Meet The Business Franchise Consultant Team

My father never had a W-2 job. He owned his own business, and I grew up watching the ups, the downs, and the heartaches that came with it. Some years were fruitful. Then the economy would turn. The oil crisis of the 1970s hit, and his business took a blow he had no control over.

I started my career in sales after studying marketing. I quickly realized that entry-level marketing was largely administrative, so I went straight into sales instead. I was good at it, moved into management, and eventually left the corporate world for startups.

Some of those companies were highly successful. Others failed spectacularly. But startup life meant rolling the dice every few years and, sometimes, starting over. When one company succeeded, my position moved from San Diego to Minneapolis. With a family in San Diego, two kids, and a mortgage, I decided I wasn’t willing to keep betting my family’s stability on where the dice landed.

That led me to franchising.

A friend who had already bought a franchise walked me through the process. I never hired a franchise consultant for that first business, but in many ways, he filled that role, and it made all the difference.

I bought a commercial building cleaning and maintenance franchise as the master franchisee, essentially becoming the franchisor in my market. The model gave me recurring contracts, predictable revenue, and a business built around supporting franchise owners rather than managing a large employee base.

I ran that business for 17 years, growing it to 150 franchisees across two markets before eventually selling it to a local buyer.

Across my career, I’ve been a partner or sole owner in five businesses, four of them in franchising.

Then people started calling me- my sister, a neighbor, friends of friends. People in their forties, fifties, and sixties who wanted to buy a business of their own but didn’t know where to start.

I found myself helping them navigate the same questions I’d wrestled with myself: What kind of business fits my life? What should I be looking for? And how do I know if an opportunity is actually right for me?

Eventually, someone I had referred a few people to pointed out that what I was already doing was franchise consulting. They asked me why I wasn’t doing it professionally.

That question led to Franchise Made.