#64 - Shark Tank Pilot Episode: Nick Friedman's College Hunks Hauling Junk

[00:00:00] Welcome back to Passive Income Pilots everyone. Tait Duryea here with Ryan Gibson on another week. How are you doing? Good. I've personally, I've actually always dreamed of owning my own franchise or benefiting from the money that can be made in that and I'm stoked to have another

[00:00:15] awesome guest who co-founded College Hunks hauling junk and moving really long name, but you probably have seen their brand all over the country if you ever moved or have had your junk hauled, right? Yeah. Pretty fun show. You know, when we booked Nick on the show,

[00:00:31] my biggest question was, okay, and we get to this one show, but so many people can have a vision. You could be in the third grade and it's okay. It's the lemonade stand idea, right?

[00:00:42] Yeah. You set up the stand, you get the inventory, you sell it, you collect the cash. And then that's sort of the end of it, right? It's the one lemonade stand. And what

[00:00:50] we really wanted to dig into is, okay, how do you go from one lemonade stand to 250? Because that's the disconnect that most of us have. Maybe you don't want to, maybe it's okay. There's

[00:01:01] no way. But if you're interested in franchises, how that model works, what it looks like and how Nick was able to go from a concept that would have been really easy to keep small and maybe

[00:01:12] just dissolve after college. Instead he took it to this multi-million dollar company and was on Shark Tank and all this other stuff. Yeah, really interesting conversation. Yeah. I mean, he literally started in a beat up cargo van in college and then now he has over

[00:01:25] 250 locations, 300 million in annual sales. He's recognized by Inc Magazine as one of America's top entrepreneurs under 30, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. He just won Entrepreneur of the Year with the Franchise Association that we'll talk about.

[00:01:40] And he's been on multiple TV shows. He was on the very first Shark Tank and we're going to tell that story. It's actually a really funny story. He was on Undercover Boss too. Oh, I completely forgot about that. He was on

[00:01:52] CBS's Undercover Boss and he also co-authored one of the best selling books, Effortless Entrepreneur. So I think you guys are going to love this. Even if you're not interested in owning your own franchise, you can learn how to invest in them and you

[00:02:04] can learn some of the trends that are going on in the industry and hear a really fun story about how Nick started this awesome company. So with that, let's get to the show. Let's go. Welcome to Passive Income Pilots, where pilots upgrade their money. This is the

[00:02:22] definitive source for personal finance and investment tactics for aviators. We interview world renowned experts and share these lessons with the flying community. So if you're ready for practical knowledge and insights, let's roll. Nick, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:02:37] Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Well, hey, we kind of unpacked your bio in the intro there, but do you want to, straight from the horse's mouth, where are you now versus how did you get started?

[00:02:47] Yeah. Well, I don't think very many kids grow up saying I want to be a moving and hauling business owner when I get out of college or when I graduate from high school. And I was no exception. I was brought up following more traditional career path.

[00:02:59] And the summer before my senior year of college, we were home for summer vacation and my buddy's mom had a beat up cargo van from her furniture store. She said, why don't you go use the van? You can move people's furniture, haul people's junk away.

[00:03:09] And then she paused for a second and says, you guys could be like college hunks who haul junk. And we all laughed at first and they were like, that's actually kind of a catchy name. Why

[00:03:18] don't we call ourselves that? So we made flyers, we stuck it in mailboxes. People called and had a need for the service. They thought the name was catchy. And that was the light bulb moment for us is there could be another opportunity here to pursue something

[00:03:29] beyond just getting a job out of college and went back to school, graduated, started the business full time. And I like to say now 20 years later, we're a 20 year overnight success.

[00:03:37] We got about 250 franchisees around the country. One of our claim to fame is we were on the very first episode of the very first season of Shark Tank. So that was kind of a fun intro into the

[00:03:48] world of television as well. Yeah. And I want to interrupt you there. Before I play the Shark Tank clip, by the way, this is the first episode ever of Shark Tank that Nick was

[00:03:57] on. Tell me about the company real quick that you were pitching that the sharks talk about in this clip about to play. Yeah, so we actually had College Hunks already started. We had about

[00:04:05] five or six franchises and we were answering an ad in Entrepreneur magazine that said looking for businesses to pitch for a television show. And that was kind of all it said, but we were trying

[00:04:14] to get our name out there. And we're like, well, we don't really want to get equity sold for our College Hunks business. So what's some other businesses ideas we've kicked around?

[00:04:21] And we used to joke at the bar and be like, hey, what if we had a female sister company, we would call it College Fox's packing boxes. And that was kind of the sharks reaction as

[00:04:29] well when we tried to pitch it to them. I think that's honestly why we got selected for the show is just because it was such an off the wall idea, but they ended up making y'all play this.

