform to help people buy and sell franchise businesses. So as we started franchising our laundromats in the previous one, I saw business. brokers taking 60% commissions and not a ton of access to good data on, you know, franchise opportunities and thought we should change that and democratize access and, you know, allow people a fair shake at becoming an entrepreneur. So we've got 4,000 brands on the platform and

have had an awesome experience helping people become business owners and entrepreneurs the last couple of years. Yeah, right on. So how much, you know, Zillow went into e-buying at one point, like they were actually all the way into the transactions. So where do you guys kind of sit in that spectrum of, oh, we're a listing site like biz by sell or all the way deep to like we're actually going to be an intermediary or actually take ownership of stuff? Like where do you guys kind of draw the line? So today we take individuals all the way through to a closed deal.

So we help with lending. You know, we generate 100 to 200 basis points on loan originations. We help with entity creation. We help with diligence. So you get at a dedicated franchise advisor. We are paid a success fee similar to a broker, but it's a flat dollar amount. That's about half of what a broker takes.

So more money into the brand's pocket means more money invested into their system, sales, training, marketing, etc. Plus the flat fee allows us to remain entirely objective. Our goal is what's the right fit for Heather or for Michael. And that's where the line stops.

We might eventually start funding and backing individuals eventually and owning locations ourselves, but for today it's go at your own pace. Some people come, they see all the data, and they actually go all the way through and do the deal on their own without any human in the loop support from us.

Others, they want to talk every other day, and they need a lot more handholding and support. Yeah, superb. Well, so you brought a deal, so what's the story of how this deal came to you? Yeah, so I mean, from the point of view that we have, and I own a couple franchises myself, some in the food space,

some in golf simulators, and there's other capital. categories I'm also very interested in from the vantage point that we get. We look at 4,000 plus franchise brands. We have the whole universe of them. And so I'm constantly looking at different macro trends. And one thing that I really like right now is senior care. There's constantly demand for it, but not enough supply. We'll do secret shopping in different markets and call as though we're looking for care for a loved one. And the same story happens every time. We've got a six-month wait list. We're full or we don't have the ability to do in-home care for your

your loved one. And so I brought a senior care deal here that's in-home senior care. It's a brand called Comfort Keepers. It's non-medical, so you don't need skilled staff. The startup cost, because there's no retail overhead, it's pretty low. It's $100 to, you know, about $160K to get started. That's mostly working capital. But the revenue upsides, you know, well over a million into the seven figures,

you know, with the highest revenue generating store doing $21 million in sales a year. Wow. Okay. So it is, have you run across anything business like this, Heather? Oh, yes. In fact, even this exact franchise brand, absolutely. We see a lot of buyers in the ETA space interested in home health care. This is a, this is a hot one for sure. Yeah. So the core of how the business works, and Heather, correctly, if I'm wrong here, is you have a, you have a local territory, right? and you recruit home health care folks. So it's kind of like a staffing agency for home health care. And you're selling to consumers and people with aging parents and stuff like that. Is that the core business?

That is exactly right. It's very much a staffing type of business. But of course, you have to have marketing and you have to get the clients and the door as well. But, yeah, I think the staffing side is always what we see is always the more challenging part of it for the business owner as well, you know, keeping, you know, being able to get enough staff to grow and just keeping the staff that they've got on, you know, there. 100%. So this is a franchise disclosure document from Michigan. Is that right? It's like. Correct. Yep.

So for people who don't know, maybe start with what a franchise disclosure document is, because this doesn't look like your normal listings. This looks like a legal document. Yep, yeah. So in franchising, you know, every franchise is regulated by the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. and if you're going to franchise a business, you need to produce what's called an FD, a franchise disclosure document. And it is this 200 plus page document that's somewhat intimidating

and has a lot of legal jargon. And that's part of the reason why, again, we built Franzy, is to let's strip out the parts that actually matter. Initial investment, what are the fees and ongoing royalties, what's the potential revenue in AUVs? How has performance been as far as stores

or territories opening, shuttering? Is the brand growing? and then is there any ongoing litigation, bankruptcy, etc. So all of that information is in an FDD. To cut through some of that 200-page noise, I really encourage people to look at three different, they're called items, is how they break the sections out.

