The Money Mondays - Why Franchises Are the Smart Investor’s Play 🏬 EP133

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

This week, we’re joined by Chris Wright and Alex Smereczniak, co-founders of FRANZY, to explore why franchises are one of the most overlooked paths to building wealth. From scaling 30+ laundromats to disrupting the franchise broker model with AI, they share how their platform is helping everyday people become business owners with proven systems, minus the startup chaos.Chris and Alex are seasoned entrepreneurs who’ve scaled businesses to millions in revenue and sold over 100 franchise locations. Together, they launched FRANZY, a tech-driven platform revolutionizing how people discover, evaluate, and buy franchises. Backed by $3.3M in venture funding, their mission is to replace outdated broker models with transparency, AI, and education, empowering the next wave of franchise owners to build wealth with confidence.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Monday's podcast. Normally, we're inside of an RV motor home. But instead, today, we are inside this $100 million mansion in Beverly Hills that Ty Lopez is hosting his events at as we speak. Some of his guests happen to be the people I was going to interview. So by the being butter boom, we decided to take over his library to make this podcast episode. So as you guys know, we cover three core topics, how to make money. how to invest money, how to give away to charity.

We're talking about all those topics, and keep in mind when you're listening to this podcast, it's not always just for you. It might be for someone from your past, present, future. Meaning, I might interview someone about real estate, owning nightclubs, a rapper, an athlete, a celebrity. And the topic that they're talking about may not pertain to you, but it might be for someone in your life from your past, present future. So listen to these episodes, we keep them to under 40 minutes because the average workout

is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. So this episode will be under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure. So without further ado, I'm going to have two guests at the same time, give you the quick two-minute bio each so we can get straight to the money. Awesome. Hey, Chris Wright, co-founder of company Franzy. My background is in software and product, and we're building a product called Franzy

Think Bazillo for franchising. So we help people get paired with franchise brands that are a good fit for them and help them become entrepreneurs. Very cool. And I'm Alex Murray. Fursnack, originally from Minnesota, based in Charlotte, North Carolina now, the other co-founder of Franzy and a serial entrepreneur. This is my third company, the last one we raised, $35 million in venture capital for.

It was a laundry and dry cleaning pick-up and delivery business. Eventually started franchising part of that business, which is how I got into the world of franchising and saw just how broken and misaligned the franchise buying processes. So with Franzy, we're hoping to disrupt the traditional broker model and democratize. access to buying small businesses and franchise businesses. So the company you raised at 35 million before did you stop? Did you get bored? Did you sell it? A mixture of all the above actually so I was nine years into it. Whoa. Yeah long, long journey and we started at the advent of all the like Uber for X businesses. So

you saw like shipped and Instacart and Wag and Rover. I was like someone's gonna do do this for laundry and dry cleaning. I'm gonna be pissed if it's not me and you know someone else does it. So we started up in 2016 and the reason I I think I eventually started to move on from it last year was we had pivoted into a business that had trucks and washers and dryers and eventually vertically integrated the business. I was like, I don't know if I'm the guy that takes us from 30 laundromats open now to 300 or 3,000. So hired a CEO last year to go work on Fransy with Chris full time.

Very cool. What about you? What about me? Yeah. Last company, what did you say? What happened there? Yeah. So before Fransy, I was with a company called HR Logics. We helped provide tax credit software and HR compliance software to businesses. We grew that business from, I think, seven people when I joined in a couple million of revenue to close to 90 million revenue by the time I left. I had just had my first kid. And we had been growing this business for about three years and it had gotten pretty intense. And I really enjoyed the people I was working with the business I was building. But I wanted to take a step back and spend a little time of my family and really be present for the first six years. months of my son's life.

Around that time, as I was kind of getting decompressed, Alex called me about this idea of Franzy. Sent the bad signal. Yeah, sent the bad signal. We've been wanting to work together for a long time. And I was ready to jump in and start building Franzy once in. Did you guys happen to live in the same city or converges?

So he was in Charlotte originally when we met, but then he'd moved to Birmingham for the HR Logics business. I was like, all right, come on. Come on back home. Very cool. All right, so let's talk about the make money side. When you're first getting to an entrepreneur career, someone out there listening, so they dive right in entrepreneurship, so they go take a job, you know, work at a company first.

