A.J. Lawrence:
Cool. I really appreciate this. I was going through your background, I was going through the businesses matter of fact, as I was just joking with you before we started recording. Since I am actively looking to buy a business, I literally now have had, I think in the past two days, like four or five different brokers from transworld, which is one of the franchises you guys own that I’ve been talking to the different brokers and stuff. So it was like, that makes so much sense. That’s a franchise.

Ray Titus:
Yeah, that one. Transworld has really taken off over the last 12 years that we’ve built it and grown it and become the world’s largest business brokerage. And so it’s exciting to be able to-it happens all the time. I meet people that are looking at businesses or considering businesses and they’re already talking with one of our transworld business advisors.

A.J. Lawrence:
What I really love, and just kind of going back into your background, it’s like you have franchising in your blood. Your dad was the founder of Minuteman Press, which I kind of grew up seeing all the time out there in that sort of first wave of printing company. And I never even knew they were a franchise. And then you started back in the 80s Signarama, and then from there, United Franchise Group, which is such a cool concept of B2B, both from the franchises you own, but also the capabilities you’ve, if that’s the right terminology that you have for helping other entrepreneurs turn their businesses into franchises. So it’s such a cool, you know. It’s like, hey, we have them and then we can help you build them from scratch.

Ray Titus:
Well, we’ve kind of gone full circle. I remember growing up and the Clockman logo was on our dining room table. Okay, so I grew up in an entrepreneurial house and many other people don’t get that opportunity. The first introduction to franchising or entrepreneurship comes when they’re older and they’ve gone through a career of some kind. I grew up in a household. My 8th grade school paper was how to start a franchise company. So I mean I was born and raised to do what I’ve been doing for the last 37 years. So when I got out of college, I went to work with my dad and we started Signarama. Now he had already had a very, very successful franchise company, Minuteman Press for many, many years. And we opened up a sign shop in Farmingdale, Long Island in New York, where I’m from.

A.J. Lawrence:
Long Island.

Ray Titus:
Long Island guy. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay.

A.J. Lawrence:
Oh, Huntington.

Ray Titus:
Okay, Huntington. Well, that’s where we used to go to have a good time.

A.J. Lawrence:
Finnegans. I was raised in Finnegans.

Ray Titus:
Great Finnegans. And there was a place there that had a white-something gardens, I think. Artful Dodger was another one. But there was a lot of great restaurant. We’ll call them restaurants on the podcast.

A.J. Lawrence:
Underage drinking spots.

Ray Titus:
They were pubs. Yeah. But you can walk to all of them, which was really, really good thing. But growing up, I came out of college, went to work with my dad, we started Signarama and we never looked back. So a year later we started franchising and today we have 10 brands, 1600 franchise owners in 80 countries worldwide. And this has been a 37 year progression as an organization. And we became United Franchise Group. But you know, a lot of people think that this is something that happened very quickly. And I’ll keep saying 37 years because the first 14 years we were only Signarama. That was it. And so we then added our second brand which was Embroidme, which later we renamed to Fully Promoted to better suit the products and services that they sell. But that’s after that is when we started to become a multi-branded organization. So I know we were talking earlier about stages of growth and times where we went from being one 1500 square foot sign shop on Long Island to a franchise company of 150 or 200 sign shops to then a multi-branded franchise company adding a second brand, to then we started looking like our shirts had all the logos on them. So we started looking like NASCAR racers.

A.J. Lawrence:
Okay, I want to see one of those shirts.

Ray Titus:
So we to come up with a name. We didn’t have United Franchise Group as a name first. We came up with it after we had three, four different brands and we put it as an umbrella name for our company. And so like I said, we’ve gotten to 10 brands and around the world and we’ve got franchises in South Africa, India to England, to Australia, where we have almost 200 franchisees with our different brands in Australia. That has been a great country for us in New Zealand and Canada to all over the world. And then that led us to the next stage of growth, which was franchise services for franchisors. So first turning them into a franchise. So we offer through Accurate Franchising Incorporated, we offer the ability to take your business and idea and turn it into a franchise company. And that means the Owner’s Manual of Operations, that means the franchise disclosure document, that means the training program, you know, everything that from sales, marketing to turn it into a franchise company.Now we can take that and just work as a consultant, hand it back to the entrepreneur. And now it’s a franchise and they do with it whatever they want and that’s fine. Or if they want to utilize our company and our experiences, we have another company called FranVestCo which does the marketing and sales for franchise companies. So maybe there’s somebody, we turn it into a franchise and they’re not good at sales or they want somebody else to handle the sales, we do that on a commissionable arrangement and we’ll sell the franchises for them.We also have a program called Exit Factor, which prepares businesses to be sold. It’s a program that entrepreneur can go through if they’re interested in potentially selling their business. But maybe it’s not ready to be sold, maybe another year or two. Cleaning up the books, cleaning up the business, you know, just kind of getting it prepared to sell. There’s an awful lot of entrepreneurs that sell their business and lose out on a lot of value that if they just took another six months or a year and cleaned up some things and it would go to a different buyer for a lot more money. And then obviously we have Transworld, which is one of our franchise brands, but then they also help businesses sell. And so, yeah, we have a lot of different services that we have. We have Titan Franchise Services, which is again, helping franchise companies with leads and getting leads. So we have all of these different companies. We also have a technology division where we take ownership stakes in different technology companies for franchise companies. And so, we’re always trying to tie the franchising side of things because that’s our expertise. Whenever we get out of franchising, it’s kind of hit or miss when we get out of franchising. It’s not usually a good thing. So I like to keep us the guardrail in franchising. So we established a company called Starpoint Brands, which Starpoint Brands is now the umbrella name for all our franchise companies. And United Franchise Group is over Starpoint Brands, but then all our service companies for the franchise workers out there. So it kind of sometimes people get confused by if we were just United Franchise Group with all these franchise brands and all these services, like what are you? And so we have to have differentiation in those different things. So it works.

