Tom DuFore: 0:01

Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open, I'm wondering if you have ever thought about your business being a type of business that people wake up thinking, I'm really interested. I want to open up a business like this, or maybe open a franchise, meaning that your business is one that maybe if you've franchised it or you're looking to franchise, it's probably not top of mind of your prospective franchisees. But our guest today is Wade Brann, who shares with us his experience in building two different franchise systems that probably are not on the top of mind for prospective buyers. Now, Wade is the president and CEO of Pigtails and Crew Cuts, one of the fastest growing children's hair salon franchises in the US. With a background in franchise leadership, Wade took a leap in 2004 when he acquired Pigtails and Crew Cuts after a chance visit with his son. What started as a single salon is now a thriving national brand with more than 80 locations across country. Wade brings decades of experience in franchise development, business strategy, and creating customer-centric experiences. Under its leadership, Pigtails and Crew Cuts has become known for turning a routine haircut into a fun, stress-free experience for kids and parents alike. You're going to love this interview, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

Wade Brannon: 1:33

My name is Wade Brannon. Thanks for having me. I am the president and CEO of Bigtails and Crew Cuts, which is a children's haircut franchise based in Atlanta.

Tom DuFore: 1:43

Thank you so much for being here. And I find your experience and background in franchising interesting. So I'd love just for you to give us a little overview of how you ended up in the franchise world and a little bit of your background there.

Wade Brannon: 1:58

Started a long time ago. I started uh in the franchise business back in 1984. After college, I moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and ended up working in the first company location of a company called Heavenly Ham, which was a spiral sliced ham company. And we built that into a franchise company. We acquired it, moved up here to Atlanta a few years later, built that into a decent-sized franchise entity, and then sold that to Honeybaked Ham. And when my tenure at Honeybake was over, I uh was looking for something to do. And a lady approached me who had just started Pigtails and Crew Cuts here in Atlanta, also, and she asked me for some help in trying to figure out if it was franchisable and if so, how to do it. And I had taken my children there. I have twin girls and a son about 20 months older, and I had taken them there, and they loved it. And it was one of those things you kind of wake up and go, this is a cool business concept. And so when she approached me, I I told her I thought it was very much franchisable, and I thought that she should, and had a few meetings with her and kind of told her what the steps were, what you had to do, all the legal requirements and things like that. And she basically said that she wasn't really going to go down that road the more she thought about it. And so I ended up with two of my old ham partners. We acquired the company with the intent of building it into a replicable model that we could franchise. And we saw a lot of similarities to the ham business. And so we put our heads together and figured out this was an interesting opportunity.

Tom DuFore: 3:49

Kind of like the uh franchise folklore stories of what Ray Crock type did, right? See an opportunity, saw a business, and you saw an opportunity with this new franchise and were able to come in and take that over. Now, so you do that and it happens. And so then talk through your launching and growth and a little bit about where you are today.

Wade Brannon: 4:10

We've just had our 20-year anniversary franchise conference. So I did the first one for 20 years, and this one for now for 20 years. But it's been an interesting growth. We've we've been through a recession, we've been through a pandemic. You know, I spent about a year collecting kind of some of our old team members from the ham business, and we got together, kind of got the band back together. And you know, the similarities between the two businesses are are large. The, you know, you're you're doing something for a child that the parents can do in their bathroom, give them a haircut. Now, that may not be very good, but we're trying to make it a great experience, make it the highest quality experience that it can be, and truthfully charge a premium for it. And it was not dissimilar from the ham business. You could buy a cheap ham or you could buy the best. And so we were selling the best. So, you know, a lot of our model is based on making this experience, which is either can be very disturbing to some children, can be very mundane to others, but and making it a place for the children and for the parents that are is comfortable, enjoyable. And so we had to kind of create those systems to do that, and so that it was replicable here, there, and throughout the country. And we we put those systems in place and we started searching for good franchisees, good operators. And we've got about 90 locations now, got another 10 or so committed to. We've got in about 25 different states, and we are, you know, we're growing. We've had a good year. We've added a lot of locations that have opened this year. Unit economics are good, they've continued to grow. We've got a good story to tell.

Tom DuFore: 6:08

You've built now two brands really from the ground up and starting to expand through franchising. What are some of the challenges along the way that you saw that you worked through? Uh, certainly some of these big economic shock factors, like you mentioned earlier, from a growth perspective as a franchise or when you have one or two franchises versus having 50 or 100.