[00:04:38] Well, hold on. We're going to listen to what the sharks said about your College Fox's packing boxes idea here in just a second. Ching, this is why we got to have the hunks.

[00:04:47] That may not sound right on TV. Hang on. I think the attractive thing that you've offered here is that you have built this infrastructure and the existing success that you've already proven. If you're going to leverage it in, let us have a piece of that also.

[00:05:02] Guys, I'm going to make an offer right now. I'll do 51% for 250K. For what? Existing business. Everything. Everything. Don't laugh so fast, buddy. It's not easy to come up with 250,000. Be very careful. Never laugh at money. Okay, guys, what do you say?

[00:05:21] Look, we built College Hunks Hauling Junk from a cargo van to a $3 million company in three years. We put all our blood, sweat and tears in that company. There's no way we can sell ourselves short for that amount that you offered of $250,000. Take it or not?

[00:05:36] They said no. Okay. What's your offer? What's your offer? Offer is a million dollars for 10%. What? Are you guys out of your minds? Bear with me. Guys, I want to tell you something right now. You will never ever, either of you,

[00:05:51] get to this side of the table doing a deal like that. Eventually, they offered you a lot of money and you turned it down. Yeah. Robert Herjavec ultimately offered us probably a pretty fair offer. He wanted

[00:06:04] 50% of this College Fox's harebrained idea and he wanted 10% of our College Hunks business, which at the time had, like I said, five or six franchises. It was probably a reasonable offer. Today, that offer would have been worth 100 times or the value of that had we

[00:06:18] taken it off or would have been worth 100 times what he offered us then. I'm glad we didn't, but we also didn't know that the sharks were going to turn into television celebrities. We didn't know that the show was going to be on 15 years later.

[00:06:29] We just knew that it was a pilot episode and we were trying to get our name out there. The show re-airs on the different streaming networks and CNBC. It's put us on the map, I think, as a stick in the sand, hey, we're out here.

[00:06:43] That's amazing. Have you gone and talked to them again? I've run across some of the different sharks over different years at events and entrepreneurship summits and things of that nature. I always remind them that they miss out on a good opportunity.

[00:06:56] But actually, one of my visions is to become a shark on the show, perhaps as a guest shark, somebody who came on as a contestant in the first episode and now is on the shark side.

[00:07:06] One of the comments that Mr. Wonderful made in the episode is you'll never get to this side of the table doing a deal like that based on what we were asking. I would love to go head-to-head with him competing for an investment opportunity.

[00:07:17] That's called putting a chip on somebody's shoulder, right? That's what drives entrepreneurship. I love it. Nick, my big question for you to kick things off because what I want for this episode is

[00:07:30] for it to be relatable to the average pilot who's just flying the line or maybe has a side hustle. But you went from the idea of getting some vans and some people together and hauling junk. It would be really easy for that to just be it. That's it.

[00:07:46] That was your college job, and then you move on and you do something else. You took this and turned it into franchises. You turned it into this multi-million dollar company. That's where I really want to take this episode is what does that transition

[00:08:00] look like from employee to owner or self-employed to owner? I think so many people are stuck in the self-employment category. I know a lot of pilots have, they might own a... I was talking to somebody the other day that started a mortgage company during COVID and they didn't

[00:08:15] really start a mortgage company. They bought themselves another job. It's, I do mortgages and they might have one other person working for them. What does that next step look like?

[00:08:28] Did you have line of sight to that? Did you always see this as a huge company idea or was it like you just started with a couple of trucks and then you had a mentor that was saying, well, you could franchise this and blow it up?

[00:08:39] Yeah. Well, it's funny. It's kind of all the above. It's an evolutionary process. When we first started, I always tell the story, we were doing all the work ourselves. We're driving the trucks. We're answering the phone. We're hauling the furniture. We did have aspirations

[00:08:50] of becoming a bigger business because I do remember we went and bought a 1-800 number to make ourselves look like a national brand. Put it on the back of the truck was still routed

[00:08:58] to our cell phone. People would call to complain about driving. I'd be in the driver's seat apologizing saying, oh yeah, we'll fire those guys. Basically, they get back to the office. Thanks for reporting that to us. We'll make sure they're safer on the road.

