Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Undercover Boss and Franchising Maven with Jeff Dudan

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Welcome to The Radcast! In this episode, we have a special guest, Jeff Dudan, the Chairman and CEO of Homefront Brands. His remarkable mission - to inspire and empower individuals to create positive change in their lives, communities, and the well-being of their loved ones through responsible franchising and entrepreneurship.We also discuss brand building, trademark acquisition, and all the fundamental aspects of franchising. So, if you're interested in learning more and potentially becoming a successful franchisee, tune in now!Jeff Dudan, CEO of Homefront Brands, shares his journey from University of Northern Iowa on creating a responsible franchise platform that is resonating with people due to its focused mission. (01:06)Franchising can provide entrepreneurs with a fast-track to revenue generation and a convenient exit strategy, although it requires five years of operation, capital, and an experienced leader. (10:03)Jeff shares when he accepted an offer for the show Undercover Boss at the last minute and saw great success after airing, with increased awareness and improved job offers, and his episode is still played overseas today. (20:48)Jeff has engaged in extensive research and conversation with a variety of guests to explore different areas and reignite his curiosity. (32:02)Jeff's book 'Discernment' encourages readers to make thoughtful and intentional decisions at an inflection point using critical thinking for a life of abundance.(37:49)This episode is packed with information, wisdom, and passion and we know you will get a ton of value from this.If you want to learn more about Jeff Dudan, follow him on Instagram @jeffdudan and his website https://homefrontbrands.com/.Learn more by visiting our website at www.theradcast.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/RadicalHomeofTheRadcastIf you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, Like, Share, and leave us a review! If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

Oh, you're listening to The Radcast, a top 25 worldwide business podcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Hey, guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of The Radcast. I'm Ryan Alford, your host. We say if it's radical, we cover it. My friend Jeff Duden is radical. Let me tell you, he's the CEO of Homefront Brands.

He's a podcast host. He's becoming a good friend, I hope, at least in my mind. But more than anything, he's a great author and a badass. The franchise, as I like to call him. What's up, Jeff? Ryan, excited to be here. I've been looking forward to this for at least the last 15 minutes. Hold it.

Keep it to a dull roar, if you would. The excitement. Oh, appreciate you coming on, brother. I know you're a busy man and I got your hands and all kinds. You're just the franchise king. I know we're going to get into that. And it's been good for you and good for the business. But what the hell's going on in your world? You're here, they're everywhere. You're talking, you're writing, you're doing things. What's new? Yeah, it's great. I'm really excited to be on, look up to you

and the show, a whole bunch. There's so much to learn and I'm just really excited for the opportunity to be on. Now, I just came back from a nine-day speaking tour in the franchise industry. I'll do, speaks to large consulting groups, brands, things like that. I had to go up to Canada and spoke to suppliers for that.

So really just spreading the good word of franchising. Franchising is the greatest wealth creation business model ever invented. That's what we believe in this industry. 785,000 establishments in the United States employing almost 9 million people, which is about one in eight of every viable employee works in or around or for a franchise organization. So big industry. And I fell into it like so many people do. There's very few colleges that have a franchising program. There's a few now, but when I say few, less than five or six out there across the country. So everybody in this industry just

finds their way into it. And then once you get into it, you get hooked. I am going to keep us from going down a rabbit hole, but I'm going to footnote myself. It's my show. I can do what the hell I want. I'm footnoting because I do want to talk to you about franchising one of my businesses. So we're going to footnote that because I need to pick who else am I going to pick the brain of than the franchise himself? Footnote that because I need to pick, who else am I going to pick the brain of than the franchise himself? Yes. A footnote, social house franchise discussion, Jeff Duden. Jeff, let's, you've written a couple of books. You're on the speaking tour for franchising, but how the hell did you start? How does one, like you said, it's not a major, but you've been such a badass in it. You've sold a company. Now you've got multiple brands underneath the home

front, but let's back up for everyone and how you either discovered, fell into, like, what was that journey to get into franchising? I think so many entrepreneurs were forced or were screwed into existence by circumstances. I was a Chicago guy. I was an athlete, was chasing a football around. I went to University of Northern Iowa for a year out of high school. Didn't work out. Wasn't a great student. I was much better. I could catch a ball better than I could do a test in the classroom. But so I dropped back to a junior college in Chicago and then I got a scholarship out to Appalachian State University. And there I wanted to stay in the summers. Three things happened for me when I showed up. First thing that happened was I met my wife.

I showed up in January. I met her February 2nd, 1989. She took the project on. When you can imagine a guy from urban Chicago showing up on top of a mountain in Boone, North Carolina, the culture shock that happened. But we're passionate about the same things. We're both constantly working on me. And my wife, yes, that's a full-time job.