A.J. Lawrence:
I mean it is really cool because one of the thesis that I’ve been developing from having my own experience as an entrepreneur but then also having amazing guests like you come on the show is a lot of the public expectation of an entrepreneur is the Zuckerbergs, the Bezos. Without realizing that Bezos really was in the back office of a bunch of investment firms for many years before he went off and created Amazon or Microsoft. It’s like most entrepreneurs do something small and just incrementally for a very long time, directionally correct, improve the business to then something happens. That transition, we’re all sudden, as you said, 14 years and then boom, things started growing. And it’s like, it’s that years of putting in what I call the reps that is so fascinating. It’s like here you are, you have this really cool, huge, incredibly well developed flywheel of a business and yet it was in hindsight, very incrementally, very directionally focused. But that’s some hard work to do.

Ray Titus:
Well, it’s a constant. You know, it’s every day, it’s every week, it’s every month. But I’m blessed to have my family involved in this business as well. Because not only did my dad helped me, now I’ve brought my sons in. So I have three sons in the business, I have three nephews in the business. We have 15 second generation employees at United Franchise Group. So it’s a very tight knit unit. And that helps. That whole thing helps during the pandemic, it helped during the 08-09 recession. It helps to have people that you’re really tight with that you can really bunker down and really make things happen and create something really, really big here, which is kind of what we’ve done.But like you said, it’s not overnight. Please don’t put me in the Zuckerberg Bezo category. But franchising is, you know, been so good to my family and to myself and my wife and everyone that we decided to do a give back. And we did. We established the Titus Franchise Center at Palm Beach Atlantic University. In fact, it was the first franchise school in the United States. And so we’re real proud of that.There’s been a lot of others that have come along after that, and that’s awesome. We want more and more universities to embrace franchising and we want to help them. We’ve given out to schools like Babson in Massachusetts. That’s a great school. We’ve given them our curriculum and work with their people there. We’ve worked with Tennessee University of Tennessee. We’ve worked with Louisville University of Louisville, that has a franchise school as well. So we’re really, really all about franchising and want to help the kids learn that there’s a career out there in franchising for them. There’s an opportunity to own your own business.I’ll never forget when we announced that we were making this large donation and establishing the Titus Franchise Center at Palm Beach Atlantic University. It was downtown West Palm Beach. It was a pretty big deal. They had a lot of reporters, and at the end, they opened it up for any questions. And the first question I get asked now, I kid you not, the first question I get in front of about 500 people is, I don’t understand why you would want to teach kids to flip hamburgers? So I went at that guy, I mean, he said the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person. And so I said, we are not teaching kids to flip hamburgers. They could figure that out on their own. We’re teaching them to own a McDonald’s, to run a franchise company, to establish and build and grow the next level of franchise companies that are going to come utilizing AI and utilizing technology that we’re not even familiar with now for down the road. And you’re missing the boat completely if you think we’re teaching them for minimum wage jobs. They can get those minimum wage jobs right now without me and without this donation and without the schooling. But the key is to teach them about the franchising industry and understand when they go out of college, they have a resume. They’ve interned here at United Franchise Group. They’ve interned at Chick Fil A. They’ve interned at a lot of these places around West Palm beach and great businesses and schools and I could go from like the Breakers Hotel, which is a part of the intern program to, I mean, some of the best in the world right here that they will work with. And they get full time jobs, they get a leg up. And so that’s really what we’re established with the Titus Franchise Center.

A.J. Lawrence:
Well, I want to kind of dive into that. But first, for you, where do you see yourself as an entrepreneur nowadays? Because you’ve had success, you have the family and the business, all the concepts of what most people think of entrepreneurial success and then some. How do you see yourself as an entrepreneur these days?

Ray Titus:
Well, it’s funny you asked that because I’ve been reflecting a little bit since December because I turned 60 in December.

A.J. Lawrence:
Congratulations.

Ray Titus:
Yeah, thank you. I made 60. And so all that means to me is there’s a better chance I’ll make 70 now. And so when you hit 70, there’s a better chance you’ll hit 80. Right? But really, I don’t ever in my past spend a lot of time reflecting on things. We celebrate them when we achieve them but I don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on all the accomplishments over the 37 years. I’m really more focused on the future. And I’ve always had the mindset that when you’re spending more time thinking about and talking about the past than you are the future, you probably should get out. That’s been my mindset.So the younger employees in our company keep me younger, at least mentally, and keep me sharp. And I understand things that maybe some others that are in their 60s and 70s don’t understand because they don’t work with 25 year olds, 30 year olds on a regular basis. My COO is 32 years old. The president of Starpoint Brands is a 31 year old. Our director of marketing at UFG is a 26 year old. So I can go right around our whole organization and tell you person after person after person. Now where do I see myself in the future? I see myself more helping utilize my experience in directing the future of the organization where not only from the P&L side, but from the creative side.So recently, and I’m a big book reader. And I know some people, the last time they picked up a book was in college. I am a big believer in lifelong learning. That’s one of my big things. And so I read 40 to 50 books a year and I look to take out three, four, five points out of every single book and apply that in our business or apply that in my life. And I’ve been doing that for years, 20 years at least. I also write one book a year. I’ve been doing that for seven years. So I have my eighth book coming out. But we’ll have to listen. My point is with the books is they change you for the better. They change your business for the better if you let them. So I’ll give you an example. Mike Michalowicz did a book called Profit First.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, I’ve been reading that recently.

