Our daily mission includes:
Practicing Avodah – Work, Worship, Service.
Supporting franchise owners to grow their business and increase their profits through proven leadership strategies.
Helping franchise owners create the systems necessary for consistently adding value to customer and employee relationships.
Working with colleagues to develop impactful franchisee leadership development experiences.
What a great day! Mom was casually sipping her vegetable soup, and I was enduring a packaged ham and cheese sandwich for lunch in the Toledo Hospital Cafeteria. My sister and her first son (of 4) rested comfortably after a flawless birth. Baby Ben was born that morning.
Mom looked at me between sips of her soup and asked, “Luke, you have a wife and 2 children, what’s your plan if the franchise fails?”
OUCH!
My mom stands 5′ tall and may weigh 95 lbs after Thanksgiving dinner, but her question dropped me to my knees.
I drove from Cincinnati to Toledo that morning because, 3 months prior, my family relocated to Cincinnati to start the first ImageFIRST franchise and be closer to family. Baby Ben’s dad is an Ohio State Buckeyes fan, so I stopped at the mall and picked up Ben’s first Michigan Wolverine onesie on the way to the hospital. Three of their four boys went on to be Michigan Wolverine Wrestlers.
Our new franchise had barely taken its first breath, and that’s the question my mom asked. I’m not sure how it happened, but to this day, she tells me that my determined look told her all she needed to know. I must have been wearing a mask because my anxious moments over the last 3+ months balled up into a giant mass of barbed wire in my stomach. The store-bought sandwich didn’t help, I’m sure.
Unless a new business owner wins the lottery, gaining visibility and earning credibility takes time, and success requires both. For the last 3 months, I had worked with the ImageFIRST sales trainer, Mark Sussman. My engineering education and corporate training, designing manufacturing systems, did little to develop my sales skills, so everything was new to me. Nevertheless, we were on the planned track.
So, I calmly replied to Mom, “We’re ahead of plan. We have one $20 every-other-week account and they haven’t paid yet.” Mom didn’t miss the sarcasm, so I explained the plan: 150 cold calls weekly, leading to 15 initial conversations and 4 customers. Each new customer averages $25 per week. Over 52 weeks, that’s $5200 in weekly revenue. That’s it. That was our current plan. Saying it out loud was as much of a thud in my ears as hers.
I thought about Mom’s question on my 3-hour drive home that night. I hadn’t even asked myself that question. Failure was not an option, so what can I do to grow ImageFIRST faster? I knew ambulatory surgery centers would be the most significant revenue-generating customers, so we needed more conversations with center directors. Mark and I decided to change our plan and start calling on a surgery center each day and spend the remainder of our day calling on area medical offices. We previously focused our days around medical offices surrounding hospitals.
Within 3 months of Baby Ben’s birth, ImageFIRST Cincinnati earned the first of many surgery center customers. That first surgery center grew from $200 to over $3000 weekly revenue in less than one year.
Business owners live with constant pressure to succeed OR not fail, but Mom’s question, “what’s your plan if your franchise fails?” never packed the same punch as it did at lunch because we had a plan and initial success.
I aim to support every franchise owner I work with to feel the relief and confidence I felt and help create their answers to the gut-wrenching questions. I didn’t appreciate the similarities between leading a business and a volunteer fire department until, after working with a career coach for 6 months, I read “Wisdom at Work” by Chip Conley from Air BnB fame. The book helped me discover that successful leadership of any organization has overlapping attributes. In my careers, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to learn how to lead, and the best use of my skills and experiences is to help franchise owners earn their success.
My mom’s question created anxiety about changing the overall sales strategy. My mission is to support franchise owners by exploring all opportunities for success. Mom’s question shaped the life curve for ImageFIRST Cincinnati. My success now is to help franchise owners positively affect the life curve for their businesses. ImageFIRST Cincinnati was fruitful by any measure, and my success is in helping others create theirs’ efficiently.