Oh man, are you kidding me? And we're still on it. But then I got serious about school. And then the other thing was I wanted to stay over the summer because I really knew that I was at this turning point in my life. But I needed money over the summer. The scholarship didn't cover the summer. So I started the painting business.

I worked the trades in Chicago. And we recruited all of the athletes that were taking classes over the summer. So we had basketball players cutting in ceilings and wrestlers doing base moldings and football players rolling walls. And we would do 15 to 20 apartments in a day. And we made about $76,000 in 1990, which was pretty darn good at that point in time. Very good. So when I graduated, I just didn't really take a job. I just ran the painting business.

And then a buddy called me from South Florida and said, hey, this massive hurricane hit South Florida. And my painting partner and I jumped in our little truck and drove down there to check it out. And we ended up coming back three years later with a business after we cut our teeth and helping the people of South Florida recover from the hurricane. Moved up to Central Florida in 94, started a business that I would sell some 24 years and 11 months later. And in 95, moved back up to the Carolinas to start multiple offices, our second location. $10 to $20 million a year business, disaster response, mold remediation, air duct cleaning, really environmental services type business. And I bought my last partner on 2004 and hired some consultants. And I knew that I wanted to franchise the business because I recognized that in this industry, it was largely

franchised. And I also knew that we had some scaling issues. So six-month engagement, seven-page purpose, vision, mission statement led us to invest heavily in a fleet of generators and semi-trucks and pickup trucks with diesel tanks in it. And sure enough, preparation met opportunity. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005. We responded and set up a four-year massive storm response down there. But I was driving back, and at the time in my life, I had three small children, and I was missing my son's first football season. And I realized that history was repeating itself because I was never home, and I grew up in a home where parents weren't home. And I just made that decision because our true values are what we tolerate and what we endorse.

It's what we endorse and what we do. So I decided in the middle of the night driving through Atlanta that I was going to sell all of our company stores under a franchise model. So I did that in 2006, 7, and 8. We launched to the marketplace with AdvantiClean as a franchise offering in 2009. Four years later, we had 130 offices open and I sold the business January 1st, 2019 with 240 locations in 37 states. And it was 24 years and 11 months after I started it and they did not need me. And I was done and done at the time. So my brother, who was actually going to the same JUCO in Chicago, came out, took over the painting business, put himself through school, got a job with Arthur Anderson doing audit and tax, public accounting firm. And then he left there and went to the Carolina Panthers football team.

He was there 16 years, finished as their CFO, and ultimately helped facilitate the deal from Mr. Richardson to the Tepper Group in 2018 when he sold the team for $2.4 billion, which was the largest transaction in sports history at the time. Doesn't seem like a lot of money now, Ryan. The Commodores just sold for $6 billion or whatever. And we got back together in 2019 and created Duden Group, where we invested, stood up for franchise companies. We invested in emerging brands. We consulted. And then about two years later, which was about maybe two, two, two and a half years ago, after it being taken in investors posture and really working in fit. Now we own a fitness concept called Rockbox Fitness. We've stood up an incredible beam light sauna concept with that and a platform called Thrive More with our business partners over there, which is a really fat, we've got 200-ish locations already moved in that in about the first year in beam.

Rockbox is a great business doing very well. But looking across personal services and fitness and food and working with all of these different companies, what I realized was the fundamentals of property services was something that were very attractive to me. And also with the economic headwinds, rising interest rates, corporate uncertainty, more people are open to the idea of doing a franchise when the economy slows just a little bit. And then when you look at interest rates going up, the lower investments, like a property service business, where you really $100,000, $150,000 all in, including the van. You sign today, you train next month, you're in business generating revenue to 60 days from now. It's very attractive to people. So we went out and decided to, we asked ourselves a couple of

big questions, Ryan. We said, if we could build the most responsible franchise platform that we could possibly imagine, what would that look like by every measure? So from people to technology, to territory design, to marketing and people to technology, to territory design, to marketing and call center combo, to learning management, we knew from being in the industry which companies did those things the very best and the most responsible. So we went out and we acquired six companies over about eight months, starting in November of 21 through maybe June of 22. And then we spent all of 22 investing millions of dollars in an infrastructure and a platform and a team so that these businesses could scale together in the most