Ray Titus:
Yeah, Profit First changed United Franchise Group for the better. I have him actually coming to our World Expo in Nashville next year where we get all our brands together and we’ll have five or six speakers that come in. He’s one of them that’s coming in and to speak to the whole group about this. So at different stages, when you talk about the stages of growth, what’s funny for me is I can actually point to a book that helped me through those stages. Right? So like in early stages, there was a book called, and I still pass it out. I pass out books every week here. It’s called Straight Line Leadership. The book Straight Line Leadership helped me personally become better and it helped a lot of our key employees in the organization and as you go like Lincoln on Leadership or the Rockefeller Habits. I can point to different books that the book right now. I’ll give you a book right now that is actually helping us tremendously right now as a company. It’s called The 6 Types of Geniuses by Patrick Lencioni.

A.J. Lawrence:
I heard another entrepreneur talk about it. Okay, please keep going.

Ray Titus:
Look, it’s his newest book. He did The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, he did Death by Meeting. He’s probably one of the best authors in the United States but nobody hears about him because he does business books. And so what I would tell you is this is his best book. This is his best book. It’s amazing. And so it helps you as a person kind of see where you fit in with an organization. But for me, it’s helping me because I have my whole board of directors, my senior management team, all doing this test that he has and then you outline he has six different he calls them geniuses. They’re basically personality traits or whatever you want to call it, but it’s six different items. And two of them that you’re really good at and you love doing, two of them you’re good at them, but you don’t love doing them, but you’re good at them. And two of them you really dislike. Like do two that you just don’t. You may have to do them, but you don’t like doing them at all. And it takes every person and gives them two, two, and two in each one of those categories. And then you could take your whole team and kind of see what you’re lacking and what you’re like. I literally remember a meeting a couple of weeks ago that it was a frustrating meeting. And I look back on it after reading the book and I know why it was frustrating. Now I know I had the wrong people there. I needed to have a couple other different people that would have helped kind of curve out that meeting and make it less frustrating and get to the conclusion that we needed to get to, but we didn’t. And so books have been a big part of my life.

A.J. Lawrence:
That is very cool. One, I expect to see a newsletter on the reading and suggested readings that different on a regular basis from you. But that is really cool because I’ve had that same situation. I joke that someone had been reading or someone told me about Walker Deibel’s Buy Then Grow. I read a lot of business books but most of the time it’s like, okay, I sometimes I’m like, why can’t they just do 20 pages. 200 pages? It’s like there’s 20 pages of good stuff. But I remember picking up that book and being like, this makes so much sense. So therefore I’ve now spent the past year and a half chasing down that rabbit hole. But like I’ve seen it in other things, even other non-business books. Watching my son become fascinated with environmental science because of a specific science fiction book he loves, Ministry of the Mystery of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. And it’s just like, it is so fascinating where reading the books help but every once in a while they just lock you in to some, they hit you differently.