Like talk to your stuff about your thoughts about the beginning of an entrepreneur's journey when they're like 21, 22, 23 years old. Yeah, so for me, like I grew up, my dad was a financial advisor and I think I got to see a little bit of that like eat what you kill mentality. And he'd always told me, he's like there's three types of careers or, you know, paths you can take. You can either work for someone else. you can have the ability to work for yourself which is what he was doing or you're going to have

people working for you and like that that just always resonated and stuck with me and i knew i needed to be in bucket two or three and he's like you'll live up probably more fulfilled you're happier life doing that um and so i took that advice wholeheartedly and you know started a business in college um loved entrepreneurship was addicted to it and through that kind of course like seeing my peers i think you know realized we're pushed frequently you know to good grades in high school to then get into the good college to get good grades again to then go work at the fortune you know 100 company and i just didn't want to do that i knew that wasn't for me and um so my advice is especially to people at that age or that juncture in life is to take

the risk then you know that's probably one of the best times in your life to do because you don't have a ton of responsibility probably don't have kids at that point a ton of you know debt or bills or anything um and so i always say buck the norm and try that, try that business and take that risk at that age. What do you think? Yeah, I had two role models in my life. Earlier on when we were talking about kind of business and what I should do with my life and kind of how to get started.

I don't think that a lot of people really know who they want to be when they grow up, but I'm still kind of learning who that is for me. But my, that's right. That's right. My father-in-law is a serial entrepreneur, and he encouraged me to kind of just explore entrepreneurship. And so I started my first business in college was a Amazon FBA business. I know a lot of people explore those at one point. And we had gotten pretty big at the time.

And then took my dad's advice and went down the kind of corporate route and went to go work for Deloitte and consulting and really enjoyed that as well. But determined that I really kind of wanted to be the holder of my own destiny a little bit. And so much my wife, chagrin, left and started a cleaning company was on demand. Uber for cleaning, similar to laundry. I got out sooner than he did. But I think that you really have to figure out what you want to build and how you want to build it. But more than anything, it's a really great time.

Like Alex said, to take risks when you have less responsibilities. I know that it was easier for me taking this risk having a kid already because I had done it in past. But if I was just starting from scratch at 31 years old and deciding to be an entrepreneur, I don't know that it would be nearly as easy as it was back then. So quick question on the laundromat side. Every article study I see, because I talk to Cody Sanders, a lot. It showcases that laundromats are actually the lowest failure rate of any business to acquire. You guys know anything about that? Yes, I mean, we had, you know, 30 plus, we still have

30 plus of them open and going. I think it's because it's such an essential, you know, need. People have to have clean clothes. And so if you're in a lower income community or an area where there isn't, you know, access to a washer and dryer, you have guaranteed customers. And they're fairly simple businesses to run. There's no employees if you don't want to. It can be an unattended laundromat and so I think that's why there's a lot of you know success in the model now the size of that success varies right you could have a business that only kicks off 30 grand in cash flow a year if it's a bad area or bad equipment right I've seen laundromats do six 700 800 K in cash flow with very

very few employees very cool so the 30 laundromats you guys are running those owning those how does that work so some of them are corporately owned and some are franchise so we started franchising the long in 2021 under a brand called Laundra Lab. We sold 118 locations in 14 months. That's the beauty of the franchise models. It can scale and just blow up and you have other partners with you that have the capital that are building and developing a series of locations with you.

And so we could grow the business pretty rapidly. The first six years we started, we had two corporate stores. In the following two years, we started franchising at 30. So it speeds everything up and you bring those partners in. bring those partners in? So I invested in Everbull in 2018. There was 13 locations. Blinked our eyes.

2019. There was 21 locations. I raised $5 million to the company to help scale it. Seven seconds later it was COVID. So we had to furlough the staff. We had at that point 25 locations open right around March when the closing day was March 2020. And then Jeff Fenster went on the full attack. the full attack, signed like over 300 leases, sold franchises all over the country,

Drew Breez invested, Jason Tatum, all these things, like Kamar Uspon, everybody started jumping in. And now, two years later, there's 103 locations, one new one every six days. We're building for everybody else. We're building for Shaq, Mark Wahlberg, EOS, we're building other people's locations. And I think about that shutdown period of, like, most of all shut down. That's why it was called the shutdown, especially franchises. they were freaking out, they weren't, no one was willing to go sell franchises. And so it leads me to, tell me about franzi, like, what is this, why is this?

