What if people could make a down payment on their mortgage with credit card points? That simple idea took years to get right. PG. 32
Illustration Nicolás Ortega
QUICK TIPS
6 Start Here This issue is all about marketing. Let’s get started.
8 The Problem With Buying Ads You might increase sales, but that alone won’t help you in the long run.
10 Who’s Your Customer? Entrepreneurs often think they know who their target market is ... but they may be wrong.
12 This Robot Can Write Your Marketing Welcome to the strange future of AI language models.
14 Yay for Dumb Ideas! An important marketing lesson from one of the weirdest brands.
16 Hustle for Clients A “dentist to the stars” explains how to land big clients, even if you’re not a big deal yourself (yet).
18 Forget Them! Stop worrying about your unsupportive friends and family, and build a network that really matters.
80 Back Page Dont hold on to your goals too tightly; leave room for the unexpected.
FRANCHISE
46 Where Business Is Really Booming These industries are seeing massive growth—and you could join them!
54 Go Local With Social Hyper-local social media is often overlooked. But when done right, it can drive real sales.
56 The Top Low-Cost Franchises Brands you can start for less than $50K, $100K, and $150K.
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The pet care industry is growing faster than a puppy.
PG. 46
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WHAT YOU PUT IN WHAT YOU GET OUT
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WHAT MAKES YOU SPECIAL?
t’s a hard question to answer, but you’ll need to grapple with it over and over again. Because let’s be honest: As soon as you start a business, you are competing in a world of noise. There are competitors to di erentiate yourself from. Marketing channels to stand out in. Social media platforms to gain audience in. You have signed up for a non-stop marathon of gaining attention and building momentum and competing for your consumers’ precious time — and you cannot even begin to succeed in this race unless you commit to answering this question.
So once again: What makes you special?
The answer may surprise you. You might think it’s a particular product or feature or branding scheme of yours. But if you talked to your customers—really talked to them—you might discover that it’s something else. Maybe it’s how your brand makes them feel. Maybe it’s your empathetic customer service. Maybe it’s the way you deeply understand your customers’ needs. Maybe it’s just you, who people like and feel good about supporting.
Whatever the answer, that’s why we’ve put together this issue of Startups . We want to get you thinking about your own uniqueness, and how to turn that into the most impact-
ful marketing possible.
You don’t just want to tell your story. You want to tell the version of your story that people most want to hear!
As you turn the pages, you’ll nd lessons and case studies on how to do just that. For example, you’ll learn how the brand Liquid Death has thrived in the ultra-crowded drinking water space. (The answer, in short: Embrace dumb ideas.)
You’ll see how a dentist with no celebrity connections transformed herself into a “dentist to the stars.” (It’s all about the hustle.) You’ll also get an important lesson from an unusual death care startup, which will inspire you to examine exactly who your customer base is.
And there’s so much more. As you’ll see, every story in this issue can be summed in in two words: Look again. People thought they knew what worked. They thought they understood their audience. They assumed something would be easy and straightforward. And then they learned that, to really get it right, and to really stand out, they had to look again.
So look again at that question: What makes you special?
Now start turning those pages!
—JASON FEIFER, editor in chief
SPEND
SPEND MONEY ON WHAT MATTERS
You can buy marketing. You can buy sales. You can buy attention. But don’t confuse those things for real customer connections.
by ADAM BORNSTEIN
I want to increase my sales. Does that mean I need to buy ads? —EDWARD, ST. LOUIS
SURE, you can buy sales. That’s what paid media is—it gives you access to a large audience and helps you test your messaging. But there’s a downside to it. Paid media can trick people into conating sales with demand. It can also make entrepre-
neurs with smaller budgets feel like they have no shot at truly connecting with their audience.
I’m here to tell you that’s not the case. You can buy your way into sales, but you can’t buy your way into product-market t—and that
is the thing you should be most focused on.
A company that has achieved product-market t (PMF) is likely doing great with sales, but that’s not to say PMF is about making money. It means what it sounds like—that your idea is in demand, and it changes people’s reality for the better. No amount of paid media can replicate that.
So how do you know if you’ve found it? When companies come to my consultancy, Pen Name, for guidance, we help them answer that question by focusing not on their product—but on their customer.
You should be obsessed with understanding the inner emotions and pain points that drive your customers’ behaviors. What leads them to action?
Survey data is a ne place to start, but it won’t contain all the answers. You must go deeper to consider their mindset and actions, look at current behaviors, and suggest alternative options to assess how they react.
When targeting your customer, we recommend taking a very narrow and speci c view of who will get the most value out of what you created. By identifying a smaller audience, you make it easier to determine when (or if!) you nd PMF. Plus, it’s cheaper.
Here’s how to start. First, if you have a product, get it into your customers’ hands. Ideally, they’ll pay you for it, but you can start free, too. Heck, even PayPal started out by paying for their early customers. Next, interact with them directly. Ask questions that
give you insights into current behaviors, their level of satisfaction with what they do now, and the importance of the category you’re trying to solve or improve. For example, you could ask, “What are you doing for [the problem] right now? How big of a priority is [the solution] for you right now?”
Your ideal consumer will already be doing something to solve the problem you’ve targeted, will have a high level of dissatisfaction with that current option, and will greatly desire and highly prioritize a new alternative.
Once you’ve collected answers, you can start to assess how much they need your product. You can even explain what you’ve created (or are creating) and ask how much they would pay for your o ering.
While this is not a foolproof method, you’ll be surprised what you nd out. Because when you nd PMF, your initial user base is insatiable. They get it, love it, and need it. Then they’ll tell others—and their advocacy will lead to a second tier of consumers who might overlap with your initial narrow scope, or expand who you help.
Whatever you do, do not become so obsessed with the idea of growth that you overlook consumer insights and leverage. It costs less and is worth much more to the short- and long-term goals of your business. And the payo is something you could never buy.
Adam Bornstein is the founder of Pen Name Consulting, a marketing and branding agency.
Illustration Federico Gastaldi
WHO REALLY NEEDS YOU?
When Justin Crowe came up with a new form for human ashes, he thought the concept would sell itself to consumers. But he hadn’t figured out who his real customer was. by
FRANCES DODDS
The company Parting Stone offers a novel service: It turns the ashes of deceased humans and animals into pretty little stones—like river rocks. And when Justin Crowe founded Parting Stone in 2019, it seemed obvious who his first customers should be. “Our research showed that while 1.6 million American families choose cremation through a funeral home each year, there are already 75 million people in the United States living with pet and human ashes at home,” he says.
In other words, Crowe planned to skip the hassle of persuading funeral homes to o er Parting Stone’s “solidied remains” as an alternative to traditional cremation. Instead, he’d sell his service directly to those 75 million consumers with an urn in the basement.
But when the company launched, things didn’t go as planned. Crowe had to step back and reconsider his strategy. In doing so, he realized that numbers aren’t everything. Sometimes sales hinge on something less quanti able: trust.
Crowe isn’t the rst person to transform ashes into keepsakes. There are other companies that put remains into objects like jewelry or vinyl records. “But those things use, like, a teaspoon of ash,” he says. “There’s still 10 cups left that go in the closet.” Crowe, who has a ne arts degree in ceramics, wanted to create something that used all of a person’s ashes, and appeared to be
made only from the ashes: a “found product,” like a stone. He got a grant to work with a ceramic submarine engineer and developed the Parting Stone concept.
When he launched in 2019, Crowe went all in on consumer sales—building a digital marketing sta and investing in online ads that targeted people living at home with ashes. But to his dismay, early direct sales were dismal. And to his surprise, nearly 100 funeral homes reached out and asked how they could o er Parting Stone’s services to their families.
marketing materials to begin o ering the service. Soon after, sales soared.
That was an unexpected turn of events. “The industry is incredibly skeptical of outsiders and slow to innovation,” Crowe explains. “Nearly 90% of funeral homes are mom-and-pop shops, many of them multigenerational.” And yet, there they were, asking for more information. So Crowe scrambled to set them up with the education and
As it turned out, the things that made funeral homes slow to innovation—a nity for tradition, and fear of o ending grief-stricken families by suggesting something newfangled—also made them the most trustworthy evangelists for Crowe’s service. That mattered a lot more than the 75 million people who have ashes stashed at home.
Once he realized his sales strategy was wrong, Crowe course-corrected. He halted Parting Stone’s consumertargeted online ads, redirected his marketing sta ’s focus to funeral home sales calls, and produced
point-of-sale retail displays for those spaces. “I was spending most of my days on Zoom conducting sales communication trainings for entire teams of funeral directors,” he says. That helped him identify pain points he hadn’t considered before, like how funeral homes make wholesale orders. Parting Stone soon built a wholesale back end into its consumer-focused website.
Two years in, the shift is paying dividends. “More than 80,000 families per year see solidi ed remains in funeral homes now,” Crowe says. “And we’re nding that as our service through funeral homes grows, our direct-toconsumer sales are steadily increasing. They’re taking on a life of their own.”
Parting Stone’s process creates 40 to 60 stones from one cremated body
CAN A ROBOT WRITE YOUR MARKETING?
A new artificial intelligence model spits out content like nothing before. Some say that as far as business tools go, it could be the last word.
by LIZ BRODY
Inorder to get something done, maybe we need to think less.”
So began an innocuous post on the otherwise obscure blog Nothing But Words in July 2020 that managed to make headlines from MIT Technology Review to NBC. Why? Because while scores of humans debated its content, it turned out most of the words weren’t actually written by a human at all. They were penned by an arti cial intelligence model called GPT-3, and posted by Liam Porr, a student at UC Berkeley at the time. The way he saw it, GPT-3 is about to change the way we write, and this blog post became high-pro le proof.
Many people agree—and that’s now raising some interesting business questions. When software can write almost as well as a human, how will that alter the way marketing copy is created, how brands communicate, and perhaps even how they interact with customers? Some entrepreneurs, like Dave Rogenmoser, founder of a marketing company called Jarvis, are already exploring that answer. His software, powered by GPT-3, writes just about anything for his clients—from emails to website content to full-length books. “GPT-3 gets you 80% there,” he says.
So what exactly is GPT3? It’s the third iteration of an AI language model called generative pre-trained transformer (or GPT), which was created by OpenAI, an AI research lab whose founders include Elon Musk. GPT-3 was released in June 2020
after being trained on hundreds of billions of words from the internet and volumes of books. (An updated model called InstructGPT has since followed.)
It works by being given prompts. A user could type a few sentences into GPT-3— say, the beginning of a blog post or a sales pitch for a product—and then de ne some parameters, like how long GPT-3 should go for. With that, the software literally writes the rest, using deep learning to produce human-like text. “It’s good at understanding the structure of what should come next after the input you provide,” explains Mira Murati, OpenAI’s senior vice president of research, product, and partnerships. GPT-3 is also good at things like answering trivia questions, summarizing text, performing complex searches, and even, to Murati’s surprise, coding. “We didn’t expect that,” she says, “but you can imagine that in the internet, there was probably JavaScript, and it must have just been enough to give it some capability.”
The model is still in private beta, but over the past year, OpenAI has been carefully pipetting access to businesses and researchers so they can observe “how it’s used in the wild,” as Murati puts it, while building out standards and safety protocols. Among the 300-plus applications using GPT-3 at press time, entrepreneurs have put it to work pumping out marketing content, making sense of data to drive product development, and creating dialogue for gaming char-
acters. And of course, some have started new businesses with it.
Typeform is one early adopter. It’s not having GPT-3 write anything, but it does use the AI in its latest product, VideoAsk, to gure out what people who interact with the tool need. VideoAsk creates customizable “human chatbots,” which have the functionality of a text-based chatbot (ask questions, get answers), but information is delivered via video snippets from a human who lmed him- or herself giving many di erent responses. GPT-3 is used to understand what customers say to the bot and send them to the most relevant next step. “It’s a really good match for what we do,” says founder David Okuniev.
GPT-3 isn’t good at everything, of course, and early users are quickly discovering its strengths and weaknesses.
Quizlet, an ed tech innovator with 250 employees and 60 million student users a month, was excited to explore GPT-3. It already uses a lot of machine learning to personalize study tools like digital ashcards, and it found that GPT-3 excelled at coming up with examples for how to use words in sentences for teaching vocabulary. “We fed it ve or 10 examples, and it’s really good at learning from them to create new interesting ones,” says Ling Cheng, Quizlet’s director of machine learning. But, as is common among all machine learning tools, it wasn’t always great at being sensitive to Quizlet’s young audience. “We did nd some of GPT-3’s sentences to be
Maybe they don’t have the money to hire a marketer, but with this, they can get pretty close. It lowers the startup costs to really go out there.”
a little biased or o ensive, so we used its content lter [which classi es text as safe, sensitive, or unsafe] and were surprised that it was pretty good,” says Cheng. “There’s a lot of research on reducing bias in these models, but it’s something we think about all the time.”
OpenAI has been working on that, as well as on another common problem with machine learning models: Sometimes they spit out gobbledygook. “Like, they might make up stu ,” Murati says. “You provide an input and they can generate something that’s not in touch with reality at all.”
She says OpenAI will continue selecting applicants to use GPT-3; pricing is based on usage. (Meanwhile, they have licensed it to Microsoft for its products and services.) And waiting in the wings? OpenAI has a new AI model named DALL-E that turns text input into images.
Meanwhile, Jarvis’s Rogenmoser says he just has to set expectations: GPT-3’s writing isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough to be a massive time-saver. Rogenmoser launched Jarvis (originally called ConversionAI) to automatically write Facebook ads for his clients, but then he saw them use it for almost
every other form of marketing writing. He advises them to take GPT-3’s copy as a starting point—“and then you’re mixing and matching what you like and piecing it together, adding your own stu , so you still have to know what looks good. But what you don’t have to do is stare at this blank screen anymore and start from scratch.”
Many people, it seems, are happy to not have a blank screen. In Jarvis’s rst six months, it attracted 20,000 clients, mostly marketers and small businesses, and raised $6 million. When competitors started springing up, Rogenmoser acquired two of them.
He is now convinced that this will be life-changing for entrepreneurs, revolutionizing writing the way the no-code movement changed engineering. “We see a ton of small businesses that are using it to build the website they’ve never built, email customers more often, start doing social media posts,” he says. “Maybe they don’t have the money to hire a marketer, but with this, they can get pretty close. It lowers the startup costs to really go out there and compete right out of the gate.”