Ray Titus:
Well, I’ll share with you what happened to me. I went to high school. In college, I went on a basketball scholarship. And in college my priorities were probably a little messed up. So what I would say is I think most of us in college, we like to enjoy our college years, right? Well, my priorities were basketball first and then maybe girls or beer. I don’t know which one, girls or beer. And it would be schoolwork to get a good enough grade so that I was eligible to play basketball. That was it.So that was my cycle and it wasn’t good. So anyway, I come out of college, we start Signarama and we have three or four employees. And on a Friday afternoon, I decide, let’s get a group meeting. We don’t have a lot going on right now. Let’s have a group meeting and let’s talk about ways we can improve this business. And so we get everybody in a table and I remember like it’s yesterday. And so, you know, what can we do to improve the business? What can I do? As we’re going through and as we’re coming up with suggestions, one of the older employees there says, Ray, I think what we ought to do is strategic planning. And I looked at him and I said, I think that’s a great idea. But you know, it’s Friday, it’s 5:00. Why don’t we break for the weekend and we’ll come back on Monday and we’ll get right into strategic planning. Great.We break, I walk out and I said to myself, what the hell is strategic planning? I’m 23 years old. I had no idea what strategic planning was. So I went to this place that has all these books in it. It’s called the library. Now, most people today have never heard of it because they just Google and Amazon and they don’t ever have to go to a library, right? But here’s the reality. I went there and I went and found a book from Jack Welch, which he was the chairman of GE at the time, and he did a book and one of the chapters was on GE strategic plan. So I took that book and I memorized that chapter. I went right to chapter 17 and memorized that part of the book because why would you want to read the other chapters? It would make no sense, right? So I just focused on that strategic planning. Came in on Monday morning, said, let’s get into strategic planning. And I just gave it like I was in a 1500 square foot sign shop on Long Island giving GE strategic plan. But I tweaked it a little bit to make it fit us, right? And then we take this break and as I’m walking out, I hear one of the employees say, man, Ray’s unbelievable on strategic planning. And I get in my office and I shut the door and I remember laughing. Because Friday I didn’t even know what strategic planning was and Monday I’m brilliant.But I stopped laughing because I realized I’ve been an idiot, that everything I want in life is in a book. And I just have to find the right book. So I started reading one book a month and taking good ideas and a funny thing started happening. I started getting better and I could actually see it. I remember my mom saying, I don’t know what’s gotten into you the last year but you’re really a different person. You’re changing in front of us. And then I started reading two books a month and three books a month. And then I was doing a lot of traveling because we were opening up stores all over and franchises all over the world and I had a lot more time and I’m reading four books.So again, I had the advantage of having that time in the planes to read the books, which I would always look to take out four or five great points to improve my life and improve my business. I just kept it going and we just kept getting better and better and better. And we challenge our employees to read the books. I pass out books to the franchisees in training school, I do it at conventions, I’d do it here. If we were face to face, I’d give you a book. And that’s kind of my thing is staying that lifelong learning. So, yes, I’ve reflected being 60, but I’m looking forward to the next 10 years being the best years of our company. And how can I help that? It’s not going to be the same work ethic that I had when I was 25 and 30 years old. Openly, 5 o’clock, I’m getting tired. So, you know, I mean, it’s so, you know, but we’re managing with that and the young group can.It’s really been a good combination. We’ve got a lot of long term employees and then we have a lot of young employees and that combination of experience and really grit, which is another great book out there called Grit, which is great for entrepreneurs to read. Forget the woman’s name that wrote it, really strong book too. But always looking at how do we improve this business, how do we improve the model, how do we get better? How can we help our franchise owners be more successful? We have a mission statement here which I have to credit Patrick Lencioni. So he did a seminar for 25 CEOs and I was fortunate enough to be one of those 25 CEOs to go, and it was a one day event and he wanted to talk about mission statement. And literally my mission statement was three paragraphs long. It was on the one wall in a conference room and it basically did everything but, you know, solve world peace. I mean, it was a ridiculous mission statement.

A.J. Lawrence:
Mission statements are very hard.

Ray Titus:
We felt good after we did it, but nobody ever looked at it again.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah.

Ray Titus:
So at this seminar, Lencioni asks me to stand up and give our mission state. And I don’t know it at that point.

A.J. Lawrence:
Oops.

Ray Titus:
Right? So it was one of the more embarrassing moments of my career. And he said, well, how do you hire by it? How do you fire by it? How do you run your business by it? How do your employees even know it if you don’t know it like your mission statement? I said, it’s three paragraphs long. It’s on a conference room. And he said, it needs to be one sentence and everyone needs to know it and everybody has to live by it. And I flew home from that meeting and I wrote down, we have one customer, our franchisee. When they’re successful, we’re successful, and went into the conference room, took the three paragraphs down, had that put up. Then I had a meeting with our company and I said, here’s our mission statement, learn it. Because I’m going to ask you starting tomorrow, and if you don’t know it, I’m going to fire you. You got to know the mission statement. You got to live the mission statement. It’s one sentence. If you can’t memorize one sentence, you shouldn’t be here. And then all of a sudden, people started living by it, and we started growing by it and we started hiring by it and we started firing by it and we started doing things that all of a sudden people would be, you know, because our focus is always on the franchisee. The more successful they are, the more successful we are. The more franchises we sell, the more royalties we collect. It’s all based on the success of the franchisee.

A.J. Lawrence:
I love that. Because what I have found from interviewing entrepreneurs like yourself is so often the concept of a mission statement. And as I’ve got, you know, I had a multiple consultants over different, many periods of times come in and you get those blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then maybe you remember a little bit and there’s nothing that is action driven from how you do that. Yet I’ve seen, like from your process and other entrepreneurs that have continued or have put the effort in to bring it into the life. And it’s usually, once again, that incremental all of a sudden, it’s such a powerful value add.

Ray Titus:
Yeah, you know what I’ve seen the problem is people don’t attach actions with the mission statement. So for instance, we have a mission statement, right? You say, okay, what does that really mean to anybody? Well, I go to my employees and I say, look, if I’m in your office or I’m on the phone with you and a franchise owner calls you, you put me on hold and you take their call. Let’s understand each other. If two people walk into our headquarters and one’s a franchisee and one’s a prospect, a vendor, a supplier, somebody else, you greet the franchisee first. They’re our customer. And so we needed to get, you know, we knew that people knew that, but they weren’t always living by it. And that changed years ago. So like you talk about these stages of growth, I can point back to like I said, different books, different seminars that have helped us through those times to take that next step. And so, like I said, that’s been a big part of us.

A.J. Lawrence:
I’m kind of thinking of two different ways now to kind of talk. I really do think I would like to kind of talk about the type of entrepreneurs from the two directions. One, someone who was looking for a franchise would like to have that, and then also someone who has a business. But maybe even a step back is the thing I have found fascinating in researching for our conversation, because I am so deep into an acquisition, entrepreneurship. And there’s tons of McKinsey studies, there are tons of the Harvard Business School studies. There is the Kellogg School has their reports on Acres ET and the industry is kind of stabilizing. A year ago, if you said you were this, they’d be like, no, you’re micro, you’re this and that. Now everyone’s like, okay, you’re an Apple. But what I found very interesting was there is nothing, literally nothing that compares. There’s talk about the types of business you can and the models and the variations and the probabilities and this and strategic, the model, but not in comparison with a franchise. And yet looking at it, it’s kind of like this is pretty much the same exact thing, just, once again, a slightly different model. Yes, you have a corporate constraint, you have this and that, but businesses, when you acquire, have constraints and variances and rules and environmental cons. So it’s like, I was really kind of highly surprised that this, that even just the comparison is not discussed. It’s almost two different audiences.