Like, why did you decide to go down the franchise model? Yeah, so when we started franchising the laundromats, we knew nothing about franchising. It was this crash course like entrepreneurs do. For sure. It's a problem. Let's just go figure it out. And so we start franchising, we realize, right, how do we sell a franchise to do sales and run ads and go on podcasts?

and we worked with what's called an FSO, a franchise sales organization that essentially acts as your internal sales team. And so that was effective. They helped a lot. They stood up our sales process with us. So we were so focused on operating the stores and getting our new franchisees open. But we eventually crossed paths with business brokers, franchise brokers. And what a lot of people don't realize is those franchise brokers take a 60% commission, 6.0.

So what? On the franchise fee. Wait, what? People don't know this. And like, you'll get reached out, you know, on LinkedIn by these individuals, you're like, oh, this is a free service for me. They tell you they make money from the brand, which they do, but they don't, they leave out how much it is that's leaving the system.

That franchise fee should be reinvested in training and site selection and marketing, 60. And so I would go to these conferences with these, you know, franchise brokers, and I saw just how much money they were all making and how, like, fat, and how, you know, happy they all were and all the brands were like, I hate having to do this, but I don't know what else to do. I'm so focused on scaling the business that this is just, this is the way it is. And as an entrepreneur, you hear that a bunch of upset people. One side that's very fat and happy. There's a problem here that could be solved with technology using AI, better sales process. And so our goal is to democratize the process around franchise

discovery, franchise buying and selling. So what stage of the company in now? So Chris and I started working full-time on it last summer. And the better half of last year was compiling the largest, most robust data set in franchising. We have over 25,000 FDs, franchise disclosure documents across 3,600 brands. We've trained the LLM, we've trained the model to be very, very accurate at recommending the best brands for you as you come through. We soft-launched in November, hard-launched January of this year. We've raised about 3.3 million in venture capital. We've started closing deals like crazy and helping people find the best fit franchise for them. So how do you make money?

So similar to a broker that we get paid based on success. So it's a much lower reduced flat fee. So we tell our clients up front, we make money from the brand. Here's how much. And it's a flat dollar amount so that we have no incentive to push one brand over another in front of you. It can be objective. Yes. So whether I want to get a gym or.

benevolable it doesn't matter to you yeah versus a broker they might only show you the analogy I use is brokers today will only have an inventory of like 30 to 50 brands you again does it was their client don't realize that you think oh this person's going to bat for me they're gonna look at the thousands of brands they're only showing the brands that have paid the play in the background 30 to 40k just to get into the group and so it's like a real estate agent showing you houses that they're also the listing it's crazy no you'd never buy a house like that so why would you buy a business that way okay so i go to the website

where's an app that's a website website i go the website i say i'm dan this is how much am i tell you my budget or in say my area what am i telling you yeah you're answering round 10 questions giving us interests what industries you're interested in your budget kind of where you want to put the franchise answer those few simple piece of information it feeds into our i which looks at everything we know about every single brand, which the model is trained on, and then pulls back with nine or so recommendations. Then you're going to see a screen that'll have kind of Tinder style, thumbs up, thumbs down. As you like different brands, that then feeds in the algorithm again. On the end of that, that journey, you kind of get connected with our team members, one of our coaches

is going to help narrow that list down. And we spend a lot of time with prospects on the front end to make sure that they're as educated as possible, but also to make sure that they're getting matched with the right brands. We're not just rushing them towards a decision or rushing them to talk to brands. We want to make sure they understand franchising and understand what they're getting to sell us into before they actually get to that stage. And so are there experienced brands that are going to come there or experience investors or do you think it's going to be someone that's just starting with one to three locations that ones to Kevin? We have three main ICPs, ideal customer profiles. It's the corporate

grinder. They've been working nine to five. They want to do something entrepreneurial, but they don't know where to stuff. They got 600K saved up. Yeah. So there's that group. Then there's like the side hustler, you're kind of hacker type that does short-term rentals and they've got crypto. Cody's like a lot of mat. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