GPT-3 didn’t write any of this. We promise.
THE DUMBER, THE BETTER
Want to stand out in a crowded market? The founder of ridiculous (and ridiculously successful) canned-water brand Liquid Death has a suggestion: Embrace crazy ideas. by MARGOT BOYER-DRY
ater is the basis of life: It grows plants, it constitutes up to 60% of the adult human body, and we can’t go longer than about three days without drinking it. So Liquid Death is probably the last thing you’d think to name a water brand.
WThat’s exactly why former marketing creative director Mike Cessario founded the canned-water company Liquid Death in 2017. He abides by a habit of asking, “What’s the dumbest idea you can think of right now?” That practice sparked an idea for packaging water di erently than anyone else: in a can with a skull on it, emblazoned with the punk slogan “Murder your thirst.” Cessario’s contrarian branding has earned ustered press, a deep degree of street cred, and a lot of social followers— more than half a million on Instagram and more than a million on TikTok. It has also led the company to become a top-selling water at Whole Foods and Walmart in just a few short years.
Liquid Death may be an extreme example of nonconformity, but in Cessario’s view, any company can take advantage of the “dumbest idea” principle. Here’s how.
T HINK WRONG. Cessario attributes the genesis of dumbidea thinking to John Bielenberg, coauthor of Think Wrong, a book that discusses how the brain is programmed
innovative place.
Even when you land on an idea that feels like it’s worth pursuing, it can be di cult to get others on board in the early days, as Cessario learned when he rst shared the concept of Liquid Death.
“You know this is only going to appeal to like 20 heavy metal guys and nobody else,” he recalls hearing. The press echoed that in amed reaction: An Eater headline called the company “uncomfortably aggressive.”
“Truly innovative ideas have to be almost laughable at rst,” says Cessario. It’s the market, not onlookers, that determines success. In its rst month online, Cessario says, Liquid Death sold $100,000 of water, spending only $2,500 on marketing.
have become smash-hit mar keting campaigns—including online videos and heavy-metalstyle swag. But the company doesn’t start by swinging big. “We try to make what we call small bets,” testing low-cost ideas and monitoring the response, says Cessario. “Sometimes the thing you think will crush doesn’t and another thing rises to the top.”
That includes the time the company released two albums on Spotify with lyrics from hate comments the brand gets—an initiative born from a tiny experiment.
“We were hard-pressed for a social post one day,” says Cessario. “We kept getting these ridiculous hater comments on our ads, so that was top of mind.” He screen-grabbed a particularly
vitriolic comment and pasted with the caption “People love us on the internet.” It slayed. That campaign cost nothing, but it showed that leaning into the brand’s haters actually galvanized its fan base. Bang: a scalable marketing principle. Cessario drew up a brief on that concept, which spawned the album Greatest Hates (and a sequel), with lyrics straight from social, reviews, and anywhere else it may have gotten hate online. With songs like “Fire Your Marketing Guy,” these albums have racked up more than 478,500 listens.
“Anytime you can surprise the shit out of people, and do the thing they never expected you to do, you’re in a way better place in terms of shareability,” says Cessario. “You’re standing out, not getting skipped.”
What does it take to land the biggest clients? A ‘dentist to the stars’ shares how she drilled her way in. (Warning: chutzpah required.)
by LIZ BRODY
ardi B fans everywhere know these lyrics: Got a bag and fixed my teeth, hope you hoes know it ain’t cheap They’re from “Bodak Yellow,” the rap per’s breakout song. But they’re also validation for Cardi’s dentist, Catrise Austin, whose entre preneurial ingenuity led her to fix those teeth.
CYears ago, as a way to differentiate herself, Austin had the potentially absurd idea of becoming a “dentist to the stars.” Then she did it, with a client list that also includes DJ Khaled, Busta Rhymes, Common, Toni Braxton, and A$AP Rocky. But . . . how?
Not every entrepreneur wants to (or should) chase celebrities. But every entrepreneur does need to land desirable customers. That’s why Austin’s story is instructive— because, at the heart of it, she says, her tactics were driven by a relentless understanding of her ideal client.
Austin graduated dental school in 1996, and during her residency started hanging out at New York comedy clubs—“it was $5, right in my budget.” That’s where she realized entertainers would be perfect clients. After all, they need a great smile. And
as a 26-year-old Black female dentist, she suspected she’d stand out.
“I hit the dance clubs, all the hot spots,” she says. One night, she spotted the musician and producer Isaac Hayes eating dinner. “Hi, I’m Dr. Catrise Austin,” she announced at his table. “I don’t know if you need one, but I would love to be your dentist.” Then she handed him a card that said “Dentist to the Stars.” Hayes invited her to join him for dinner. She didn’t even have a practice yet.
She’d faked it, and now she had to make it. Racing around the city, she found a Black dentist on 57th Street who let her set up shop in his extra space until she could pay rent. The timing worked: Hayes became her rst celebrity client.
Austin soon realized that
Want celebrity customers?
dentistry wasn’t just her service; it was also her currency. She found a publicist to do PR in exchange for dental care, which helped her land in magazines and on TV. Then she hit up Persaud Brothers, a marketing and ad agency with clients like Tanqueray gin and Coca-Cola, who shared their contact list in exchange for a year of free cleanings and checkups. “Not only did I get the list, but I got access to all the music festivals and hot ticket celebrity events they sponsored,” she says. Once inside, she’d approach performers at a concert or party with her (now bona de) card, and say, “If you ever need a dentist . . .”
To make clients feel at home, she lled her exam rooms with speakers and TVs, and kept the latest music and movies on hand. She got a portable unit to service clients in the studio or on tour. And she started giving new clients consent forms, allowing her to use their names in marketing. Most sign it, she says.
In 2016, everything clicked. Through the Persaud list, she’d met a manager at an event who sent some of her musicians for dental work. Now that manager was producing the popular VH1 show Love & Hip Hop New York, and a newcomer named Cardi B had been tearing up Season 6. The young star’s crooked teeth were taking a lot of heat; the producer wanted Austin to x them. At the time, Cardi B was No. 1 on Austin’s hit list of dream clients. “I was like, there is a God,” she says. Cardi B’s consultation with Austin was featured on the show. Then the song “Bodak Yellow” blew Cardi out of the water. TMZ called Austin. Her business tripled.
These days, Austin says social media has made client hunting easier. You don’t need to stalk anyone at 3 a.m. at a club, but you still do need to go directly to them. “Use Instagram to DM somebody you want,” she says. “I do that now.” Don’t be afraid, she says: A client will never know you exist if you don’t make yourself known.
Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there, says Dr. Catrise Austin.
WHO SUPPORTS YOU?
Not everyone understands the life of an entrepreneur, and that may include your friends and family. Here’s how to build a network that cares. by
TSTEFANIE RICCHIO
wo years after launching my consulting business, I had doubled growth and built multiple high-exposure brand partnerships. This was a bittersweet moment for me. Professionally, I had achieved many of my goals—but it was to the detriment of my physical, mental, and, at times, emotional well-being. Hardly anyone noticed. No one sent flowers. And that’s OK.
Entrepreneurs often struggle to keep going without the support of family and friends, but I always tell them this: Friends and family don’t pay your bills, and people who don’t share your career ambition or background simply may not understand what you’re doing. I once obsessed over who did (or didn’t) read my book, or who supported me on social media, and then realized I was just spending mental capacity on something that would never yield tangible results for my business. The only thing I really needed to worry about was my business, so I put my head down and started strategizing.
Here’s the most important thing I realized: To succeed, an entrepreneur must learn where their target audience lives—and then move towards them. Your delighted customers will support you, and so will many of the entrepreneurs you meet and collaborate with. So I started formulating very speci c partnerships and collaborations.
I poured every ounce of myself into my consulting engagements. My business grew as a result. Many of my family and friends didn’t notice, but I no longer cared. So, what can you do to get the support you need to grow? Focus on these three areas.
1 Build your reputation
To grow your business, the right people need to trust your ethics and standards. Treat every client, regardless of size, like they are the most important in your portfolio. Treat every business partner with respect. This is how you build retention and longterm engagements.
Consider this: If you mistreat a key partner who then slows down or holds back their services, how will that impact your business and, in turn, your customers? When everyone feels supported by you, they support you in return—and enable you to build a reputation that drives referrals. Client testimonials carry signi cant weight over your best friend or mom and dad. Aim for these.
2 Network in like-minded communities
Go where you are understood and where your conversations add real value. That will look and feel di erent to everyone, but you can start by ltering every social and professional setting through this question: Is there a mutual exchange of value here? Are you feeling and providing support? And are you teaching and learning?
This also helps you recognize what you can get from each setting. Friends and family may be able to provide a morale boost, but you’ll need a di erent crew to help you with business advice. Seek out organizations online and in person that can help you nd answers, get support, connect with the right people, and grow.
3 Support and validate yourself
You don’t need other people for validation; you
can validate yourself. But it requires pausing to re ect. Many entrepreneurs ignore their small victories because they’re too focused on the big ones. That’s a mistake, and it can rob you of well-deserved mental breaks.
The path to success is based on many small milestones. They are worth celebrating. When you do this, you will recognize that you are succeeding and creating your pathway to success—because it is the journey, not the destination, that builds us.
Ultimately, you are the only one who knows what it takes to get where you are. The world’s most successful entrepreneurs don’t sit around worrying about why people aren’t patting them on the back. They’re out there working hard and nding motivation in the right places.
Stefanie Ricchio is the founder of The Modern Accountant.
WORK?
WHAT IS MEANINGFUL WORK? ( AN INVESTIGATION )
Everyone says they want it. But nobody can agree on how to find it, provide it, or even define it. So we set out to try.
by JOE KEOHANE
Emotional Intelligence
Jocelyn Lincoln was not prepared for the weeping.
Lincoln is the chief talent o cer for Kelly Services, a global sta ng rm, and she’s been in the recruitment business for 23 years. Over that time, she’s witnessed an evolution in attitudes—with candidates talking less about money and more about things like mission, purpose, and bringing their whole self to work. But then came 2020, an exceptional year on an exceptional number of levels, and Lincoln was granted a front-row seat to a seismic shift that may have forever altered the relationship between Americans and work.
“I remember I told my manager, ‘I have been on more calls with people crying than ever before in my entire career,’ ” Lincoln says. People were fed up, overwhelmed, di erent. “They became very introspective around what’s important. What matters? What’s sacred to me? What impact do I want to have? What do I want my legacy to be? Am I prioritizing the right things in my life?”
The candidates coming across Lincoln’s desk were interested in not only securing jobs, or good jobs, but Good Jobs. Good Jobs that helped them live better lives. Good Jobs that helped them become more realized versions of themselves. Good Jobs at companies that were helping improve the world, or at least not actively poisoning children or cratering democracies. In other words, people became more interested in meaningful work. They wanted better answers to the question, Why am I doing this? America’s hallowed pastime is dunking on the young for being unreasonably entitled, but younger workers aren’t driving this change alone. Members of all generations have developed what phi-
losophers call “a will to meaning” in their professional lives.
Evidence is everywhere. Millions have quit their jobs in the “Great Resignation.” Nearly 3% of all American workers quit in August 2021 alone. That was a record that lasted until the next month, when even more quit. Millions of jobs languish un lled as of this writing. But even workers who haven’t quit aren’t exactly thrilled. Depending on the poll, anywhere between 39% and 95% of people were thinking of quitting their jobs in 2021. According to a YouGov poll, 1 in 5 American workers considered their jobs meaningless, and a Harvard Business School study found that 9 out of 10 workers were willing to take less
money for more meaningful work.
Employers have struggled to catch up—a 2021 Kelly Services study report found that 27% confess to having no idea what workers want anymore—but they’re not the only ones trying to understand what’s happening. Catherine Bailey, a professor at King’s College London who studies meaningful work, has seen this rsthand. “There’s been an absolute avalanche of interest,” she says. “I get calls all the time from journalists and di erent professional bodies all wanting to talk about meaningful work in the context of the type of work that they do.”
Being a journalist myself, I had sent Bailey a list of questions in the hope of gaining a better understanding of what meaningful work is. The answer, it turns out, is complicated. In 2018, Bailey and four colleagues reviewed 71 studies to try to arrive at a more solid understanding of meaningful work. They found that between these 71 studies there were 28 di erent scales for determining meaning. “There was no consensus over the de nition of meaningful work across all the papers we reviewed,” the authors wrote. I asked her if they had made any progress since.
“We’re still working on it,” she laughed. “We still haven’t answered any of your questions.”
What we do know is this: Meaningful work—or at least work that people perceive as meaningful—is a powerful thing. A growing number of researchers have been studying it since the mid-
1970s, and they have found an array of bene ts. “When folks engage in meaningful work, they’re more productive,” says Michael Steger, a psychology professor at Colorado State University who studies meaning. “They get better supervisor ratings, they are rated as better team members, they’re happy to put in discretionary work hours, and they tend to act as better brand ambassadors for their organizations. They’re the ones who put the paper back in the copier after they’ve taken the last sheet.” They are also more engaged in the work, more likely to be proactive about developing their skills, and less likely to call in sick, burn out, or quit.
Naturally, these ndings have caused many an HR professional to salivate at the prospect of somehow making their employees nd their work more meaningful, and many a previously bottom-line obsessed corporation to start issuing lofty purpose statements to attract meaning-seeking employees. “I’m going to strand myself on a desert island if I hear that Bain is doing ‘meaningful work,’ ” quips Steger. But this isn’t just another untapped resource for companies to mine en route to drive revenue. Meaningful work carries bene ts for workers, too. “From a personal standpoint,” says Steger, when you have meaningful work, “you’re happier. You’re more motivated. You’re there for the right reasons, you’re enriching your home life with your work life. Your life feels more meaningful and less
depressing.” Meaningful work can also lead to lower levels of stress and serve as a powerful source of identity, belonging, and purpose—fundamental things that humans need to thrive.
