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Craig and Lori Kaufman
Pro Martial Art franchisees with 5 locations in the Folsom and Sacramento, CA area
Andrew often says “do things from a position of strength.” My wife and I came to Andrew because we weren’t sure a franchise we were about to buy was a good fit for us. After filling out a questionnaire, we met Andrew at a local Starbucks. By the time our first meeting ended, we knew not only that the opportunity wasn’t for us, but we knew why!
Over the next few months, Andrew methodically helped us explore franchise opportunities that would leverage our strengths. Our background is in I.T. so it seemed at first that a cloud services franchise would be an ideal fit. At every step, Andrew made himself available through regular phone calls and emails. Not only that, but he kept in regular contact with the franchisor. Andrew’s interventions helped smooth introductions and clarify facts. This helped him to ask extremely pertinent, and sometimes tough, questions which made us better understand the strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities behind the franchise.
The obvious fit isn’t necessarily the best fit as we learned. Andrew spent the time so together we would fully explore, understand, and learn from this experience. Not satisfied with partial understanding, Andrew placed calls to the franchisor so he would understand their position.
We continued to explore franchise opportunities and ultimately attended three Discovery Day events with different franchisors. We looked into a business services franchise and a document destruction franchise. Each played to specific strengths. But for various reasons, each opportunity proved not to be a good fit. In one case, it was our lack of sales and marketing experience. In another case, it was the projected time to break-even.
After these disappointments, Andrew asked us whether we wanted to take a break or re-double our efforts. We’d put a lot of time and effort into our search and had built a momentum. More importantly, with Andrew’s invaluable assistance, we decided to look for opportunities where we would measure and manage staff, rather than market and sell.
When Andrew suggested a martial arts franchise aimed at helping children, we were curious but surprised. Neither of us has experience in martial arts (and we don’t have kids). As a scalable, semi-absentee business, we could open several units and hire a manager for each. This would enable us to continue our I.T. work, build a successful business, and help local communities to boot!
Thanks Andrew for seeing the potential in us and helping aim us in a new and exciting direction.