And then the third group is your sophisticated, you know, opera. They own five units, ten units, 20 units of a concept and they're looking to add to that portfolio and find the next Dave's hot chicken or hot concept that they're discovering on Francy. So I go there, I discover it and you guys recommend fit body boot camp. Okay. Now what? Yep. So we, you have a coach that you can use as much or as little as you want. So, you know, franchise advice.

advisor. They can help you with finding the right lending or capital structure. They help you with finding a franchise CPA, a franchise attorney, the right commercial real estate agent help you find the site if it's a retail business. And then if there is ability to negotiate with the brand, they'll help you, you know, be in your corner through that process as well. So they walk you through the whole franchise buying process to the day that you sign and then we're not done at that point either. We help you with all the things that the brand isn't already doing the brand is going to do training and marketing and some of the site selection were all the business in a box you know type of stuff get your entity formed we'll help you set

that up we'll help you with all those other things that every business has to do regardless of whether it's a franchise or not and then what about the building like have you talked to Jeff Fenster about we build to actually go build the locations yeah I was on Jeff's show probably a month or two ago and met Justin Sloan who's your big operator in Texas you know we'll eventually pull we build in for offering to do that yeah interesting okay so i go there you tell me fit by the boot camp i talk to my coach i've got 350k saved up ready to go do i talk to you again do i need you anymore yeah the idea is that every step of the buying process even if you hit a hiccup along the way in a

brain conversation we're having conversations with you your coaches every single time you have one of those there's debrief calls if you want to have them right depends on how much the prospect once engaged, but has debrief calls at the end of each of your meetings with the brand, helps you understand what came out of that meeting, helps you have new questions to ask at that meeting, and then walks with you all the way to Discovery Day, which is that kind of final step before you sign or don't sign, and then helps you make that decision at the end of the day. So they're there as much or as little as you want, but really throughout the whole process and then thereafter.

How do people find me, guys? Where do you, where's your clients coming from? Yeah, so it's three main channels right now. It's program. SEO that we're using. So we have all these very data rich articles on top 10 ice cream franchise of 2025 that have investment costs and revenue and Google My Business reviews. So SEO we're dominating in paid ads, podcasts, and we're starting to put a ton of our own content out. We launched a show recently called How I Franchise this, which is like a play on the NPR podcast. We're telling the story of like the normal dude, right? It's not Colonel Sanders or Ray Crock.

It's like, we're going to talk to Susan and Tim who left their jobs at Bank of America. Now they run three, you know, fitness concepts and they love it. They've been more fulfilled doing that than anything else they've done. We want to tell the story of that, you know, average person, that average operator that went and did it. So someone saved up this money. They're working their core job. Maybe they sold some real estate. On the investin side of this podcast, I like to ask, like, how do people make decision

like that because they can invest in the stock market, cryptocurrency, more real estate. There's so many different things. S&P 500. Why franchises? Yeah. So I think franchising is one of the most underestimated wealth plays of all time. I mean, it's 10% of our country's GDP and no one's talking about it. It's always like, oh, it's McDonald's and Subway, and that's what it is.

They don't realize it's hospitality and home services and fitness and health and wellness. So it really spans all these different categories. And then the success rate, which I think is important for people that are being entrepreneurs for the first time or the 20th time, is the five-year success rate on a franchise business is 85% compared to half of independent businesses failing after five years. And so that's the reason we're preaching about it is entrepreneurship has changed both of our lives in a very positive, incredible way. but not everyone wants to go be a tech entrepreneur or a real estate entrepreneur. And this is a really good but diverse set of options to become an entrepreneur in a more de-risk way. Interesting.

What about for you guys personally? As you guys are making capital, what do you like to mess into? I mean, we're both looking at more ways to invest in franchising as much as possible. Alex is invested in a couple of franchises. And me personally, I'm trying to build out a franchise portfolio as well. We haven't, we're just kind of getting it off the ground. but I think that we want to put our money where our mouth is and invest in franchises because we do believe it is a very de-risk way to build out your own personal wealth,

wealth, your family, and generational wealth that scales. It's got a playbook that's built in, and it gives you the opportunity to build on a system and platform that's got support built in that you wouldn't necessarily otherwise have if you're building something from scratch or buying an existing business. I'm doing five indoor golf simulators in Minnesota. It's called Another Nine, but I like it because there's no employees. There's no food in bed. It's like any time fitness you fob in or use the app to get in.