[00:09:09] We actually started to burn out a little bit doing everything in the business like you just described. It was one of our mentors said to us, hey, look, if you're ever going to have another truck, let alone another location, you've got to start learning how

[00:09:20] to work on the business, not just in the business. You've got to start creating systems and processes for you to then bring other people and plug them in. Actually, it was the airline industry analogy that he gave me. He said every time a pilot

[00:09:32] gets ready to fly the plane, he or she goes through their checklist. The pre-flight checklist and pre-landing, whatever. You guys obviously know more than I. This is just the analogy he gave me. It made so much sense. The first thing we started doing in our business was

[00:09:45] making checklists of how we did everything, how we wore the uniform, how we drove the trucks, how we greeted the client, how we answered the phone, hopefully not while driving. The idea was that eventually we'd be able to plug people in to do those different aspects

[00:09:59] of the business. It was an iterative evolutionary process. Eventually, we got to hire people that also could bring value. If they saw a broken system or broken process, we gave them the empowerment to fix it. There was a lot of tripping and falling over

[00:10:12] ourselves in those early days, hiring the wrong people or giving them not enough direction or instruction or promoting somebody past his or her point of competency. Like I said, it was an evolutionary process, but we did always have this

[00:10:25] long-term ambition of being a national brand. Then we started following this small step process of creating systems and bringing in people to help develop those systems along the way. That is what ultimately allowed us to franchise the brand, has allowed us to scale

[00:10:41] the service, scale the culture. We've got 250 franchisees around the country now. It's, as I said, a 20-year overnight success. I think a lot of entrepreneurs either they get caught up in that burnout cycle or they don't have the patience to allow the process to evolve and

[00:10:57] understand that it doesn't happen overnight. It's not like a switch flips where you're going from being in the business to all of a sudden on the business full-time. It's sort of a mindset and intentionality, and then a process of making it happen.

[00:11:10] Those are wise comments. Obviously, a mentor helped you. Who is this mentor? How did you meet them? What kind of background did they have? We've had a few over the years. This particular mentor, she's one of the founders of Bright Star

[00:11:25] Care franchising that actually have given us that advice. We also have joined different peer groups like the Entrepreneurs' Organization and YPO. Being around other business owners, business leaders, entrepreneurs, you're able to find mentors and subject matter experts that

[00:11:42] A, doesn't make you feel like you're out on an island and B, gives you some insights that maybe you're not thinking about or contemplating. That's excellent. That's great. I think many people have great ideas. They have this idea to have a landscaping

[00:11:56] company or moving company or a franchise, but execution is kind of where the rubber meets the road. It's where the magic happens. Can you kind of, the point at which you move from

[00:12:06] this is not just a couple of trucks, this is a, I'm going to take action to really make this. What were your first couple of hires? What were your first couple of things that you did?

[00:12:15] Yeah. I mean, so our business, I think is pretty relatable because it's like trucks and labor. It's not like we reinvented something completely off the wall or some crazy tech platform in

[00:12:25] Silicon Valley. We had a catchy name, a great image. We had kind of an intentional focus on trying to develop culture and service. And we became really students of entrepreneurship, students of business ownership where we were trying to take pieces of every playbook,

[00:12:39] every entrepreneurship book we read, every leadership conference we attended and apply it into our business. Because it was sort of this working ecosystem that we could try to apply the things that we were learning that were maybe theoretical before we had a business, but

[00:12:52] applicable once we had the company. And some of those early hires, when we finally started evolving from just hiring any warm body that could fill a seat or could fog a mirror to

[00:13:02] actually having a process by which we vetted the people and had a defined criteria of what we were looking for in a system for interviewing and identifying the right fit. And also being comfortable with making mistakes too, because one of the things I've always had to

[00:13:18] kind of remind myself is that even the professional sports teams get it wrong. And they've got all the, in terms of who they draft, who they sign to play on the team, and they've got all the videotape. It's not like we can see the other prospective

[00:13:30] employees at their prior job. We got to take their resume. We got to take their word for it, some of their references and try to predict if they're going to be the right fit for

[00:13:37] something that may or may not be related to what they did previously. And so those are some of the lessons that we've had to just keep getting better at through repetitions really. Tanner Iskra I think that making mistakes is something that is a common thread through a lot

[00:13:52] of entrepreneurs willing to make mistakes and a lot of investors too, they're newer to the game. You got to jump in. You got to be willing to take mistakes. I think that our education

[00:14:03] often prepares us to be employees, right? And the educational system is all about not making mistakes. If you make a mistake that's bad and you get a bad grade, you got to do better.