Wade Brannon: 6:31

I think it's like any business when you're opening a new location. If you're the operator, there are stressful things. There is the labor component. You know, how do you create a team and build the culture of that team to retain them? And that's probably the more difficult challenge that we face right now and have for a number of years. We work through it, but it's it's always a challenge. And how do you teach them for what I'll lack of a better way of calling it, the pigtails way? Because you can experience dilution. You know, the message, the memo, the look, the feel can be diluted if you're not careful. And and what I mean by diluted is it's kind of like the story of the children in a circle, and you start the story with one child, and then as it goes around, they tell the next person, they tell the next child, and it comes back around, and it doesn't sound anything like what the starting story was. And so we have to be very careful about how we do that. And so we're very conscious of regular meetings, we're very conscious of regular visits, regular calls, regular communication, and adding it not just to the owners, but to managers and all the way down to team members, so that they understand that TigTales and Crew Cuts is bigger than just their one local salon. And I think that's what all franchise owners face and and big entities that there can easily be dilution. You know, some of the challenges have been the technology has changed. I mean, radically different from where we were in 2004 when we started this business to what we do now. The the method for bookkeeping, the methodology for communication, the methodology for marketing the customers, for attracting customers, all of those things has changed so dramatically with the advent of new technology that we've had to adapt, and any business has to adapt, or they just won't move along.

Tom DuFore: 8:42

Great points. And I think it's interesting. You talked about this technology piece, which gets me thinking about franchisee support. And one thing I've I've seen in my 20 years in franchising is the brands that seem to stick around for a while and do a great job have a nice support structure in place or at least have figured it out. Maybe they didn't at one point, but they figured it out now. So talk about how you help support your franchisees with things like the technology or keeping up with trends or even just maintaining that consistency that you were talking about.

Wade Brannon: 9:18

Yeah, it starts with our team here. And, you know, I I've always believed that, and I think if you walk down the hall, you would ask everybody, what's our job? Our job is to help franchisees be successful. It's not about making money for us, it's not about X number of growth of units, anything like that. It is about our franchisees being successful. And we all know and we all believe that if they are successful, then we will be successful. So that's job one. Beyond that, the support mechanism starts at site selection. It starts at helping them identify and secure a lease for retail space. It then moves to construction. How do we create help them create blueprints and secure contractors and work through the construction phase? So we've got to sign people for that. Then once they secure a space, they come to training here while it's under construction. And they're here for a week. We assign a franchise support specialist directly to them who really is responsible for that franchisee. And so they've got one person to call. They don't have to call the marketing guy or the staffing guy or the this, that, or the other. They've got one person that they reach out to. And so they build a rapport, they build a relationship, we understand what they're going through, and they've got a regular shoulder to lean on and cry on and stand on as they move through. We have regular visits. We have something called sheer excellence, where we play on words, obviously, but it's regular visits into the salon to see what they're doing. And we help them score. They help us score. We, you know, and see how they're performing to a series of standards. We have regular communications. I send out videos regularly. All our teams send stuff out. We have a library that's being developed of training videos. Some of it already exist, but we're collating it into a bigger library. We have franchise conferences every 18 months where everybody gets together and they get to support each other. The franchise owners have their own Facebook page where they can communicate with each other and support each other. So it's really all of that. You know, that's that's all of the, I mean, that's really what we do. So we're always looking for new ways to support the franchisees.

Tom DuFore: 11:53

It seems like with something like Facebook, you'd probably more likely to get franchisee engagement through something they're already using on a personal level.

Wade Brannon: 12:02

Aaron Powell In the old business, this technology didn't exist. And as it came online over the years, you know, one side of you says, gosh, I don't want somebody who's negative talking to somebody who's positive and bringing them down. But by the same token, I want somebody positive who can help drop up the guy who's struggling a little bit. And you're right, Facebook has been a great simple, easy platform to communicate. And they talk about everything there. They talk about staffing challenges, they talk about their wins, their successes, and it it's it's a great tool. And sometimes they talk about us.

Tom DuFore: 12:40

I'd love for you to talk just a little bit about some of those unique attributes for your business.