Ray Titus:
So take a step back. Take a step back. What we have to do all the time is we meet with people that are looking for their own business. Now we have to sit down with them and try to match them up based on their skill set. Who’s going to be running the business? Do you want a full time, is it a part time? What kind of funding are we looking at as far as that will dictate which business. Because again, we have 10 different franchise companies that we will talk. And most people come in and they’re interested in Signarama or they’re interested in food, they’re interested in our great Greek or our graze craze food business. Or they might be interested in co-working and it’s venture X or office evolution. Right? And so each one of our businesses, they’re different and they attract different people. But then also we have to look and say, are those people good matches for that business?And so when we were talking before this, we talked a little bit about coaching, right? And that’s really the idea that coaches would kind of pick it, help the person gear the business toward their strengths and they would then hire their weaknesses in the business. Because nobody has all the attributes that you need to be a large franchise owner. Like it just, you’re going to need other pieces and like we all do, right? Nobody makes it on their own. You always need other people and you need other people that bring things to the table.So when we look at that’s one side of the equation that’s kind of matching people up. So if it were you and I and you were looking at a business, I would be sitting down going, tell me about your background, tell me what you like to do, tell me what you’re really good at. Tell me you know yourself better than anyone. Tell me what you would be good at. Tell me what you would like. Tell me, have you managed people? What do you do? You want to have a business where there’s a retail location and you go there every day? Or would you rather have something that you work from home? What type of person are you right now in your life? And it’s changed. We all change, we all evolve, right? And so your wife leaves a big company, what’s going to be a good fit for her? Right? And you have to sit down and say, okay, are you going to do this together? Is she going to do this on her own? What’s going to happen as you go through this, you know what’s the strengths and weaknesses. And you need a really, a true third party that will help you do that. And I’ve done that with many, many people and so I’m happy to help you if that’s something down the road.But then on the other side, companies that are successfully run, I walked into a chicken business in Houston and the guy said, United Franchise Group because I’m always wearing my shirt because it’s a calling card. He said, United Franchise Group, do you turn businesses into franchises? And I said, we do. And we turned that business into a franchise. And so these kind of things happen. Now is that a franchise that I wanted to invest in? No, I didn’t because I didn’t want to compete with Chick Fil A and all the other fast foods that are out there. But to me, I look for differentiators. Any time that we sit down and talk to that entrepreneur that has a good idea, I’m talking to somebody right now who you want to talk about a niche. They clean car seats and strollers. They sanitize baby stuff. They’ve been certified to do it. Like the firemen have to get certified to mess with car seats, right? And to understand them, they get certified. But it’s a niche that nobody even thinks about. So like Transworld, everybody knows the real estate industry. Everybody knows how real estate, they sell homes, they sell land. But there’s a lot of people that don’t even know that there’s a whole industry out there for selling businesses and for people to buy an existing business. And maybe somebody’s at a later stage in their life that they don’t want to go through the startup of starting a franchise. Maybe they’d be better off buying an existing business that’s going, that they could step in, already has employees, already has customers, has an income, and they could fix it, maybe they could improve it. Or they, you know, it gives them something to do for the next three to five years or whatever.And so everybody’s different. And so you take a step back, whether it’s the entrepreneur that has a great business idea and we want to help them scale it, turn it into a franchise and grow it, or whether it’s the individual that’s been working somewhere for years and maybe doesn’t get the same benefits financially as others have, or they’re ready to go out on their own, but they want some structure. They don’t want to be by themselves. They want to build their business for themselves but not be by themselves. And so that’s where a franchise is a great opportunity because we provide training, we provide the setup, we provide the support. We have all the vendors and suppliers for that business already negotiated. And then we’ve been through it for years and we can put you in touch with other franchise owners, where we get our best ideas from the franchise owners anyway. So if you were a Signarama owner and you were looking to add a truck, I can put you in touch with 25 owners that have bought that same truck, how much they paid, where they bought it, what they use it for. Or maybe there’s a better one that you’re looking at, a piece of equipment. I’ve had franchise owners tell me that we’ve saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years because of the deals we get with vendors and suppliers or the directions we give them to go in this direction versus that direction. And that makes a lot of sense. They don’t have to spend time on R and D. We’re at the trade show in Paris when they’re introducing that in the industry. And so whether it’s fully promoted with ad specialties and promotional products, or whether it’s our co-working, our fast food, our networking business, or Signarama, all of our businesses, we look for good, solid people that are willing to work, follow a program. And really, they’re not afraid to speak up. We get our best ideas from the franchise owners. We’re not looking for robots. We’re not looking for people to just plug in. The way we’ve evolved our organization is through entrepreneurs. We’re an entrepreneur for entrepreneurs. That’s kind of how it is at United Franchise Group.