responsible way that we could possibly put together. And we're having great results with it. We care very much about what's happening on Main Street USA, creating opportunities that are big enough to create generational wealth for families in every town in this country. We care a lot about having dynasty size type franchise ease where they can have one or more of our brands and build material businesses that would be attractive for resale to private equity or independent buyers. And then we also care a lot about education and transition in U.S. veterans. Those are the problems we set out to solve. That was our thesis when we went to it. And candidly, it's going so much better than we could have possibly imagined. It's a message that's really resonating with people today. It's attracting really qualified investors and franchisees to

the platform. And we're having a lot of fun with it. love it man a lot to unpack there talking to the franchise jeff dude his new name just named by me but he is the franchise so even if it's just for me but jeff i'm like my mind's swirling a bit like you just you gave me like i'm usually like okay they gave me two questions you gave me like. So here is question number one. What makes for a good franchise? Like when, like obviously the home services thing for someone that thinks they have a business and they're going to franchise it or things like that. What are the building blocks?

What are the starting points? It's clearly not everything, but there's probably, you've probably done this long enough to know what are those variables that, okay, this can be a franchise. Yeah, a hundred percent. Brands that we look for need to have been in business for at least five years. And they need to, we're looking for businesses that are doing at least a million, but preferably two to $3 million per location

in a business. There is no outcome without income. And there needs to be an addressable market for a business. Number one, it needs to have a proven business model that performs financially, right? If the first business is making a little bit of money and the second one is open, is breaking even or losing money, you're not ready to franchise that business. Really, you're not ready to take people's hard-earned money, their 401k, however they're funding this thing, and put that into a business that you don't have a real way for them to likely be successful. Now, not everybody's going to be successful in a business because the biggest variable is the franchisee and they have to execute the model. The second

thing that we look for is really some sort of a competitive advantage. There needs to be some sort of a differentiator, some little niche in the market that they're really good at. And it doesn't have to be like a crazy niche or crazy differentiator, but it could be a customer acquisition lead generation. It could be supply chain efficiencies or a slightly different mix of products. supply chain efficiencies or a slightly different mix of products. But it needs to be something that there's enough differentiation in the market to where 100 or 200 or 300 other people in the country can repeat that play and can exploit that niche. I look for an inspired leader because early phase stage franchising is really reliant upon the founder and the owner. People have to, they're going to look at the business. They're going to be like, yeah, but there's only two of these. So they're going to be looking at that person and trying to make, and you have to look

at it and say, franchising is a hundred percent different than running your aquarium cleaning business or whatever it is. It's a hundred percent. It is nothing to do with the business. It has everything to do with adult education, building a brand, lead generation, technology, the conferences, events, all of that thing, sometimes real estate. What it took for you to be successful in one or two locations has nothing to do with what it's going to be successful as a franchise or it's, I'm not going to say it's a higher order of execution, but it's certainly different. They have to be inspired and they have to be willing to carry that ball. Then the other thing is you really, and I've found this to be very true. You need a franchise guru. You need somebody that's done it before. If you look at all of

the great brands, many, and I got the all, I never used the word all. If you look at all of the great brands, many, and I got the all, I never used the word all. If you look at many of the great brands that are out there today, the Servpro family many decades ago, I believe, came out of the ServiceMaster franchise. If you look at the Orange Theory people, I think many of them had roots in massage envy. So if you got to have people, it's a counterintuitive business as opposed to a direct business. So getting somebody on the team or on the advisory board that has franchise experience that you just can't afford to make mistakes with franchisees money and time and energy. So getting a franchise guru and then it does take some capital. And how much capital depends on a variety of factors. If you can barely afford to pay your lawyer for your franchise documents and you had to scrape up to do it, you're probably not ready to franchise. Because you've got to hire some people and you've got to provide some services really

ahead of revenue. We only get paid nickels on the back end in terms of royalty. So you've got to have some staying power to be able to get the system. It's kind of like water skiing, man. Like you got to fight to get yourself up on it. And then once you're moving, you're on top of the water and you're going, but you got to fight to get yourself there. What about the whole licensing versus franchising people that make that decision? And I'm not, I mean, that's not your cup of tea, but I don't know. I've here, I hear those two things like tossed around when people talk about franchising or expansion.