People with meaningful work ourish. People without it su er. “A lack of meaningful work has long been recognized as a primary source of alienation, anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and boredom in the modern era,” write Jing Hu and Jacob Hirsch, psychologists at the University of Toronto. A perception that our work is meaningless, or even insu ciently meaningful, is a recipe for burnout, which is one of the key drivers behind the Great Resignation.
So it’s settled then! We must have it!But . . . what is it? That’s the problem. Meaningful work is by nature personal, subjective, elusive, and episodic. Like meaning itself, it’s an animal that multiplies like a wet gremlin every time you get your hands on it. In October of last year, I got on the phone with Christopher Michaelson, a former management consultant who teaches business ethics at the University of St. Thomas and New York University. He’s a leading thinker on meaningful work with a focus on the moral implications. I told him I was out to understand meaningful work, but there seemed to be about 8 million de nitions in circulation.
“I’ll go you one better,” he said. “I’ll say that there might be 8 billion de nitions.” One for every person in the world.
So where do we start? We start at the beginning.
What Was Meaningful Work?
To understand what makes work meaningful, we have to talk a little about what made so much of it meaningless to begin with. Or more to the point, what had to happen to human societies to even create the possibility of meaningless work. After all, no bird, snake, or
hippopotamus would ever look up from its daily hunting or foraging and wonder, “Why the hell am I doing this?” It’s pretty clear why they’re doing it.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors may have thought similarly. I reached out to several leading anthropologists, and they pretty much agreed that the meaning of work to the hunter-gatherer societies they’ve studied would have been straightfor-
ward. You worked to keep yourself, your family, and your group alive. This reinforced social bonds with your community and maybe won you some admiration. Work was inextricable from life.
Fast-forward a few hundred thousand years—and I’m skipping a lot, I know, including obscenities like slavery and indentured servitude, which are fodder for something much more expansive than we have
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room for here. By the 16th century, we begin to see the emergence of what came to be known as the Protestant work ethic. The meaning of work then becomes more complicated, tied to worship and morality. The question Why am I doing this? has a new answer: I am doing it because God wants me to.
Then comes the Industrial Revolution. Now instead of, say, crafting a hammer from start to nish and selling it to someone, which an artisan would have done, many workers were made to tend to different small details of the hammer, over and over again for hours, days, years. This drove productivity and pro t to staggering heights for a few, but the work was stripped of the intangible things that humans require to ourish, which had been present in hunting, gathering, farming, and artisan work.
According to the historian Richard Donkin, that’s when we saw the rst reports of “stress.” Not fear, terror, or tiredness, but stress: resultant from performing the same mind-numbing, dehumanizing task under relentless pressure all day long for years. The obsession with extracting as much productivity out of workers, with few opportunities for personal growth, learning, or even socializing was “laying waste to human potential on a massive scale,” writes Donkin. It was a “ghastly sublimation of the human spirit.”
Then what happens? The Protestant work ethic changes, and “meaningful” becomes even more di -
cult to discern. Whereas workers may well have believed they were serving God in some way by working in a factory, later generations swapped God out for the marketplace. That didn’t alter the zealous belief that work is unto itself virtuous, that good people work very hard and bad people don’t. It just proposed that the health of the market mattered above all else. (This continues. I read a story the other day about customers attacking service employees. The story was about terrible human behavior, but the headline focused on its implications for the market: “Unruly customers threaten economic recovery.”)
Basically, the Protestant work ethic turns into what we now know as the meritocracy: the dominant narrative of life in America and the basis of the American Dream, which is itself a great wellspring of meaning for millions. Under the meritocracy, heaven has been replaced by success, ful llment, belonging, and purpose. If you have faith and do enough work—even if it’s pointless, dangerous, or degrading—you will gain your earthly reward. The idea is an impressively powerful piece of social technology. It built the United States in all its sins and graces, and many people who embody it—myself included—are indeed inspired to put in the long hours and endure hard conditions to scale great heights, launch successful businesses, make positive change in the world, and build the lives they want.
Meaningful work is basically a question of quality and quantity: The more sources of meaning you can fit into a job, the more meaningful the job will be.”
But there are a couple of problems. First, the meritocracy narrative can be exploited very easily by employers to get people to work much harder than is fair or reasonable, for fear of being branded feckless or lazy. The writer Mark Slouka calls this the “Church of Work.” To belong to it, you must sacri ce your other sources of meaning—family, friends, hobbies, moments of re ection—to the altar of work. “You must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good,” he writes. “But even so, your soul will not be saved.”
Second, while the meritocracy has rewarded many people, we know now that it is at least partially a false promise. Some workers will never crack the middle class, despite working three jobs. Others may have done well, but still don’t feel secure, knowing that at any moment they could lose their livelihood because some born-rich shareholder got grumpy one day. Both groups have lost faith. The old story they told themselves in order to imbue their jobs with meaning has imploded. “I think workers feel more than ever that
they’re just treated as a way to get other people rich,” says Michael Steger. “That begs the question: Is this all it is?” And the answer all too often has come back “yes.”
A story may seem like a tri e, something untrue, something for kids. But the stories we tell ourselves about why we do what we do give our lives meaning, whether they’re derived from a belief in God, patriotism, ideology, or the benevolence of our employers. When these stories break down, meaning breaks down with them, and the question Why am I doing this? rears its head with an absolute vengeance.
What Is Meaningful Work?
So what is meaningful work? I’ve read dozens of papers and talked to a lot of people to try to gure this out. The upshot is this: It isn’t any one thing. Like meaning in life, there are a variety of potential sources that give work meaning. Sometimes one, or several, or all of them, are closed o to us. That’s when work becomes meaningless. Sometimes only one source of meaning is available, but there’s a lot of it, and that’s
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enough. Meaningful work is basically a question of quality and quantity: The more sources of meaning you can t into a job, the more meaningful the job will be.
On the most basic level, meaningful work must make sense. And it doesn’t make sense if you’re busting your ass doing it without gaining an ability to pay for food, clothing, shelter, and the other bare necessities of life. After we clear that hurdle, the thinking on meaningful work gets more complicated.
In 1975, two organizational psychologists named J. Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham developed what is known as the “Job Characteristics Model.” This was the big bang for meaningful work studies. Hackman and Oldham found that when jobs had certain characteristics, workers were more engaged and more likely to nd their work meaningful. These characteristics were basically the antithesis of what we saw during the Industrial Revolution. They were skill variety (meaning the work was varied and interesting), task signi cance (the work had a clear purpose in the company and/or in the world), task identity (workers could follow a whole
task from start to nish), autonomy (workers had a say in how the work was done), and nally job feedback (meaning the boss let you know how you were doing). If your job has these characteristics, Hackman and Oldham found, you’re likely to nd work meaningful in some way, because it made sense and allowed you to be a human.
Then, in 1985, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues wrote an in uential paper on “job orientations.” The plot thickened. They wanted to understand how individual motivations might a ect people’s experience of meaning at work. They broke workers down into three di erent mindsets. The rst group has a “job orientation.” For these people, work largely serves to produce a paycheck that funds the more meaningful nonwork part of life. The next has a “career orientation,” in which the meaning of work comes from opportunities to advance—in skills, titles, compensation, and status. And the third has a “calling orientation.” People in this group favor work that “has meaning and value in itself,” the authors wrote.
There isn’t such a thing as work-life balance, because it implies that you have work over here, and life over here. But it’s so blended.”
Since the 1990s, research on meaningful work ramped up, splintering in dozens of directions, but luckily not to the point where the whole thing became an impenetrable mess of spaghetti. Some studies focused on social aspects of work, how a big part of meaningful work seems to be belonging to a group, satisfying the basic human need for kinship and cooperation. Some focused on the role of jobs in helping forge our identities, linking the question Why am I doing this? with Who am I? Some looked at a need to feel that our work transcends ourselves, linking us to other people, a cause, or the world at large. Others focused on how “visionary leaders” can infuse workers’ jobs with meaning, by selling workers on shared corporate values or how managers can make a sta feel more like a family.
But in the early years of the millennium, and especially over the last decade or so, something began to shift. Researchers moved away from a sort of à la carte approach to studying meaning, and into something deeper and more holistic. According to Christopher Michaelson at NYU, this was likely the result of two di erent things: 1) More researchers from more disciplines got involved, which took the research in new directions and 2) The subject shifted. “I think a lot of early work in management was primarily concerned with making the experience of powerless laborers less miserable and so more meaningful,” Michaelson says. “However, a lot of interest today in
meaningful work considers the perspective of economically privileged workers who have the potential power to choose meaningful work. The former focus is more on human rights, and the latter focus tends to be on human self-realization.”
This isn’t at all to say lower-paying jobs aren’t meaningful, though.
Research on zookeepers, who are notoriously underpaid, revealed that most considered their jobs extremely meaningful.
Research on janitors in hospitals found that many took great pride in the important work they did, despite the poor wages and frequent mistreatment. In some cases, lower-paid workers experience meaning di erently than white-collar workers.
Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, a professor at the Auckland University of Technology, conducted a study that compared di erent types of workers’ perceptions of the meaningfulness of their jobs. While the white-collar workers found meaning in the ability to express their full potential at work, blue-collar workers found meaning in the bonds they had with their coworkers, forged from the experience of doing dirty, thankless work together and bound in their shared identity as people who could do these hard jobs.
It’s enormously frustrating that the research really only turned to matters of the soul when it trained its sights on the a uent—as if a desire to realize your potential is a luxury available only to people with a 401(k).
Emotional Intelligence
Nevertheless, this is where things start to get interesting, because here is where the research began exposing the so-called “work-life balance” as a false and even harmful dichotomy.
Now, this is by no means a comprehensive summary of all the new research, but here are a few big ideas to help us along.
First, there’s the “map of meaning,” created in 1999 by researcher Marjolein Lips-Wiersma and later re ned by others. Here, the pinnacle of meaningful work involves expressing one’s full potential, developing and becoming oneself, having unity with others, and serving others. The trick is to keep them all in balance, which is dicult. “You gain one, you lose the other,” says LipsWiersma. “We can do really well in our career achievement, but lose our integrity. We can do really well in unity, but lose our own unique voice and creativity. We’re all lovey-dovey, and it’s cool, but nobody does anything interesting.” In this sense, “the search for meaning is always out of equilibrium.” Getting it right is a matter of constant and deliberate calibration.
Another model, from Brent Rosso at the University of Michigan in 2010, proposed four pathways to meaningful work: A worker must feel personally valuable, share principles with those they work with, stay connected to their sense of self, and serve something greater than themselves. In 2012, Michael Steger, the psychology professor at Colorado
State University whom we met earlier, added another model. He visualized meaningful work as a series of three concentric circles. The central circle is just the job itself. If it feels meaningful to the worker and has a clear point within an organization, then it provides a measure of meaning. The next circle represents harmony between a person’s job and their personal life. And the outermost circle is the greater good, an opportunity to help others. When all three circles are reached, Steger argues, you have hit the meaningful work jackpot.
In 2016, Catherine Bailey, whom we met earlier, and Adrian Madden boiled meaningful work down to ve key characteristics based on dozens of interviews with workers. They found that meaningful work is self-transcendent: 1) It matters to others—not just to the worker themselves. 2) It inspires a wide range of emotions—not just happiness. 3) It is episodic, meaning it may not always feel meaningful. 4) It is retrospective, meaning it may not even register as meaningful until well after the fact. 5) And it is not con ned to the workplace, but is entwined with a worker’s own life, values, and experiences.
The research goes on with dozens of studies and models amounting to a much more nuanced idea of what makes work meaningful, and capturing the complexity and confusion of being a human: a creature that is both individualistic and social, and must express itself and belong to
None of us knows what meaning is any better than someone else, and nobody knows how to live a good, meaningful life better than anyone else.” knows
something larger to nd itself. Increasingly, workers want that messy reality— what it means to be a ourishing, living human—built into their jobs, not kept separate from them.
“I haven’t talked about ‘work-life balance’ in at least a decade when I give presentations,” Michael Steger says. “I always talk about ‘work-life harmony’ as the goal. There isn’t such a thing anymore as worklife balance, because it implies that you have work over here, and life over here. But it’s so blended. The case for meaningful work is that while you’re working, you’re living in a positive way. You’re not cannibalizing life. When I’m at work, I can be really, fully myself. I can be growing and learning and feeling good as a human. The ideal state is both are in harmony. As one grows, so grows the other—and not at the cost of the other.”
Of course, the academics who study this have it easy, relatively speaking: They can identify what makes work meaningful, but they are not the managers, executives, and, yes, entrepreneurs out there trying to actually create meaningful jobs. So what can we tell them?
How to Make Work Meaningful.
A lot of employers really struggle with meaningfulness,” Catherine Bailey of King’s College London tells me. “They want to put an initiative in place and they want to measure it and they want to evaluate it, and then they want to tell people the ways in which they should be nding their work meaningful, because then they can manage it and control it. But meaningfulness isn’t really like that. It’s very personal.”
Bailey has discovered a lot about meaningful work in her research. What she has not found is much evidence that such initiatives do anything. “Whereas our interviewees tended to nd meaningfulness for themselves rather than it being mandated by their managers, we discovered that if employers want to destroy that sense of meaningfulness, that was far more easily achieved,” she and Adrian Madden wrote in 2016. Among the enemies of meaning: loading workers with pointless jobs, mistreating them, disconnecting them from their relationships at work, and forcing them to go against
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their own values. If managers can’t unilaterally create meaning, however, they can create an environment in which workers—of whatever class—can nd it themselves. For this, Bailey and Madden devised what they call a “meaningfulness ecosystem.” It includes four elements: 1) An employee needs to understand what a company’s core business is, what its values are, what its objectives are, and how it goes about achieving them. 2) They need to understand what purpose their jobs play in a broader sense, be it the company or the world. 3) They need to understand why each speci c task they do matters, even if it’s tedious or seemingly pointless. 4) And they need to have supportive relationships with people they work with, or meaningful interactions with the bene ciaries of their work, or both. With those things together, workers can nd their own meaning, depending on who they are and what they want.