[00:14:13] Instead of rewarding you for making mistakes and failing so that you can get the experience. So how do you, were you just born with that mindset? Is it something that you were exposed to throughout primary education or college or were you around friends that were entrepreneurial

[00:14:31] and willing to take risks and fail? Chris Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think I always had the entrepreneurial energy. I was willing to not necessarily stand in line and form to the way everything was being laid out for me, but I didn't know where I could apply

[00:14:44] that energy until we sort of found this idea, this name and had the truck to actually go pursue something that we could then build. Prior to that, I was just sort of restless. I, there's actually a great story I heard of Sarah Blakely. She's the founder of Spanx,

[00:14:59] one of the first female self-made billionaires out there. And she talks about how when she was growing up, her father would ask her at the dinner table and her siblings, what did you fail at today? Basically to your point making failure, not a negative,

[00:15:12] but a learning opportunity and something that you can be comfortable with experiencing. And it's hard for me because I don't have any direct recollection of whether it was my parents or teachers sort of instilling that willingness to embrace failure or willingness

[00:15:26] to embrace risk. But I think it was just a bit of making my own mistakes and then going to conferences or hearing speakers talk and talk about the importance of failing fast and failing forward. Yeah, I love that so much. So she's married to a guy

[00:15:40] named Jesse Itzler who I've known for, well, not personally, but I've seen him speak. The first time I heard about him was on a bigger pockets episode. And if you look this up, he talks about that. He talks about her family at the end of every week saying,

[00:15:52] okay, what did you fail at this week or today? And that's a concept that I've brought into my personal conversations with my other half. And it's if you're not failing, you're not pushing hard enough. And that is, it's such a cool concept and something

[00:16:06] that if you have kids, man, what a powerful thing to ask around the dinner table of what did you fail at this week or today to really accept? We do the rose. What is your rose, your bud and your thorn at dinner every night now?

[00:16:20] The rose is something you're happy about. The bud is something that you're learning and the thorn is it could be your failure or just your thorn on your side. So Love that. Stole that from a friend. That's great. That's good.

[00:16:29] I think along these lines, we're talking about systemic conditioning. Everybody's raised to be like go to school, get good grades and prepares everybody to basically be an employee. Right? And there's no real entrepreneurial high school you can go to or maybe there is,

[00:16:46] but they're very infrequent, right? The system conditions you to be get good grades, get out, go to school or whatever and be an employee. You've kind of spoken to like you get out there and like other entrepreneurs speak. I know you do a lot of speaking yourself. What

[00:16:59] advice would you give a parent of children in school right now on just because obviously I've taken the pill and now I'm, you know, I want my kids to be entrepreneurs. So we're doing

[00:17:09] things, getting a vending machine and teaching them about cogs and things like that. But what would you, what would advice would you give those parents or maybe even to the parent who's been conditioned to be an employee their entire life that wants to make the switch?

[00:17:19] Well, I think what you just suggested is doing some of those things, exposing kids to entrepreneurial experiences and, but also being okay with it is not for everybody because they're not, everybody can be an entrepreneur or even wants to be an entrepreneur. But I think

[00:17:36] now more than ever, it's a much more viable or at least recognized path that people might take. I think Shark Tank has actually done a great job of just mainstreaming entrepreneurship, to a degree they've almost glamorized it a little bit too much in my opinion, because

[00:17:51] it makes it, it doesn't paint the picture of truly the knocks that you got to be able to take to get through the pain, sort of the pain tolerance you have to be able to have

[00:17:59] the failure tolerance. You have to be willing to have and sort of that, that relentlessness necessary to kind of push through, to have your vision turn into a reality. But I do think some of the tactical elements, whether it's cashflow management,

[00:18:14] sales, customer service, just ownership, leadership, I think all of those things can be valuable whether somebody pursues a career as an employee or pursues a career of entrepreneurship. And then ultimately the aspiring entrepreneur or potential entrepreneur will

[00:18:31] kind of recognize if it's something that they want to pursue as well. I think it's like pushing one of our kids into a certain sport. You can tell which one they're really gravitating towards and which one they're, even if they're really good at that one,

[00:18:45] it doesn't interest them as much. And so I think just exposing everyone to the notion of entrepreneurship and not making it a mandate, but just same way as we don't should make mandating college or career path as it used to be traditionally.

[00:18:58] Absolutely. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. And one thing that you mentioned was like, it's not all gumdrops and lollipops on the way, right? You made it, I'm sure you had your challenges, but what was your major challenge? You grinded, you're burnt out and you're like,

[00:19:12] and one day you just boom, you hit the wall and just what was that and how did you get through it? I think brute force, if I'm being honest with you, it's like when I think about the,

[00:19:24] when we got into franchising, for example, we had this sort of naive glamorized view that it was going to make things easier. It's like, oh, royalties, that means passive income. Passive means like completely like mailbox money. And I think in reality, yes, we are at a scale now

[00:19:41] where the royalty stream is consistent. We've got a great leadership team and I'm not involved as much in the day to day. I'm not taking as much inbound knocks or shrapnel as I used to, but

