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 today, I'm wondering, what's your plan for helping your franchisees get funding? Or maybe, do you have one? Well, our guest today is Jeremy Ames, and he shares with us some best practices for funding new and existing businesses. Now, Jeremy helps aspiring business owners take the next step by turning ideas and ambition into real ownership. As co-founder and CEO of Guidance Financial, he's helped more than 30,000 people become business owners. Through this work and his own experience, co-founding startups, acquiring companies, and owning franchises, Jeremy has gained a front row view of both the patterns that lead to success and the pitfalls that hold entrepreneurs back. You're going to love this interview, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

SPEAKER_01: 0:59

Thanks, Tom. I'm happy to be here. My name is Jeremy Ames. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Guidance Financial Group. We've been around for about 22 years and have helped 35,000 people become business owners, most frequently through helping people use retirement funds to invest in buying or starting a small business. I've been familiar with your brand.

Tom DuFore: 1:16

I've been a customer and referred many folks over to you over the years and would love to talk a little bit about funding for small businesses, just I guess from a high level, whether it's the entrepreneur looking to open up another something or for the franchise or trying to help their franchisees get funding. Talk through that process a little bit.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37

Well, I think there's two very different perspectives there. So maybe I'll start with the one that I see all day, every day, because we're constantly dealing with people coming in who have this dream of business ownership, but maybe haven't quite figured it out yet. And the first thing I would say is for a lot of people, funding feels really scary. They don't know what's out there, they don't know what's available to them, and they see it as the primary obstacle to them becoming a business owner. And the thing I would tell people is yeah, there's a lot of potential complexity in financing that's out there. But you should a hundred percent, if you've got the itch that has been trying to get scratched that says you might want to change the trajectory of your life, you might want to look at something different, and business ownership keeps calling to you, then you owe it to yourself to do some exploration to understand what is even available to you. I can tell you, because I've started a business with close to zero dollars in money, that money doesn't have to be an obstacle. It definitely limits the kind of things and the number of things that you can do, but it doesn't completely take business ownership off the table. And I think the sooner you understand what's out there and what might be a fit, the sooner you can decide whether it's a a path you want to walk or B, something you want to build toward in your future.

Tom DuFore: 2:50

This could be for any form of a budding entrepreneur for the traditional startup, or maybe even someone that's exploring franchise ownership.

SPEAKER_01: 2:57

Yep. And to answer your second question is from the perspective of a franchise or I would just say if your assumption is that people are going to walk in with some knowledge and understanding of the financing landscape when they say, I'm interested in your franchise, it's probably a poor assumption based on 22 years of working in this industry. I would tell you, most people don't have all their financing lined up. They don't treat it like they would treat buying a house, where they go and get pre-approved with a lender and then go shopping. They do the exact opposite. They start looking for what's out there because they don't want to invest too much time or effort or energy until they find something where they're like, yes, I believe in that and I want to do it. And then I'll go figure out the financing piece. So as a franchisor, you can set yourself up for success if you have an understanding with your model of what kind of financing options are the best fit, because it'll help you really align as a franchise owner with who your ideal client profile is. And I would say, having worked with lots of franchise oars over the years, I was sharing this with you earlier, Tom. I'm now a major investor in a business that has been franchising for a little over a year. And I will tell you, it has just highlighted for me how important it is to get that ideal business owner profile right. Because if you don't, you're gonna be stuck with someone that's very hard to help succeed. And that is going to get in the way of your ability to have a great franchise disclosure document. It's gonna be get in the way of your ability to expand your business because you're gonna be spending time on the wrong people. Financing is a huge part of that, not just recognizing that you've got people who have the ability and the finances to get in and tackle the initial investment, but making sure that they also have backup options because it is very, very common for things to cost more and or take longer than you expect. Almost every my wife is in commercial real estate and she works with a lot of franchise brands. And I would tell you, more than 75% of people come in over budget for their tenant improvements on their space. Right. So even just that, it's the most common reason that an SBOA loan proposal has to get reworked because you've gotten pre-approval for a loan, but it's based on a certain set of assumptions of cost. And then when you get in there and start doing the work, the cost is greater. Now you got to go back through the reapproof through the approval process.

