July 12, 2022

How I Franchised My Service Business with Daniel Felt

 Daniel Felt is the founder and chief executive officer of Kura Home, a home service franchise. Since starting in 2016, Kura Home has grown from Daniel's garage to four different states and 32 employees. Focusing on high quality work at a fair price, Kura Home services over 600 homes per quarter while completing their routine maintenance needs. In his free time, Daniel enjoys being a husband, father, camping and hiking with his family, marathons and Ironman triathlons. He is also a private pilot and certified home inspector. Today he speaks to us about how he franchised his service business!

Transcript

Josh
 Hey, good day, fellow dealmakers. Welcome to the deal scout. The purpose and mission of this show is to talk with deal makers, find opportunities and to connect deals and deal makers, right? That's our business. That's what we do. That's what we go on the hunt for is cool deals and cool deal makers. On today's show, we're going to have a conversation with Daniel. Who's going to talk to us about his journey, about building a franchise and growing that. So Daniel, welcome to the show, man. 


 Daniel
 Awesome. Thank you, Josh. Great to be here. 


 Josh
 Yeah. All right. Why don't you give us an idea about who you are and what you do? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, for sure. Real quick. Sorry, is I grew up in a large family entrepreneurs by accident. My mom got a dog for Christmas in 1980 and one day the neighbor's dog came over and I eventually started selling golden retriever puppies, but that grew into a really awesome business. Like everyone else went through high school. Athletic went to college, started working in a really cool company that sells about 6 million chicken eggs a day. I got really obsessed with systems and processes and documenting things and helping train people in quickly to do an efficient job. After that, I start working for my brother's home service company, cleaning windows, holiday lights, and grew that company really quickly as well. The idea for cure home came up in 2016 and decided to go out of my own and start that was in my garage in Plymouth, Minnesota. And we grew quite quickly. 


 Daniel
 I feel to the point where today we now service Minneapolis and Denver and we also selling franchises. What we do is we visit our client's homes. Once every three months, it's a home maintenance subscription for your home. We also offer one-time services like dryer vent, cleaning, air, duct, cleaning, ACU, and clean. 


 Josh
 Oh, really? Okay, cool. All right. You started, you brought home a puppy and you're like, Hey man, this could actually turn into a product and a service. You and your company grew that business. Now, how old were you when that, when you first got your taste in entrepreneurship? 


 Daniel
 Well, so that was before I was even on the earth that was in the 1980s. My dad bought my mom a puppy and brought it home and they started selling dogs. The really unique story about that is they were selling puppies for like 50 bucks. Back then it was, you put an ad in the paper and they weren't selling any puppies. They brought him to the vet and they're like, we haven't sold a few of these. What do we do? The vet said, well, you need to increase your price, try 3 75. I'm like, well, that's insane, but I guess it's better than nothing. Sure enough, they sold all the puppies based on that higher value. Today they sell their dogs for about 3,900 a piece in there. There's a, there's the waiting list. They don't even have waiting lists because it's, they just, when they have like 10 puppies available, they just send out a blast. 


 Daniel
 In about five to 10 minutes, they have 10 people that want the puppies and they closed it and they don't accept people anymore. It's really an incredible business to grow up in. 


 Josh
 Wow. How many puppies per year can your parents produce? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, so they're really particular about their quality, but they have, I think in a really good year, they can have about 80 puppies. Each female can have it's mother nature straight. Sometimes like you have pops in and she's pregnant, or she has a cake for example, but she might only have one or two puppies. They can have, 12, 13 puppies as well. Realistically, by keeping up with their process of, they bring each puppy, they bring them to like the nursing home preschools. Like they have this huge it's crazy how much they do with them. So they can only do so much. My parents are getting very close to retirement age. At this point in their life, they can very comfortably have about 75, 80 pups a year. 


 Josh
 Doing the numbers 80 puppies at 3,900 bucks a pop, this is a multiple six-figure business for them. 


 Daniel
 Yeah. Yeah. But that happened by accident. 


 Josh
 And that happened by accident. The first thing that they did was put a price tag, put it in the newspaper, 50 bucks, crickets, they talk to an expert and they, and he said, you need to increase your price. You didn't change anything else except the price increase. 


 Daniel
 Correct. 


 Josh
 Now it built a multiple six-figure business that they've been doing this for as long as you've been alive. 


 Daniel
 Since 1980. 


 Josh
 Okay. Why do you think that was so vital in their growth and what would you, what do you think would happen if they did not do that? 


