Franchising with Greg Mohr

Looking to make a career change and thinking about starting a franchise? Greg Mohr shares his expertise on the questions to ask yourself as well as the companies you’re considering affiliating with!

Nov 27, 2021 | Podcast

About the Episode

LifeBlood: We talked about franchising, common characteristics of ple who are successful at it, why people fail, and how to figure out which of the 4,000 franchises is right for you with Greg Mohr, Franchise Consultant with Franchise Maven. 

Listen to learn how working with professionals can save you time and money today as well as over the long term!

For the Difference Making Tip, scan ahead to 18:30!

You can learn more about Greg at FranchiseMaven.com, Twitter  and LinkedIn.

Thanks, as always for listening!  If you got some value and enjoyed the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and subscribe as well. 

You can learn more about us at MoneyAlignmentAcademy.com, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Facebook or you’d like to be a guest on the show, contact George at [email protected].  

George Grombacher

George Grombacher

Lifeblood Host

Greg Mohr

Greg Mohr

Guest

Episode Transcript

Come on. Welcome to lead flow. This is George G. And the time is right, welcome. Today’s guest is strong and powerful. Greg Moore. Greg, are you ready to do this?

Greg Mohr 0:21
Yes, I am. George, I appreciate you having me on.

george grombacher 0:23
Yeah, excited to have you on. Greg is a franchise consultant with franchise Maven. He’s helping people find the secure financial future that they want. Greg, tell us a little about your personal life, some more about your work and why you do what you do.

Greg Mohr 0:40
Thank you, George. Well, I live out here in the middle of nowhere in Lake Kane, Missouri. And I do, I ended up doing this kind of work being a franchise consultant, because I do like living out in the woods. So it’s very easy for me to do this from the comfort of your own home, from a computer, and I talk with many different people from all across the nation. And actually, I actually will call across the world. I’ve always liked helping people, I did a lot of that when I was an engineer, I did a lot of training of others. And I got into my mobile franchise A while back, and was helping many business people. But I really wanted to help a lot of other people do the things I do do what I want, when I want. And I found that having a business of your own really gives you that freedom to do that. Well, that’s why I got into this business, George.

george grombacher 1:29
Nice. What kind of an engineer were you?

Greg Mohr 1:33
electrical engineer, microelectronic circuits with Motorola semiconductor and Freescale Semiconductor.

george grombacher 1:39
Got it perfect. And then you got into your own franchise and what what? What was that or what industry niche.

Greg Mohr 1:48
So that was telecommunications consulting on that one. So after a while climbing the corporate ladder, I had had enough wanted to get my own business didn’t have the latest, greatest idea. The only things so I got into telecommunications, consulting, and I help businesses find the best communications for telephones, video. All those things, I found them the usually I’d come up with like three different ideas for them to either keep the same system they had and save money, or improve the system they had and save money on that. Give them a few different ideas. That great business loved it.

george grombacher 2:26
Nice, I appreciate that. So working as an electrical engineer at big companies like Motorola and Freescale, I mean, there’s a obviously a very unique skill set and a lot of hard work and and intelligence that go along with that. Different though, than being an entrepreneur.

Greg Mohr 2:46
Oh, Georgia was like, Yeah, like night and day. So just going from being an engineer where I just said, you know, here’s the data, let’s make a decision on this data. Let’s make a decision on this data today. Because we’ve got to be you know, change things around to get things moving. So now you’re going into a field where you’re now a business person, you’re in my case, I was helping other business people make decisions, so I could show them the data. Well, what I really had to do there was learn a lot of patients and kind of looking at their point of view and seeing what they’re looking at patience, but persistence on that get to show them not only the data, but get them to feel good about not only myself and me helping them. But the data itself also shows that they can improve themselves. So it was really different. read a lot of Zig Ziglar books. Zig was a really great one, you know, sales is do something is something you do with somebody, not to somebody. So I really had to take that mindset of engineering. And here’s the data, let’s make a decision right now. To where now I’m working with somebody and kind of getting them over to my side, showing them going through the process. It’s actually quite a bit of a learning process to go through there and do that.

george grombacher 4:01
Yeah, for sure. So is it common for folks to you know, I don’t know how long you were with Motorola and and Freescale, let’s assume that that it was a whole career, right? And you probably is a common for somebody to do what you did, and then to say okay, now I am interested in doing my own thing of having financial freedom and time freedom and all these things. How do I make that leap to entrepreneurship?