Tom DuFore: 5:12

Let's dig into this franchise or piece a little bit because I think you you hit on something really pressing that most of these prospective franchisees, when they start that journey, they have not been pre-qualified, like buying the house. That's a perfect analogy. What have you seen, or maybe you help your customers through or franchisors at work with your company in helping them figure this out to have a solution or a program in place to support their prospective franchisees as they start getting serious about the brand and say, okay, well, now how do I get funding? How do I get money to purchase this?

SPEAKER_01: 5:49

Well, first of all, I would just say at this point, most humans that you're going to meet in your life are capable online internet researchers, right? So they can go out and they can piece these things together and learn 80% of what is out there from a financing standpoint pretty easily. Now, the way that we've tackled this as a company is that we have a pretty robust way that we approach education with our prospects that come in, both with we have a qualification calculator that really asks individuals for information and then helps them understand how much they may be qualified for among any number of different types of financing options. Now, that's not specific to a business deal, so it's not perfect, but it can at least give them a fuzzy idea up front of what kind of things they might want to look at more in depth. And then our consultants on our team do tons of these consultations all the time where they're walking through, finding out more about what the individual is trying to do, and then helping them walk through what kind of things might make sense. And they really all come down to one of two things. It's either some form of debt or some form of equity. So let me give you some examples. Equity you might have. You may have savings sitting around somewhere. You may have a portfolio of stocks sitting somewhere that you could access or sell. You may have equity in your home. You may have retirement funds, right? This is a common one that people have no idea. You can actually use retirement funds, assuming you're willing to live within certain restrictions and guidelines, to invest in buying or starting a business without having to take that as a distribution. That's a large part of what we do. But those are just some examples of the equity portion of what you could do. And then there's a whole bunch of debt options, of which SBA is the most commonly known one, and for good reason, because the government provides a guarantee that makes it more attractive for lenders to lend to people that they otherwise would not. So a lot of people go down that path. But it's also probably the most complex and the slowest path to go down. So a lot of people also have real frustration with that. But there are other lending options that people may not be familiar with. So for example, if you have that stock portfolio, you don't necessarily have to sell your stocks. There's ways to borrow against a portion of that portfolio that allows you to get a low-cost debt instrument that's secured by this asset without having to sell that asset. And the reason that could be important for someone is because when you sell your assets, you get to pay taxes. And that's when the IRS wins. So if you can separate those two things and if you structure it properly, it can be a write-off for the business. And you could do something similar if you have a whole life insurance policy. And for some types of businesses, things like equipment leasing can make sense, right? So if you're gonna, if you're gonna invest in a business where you're doing mobile dog washes, right, you're probably gonna buy some vans. Guess what? That's a very easy asset to get leased, as is different types of equipment. For example, if you're gonna have maybe a restaurant or something of that nature. But those are just some of the common options, but there are many out there. We try and educate people on those. We got tons of resources on our site if people just want to go there and access that. But you can find it all online. You can probably find much of it on ChatGPT. I've just caution you go double check it with a source before you rely on what Chat GPT tells you. While it's super helpful for getting started, it's not always accurate in what it delivers.

Tom DuFore: 8:59

Thinking of all of these different options, and you've shared some that are new to me, or if I've learned of them, I have since forgotten and it's now new again. I think that this is interesting. So, how does an organization like yours, or maybe even someone that's going through this process help decipher through? Okay, I'm sure there are a lot of decisions or questions that get asked to figure out which is the best option for that specific person. Is this something that you help guide your customers through this kind of process? How does something like that work?