Wade Brannon: 12:46

I think TigTales and Crew Cuts is well positioned in the industry, first and foremost. Nobody wakes up one day and goes, you know, I'm I'm thinking I want to get in the kids' haircut business. You know, it just doesn't really flow. You know, I might want to get in the restaurant business, I might want to get in the car dealer business, but it doesn't really happen that way. And and so, you know, what I tell people when they're thinking of, and people call me all the time and just say, hey, I'm thinking about a franchise and I'll talk to them about anything. But, you know, understand the model. Look at the model, look at it, and and see if it fits into your family. We get a lot of people who are interested in this because they have younger children. And a lot of times people are going back to work after having a child. They want to be in that ownership control situation and have the flexibility to have a family. This lends itself to that because they're reasonable hours of operation, it's it's enjoyable. But make sure first and foremost that it fits into what your family structure is. You know, do your due diligence, you know, make sure you understand really what the challenges are with the business, because anybody who tells you it's all easy is not telling you the truth. So, you know, I think the more information you can gather is so important. But this industry is fascinating. The hair care industry, I never thought about it. Uh, I mean, look at me, you know, I mean, it's uh I don't have a whole lot of hair. But as I started looking at it, I I drove around and I'm like, my goodness, there's a hair salon on every street corner. I mean, they're everywhere. It's an enormous $60 billion industry, and the kids' segment is estimated to be about $7 billion. You know, somebody who can help you run it right, it can be a very successful business that you can scale, that you can, if it fits into your family. Again, it's all about what fits into your life and your family situation. And I think that's the most important part of it.

Tom DuFore: 14:51

Yeah, I want to go back to a comment. You were talking about going in for site visits or field visits to see franchisees and providing that ongoing support. What kind of schedule are you on? Is this every week? Is it every month? Is it once a year?

Wade Brannon: 15:06

We are a minimum of once a year, and we have monthly scheduled calls with each franchisee. And in those, we're talking about face-to-face once a year in their salon at least. But m regular monthly calls to talk about business practices. How's your bookkeeping going? How's your marketing going? Are we getting timely and accurate financial statements? And if so, let's review those each month and see where you're doing, how you're doing compared to others, and being a part of a system and being able to compare your KPIs to others. That's, you know, what are the targets that we're trying to hit to help you be successful? So it's continuous, but face-to-face at least once a year inside the salon and monthly at least on a phone call. And those start out weekly, you know, they start out twice a week as you're new and you need that extra hand holding, and then it's slowly, you know, yeah, we got this. We'll we'll back off a little bit. But we still want to talk at least once a month to, you know, take a pulse.

Tom DuFore: 16:12

Oh, that's great. Thank you for sharing that. And what advice would you give to a new franchise or emerging brand as they're starting to grow or launch into franchising?

Wade Brannon: 16:23

I truly believe that the biggest best piece of advice I can give is attract the best franchisees you possibly can and help them as much as you can afford to. You know, you got to make sure the systems are right. You gotta make sure the systems work, you gotta make sure that the systems can be replicated all over. Don't outgrow yourself just for the sake of growth. Grow strategically, grow organically, grow appropriately to the level of your infrastructure. And, you know, everybody wants to grow as fast as you can, as as much as you can, but it's got to be good growth. Bad growth is a disaster. And, you know, we did it one year back in the ham business, and I remember it well. We outgrew, we outsold our infrastructure, and it really hampered us for a year to two years because we had to rebuild the trust, we had to rebuild the relationships, we had to rebuild our support mechanisms, and we came out stronger on the other side, but it was a it was a challenge. So, you know, make sure your systems work and grow at the appropriate speed.

Tom DuFore: 17:46

Real quick, what's the best way for someone to get in contact with you or with pigtails and crew cuts to learn a little bit more about what you're doing?

Wade Brannon: 17:54

We've got contact information on the web. There's Facebook, there's all the normal communications platforms. We're readily available.

Tom DuFore: 18:03

Well, wait, this is a great time in the show, and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

Wade Brannon: 18:14

A recent miss was interestingly enough, as recent as 2020 in in March. I think it was March 13th, and you know, the world kind of shut down. I didn't know what it meant. We didn't know what it meant, but we knew we I thought it was gonna be short-lived. I thought this was a, you know, we'd been hearing about it for months, you know, and then all of a sudden it got really, really serious. And my theory was you gotta do every we immediately had Zoom calls with our whole system, system-wide calls, and I said, look, you gotta hang on to your staff. You gotta do everything you can to hang on to your staff. This should be over fairly soon. And you got to keep your people because that's our biggest asset. Our employees are our biggest asset. And honestly, I was wrong. I was I was mistaken. And fortunately, a lot of the states were very helpful with unemployment, but we would have broken the bank if we had tried to hang on to all our employees. We had to help them get unemployment through the state governments. And I missed on that. And I thought, you know, uh it was it was tragic. I mean, it was very difficult. And a lot of those people have still not ever gone back to work, you know, throughout the country. And I'm not talking about Bigtails people, I'm just talking about people in general that just never gone back to work. It was just so incredibly traumatic for people. An interesting thing that came out of it, though, is we were always a walk in model, meaning you didn't have to schedule an appointment. And I fought appointments forever because we're talking about another miss here. You asked for two. But it was the same same timing. The we were always a walk-in model because nobody's ever on time with their children. It's just impossible. And so if you've got appointments every 15 or 20 minutes and you know you're late, it kind of messes up the rest of the day, and this, that, and the other. So we fought it for a long time. And with the mandates put in place, we had to go to an appointments model because you couldn't have too many people in the salon at one time. There were challenges with scheduling people. So we set up appointments. And I was wrong all these years. I was wrong because it has helped us become immensely more profitable because now we control labor based on our appointments, as opposed to just probably overstaffing and creating this backlog of customers, you know, just because we didn't know how many were coming in. And so I missed on that one too. But both of them worked out pretty well.