 Daniel
 I would assume that at one point coming from as a family of six, we w at a certain point when I was little, I mean, the paycheck came in on Friday for my dad's work. Went to the grocery store immediately thereafter. I mean, it was tight. And, and I think what would have happened, neither one of my parents were college educated. I think eventually my mom probably would have had to go get a job. When, before I came along, I was number four of six. My mom would work at times at night, waitressing doing things like that, anything to make ends meet. I assume that I would have had a very different upbringing because several of my siblings are also entrepreneurs. We all have that bog and we've saw that, Hey, the harder you work, the more potential you have to make money. And, and we all have it. 


 Daniel
 And, and it's really fun. 


 Josh
 I'm assuming here that you're pretty good with dogs. Is that right? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, I, yeah. I'm going to break on that one. I would say I have two golden retrievers say, and I very frequently get compliments where anywhere, camping or anywhere it's, they, I would say, yeah, really good with dogs. 


 Josh
 All right. This is deal aside, but I love getting to know the maker and I always try to pick up golden nuggets from our conversations. Sometimes it's about deals and sometimes it's not. With that, I have a, a golden Ozzie. I think that they're called he's a little pop. What advice do you have for a, he's a new dog, w for a, an owner like myself, what advice do you have for me? 


 Daniel
 Yeah. Well, I could probably write a book on it. I think my mom has, but I would say, start doing things now that you want to do in the longterm. Right away, when you get your dog home, if you want to be a boating family, put the dog in the boat in your garage, even if it's like winter, like start doing these things. If you don't want your dog to be like on the couch, don't want your puppy on the couch. So just start being super consistent. If you can spend like 10 to 15 minutes a day training your dog, just like, sit, stay, he'll come. I mean, just those basics. You'd be amazed at how, rather than waiting until they're like six months old. They're, 40, 50 pounds jumping on people. If you just start at a very small age, like even like before you give them their food, have the dog sit and reward them, or, just verbal verbal rewards. 


 Daniel
 Don't give them treats. I don't recommend treats because you don't always have that, but most people always have their voice. You can always verbally praise your dog and just doing those little things very consistently, 15, 20 minutes a day, you're going to be off to a really good start. 


 Josh
 I'm sure you're an expert when you, cause you've trained hundreds of dogs. Probably. All right. You do write the book, let me know I'll be in line to buy it. 


 Daniel
 Sounds good. 


 Josh
 Yeah. All right. So back to deals. All right. You grew up in the family business. Why didn't you stay in the dog business? Why didn't build a, multiple breeds, multiple brands, whatever you might call them. 


 Daniel
 Yeah. So I dabbled in it. I, through college, I would go to people's homes for a hundred dollars. I would train you how to train your dog and spend an hour and a half at your home doing that. And that was really great. I also would board people's dogs for them as well. I, my, I had a fenced in backyard and it was really easy and it was very, I would say, I call it actively passive income. I had to put it on my clients where they would leave their dog in my garage. I had it, an AC unit and he was heated and I would be home for sure in the morning at noon and then for the rest of the day. And they knew that. I would say, you can drop off your dog anytime that you're leaving. I will, I will be there within four hours to exercise them. 


 Daniel
 That was really great. What the biggest problem that I found with that and with my current lifestyle, I'm married, I have a, almost two year old one on the way we are very adventurous people. Having dogs is very similar to being a dairy farmer. You have to be there at least twice a day, no matter what. If you want to go somewhere for spring break or whatever, I mean, now you have to literally hire someone to come to your house. I mean, my parents have 10 adult dogs. They have dogs that are coming up that can be bred once. They're two, they have dogs that are retired. You always need a few males because father can't read daughter, et cetera. You can't just like bring 10 dogs to boarding facility and be like, Hey, take care of my dogs today that doesn't work out. It's really similar to being a, a farmer. 


 Daniel
 We just didn't want to be, I just don't want to be a farmer. We have thought about an idea of having announced some of my, take this be based on your listening listeners, but having a, a place where you buy property outside of a metropolitan area. You go and you get a old school bus, a small short bus, and you get, creates kennels set up in there and you go, and you have a bus route for dogs and you do a daycare for dogs. You go in the morning and you pick up all the dogs for people as they're going back to work and not working out as at home as much. You bring them out, you have a huge fence and facility that always run and play all day long. You have live cams, all the things, and then you bring them back home at the end of the day, or you just pick them up for people. 


 Daniel
 They're like, Hey, keep my dog for weeks. I'm on, I'm traveling and bring it back, drop them off on your bus route in, a week. I think that would be, we, my wife had even created a logo for it. We got, we get, we got pretty far into that one at one point. 


 Josh
 Well, it's good that your wife likes dogs too, because it seems like dogs run, dogs runs in your blood, right. If you guys are dog people, super cool, man, I got tons of dog advice that I got to get from you, but we'll do that on another show, probably. From there, you said you worked in your brother's business, right. Window cleaning, and doing these kinds of, tasks, right? These, these things that you have to go and actually do that, what was that like going from, dogs to this? 