SPEAKER_01: 9:28

Yeah, I think there's two considerations here. One is we see our job as helping people understand what is available to them because the decision about what makes the most sense is rarely just a decision about what is the most efficient on a spreadsheet doing the math. A lot of it has to do with who the person is and how they think about the world. There are some people that I've met that love debt because they look at this and they go, I can get the SBA to guarantee this and I can help me leverage this equity that I have. And now I can buy a bigger business that's going to help me walk into solid income replacement. Awesome. And then I have heard other people say, I have no desire to take on debt. Adding that level of stress to also starting a business would make me freak out and pull my hair out. And maybe the best example I could get, I love Morgan Housel as a sort of financing guru out there in the world. And one of the things he always tells people is he and his wife paid off his house, and it is the worst financial decision they have ever made and the best money decision they have ever made. Because financially, you do the math, it doesn't make sense for him to pay off his house when he could have it at a 3% interest rate and get to deduct some of that from his taxes. But for he and his wife, the peace of mind that it gives him to operate his life without having any sort of debt instrument on his home is huge. So I don't think that there's one right answer out there for everyone. I think people have to decide that for themselves. Job number one is to figure out what are even the options of what you can decide from. And then you're gonna know based on who you are. You can do your spreadsheets and look at it, but you're also gonna be doing trade-offs of how comfortable you are with certain types of debt and different types of risk and how much buffer do you want to have. I would tell people if there is one common mistake I see people make, end up with more buffer than you need. I call it the financial runway. And I think the number one reason that people go out of business is not because their business idea sucks or they are horrible executors in their business. I think it's because they run out of runway before they can get the plane off the ground. And there are things you can do to extend that runway because getting into any business and learning it and understanding how it works and knowing which levers to pull to be successful, that takes time. And it's rare for someone to walk into that and just magically have that happen on month two or month three. But yeah, that is how everyone builds their projections. They look at a franchise disclosure document, for example, and they say, Well, this is the best case scenario about what's there. So clearly I'm gonna do it within that time frame. And then they're surprised when it takes them 12 more months to get to break even, and they may not be financially prepared to weather that period of time and get there.

Tom DuFore: 12:02

Very well said. And it reminds me of close friends of mine and my family's that ended up buying a franchise. It was a large initial investment to buy into it, and they decided to do exactly what you said get what they thought was excessive runway, and it just happened to come right at the moment. They bought the franchise pre-COVID, but the build-out started right in the thick of all the rising construction costs during COVID. And had they not done that and done the excessive runway, I don't know if they would have been able to, as you said, gotten the plane off the ground to get it going. But because they did, they were ready for that.

SPEAKER_01: 12:39

Can I reinforce one thing too? Yes. The reason it's important to do your homework before you start making major decisions is that the decisions you make can impact the options that are available to you. So, for example, one of the things that I constantly tell people to do is if you have equity in your home, you should go out and get a home equity line of credit before you apply for an SBA loan, before you quit your job. Because when you go down the path of doing these other things, that it's gonna close that door. And then that is not going to be available to you. A HELOC is a great thing to have because you don't have to use it. No one is going to twist your arm and force you to take money out of the account and put it in there. But you're gonna be glad that you have it as a fallback if and when you need it and want to use it.

Tom DuFore: 13:23

There are a lot of these different financial, I guess, instruments and funding options and sources for getting access to these things. Is there kind of this one magic stop to find access to that? I mean, is it just as an example with guidance or other organizations are are you able to access all of these different things through one source, or do you have to kind of go shop around and look at all these different places online?

SPEAKER_01: 13:47

I think there's two ways you can approach it. One is I would encourage you to do your own research anyway, partly because you want to make sure you understand it and don't get pigeonholed down a path where you end up with something that doesn't make sense or that you don't completely understand. We certainly try to be a hub for people, but I'm not a believer that any one organization can be the best in the world at doing all of these different things. So the thing that we try to be the best in the world at is people who want to roll over retirement funds and use that to invest in starting to buying a company. And we think about all these other financing options is we try and put the right partnerships and relationships in place for all those other financing options. So our clients don't have to go out and do tons of that research. We can help point them to people who not only know it well, but know how those things interact with a retirement plan that's going to be an owner in your company. So, for example, how you approach SBA has to look differently when you have a retirement account that's going to be an owner of the business, which is what is happening when you're investing your retirement funds in something. So there are options out there, but I don't think it's ever, I don't care what company says, yeah, we're the be-all, end-all, go do your homework anyway because you want to make sure you understand it and that you've heard it from a couple different sources in a similar enough way where you really get it and have it locked in and not maybe misunderstand something because you've only had a conversation with one person and and don't quite get it yet.

