Inside a Senior Care Franchise Doing $21M in Revenue

**Michael Girdley** (0:00)
Acquisitions Anonymous, Internet's number one podcast about buying and selling of small businesses. Today, we had a special guest who I will let introduce themselves in a moment, but they brought a pretty cool deal, which was something we've never done before. And I think you'll be fascinated by where Heather and myself and our guest, Alex, ended up when we dug into it. Yeah, it's totally new and surprisingly positive. Yeah, yay me. All right, here's the episode.

**Bill D'Alessandro** (0:26)
Well said, Acquisitions Anonymous. Hello, another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous.

**Michael Girdley** (0:31)
We don't have 100% beers anymore.

**Heather Endresen** (0:34)
And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory alone.

**Michael Girdley** (0:38)
One of the biggest risks in entrepreneurship through acquisition is buying a business with fragile systems. Unclear demand are a single owner who holds all the knowledge. Franchising approaches that problem differently. You are buying into an established brand with documented systems, unit level data and repeatable operating playbooks. The hard part is knowing which franchises are actually worth evaluating. That's why Alex Smereczniak, former CEO of 2U Laundry, built Franzy. Franzy is a free platform that helps acquisition-minded entrepreneurs explore franchise ownership without broker bias. You answer a few questions and Franzy shows you franchise opportunities that align with your capital, lifestyle and long-term goals. You also get free coaching from people who have actually built and scaled franchise businesses. If you are exploring ETA and want to understand whether franchising fits your acquisition strategy, visit franzy.com, that's franzy.com and thanks to them for sponsoring today's episode. All right. Good morning, everybody. Heather, I have a special surprise for you today.

**Heather Endresen** (1:30)
Uh-oh. I'm scared.

**Michael Girdley** (1:32)
Well, we have a guest.

**Alex Smereczniak** (1:33)
Oh, okay.

**Heather Endresen** (1:34)
No, I'm not scared.

**Michael Girdley** (1:37)
Yeah, Alex is here from Franzy. So, Alex, maybe get started, like introduce yourself and then you're the best guest ever because you also brought a deal, but let's start with you telling us about yourself.

**Alex Smereczniak** (1:48)
Yeah, let's do it. Well, thank you both for having me on. My name is Alex. I'm a serial entrepreneur, originally from Minnesota, but based here in Charlotte, North Carolina now. Background has been in tech companies ranging from laundry delivery, so the Uber for X category when that was popular, scaled that up to about $100 million valuation, $18 million in annual revenue, raised $33 million in venture and eventually hired a CEO and started my next thing, which is Franzy, which is a Zillow-like platform to help people buy and sell franchise businesses. So as we started franchising our laundromats in the previous one, I saw business brokers taking 60 percent commissions and not a ton of access to good data on franchise opportunities and thought we should change that and democratize access and allow people a fair shake at becoming an entrepreneur. So we've got 4,000 brands on the platform and have had an awesome experience helping people become business owners and entrepreneurs the last couple of years.

**Michael Girdley** (2:50)
Yeah, right on. So how much, you know, Zillow went into e-buying at one point, like they were actually all the way into the transactions. So where do you guys kind of sit in that spectrum of, oh, we're a listing site like BizBuySell or all the way deep to like, we're actually going to be an intermediary or actually take ownership of stuff. Like where do you guys kind of draw the line?

**Alex Smereczniak** (3:12)
So today we take individuals all the way through to a closed deal. So we help with lending. We generate 100 to 200 basis points on loan originations. We help with entity creation. We help with diligence. So you get a dedicated franchise advisor. We are paid a success fee similar to a broker, but it's a flat dollar amount. That's about half of what a broker takes. So more money into the brand's pocket means more money invested into their system, sales, training, marketing, etc. Plus the flat fee allows us to remain entirely objective. Our goal is what's the right fit for Heather or for Michael. And that's where the line stops. We might eventually start funding and backing individuals eventually and owning locations ourselves. But for today it's go at your own pace. Some people come, they see all the data and they actually go all the way through and do the deal on their own without any human in the loop support from us. Others, they want to talk every other day and they need a lot more handholding and support.

**Michael Girdley** (4:09)
Yeah, superb. Well, so you brought a deal. So maybe how's the story? What's the story of how this deal came to you?