It is something that we're familiar with quite a bit. Now, I'm not an attorney, but the states take issue with licensing operations that mask themselves as such, but they're really operating as a franchise. Generally, some of the differentiators are if you're a franchise system, you are going to have very rigorous standards about how the brand is used, how the brand is displayed, how it's marketed. You're going to have to approve a lot of things where if it's a licensing model, they can do whatever they want. You might have a supply chain agreement. So it might be, a supply chain agreement. So it might be, we're a licensed train HVAC dealer, but I'm Jeff's HVAC and they'll help me co-op marketing. They'll give me advice, but I can pretty much do what I want to do. And as long as I keep buying the product and I keep hitting my numbers, they'll keep selling it to me and they'll give me the discounts that I get. But it's more licensing models or more suggestions where a

franchising model is pretty rigorous in terms of complying with the brand standards. Yeah. It's so different. You nailed it. Like when you're talking about franchising, like you're growing a business and a brand like you did with your company, but then the business of taking other people's money and them relying on you, those dynamics are just so different. Like it's one thing when you've built it yourself and most, if not all the risk is on your shoulders, it's a whole nother ball of wax when, you know,

you feel like you've got a great model, you've done all the right things, you've done these things, but inevitably there's going to be people that maybe weren't cut out for it that invest in it and do it. And no matter your best intentions and your best guides and everything that you had right, I just, it strikes me as being a lot to bear. I don't know. It is. And it's a fantastic business model. Franchising does a variety of things.

First of all, it creates great leverage. Brands invest a lot in the marketing and join a brand. And the speed to which they have a proficient business generating dollars is so much faster than if they just went out and tried to do it themselves because they have to create all that. You got to go get trademarks. That might be a year. You got to build your websites. You got to do all of this stuff. And at the end of the day, you're paying pennies on the dollar for all of this stuff and you get all of these shared services. So it's really transitional for people too. People can pay $49,000 or $54,000 for a franchise fee and be in business in 60 or 90 days

and then create something that they can build a big multimillion dollar business and sell for maybe multimillion dollars. And then if it's a good franchise and they maintain a pipeline of people that want to join the brand, they have a clear path to exit. So it's easy in, speed to revenue, and then easy out. A lot of people will do a franchise as their first business and they'll spend five, six, seven, eight years doing it, have a great experience, and then they're going to go off and be entrepreneurial in some other way. I see that all the time and I'm really proud of it too. We have so many of our business owners that we put in business through AdvantiClean that I'm still connected with that are just doing incredible things out there. But the fundamental of what they

are doing was all of the things that they learned by being an operator within our system. I love that. I want to pivot here shortly to some personal things, some experiences you've had, the podcast, a little TV show, maybe a few people have heard of, but let's last kind of question. You mentioned the trademark thing. It made me think like, would you ever, if you, would you ever start a friend? Can you start a franchise if you don't have a trademark on your name? Is that like rule one? Let's say you're someone that's built one or two locations and they're super successful.

I'm like, oh, I'm ready to franchise. But you just happen to have a name that you didn't trademark or can't trademark. Do you immediately need to get a different name? Yeah, so those are two different things. So didn't trademark, yes, you can start. You would disclose that in your disclosure documents that say we have a trademark applied for. Here is the application number. Here's the date that we filed for it.

And now if you get denied on that, then that requires an additional disclosure immediately. So you've got to do that. Now, if you went to a trademark attorney and they said, no way. Yeah, you're Smith Fitness, like Smith Fitness. And it's wonderful. You're making millions. You know that everything can be transitioned to a successful franchise. But Smith Fitness, what you started out with and what you built with

just happens to be a non-trademark. Do I need to change my name? I don't know. It made me think of that when you started. I'm like, damn, how many people might start down this path and they've got an amazing business, but maybe they didn't think about it or they just pick something too common. Look, Ryan, I learned a long time ago that if I'm going to be broke, I don't want to be tired too. Can you imagine if I'm going to be broke, like I'm going to be comfortably laid up on catfishing somewhere in a really in a garbage pick lawn lawn chair. Now, but look, you build this whole brand and then the equity is in the name. When you go to sell your franchise system, a lot of it has to do with what's the equity in the brand. People know the brand. So if you don't own it, you've just built, I'm not going to say you built it for nothing,

but that would be a non-starter if you can't get a trademark. I don't think anyone would do that. So yes, you would have to go through a rebrand. And you would think that in this day and age, that every good name is taken, but it's not true. There's all kinds of variations of things you can get. You can make up words. There's get a little creative. Google doesn't mean anything 30 years ago or 25 years, that long ago. But Jeff, I know you've had some incredible experiences through your success and what you've done. Let's, let's go right at undercover boss. I know our audience has probably heard of that. Maybe even seen you. I may have gone, I recognize that guy. I, he had to go tea and they were trying to put it together. Talk about how that came about and just the overall experience. Yeah, it's still, we had a really good episode. It still plays a lot. It plays overseas. I'll