Greg Mohr 4:31
You know, I was with him for 15 years. So yeah, 15 years with in the semiconductor industry. Before that the other career was 17 years as a restaurant manager. And it’s actually I get quite a few people who get to that point in time who have been with the company, climbing the corporate ladder, 10 1520 years, sometimes 30 years, and they get to that point where they say, I need something different. So either they’re looking The fact that they’re not gonna have enough money for retirement, and they just, they still like their job, they want to stay there, but they’re not quite going to get to where they want to be. So they need something passive, or semi passive that they can do in conjunction with working. And some people that I get, I have to once I get to that time period, they just want to step away from corporate world altogether. I just said, you know, I’ve run businesses within businesses, I’ve made other people money my entire life, it is time for me to get out of this and do something for myself, for every bit of effort I put into it is now coming back to me.

george grombacher 5:33
doubt it, I think, if that makes sense, quite, quite off. Yeah. So the the options are vast, you could just start your own thing. Your your thoughts on why franchising over me just started my own thing.

Greg Mohr 5:55
Both great ideas, it really depends on the person that we’re working with. So franchising is not for everybody. Each one of those franchises started their own thing, each one of those people had something in mind that they wanted to do, they started it on their own, they built it up, they became a franchise, you want to do that, that’s fine, go for that, we’ll actually help you turn it into a franchise, we do that as well. So the real question of what you’re asking there was, Why go with a franchise instead of trying to do my own thing. So when people want to go with it, go with the franchise, because they don’t necessarily have that idea. Like, I didn’t have that great idea. They’ve never been in business necessarily, by themselves before, and they want somebody there that’s going to help them out. They want a proven process and a proven method that they can follow to success they want. My people when they’re looking at a franchise, they really want is they really want to talk to a lot of those franchisees and a lot of those businesses before that have already done it. So they can find out from the franchisees, especially, you know, how was the franchise to get you going, because that’s the biggest fear is, you know, you build it, and they won’t come is the biggest fear on that one. So you know, they’re gonna put their hard earned money to it, nothing’s gonna happen. So people get into franchise because they want a partner in their success. They want a proven business model that they can fall back on. And they want it to be shown that other people have been successful in that business before as well.

george grombacher 7:27
Yeah, that certainly does make sense. And while there are no guarantees in life, Greg, obviously, being able to see that, okay, these folks have have have certainly done it. And it’s a repeatable process or a recipe or a roadmap, however you want to look at that, if I do these things, this is the result, I’m probably going to get

Greg Mohr 7:51
very true. And if you’re looking at probabilities and statistics, like I do as an engineer, then if you go into what they call their Franchise Disclosure documents, because a lot of people will ask me, what is the success rate on a particular franchise? Well in their Franchise Disclosure documents, and I’ll go through that with people. Once we get to that point, how to look through the Franchise Disclosure documents, but didn’t there was a list of franchisees who are currently running the business, and a list of franchisees who started the business and are no longer running the business. So it’s pretty simple math, to put that together, and to see what kind of a success rate that particular franchise has. And we really want to look for like 85 90%, or better on those really makes people feel a lot more comfortable.

george grombacher 8:35
Yeah, certainly, that’s an 85 90% success rate is excellent. So of that, and obviously, it’s always going to be relative and depend. But commonly, why do people not? Why do people fail at franchising? commonly, if that’s possible to answer

Greg Mohr 8:54
it is possible to answer actually, the biggest couple, probably the two biggest things there’s one a spouse invested in that franchise. The other spouse, for whatever reason, still had a job and had to move. So now they’ve moved out of the area, and now they’re too far away from it and they can’t oversee it properly. Like it should be, each franchise really wants you to be for the most part in the territory that you’re running that business so you can go by and check on to do that. That’s one of the main reasons interestingly enough that they have to move and they leave it behind. The other one is they may turn that over to a family member to run or to operate. That family member might not have gone through that process of not only investigating the franchise, but the franchise itself didn’t investigate that person to see that they’d be a good fit for their franchise. So when a when you turn it over to a family member like you know, mom or dad up, you know, invest in that franchise turns it over to one of the kids to run steps back. Kids don’t care too much about it or just think it’s just a fun thing. Those are actually the two main things that I find when when looking into an asking the franchise is why are there failures and those are the two main reasons. The third one kind of lower end on that is health reasons. Sometimes people something happens, they get sick, they can’t do it, in which case the franchise in all those cases, the franchise will put it up for sale. And we have a lot of resale franchises as well that are available out there.