And so I encourage people to look at the item seven. That's where it's your total investment cost. How much working capital even do you need for the first three months is the minimum requirement you have to disclose? Some will show five, six, seven months plus. But it shows your working capital requirement. What's going to cost is. do the build-out if it's a retail business, what point of sale and technology costs you're

to have, all of the, you know, all-in soup to nuts, what is this going to cost you to get into? And then the item 20 is the number of territories or locations that have opened, shut down over, you know, a time period. So you can see is the system growing, which is usually a good indicator of the health of the system, if they've had a lot of units shut down or stay stagnant or transfer. It's kind of a hidden thing I look for. If there's a lot of transfers, that might, be the brand trying to hide, you know, essentially that they didn't have locations shut down, it's not enough to mark it down as a closure because they had a franchisee sell it to someone else and it's not counted as a closure at that point. And then the last item I encourage people

to look at is the item 19. That's where there's audited financials. But again, there's some flags to look out for here. Similar to a company's public filings, they get clever with the metrics and, you know, they have footnotes and they have adjusted EBITDA and, you know, there's a little of finessing that some companies will do to try to make their performance look better than it is. But the item 19 is where there are audited financials and numbers that you can look at to get a sense for the unit economics of the business and the individual territories or units. So these guys have been around for a while. So I pulled up Table 19 or Section 19, which is the, which you talked about the revenue per

location and stuff like that. So they have locations that have been around for 85 months or more. That's seven years. There's 532. So the vast majority of franchisees are seven years older, older, because they only have 600 total as of 2024. Yep. And somebody's doing 21 million in home staffing.

Wow, that's crazy. On the other end of that spectrum, like some are doing, you can see 8,000 or 25,000 and aren't doing as well. But what I've noticed in talking to franchisees is a lot of it comes down to who the operator is, how much are they putting into it, and did they get a good territory, and have they bolted on second, third, fourth, fifth territories

and are really empire building versus income replacing. So it looks like as the franchise's age, the ones that are relatively new, less than two years old, they have two of them, and their average revenue is 200,000. The ones that are closer to three years in age is 500,000. then they have this cohort that's actually lower in average. There's five of those that are between three and four years old.

They're 364. But it mostly looks like people are growing. And some of the higher-earned ones end up at $2 or $3 million in revenue. A question for Alex on this table. Would the franchise, if a franchisee sold their going concern franchise to somebody new, would they start the age all over again? Would they say that's a new one? Or would they count it from whenever that territory started?

So there's no hard and fast rule, and this is where I think, you know, as you're doing diligence on a brand, asking the franchise or that type of question, because the document doesn't require, you know, for them to have a hard and fast rule on, you know, how to treat that. I'm actually not entirely sure in Comfort Keepers case, but let me see if I can't find in the FD if they mention it. The reason I ask is in the SBA, the agency itself, they will, at the time of a business sale, they count the business as new in their data set at the time of a transfer of ownership, which is small nuance, but it would be interesting to know. It matters for sure. Let me see if I can't find it in the item 19. Okay, so typically the unit does not reset to year one in the item 19. It continues on from the age it was at the year it was purchased. Interesting. So how can I tell how many failed? It didn't work out.

Yep, so that would be the item 20. Item 20. And that's one of the other ones you mentioned, right, that people should look at it. All right, let's go down to item 20. By the way, I'm using, if you're on listing on audio, the reason it takes me a while to pull this up is this document's like 250 pages long.

It's crazy. And that's the issue. Again, with franchising that I have, is it's like, who's going to actively look through dozens and dozens of these and know what to look for and what to surge? And that was the issue I had. I think franchising is a great vehicle to wealth creation,

but the way it's structured today, the access to data support is just not not as clear or as aligned as it should be. Maybe let's walk through this. So this is item 20 outlets and franchisee information. So what do we have here, Alex? It's the outlet type and company owned and changes of those? Correct.

Yeah, if there's any transfers, if there's any closures, any sell-offs. And this is the 2025 FDD. So they've got a net new 41 units year over year. last year, 86% have been operating seven plus years. So you mean this signals it's a very mature system. Closures exist. Well, it's interesting. You can see here that they owned under an affiliate,

which is an associated company, about 20% of the units, maybe 15% of the units. They owned 100 of them in 2023. And it looks like they've been selling off their company on franchises to franchisees and go and just pure play franchise. What would cause that to happen? It could be ownership once. I've heard there's an individual in Charlotte.