Tom DuFore: 21:08

So thank you for sharing. I've always appreciated that. And let's talk about a make or two, a highlight.

Wade Brannon: 21:15

Well, I guess I can go back to the appointments model because it really did add a lot to our bottom line. But we weren't together. I don't count on my successes. I faced more of my failures. We weren't together for a while because of travel restrictions and things like that after the pandemic. And, you know, once we got back together face to face, we had a lot of growth. Our franchisees had been through the trenches, they'd been through the battles that came out of that. And they wanted to add more units. They wanted to grow. And so I think that was a great win. People realized, you know what, this is a good business. We're doing really well in it. And we want to we want to expand our footprint. And so that's been great. That's where a lot of our growths come from.

Tom DuFore: 22:01

Well, the name of the show is Multiply Your Success. And so we always like to ask every guest have you used a multiplier to multiply yourself personally, professionally, or any of the organizations you've run?

Wade Brannon: 22:13

I have a very smart wife. And she is a real estate attorney. We have different businesses. But if I had to pick somebody or something that has kind of guided me through ethically, you know, decision-making-wise and otherwise, it's probably my wife. She is, you know, we don't talk about our businesses all the time because we're in very different businesses and we both own our gigs. And she is a great resource and has been over the years. And when, you know, when Chief Dark Cloud appears in my mind or Chief Super Ego appears in my mind, she's always there to bring me back to center. You know, when you're when you're taking on a business as a franchisee or a new franchise or something like that, you got to have a support mechanism because you're not in it alone. And she's been a great one for me. So that's probably my best multiplier that I could come up with.

Tom DuFore: 23:18

Thank you, Wade. And the the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?

Wade Brannon: 23:24

I want my team to be successful and happy with their growth in their careers. And I want our franchisees to be happy and successful with their growth in pigtails and crit cuts. Everything else will follow. Everything else is just going to flow right out of that. So if they're all doing well, then I'll be I'll consider myself to be successful.

Tom DuFore: 23:51

Wade, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let's go ahead and jump into today's three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when Wade talked about how he asks his team what their job is. And he said their job is to help franchisees be successful. He said, Our job is to help our franchisees be successful. Love that focus. Takeaway number two is when he talked about some advice for emerging franchisors and emerging franchise brands. And he said, attract the best franchisees you possibly can and help them as much as you possibly can afford to. I thought that was just a great takeaway. And he said, don't grow for the sake of growth. It just needs to be good growth and don't outgrow your franchise systems. Takeaway number three is when he said, no one wakes up one day and says, I want to open up and buy a pigtails and crew cuts franchise. And what he was saying is that his business model type is not necessarily on the top of mind for a prospective franchisee. And maybe your brand falls into that category. And so I thought that was a nice little nugget and takeaway for you to think about for your own system. So does your business fall into that category as well? And if so, then you need to think a little bit differently in terms of how you might get in front of or be exposed to potential franchise buyers. And now it's time for today's win-win. So today's win-win comes from the comment when Wade was talking about how to help grow and support franchise systems. I just love how he said our job as a franchise or is to help our franchisees to be successful. And I think the takeaway, one of the things he said is you can do this if you don't outgrow your systems and attract the best franchisees that you can. And I think what he means or was meaning to say by outgrowing your systems is that don't grow for the sake of growth. As you start to expand systems, meaning it could be technological systems, but it also could be internal processes and procedures that you need to adjust and adapt as your system starts to grow. So I just thought that was a great takeaway because if you can focus on your franchisees' success and growing with the best franchisees you can and really summarizing it the way you said, attract the best franchisees you possibly can and help them as much as you possibly can afford to do so. And that's the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise your business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com to schedule your free no obligation consultation with one of our team members and consultants. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.