Co-founder and CEO of Franzy | Former founder & CEO turned franchising enthusiast | On a mission to make franchising simpler, smarter, and more accessible
Joined January 2022
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2010: Bought my first business, Wake Wash. Learned seller financing + DCF before I knew what to do with them. Life changed.
2014: Graduated from Wake Forest. Sold Wake Wash for multiple 6 figures. Joined Ernst & Young.
2016: Quit EY. Started 2ULaundry with childhood friends, 5 guys, 3-bedroom apartment, mattresses on the floor, doing deliveries and laundry ourselves. Raised $400K on a $2M valuation.
2017–2019: Techstars → Atlanta. Built our first laundromat in an old McDonald’s. Raised $8.9M (seed + Series A). Thought we’d “made it.” We hadn’t.
2020: Launched Raleigh… shut it down 60 days later due to COVID. Laid off people I cared about. Rebuilt the model and planted the seeds of LaundroLab.
2021–2022: Franchising took off, sold 100+ licenses, raised $20M Series B. Learned that growth only matters when incentives align with the people building alongside you.
2023: A year of pain: dad’s cancer, COO’s passing, ruptured Achilles, wife’s immigration challenges. Realized nothing matters more than health and loved ones. Stepped down as CEO.
2024: Focused on myself. Then teamed up with Chris Wright to build @franzyinc, an idea from 2021 to democratize franchising and empower operators.
2025: Fully launched Franzy. Raised $3.6M. Became a dad to Luka Mateo.
None of this makes me “successful.” It just means I’ve stuck around long enough to learn what actually matters:
Build things that help people
Work with aligned incentives
Don’t lose yourself in the process
34 years in. Many more miles to go.
If you’re betting on yourself this year, I’m rooting for you.
I’m developing 10 PopUp Bagels shops in the Midwest, and the first one in Minneapolis is getting close.
I spend most of my time helping people figure out which franchise actually fits them. Now I’m the one going through it, practicing what I preach, and it feels a lot like the old days running laundry businesses. It’s also a little funny, because I used to be a franchise hater.
Knowing this process as well as I do, I’ll tell you there’s still no shortcut. Permits, builders, hiring, it’s all hard work. That’s why the system you pick matters so much. You want a brand that’s actually going to help you through the hard parts, and the best way to find that out is to call their franchisees and ask, “Would you do this again knowing everything you know now?”
I’m going to share all of it as we go, so follow along if you want to see what opening a franchise actually looks like from the inside.
Opening date and location for shop #1 coming soon.
Burger King offloading 200 corporate units is a great signal when capital funds menu innovation.
Trading store EBITDA for royalties works if cash aids local operators.
Trimming payroll means nothing if friction kills repeat visits. Hospitality builds brand equity.
Walmart pushes vendors to 60-day payment terms while collecting cash instantly through its own rails.
A guest loads a $25 balance for a $10 lunch costing the store $4 on net 60 terms.
Trimming payroll means nothing if app friction kills repeat visits.
Frontline hospitality builds lasting brand equity.
Noticing the timeline complaining about AI pricing and calling it price gouging.
People already pay a ZIP code tax every day. People in wealthy neighborhoods already get quoted more for drywall repair or lawn maintenance than the same work in a different ZIP code. Giving an operator market data simply surfaces key insights so a franchisee can optimize local pricing and lift store margins.
Real antitrust happens when competing gas stations collude so drivers have zero alternatives. When McDonald's surfaces pricing insights to operators, a guest can easily choose Burger King, Wendy's, or Chick-fil-A.
Any efficiency gain on payroll means nothing if pricing friction turns off guests and kills repeat visits.
Technology only creates enterprise value in a franchise when it protects frontline customer experience and hospitality.
Leaving Ernst & Young after buying my first business at 18 taught me that aggressive learning compounds faster than a safe corporate salary.
In your 20s, you learn 10x more inside a high-velocity startup than peers climbing the ladder at Pepsi or Bank of America.
At 34 building Franzy, the hardest operational lesson has been accepting that founders do not scale. Early on, you micromanage because you think nobody else can execute to your standard, but progress beats perfection every time.
The unlock was learning to hire people smarter than myself using the A method. We evaluate candidate life patterns, accountability, low ego, and adaptability from their earliest influences all the way through their career, and then get completely out of their way. Roadblock clearing only.
Saving payroll dollars means nothing if internal friction trickles down to the guest. Getting out of the way lets great operators obsess over customer experience and build real brand equity.
Seeing people on the timeline fight for 4% retail margins.
Commercial maintenance is an unemotional budget line that never gets cut. An office park or apartment complex has to get grounds landscaped, turnovers painted, and HVAC handled every month. Backing an operator with a franchise call center, back office accounting, and brand trust lets someone with sales chops scale recurring contracts without fighting local outfits on price.
Saving 5% on payroll means nothing if sloppy execution creates friction and kills repeat visits.
Enterprise value always lands on customer experience and brand equity.
Hawaiian Bros signed a 52-unit development agreement in Florida, but scaling that fast comes down to delivery mix.
If third-party delivery is 60% of orders like Jersey Mike's, an operator can take B real estate and still drive A+ revenues. But when a brand relies on dine-in foot traffic, you have to pay up for the A+ box. Once you pour the concrete, you cannot move it.