Of course, to gure out who they are and what they want, managers have to actually talk to them. As
equals. Not about their jobs, because they’ll probably say what they think the boss wants to hear, but about their lives. Those conversations will give managers a sense of their people’s motivation and values, and the things that make life meaningful to them. And managers have to listen, and be humble, and resist the intoxicating belief that they know the best answers to all of those questions. “None of us knows what meaning is any better than someone else, and nobody knows how to live a good, meaningful life better than anybody else,” Lips-Wiersma says. “That whole idea that leaders know more about how to live a meaningful life is nonsense.” And that leads us to our nal point. If you’re a manager, you may not want to hear this, and it may seem unfathomable amid the great global yawp for meaningful work, but here it is: Some people don’t actually need their work to be that meaningful. Blasphemy, I know. But as we draw closer to a fuller understanding of what meaningful work is, we see more and more that it is inextricable from what a meaningful life is.
Meaningful work can lead to lower levels of stress and serve as a source of identity, belonging, and purpose— things humans need to thrive.” of of
Each feeds the other; each compensates for what the other lacks.
“No workplace, or private life, is perfect,” LipsWiersma tells me. “So if you’re nding that you can’t make much of a difference in your workplace, then it is good to withdraw some energy from it, and maybe make a di erence in your community or your family. It’s like if I’m a nurse: I get a lot of service in my workplace, but I don’t get a lot of unity, because there’s quite a bit of gossiping going on. I need to make sure I get that in other parts of my life, because I can’t live without that meaning. It’s essential to me.”
This uidity, this toggling between professional life and personal life, picking up some meaning here to compensate for an absence of it on the other side, cuts to the very core of what meaningful work is. At its best, it is a well-functioning part of a larger system. And it holds that people who derive more meaning from their personal lives may not actually need to derive that much meaning from their jobs. That is the meaning of work for them. That doesn’t mean they won’t bene t from feedback, and autonomy, and fair treatment, and having a say, and performing tasks that engage them with people they like at a company that is not destroying the world. It just means that meaningful work to them is work that doesn’t need to be mean-
ingful. It just needs to play its part in the larger whole of life. And when we talk about meaningful work, that needs to be respected as much as someone who considers their job a higher calling.
While reporting this story, I had co ee with a corporate consultant who told me that the future of management will parallel the last two decades of customer service. No longer will companies be able to impose a one-size- tsall approach, he predicted. Not if they want to compete. Instead, they’ll need to customize the way they interact with their employees, just like they’ve learned to do with their customers. They’ll have to listen, make a sincere e ort to understand what motivates their workers as individuals, and then make a reasonable e ort to accommodate them. They’ll have to recognize the importance of meaningful work, while also grappling with the fact that everyone’s sense of meaning is di erent. This won’t be easy. It will not be something that an HR department can solve with a press release. It will require a complete rethinking of what it means to be a manager, what it means to be a company, and what it means to be an employee. It will require a total reckoning. And when it happens, it will be long overdue.
Joe Keohane is author of the book The Power of Strangers: The Bene ts of Connecting in a Suspicious World.
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Ankur Jain wanted to create a rewards program that helps people buy a home. Nothing like it existed. To become the first, he’d have to first fail over and over again.
by NATE HOPPER
In2017, Ankur Jain had sold a company to Tinder, had become its vice president of product, and was hating the conversations he was having. He was living in San Francisco, where Silicon Valley types would talk about solving big problems and bettering the world—“and then the kind of stu I would keep hearing about was, like, ‘We’re building crypto stickers,’ ” Jain says. This in a state where the median household price had hit twice the national mark, and in a city that over the past ve years had seen median home prices nearly double. And it wasn’t as if the housing stock had astronomically improved. “The more these things became expensive, the less you got as a consumer,” he remembers realizing. “In what world of private sector markets does that make sense? And that, to me, spells opportunities to change a whole model.”
Even some highly educated, relatively well-paid San Franciscans—buoyed by lucrative jobs yet awash in student loans—could not a ord to buy a house there, and homeownership nationwide had been largely dropping for more than a decade. “Then the worst part is, everyone tells you that the only way to ever build wealth in your life is homeownership,” Jain says. This was made even more annoying by the fact that what people did spend to put a roof over their heads—often, especially for young people, paying rent— helped their homeownership hopes very little, even
as nearly half of American renter households paid more than 30% of their income on the expense. As far as Jain could tell, reliably paying rent only sapped one’s savings. Since few renters could pay rent via credit card, their reliability rarely, if ever, translated into an improved credit score despite rent being so many people’s largest monthly expense. It didn’t even earn you cash back or points like buying gas or groceries or airplane tickets did. Rent was an exceptionally big drag—which was, in its way, exciting.
Jain had been developing a theory of pro table betterment: Take young people’s biggest problems—ones surrounding massive sums of expenditure, like student loans and healthcare costs as they and their parents age—and see if entrepreneurs could reshape them to actually improve one’s life trajectory. “It’s like the age-old adage of ‘Follow the money,’ ” says Jain. “Where are people having to spend money? If you give consumers a better experience, you can disrupt legacy markets.”
That was the guiding principle behind the venture studio, called Kairos, he began as he departed San Francisco and moved to New York. (The incubator shared the name with the wildly popular networking society for aspirant entrepreneurs Jain had founded while a student at Wharton. This had made him a darling to some of the world’s most powerful business elites as they sought out connections to bright, young talent.) And that experience-cen-
tric principle drove two of Kairos’ rst companies: Rhino, which created a system that allowed renters to avoid paying an enormous up-front security deposit on an apartment and instead contribute a small monthly fee as insurance; and Cera, which aims to make home care for the elderly more a ordable and is currently operating across the U.K. “People thought it was, like, a nice-to-tell story,” Jain says of Cera. But he says that, today, both it and Rhino are $500 million businesses. “It’s actually both helping people and making a lot of money because you’re solving a real problem.”
Yet rent—useless, savingssapping rent—remained Jain’s most loathed nemesis. He had his question, which was ambitious yet simple, as he liked one to be: What if there were a way to help turn renting into a pathway to homeownership? He just couldn’t picture what the answer would look like.
JAIN LIKENS building a startup to putting together a puzzle. There’s a mess of pieces—hundreds of them. But at any given moment, a founder and their team have to focus on where to put whichever they believe at the time is the most important piece. Only once that’s set should they move on and look at what seems to be next. “If you try to piece it all together from the beginning, you’ll be lost with where to even begin,” says Jain. “There are so many issues that will happen, you’ll never build the foundation.” And while an entrepreneur may have an initial idea,
a startup actually doesn’t know in the beginning what it will build. “Imagine a puzzle where you don’t have the image,” he explains, “but you have to imagine what that image is.”
Jain started asking around to see what was already happening in the homeownership space. He leaned on his formidable, possibly unparalleledfor-his-age network (he’s now 32), asking for connections and conversations. Most of what he saw were techy takes on rent-to-own systems— which seemed innovative and cool, until they seemed useless and even sinister. He felt that the programs preyed on lower-income people by using nearly incomprehensible math to increase the prices over time. “You would never use these programs unless you absolutely had to, and that is the rst sign something is predatory,” he says. That clashed with Jain’s ideals. “Technology companies, at their best, improve the quality of what’s bestin-class and democratize access,” he says. “Meaning, if you are someone with high income, you would want this product because it’s better and more a ordable. And if you are low-income, you also want it because it’s better and more a ordable.”
So he kept having talks and leaning on his network, and eventually he developed what seemed like a vision worth pursuing: a rewards program. He spoke with Barry Sternlicht, founder, chairman, and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, who told Jain about Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), the beloved hotel rewards program that Marriott
How I’ve approached this program is: How can I put together a program that is relevant from your very, very first rent payment all the way to homeownership?”
International acquired when it purchased Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide in 2016. Jain learned about how hotel groups and airlines thrived o not individual bookings but their loyalty programs.
Consumers know the basics of a loyalty program. It creates a form of currency, often called “points” (though airlines typically call theirs “miles”), which have a particular value. Sometimes that value is assigned essentially internally; a Starbucks Rewards card awards points that can be redeemed for Starbucks products. But the value of points can also be agreed upon by a pair of partners—including two distinct rewards programs. A hotel program could create partnerships with airlines in which the hotel members exchange hotel points for a certain amount of those airlines’ miles. The customer doesn’t see that once that exchange occurs, those points are actually sold from one company (the hotel) to the other (the airline).
Such systems have been invaluable to airlines during the pandemic, when United, Spirit, Delta, and American Airlines all collateralized their loyalty programs to raise billions while ights were
grounded. American Airlines’ o ering last March reportedly set an aviation industry record by raising $10 billion.
Jain saw a direct application to renters who wanted to one day own a home, by way of the people to whom they paid their rent. To landlords, renters have costly commitment issues. According to the institutional multifamily real estate scion Mitchell Moinian (who is a principal at The Moinian Group and an investor in Rhino, and became an early partner in helping Jain shape the real estate side of this nascent business), about a third of leases in higher-tier buildings aren’t renewed, and that gure expands to about 50% of leases nationwide. The costs of that turnover—the vacancies not earning anything, the marketing to nd new renters—are substantial. “If you can get an extra handful of people to stay one more year, two more years—massive di erence,” says Jain. And a rewards program is a proven, popular way to inspire commitment. Jain imagined creating a program that would sell its points to landlords, who could then o er those points to renters as incentives to sign or renew leases or for making a rent payment; at the same time,
Jain gured, the rewards program could make it so its points could be cashed in for a down payment on a mortgage—which he thought he could also make money from by eventually getting a mortgage originator license. Landlords would see less turnover; renters would nally get something back for paying rent. All he thought he had to do was get real estate owners to sign up for this program and build from there. “It seemed like a no-brainer,” he says.
He called in the lawyers and asked how he had to set this up. “Then our lawyers come back and say, ‘Hey, love the idea. It might not be legal,’ ” says Jain. “And I was like, ‘Sorry—what?’ ” Apparently, legally, Jain needed explicit approval from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Fannie Mae in order to allow people to put points toward a quali ed mortgage, just as they can legally use personal savings or gifts from their parents. (“Why, by the way, gifts from your parents?” Jain says. “I mean, like, so rich kids can get bene ts, but nobody else?”) What had seemed simple now seemed impossible; the regulatory issues felt like a lethal blow. “Suddenly, my picture I’d imagined no longer worked,” he says.
Jain set his sights elsewhere—including on seeking regulatory reforms around the country for Rhino so local governments mandated that all renters in the area have access to its security deposit alternative. Through that process, Jain found, to his Silicon Valley–jaded surprise, that
politicians actually wanted to be of service. “We were not just saying, ‘Move fast, break things, and screw you, government’ but actually asking for help,” says Jain. And Rhino received it. It was around this time that Jain reconnected with Tim Mayopoulos, who had recently ended a six-year tenure as president and CEO of Fannie Mae and who agreed with Jain’s earlier thinking: Why should loyalty points earned from paying rent be any di erent from personal savings? Earnings should be earnings, regardless of the currency.
That renewed Jain’s condence in what had gained the internal code name of Project Casa, and he traveled to a meeting with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Washington, D.C. to nd a roomful of high-powered o cials, including the head of the FHA and the then HUD secretary, Ben Carson. It seemed that the government not only wanted to help but needed help.
Young people were missing out on building wealth through homeownership— risking both a further rise in inequality and an economy in which boomers may soon struggle to liquidate their investments as they retire. “I get to this meeting, and I start to realize how big of an issue this is,” Jain recalls.
So began a nine-monthlong gauntlet of working with federal policy and risk teams, asking and answering endless questions, and making adjustment after adjustment to ensure the program would be safe for consumers. The key was to
We were building a distribution channel to reach millennials and Gen Z that nobody else had access to, around their largest expense.”
balance conviction in the larger vision while maintaining the humility of knowing it was only a vision—maybe even an ill-informed one— and that reality would fracture it over and over again in instructional ways. “You feel excited and con dent that other people share that [vision], but you’re also scared shitless because in the back of your head, you know that you’re trying to gure out the puzzle piece in real time,” he says.
Finally, Jain sent a letter requesting formal regulatory approval. Convinced that his team had done everything it could to get a yes, he ew to Chicago to meet with the Pritzker Realty Group and, at long last, pitch the no-brainer— that it should o er a loyalty program to its renters. But as he sat alone in his hotel room the day before, an email arrived from the FHA with a scanned PDF of its decision: Jain’s request was denied. He would have to cancel the Pritzker meeting. He recalls texting the team, “Guys, I think Project Casa just died again.”
Jain called everyone he had been in touch with—people who had helped guide him through the process but had no say over the rul-
ing. He pleaded for another meeting with the government so he could explain the project’s intentions; he was certain something must have been miscommunicated. Soon he had his meeting, in which he made an impassioned case. And soon after that, he got o cial approval from the FHA. The months of work had actually paid o . “And the irony is,” says Jain now, “if you look back today, that’s such a tiny piece.”
AT LONG LAST, around September 2019, it was time to talk with the real estate companies. Beyond what Jain believed to be the program’s obvious appeal, he had built a rapport and some credibility with several real estate owners through his work with Rhino. Friends in the industry had encouraged him when he’d softpitched them the concept. That made it all the more surprising when, Jain says, the rst people he o cially met with told him that it was just about the stupidest idea they’d heard.
Re ecting on his mistakes from those early pitches, Jain sees where he erred. For one, he forgot his audience. His early pitches played up the value the rewards program would provide rent-
ers but took the bene t to landlords (decreased turnover) a little bit for granted. He was gobsmacked by their skepticism; worst of all, some wondered aloud whether they wanted to encourage homeownership at all. (Their thinking went: More homeowners equals fewer renters.) But over about three months, he re ned his presentation and worked through landlords’ abundance of concerns. They began to see the promise, even though the mechanics needed re ning. But still they wouldn’t sign up. “Nobody wants to be rst, except for a very rare group,” says Jain. So he leaned on owners who were involved in Kairos—people like Barry Sternlicht—to get on board, and once they were, he let FOMO slowly convince others.
Jain also knew that for any of this to work, he would need renters to really buy in on a program where rent earns points that can be spent on mortgages. But while homeownership may have been a deeply held goal, it was also the sort of thing young people typically put o . The team heard from potential customers that the program seemed interesting, and that they may sign up—when they were older. This got Jain wondering, Why do we need to tell you what to do? Yes, the program could enable someone to earn unprecedented points on an enormous expenditure; that would not be nothing. But why design a program in which you must use those points on homeownership— instead of one where you
can do so? He wanted to o er not a command but an option.