[00:19:51] I think it was a much longer march. I think a lot of entrepreneurs maybe, I don't think any entrepreneur has ever said I made more money faster than I expected to and easier than I expected to. It's usually the opposite. And it's kind of because as

[00:20:04] entrepreneurs, we're eternal optimists. If we wouldn't be successful, if we didn't believe wholeheartedly that our vision was going to work and that our vision was going to work faster than it ultimately takes to work. And so I think that was the processing and learning

[00:20:19] experience for me when we started franchising, it was right as the housing market was taking a crash. So if you were asking somebody to start a home services franchise, that may not be the

[00:20:27] ideal time to do it. But in hindsight, I think it was actually the best time because it made us really much more resilient, much more gritty. We were able to just withstand the headwinds and

[00:20:37] keep pushing through day in, day out and not willing to quit. And that allowed us to ride the wave of this past decade of growth. And now of course we're in a high interest rate

[00:20:45] climate, the housing market is a little slower. And so I think that having had that experience previously, we're much better prepared to withstand the current climate. That's interesting. I want to make, I want to kind of change the trajectory a little bit of this

[00:20:58] and talk about how a pilot might participate in your brand or in your franchise. If I'm a pilot in Georgia and I want to grab a college hunk's hauling junk franchise, like what does that

[00:21:11] look like? And is it passive? Is it active? Is it a little bit of both? Can it be passive? Yeah, I would say it's a little bit of both. At the outside, it's certainly owner managed.

[00:21:20] And so we've set up our franchise opportunities in a way where we do anticipate our franchise owners being on the business, not in the business. We don't participate our franchise owners moving furniture or hauling junk, but they do need to hire and hold accountable the team members that

[00:21:36] are going to be doing that and building some relationships in the community with channel partners like real estate agents, property managers, and so forth. We do a lot of the back office functions for them, call center operations, bookkeeping. We do that on behalf

[00:21:48] of the franchisees. So it helps take and alleviate a lot of the heavy lifting off their plate so they can just focus working on the business, not in it. And all of our franchise training is geared towards that. So we actually have a franchise website, collegehunksfranchise.com,

[00:22:01] where people can learn about the investment level, what's involved. And we have kind of a discovery webinar we can take people through. But it actually would be an interesting concept, certainly for pilots to consider because systems focused where it's all about executing

[00:22:14] the playbook. And if you can execute the playbook, it's going to be effective. And that's really the key. What markets are you lacking franchise ease in? Yeah, we're in 250. We have 250 franchise owners. And it'd be hard for me to pinpoint

[00:22:30] exactly which markets we're lacking. I would say if you were to look at a map, the least concentration is currently out west just because we started on the East Coast, where we started in March and our way out west. But we do have some locations in California

[00:22:41] and Seattle and in Arizona and so forth. But the major metros in those markets aren't fully filled out. And we've got really got territory, quite frankly, everywhere. I'm also involved in another franchise called Kiddo Kinetics, which is a little bit lower

[00:22:54] investment level. It's kind of a youth enrichment sports franchise that my business partner and I invested in. And we knew the founder. And so we decided to back him. They've got about 60 franchisees. And it's an interesting youth sports, youth enrichment extracurricular franchise platform. That's amazing. That's super popular.

[00:23:10] My kids doing like the arena sports on the weekend for soccer. It's like a zoo in there. There's just tons of space. But Tate, I know you're done to get in. I'm just curious, like for I don't think we've really talked about

[00:23:19] franchise as much on this show. So can you give us a really elementary 101 course on what are franchises? How do they work? Everybody knows McDonald's is a franchise, right? But what are the economics behind it? What does it look like?

[00:23:32] What are the responsibilities of the person that are that's buying the franchise? What are the responsibilities of the seller of the franchise? Give us the breakdown. Yes. So we are the franchisor. And so what we do is we sell and support the franchisees.

[00:23:46] The franchisees are individual independent business owners that want to own a business. And we always say be in business for themselves, but not by themselves. So they would pay an upfront franchise fee for the rights to operate our business in

[00:24:00] a specific market or in the McDonald's example for the rights to operate a McDonald's store in their market. And then we would provide them the training, the tools, the vendor resources, the know-how, as I mentioned, some of the back office functions on how to run their business

[00:24:14] so that they have all the support and tools, the playbook if you will, the operating manual, and they'll run the business independently. They'll make their own hires. They'll make it run their own sales, their own revenue. And they pay us a small percentage what's called

[00:24:27] a royalty for the ongoing support. And so that's a percentage of their revenue. And so typical royalty in the franchise industry is anywhere from five to eight percent, depending on kind of the concept. And there's 3,000 different franchise concepts out there.