 Daniel
 Yeah. The dog thing was always like a side, a side business, right? Like that, it was always, it didn't affect my day job, I would say. So that was always fine. I always kind of had that mindset of like being an entrepreneur. Right. Like I was even like the house, my first house that I purchased, I rented out the basement. Like I I've very specifically bought a house to house hack. Always kind of having in the back of your mind, like several streams of income and that way it really helps, anything that goes on, right. Like stuff happens. COVID happens. Things happen and having multiple streams of income is always really nice. I always kind of was set up that way with renting out my basement. I've got these dogs and I'm boarding and training on the side. I have my day job and all of them combined, I'm living a very comfortable lifestyle, especially before I got married, had a kid. 


 Daniel
 So, so going that it's a different mindset. I think it's ultimately one of the reasons what I really wanted to start my own business. Well, I was just wanting to take a, somewhat use some of my PTO during the slow season of my brother's company. He was like, I actually really need you that week. I was like, well, I really want to use my PTO, ? It was like three months in advance. Ultimately I wanted the freedoms of having completely being an entrepreneur where I didn't have to ask people to take a week off. 


 Josh
 Yeah. All right. You were working in your brother's business on the clock W2 clock-in and clock-out at what point did you say this entre it's killing me, right? Like the entrepreneur has to go be the entrepreneur. 


 Daniel
 Yeah. 


 Josh
 Point. Did you crack? You're like, I'm doing this on my own. 


 Daniel
 It was. So it was January of 2016. This idea came up for the routine maintenance service. I actually told my brother, like, he should do it, but it didn't fit in quite with his service base. I think the moment that I decided that's it, I'm doing it as when I wanted a full week off. He said, I could only take three days. He might not even know that if he ever listened to that big brother, David, I'm sorry, if that was the straw that broke the camel's back. But ultimately it was that freedom. What people don't realize is that you leave your nine to five job to you say, oh, I'm only, I was like, oh, I'll just work like four tens. You know, I'll work Monday through Thursday. That is not the case. Now. I'm always, you're always kind of working and my wife knows when you go on a trip, Hey, I'm going to answer emails for 15, 20 minutes in the morning, maybe on lunch. 


 Daniel
 I step away for a few minutes, but you're always kind of working, but that was ultimately for me as an entrepreneur, wanting to feed that fire. I wanted that freedom. 


 Josh
 Totally. How did you quit your brother's job? 


 Daniel
 I feel like it was the right way to do it. I gave him a four month notice and I said, Hey, I'm going to start this idea that we talked about a few months ago. I think it's going to work. And he's like, that's really stupid. Yeah. That's not gonna work. I, again, monthly, I'm like, Hey, do you want to hire me? I'm a replacement. I'm your GM. And we had grown fast. We, when I came on, he had eight crews and bytes in two years, we'd grown to 16 crews. Wow. Very fast growth. And he's a really great business person. I can't really take any of the credit, but he needs more people to duplicate himself. I was there to kind of, he, a very trusting person, as brothers and I gave him a two months notice and still he wasn't hiring my replacement. 


 Daniel
 At one month I, I actually had to go then and get up my own vehicle because he had given me a company vehicle to use and I saw I'm like, Hey, I, this is my vehicle was like, oh, you're really leaving. Like, this is real. I go, yeah, I really am. It's been a month. Remember I told you three months ago that I'm leaving next month. And, and so we are great friends that he's one of my closest friends, Christmas dinner is very nice at our house. We get along really well and left on very good terms. We very frequently refer each other's businesses out. It's fun to actually have competition because he'll say, oh, you're six years in. And well, here's where I was. You'll say, you're doing pretty good, I guess, ? It's very fun to compete against each other. And I always want to beat him. 


 Josh
 Yeah. There is. There's fun. I think healthy competition does drive us to do better. Yeah, an entrepreneur is the only person who will quit a nine to five to work from five in the morning to nine o'clock at night. Right. 


 Daniel
 Like. 


 Josh
 Exactly. The, the switch there that happens as you built this, were you married at the time when you left the W2? 


 Daniel
 No, I was not. My wife, you know, your one right. In a business, unless you're a super, like, you're making a ton of money, but I always say my wife did not marry me for money because she was definitely the breadwinner at a very modest job. No, she met me when I was lo at a very low point. Right. I was making money off the rental and the dog business. I was making 12 grand a year renting out my basement and about 35 K training and boarding dogs on the side. You're still making, a decent, you're not like starving, right. You're not on the street. You're still paying your bills. I'm not like getting calls from debt collectors or anything like that. I also had taken out an equity line against my home before I started this. I had an additional 32 K that I could use, I could dip into if I really wanted to. 