His name's Jeff Duden. He started a Advanta Clean, which was like a home restoration, a restoration franchise that did really well. He was on undercover boss and had a nine-figure exit, et cetera. But he at one point decided to go all franchising because he started having a young family. He was like, I was on the road all the time and to manage these locations corporately. It was just more than I wanted to do. And so he decided to franchise some of those units out. One, to prove in the franchise model.

but to change his, you know, lifestyle. So sometimes that's a signal that the owners and the original group decided we want this to be more scalable and we want to, you know, collect royalties at the parent. But from an operating perspective, we want to, you know, de-risk it a little bit and put some of that labor risk onto the franchisees and the franchise system in exchange for them, you know, recouping the majority of the, you know, owner profit, EBITA, et cetera. For other systems, though, there's, you know, there's another. side of that coin, the rule of thumb in franchising is corporate should develop anywhere from 10 to 25% of the units as they scale. The reason being, if you think about a franchise system a lot of the time is if you do it all on your own and you do it over time and self-funded, it would take 40, 50 plus years to really get to a national scale with all those brick and mortar locations and it's just speed is not there. It's much harder to get there. But they maintain 10 to 20-ish 25% ownership because inevitably you sell out the whole country. And so where you're

do you grow from there if this is an empire building your private equity backed or you know more ambitious group they then start buying the system back because the economics at the unit are much better than you know just a pure royalty pay payments you can collect like look at the flin group for example they're the largest franchisee in the country their business does more revenue than some of the largest franchise or systems you know more than pop-is more than um um um dominoes more than you know like they're doing billions and billions of dollars of revenue as a franchisee. And so the franchisor, if they want to grow more at that point, they need to start buying stores back. And in some cases in these FDs, we'll negotiate with that multiple that they buy you back for is on day one,

even though that event might not happen for five to ten years. But don't negotiate some multiple or some predetermined right of first refusal. I have run into that right of first refusal to buy back before with buyers. who someone wanted to sell their franchise, they got a broker, they listed it, buyer came along, got a signed LOI, and then found out during diligence that the franchisor had this right of first refusal

and wanted to exercise it, and the deal was off. Yeah, you have to, I mean, these are the types of questions I think people might not think of initially, and these are the types of questions you have to ask, is, you know, we even had this happen with a client with a brand recently.

They wanted to buy four or five territories in a market. they went through diligence. They were doing validation, which is another thing that's critical in this process. Talk to other franchisees, other business owners. That's one of the benefits of franchising is you can talk to people who have done exactly what you're about to do versus Heather and Alex's one-off coffee shop. There's only one of those. You can talk to other coffee operators,

but not others that have been in that exact same kind of predicament or situation. And so they were deep in diligence doing validation and they loved the brand. They decided they wanted to do it. and then the brand came back and said, hey, we gave a right of first refusal to another owner and operator in this area, and they've decided they want to do it. And the issue there is the branch should have been more forthright about that

is to not waste people's time. Those are some of the kind of frustrating things that can kill a deal that there should be more visibility and communication around. So, I mean, looking at these charts, it's green flags that, at least so far, we're not seeing a lot of transfers. we're not seeing a lot of outlets close down or get reacquired by the franchisor ceased operations.

In general, it looks like the franchisees are pretty healthy and continuing based on just kind of the macro numbers on a state-by-state basis. And then we either like or maybe don't like that the franchisor is selling off their units to franchisees because they had, again, close to 20% of the units were run by the company. But so far, it looks like,

people have been pretty successful with this one just based on the numbers over the past 25 years. Yeah, I like it because it has, and this is what I like about franchising in general. It's 6 to 8% of our country's GDP quietly. A lot of people don't realize that or even think that franchising represents all these different industries. It's not just McDonald's and Subway. It's hospitality. It's health and wellness. It's home services.

It's childhood education. It's senior care. and what I like about comfort keepers or senior care in general is, you know, the, from a macro perspective, there's 10,000 individuals hitting 65 every day right now. The population of folks that want to age in home is, like, 94% of that group, but there's not enough demand again. And so there's this upside potential of, you see the 21 million, you know, your outlier, but there's also this ability to just replace your income if that's what you want. You're sick of working at the bank. You're sick of working at the bank. You're sick of working. at the hospital as a nurse or whatever it may be and you just you want something for yourself

there's the ability to do everything in between i'm going to go replace my 120 150k salary and do this for myself or i'm going to go buy two three four territories and start making 500k 700k a million dollars a year in profit um if i want to go put in that effort and you know build a mini empire in my market yeah man i'm just looking at all these fees as it like an entrepreneurial bent kind of guy i'm like $800 a month for all this stuff, zip code fees. Like, you know, it's just like, oh, man. Like, I guess that's the core of it. Like, if I'm entrepreneurial, like, why do I need to be part of this franchise system?