It's private days. It'll be like a room like this where you can go with your family or buddies at 3 in the afternoon or 3 in the morning. There's no employees there. It's Fob access. And I really like this one bagel concept called pop-up bagels. Oh yeah. I follow that guy.

It's blowing up. The average unit volumes are crazy. It's like $2 million in revenue off of bagels. Really? And it's the simplest thing. but one of the genius things they did is they force you to buy three you can't buy one you can't buy one you can only get three like groups of three that's so interesting that's the thing and the cost to get in is like 450 to 650k they've sold all of main to

florida all of texas all of california blown up it's like the next i'd say crumble cookies but for bagels interesting yeah i was wondering why i followed that guy there was something about it that made me compelled by it they're doing new you know flavors every week and cheese crazy and spice flavors and cookies and cream and that's why I think people are getting hyped up about it's the crumbull playbook but for bagels yeah i mean crumbos got multi-billion dollar valuation now it's just staggering to watch yeah they're doing okay so also on the investing side how can people invest into learning they kind of they learn about franchise they can figure out do i want a pop-up bagel do i want an ever bowl do i want to

Fit body boot camp? Do I want a laundromat? Where do they study? How do they invest in themselves? So there's a lot of good, you know, podcasters out to those Brian Beers. There's Fran dogs and the Wolf of Franchising are good like newsletter resources. We have our podcast where we tell stories of people getting into it, how they got into it, how they financed it, how they identified. What's your podcast called? How I franchise this. And then on Franzy as well, we have all sorts of franchising 101 guides.

So what is an FDD in the first place and what section should I look for? And then a lot of our, you know, software, our process is to help with that education to get over that first step of fear because that's where most people get hung up is I don't even know where to start. So I'm not going to. We want to make it as easy as looking for a house on Zill. Make it fun, honestly, where you can go look and see like, I could see myself doing this. It fits me. It's a 97% match, et cetera. So we have tons of educational content on the site as well. And then our coaches as well, right, there's no obligation if you start talking on one of our team members. There's a lot of our team members. There's a lot of. no obligation to move forward, even if it's just to understand if franchising is a good fit for you. We sometimes sell people franchising might not be a good fit for them, which is part of what we believe in is transparency and objectivity, right? We don't want to recommend one brand of the other because one brand pays us more, and we also want to make sure that we're transparent with people on how the whole process works and can educate them whether they become a client

or not. So as you're considering investing to the business, raise 3.3 million and growing, Why does the company go raise $3 million? Why is that part of the process? Yeah, so we bootstrapped initially and we were like, oh, let's take some of the money from previous businesses. And then we just, you know, we see this wave happening right now. AI starting to displace more and more white collar jobs. It's people that would go, you know, buy and run a franchise. And we want to capitalize on the wave that's happening.

There's also the silver tsunami happening with the boomers, you know, transferring 15 trillion over the next, you know, decade. And so our thought was we get their bootstrap and go a little slow or we can raise money, accelerate product development, accelerate, go to market and be more aggressive on marketing and driving awareness for what we're doing because there's a lot of things out there that you could do. You can go to Biz Buy Sell. You can go, you know, consume Cody Sanchez's content. There's all these other ways to buy a business and we want to grab our piece of that mind share of, hey, franchising is a very viable way to get in ownership and raising capital helps do that better and faster.

With Alex's point earlier about franchising making up 10% of the US GDP, but no one seems to really talk about it. You can either buy a business, you can start a business from scratch, and then you maybe have a friend or a cousin or somebody who does franchising or is in franchising somehow. We want to make franchising as mainstream as possible, and one of the best, quickest ways to get there is to invest more capital and making that story told at a more broader scale. It's talking about investing in people. Let's say I am the doctor or accountant, lawyer that did save up half a million.

I can put it into $350K into this thing, one of these franchises. I don't want to run it or I don't know how to run it. How do I invest in people? How do I go find someone to run this thing or partner on this thing? So not yet, but at some point, Franzy is going to pay our capital with operators as well. So part of that survey... I was not seeing that up. Not there yet, but that's one of the product iterations we want to make is because I ran into it all the time.

You get these really, really good operators. that ran five McDonald's for, you know, wealthy family or individual who just doesn't have enough money saved up to go buy their own restaurants, they would be a great candidate to go pair with, you know, Dan, who's maybe saying, hey, I've got capital, but I don't want to run six Dave's Hopp chickens. So let's find the operator, give them some sweat. I don't know. I don't want to run them.