george grombacher 10:23
Yeah, interesting. Alright, so kind of walk me through the process if if I came to you and I said, Hey, Greg, I’m actually going to be stepping away for whatever reason from my engineering career over at XYZ company and I’m really considering franchising, what is that process look like me trying to figure out and you tried to help me determine out of the world of 1000s of franchises millions, which one is right.

Greg Mohr 10:51
Okay, so basically, there’s all about 4000 different franchises out there in the United States. So we work with about 300 of them, right? So we in our run our consulting organization, one of the main questions people ask is how we get paid. Everybody wants to know that so we have agreements, with the franchises that if you invest in one of the franchises we introduce you to, they pay us a referral fee. So there’s never any charged my clients. For our services, the first step in the process is basically just, we just get on the phone together, we start getting to know each other. So at that point in time, what I need from my clients is basically to ask as many questions as they can about me, and about franchise and whatever questions they have about that, I want to get them comfortable with me getting to know me, I send them background information on myself, I really want them to go through there, and check me out thoroughly and make certain that they’re comfortable working with me, for my standpoint, I’m going to be looking at in the first call is probably 1520 minutes, not too long, just kind of get to know each other, I’m going to be getting to know, what are their expectations, what do they see a franchise doing for them, I want to make sure that they’ve got some pretty realistic expectations, you know, they’re not going to be a millionaire in a year in one year, that’s your expectation probably not gonna happen, it’s definitely not gonna happen. So that’s the first phone call, just kind of get to know each other. Make sure we’re compatible, make sure that you adapt point in time, at least trust me and know me as much as you can, that you’re comfortable moving on to the next step. So what at that point in time, I would send them out a questionnaire to fill out, get, send them my due diligence process, what we’re going to go through to find a franchise. And then we’ll get on the phone call again, on the phone again, and we’ll go sit down for about a half an hour, hour or so. And basically what we do is we just talk about you, Mike and my client, find out where have you been? Where are you at now? And where do you want to be five to 10 years from now? So I’m looking at what what you bring to the table on there, you know, what’s your background? What experience do you have, because each one of those franchises is going to have certain expectations for the franchises we introduce them to the potential franchisees we introduce them to so I want to see what kind of background they have. So that at that point, I’m after I gather that information, go through the questionnaire, ask a few more questions. We have a matrix of business types we take it through to kind of get a feel for what kind of businesses you may be interested in. I’m gathering up as much information as I can about the candidates. So I can find out okay, which franchise? Would they feel good about? Could they picture themselves and doing so I already know who the franchise or the franchise is looking for in potential candidate. Now I just need to find out what type of a franchise would this candidate be interested in. And then what I do after that call is I do the matchup come back with maybe five or 10 different opportunities for my candidate, present those to them. So that’ll be our next call, our third calls will go through the different franchises that I picked out for them led them to know why I picked out each one where I see it fitting into their goals, their criteria, and then at that point in time, then I will walk them through and stay with them through the entire investigation process of we’ll maybe pick out two franchises to investigate. And we’ll go through the entire process of investigating that franchise, generally, four or four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks for the entire process to go through. Just depending on how fast or slow my candidate may want to go all the way through to where you they go out and they meet that the franchise team in person at that point in time, then they go back home and make a decision on whether or not they want to invest in that franchise.

george grombacher 14:38
Nice. Well, let’s really make sense. Is there a way or I mean, I like to think about our most important resources as time attention and money. So some of these franchises are going to be a lot more expensive. Some of them the opportunities are going to be way more time intensive of me actually being on site doing how Help, how do you think about that or kind of communicate that.

