The reality is the vast majority of our franchisees are incredibly happy and are more focused on growing themselves than they are focused on exiting. And so we have very few stores for sale across either of our two systems at any point in time. Just again, based on that virtue of people more in the expansion mode versus the exit mode.
Acquiring Minds
Buying a $200m Franchisor (Not Units, the Whole System)
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And so it is a constraint today, at least, as it relates to attracting new people in who want to buy that base platform. But inherently, it's a great thing. We love the fact that...
Our franchisees are so happy with the decision they make that they want to double down and open a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a tenth store. And so that's just the reality of where we are today, where it's much more of a development oriented opportunity than it is a acquire and then build opportunity.
yeah and so therefore also if i were to want to come in and do programmatic acquisition would be hard let's say i let's say i do my first one de novo maybe two de novo and then i want to start programmatically acquiring more i'm going to bump into the same unfortunate enthusiasm of all your franchisees who want to who want to retain their their stores
Yeah, and I think that that ends up being a reality of franchise systems around our scale. So if we've got about 270 stores today, I think the more programmatic acquisition narrative becomes more relevant when you're probably at about 500 stores.
Now, there's some merit, at least in my mind, of, hey, you get in, you start building your platform, you start getting to know the various opportunities, either in a given region or nationally, such that as we achieve that scale, hopefully over time, you're then the acquirer of choice, again, in a regional or a broader context. But yeah, today, it's again, much more on that development side.
What about though the fact that there's gotta be some percentage of franchisee churn just related to retirement age? Are there not boomers who are the owners of these stores who are just ready to stop working?
There are, although it's interesting. In several cases, we have had the parents end up transitioning ownership of the store onto their kids. In a lot of other cases, it is the store manager acquiring the store from the owner as they're looking to retire.
Now, that's not the case in every single circumstance, but there just really are not that many opportunities where you have the initial franchisee who developed the store then looking to exit to a new entrant to our system.
the average age of our franchisees is just pretty young i would say as well um so if you think about retirement age kind of as the relevant threshold then when you would have uh people looking to transact um there aren't that many people who are beyond that threshold it's not zero um and you know five ten years from now that population will grow but as of right now it's it's small
And is that a commentary on the age of the franchise system or the type of person that it has attracted as a franchisee?
I would say more the age of the franchise system, more that.
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