I don't want to eat at them and own them, but not run them. I want to post about it. Definitely don't want to run it. So my life is designed where I will not do a project without a quarterback. I don't care, how much money you tell me, I don't care who, this, that, I don't, I don't care about any of that stuff. If I don't have a quarterback, which is a CEO, to run that company, I will not do the project, even if someone offers a boatload of capital.

There's a war chest. There's $12 million, Dan, do this tequila brand with me. No. I'm not going to run it. You're not going to run it. Who's going to run it? I don't want to find out later. I don't want to go just hire someone off of LinkedIn or monster.com or hot jobs to go try to run it.

I need to know who the quarterback is. I am not in, ever, under any circumstances. It comes up every week I'm pitched, well, every day I'm pitched, but every week I'm pitched like, da-da-ton, like something that's fully capitalized, just be my partner, just be the advisor, and I just say no. I leave a lot of free money on the table, but I know the long-term effect if it is and the short-term, if there's not a CEO, if there's not a quarterback around this thing, there is no chance at all, at all.

Can it get off the ground, maybe? Can it get to X, Y, Z? probably but like without someone running the day to day to day not possible you need someone who's like blood sweat and tears and time like the man in the arena yes constantly obsessing over it thinking about it the way I described it is called ride or die so I'll give a quick example let's say there's two girls that are pitching right now to invest in their companies one girl she went to Harvard she got summa cum laude blah blah blah

fanciest degrees you can imagine and she's selling red cups And these red cups are going to be $2.99, very comparable to the other price point of other, the solo red cups that everyone knows at every grocery store. But she's got the pedigree. She's got a business plan. All set. This girl over here is selling green cups. These green cups are biodegradable. She don't need to a percentage to saving the elephants and the manatees. And they're a little bit more expensive to $3.99 because it is more expensive to make these green cups. But this is her passion. She's been studying everything. She knows that they're completely. you know, combustible, compatible, whatever the heck you call it, and they can be replanted.

And she does it. She has all the things. Every time you buy one of her packs of green cups, a tree is planted. She's got it all, who do I want to invest in to? Green cup. Every single time. You know why? Because if Red Solo Cup girl gets an offer from Gary B or Microsoft to come work for her,

she's out of there. Oh, yeah, we'll give you 800K salary plus equity. You see a bunch of smoke. She'd go work for them. Because she doesn't care about the red cups. It's just a business. I can interchange red cups with flowers, cans, books. She doesn't care.

It's just, it's a widget to her. She just knows she can run a business because she has the pedigree. This girl with the green cups, you can't offer her a million dollars to go leave or 800K to go leave. This is her life. She wants to save the elephants and the manatees and plant seeds and plant trees. She cares deep in her soul about this thing. And the money is a default byproduct of it. She might not even care about.

She might. I hope she has stuff. I do want her to care about it from that revenue percentage. perspective, but I want to know that she cares about the thing. And I will pick her every single day, and she might not have any college degree. She might have left high school as a sophomore, and I don't care about that part. So I can build a team around her. I can go get the Harvard girl to go work for her.

That I would love. I would love for that girl to be the president, right? But I want the green cup girl that's passion to be the owner. I want her to be the right, what I call right or die. I remember when Pop, we were talking about Pop earlier, invested in our first company. He was like, you're not going to leave in like six months and go backpack across Patagonia, are you? I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, I've had a bunch of investments where the founder just, you know, didn't have that hard, didn't have the passion into it.

And I get why he was asking that now. But at the time, I was like, what do you mean? No, this is like, this is it. This is all I do. And think of I work most weekends. And you have to have, I think, that desire to win and be competitive and pour everything you have into it. That's my biggest fear is the founder leaves. whether they leave for personal reasons.

They leave because they were lured away. They leave because they got hard. That is my fear in investing in a company because I'm betting on them, not the product. The products are all interchangeable. I always joke about Jeff Fenster memorable. If he was selling pillows, I would invest in the same amount of money. I say that same sentence all the time. He's ride or die.