Tom DuFore: 15:12

You started talking a little bit about this uh retirement rollover process. And I've been in franchising a long time. And I remember the first time I had heard about this whole retirement rollover. And when I really saw the acceleration of it was during the real estate bust in 08, 09, I saw a huge influx of franchisees and franchisors starting to use this as an option for funding. And it's just continued, it seems to me, to be popular as an option. I'd love for if you could just explain how this works, what it's all about, because I think there's still a lot of confusion around some of it. And you probably aren't going to answer every question, but at least help give a better understanding there.

SPEAKER_01: 15:53

Yeah, I'll just offer at the end of this. If you go to our website, guytonfinancial.com, we have a whole complete guide on rollovers for business startups, and you're welcome to download it. And it can give you all the sort of details if you want, but just a high-level picture. You've been saving likely. Let me give you an example of a client that I've talked with. So we have many clients who maybe have an inkling of wanting to be a business owner, but don't think it's possible because they've been spending most of their lives building a family, launching their career, and they don't have a ton of excess savings. They may have kids in college, and most of their money is tied up other places. And some of that is in a 401k or in IRA. Now, you can use those funds to invest in a business. Now, the way that you want to structure it, because if you go out and take money out of your retirement plan, especially before you're 59 and a half, you're not only going to pay taxes, you're also going to pay a penalty on top of that. So if you do that, you can just take a haircut of 50% off the top and expect, hey, if I've got$100,000, it's now going to become$50,000. I don't generally recommend that for anyone. But there is a way to structure it where your retirement plan, instead of investing in NVIDIA and Tesla and Amazon stock, can invest in stock of Tom Dufour Inc., but you have to set it up in a particular way. It has to meet certain requirements. So for example, your business structure has to be a C corporation because it's the only type of business entity that can have a non-human owner and still maintain its status. And that's what your retirement plan is. It's almost like you're becoming your own angel investor, where you're going to look at your stock ledger for your business and you're going to see your name with a percentage, but you're also going to see your retirement plan with a percentage, and you have to treat that person as if they are an outside shareholder. And they're, you know, what we do essentially is we help our clients through setting up those transactions and then managing all the annual details that have to happen to continue to do that reporting. Because every year your 401k plan essentially has to file its own tax return with the IRS and with the Department of Labor. But we do all that for our clients.

Tom DuFore: 17:58

Talking about how you're able to collaborate or support or work with franchise oars and helping prospective franchisees go through this funding process to make it a little smoother, a little easier. Because I find some of the things you do very interesting and being able to support that.