A.J. Lawrence:
It’s funny, it makes me think of the scene in the Founder where Ray Kroc all of a sudden gets frustrated with selling franchises to his country club things and starts going to the VF. To like different groups of people who are working and struggling, who are showing they have determination and like that little click. It’s like, oh, people with money sometimes just coast along. People who are aspirational. If you could figure out that aspirational angle and how that transformed it.As you talk, I keep thinking about that movie but taking a step back, I want to hit two different things because one, so much of the audience have an existing business. And so I want to ask you a two part. Let’s talk about that creation of a franchise. Let’s talk about sort of like the time frame, the structural things that happen and sort of the mindset that you need to have thinking about, well, is my business or not? And then I kind of want to follow up because now you have me thinking on it literally like, what would make a good business for it? Maybe an addendum because now. So I’m like, maybe I go buy a company that could be then built into a franchise. So, all right, another.

Ray Titus:
That’s another whole level I do. I’m looking at myself too. So. So take a step back. So what happened? As everything does, it evolved, right? So I’m a huge proponent of franchising. I’m a big believer in what franchising has done for our country. Franchising, if you look at the job creation, if you look at the taxes paid, franchising is the big, big driver. It’s not big business. It’s the franchising that is done in this country that drives our economy. So I would go speak at different franchise companies conventions. I was at a frozen yogurt. I remember I’m flying to Indianapolis and my wife is going, why are you going to Indianapolis? And I said, well, I’m speaking at the frozen custard franchise companies convention. She goes, what do you know about frozen custard? And I said, I don’t know anything about frozen custard. But they asked me to speak and I’m doing it.But as I was doing this and from time to time, and I had a board meeting, and the board says to me, Ray, you’re putting some extra time into these other companies and we’re not getting paid anything for that. And you’re taking time away from the business that we do get paid for and everybody gets paid for. If you want to keep doing that, why don’t you just turn it into a business? And I’m, okay. So I came up with the name Accurate Franchising Inc, AFI, and we started offering our services to other businesses out there.And we started not only getting franchise companies that wanted us to help and whether it was mediation or whether it was, things that we had been through as an organization all these years that we could help them with, marketing campaigns and all different things. But then new people that had great ideas started coming along and saying, can you turn me into a franchise? And then that became the business. Now today we do about 8 to 10 of those a month that we turn into a franchise company. And these pass my desk every day.And so my wife accuses me of having my own personal shark tank here in West Palm beach, that I get to see all these new ideas all the time. And she’s kind of right in that regard because that’s where Graze Craze came from. As we go through this Transworld and I could go through a lot of, you know, this has led us to other opportunities and other brands. So it’s been a great part of our business and led us into more franchisor services that we’ve gotten into as well. So helping the entrepreneur understand franchising, and it’s not easy. It’s complicated. There’s a lot of laws, there’s a lot of things to franchising. So you want to do it right.I had a guy here last month that said, I want to turn my business into a franchise. I sat down with him and he had been in business for two months. I said, people want to buy a franchise. That’s a proven commodity. They don’t want to buy something that you’ve been doing for two months and you’re still trying to figure this out. Come back in another six months or a year after you have the thing figured out and you’re running it smoothly, successfully. Again, people don’t want to be a guinea pig. They want something that’s been proven, and here it is. Right? And so take it in steps. And so that person will come back.Now, we established Exit Factor as a business model here because were in the business, brokerage business, and our franchise owners at Transworld kept running into people that they weren’t ready to sell their business. But they weren’t going to take the time. They didn’t have the knowledge, they didn’t know what to do with these people. So we established Exit Factor and Exit Factor, Jessica Fialkovich is my president there and just does an amazing job with this company. But her and her team will work with these entrepreneurs and counsel them month after month after month to take them through a process to increase the value of their business. Right now, I think the average is 56% improvement in valuation from the time they meet the person to the time they go to sell it.

A.J. Lawrence:
That’s huge. Yeah.

Ray Titus:
Some people think, Oh my God, what does that mean? Well, let me just tell you. Instead of selling your business for 300,000, you’re selling it for 475,000. Instead of selling your business for 800,000, you’re selling it for 1.3 million. And so as you start to look at this, we can make a huge positive influence on those entrepreneurs. And so earlier I said lifelong learning and books was a big part of who I am and how we built our company. The other thing that, if I was to say what’s the other thing, that’s that driving force behind our organization and it’s a positive mental attitude.It’s a positive attitude with our franchise owners, with our industries, with our company. It’s being positive and taking advantage of our advantages and taking advantage of the opportunities that are in front of us. So where a lot of people during the pandemic were woo is me, I can’t go to work, there’s nothing I can do. We were exactly the opposite. We got hurt for the first maybe 60 days trying to figure out what’s going on, right? And then one of our franchise owners said, you know we have the largest collection of clear plexiglass sheets in the back of our stores because we make signs out of these things. We cut them up and make signs out of them. Well, what if we did all the sneeze cards? So all of a sudden, Signarama jumped into that business and we were the had the largest collection of 4 by 8 sheets of Plexiglas clear plexiglass cards in every store, everywhere putting graphics on the floor where people should stand.We pivoted our business to meet the needs of that time. I’ll give you another example, Venture X. Perfect example, Venture X. They’re telling us we can’t even go to our location. You got to close your business in all these different states. You can’t go New York, California. You can’t go to the business. Well, we have mailboxes in Venture X. We deliver the mail. We have to be open to have the mail, just like the post office had to be open during COVID so we were an excused business from all of those. We were able to stay open and a lot of other businesses in our same industry didn’t realize that they could do that. And we did that with our franchisees.And so as you go through fully promoted, had safety masks with companies names on them and each one of our businesses, we pivoted the business and we were able to move. But it’s having that positive attitude to always look for the lemonade out of the lemon, to always look for the silver lining, the opportunity that others aren’t looking at, that people were looking to just hold on. And what we said is, we don’t want to hold on. We want to expand. During this time, we didn’t close Venture X stores. We opened 14 Venture X locations during the pandemic. It was a grand openings. So what I’m saying is that you have to take a contrarian view when you’re in business and everybody’s running this way and you need to take a step back and go, how can I use my advantages to take advantage of the opportunities that are in front of us?