Jain needed to nd other things for which people could redeem the program’s points, but the greater rewards ecosystem was yet another unknown he would have to explore. He reached out to Dave Canty, a rewards program veteran who had helped design the SPG program, build AutoZone Rewards, design and helm the loyalty side of JetBlue’s TrueBlue, and lead InterContinental Hotels Group’s loyalty programs globally, each of which has millions of members and brings in billions in revenue. “I think within two minutes of listening to what the vision was, I was fully on board,” says Canty, who joined as the project’s director of loyalty.
Canty knew that the major rewards programs heavily relied on people older than 50. Given the comparatively youthful demographics of renters, that presented an opportunity to build something for a new generation and guide it into the more established stages of adulthood.
“How I’ve approached this program is: How can I put together a program that is relevant from your very, very rst rent payment all the way to homeownership?” says Canty. Whereas some companies may see a loyalty program as a cost of doing business and build out their portfolio of o erings by seeing what their peers had already done, Canty wanted to be more selective and build from what these prospective customers would
want to redeem the most. “Redemption breeds loyalty,” Canty says. He would ask himself, What would I want? Or he would ask his Gen-Z daughter what she would want.
One obvious space was travel, and so Canty leaned on his past contacts to start pitching. Jain also brought in Brian Kelly, founder of the website The Points Guy, as a senior loyalty adviser. Kelly saw two particularly attractive targets: American Airlines and Hyatt Hotels, which have some of the most valuable points of any independent airline or hotel, according to The Points Guy’s analysts; he brokered introductions and meetings. Jain, Canty, Kelly, and Tina Moore, who was hired to be a senior director of loyalty and partnerships, divided and conquered. It was the sort of sell that required the partners to look toward the future. But by wanting to help younger people in particular, Jain says, “we were building a distribution channel to reach millennials and Gen Z that nobody else had access to, around their largest expense, with a program they were going to earn a lot of points on.” Ultimately, it was a convincing proposition. Some of the largest hotel and airline programs partnered up with the rewards program, including American Airlines and Hyatt. The array of choices for how to use the points—on rent, on a down payment, on travel, on tness classes— expanded and started to feel like a central hub for not just renting but living.
They stopped calling the program Project Casa and gave it a proper name: Bilt.
At the same time, the Bilt team wanted to go even bigger—to create not just a rewards program but also a credit card through which those points could be earned even faster. That would add a revenue stream: Bilt would make money whenever someone used the card on any purchase, via the merchant fees that stores pay to credit card companies for processing a purchase. It would also accelerate, beyond the baseline rewards program, how quickly customers would accrue points. That would both make money and, if launched simultaneously with the rewards program, be an immediate aid in creating the “brand stickiness” Bilt sought to create in a space that had few to no brands—unlike just about every other market on Earth, be it sports, beverages, or sports beverages.
To make a Bilt-branded credit card, among the multitude of organizations it would need to work with, Bilt particularly needed a bank and a credit card issuer. Jain got a meeting with U.S. Bank, in part by way of a connection made by Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL and a board member of the Kairos venture studio. Jain and his team went in and once again passionately pitched until they learned exactly how wrong they were about something, at which point they would go back to the proverbial (or sometimes literal) whiteboard, rework what they had, then repeat.
“It was, like, months of the U.S. Bank team being very nice to us, entertaining the conversation, while clearly recognizing we didn’t have our nancial models straight,” says Jain. Over time, things started to align.
A similar process happened with Mastercard. Via a mutual business partner, Jain was introduced to Sherri Haymond, executive vice president of digital partnerships at Mastercard, whom Jain describes as Bilt’s “fairy godmother.” They met not long before the pandemic began and developed a partnership almost completely over phone calls and FaceTime. Slowly, the two companies worked out a payment ow—one that would enable people to pay their rent with the card for no fee. That would also be a boon to helping people better their credit score; counting rent could dramatically improve one’s score, which could enable them to receive a better rate on a mortgage, potentially saving up to tens of thousands of dollars in interest (in addition to potentially redeeming points for the down payment).
Conveniently enough, Mastercard had acquired SessionM, a loyalty platform used by partners like Starbucks, and would soon acquire Finicity, which had a wealth of experience in data aggregation for mortgages. There were seemingly endless additional details to gure out. The landlords needed Bilt to sync up with their various aging
payment processing and accounting software systems. The company came up with a way of ensuring that people weren’t going into debt due to their rent payments. It had to physically build a card—including a custom baby-blue magnet stripe—amid a global chip shortage. It needed an app that actually explained how to use the points. It created a program where specially selected young artists could sell exclusive art for points within that app, as well as an exclusive home decor collection. It kept pitching and expanding the number of real estate owners and rewards partners involved, who often had their own corporate or legal requirements and data-privacy restrictions and you-name-it.
Along the way, Jain was reminded of a lesson taught to him when he was a child by his father, Naveen, who founded the company InfoSpace during the nineties dot-com bubble and reportedly became a multibillionaire. (He is now CEO of the health-tech company Viome, which he founded.)
Ankur recalls, “I was learning and just going to the o ce, and he was like, ‘In every partnership, every stakeholder has maybe two or three things they really care about, and the rest are fungible. Sometimes they’ll tell you what those are; sometimes they won’t. Ninety- ve percent of the time, two out of the three [things they care about] are at direct odds, so you just focus on the one, and the rest ows.’ ”
In Bilt’s case, it wasn’t just
Jain likens building a startup to a puzzle: ‘Imagine a puzzle where you don’t have the image,’ he says, ‘but you have to imagine what the image is.’”
each individual partner’s possible internal contradictions. It was a vast collection of competing needs. But it turned out, if you responded with a very clear yet ever-adaptable hypothesis and kept trying to rotate each piece of the puzzle in just the right way (and, sure, maybe tossed or tweaked a piece if absolutely needed), a simple yet complex possibility could appear: Everyone could stand to make money by rewarding reliable renters for doing what they already did.
MOST PEOPLE look back at how smart they thought they were a few years ago and laugh. It’s a kind of re ection that one undergoes only occasionally. But as Jain puts it, he’s spent the past three years looking back just about every week and realizing how naive he’d been a few days prior. Then, energized by those epiphanies or some new information or an exciting idea, he and his team would sprint o , only to collide with another brick wall. They’d rub their heads, plan what seemed like a wiser path, then—thwack.
But over time, the Bilt team could smoothly run a renter, a regulator, a bank,
a reward program partner, and a credit card company through the value proposition. The brick walls eroded into predictable bumps—or at least ones the team was now informed enough to know it could manage without losing too much momentum. “That’s the time when we felt, I think we’re ready to launch,” Jain says.
On June 22, Bilt Rewards and Bilt Mastercard debuted with points that could be redeemed through more than a hundred airlines and hotels, in addition to tness class partners and other redemption options, including, yes, a down payment on a mortgage. It boasted a relationship with a collection of real estate owners whose properties added up to two million rental units that would roll out the program through the summer and into the fall.
It was a success—and just the start. Jain maintained his conviction, and his uncertainty. A couple of weeks before the debut, exhausted but exhilarated, he predicted, “At launch, our hypotheses will be wrong in ve other ways. But we’ll adapt then.”
Nate Hopper is a reporter and an editor.
BETTER THAN
YOU MIGHT BE A BETTER FIT THAN YOU THINK
Does a cat-focused franchise only want cat lovers? No! Sometimes, people have the wrong idea about what makes a great franchisee—as these three brands can attest to.
by BRITTA LOKTING
When a franchise brand tries attracting new franchisees, they often run into the same problem: Potential franchisees think they’re not the right fit when in fact, they might be perfect.
Why? Because oftentimes, people assume they need a certain kind of background to run a niche franchise brand. They think they need an education background to run a school, for example, or they need a blue-collar background to run a cleaning business. This often isn’t the case, though: Brands want franchisees who understand the business opportunity first, and who are willing and able to learn everything else.
So how can a brand get that message across? “You have to make sure your brand is attractive and constantly letting them know why you should be a part of this,” says Celebree School founder and CEO Richard Huffman. “If you can’t answer that question, then why would they?”
To appreciate the challenge, we asked three specialty brands to explain the biggest myth people have about their franchise, the reality of who they’re actually looking for, and how they’ve worked to recruit the right people.
Myth No. 1
PUROCLEAN WANTS FRANCHISEES WHO LOVE STANDING IN DIRTY WATER
PuroClean cleans up buildings’ biggest messes, including water damage, smoke and re damage, mold, and biohazard removal. Because the labor is hands-on, potential franchisees often presume that they’ll be the ones performing messy tasks themselves. This in turn leads some of them to believe that PuroClean wants owners who have a signi cant background in blue-collar work.
Reality
PUROCLEAN WANTS FORMER HIGH-LEVEL CORPORATE EXECUTIVES
The company likes franchisees with corporate backgrounds, usually (though not exclusively) in sales or nance. In fact, 67% of both potential candidates and those who purchased a PuroClean franchise recently have a business professional background. Those folks don’t generally get their hands dirty on jobs. They hire and train teams to operate PuroClean’s equipment, which does a lot of dirty work itself.
To overcome the myth, PuroClean began to promote success stories from its white-collar franchisees. “As we started to have white-collar people have substantial success,” says Bud Summers, the company’s executive vice president of operations and training, “we had them provide testimonials and examples of how they started the business.” PuroClean highlighted ways that these owners built their units to be self-managed, and made a conscious e ort to educate both existing and future owners about work that went beyond typical blue-collar tasks.
PuroClean’s marketing materials also stress things like clear career paths, the reward of exible working schedules, and the power of working together as a team. That’s for a very particular reason: PuroClean is working to attract millennial franchisees. “Culture, mission statements, training programs, those are things that have value to millennials,” says Summers. And, he says, these are things that aren’t talked about as much in blue-collar elds.
But, of course, PuroClean is still happy to talk money with potential franchisees, and that includes all the different ways that its equipment can be used to generate ancillary revenue, such as pandemic-related decontaminations. This often helps people with white-collar backgrounds appreciate PuroClean’s scalability. “Once they learn that it’s mostly the equipment that’s doing the work for them,” says Timothy Courtney, vice president of franchise development, “they really begin to understand what the business is.”
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Myth No. 2
HAPPY CAT WANTS THE ‘CRAZY CAT LADIES’
The Happy Cat Hotel & Spa is just what it sounds like—a place where cat owners can drop their kitty o for an extended stay or a little pampering. The company often hears from self-proclaimed cat enthusiasts who assume that a love for cats is the primary requisite for being a franchisee. Conversely, when the company comes across people who don’t love cats (or at least, don’t loooove them), they usually assume the brand isn’t for them. Wrong and wrong!
Reality IT’S CUSTOMER FIRST, CATS SECOND
Happy Cat’s franchising team prefers people who like cats but aren’t overly attached. The issue, says CEO and founder Chris Raimo, is that a love for cats might cloud a person’s business judgment. “Some of these extreme cat enthusiasts are great people,” says Raimo, “but they don’t see eye to eye with how somebody else might take care of their cat.” For instance, if a cat enthusiast prefers one brand of cat food and the customer prefers another, con ict might arise.
The brand makes this clear in its marketing materials. Rather than focus on a franchisee’s love of cats, for example, it mentions all the celebrities who like cats (to emphasize their cultural relevance). It even notes that franchisees can be allergic to cats—just like its CEO is! Raimo tells people that he still manages to go into work despite his allergy and that he didn’t even set out to start a cat brand. “We came from a dog business, and it evolved into a more generalized pet business,” he says. He compares normalizing cat ownership to how nerd culture evolved—and now, he says, people who were thought of as nerds “run half the entertainment industry.”
So what does the company value, aside from a mild attachment to cats? Raimo says that Happy Cat is particularly appealing to corporate expatriates, and that the greatest skill required is open-mindedness. The company does a lot of franchisee education, which includes a 123-page feline behavior manual. One protocol involves using a secure towel wrap during grooming instead of leashes or tethers. “People who are coming in most likely have not been exposed to these ideas and techniques and philosophies, so the most important thing is that they’re open to learning more about it,” says Raimo. “That puts them in a category where they don’t have to be a cat enthusiast necessarily.”
Myth No. 3 CELEBREE WANTS PEOPLE WITH EDUCATIONAL DEGREES
Celebree School is a brand of childcare centers with many services, ranging from infant care to summer camps. But potential franchisees sometimes assume they’ll unk the rst test if they don’t have a background in education. They also imagine that the work involves being in a classroom with students, and maybe even teaching?
Reality YOU CAN LEAVE THE TEACHING TO THE TEACHERS!
When people tell Celebree founder and CEO Richard Hu man that they don’t have an educational degree, he says, “Neither do I. Welcome to the club.” Then he pivots the conversation to a discussion about the bene ts of owning a Celebree School, which includes an average revenue of $1.4 million and a $372,000 return. At Celebree School, teachers are the ones designing lesson plans and helping children meet developmental milestones— which means that as long as a franchisee can build and coach a team, Hu man says, they can succeed without a formal background in education. “They’re like, ‘OK now you have my attention.’ They don’t correlate that pre-K and early education can be that rewarding nancially,” says Hu man.
Celebree School tries to correct these misconceptions on its website, and with videos and other marketing materials. The company also saw the pandemic as an opportunity to tap into a broader market of franchisees who are looking for community, as well as more meaning in their work. “We have franchisees that worked for 20 years at Enterprise Rent-a-Car, those that are getting o of Wall Street, getting out of insurance companies,” says Hu man. “COVID has allowed people to sit back and say, ‘What do I want the second chapter of my life to look like?’ They’re interested in giving back, creating an impact, and building a legacy for their family.”
But that’s not to say franchisees can’t become teachers of a di erent sort. Hu man always stresses that education is a two-way street at Celebree School: He wants franchisees to learn the brand’s systems while bringing their own wealth of experience to the business. That way, everyone learns something new.
IS REALLY
WHERE THE BOOM IS REALLY BOOMING…
Why is business so great for home improvement, chicken, health-and-wellness, and pet brands? The answer tells you a lot about where franchising is going next.
by KIM KAVIN
t’s been a wild time for franchising. Some categories reinvented themselves in the earlier days of the pandemic, like tutoring, when it moved from in-home to virtual. Others experienced a massive boom once vaccines rolled out and people began resuming a version of normal life. So what comes next? How can we predict which ones will do well going forward?