Greg Mohr 15:05
So basically, we’re gonna go with two different two different business models of franchises or any business in here in the United States. One of them is the brick and mortar. So your restaurants that you see out there, McDonald’s reverb games, Supercuts redcliffs. brick and mortar franchise, you build it, and they will come is a general thing, that’s going to be your big investment, you’ve got that building, you’ve got that prime real estate location, you’re probably looking at $250,000, total investment on up from there, and it can go up to wherever, on that one, your second group, group, then group number two will be your services industry. franchises, so services industry franchise, this was where you need maybe a small office, or you work from home, working from home doesn’t mean your clients are coming to your home, it means you’re going out and visiting with your clients. For those you’re looking at 100,200 50,000 total investment there are about services industry is a little bit different. Your clients don’t necessarily know you exist until they need you. So that’s what we’re looking for great franchise system, that’s going to put you out in front of people when the need arises. So whether it be tutoring services, Senior Care Services, restoration services, remodel kitchens, bathrooms, pest control, you want a great franchise system that’s going to put your name out there, when people look for you, maybe have a call center, that’s going to schedule appointments for you. So those are the two, as far as investment levels that you’re gonna be looking at. As far as time concerns, we look into three different types here, one is almost completely absentee, there’s a few of them out there, not a whole lot to do that, they will find people to manage the place for you. You’ve got your semi absentee. So your semi absentee is going to be 15 to 20 hours a week, on average for you. Depending on your management skill and style. That’s where you’re looking at managing the manager and managing the profit and loss payments, that will be your role. And then there’ll be obviously the full time once we you step into it, and you run it yourself. Now each franchise is going to be different. So some will allow you to be absentee semi absentee. Obviously everyone will be full time if you want to, to do it. But that’s basically what it’s broken down into it, it just comes down to what it is you’re looking to accomplish and what you’re looking to do.

george grombacher 17:28
Love it. That certainly does make sense. And I think it you know, I think sometimes when people hear that, they say, Well, I definitely want to be totally absent. But at the same time, I think that if somebody perhaps like you, Greg, you were used to going and showing up at a place, you know, for, you know, five days a week for however many hours and that, you know, that’s not good or bad. So really knowing yourself and what you want is probably really important part of this.

Greg Mohr 17:57
You’re exactly right, George and that’s a big, big thing. When I when I talk to people is that you know, you like that, where you step out of your house and you go somewhere and you want to be there, put in whatever hours, then leave it behind like that. So we’re actually right, George, that’s definitely something that we go over with our candidates and find out from them. Where it is they’re looking to do because working from home can be can be a challenge sometimes.

george grombacher 18:19
Yeah, it’s you know, it’s not good or bad. It’s just it just is what it is. So love it. Well, Greg, the people are ready for your difference making tip, what do you have for them.

Greg Mohr 18:30
So we do basically, we just save you time and money. A lot of franchises out there, or 1000 of them, you’ve got to go through and figure out which one’s a good fit for you. Whether or not they have territory available in your area, what the investment level is. That’s a lot of work on your part. Come to us. It could be any franchise consultant unnecessarily me go through and interview a few franchise consultants until you find the right one for you. But we’re gonna save you time as well. Also money, surprisingly enough. One thing we didn’t go over is that we do have franchise attorneys that are going to look over your franchise agreements. There was one instance where the franchise agreement was a little bit off and I managed to save one of my clients $15,000 audios franchise investment there was a territory so we can’t we’ll save you time we’ll save your money. And we don’t charge anything.

george grombacher 19:23
Well, I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets come up. Come on. Right thank thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you and how can they engage with you

Greg Mohr 19:34
go to franchise maven.com that’s my website. That’s franchise ma v as in Victor e n.com. Where I get franchise maven.com or just pick up the phone and give me a call 36177 to 6401 love

george grombacher 19:53
it. Well if you enjoyed this as much as I did show Gregor appreciation and share today’s show the friend who also appreciates good ideas good franchise maven.com and shoot Greg an email Greg at franchise Maven calm or just give him a call and find out if franchising is a good opportunity for you. Thanks good, Greg.

Greg Mohr 20:15
I appreciate it. A great day

george grombacher 20:17
you as well. And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

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