A.J. Lawrence:
Where everyone goes left, how can you go right? And it is the fun of that being entrepreneur. But I love that you’ve built this organization because you’re referencing things that actually take work. Because you talking about the knowledge you’ve gained from the books, but to have that passed down, it’s one thing for you to have that knowledge, but then to have your organization on multiple levels be able to flow that type of thing, that is difficult work. A lot of entrepreneurs, Oh, yes, we do that. I’m like, okay, but having been that, I know the first 90 times you do that, it’s kind of like and then like, you kind of go, oh, if we do this, we just, oh, wait. Yeah, it’s like that takes a lot of practice and iteration.But in doing that, that shows just the progress you guys have made and that is really impressive. You’ve talked about sort of where you want to go and be more and more about guiding other entrepreneurs into this. How do you look, you know, here you are, multigenerational family, second generation with multiple new generations following up, how are you looking to define your success? Because I know you said you don’t really look at your piece, but so often I think entrepreneurs fall into the trap. And I know I didn’t wait. Someone would ask me how I was doing, I’m like, well, the business did this, you know and it was like, oh, the business is happening this. And it’s like, yeah, they were two entities. How do you go about defining what success is for you?

Ray Titus:
Well, I mean, look, in the beginning, when you first start a business, it’s easy to find what success is. Are you paying your bills? Are you making money? And so you go through these levels where I want to get the business to break even, then I want to be making some money. Then I want to be making a lot more money. But we’ve kind of gone beyond that paradigm, okay?So it’s now for me in that, again, I turned 60 so I’ve got two granddaughters that are on my wife and I. Last year was our best year ever. We had two granddaughters last year. And so what we start to look at are a little different. You said you had kids in their teens and you’re going to look at, hey, graduation and colleges and all different stages of life. And some people try to run their life separate. My personal life and my business life, and they try to run them separate. And that’s a big mistake that people make, right? You only have one calendar. You only have one life. You got to intertwine them all like it’s who you are. And so you take a step back. I went to a lot of graduations, okay? My kids graduations from high school, college, you know, all these graduations. And you hear the same message every single graduation in a different form or maybe a different speaker, a different way. But it all revolves around finding something that you love to do. This is the theme, this is what we’re telling our kids. And if I got up there, I would tell them that is the biggest amount of crap that you would ever get in your whole life.Because I love music, but I can’t play a musical instrument. So the reality is you should not be in search of finding something you love. Those are for vacations and off time. Those are for hobbies. What you should be doing is finding something you’re good at. Find the things that you’re good at and build your career and your business around what you’re good at. And don’t worry about what you love, okay? Because if you’re good at it, trust me, you’ll end up loving it. Because you’re good at it, you’ll make a lot of money. You’ll get accolades, you’ll end up loving it. And you’ll still have other things you love, but those are hobbies, those are vacations. Those are family things. Those are other things that you’re gonna enjoy. So look, I love beer. I’m going to Oktoberfest in September. We’re taking the family, we’re going to Munich, right? And so we’re going to Oktoberfest. I love beer but I’m not making my career around beer. That would be a mistake.So my point to you is that you gotta find what you’re good at. You gotta look. The entrepreneur has to look in the mirror and say, I’m really good with customers. I’m really good at selling things. I’m really good at operations. I’m really good with my hands. I’ll work harder than anybody, whatever that is those things are. You put them together and you say, okay, now what kind of business makes sense for me to utilize these things that I’m really good at?

A.J. Lawrence:
It’s so true. And other kind of fun thing about like saying, Oh, my passion’s this, but here I’m going to focus on what I’m good at literally. When you were talking about Oktoberfest, I have a good friend, another entrepreneur who jokes that in college his only real interest was beer. Like he loved to drink. To the fact where he said he did, you know, that microbrewery thing kind of hit really crazy in the early 90s but like from the 80s. He was like, okay. I looked, there was like Anheuser Busch. It was chemical engineering. And kind of like, kind of went down that path to the point, realized that wasn’t for him, but was a very good programmer. And he developed an early development shop in New York City go through multiple. They’ve grown like crazy, literally. He’s made some great deals where he did the development for equity and all crazy types of startups, made tons of money. He recently brought a brewery, and I’m going there tonight, of all things. And he was joking. It’s like, I finally got my lifelong passion.

Ray Titus:
There you go.

A.J. Lawrence:
He’s done amazing, but you have to balance it.