[00:24:41] So a lot of people think about the food space, naturally Subway, McDonald's, but obviously we're in the home services. There's other home service franchises like painting and landscaping or pressure washing. There's, as we talked about, youth sports

[00:24:53] franchises and the whole gamut health and wellness. And there's actually franchise brokers out there that'll work with people to help them explore what's the right fit for them. And there's even actually a guy, I met a guy recently at the International Franchise

[00:25:04] Association who's starting a crowdfunding platform called Franchairs where people can invest and be fractional owners of franchise specific concepts in their market because maybe they don't want to run it or don't want to be the franchisee per se, but they could help back

[00:25:18] somebody as an operator. I want to pull on that thread. That's interesting. What's the success rate of business owners? It's like starting a business with training wheels in my eyes, right? Yeah. What's the success rate versus starting your own company?

[00:25:32] Yeah. The analogy we use is we're handing you the baton after the third leg of the four-legged relay race. So you're getting, you're starting at third base, not at home plate. So you've got to bring it home. And the success statistics that I've seen is that

[00:25:44] four out of five franchise owners succeed in the first five years, whereas one out of five independent business owners succeed in the first five years. So if you're an independent, you got a 20% chance of success, of likelihood of success. If you're a franchise owner, you got an

[00:25:59] 80% likelihood of success. So that's why when people are always like, well, why would I buy a franchise when I could go get a truck and start a moving company myself? And it's, well, yeah, you could do that. But then you're going to be answering the phone while driving

[00:26:09] the truck, while hauling the junk, while trying to figure out how to hire your employees and what to call the company and how to build your website and all these other things that we've already done and spent the past 20 years developing. And because we've got those,

[00:26:20] to your point, the training wheels in place for our franchise owners, they got a much more likelihood of success than doing it on their own. But anybody that's contemplating franchising, do your research, talk to their existing franchisees to see how they're doing,

[00:26:32] would they do it again? Are they making the returns that they anticipated or are they working in the business or on the business? Those are the types of questions you would want to know

[00:26:41] if you were contemplating an opportunity. Right. I know you're down to jump in there, go for it. No, just if we could talk about the passive activity, I didn't realize that was a thing. So there's a website you can go to invest passively in franchisees or franchisors.

[00:26:55] Both actually. So our KinoKinetics franchise that we're invested in is actually doing a capital raise for the franchisor. And then there's also other concepts on the platform that are individual franchisees. So it's a guy by the name of Kenny that I met up in

[00:27:09] the International Franchise Association, and then he started this platform called FranShares. I believe it's franshares.com. You can just Google FranShares. And the idea is that there's a lot of people that want to run a franchise that maybe don't

[00:27:24] have the capital. And there's a lot of people that want to invest in a franchise that maybe don't have the time. And so the idea is that it's going to match operators with investors

[00:27:34] and have a reasonable split of how the equity would flow. And it would give individuals the opportunity to invest in franchise concepts that are proven, and they have a good track record that maybe aren't in a specific market. Maybe you've seen it up in Boston,

[00:27:48] but it would do really well in Cleveland and you live in Cleveland and you want to help bring that concept to Cleveland, but you don't want to run it or you don't want to put the whole

[00:27:56] full investment in it. You want to put 20 grand or whatever. So that I think is a very innovative concept. It's new to franchising, but I think it'll do well. And then there's, as I mentioned, brokers that work with individuals who do want to own and operate

[00:28:08] a franchise and they can help evaluate, is it passive? Is it active? Is it semi-passive is a word that they throw around a lot where you're maybe not in the day to day, but you still got to go check in on things throughout the week and so forth.

[00:28:20] Yeah, that's great. And what do they vet the franchisee or you're just doing the investor, the passive investor kind of has to figure that out. I believe with franchisees, I believe they're vetting the franchisee. I believe

[00:28:32] they've got sort of a pool of candidates, whether it's veterans or retired executives or middle managers or kind of upstart leaders that do want to go run a business, but maybe don't have the full capital or traditional financing available to be able to fund it themselves.

[00:28:48] If I was like, hey, I want to go away for the weekend. I want to go to a conference, an industry trade show. What conference am I going to go to? I just want to learn in general about franchisees and franchise opportunities.

[00:28:58] Where I would start is the International Franchise Association website. Franchise.org is the domain. They're the authority figure in the space. Their membership organization of both franchisors and franchisees. They host learning events, education, trade shows,

[00:29:14] and everything in between. Actually my business partner and I, we were just named entrepreneurs of the year by the International Franchise Association. Thank you. So it was a really cool experience, kind of a full circle experience for us because I remember being at their

[00:29:26] conference looking up at the stage at the award winners and being like, wow, that's pretty, pretty aspirational. But yeah, I would definitely start there. That's amazing. Okay. So thank you for your time so far, by the way. This has been

[00:29:38] really cool, but you got to tell us what is the craziest piece of junk that you had to haul away? Let's have some fun with this. What happened to you that, oh my God, I can't believe that

[00:29:50] happened. Okay. I've put most of them out of my memory bank because like Michael Jordan, he doesn't remember his misses. I don't like to remember the traumatic events that have happened. But I think the one that I do recall is we were helping with an eviction.