Here’s a theory: Major clues to franchising’s future can be found inside the home improvement, chicken, health-and-wellness, and pet categories.
Why those? Let’s back up. Every December, Entrepreneur publishes a list of 10 thriving areas in franchising where, based on an analysis of industry trends and year-over-year growth, we expect to see continued success. These categories have all gone strong for two years or more, and seem well positioned to continue thriving. By understanding why these sectors are doing so well, we wondered: Can we get a better sense of where the industry is going? That’s what we set out to explore—and in doing so, a pattern emerged. All these categories are responding to the shifting lifestyles of consumers.
On the following pages, you’ll find an examination of each, an interview with a franchisee who recently joined it, and, we hope, insights that can help you prepare for your own success ahead.
WHY HOME IMPROVEMENT IS BOOMING…
When people spend far more time at home than usual, they start thinking about all the things they’d like to change about their homes. That’s why, since the start of the pandemic, Americans have been doing everything from putting up window treatments to installing new kitchens to ordering pools. And because travel restrictions prevented many people from spending money on annual vacations, there was more cash than usual to put into home projects.
“You name it, people were doing it,” says Matt Haller, president and CEO of the International Franchise Association.
“That’s not an area people think of as franchising, but a lot of that type of work is out there, and these concepts have done tremendously well. Especially
the outdoor ones with no COVID issues, like housepainting.”
Jonathan Thiessen, chief development o cer at Home Franchise Concepts, says that throughout the pandemic, home improvement franchises without a brick-and-mortar presence have done particularly well. One of his company’s brands is Budget Blinds, which doesn’t require any retail space—and saw 42% of business from repeat customers and referrals during the pandemic.
“You don’t have customers physically coming to you, so there’s no concerns about contact and masks,” he says. “When people are looking for franchise businesses, they realize they can operate this relatively small. They don’t need a lot of employees; they don’t need a lot of space.”
Those attributes are especially attractive to franchisees now, he says, with so much uncertainty about restrictions going forward. “If someone is looking to start a business,
they may be hesitant to sign a big lease for something like a gym because they’re unsure of what that environment is going to look like,” he says.
Lynlea Rudell, director of marketing at Pool Scouts, says the same thinking brought a lot of interest in her brand from new franchisees, who can buy into a territory for $25,000. A little more than a year ago, Pool Scouts had about 33 territories in six states. Now there are 45 franchises (and two company-owned locations) in 12 states. (That number, like all unit counts in this story, is as of July 31—the cuto for data submitted for our annual Franchise 500 issue.)
“People learned that they really liked working from home, so they’re getting out of the corporate world and trying this,” she says. “We’re a homebased franchise, which keeps startup costs down. And they see that the pool industry seems to be on re right now. It’s a low-cost business they can get into.”
FROM A FRANCHISEE’S PERSPECTIVE
Michelle Stern and her husband became rst-time franchisees in their early 50s, after careers in corporate marketing. In September, they celebrated the rst anniversary of owning their Pool Scouts franchise in North Dallas.
Why did you choose a Pool Scouts franchise?
We were interested in recurring services, where it’s like the lawn guy. We worked with a franchise coach, and we looked at 13 or 14 di erent models before we found Pool Scouts.
What was it about the recurring-services business model that appealed to you?
We are more account management and relationship development people than we are salespeople. We wanted something where we could onboard clients and have long-term relationships with them.
How has your first year been? It’s been crazy but great. People have shifted their priorities to be at home with their families, and that’s going to stick. We just love that we can help them do that.
Growth Areas
WHY CHICKEN IS BOOMING…
If you look at how burger franchises developed, there were two big waves. First was the McDonald’s and Burger King wave, with a business model that helped parents get burgers with their kids at an a ordable price. Then came the gourmet burger wave, with brands such as Five Guys and Burger 21 adding toppings like garlic aioli and cilantro cream.
Experts say that same business pattern is now repeating with chicken. Whereas brands such as KFC, Popeyes, and Church’s Chicken are longestablished and beloved, a new wave of franchises like Pollo Campero, El Pollo Loco, and the Shaquille O’Neal–backed Big Chicken are o ering sandwiches with smashed avocado and low-calorie, re-grilled chicken breast dinners.
“We call it the better chicken category,” says
Sam Rothschild, chief operating o cer at Slim Chickens, a 19-year-old company that has 120 restaurants in the U.S., U.K., and Kuwait, with more than 800 restaurants under signed commitments. “We o er a di erent lineup of products that are of better quality than those of the people who have been around a long time.”
Christina Coy, vice president of marketing at the Korean fried chicken franchise Bonchon, says consumers looking for new tastes are also driving growth. “People’s taste buds are changing,” she says. “They’re more willing to try new avors. That’s why more consumers are getting excited about fried chicken. It’s Korean fried chicken or Nashville hot fried chicken. There’s just so many di erent ways now to have fried chicken.”
Bonchon has been in the U.S. since 2006. It now has more than 370 locations worldwide,
with 110-plus in America. Same-store sales were up 17.5% in 2021 versus 2019. That kind of success is luring even more competitors, Coy says. “We’re de nitely starting to see more companies, and especially ones coming over from Korea and other Asian companies that do fried chicken,” she says. “They’re mainly hitting the East and West coasts.”
Those new franchises are going to keep coming, according to Mark Siebert, CEO of iFranchise Group, a franchise development and consulting rm. There’s widespread consumer demand for the product right now, along with advantages in leasing space.
“When you have a restaurant in a prime location that did not survive COVID, suddenly the landlords have to make good deals for restaurateurs in prime locations,” he says. “Not only are franchisees looking at these, but the multifranchise operators are jumping on them.”
FROM A FRANCHISEE’S PERSPECTIVE
Henry Lee was done with corporate life. After working for Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers, he opened his rst Bonchon in 2018 in Denver. His second opened in Aurora in 2020, and he is now opening two more in Colorado.
Why did you leave consulting to open a franchise? I did it for, like, 15 years, and it just wears you down. But owning these franchises? I’ve never been happier.
What drew you to Bonchon? There’s American fried chicken, and then there’s Korean fried chicken. In my opinion, Korean fried chicken is going to take over the scene. The texture is a light kind of crispy, and the flavors are very unique.
What’s the best part of your day?
Interactions with customers. They’ve never had anything like this in their life. They usually come back the next week. Sometimes it’s the next day. It’s an extremely addictive product. And I know the feeling. I have a few wings with the soy-garlic sauce to get my fix on.
Reimagine Your Career
If you are reevaluating your career choice or wanting to find more purpose in your work, a rewarding opportunity is closer than you think!
Reimagine your Career as a Senior Helpers Franchise Owner
• Shape your future in an industry set for unparalleled growth that ranks as one of the most lucrative in franchising
• Enjoy the independence of being a business owner, backed by the support & proven model of an award winning brand
• Build meaningful relationships
• Make a positive impact in your community
BE A PART OF OUR TEAM WHILE BUILDING YOUR OWN BUSINESS IN THE PROFITABLE SENIOR CARE INDUSTRY
WHY HEALTH AND WELLNESS IS BOOMING…
There are about 70 million baby boomers, and they’ll all be at least 65 by 2030. They have supported health-and-wellness franchises for years.
But the pandemic’s stressors added new demand from all age groups. That rush, in turn, led franchisees to take another look at the sector, says Sean Hart, vice president of franchise sales and development for American Family Care. “Everybody assumed you had to be a physician,” Hart says. “The truth is that not only do you not have to be a physician, but there are bene ts to not being a physician. A well-run restaurant, a well-run hotel, a well-run gas station—they all have something in common: customer service. It’s the same for us.”
Between 2019 and the end of 2021, he says, American Family Care grew from three million to six and a half million patients annually. There are 171 franchises nationwide as of July, with at least another 50 coming this year. “With this shift in focus, people are learning things they wouldn’t have learned otherwise,” Hart says. “And that’s in terms of patients and franchisees.”
Eric Simon, vice president of franchise sales and development for The Joint Chiropractic, also says the pandemic led people to seek new services (like xing sore backs from working at dining-room tables). That demand helped The Joint open about as many franchises in 2020 as in 2019. “Demand is increasing,” he says. “There is no sign of it slowing down. Consumers want this.”
David Essuman sold his food franchise in 2019 and opened a Joint Chiropractic franchise in Idaho in 2021—
with another two territories already purchased for openings in 2022. “It goes in conjunction with your diet; this is ancillary to that,” he says. “I think the more people are becoming educated about their health, the more they’re going to the chiropractic clinics.”
David Fossas, chief marketing o cer for Restore Hyper Wellness—which is growing quickly and had 87 franchises open by July— says the trend of people wanting services beyond traditional medicine is here to stay. His brand specializes in cryotherapy, IV drips, and mild hyperbaric oxygen therapy, to treat everything from in ammation to vitamin deciencies. “All these kinds of alternative services are picking up steam right now,” Fossas says. “Most people would typically wait until they’re sick and then go to a doctor and treat it. What we’re seeing now is more people trying to be preventive.”
FROM A FRANCHISEE’S PERSPECTIVE
Latrice Basden-Clarke was an attorney, and her husband, Clarence Clarke, was an emergency room physician. They opened their rst American Family Care franchise in Virginia in 2018 and opened their second in early 2022.
Your career switch came right swiftly, didn’t it?
CLARENCE: My wife called me. She said she had quit her job. I said, “What?” And she said, “God spoke to me, and we’re going to open up an urgent care.”
What drew you to American Family Care, Latrice?
LATRICE: AFC allows you to connect with the community the way you want to connect. Especially at the height of the pandemic, we were giving free services to people who needed it.
How has the response been?
LATRICE: We’re a Black family, and people ask us, “How in the world were you able to do this?” To be in a position to tell people who think they can’t do it that they can do it if they save and invest their money wisely—that helps the community.
WHY PET CARE IS BOOMING…
It’s estimated that 70% of American households own a pet, so the segment has always been strong. But when much of America got sent home in early 2020, tails really started wagging.
In short, families added even more pets. All those dogs need food and supplies. They need veterinary care. They need groomers. And as they’re hitting adolescence now, they also need trainers and caretakers.
“We’ve had 30 years of year-over-year growth, and the pet industry has
had 30 years of year-overyear growth,” says Chris Rowland, CEO of Pet Supplies Plus. “The past two years have been signicantly better. We’ve seen stores that have been open 25 years that were at to slightly positive in revenue jump up signi cantly, with double-digit comps.”
Dogs have driven the category the most—there’s a reason the phrase “pandemic puppy” became popular. But people in the industry say that growth extends far beyond Fido.
“What we’ve seen and heard from franchisors in this space is that as folks have been sheltering in place, there are fewer entertainment options and
connections with others, so pets are naturally a way to have loving and compassionate interaction with another being,” says Edith Wiseman
with Frandata, which does franchise market research and consulting. “Even in the bird-watching subcategory, there’s increased demand.
Low Start-Up Investment!
Jackson Hewitt is the nation’s second-largest, in-person, full-service tax preparation company. Since 1982, we’ve grown to nearly 6,000 company-owned and franchised locations.
• Lifestyle Choice: Tax preparation is a seasonal business
• Multi-Unit Expansion: Our franchise owners average more than 7 locations
• 2 year dedicated Mentoring program with our Franchise Integration Team
• Stable Industry: Nearly 170 million Americans filed a tax return in 2021. Approximately 60% of individual tax returns were prepared by a paid tax professional.*
*Source: IRS.gov. Total includes returns filed to obtain the Advance Child Tax Credit by those who would not usually file income tax returns.
Contact us at 973-630-0882 jacksonhewitt.com/own
It’s another activity that can be safely done at home.”
But while some of that may have been expected, this in ux of pets is having some more surprising e ects, too. For example, many pet owners reevaluated their own lives during the pandemic—and decided they wanted to enter the pet care industry themselves. That has helped drive a surge of franchisee interest in Pet Supplies Plus, says Rowland. The brand now has more than 580 locations, with nearly 100 opening in 2021. Also, as the shifting economy wreaked havoc on young people’s career plans and older people’s existing careers, many
looked to franchising as a viable route they could take together. Corporate refugees ready for a change felt excited to work for themselves and build a business that they could pass down to their children, while the younger entrepreneurs saw a way to control their own destinies going forward.
“The son or daughter went o to college, and they’re probably in their initial job, and maybe they weren’t following their passion and told their parents, and the parents had a nest egg,” he says. “By store number two, it’s a 50-50 relationship going forward. That’s really cool, to see that multigenerational aspect coming into the business.”
FROM A FRANCHISEE’S PERSPECTIVE
Julie Barnes spent nearly 20 years as a corporate retail executive before being laid o in 2020. She wanted a meaningful next chapter, and she’d always loved dogs, so she bought a Dogtopia franchise that opened in October.
How did you pick your location?
My location is two blocks from the biggest hospital system in Milwaukee, so I can be of service to people who are servic-
GET RESULTS WITH
ing humans. And the location is surrounded by pet-friendly apartments.
Is the neighborhood responding?
We had a goal of a certain number of dogs we wanted to have enrolled by the time we opened in October. We reached that goal by August 15.
How is Dogtopia as a franchisor?
I feel like I’ve been supported. What they told me is what has actually happened. And the owner network at Dogtopia is fabulous. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Kim Kavin is a writer and editor in New Jersey and winner of the Donald Robinson Prize for Investigative Journalism.
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Cheri Reid,
GO LOCAL WITH SOCIAL
National social media campaigns may drive awareness, but hyper-local campaigns actually drive business. Franchisees shouldn’t overlook that.
When franchisees buy into a system, they can generally rely on the parent brand’s name recognition and business processes. But here’s something a franchisee should not rely solely upon: the parent brand’s social media marketing.
Why? Because doing so misses out on the real opportunity of social media. It isn’t just to build a brand—it’s to actively drive business and engage with customers. That must happen on a local level, with local social media accounts operated by local people.