know when it plays in Australia or in Europe somewhere, because I'll get a bunch of weird Facebook messages. No. So in 2016, they were filming season eight and they had somebody drop out at the last minute. So one of the things in life is if there's no reason to say no, then you say yes. So they came to us and said, we've got two weeks to do this. We've got seven or eight people that we're talking to. We'd have to fly out from California tomorrow, shoot a sizzle reel, put it together, pitch it to NBC and they would,

or was it CBS? I think it was CBS. Pitch it to the network. Yeah. Pitch it to CBS and they would have to decide. So we did that and really quick, it came back that they were interested in having us on. So then we went through the reams and reams of paperwork and it was we went out on the show we went out on the road maybe like a month later and it was a surreal experience for those people that haven't been behind the scenes in a production like that it was really cool i know i signed a bunch of confidentiality stuff and i really don't want to do anything to I don't want to say anything that makes it harder for them to do the show. Yeah, but it just it seems to me, Ryan, every year the show is canceled. Yeah. And then somehow it comes back for another. But it's such a well-known show. But I will tell you, the way that this is done, it is done so well and so over the top that you would not think.

People do, is this undercover boss? And then as this is going on, they're like, no, it's not. It's clearly not. But it really is. So, yeah, it was great. We ended up being on the road. We had a couple of little hiccups with a couple of things that were going on politically where they, we shot some stuff in North Carolina and then they're like, Oh, we don't want to shoot North. They're ready to reshoot stuff. So I had to fly

my family. We did all the family stuff, right? We went, we did the office stuff. We did the B roll at the office. And then we went to the house and I'm cooking hot dogs on the grill. Dogs are swimming in the pool and all that. And they're like, we can't use any of that because there was some political thing going on. And it was one of those things. And so then we go on the road for a week. We film two or three segments. They fly my family to this wonderful resort somewhere in Georgia. And we reshoot all of the family stuff. And then we go on the road. So I was on the road for a total of 16 days. And it was a great experience. And I will tell you that we had five, the producer said we had five episodes that we

had to cut one that many shows would have killed to have. Our franchisees were absolutely amazing. They lived the values of our company. They were out there trying to do the best thing for the customer. They were highly empathetic. I could have picked at a few things here and there. But at the end of the day, we had we ended up with four great segments. I got busted twice.

They showed one of them. And but it was really I think what's interesting about the process is we have a you haven't been here yet. I think you're coming, but you haven't been here yet. But we have 22,000 square foot building on a five acre campus. It's got broad shoulders. And I coached over 30 seasons of my kids' sports. And my daughter's basketball team would practice in our warehouse. I lined the side yard as a football field.

And that's where I coached our peewee football teams when the kids were growing up. And people didn't even know I owned the business. That's how we rolled. People had no idea really what we did, the scale of the enterprise. They didn't know that, oh, it's nice. They let you practice here type stuff. And so like we, we were pretty under the radar and I sat my kids down on the couch in our

bonus room and above it is a quote on the wall we put, and it has kids pictures of them doing whatever it is they did that we wanted them to think we were proud of them for. And it had this quote from Jerry Moore, the football coach at Appalachian State. It said, always do more than is expected. And then we had our family values up on our little plaque there and stuff. And one of the family values is trust yourself to take chances, fail fast and move forward, always do more than is expected. And all of that. And I said, guys, this is going to change things. And this is, it's, it might change things at your school. We're given, we're going to be giving away

a quarter million dollars worth of stuff. People are clearly going to know that, that whatever it is that makes the show. But when you looked at our values, it's like we couldn't say no. And they're just like, okay, we're willing to take the consequences of it. And we did. And we ended up having a great show and they all got a little bit of time on it. So that was cool. They got like a flash across the screen. Yeah. They're 15 seconds of fame. Yeah. They're 15 seconds of fame. And then we had when it showed the night that it showed in January of 17, we rented out an entire bar. There was 250. Oh, and I had my little football, the little football team was coaching at the time like they were on it. So that was cool. So we had about 250 people came, kids that I've coached, their families, all the employees, their families, the local news. And we saw it for the first time, along with 7.1 million other people. And I'm telling you, it was a great show. And it did so much for the business and the brand and the franchisees, really just confirming, really living the values that we had, that we knew that we lived within the four walls of the business. But being able to display it to the

world and put the franchisees front and center was just an incredible opportunity. So I always encourage people to say yes. And there's risk because if you watch that show, some of them go very poorly and you have no control. And I will tell you, man, they tried to wear me out like early, late, three times a day, an hour in front of the camera, asking me probing questions that would be incendiary, trying to get me to break and i just said my i took the whole position that said if i don't they can't use anything that i don't say yeah that's smart i hope you got media training before that sounds like you did no i didn't but i knew i knew that i had a irresponsibly quick mouth and I needed to put a clap,