Like, I understand, like, you know, 1-800 got junk or even Popeye's. Like, there's a national brand that people know about. Like, what, when you have an off-brand or kind of niche brand like this, like, what am I actually buying when I buy into a, a system like this. Yeah, so they're, part of it with comfortkeepers, they do have a national brand.

People are somewhat familiar with the SEO, ad presence, et cetera, as part of it for sure. And to your point, more so in restaurants or brick and mortar, you get that benefit, especially the supply chain, you kind of menu innovation,

stuff that happens with retail. For a business like this, I think it's a lot of the technology they've built for scheduling, training, coordinating care with, you know, a group of individuals that maybe aren't very,

very tech forward. So they've figured out the nuances of how do you handle that. How do you bring in children or other family members into the process and be able to communicate and expose that both ways? Your average individual, and it's becoming increasingly easy with AI and vibe coding, but the average individual isn't going to go build their own website and brand and know how to do SEO and figure out scheduling. And so it's that kind of cheat code for the average individual who wants to be entrepreneurial but might not think how Michael does or how Alex does and can operate a business and can manage people and can look at a P&L but they might not be able to put the whole thing together and so franchising to me is you're giving up economics five to nine percent of revenue

in exchange for a peer group training technology a brand support throughout that journey you know I run into this issue that I haven't seen before there's 600 other franchisees I can call on to say, how do I handle this? And you have all that built in. And I think the, you know, the data supports that is the chance of success in a franchise over five-year periods, 80% while an independent business is 50%. So you're de-risking it, but you're giving up economics to do that. Hey, everyone, it's Bill. And I want to tell you about maybe the most exciting sponsor we've had in a long time on the pod. It's called CapitalPad. And it is the thing that I wish

existed when I started my journey of operating and investing in small businesses. So CapitalPad is a marketplace for acquisition entrepreneurs that is people who want to buy a business and need capital to list their deals and solicit capital from other people who want to invest in acquisition deals. So if you want to back somebody buying a small business, CapitalPad is a place to do it. And if you want to buy a business and need capital, you can go on CapitalPad to be introduced to investors. So the really great thing, too, from the investor side is that CapitalPad takes care of all of the details that can get hairy with small business acquisitions. They handle standardized terms, standardized governance, standardized distributions all up front in black and white.

Basically, CapitalPad professionalizes investing in small businesses, and the returns can be really, really good. I'm so stoked they exist. It's founded by my friend Travis, who is a phenomenal entrepreneur in his own right. So if this sounds like something that's appealing to you, if you want to buy a small business and need capital, or if you want to invest in small businesses, go check out Capitalpad.com and tell them that Acquisitions Anonymous sent you. I think lenders look on it like training wheels, entrepreneurship with training wheels. And so when you look at a buyer that maybe doesn't have the perfect resume fit for whatever it is they're trying to get into, if it's a franchise system, the lender will be a little more. accepting of that because they've got all that support that you just mentioned, Alex, whereas if they're trying to buy a business that doesn't have that franchise framework, the lender's going to

scrutinize it a little bit more. So we always kind of look at it like training wheels. There's a lot of people that want to become entrepreneurs that do need all that support. Yeah, I would say that's the vast majority of the United States. There's how many friends, you know, family members do you have that you're at Thanksgiving or getting a dinner and a drink? And they're like, I hate my job, but I don't know what to do. Franchising to me is one of those vehicles. Short-term rentals is another one of those vehicles where it's entrepreneurial, but it's not building Uber from scratch or this steel manufacturing company that I'm like, I don't know how to put a deal like that together and raise capital for it, etc. So it makes to me entrepreneurial and entrepreneurship and small business

vastly more accessible than a lot of the other options out there. And to Heather's point, banks underwrite them a little bit differently, a little bit more favorably in some cases. And on the enterprise value when you go to exit, the multiples are typically one to three turns higher in a franchise system versus an independent business for that exact reason. There's de-risk a little bit. There's the opportunity to scale.