SPEAKER_01: 18:13

Yeah, I think there's a couple things. One, I think about the process before someone decides on a business in sort of two stages, right? There's the stage one where you are doing your exploration. You need to understand what funding options are available to you so you can have sort of a tentative plan. And then you need to go find the business that you actually want to buy or start. And then you got to create a more tactical specific funding plan. Okay, I said, hey, I'm going to get an SBA loan and I'm going to use some retirement funds as my down payment. But now I got to figure out like, how am I doing all that? Who am I applying with? What documents do I have to fill out? All of that jazz. So we have two parts of that process that we help both prospects and you know our partners who send us prospects with, helping understand those options up front. And then when it gets to the tactical piece of going, okay, you're combining an SBA loan with what you're doing on the retirement account. Here's what you're going to need. We can coordinate with your SBA lender. We need to do these parts of the process first. And we sort of execute on those. So that's one way that that happens. I think the second piece, and this is, I love franchisors. And I love franchisors because franchisors have skin in the game with the people who invest in their business model. Because franchisors, if you understand the economics of the industry, they don't actually make money when someone buys a franchise. They only make money when those stores get open and when they start generating revenue. And, you know, our businesses like that too. We don't make any money when someone does their upfront transaction. We only make money when they stay in business and can continue to afford to pay us to manage their 401k account and make sure that those funds stay tax deferred or tax-free going into the future. And so there's this alignment of interest in helping these individuals succeed. And we do that through a combination of things that include some other services we offer, things like bookkeeping and tax and payroll services, some things that we've looked at over time and figured out. Hey, there's some uniqueness when someone is using retirement funds to fund a business and some complexities that it creates in some of these other areas. And so we want to make sure it's really well coordinated because, Tom, I've been doing this for 22 years and I've still never met someone who has said to me, I can't wait to start a business because I love paperwork. And man, I wish I could just do more of it. That has never happened once. In fact, the hardest part of our job is that we're constantly chasing business owners for information and trying to convince them of why they need to work with particular types of partners or organizations so that we don't have to go through them to get data, but we can just take that off their plate. Because once you get into a business, hopefully you will realize pretty quickly. My experience has been when people first get into or started company, they kind of lose their minds when it comes to investing cash and they are trying to hoard all the pennies and all the things. But I can tell you, in any given business, there is a highest and best use of your time. And I have never seen a business other than an actual accounting firm where the highest and best use of your time is doing your books, filing 5,500 paperwork with the IRS. It's about getting the next customer, hiring the next best employee, building that great new product that needs to get out there. Those are the things that really drive business success. And the business owners that I see do really well understand that going into the company, what that big driver is, and they focus 90% of the time there and they figure out either who to partner with or how to descope everything else to fit in the other 10%.

Tom DuFore: 21:45

How can someone find out more about Guidant and get access to some of the resources that you have available? Sure.

SPEAKER_01: 21:51

If you go to guidantfinancial.com, G U I D A N T Financial.com, we have a whole resource center that's on there. It's got tons of free information about all sorts of different financing. And a bunch of different guides too. So there's not only the guides to rollovers for business startups, there's also a guide there, just overall of small business financing that talks about a lot of the different things I've shared with you today. So that's one good resource. You can also, I've got a personal website, jeremyames.com, and this is really built around my personal mission to help increase the number of people that succeed in small business. My heart is really for those people who are in a place in their lives where they know they're not fulfilled and they want to do something different and they're really feeling that pull towards business ownership, but it also feels like this giant, overwhelming project that they just don't know how to figure out. And so I have a newsletter and a bunch of articles that I create all the time that are really designed around how to solve those problems when you're trying to figure out what business is the right fit for me. How should I think about financing up front? Like, how do I, how do I put the pieces together? How do I even go find the business? Or how would I vet a franchise to see if that was the thing that I wanted to do? Those are a lot of questions I get. And so we've created that site as a way to offer some additional support and potential. And it's free. We don't make any money off that. That's just something we do because we believe that when we support that ecosystem of helping more people get into business ownership, that helps our mission of what we're trying to do at Guidance, which is help more people get out there and take control of their lives. I happen to be a believer that the world would be a better place if more people were entrepreneurs, because these are people that are stepping up and saying, I'm going to take ownership of my life and I'm going to take accountability for creating the future that I want to live in. And I love those people, even if your motivation is money, because I know once you get in, it's going to change you. And you are going to find that taking on hard problems and challenges, even though it can really be a struggle at times, is going to make you not only a better human, but somebody who understands how much agency you really have to create what it is you want. And that is empowering and exciting and not the kind of thing you can do the same way when you are executing on someone else's goals and dreams.