a clap, a lock on it, but we did good. Two questions on that for transition. Like first, and you mentioned it, it was good for the business. I tell people that they don't completely recognize like when, which things like shark tank and things like these things where you can get your company like out there, like the monetary and brand impact of that awareness that you can't buy, by the way, or you can, and it's just way more than you'd ever spend. I'm assuming there was some rebound

from like some upshot from that on some level. It was immediate. We ran a call center. We answered 250,000 inbound phone calls for our franchisees. We did it very well. And there was many jobs that said, I saw your company on Undercover Boss and I'm giving you this job for sure. They were touched by the episode and franchisees directly got work attributed to it. There was a spike in franchise sales, but it wasn't massive. But being able to use that episode as a piece of content during the process to really exemplify what we stood for, how we rolled. It tells, my gosh, it tells the story of our brand. They did, obviously, a great job with it and little graphics and little trucks and a map. So you could watch the first four or five minutes of that thing and get our whole company history and in a high production quality. So just that was worth $250,000.

Yeah. But think about what you just said. It's not just like the immediate, okay, I sold X number of franchises or X number of jobs, the recruitment benefits. How many more people were you able to recruit? There were high quality people that wanted to work with you. And what was the long game monetary benefit of that is probably greater than what we could ever calculate. To this day, it's a banner on my LinkedIn. So if you reach, if you do Jeff Duden at LinkedIn, anybody out there, you want to connect with me and you want to watch the episode, it's 42 minutes of your life. You'll never get back. Go to my LinkedIn profile, just scroll down three inches and it's

the big banner right there. And if you click on it, it'll take you to a Vimeo page that's free and you get to watch the episode. Franchise candidates that we work with today at Home From Brands are interested in seeing who we are really and how we roll. It continues to pay dividends. It's just a very high quality piece of independent content. Final question on that, on the show. Editing is always so interesting. I've been in the business for 22 years on the commercial side, but I've done enough production to know what you shoot and what gets edited. The stories can change and all that. Were you, it sounds like you were generally still pleased, but was there any editing magic that you were a little didn't love? No, it was, I was fine with all of it, but I'm pretty easy.

Like I found it, but one thing I found really interesting, we had a guy in there named Barry and Barry, at one point they had them do a Superman, like how fast can you get out of the crawl space? And then at another point, we were having a conversation about snakes or something like that. And then so they took two or three different really disassociated pieces of content and they put them all together in a sequence that basically said oh man i see a snake i'm out of here and they had them scooting out so it made it look like created a little drama that didn't exist yeah but it all happened but it just didn't happen

exactly in that order but other than that we played it really straight yeah there wasn't we didn't give them anything that that wasn't that wasn't authentic and than that, we played it really straight. Yeah. There wasn't, we didn't give them anything that wasn't authentic. And then the other side of it is it must be good because it plays all the time. And it's funny, like my daughter, she went to Clemson and it was probably two years in. And she doesn't say anything about anything. We don't. We just don't. So anyway, they're sitting there and i guess i guess it comes on the tv or they were at a somehow they found out about

it or whatever but this is a year and a half two years afterwards or she's with her soccer team and you're at the hotel waiting to go to dinner and the tv's on in the hotel lobby and they're all just hanging out there waiting for everybody to load up and go to dinner and it's on the television. And she'll try to turn it off if she can, but whatever. So it's really interesting that it plays as much as it does. And we continue to get lift from it. Love it. Talking to CEO of Homefront Brands, Jeff Duden. Find more about Jeff at jeffduden.com. Jeff Duden. Find more about Jeff at jeffduden.com. We'll also give some of his other links as we move along. Jeff, so podcasting on the home front.

You've done a couple others. We're going to get meta here on the podcast talking about your podcasting. But did you just see the wave? You're like, I can do this. What got you interested in it and how's it been going? It's been going well. If I had to guess, we've got 15 to 20 in the can right now. We've been releasing one a week. I've been excited about the caliber of guests that we've been able to get on. We've been able to get on, first of all, the great Ryan Alford's been on the show. Man, it must be really impressive. It is. It is. and then stepping down from there but

kara golden the founder of hint water it was a 500 million dollar business she sold stacy madison founder stacy's pita chips dave sisson who's a primal we've got chris voss scheduled to come on next month it's kind of a drop right there somebody that i've seen a lot of yeah social media and he's out there a lot yeah so we've had a lot of on social media. He's out there a lot. Yeah, so we've had a lot of really great guests, too many to name right now, but it's been good. And of course, I'm just working my way into doing the best I can to figure out how to be a good host and how to keep it interesting.

