Franchise Update Magazine Issue I, 2016 | Page 24

Female Founders I enjoy leading and inspiring teams to reach higher levels of performance and helping individuals reach their potential. I have strong financial acumen and am able to manage the results and personnel to a critical set of metrics. My background with numbers, leadership, team development, and organizational planning were a critical foundation to succeed as an entrepreneur and to access capital along the way to expand as opportunities arose. What’s the best and worst advice you got when starting out? Best: Establish an advisory board to assist me in my entrepreneurial journey. I was encouraged to have other founders on the board along with franchise experts. This advice has proven invaluable. My advisory board has evolved three times at different stages of the business’s life cycle. On my current board, I feel blessed to have tapped into the talent of David Barr and Sid Feltenstein as we tackle uncharted territory with international expansion, debt recapitalization, national TV advertising, and many more exciting opportunities for growth. Worst: That it would take only $100,000 to launch our franchise initiative. Since I am a CPA by background and conservative, I planned for a cushion and ensured we had $250,000 to invest in launching our franchise opportunity. We needed nearly $500,000 to get our franchising organization to be self-sufficient where recurring revenues were more than expenses. Why did you choose franchising? In our original business plan we would expand to have hundreds of locations across the country. In that original plan, we didn’t know if we would raise money and have all locations be company-owned, if we would enter into joint venture partnerships to share the investment/risk with local operators, or if we would franchise. As franchisees ourselves (Choice Hotels in 2004), seeing the hotel franchise model up close made the path of franchising crystal clear. How did you get started in franchising? My mother-in-law invested in two hotels in mid-2004 and invited us to invest as well. I attended the franchise’s new owner and new manager training with her 22 “Although we already had three successful companyowned locations, we knew that through franchising we would be able to expand much faster than if we were to do it on our own.” and came away from the training classes with the idea that BrightStar Care could work as a franchise, expanding much more quickly than if we were to open locations on our own. After successfully opening a second and third location in McHenry and Chicago, we knew we had a business model that could be successfully replicated and that we had the systems to open and grow a location to help others do the same. We sold our first franchise location in late 2005. Did you have a partner/co-founder when you started? How important was that in building your company? My husband J.D. and I co-founded BrightStar Care together (see above). J.D. was strong at sales and handled that function. I handled the recruiting, customer service, operations, and finance functions and built the organization to handle the scale as the business grew. It was a great partnership. Eventually we backfilled our old roles, and I went on to start and run the franchise company with J.D. handling franchise sales at different points in our life cycle until we hired an industry veteran to build out an entire franchise development team. How did you fund your company at the beginning? As you grew? In the beginning I used the majority of my severance package from United Airlines to launch BrightStar Care and coupled that with a bank line of credit to fund accounts receivable. As the company grew, we were fortunate to be approved for State of Illinois Department of Commerce loans set aside for female-owned businesses. What were the keys to funding your brand? In the beginning with companyowned stores, the keys to funding were sufficient working capital lines of credit to cover the growth in accounts receivable as sales ramped up. As we expanded into franchising, we used profits from company-owned operations, but we also needed loans and lines of credit to assist with the costs incurred ahead of when revenues were earned. We leveraged state programs created to assist female-owned businesses to access the capital we needed to launch the franchise brand and again to further its growth. BUILDING THE BUSINESS What has been the best and the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur? Best: The opportunity to help others become entrepreneurs through our franchisees and other emerging franchisors I mentor. It is such an incredible honor to work alongside passionate, driven franchisees who serve customers and create jobs in their communities. I may be a little biased, but I believe we have the best franchisees of any system. It is always an amazing experience to open the awards ceremony at our Annual Conference Gala and look at a roomful of more than 250 people who have become dear friends and achieved great success and remember that just 10 years ago none of it existed. Hardest: Never being able to have a bad day. My temperament sets the tone for the organization—for our team members and for our franchisees—so I am cogni