Tom DuFore: 23:58

I love what you shared. I have a huge heart for very similar purpose and reason. And in fact, one of the reasons I started this podcast and asked, which I'm going to ask you here shortly, the final question we ask everyone is what does success mean to you? Because I had a hunch for most successful entrepreneurs and business leaders, it's generally not money. And, you know, here we are fast approaching, you know, our 300th episode and growing and so on. And I think out of all the years of doing this, we've only had maybe a handful say that was their primary driver. Most, it's something else. It's some other thing that they're finding, like you said, fulfillment, lifestyle, whatever it is, you know, something else. So that's really interesting. Well, that actually is a great segue for us to jump into those four questions we ask every guest. So the first one we ask is Have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

SPEAKER_01: 24:50

I've had more than two misses, Tom, but I will tell you about one. In 2007, I had this great idea for this product I wanted to build that would solve a problem in a market that one of my businesses was in. And I thought about how great this was going to be and ended up spending about$400,000 building a team, hiring a CTO, getting our own space and getting this website launched to offer this service. And then nobody showed up. To me, the big learning was it's not build it and they will come. I think I was a high on the success of some other businesses I had started that had done well. And I hadn't had the experience of recognizing that if you're not clear on the customer you're trying to serve, and if you're not validating that what you want to solve for them is something that they're willing to pay for, you can flush a lot of money down the toilet. So I tell people I actually dropped out of school, I didn't finish college, but I paid$400,000 for my education. And that was the most painful version of the MBA that I got.

Tom DuFore: 25:54

Wow. That is a great lesson learned, it sounds like.

SPEAKER_01: 28:10

Sometimes it's just getting started that exposes you to a whole set of opportunities out there. So, for example, I know a number of people who have gone into franchising, bought a franchise, and realized it wasn't really for them. But in the process of getting in there in that business and getting it up off the ground and learning it, they found some other interesting problem with the same customer or they found some other interesting opportunity, right? So it became sort of this stepping stone to the next stage of their, you know, business development. So, you know, I would tell you the first business I started didn't really do anything magical. But it was the thing that opened the door to all the things that have happened for me since. So don't feel like you have to nail it on the first try. Some of this is just you're building this skill set and this capability to play a different game. And it's the game where you're not taking orders and executing on someone else's goals and priorities. It's you're deciding what those are and what problem you want to work on and what you're passionate about delivering in the world.

Tom DuFore: 29:09

Very well said. Well, Jeremy, the name of the show is multiply your success. And so we always ask, have you used a multiplier to help you grow personally, professionally, or grow any of the organizations you've run?

SPEAKER_01: 29:20

Yeah, I was actually, I did a call for this college student the other day who, for some class project, had to go interview an entrepreneur. And he asked me, like, what has been the biggest success amplifier in your life? And I said, it was when I rediscovered the joy of reading. And the reason I told him that is because high school and college killed the love of reading for me. Like I used to love reading as a kid. In fourth and fifth, and sixth grade, I would read all summer and it was amazing. And then I got into high school and college, and the books they were forcing on me were not things I was interested in. And I just sort of shut it out. And, you know, in the early stages of the business, I started struggling with things. And I don't remember what happened. I think I sprained my ankle really bad one time, and I was out for like three weeks, and I didn't really have much to do. And so I picked up a couple books, and all of a sudden, my brain was just firing with all these ideas. And I'm just, it helped me realize how much value there is. Like you really, I think it's Bill Gurley who says this, you have no excuse to not be an expert in anything that you want to be an expert in. There is so much information out there that you can learn that will help you figure out anything. So even these days, when I'm struggling with something, trying to figure out something, I will go find four or five books on the topic and I'll read them all within a two or three month period of time because I know if I read four or five books on a subject, I'm not just gonna get what someone tells me is this magic blue pill that's gonna make all my problems go away. I'm gonna start to see the principles that are true among this from different angles. And that helps me really lock into, okay, this is what really matters, these two things. And so that has been an amplifier for me. It's creating the space in my life to read on a regular basis and then just using it as a way to fuel ideas, fuel personal growth. Because my whole perspective on if you just get a tiny little bit better every single day, like you will be amazed at the compound difference that can make in your life over five, 10, 15 years.

Tom DuFore: 31:22

But and Jeremy, the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?

