By the end of 1978, we had 11 partners and six franchisees, we were operating in 22 cities, and we had about 6,000 clients. We had left Electronic Accounting Systems and were doing our own processing on our own computers.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There's nothing magic about working with franchisees. What you have to do is help them improve their business.
For a franchise system to work well, you really need people with an entrepreneurial mind-set because, while you have a large, overarching system that everybody has to work with, a lot of local issues have to be handled.
When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.
In 1986, Microsoft and Oracle went public within a day of each other, and I recall telling one of my colleagues that the software business will become big. So I started working with software companies in the mid-'80s and never turned back.
I don't think there is any franchise more powerful than ours around securing the consumer experience and we will not concede that to anyone including Microsoft.
How can you franchise hospitality?
Franchises are independently owned and operated businesses whose owners are responsible for their operations.
I'm lucky that my restaurant partners are my wife Liz and Doug Petkovic. We opened our first restaurant over 15 years ago. And we didn't open up our second restaurant for almost ten years. So that gave us a good foundation of employees.
When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.
In 1974, we began franchising. We didn't have any big thought process except that, 'OK, franchising will help us get to our goal of 32 stores and help us run stores farther away from home.'