Morning, noon, and night. He's on airplanes, trains, and automobiles figuring out to scale his business over and over and over, no matter what. The good stuff, the hard stuff, the whole world shuts down. down. When the freaking world shut down in 2020, he went on QBC and started doing a hundred $150,000 episodes. He was selling 150 grand every 11 minutes of frozen assayee. All right, let's talk about the charity side of things. Why do you think it's important for companies, whether it's for their employees, their investors, their partners, their clients, or front facing to have some type of charity component to their business. I've always been a huge believer in like do good while doing

well. And I think without getting on the soapbox too much, if you think like whether the center of like power used to sit in society. At one point it was, you know, very much religion. Like the church had a lot of, you know, influence and control over society. And then I think it shifted to government, you know, for a long period of time. We very much operate in a society now or that power and that influence sits within businesses. But yeah, we have the government still, but all the businesses are in your pockets of politicians and have a lot of influence on what we all consume and do. And so I think businesses have a huge responsibility to have that element as part of their culture and their mission of doing good while doing well.

And part of the reason, you know, our mission at Franzy is to help the next million entrepreneurs is they have that influence and the biggest propensity to positively impact society and the communities that they operate in. So I think it's wildly important. And I think there's good ways to do it through entrepreneurship, whether it's job creation or you know, creating a ton of revenue to pay a ton of taxes on it. Those taxes hopefully get used appropriately to get back to that, you know, community that you're in. But then beyond that, what other things can you do? So at our laundromats, for example, we put read, play, learn centers in each location.

Or it's free books in a kid's play area for families to come in because it's a lot of single mothers and dads going into laundromats. We get new books every month and you could, you know, the kids could take them home and we just restock them every month. But it's things like that that don't cost the business a whole lot. It could drastically change the life of an individual or a customer experiencing that. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that to Alex's point about where the power lies, I think at the end of the day, right, money can do a lot of good and it can also provide for a lot of people, right? I think the more that businesses can give back, the more that, especially in a space like franchising where one owner can own 15 units, 15 units could be 15 communities that are being built around that unit and the ability that they have on a scale is much larger than more. most individual business owners.

So they have the opportunity to give back. And I think that in all rights, we all should give back as much as we possibly can to help those less fortunate than ourselves. We share a lot of the same philosophy on that topic. So there's one main question I asked on every single episode and I've never asked this question to two people at the same time.

And I've never gotten the same answer once out of 200-ish episodes. All right. So you build this company up, you exit it, 40 years from now. of millions of dollars. You can do your next company, build it up hundreds of millions of dollars. But at the end of the time, let's say hopefully God willing 100 years from now, it's finally time to pass away. But you've accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars of net worth, and you both

have these brand new children, what percentage of your net worth do you leave to those kids? That's a really good question. That's a really good question. It's the only question I ask on every episode. I don't know what the exact dollar amount or percentages, but one thing my dad, my dad grew up really poor and I think he did a good job instilling these kind of values of my brothers and I, where it was like, when we got a car, for example, he's like, I'm not buying you a car, like whatever you save up on your own by the time you're 16 years old, I'll match. So if you got 200 bucks or you're getting a $400 car, go figure it out. If you got two grand, I'll give you another two, you got $4,000 car now. And so I think about things like that a lot of like, it could be worth a billion dollars. I wouldn't want to have, you know, my children be super entitled or everything's just kind of handed and you don't understand some of the sacrifices that you have to make and the work ethic you have to develop and build on. And so I think my number and my percentage would be centered and focused around that. It's like what do they need to, you know, survive and you have a happy life, but without it, I think not setting them up for

success as an individual on their own. And so it's a very small. I'm not planning to give whatever money I make away for the most part. Damn, that was a good answer. That was like very similar to where my head was going. Yeah, so both my father and father and law similarly, like grew up relatively poor. And one thing that my father instilled in me in my younger years and my father on later on on is the ability of the hard work and basically being the one who always shows up, who gets in early, who leaves late, can provide for you and your family. One thing they both believe in is making sure that the next generation doesn't have to

struggle as much as your generation did. However, making sure that those values are working hard and what showing up and leaving late can can build in yourself and your family and build those ethics. Similarly, I don't know the exact percentage. I do want to give away a lot. I literally was thinking about this as you're giving this answer, but my goal would be to make sure that my kids have to work hard for everything because I don't think that handing them things is going to be a good value for them in the later parts of their life. I think we're built in the hard moments, not in the easy ones. I think character comes from the hard moments. So if you're giving too much to your kids,