I’m the vice president of communications at Rallio, a social media management company, and we see this mistake happen all the time. Franchisors typically create social pro les on behalf of their franchisees and syndicate corporate content to these pages. Franchisees then believe that their parent company’s social media content covers all their needs, so many don’t create social content of their own. As a result, franchisees’ pages mostly all look the same—with only corporate posts and no localized personality.
Here’s what they don’t realize: These local pages could be actively connecting with franchisees’ communities, building relationships with their followers, and giving people a reason to visit their establishment or pay for their service. In some cases, these empty
pages mean more than just missed connections. Customers could be commenting on posts or submitting feedback, sending direct messages, or even inquiring about products or services. Franchisees who aren’t monitoring their pages may be neglecting sales opportunities, along with disgruntled customers.
So how do you do it better? Think local.
Many franchisees think there’s no way they can match their parent brand’s skill and frequency on social media. That may be true— most brands have in-house social media managers, or work with very large agencies, to produce a steady stream of content. But a local franchisee doesn’t need all that. Local social media management can be simple and quick.
Start by taking out your phone and snapping pictures of sta members and customers (with permission) or capturing glimpses of life behind the scenes at your business. Team celebrations, events, holidays, birthdays, video testimonials, how-to posts, even pictures of your dog—
behind your business, and to remind people that even though your business may be part of a larger franchise system, your location is run by you, and you’re part of the community.
Stay relevant by addressing current events (the pandemic, for example) and topics of interest to your followers. Once you start posting regularly, you’ll get a sense of what your audience likes to see the most. When you have a popular post, you can spend a few ad dollars boosting its visibility and targeting people in your community.
We’ve seen this strategy do well no matter the kind of franchise. For example, we recently worked with a pet supply franchisor to do social media for all its individual franchisees.
localized content—including plenty of images of local cats and dogs!—and then also started using the social media accounts to introduce new services such as curbside pickup and delivery. This helped build awareness of how each franchisee was serving their community during the pandemic. We then paid to boost their most popular posts, budgeting about $5 to $20 per post.
The result of all this: In 2020, localized social media drove more than $1.7 million in purchase conversions. Ultimately, these simple steps are what will inspire your followers to like, comment, follow, and share content—all of which creates greater traction in social feeds. Soon enough, you’ll have an audience that’s eager to not only see your content but frequent your business, too.
TOP FRANCHISES FOR ANY BUDGET
We rank the top 100 franchises that cost less than $50K , less than $100K , and less than $150K .
by TRACY STAPP HEROLD
Buying a franchise doesn’t have to break the bank. If you have a desire to start your own business, there are numerous franchise opportunities available to t just about every budget, starting at just a couple thousand dollars. Limiting your search to low-cost franchises doesn’t limit your options much at all, in fact. You’ll nd that cleaning companies, home improvement services, children’s enrichment programs, real estate agencies, tness businesses, and more can be started for less than $150,000, less than $100,000, or even less than $50,000—as you’ll see on the following pages.
Here we’ve gathered the top 100 franchises from each of those three cost tiers. These companies are ranked based on the scores they received in Entrepreneur’s 2022 Franchise 500 ranking, our comprehensive analysis that looked at more than 150 data points in the areas of costs and fees, size and growth, franchisee support, brand strength, and nancial strength and stability. One important note as you peruse these lists: A company’s placement within a particular cost tier does not mean that all franchisees will be able to start the business for less than that amount, but simply that it is reasonably possible for some. For reference, we’ve listed the full initial investment range (startup cost) from each company’s franchise disclosure document (FDD). Remember also that this ranking is not intended as a recommendation of any particular franchise. No matter how much you’re looking to invest in a business, you should always carefully research the opportunity rst. Read the company’s FDD, consult with an attorney and an accountant, and talk to current and former franchisees to nd out if it’s the right franchise for you.
TOP 100 FRANCHISES FOR
FOR LESS THAN
LESS THAN $50,000
No. 3
Anago Cleaning Systems
1 Jan-Pro Cleaning and Disinfecting Commercial cleaning STARTUP COST
$4.2K-$56K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 10,476/0
2 Stratus Building Solutions Environmentally friendly commercial cleaning and disinfecting STARTUP COST
$4.5K-$79.8K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 2,418/0
Anago Cleaning Systems
Commercial cleaning
STARTUP COST
$11.3K-$68.3K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 1,719/0
4 Goosehead Insurance Property and casualty insurance STARTUP COST
$41.5K-$116.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 1,072/0
5 Realty One Group
Real estate
STARTUP COST
$44.3K-$224.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 272/12
6 Rooter-Man
Plumbing, drain, and sewer cleaning
STARTUP COST
$46.8K-$137.6K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 743/25
7 Dream Vacations Travel agencies
STARTUP COST
$1.8K-$21K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 1,489/0
8 NextHome Real estate
STARTUP COST
$15.3K-$214.1K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 500/0
9 Chester’s Chicken STARTUP COST
$12.4K-$278.5K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 1,272/0
10 Cruise Planners Travel agencies STARTUP COST
$2.3K-$23.7K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 2,658/1
11 Brightway Insurance Property and casualty insurance STARTUP COST
40 Mint Condition Commercial cleaning, building maintenance
STARTUP COST
$4.6K-$32.4K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 410/0
41 Colors On Parade Auto paint and dent repair STARTUP COST
$16.1K-$84K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 218/6
42 Network In Action Professional networking and referral groups
STARTUP COST
$19.7K-$47.7K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 76/3
43 Payroll Vault Payroll and workforce management services
STARTUP COST
$48.9K-$64.3K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 58/4
44 Aire-Master Restroom odor-control, scent branding, and commercial hygiene services
STARTUP COST
$44.98K-$160.9K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 112/7
Generating Leads for You
Our readily recognizable brand, national advertising effort, and lead generation sources help keep leads flowing so you can grow your business.
Loans for Buying and Repairing Property
We make it easy to keep your business running smoothly with in-house loans for qualifying purchases and repairs, and no need to tie up your cashflow one property at a time.
Mentors and a Proven Model for Success
Dedicated mentors guide you through all aspects of learning your new business, and with more than a thousand franchise locations, over a quarter century of experience, and a vast network of knowledgeable professionals you’ll continue to help one another rather than compete.
39 Footprints Floors Flooring installation and restoration STARTUP COST
$70.1K-$97.6K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 123/4
40 Kitchen Tune-Up Residential and commercial kitchen and bath remodeling STARTUP COST
$98.4K-$142.6K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 213/0
41 Homewatch CareGivers Home care, nursing-care coordination, memory care STARTUP COST
$91.4K-$163.4K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 215/0
42 HouseMaster Home Inspections Home inspections and related services
STARTUP COST
$61.1K-$107.7K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 311/6
43 Premier Pools & Spas
Residential pool construction STARTUP COST
$53K-$112K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 86/0
44 Gotcha Covered Window treatments STARTUP COST
$75.95K-$94.2K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 116/0
45 Mosquito Authority Mosquito control STARTUP COST
$36.95K-$98K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 507/0
*The low end of Mosquito Authority’s initial investment range applies only to franchisees purchasing a lessthan-full-size territory. With a full-size territory, the initial investment will be higher than $50,000.
46 Fitness Machine Technicians (FMT) Exercise equipment service and repairs
STARTUP COST
$71.5K-$118.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 44/1
47 Mosquito Hunters Mosquito, tick, and flea control STARTUP COST
$73.9K-$96.4K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 113/4
48 Fish Window Cleaning Low-rise commercial and residential window cleaning STARTUP COST
$88.3K-$152.6K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 276/1
49 Two Maids & A Mop Residential cleaning STARTUP COST
$64.2K-$144.6K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 88/2
50 ShelfGenie Custom pull-out shelving for cabinets and pantries STARTUP COST
$42.4K-$135.5K*
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 186/18
*The low end of ShelfGenie’s investment range is for a single unit, but ShelfGenie requires franchisees to purchase multiple units.
*The low end of Liberty Tax Service’s initial investment range is only possible with a discounted franchise fee, which is only available to certain franchisees (CPAs, veterans, first responders, etc.). Franchisees not receiving a special discount will invest more than $50,000 at startup.
68 Kidcreate Studio Children’s art education STARTUP COST
$64.5K-$279.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 17/2
69 Color Glo Leather, vinyl, fabric, carpet, and surface repair and restoration
STARTUP COST
$56.3K-$61.4K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 138/0
70 Caring Transitions
Senior transition and relocation, online auctions, and estate management
STARTUP COST
$58.9K-$82.7K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 240/0
71 Social Indoor Indoor print and digital advertising services
STARTUP COST
$71.3K-$189K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 40/2
72 Furniture Medic Wood restoration, repair, and maintenance
STARTUP COST
$79.99K-$94.7K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 312/0
73 Sir Grout Hard surface restoration STARTUP COST
$99.8K-$152.5K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 44/2
74 All County Property Management Property management STARTUP COST
$72.5K-$104.4K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 64/4
75 RSVP Advertising Advertising
STARTUP COST
$97.4K-$277.3K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 56/1
76 DPF Alternatives Diesel particulate filter cleaning and aftertreatment system restoration STARTUP COST
$78.7K-$177.2K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 53/1
77 Dog Training Elite Dog training STARTUP COST
$82.8K-$104.8K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 59/0
78 The Grounds Guys Lawn and landscape maintenance STARTUP COST
$81.2K-$200.9K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 211/0
79 InXpress Shipping services STARTUP COST
$85.6K-$166.99K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 435/0
80 HomeSmart Real estate STARTUP COST
$65.5K-$205K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 145/45
81 Orion Food Systems Fast-food systems for nontraditional markets STARTUP COST
$59.5K-$140K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 979/0
82 Bloomin’ Blinds Window covering sales, installation, and repairs
STARTUP COST
$82.6K-$140K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 72/0
83 TruBlue Total House Care
Senior home modification, maintenance, and repair services STARTUP COST
$65.1K-$91.4K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 58/0
84 Home Helpers Home Care
Nonmedical/skilled home care; monitoring products and services STARTUP COST
$97.1K-$139.3K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 315/0
85 Talem Home Care & Placement Services
Senior care and placement services
STARTUP COST
$65.8K-$160.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 8/2
86 Sylvan Learning
Supplemental education, STEM camps, college prep
STARTUP COST
$69.8K-$161.4K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 563/6
87 Decorating Den Interiors
Interior design and decorating services and products
STARTUP COST
$52.6K-$70.4K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 254/0
88 Fastest Labs
Drug, alcohol, and DNA testing, background screening STARTUP COST
$83.3K-$111.7K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 59/1
89 i9 Sports
Youth sports leagues, camps, and clinics
STARTUP COST
$59.9K-$69.9K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 171/1
90 Fresh Coat
Residential and commercial painting STARTUP COST
$53.99K-$76.9K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 153/0
91 The Alternative Board (TAB)
Business owner advisory boards, coaching, strategic planning STARTUP COST
$57.9K-$108K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 349/18
92 Our Town America Direct-mail advertising to new movers STARTUP COST
$63.9K-$86.3K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 52/0
93 Bath Tune-Up Bathroom remodeling
STARTUP COST
$91.4K-$135.6K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 19/0
94 Kitchen Solvers
Kitchen and bath remodeling, design, and installation STARTUP COST
*While 7-Eleven’s initial investment range varies widely based on di erent circumstances, most firsttime franchisees’ startup costs will be above $100,000.
5 Interim HealthCare Medical home care, medical sta ng STARTUP COST
$128.5K-$201.5K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 621/2
6 Molly Maid Residential cleaning STARTUP COST
$110.2K-$160.2K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 496/0
7 Spherion Sta ng Sta ng, recruitment, and employment-related services
STARTUP COST
$148K-$347.5K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 205/0
BRING HEALTHY FOOD TO YOUR COMMUNITY
Consumers crave customizable good-for-you menu options that taste great. From our first Saladworks location in 1986, to the addition of Frutta Bowls and Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh, WOWorks has built a collection of healthy-halo brands providing fresh, whole-food ingredients at 250+ locations across the US and Canada.
8 Cornwell Quality Tools
Automotive tools and equipment
STARTUP COST
$59.5K-$272.8K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
756/0
*The low end of Cornwell Quality Tools’ initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
9 Lawn Doctor Lawn, tree, and shrub care; mosquito and tick control STARTUP COST
$102K-$127.1K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
606/0
10 Mathnasium Math tutoring
STARTUP COST
$112.8K-$149.1K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 1,075/7
11 Stanley Steemer Carpet Cleaner Carpet, upholstery, HVAC, and air-duct cleaning; water damage restoration
STARTUP COST
$127.7K-$335.7K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 214/55
12 Signarama Sign products and services
STARTUP COST
$119.7K-$313.8K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 706/0
13 Two Men and a Truck Moving, storage, and junk removal services
STARTUP COST
$100K-$550K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 315/3
14 TeamLogic IT IT managed services for businesses
STARTUP COST
$111.2K-$142.3K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 235/0
15 Home Instead Nonmedical senior care STARTUP COST
$128K-$160K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 1,141/3
16 FirstLight Home Care Nonmedical home care
STARTUP COST
$113.3K-$197.9K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 202/0
17 Huntington Learning Center
Tutoring and test prep STARTUP COST
$147K-$266.1K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 271/14
18 CertaPro Painters Residential and commercial painting
STARTUP COST
$147.8K-$221K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 377/0
19 Pop-A-Lock Mobile locksmith and security services
STARTUP COST
$110.2K-$143.3K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 609/7
20 Sanford Rose Associates Executive search and recruiting
STARTUP COST
$108.3K-$143.6K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 161/0
21 BrightStar Care Medical/nonmedical home care, medical sta ng
STARTUP COST
$105.7K-$170.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
339/3
22 Spring-Green Lawn Care
Lawn and tree care, pest control STARTUP COST
$82.3K-$104.7K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
126/26
*The low end of Spring-Green’s initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
23 Rosati’s Pizza Pizza, Italian food STARTUP COST
$136.2K-$1.2M
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 151/8
24 Minuteman Press Printing, graphics, and marketing services
STARTUP COST
$75.5K-$182.9K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
956/0
*The low end of Minuteman Press’s initial investment range applies only to the purchase of an existing store. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
25 YESCO Sign & Lighting Service Sign and lighting service and maintenance STARTUP COST
$65K-$352.2K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
61/42
*The low end of YESCO’s initial investment range applies only to someone adding onto or converting an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
26 Bin There Dump That Residential-friendly dumpster rentals
STARTUP COST
$73.1K-$128.3K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
214/0
*Although Bin There Dump That’s initial investment range starts at $73,050, franchisees typically invest more than $100,000 at startup.