Permitting delays will test patience, but the real test is the first 30 days. Nailing the grand opening matters more than saving on rent because that first visit locks in guest perception and repeat visits.
I was wondering why there wasn't much innovation in the mobile game space, and now it all makes sense.
This is insane
Ace Hardware charges operators a 0% royalty on gross sales.
Corporate makes money selling tools and paint at wholesale rates a solo shop cannot match.
Pooling purchasing power across thousands of stores protects unit margins and builds a durable distribution network.
I've interviewed 60+ founders and franchise owners on The Exit Plan.
Very few started the way Jeff Platt did.
He was 21 when his dad handed him a two-location trampoline park in Las Vegas. He grew it into Sky Zone: nearly 200 parks before the 2018 sale.
A month after selling, he was bored. So he started over and co-founded Bowie Barker, and now he runs The NOW Massage.
If you're thinking about buying a franchise, or franchising your own business, this is the episode to start with.
I condensed my biggest lessons from the conversation below:
1. Franchising Should Start With Demand, Not a Pitch
A UFC fighter trained at Sky Zone on Spike TV. Three minutes of footage aired internationally, and emails poured in from people who wanted a park in their city. Jeff didn't go looking for franchisees. They found him first.
2. You Don't Need to Be an Expert to Start
Jeff had no idea how franchising worked. He flew to Chicago, took a two-day course and started selling. He learned the rest by running the system.
3. Your Franchisees Will Out-Operate You
He went into franchising sure no franchisee would run a park as well as corporate. He was wrong. Owners will almost always be better operators than the franchisor, and the best ideas in a system come from them.
4. Learn From Owners, Not the Brand
That's why he now tells prospects they'll learn more from other owners than from the brand. If you're buying, the calls with current franchisees matter more than the sales deck.
5. The Exit Isn't the Finish Line
The morning after the Sky Zone sale closed, Jeff was on his way to the office at 5:36. Within a month he was bored. Know what you'll do the day after you sell.
6. The Best Ideas Start in a Line You're Stuck In
Jeff waited three weeks for an appointment at his own dog groomer. That wait became Bowie Barker, which started franchising 18 months after its first location opened.
(Sky Zone, Bowie Barker and The NOW Massage aren't Franzy partners.)
(links in comments)
Spotify 👉 open.spotify.com/episode/6HT…
YouTube 👉 youtube.com/watch?v=ojQsHhse…
Apple Podcasts 👉 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
An office park property manager will never send the accountant outside to mow the lawn.
Commercial maintenance is an unemotional operating expense backed by corporate budgets instead of personal bank accounts.
That gap in price sensitivity is why commercial accounts hold value through downturns when residential customers cancel.
A guest on The Exit Plan bought a CertaPro franchise doing $1.3M in revenue with just over $100K in net worth using debt financing.
He left residential volume flat and focused entirely on securing recurring commercial painting accounts.
Three years later he sold the business at $3M in revenue after building a $1.5M commercial book.
The transaction yielded a multimillion dollar exit that increased his net worth by 10x.
Acquirers pay substantially higher valuation multiples for commercial revenue because corporate contract cash flow is predictable and durable.
Corporate executives excel in commercial franchising because franchisor systems let them execute institutional procurement that mom and pop operators overlook.
We raised over $1M to scale PopUp Bagels before opening our first store.
That upfront capital funded a director of operations and assistant GMs before day one.
Franchising handles the supply chain so multi unit operators can focus entirely on customer hospitality.
Franchisors collect royalties off top line revenue whether a store makes money or not.
Corporate pushes tech mandates and menu discounts completely blind to operator prime costs.
Forcing automation into four wall operations creates customer friction and destroys hospitality.
Laundromats collect customer swipe revenue instantly while utility bills and equipment debt settle 45 days later.
Collecting customer revenue upfront while deferring trade liabilities creates powerful negative working capital.
Walmart turned this exact float into an empire by negotiating net 60 day payment terms with vendors while sweeping register receipts daily.
Reinvesting that upfront cash works right up until customer transaction volume softens and deferred payables come due.
Cash conversion cycles only build a durable moat when an operator protects the underlying revenue pipeline that generates the float.
Dave's Hot Chicken crossed 500 units by keeping the entire menu focused on tenders and sliders.
Radical menu simplicity protects supply chains, speeds up line training, and eliminates customer decision fatigue.
Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane's dominate by mastering two items instead of managing a hundred like Cheesecake Factory.
Opening 100 franchise units in a single year stalls on real estate and construction long before kitchen execution becomes an issue.
Permitting delays, architectural signoffs, and coordinating mechanical, electrical, and plumbing contractors create massive schedule bleed.
Aggressive franchise expansion demands an elite real estate pipeline and buildout team long before marketing spend matters.
Marketing in 2026
Jack Doherty might have made the biggest mistake of his life
Jack (@dohertyjackk) signed a sponsorship deal with Shuffle (a crypto casino) but didn’t fully read the contract
One of the terms is a 6 month ban on posting online
He said he thought it was a joke, but Shuffle is enforcing it
Shuffle CEO (Noah Dummett) just confirmed it’s real and said they’ll stick to the contract even though Jack lawyers are pushing back
Wild times