Ray Titus:
You do. And everybody does. So, you know, it’s just kind of gearing your business toward your strength and hiring your weaknesses. I’m not a detail guy alright, so I have a great COO. I have a great CFO. I have a great executive assistant, who’s looking at me through the window right now, waving, saying we’ve gone over our time. Yeah, okay. Yep. So these people that keep me on track or to help me from an organizational standpoint, which is so important in business to be organized.And so it’s not a one man thing. I mean, initially, yeah. I was running a store and it was me and three or four employees and it was more on what I did. And so it’s in the beginning, it’s the work ethic. I remember I was still living at home and I came home one night, I thought, you know, 7:00 at night, I came home. I put in a really good day and I came home and my mom was at the kitchen table and there was a guy with a book with pictures and he was pitching her on in ground sprinklers. I was getting a glass of water at the sink and listened. And this guy was there till 8:30. And what dawned on me was I am getting beat in business by the in ground sprinkler salesman that’s at my house right now. So I went in the next day and I said, I’m open for business till 8 o’clock now if you guys have an appointment or anything else. So I worked longer hours and harder hours and so I didn’t want to get beat by the sprinkler salesman, right?And so what in the beginning, it’s work ethic. That’s what it’s all about. I mean, you put the time in, you get the reps in, as you said earlier, right? You get really good at something but you got to put the time in at it. And you know what do they say? You need 10,000 hours to become an expert in anything. And so you got to put the time and effort into it. But then how do you take advantage as you’re building and growing it and it’s seeing those opportunities that are presented? We happen to live in a country and live in a place where these opportunities are in front of us every single day. Some people don’t see them and some people do. I sit down next to somebody in an airplane and they have their headset on and we don’t say one word. And I could be the solution for their biggest problem that they have right next to them and they didn’t take advantage of that.And sometimes I sit down next to somebody and we start talking and they’re my solution, right? They help me with finding a different vendor or supplier or insurance or whatever it might be. So I think we complicate business. Everybody complicates it so much. Simplify it. Always look to keep it simple and stay focused on what is the most important things that need to happen. Too many people have a to do list, 17 things, and they get number 15, number 11 done. They get number 9 done. But they don’t get 1, 2 and 3 done. And 1, 2 and 3 add up to way more than all the others combined. So while I have a to do list, I have a goal list and my goals are always three goals. I don’t have more than three goals because if you have more than three, it’s a to do list. So it goes over to the to do list. But we’re very goal oriented at United Franchise Group. We believe in setting high goals and really pushing and challenging our people to meet those high goals.

A.J. Lawrence:
Well, I really think that is great. And yeah, I saw your discussion that on LinkedIn where you posted that. So because I know your assistant is there, thank them first for letting me get a little more of your time. But how can the audience find you and where should they go and what should they be thinking?

Ray Titus:
Well, I think if you’re an entrepreneur that’s looking potentially to turn your business into a franchise or considering that Accurate Franchising Incorporated is the best company to do that, you can go to accuratefranchising.com, you’ll see it. You can go to unitedfranchisegroup.com and all our brands are listed there and you can get there from there as well.So if you’re somebody that’s looking for a franchise, let’s say, you know one of our franchises, you have some interest in, whether it’s real estate or the brokerage business or co-working or you’re just looking for a great business, we’ve got some great, great businesses available. Go to United Franchise Group, request some information, we’ll have somebody talk to you about it and kind of go from there. But I would just, to us from our end, we’re looking to match the right people up at the right time in their lives in the right business. And we have a limited, you know, we have 10 different franchise companies that we have and we can offer folks to look at, but if we’re not a good fit, if somebody is passionate about cutting hair, we don’t have a hair salon. But over at FranVestCo, which is our company that works for a lot of other franchise companies, they service a company that does that and so we can kind of steer them into other businesses that we have nothing to do with.No, we don’t own them. We just want to help people get the right business at the right time in their life so that they can be successful. And obviously if they’re going to have a business, they’re going to need signs. So we’d like them to go to Signarama for signs. They’re going to need uniforms. We want them to go to Fully Promoted for uniforms, caps, jackets. They’re going to want to sell their business sometime and we want Transworld to sell their business for them. So once we work together, we’d love to be able to expand on that relationship long term. Build a great relationship and do it long term.

A.J. Lawrence:
Very cool. We’ll make sure everyone that all this is in the show notes, all the different links and also the reasoning for why we’ll also include it in the email when this episode comes out. So if you’re hearing this episode, just go check out and make sure you subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll be able to see all this and of course on our socials.Ray, thank you. This has been great. I really appreciate and I love talking with another Long Island guy. Thank you for coming on the show.

Ray Titus:
Hey, nothing better than Huntington during Christmas with all the lights going across the street. Everything else so beautiful. Beautiful place, but really good spending time.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yes, thank you, Ray. I really appreciate it.

Ray Titus:
Take care.

A.J. Lawrence:
You have a good one.

Ray Titus:
You too. Bye. Bye.

A.J. Lawrence:
Hey everyone, just remember, thank you so much for listening and look, if you enjoyed today’s conversation, please go share it. Especially if you think there’s someone who is thinking about franchising or their own business, go share with them. They could learn a lot from Ray and tell them to go subscribe also while they’re at it. All right, everyone, thank you. Have a wonderful day. Talk to you soon. Bye Bye.This episode of Beyond 8 Figures is over, but your journey as an entrepreneur continues. So if we can help you with anything, please just let us know. And if you like this episode, please share it with someone who might learn from it. Until next time, keep growing and find the joy in your journey. This is A.J. and I’ll be talking to you soon. Bye-bye.