SPEAKER_01: 31:28

Man, that has shifted for me, Tom. When I was in my 20s, success meant for me to make a ton of money, sell a business, go retire and live on a deserted island. I have since given up on that idea for a couple of reasons. One is that every person I know who has sold their business and gone on to do nothing has been bored out of their minds. And I think one mentor said it best. He said, Oh, I loved golf. He was so excited to sell his business. He went off and played golf every day. And then after Uri came back and says, Turns out you can't play enough golf. And for me, the insight in that is it's less about like hustle, hustle, hustle to get to this destination and more like, how do you build a life that you really enjoy? And for me, part of recognizing that part of what I enjoy, part of what gives my life life, is being able to make an impact. So, what success looks like to me is when I can help someone else see a path to a better life. And that's true, whether it's an employee that I'm coaching, whether it's a customer and I'm getting to hear their story of what we helped enable, or whether it's some individual who's been stuck for weeks or months or years about this dream they want to pursue, but they have all this fear, hesitation around it, and I help them unlock something that helps them move forward. Like that is what gets me out of bed. And I don't want to stop doing that.

Tom DuFore: 32:44

That's wonderful. And Jeremy, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you are hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

SPEAKER_01: 32:52

I think the one thing I see most commonly when I'm talking to people who are stuck is that they have a dream of something that's different or better than where they're at today. And I would tell you, if you've got that dream, if you've got that itch, you need to scratch it. And scratch it doesn't mean that you have to burn the boats and make a commitment and quit your job. It just means carve out the time in your life to explore that dream. Because to me, the two possible worst scenarios that can happen with your dream is A, you do nothing, and then 20 years from now, you're sitting looking back on your life, wishing you had the courage to have tried something. Or B, you just rush into something without thinking, and then you end up getting into some massive failure that changes the trajectory of your life in a negative way, and then you feel bitter and hurt at the end of the day. Like to me, people spend time solving the wrong question. They start with the should I? Should I be a business owner? Should I start a business? And I would tell you to start that is the wrong question. You don't need to answer the should I question until you have to make the big decision. Until you have to write the big check, until you have to quit your job, until you have to make a big bet. Before then, the questions you should be asking are all the how questions. How would I do this? Answering a how question does not commit you to a path. But how on earth could you make a decision about whether it's the path for you if you have not done the work to figure out what you would actually do and why? So do the work. Stop making excuses. You can always decide that it's not the right decision for you or that it's not the right time for you. That's great. But don't be the person that just sits there and does nothing. And don't be the person that just moves forward blindly, because both end poorly, and I've seen both.

Tom DuFore: 34:35

Jeremy, 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 Jeremy said to those franchisors out there, if you have an assumption that people are just gonna walk in ready to buy your franchise, fully funded, you need to rethink that approach. And he said, most people start to get funding after they find a business, not before. So having a plan is going to be important. And he said that more than 75% of people come in over the estimated costs of opening a business. So I think that's important to know to make sure that they're getting enough capital when they go. Takeaway number two is when he talked about two forms of getting financing. He talked about debt and equity. And examples of debt were an SBA loan, borrowing against a stock portfolio, and other assets that you might have, and equity financing, where you are using existing equity and stocks, home equity, retirement accounts, and other forms in that nature. Takeaway number three is when he gave that quote from Morgan Housel, and I'm not familiar with him, but Morgan Housel said, paying off my house was the worst financial decision I made, but the best money decision I've made. I liked how he described that is helping with that tension of people who don't want to take on debt and those who do, where some are comfortable with it and others aren't. And now it's time for today's win-win. So today's win-win came from the end of the episode when he talked about people who have a dream of starting a business. And it might be you looking to franchise your business that you've already started, or maybe you're franchising and you're getting ready to help someone launch that business. And I thought this was a great thing. He said, instead of starting with should I do it, he said, start with a how question first to help your mind start working on how would you do it? How would you fund it? How would you make it go as a helpful tool to get you there? I thought that was a great way to close. As it'd be a great win for you and those you're connected with as well. And so that's the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to our podcast. Please, please, please give us a review. All of those help. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com where you can schedule your free no obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.