27 Senior Helpers Personal, companion, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s home care STARTUP COST
$113.3K-$152.3K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
327/4
28 Real Property Management Property management STARTUP COST
*The low end of uBreakiFix’s initial investment range applies only to o cers, directors, or employees of uBreakiFix whose franchise and training fees are waived. Franchisees paying the standard fees will invest more than $100,000.
31 The Exercise Coach
Personal training
STARTUP COST
$129.98K-$351.8K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 155/2
32 Mosquito Joe Outdoor pest control
STARTUP COST
$105.6K-$139.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 345/2
33 Cookie Cutters Haircuts for Kids Children’s hair salons
STARTUP COST
$132K-$339.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 110/2
34 CMIT Solutions
IT and business services for SMBs
STARTUP COST
$122.6K-$165.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
246/0
35 Ecomaids
Environmentally friendly residential cleaning
STARTUP COST
$121.6K-$147.6K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 67/1
36 Maid Brigade Residential cleaning
STARTUP COST
$110.1K-$127.4K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 397/24
37 Coldwell Banker Real Estate
Real estate
STARTUP COST
$30.6K-$489.3K*
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 2,527/605
*The low end of Coldwell Banker’s initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
38 The Cleaning Authority
Environmentally friendly residential cleaning
STARTUP COST
$76K-$169K*
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 218/3
*The low end of The Cleaning Authority’s initial investment range applies only to those purchasing a smaller “hometown market” territory. Most franchisees purchase the larger “enterprise market” territory and will invest more than $100,000.
39 Dippin’ Dots
Specialty ice cream, frozen yogurt, ices, sorbet
STARTUP COST
$112.2K-$366.95K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 226/0
Of the 25 stores included for the second year, 15 (or 60%) attained or exceeded the average total revenue and 14 (or 56%) attained or exceeded the average gross profit. You should review our FDD for details about these numbers. Your results may di er and there are no assurances you will do as well and must accept that risk. **This information is not intended as an o er to sell or the solicitation of an o er to buy a franchise. It is for information purposes only. The o ering is made by prospectus only. Currently, the following states regulate the o er and sale of franchises: California, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota (File No. F-9825), New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. If you are a resident of or want to locate a franchise in one of these states, we will not o er you a franchise unless and until we have complied with applicable pre-sale registration and disclosure requirements in your state. This information is not intended as an o er to sell, or the solicitation of an o er to buy a franchise. If you are a resident of or want to locate a franchise in a state that regulates the o er and sale of franchises, we will not o er you a franchise unless we have complied with that applicable pre-sale registration and disclosure requirement in your state.
New York Disclaimer: This advertisement is not an o ering. An o ering can only be made by a franchise disclosure document filed with the Department of Law of the State of New York. Such filing does not constitute approval by the Department of Law of the State of New York. CALIFORNIA DISCLAIMER: THESE FRANCHISES HAVE BEEN REGISTERED UNDER THE FRANCHISE INVESTMENT LAW OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. SUCH REGISTRATION DOES NOT CONSTITUTE APPROVAL, RECOMMENDATION OR ENDORSEMENT BY THE COMMISSIONER OF CORPORATIONS NOR A FINDING BY THE COMMISSIONER THAT THE INFORMATION PROVIDED HEREIN IS TRUE, COMPLETE AND NOT MISLEADING. UBIF Franchising, Co., 2121 S. Hiawassee Rd., Suite 120, Orlando, FL 32835
40 Fyzical Therapy & Balance Centers
Physical therapy, balance and vestibular therapy, preventive wellness services
STARTUP COST
$138.8K-$361.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED)
381/50
41 Conserva Irrigation Irrigation repair, maintenance, installation, and e ciency upgrades
STARTUP COST
$81.8K-$102.3K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 144/0
*Although Conserva Irrigation’s initial investment range starts at $81,800, the company advises that this only covers the first 90-120 days in business, and additional funds will be necessary for full startup.
42 Glass Doctor Auto/residential/commercial glass installation, repair, and replacement STARTUP COST
$132.3K-$275.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 180/0
43 Mr. Electric Electrical services STARTUP COST
$106.1K-$244.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 176/0
44 Koala Insulation Insulation
STARTUP COST
$127.3K-$165.1K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 213/0
45 Century 21 Real Estate Real estate
STARTUP COST
$24.7K-$456.8K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 13,222/0
*The low end of Century 21’s initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
46 Outdoor Lighting Perspectives
Residential landscape, architectural, holiday, and hospitality lighting
STARTUP COST
$80K-$143.1K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 104/0
*Although Outdoor Lighting Perspectives’ initial investment range starts at $80,025, the company advises that this only covers the first 90-120 days in business, and additional funds will be necessary for full startup.
47 HomeWell Care Services
Home care
STARTUP COST
$96.9K-$224.8K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 97/0
*Although the low end of HomeWell’s initial investment range is $96,900, most franchisees will invest more than $100,000 at startup.
*The low end of Weichert’s initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
51 Mr. Handyman Residential and commercial repair, maintenance, and improvement services STARTUP COST
$117.5K-$154.1K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 272/0
52 Five Star Bath Solutions Bathroom remodeling STARTUP COST
$109.5K-$206.1K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 65/0
53 Corcoran Real estate STARTUP COST
$52.9K-$546.3K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 76/28
*The low end of Corcoran’s initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
54 Spaulding Decon Crime-scene, meth-lab, and hoarding cleanup; mold remediation; house buying STARTUP COST
$88.5K-$140.4K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 36/1
*The low end of Spaulding Decon’s initial investment range is possible only when purchasing a mini market territory, which are not highly available. With a full-size territory, the initial investment will be higher than $100,000.
55 PrideSta Sta ng STARTUP COST
$137.7K-$233K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 80/3
56 Griswold Home Care Nonmedical home care
STARTUP COST
$108.2K-$181.4K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 166/14
57 One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning
Heating and cooling repairs, replacements, and maintenance; indoor air quality services
STARTUP COST
$133.9K-$311.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 349/33
58 The Entrepreneur’s Source Franchise/business coaching and development
STARTUP COST
$117.6K-$125.9K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 131/0
59 Precision Door Service
Residential garage door repair, installation, and service STARTUP COST
$104.5K-$652.98K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 102/0
60 Honest Abe Roofing Roof installation and repairs, gutter installation
STARTUP COST
$121.3K-$361.2K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 27/1
61 Money Pages Direct-mail marketing
STARTUP COST
$107.5K-$148.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 16/15
62 College Hunks Hauling Junk & Moving Junk removal, moving, and labor services
STARTUP COST
$108.7K-$273.2K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 153/3
63 30 Minute Hit Kickboxing circuit-training programs for women
STARTUP COST
$108.7K-$248.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 73/0
64 Bio-One Crime-scene and trauma-scene cleaning
STARTUP COST
$105.4K-$153.4K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 115/0
65 The Junkluggers Environmentally friendly junk removal
STARTUP COST
$120.3K-$275.96K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 76/1
66 Archadeck Outdoor
Living Outdoor living space design and construction
STARTUP COST
$58.6K-$103.6K*
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 71/3
*Although Archadeck’s initial investment range starts at $58,625, the company advises that this only covers the first 90-120 days in business, and additional funds will be necessary for full startup
67 Window World Replacement windows, doors, siding, roofing, and other exterior remodeling products
STARTUP COST
$123.8K-$330.1K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 206/0
68 ERA Real Estate Real estate
STARTUP COST
$27.4K-$432.6K*
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 2,318/0
*The low end of ERA’s initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000
69 Auntie Anne’s Soft pretzels
STARTUP COST
$100.6K-$503.5K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 1,891/12
MAKE A LIVING SAVING LIVES SAVING
FRANCHISE The List
70 NaturaLawn of America Organic-based lawn care STARTUP COST
$47.5K-$112.7K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 82/11
*The low end of NaturaLawn’s initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
71 911 Restoration
Residential and commercial property restoration STARTUP COST
$68.6K-$227.4K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 166/3
*The low end of 911 Restoration’s initial investment range applies only to those converting an existing business or using financing. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000 without financing.
72 Fully Promoted Branded products and marketing services
STARTUP COST
$122.7K-$285.7K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 271/0
73 Surface Experts
Interior surface repair STARTUP COST
$132.9K-$212.98K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 38/0
74 LIME Painting Residential and commercial painting, coatings, and surface restoration STARTUP COST
$124.7K-$162.4K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 23/2
75 Sandler Training Sales and sales-management training
*Although the low end of Pool Scouts’ initial investment range is $68,600, the average franchisee spends more than $100,000 to start the business.
78 Acai Express Superfood Bowls
Acai bowls, smoothies, juices STARTUP COST
$133.5K-$364K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 28/7
79 Z Plumberz Plumbing STARTUP COST
$92.3K-$342.2K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 16/1
*The low end of Z Plumberz’s initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000
80 Rytech
Water, mold, fire, and smoke restoration; Covid-19 sanitation STARTUP COST
$135.3K-$170.8K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 68/5
81 Code Ninjas
Computer-coding learning centers for ages 5 and up STARTUP COST
$130.3K-$348.6K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 332/4
82 Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Real estate STARTUP COST
$32.4K-$455K*
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 389/0
*The low end of Better Homes and Gardens’ initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
83 United Water Restoration Group Water, fire, and mold restoration STARTUP COST
$122.2K-$508.3K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 22/11
84 ATC Healthcare Services Medical sta ng STARTUP COST
$136.9K-$223.2K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 43/0
85 Mosquito Squad Outdoor pest control STARTUP COST
87 Duct Doctor USA Residential and commercial airduct cleaning STARTUP COST
$44.1K-$176.5K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 27/0
*Duct Doctor requires franchisees to purchase a $125,000 truck. The low end of the initial investment range considers only a 10% down payment on that vehicle, rather than the full payment.
92 Painting with a Twist Paint-and-sip studios STARTUP COST
$121.5K-$261K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 241/3
93 Westside Pizza Pizza STARTUP COST
$141.7K-$397.8K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 30/2
94 Miracle-Ear Hearing aids STARTUP COST
$119K-$352.5K
TOTAL UNITS (FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 1,323/193
95 iTrip Vacations
Short-term rental property management
STARTUP COST
$101.4K-$140.6K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 81/1
96 Learning Express
Toys & Gifts Specialty toy stores
STARTUP COST
$133.4K-$313.8K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 86/0
97 Closet & Storage
Concepts/More Space Place
Residential/commercial closet and storage systems; Murphy beds
STARTUP COST
$104.3K-$499.9K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 37/3
98 Benjamin Franklin Plumbing
Residential and light commercial plumbing services
STARTUP COST
$133.9K-$311.5K
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 256/10
99 Mister Sparky
Residential electrical maintenance, repair, and replacement services
STARTUP COST
$33.1K-$301.5K*
TOTAL UNITS
(FRANCHISED / CO.-OWNED) 106/7
*The low end of Mister Sparky’s initial investment range applies only to the conversion of an existing business. Franchisees starting a new business will invest more than $100,000.
—JACK BRENDAMOUR MULTI-UNIT OWNER OHIO AND KENTUCKY
MAKE ROOM FOR THE UNEXPECTED
This year, our greatest opportunities may be the ones we were never looking for.
by JASON FEIFER
When you narrow your path, you limit your chances of finding what will make you happiest.
That’s something I’ve learned personally—and witnessed happening to others—throughout my career. As we look ahead at the rest of the year and set new goals, it’s a lesson worth reflecting on.
We must make room for the unexpected. We must set goals but be completely comfortable abandoning them. We must accept that the greatest opportunities may be the ones we weren’t looking for, and maybe didn’t even know existed.
I’ll give you an example: This is the story of “Tom,” a real friend whose name I’m changing.
Tom always wanted to work at one speci c company. He set this goal at the beginning of his career because that company was full of widely recognized talented people, and it produced products he thought were genius. Joining that tribe became his de nition of success. Every job he took was strategically selected to one day appeal to his dream job. He followed the company religiously; he got to know people who worked there.
One day, after many years of labor, his e orts paid o : He got the job. And it was not what he expected.
It was gratifying in many ways, sure, but it was thankless in too many other ways.
It paid poorly. The hours were awful. It was often creatively sti ing. He stayed there for years, often deeply unhappy, because the idea of being there still gave him joy, even if the work did not. But eventually, he left. It was too much to take. He’s held a series of impressive jobs since then—the guy is talented, after all—but he’s been passionate about none of them. He still doesn’t really know what he wants, because he spent his entire career plotting one course.
I meet a lot of people who are like this. I feel fortunate I’m not one of them, and I attribute that to what I did not know earlier in my career.
I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I’d never heard of Entrepreneur magazine. I had no idea people got paid to speak onstage, and I was generally ignorant of all the other stu I do now that brings me joy.
So how did I get here? By exploring. I took jobs solely for the skills they’d teach me, even if I didn’t really care about the companies. I went down many fruitless paths. I tried on a few identities. I
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started things that failed. I kept my options open. And that prepared me for the unexpected, which was the role I hold now and the career I’m building around it.
This doesn’t make me special, but it does make me part of a lucky club. I meet so many entrepreneurs who laugh—laugh!—at the reality of what they’re doing now. They say things like, “I never planned to run a soap company!” But that soap company pulls in millions and challenges them in all the right ways. They love that soap company. And they got there not through careful plotting but by indulging the unknown. (Ditto for many of my colleagues here at Entrepreneur, by the way. While delivering this maga-
zine to you, many of them are also doing other wild and amazing projects.)
This year, as you set goals, I encourage you to hold them loosely. I’ve always thought of goals as a useful thing to move toward, simply because movement itself is so important. A goal can light our path forward, and that’s useful for a while. But a goal is not a map. It cannot de ne your whole journey. If you chart your course too tightly, you’ll miss all the promising oramps in your periphery. Prepare for what is ahead. There are many big things coming. But as you do, prepare to indulge the unexpected as well. Because I promise you, the unexpected is where the payo and the joy will really be.