[00:30:04] And this is when I was still on the truck and we get into the house and there was, this is in Washington, DC, you know, miracle city. And it was like a 15 foot python loose

[00:30:15] in the house. Like it was the guy's pet and he just lived with it. And needless to say, we ran out of the house, waited for animal control to come take care of that. And so that wasn't a snake. That was just a politician on a bed.

[00:30:29] I see what you did there. That's right. So yeah, that was before the swamp was even a thing. That was what we saw there. But yes, that was pretty intense. Some of the extreme hoarding

[00:30:40] situations are obviously emotional, but also a little bit intense as well that we get called into where there's stuff piled head high throughout the house. And you got to kind of walk through this little maze of newspapers and clutter. We've had actually a franchise up

[00:30:56] in Boston where a client, well, I said client, somebody called to have us haul away these music speakers, but was very adamant that they needed to go straight to the disposal facility and could not be resold, could not be opened. They specifically said open. It was like,

[00:31:13] well, who would open a speaker? Well, the speakers were bumping around in the back of the truck and open and there was like machine guns, grenades, like all these things. And it

[00:31:24] turns out it was these weapons that had been used in a bank robbery in Boston and the wife or somebody was trying to dispose of the evidence and had called college hunks to haul it away. So that

[00:31:35] was pretty intense also, but yeah, you got to imagine we're doing half a million jobs a year now. Those stories are probably popping up weekly and hopefully most of them don't make it across my desk thankfully because I- It sounds like a new business idea, right?

[00:31:48] Commandoes hauling ammo, something like that. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Or Jake's hauling snakes. You know, you got- That's awesome. No, I think what's been so interesting is it's so funny how a cool, there's been way more than just this, but like a cool

[00:32:04] name, like marketing and branding is such an important part of your business that I know you've got the grit and the drive and the tenacity and the mentors and all this other stuff, but it sounds like that was kind of the foundation, right? Like a funny name.

[00:32:17] I mean, the point I think of the quote that jumped out at me when I saw it, he says, many a small thing can be made big with the right form of marketing. And it's so true. The

[00:32:26] name is catchy and it's a mouthful. Like it flies in the face of traditional marketing 101. Most people can't even say the whole thing, college hunks hauling junk and moving. We added and moving when we started doing movies. It's like a six word company name. A lot of people

[00:32:40] refer to us just as college hunks or the hunks, but by now because it's more well known, but yeah, there was a book we read called The Purple Cow by Seth Godin and he says,

[00:32:49] you're driving down a country road and you see a bunch of brown cows. You're going to keep driving. You've seen it before, but if you see a purple cow, it's remarkable. It's going to stand out.

[00:32:56] You're going to pull over, take pictures, tell friends about it. Nowadays you put it on social media. So that's stuck in my head is we got to stand out. College hunks as a name,

[00:33:04] the colors, it's a pattern interrupt. And then it can't just stop at the name and the brand. It's got to be the culture experience of our team members, the service experience of our

[00:33:15] clients. That's the steak of the purple cow. So the name is kind of the outside exterior, but the steak, the experience is what creates the longevity and the repeat business and the referrals. Makes a lot of sense. I love it. All right. So it was late at night

[00:33:30] and you're grob grind and what's your favorite go-to snack? Lately it's been almond butter and jelly half sandwich. I fold it in half. So I was eating almond butter and some jelly half sandwich and a glass of milk,

[00:33:44] lactate milk because I'm lactose intolerant. But I like the kind bars. I like just to grab a handful of walnuts and almonds. Try to do it healthier nowadays. In the old days it was probably a hot pocket or a Stouffer's pot pie or something like that. Something

[00:33:57] microwavable. Love that. All right. What's an unpopular opinion about entrepreneurship that you have? Two unpopular opinions. One is the naive opinion that it's easy because it's certainly not or that the overnight success happens overnight. And then I think the other

[00:34:11] one is that the unpopular opinion, and this is probably a narrow population that views entrepreneurs as greedy that aren't passionate about impact, aren't passionate about making a difference because I do think entrepreneurs are dreamers. I think most entrepreneurs might

[00:34:28] get into business with the notion of yes, making financial wealth and success and status and those sorts of things that are maybe ego driven. But I think the ones that are truly successful that actually make it past the starting blocks are the ones that have a broader