and I don't want to give too much to my, I don't want to make sure he works hard for things, but it's safe, right? Yeah. So I don't know exactly. What's your answer? So it evolves over time. In my dream world, I'd give her all of it to utilize

while still giving a big portion of charity, but she leads it, right? I'll be adopting a boy at some point, so there'll be two kids, but right now there's just one. But in my dream world, I'm building her up to be the steward of capital that I don't trust in her. Not for her to have a zillion dollars, you know, because that would steal her chance of greatness. But if I teach her enough and she's in her, God willing, she's in the 30s or 40s when I pass away, then I don't mind. If I give it to her when she's 19, it's different.

If I give her to her when she's 44, you know, I'm not saying I'll be alive, then hopefully I will. And so I think it's a much different when we think about when you hand the child, because when she's a 44-year-old child, right? By that time, she's probably had her third exit for all I know, you know, like, and married with two kids. So I think I wouldn't be stealing anything from her if I all of a sudden gave her $700,000. Like, I think that'd be fine. It's 44 years old, for example. So I think there's, for me, one, it would be in a trust format. So she's not just getting handed at X time.

And I also think no matter what, I would never give it to her own one lump sum because there's no need for that. She's not going to go deploy it all. If I hand her 700 million, for example, I'm going to go deploy it all in one shot anyways. I'd rather give it to her at, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 million year, whatever that number is probably the course of time and have her deployed percentages to charity, percentages to our family members. And hopefully she's the leader of that because I built her up that way. and my unborn adopted son, same similar fashion, right? Let them split it up, assuming that they're both good kids and good stewards of capital. But it's an interesting because we didn't have money when I grew up.

It built me to who I am. And so I definitely wouldn't want to take that from her, but hopefully I'm still alive at that point. So I'm not trying to like, you know. But if for some reason I pass and she's like 11, then yeah, it's going to be in a trust. she'll get it when she's, you know, 18, 21, 25, 30, et cetera, in tranches so that she's not getting, I don't want her to be a zillionaire at 18 years old. That's not. Yeah.

I know too many trust fund kids. And no matter how much training you give them, you know, we watch NBA athletes, we watch rappers, we watch people grow up and they get handed a zillion dollars. It's, you know, it's very difficult to explain this, the human psychology of what happens. A lot of their learnings about the window. their non-learnings don't, you know, are relevant at that point if they get handed this much money. So especially now with NIL deals,

you've got 17, 18 year olds getting 11 million dollars and they're, they don't have a driver's license yet. It's insane. It is crazy. So yeah, so the knowledge is a big thing, that the age is a big thing for me, but I would be comfortable with her having a huge amount of capital to deploy not for her to go buy.

Title doesn't mention, right? That's not the point. All right. Where can people find you guys? Where can they find your socials? Where can they find the company? Tell us everything. Yep. So if you're interested or just wanting to explore buying a franchise, it's franzi.com, F-R-A-N-Z-Y.com. You can also follow me on Instagram, TikTok, X, et cetera, Alex from Fransi. We have tons of business teardowns, breakdowns, and interesting business content that we put out on a daily basis. Yeah, I'd say honestly, follow Alex. My socials are not dialed Henry, Apple, Paul, Alex. And yeah, find us on Franzy. And honestly, we're big fans of product feedback. So tell us our baby's ugly.

The only way that we get better is buy feedback from people like you. So please visit Franzy if you want to buy a business or if you just want to rip it apart and give us feedback. I'm getting here for that too. All right, guys, we're listening to the Money Mondays podcast where we cover those three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. With these gentlemen, it's very interesting because, again, you may not want to buy a franchise. But your mom might, your uncle might, your friends might. Someone at a dinner or lunch six months from now might want to get into the franchise game.

And you can be like, oh, you should listen to this episode, The Money Mondays with the guys from Fransy or some on the website, etc. So it's not always about you. Think about the people in your world that you might not even met yet that might want to listen to an episode like this. We grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's ridiculous. We have to have discussion about money about loans, accounts, taxes, should I borrow, should I lease, should I buy?

there's so many questions about your normal daily life money is not the root of all evil it's so much power in money and it goes for your bills your health and everything involved in your life so check us out here on the money mondays.com and we'll see you guys next monday