Private equity loves it. So as a finance guy, I love the EBITDA multiple expansion as a value for franchise as well. And there's data. I think like you said, there's data for a buyer. There's data for lenders.

And anytime there's data, it just makes decision-making a lot easier. It's interesting on this show we've looked at franchise disclosure documents from, I would say, franchise systems that don't look this good. Like, that's where I've kind of like,

wait a second, all this looks like perfectly normal and healthy. Like, what's going on with the field? We looked at other ones and we're like, wait, this is crazy. So that's why I'm glad you brought it because I'm like, oh, actually sitting down and looking at one

that's not a train wreck is pretty cool. Well, and that's, I mean, part of my goal with what we're doing here is I used to be a franchise skeptic. I think like a lot of people, you hear franchising, you either think, I need $3 million to go open to McDonald's. That's not me. That's not accessible.

Or you think, oh, it's this like shady snake oil salesman, emerging brand that has no track record, and I'm going to spend half my 401K and risk my financial future. And the reality is, those are the two ends of the spectrum, and there's so much in between. It's a buffet. Franchising is a business model, not a business, not an industry. It spans several industries, and there's risk with those industries.

There's risk with the macro environment that impact those industries. And so it's really about finding the right fit that meets your unique individual's criteria from a risk tolerance perspective, a financial readiness perspective. What am I operationally good at? I should probably pick something that my skill set aligns with. Then what am I trying to accomplish here? Am I just trying to make another 50 grand a year or 200 grand a year and replace my income? all of those things is what we're setting out to help people think through and do.

And I hope that they all have the same kind of reaction you did, Michael. Is it like, wow, there are way more things out here than I realized. And maybe franchising isn't so bad, if done right. Yeah. I've gotten the same journey where I was like, this is terrible. And now I'm like, this is great. So for the right situation and stuff. And it's, I know, the thing that opened my eyes was one time I was at my kids,

like, pretty good little private school. and like I was talking to a dad who drove up in these ridiculous rangerovers and his wife about the ridiculous rangerovers and I was like, oh, any guys do? They're like, oh, we own six McDonald's. I was like, oh, sweet. Very cool. Yeah, I want to share this with you guys because this, you know, kind of opened my eyes. But I met this guy.

We have a podcast called How I Franchise this and we had a guest come on. He started seven years ago. He was a former finance guy working in New York City. And he started buying some butcher shops. They did okay, but he learned how to operate. and he understood small business a little bit at that point. Then he goes into an orange theory as a client, taking a class.

He's always just curious, what do these businesses make? What do they do? And he ends up getting a hold of the owner. And the owner showed him as P&L. And he's like, you make that off of two orange theories. And the owner said,

I make that off of one orange theory. And so Cal is the guy's name. He went and bought a couple orange theories at that point. You raised a little bit of money. He put the deal together. That was in 2018. Fast forward seven years. portfolio is up to a hundred and twenty locations across Dave's hot chicken,

Marco's Pizza, European Wax. So not just food, also health and wellness. That portfolio probably generates over half a billion dollars a year in revenue. And he did that in seven years. And so again, I look at franchising as this backbone in many ways of America and our economy. But again, it gets this kind of bad rep for the reasons we've discussed.

Yeah. Amazing. All right, let's talk about the negative of this deal. Here's why it's not for me. And franchising is good in general. This is not a knock-off franchising. I think my problem with this deal is I try to avoid anything where I'm taking responsibility for people's parents or their kids.

And there's a big life safety thing about this stuff, which I just don't want to take that personal kind of moral obligation, you know. And they are getting sued, by the way, as a franchise system. I looked at it in the document here. There's a couple suits going on where people are suing them because of things that happened in somebody's house.

I think that's, you know, this is a great business because you get to help people, but there's risk when you're helping people in their homes like this. Yeah, for me, when I was looking at senior care,

my issue, and this is, again, going back to my unique, you know, operating type, I've ran a business previously with hundreds of hourly employees, and while if you get good at it, I can see it being,

you know, effective and a lot of upside, but there are so many headaches that no matter what you do, you are not going to solve for. You have to accept you're going to have 60% turnover every six months. And that is just an exhausting revolving door. And this business has some of those downsides. There's 25 to 100 caregivers per territory.