[00:34:41] purpose and a broader impact that they're trying to create. And they want to create meaning with the work that they're doing. And we actually say at College Hunts, our purpose is to move the world. It's a double meaning. We want to move people physically, but we actually want

[00:34:52] to move people emotionally with their interaction with our brand and our franchise platform. And so I think that notion that all entrepreneurship, oh, you're just greedy and you're just trying to make money and you're trying to exploit your employees and things

[00:35:02] of that nature. I think that's pretty frustrating. That's totally true. And I believe that. I mean, entrepreneurship is really tough. It's taken me and Tate a long time to have success in our businesses. And sometimes it feels like there's no success and sometimes it feels so. Yeah.

[00:35:17] Some days you're having a breakthrough. Some days you're having a breakdown and maybe it's some hours. It's a little bit of both. Yeah. Be nice to your fellow entrepreneur. They need it. Give them a hug when you see them. My last question that I have for you,

[00:35:30] and I think Tate, I don't know if you have one more, but what do you see as the next big trend in your industry or just anything that you're kind of thinking about right now? I know you're always, you've got. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know,

[00:35:41] honestly the zeitgeist right now is artificial intelligence because the speed at which it's excelling is just kind of incredible. I saw a post yesterday where a guy was actually doing a podcast interview with an avatar of himself because they had created a video ability for the

[00:36:00] avatar to look and sound just like him. And they created a GPT where the avatar had read all of this guy's books and knew everything about them. So they were like interviewing and challenging each other. It was like black mirror stuff. So I can't even really wrap my

[00:36:16] head around that. That was like, I got to pause here for a second, but for us, I think it'll be a while before the robots are moving the furniture and hauling the junk. So we got

[00:36:23] to deal with human interaction, but I actually think to be honest with you, the opportunity is to be more human in a world that's becoming more and more tech driven because that human

[00:36:36] touch, the human interaction, yes, AI is going to be able to be more and more human and try to like take the place and or replicate or supplement the human interaction. But I think one thing about our industry is it's a very human intensive business.

[00:36:52] And it's also still a high touch business. People want to talk to a human on the phone. They want to when they're booking, they want to know who's coming into their home to do

[00:36:59] the work. And so I think you can do that and put that human touch on any business. You even look at Amazon, which is a very tech platform concept. They try to put that human

[00:37:09] touch and the human elements into what they're doing. So I think that's the opportunity. That's great. That's amazing. Who do you, my last question is for someone listening to this, they're sitting in the cockpit with some earphones in and they're thinking, OK,

[00:37:23] maybe this franchise thing could be interesting. Who's it right for and who's it wrong for? It's right for somebody that has a vision, has a passion, and has a work ethic that they're willing to learn and commit wholeheartedly to something. They're willing to go all in

[00:37:42] on something. I think it's wrong for individuals that think it's going to be an overnight success. It's wrong for individuals that are going to sort of quit the moment it gets challenging or

[00:37:53] the moment there's a setback. And I think it's wrong for individuals that maybe don't have the patience for the results. I always say urgency of effort, patience for results. You've got to have that combination and not everybody has that mindset. It's also probably wrong for

[00:38:08] people that don't like people because you've got to have some human relation dynamics. If you're going to be a good entrepreneur, you've got to be able to interact with your clients, your employees, your investors, whatever the case may be.

[00:38:19] So you've got to have some good human dynamics as well. That makes a lot of sense. Well, Nick, thank you so much. I love that. Yeah, I love that quote you gave. What was it again? It was

[00:38:29] patience. You have to have the patience, the grit. Go ahead. Sorry, I'm going to screw it up. Yeah, that's OK. You probably come up with a better one. I always say urgency of effort, patience for results. And that's

[00:38:38] actually stuff I kind of a mantra I keep in my mind because it's like you go crazy hoping for the results to come faster and you can drive yourself crazy sitting up at night wondering if it's going to work. But it's that compound effect of chipping

[00:38:51] away and then it starts to create some momentum. And the momentum is real once it starts to flywheel effect that Jim Collins talks about is real. And you don't know when it's going to break, but it does eventually start moving.

[00:39:02] That's amazing. Well, Nick, we wanted to thank you for your time. Thanks for coming on and given our listeners a overview of your story and in the franchise world and how they can participate passively or actively or learn more. So thank you so much for coming on.

[00:39:17] Hey, thanks. Thanks a lot. What you guys are doing. All right. And for those listeners, thanks for listening or tuning in. Remember, you can always go to ask at passiveincomepilots.com. If you have a question, engage with us on social media. You can go to the

[00:39:30] Facebook group. And with that to the next show.