But it's just, it's something that I'm, at my heart, I'm a coach. Like I've coached over 30 seasons of kids sports. Everything I do is like team building, culture, execution. Why? Like you've got to be at work anyway. Why aren't we being trying to do this in the very best way possible me personally has reignited my curiosity. And I say that because now, as you get really busy with lots of things, sometimes your reading falls behind. And I've always been a voracious reader, but my reading hasn't been where it needs to be. And just continuing to really pour into myself, preparing for a podcast with a guest. I will research for, our team will do some research. I'll study the research, but I will consume at least an hour to three hours of their live content.

And it's always available, it seems, that you can find people doing things. I've read a whole book. I read Kara Golden's book, which name escapes me right now. I've actually got the copy of it right over there. But it read a whole book. I read Kara Golden's book, which the name escapes me right now. I've actually got the copy of it right over there, but it was fantastic. It was a fantastic book. So that Sunday I consumed the whole thing and was just, I had a great show with her. If I'm learning and I'm having a good time and the guests, then if you consume other people's live content, what it allows me to do is it allows me to, because one of my personality profiles is a chameleon, so I will talk to them as if they're talking to themselves.

And it gets people comfortable and we end up having a really good time and that's it. Now, if other people enjoy it because we're having a good time and we're laughing and we're talking about interesting things that they have a strong command of the subject matter, then that's great. So yeah, we're really excited. We're putting resources behind it. We're working with you to help understand how we can be better. It's a real passion play for me. And I've taken a big chunk of my calendar and allocated it specifically to it.

Yeah, it's a wonderful medium, I think, for all the reasons you mentioned. But the relationship building and the... I'm a curious guy, too. And I think, but it has definitely done similar things for me because you get, one, you're researching the person is on and then the actual interview, much like this,

you shut everything down and you're like actually having a conversation and it's sad, but it's so you don't have this, those kinds of discussions anymore. You got, I've got the headphones on you don't have those kind of discussions anymore. I've got the headphones on. You and I are kind of locked in. We're having a dialogue. And yes, it's an interview, but like where you're just truly actively listening. And no matter how good a listener you think you are and all those things,

but when you have guests and you do these things, it's just on a different level. And that's where I, someone that's a hair AD, it's just on a different level. And I was, that's where I, someone that's a hairy D it locks me in it for good. I'm focused on one thing and that's the guest. And I learned a lot more about them. And then I'm actually absorbing like the lessons like that you've given here today. And like other guests that I have, I'm like banking knowledge and it's great. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And just anecdotally, podcasts are probably my number one thing that I consume now above anything else. So if I'm at the gym or working out or walking the dog or driving, there is a podcast on. So it's clearly because it's a real conversation. As opposed to that's the great thing about non-scripted television.

And that's reality. It's reality. Yeah. It's non-scripted television and that's reality. It's non-scripted, but it's edited. But podcasts are they're edited, but they're even more non-scripted. Yeah, they're 100 percent. Yeah. When I have guests like Jeff Duden, they're not even edited. It's like we just roll. It's the beginning, the end.

And hey, I gave myself a license. This is what I say at my agency. There's two things. So I say this at my agency. I named the agency Radical. I am giving you a fucking license to be and come up with anything because anyone that hires us, if they come to me,

they call Ryan, the owner. They go, Ryan, what is your team thinking? You hired an agency named Radical. What do you want? And the Radcast. So it's Radical. We cover it. So it gives me a lot of, I don't know, bandwidth or license to expand, go down those rabbit holes. But I love it. Talking with Jeff Duden, CEO of Homefront Brands, host of On the Homefront podcast. I know we got a couple of books here as we're closing out. I want to mention these for our listeners.

We've got Hey Coach. We've got Discernment. The Business Athlete's Regimen for a Great Life Through Better Decisions. Talk to me about the books. Yeah, I tend to write a book when I come to the end of a phase in my life. So I wrote Hey Coach after I knew that I was pretty much done coaching my three kids in all the athletics. And I was doing that while I was building a national company. And the similarities between getting a group of 11, 12, 13-year-old men or women to play fast,

play loose, play within a system, play for one another, really get better, learn something. It was just, it was all of those lessons of communication and structure and autonomy, giving the team to them as the season progressed. We ended up with a completely different looking team usually at the end of the season than your typical little team, just because of our process that we developed over many seasons with some other great assistant coaches and whatnot. So I really wanted to document that and put that into a book. And I did that in Hey Coach. So it is out there and available. And then Discernment is what I wrote really in 2019 after I sold at Vaniclean. And it was all these models of thought around how to really be thoughtful and intentional about decision