So you're managing a small army in this business. For those that are really good at managing people and teams, and maybe you're ex-military or you're used to managing that level of operation. This can be a great business, but for me as an individual, I know that's not a strength of mine and I'm not good at, you know, that many hourly employees. Even the franchises I own, one's a golf simulator, zero employees. The other one's a very simple QSR concept, less than 10 employees, whereas most QSR,

50, 60 employees per location. So I, again, I know my strength. I go for that. And that's why for me, you know, I love the space, but comfort keepers specifically, I just, you know, I wouldn't, I would have a hard time. I'm with the number of caregivers I would have to manage. Yeah. Heather, what do you think? Yeah, I'm with Alex and you on that.

I think every time we've looked at these businesses, yeah, some people are very good at that, and they're very successful in this space, but it's kind of like a go-no-go decision from the start. And you also have to look at where the territory is. In terms of not just who your customers are going to be, a lot of people just look at that, but where your labor force is going to come.

come from. Some areas for this level of labor are more constrained than others. So you really have to look at the, in this case, the supply side is your people. And do you have a really good, you know, pool of potential labor there? Does the business have good systems for you to recruit those people? Because you are going to have turnover. And if you grow, you're going to need more people. So I think it's almost a supply side business in my mind. And you've got to be great at managing people. So, yeah, if you're good at all those things and it's in the right spot, it can be a great business for a lot of people. There was an interesting detail in here that kind of hints about how the business works. The franchisor is running a promotion to get you to open up a second physical office in your territory.

They will reimburse you for that. And it's interesting, the lower end you kind of go in terms of sophistication and the complexity of the work, the more you have to have physical presences because the type of people apply. for this job, like show up at your office and get interviewed right away. And it's interesting the franchisor is reflecting that by trying to pay their franchisees to open up more physical offices. There you go. All right. Well, I like it for the right person. I think we've covered none of us for the right person. Yeah, if you're, I was going to say, if you're ex-military or you're you managed military nurses or you've managed nurses or you've managed nurses or, you know, again,

large team before this could be right up your alley it's less than 150k to get into seven figure revenue upside but you got to know going in that the hard part is going to be the people yeah and i have a friend that actually runs a franchisor that does almost exactly this um the interesting trend that's happening is how much AI and technology is stepping in and doing so many of these things like um like the caregivers have uh basically show up with like internet connected tablets to do check-ins, put in all the reports. AI is like running scheduling for them, monitoring customer service,

listening in on episodes with the caregivers, checking in on them with the patients. The automation is really coming, and I think that is a positive for a chain like this, or a franchise system like this, because there's huge economies of scale once you start to deploy that stuff and adopt it and make the franchisees much more efficient.

And something you just mentioned, I think, is again, the value of a franchise system. The three of us on our own might not be investing in AI technology like that or even know where to start or do we deploy a million, $2 million of our own. Where do we get that money to do this? The franchise system has that capability to use the collective bargaining power and resources of the system to make those kind of bets that you can set a brand apart and make or break, whether the business, whether it's franchise or not, as successful. Super good.

All right, any more comments on this one? I think we rated it. Man, I'm still just kind of, if I look stunned, it's because I'm like, oh, like, usually we're looking at total garbage franchise systems and it's like a really good one. It's like, I'm like, oh, okay, well, fine. And Alex taught us where to look in this 200-page document. Those three items are the main ones.

Alex GPT, either those three or, you know, again, try to use some of the research. that are out there. I'm not just going to plug what we're doing at Franzy, but there are good resources out there that summarize brands and really give access to the data and the full picture without having to become a lawyer and read this 200-page document, which is very boring in most of its content. But there's resources out there, find them. When Alex, where can people find you and if they want to find out more about Franzy and work with you? Yeah, so we have a podcast called How I Franchise this, where we, interview people that went from corporate or went from software, went from being a commercial

real estate investor to adding franchising as a diversification or an asset. So that's called how I franchise this. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, as Alex from Franzy. And then if you go to franzi.com, F-R-A-N-Z-Y.com, we've got, again, 4,000 brands, 26,000 F-T-Ds that we've indexed and turned into these Zill-like pages where all the highlights are there. It's what Michael just did in less than 30 seconds. So it's all packaged up. You don't have to kind of sift through. And then we provide you with free hands-on coaching the whole step of the way from finding the right fit to getting capitalized, to entity created, and deal done and on your way. That's what Franzy is meant to do and to be in your corner. Incredible. Well, thanks for being here.

Heather, great job today. Sorry to get you up early again. Feel bad Friday. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. All right. Catch everybody next time. Thanks for being here.