making when you're at an inflection point in your life and all the things that I think went into it. Business is a full context sport. The quality of our decisions determines the quality of our life and the velocity of our business. And wisdom is really a cumulative asset. Wisdom is really just models of thought that you've accumulated over experiences in your life. And you take them and you put them into models and then you apply them to present day situations and you test them against that. So things like what are the various types of equity as people that we build? We build relationship equity. We build, and that's really important in franchising because it's a relationship business. It's not, you can't fire a franchisee. We're in this thing

together, so we got to make it work. Franchise agreements at 10 years, I think, are longer than the average marriage in this country now. Reputational equity, your health equity, your wellness, your fitness, all of those things play into what kind of decision you're making, how you occur in the world. And I think the big takeaway is that nothing is 100% and anything could go to zero. And the probability of success is just notching up one percentage point at a time, one way or another, based on the decisions that you're making every single day. Starting with what do you do the first thing when you wake up in the morning? How do you occur? How do you make your money? Are you a transactional type business builder?

Or are you a long term equity company value type business builder and all of those types of things? So that's really what decisions are, because bad decisions are a debt on your future time, energy and money. At the end of the day day, we carry the burden of bad decisions on our back sometimes for our entire life. And those are decisions that we made haphazardly without any fundamental basis for making them. How do you use a set of values personally? We have a set of family values, live fun, be humble, respect others, be a servant leader, fail fast and move forward, trust yourself to take chances. Always do more than is expected, man.

Okay. There's a lot to unpack inside of that. But like when you're making big life decisions, how does that lay against those set of values? I mean, companies have sets of values. Really using these different filters as you go through your decision-making process really hones your probability of success in those outcomes and that's what i try to pack into it for people that are in the right place it's not like a book that's flying off the shelf or anything like that but man more and more people are asking for it they're buying these and giving them out at the talks that i'm doing and i'm getting a lot of people coming back to me and saying i highlighted like a hundred things in that book it's the flow

is fine there's a ton of stories because we're tribal people, right? Our people remember stories. So there's a ton of stories in it, but there's also good, really tactical tools for people to use, especially people that are looking at embarking on a business or making some sort of a life change or an inflection point. I love it, man. One of my favorite people in marketing makes a statement. It's called, we need more thinking about thinking. And that's where my mind goes when I think about discernment. Discerning takes thinking. And you don't want paralysis from analysis.

There's a fine line of that. But at the same time, it's just important that we really think through things and think a little harder. We've gotten, everything's gotten so convenient though. Critical thinking is still a really important skill, especially if you want to live a life of abundance and at a higher threshold. And so that's really where my mind goes when I think about this. And I hope people go to Amazon, check it out. Discernment, the business athlete's regimen for a great life through better decisions. Jeff, I think we've come to the end, my friend. It's never the end, but we'll just take a break for now.

How about that? Yeah, break for now. We'll do a round two when Jeff writes a new book or his podcast overtakes like every other one, including the Radcast, everything else. We'll bring Jeff back. And shit, we probably, I know we go even deeper on the whole franchise thing. I think people are gonna get a lot of value out of your insight on that.

And I know you're available if they go find you. Where can they keep up with the great Jeff Duden? LinkedIn is probably my preferred network. So just Jeff Duden, J-E-F-D-U-D-A-N, and you will find me there. You can see Undercover Boss on there. If you want to find out about our brands or right on the Homefront website is homefrontbrands.com is links to Spotify and all the places where the On the Homefront podcast is. And you can also click through on all of our six brands and see what's

going on there, whether you want a top rail fence or a temporary wall or a window hero or a designery kitchen and bath or any of those. They're all on there for you to look at. And then Instagram seems to be the other place where I spend a lot of time. So just Jeff Duden there right on Instagram. There you have it. The franchise, the new nickname,

at least for me, for Jeff. I will take it. I'll take it. Thank you, Ryan. This has been fun. No, man, it's been great. Really appreciate you coming on and appreciate our growing and burgeoning relationship. So we'll stay in touch. Hey guys, you'll find us the radcast.com. Search for Jeff Dude and you'll find all the highlight clips and the full episode from today, wherever, whenever

you are. We love you. We appreciate you for making us the number two business and marketing podcast in the U.S. on Apple. We really appreciate everyone that listens and you know, to find me at Ryan offered on Instagram, on Tik TOK on you see that blue check, you know, where you're at. That's me. We'll see you next time on the radcast. To listen or watch full episodes, visit us on the web at the radcast.com or follow us on social media at our Instagram account, the.rad.cast or at Ryan Alford. Stay radical.