 Daniel
 I think what she, and she'll say this and her mom has said in years past, she's like, cause I say, you guys are like kind of crazy. That a Andrew, my wife, that you were like, totally fine with me, like being this crazy entrepreneur, but I've told her mom, like, when I asked you if I could have your daughter's hand in marriage, you quickly said, yeah. She's like, yeah, I knew you'd always take care of her. She's like, one reason why I knew that is when were at Christmas, you told me that in a way to make extra money, you ad out on Craigslist and Facebook too. If anyone wanted their Christmas tree hauled away, you pick it up for 30 bucks. She's like, when I saw that, like, that you were willing to do whatever it takes to make ends meet. I she's, like, I knew that you would always take care of my daughter. 


 Daniel
 So, and being entrepreneurs, sometimes you have to do things that are like, I don't know, I'm assuming some of these people want that done. Like, I'll go do it. I never did pick up anyone's Christmas tree, but it was an idea. Yeah. 


 Josh
 Hey, it's a pretty interesting idea. Would you take them to like a piece of property in Burnham or would you take them into the dumper? You haven't yet? 


 Daniel
 I guess I didn't really thought that far. I think, I think my plan was that the city that I lived in, if you had your ID, you could drop off your car off the street for free. I assume they didn't like mark down your address that you'd already dropped one off. I think I assumed I would just keep on dropping those off each day. 


 Josh
 Yeah. He'd show up with 40 trees. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. All right. So you started your business. Did you have it in mind that you were going to turn it into a franchise or was it just your own business? Like what was the thought process as you built your first business? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, I was actually, if you would have asked me on day one, I would've said absolutely not. We've no way we'd ever franchise because I'd helped my brother franchise, his business. I had seen the financials that go into that and the amount of detail that you have to have in place, and he never actually sold a franchise. I saw just that, that was a large six figures, to get in all that legal information. From that, I actually learned how to do it a better way to not spend as much money and not use attorneys for doing some of these things. Save a ton of money when I did it. Day one, if, and when I look back at like some of my notes and journaling that I did at that time, my ultimate goal was to have a business that I was the owner. When I was 65, I had eight to 10 crews running and we've surpassed that by year four. 


 Daniel
 So grew very quickly. I think even I didn't quite understand the potential and the demand for what people were looking for in the routine maintenance services. 


 Josh
 Yeah. Yeah. Super cool. You took your brother through this process of franchising. You saw ways to do it better, cheaper, faster, right? So you did it yourself. Now, if you look at yourself as a, as a business owner and skillsets, like what are your superpowers, what are your massive strengths that you bring to the table? Where are some of the gaps that you have as a entrepreneur? 


 Daniel
 Yeah. Well, a lot easier to talk about strengths. We'll talk about those first. I will say that I, because of my upbringing, I love systems and processes working at that agriculture farm that sells eggs, creating SLPs. It comes very natural for me to see a problem and then create a process that solves it for the next person. I really enjoy enabling my team members to be successful by kind of finding like a better way to do it. I would say my weakness is that I'll say to my team all the time, if we had followed through with every good idea that we've ever had, I think we'd be like a billion dollar business, of course. Right. I think that sometimes it's really easy to stern, like brainstorm and have these sessions for lunch or whatever it may be. You're talking about like the next great thing at your home. 


 Daniel
 We all come back and sit down on our computer and just keep on doing it. I wish that were be better at delegating and implementing things and really holding people accountable to those tasks. I think it's so easy to be like, oh my gosh, that's the best idea ever. Also like two years ago by me, like we literally talked about that two years ago. Why didn't we implement it at that time? And that's really frustrating for me. 


 Josh
 Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. I, I think that as we learn as entrepreneurs, our strengths and our weaknesses and on how to delegate and such, that's where, business growth starts to happen. What was the first, what was the first aha you had in your business and what was the first major milestone that kind of shocked you? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, we, I would say in 2018, I was still running this business completely out of my garage. Like if my vehicle wasn't running Cura home, wasn't running and I had hired a part-time guy and he would meet at my house and park in the street and we'd go out for the day. I actually met with a business coach and they said, if you weren't running this, you could, you would, how many people could you sign up per day for on your subscription model? I said, realistically, I think I can get like two a week three if I was just doing this. They're like, okay, two week compounding that I can, you're doing $8,000 a month in sales in January that you could do 25 K by December. Like they wrote it all out and they literally showed me on, here are the numbers. And I left that meeting. 


 Daniel
 I went to the bank and I said, I'm buying a vehicle. What, you know, what can I afford? They gave me a vehicle loan and I went and I bought a van and I got my guy going. Within two months I actually needed a second ban. I stopped working just on that level of, in the business, cause I would always say like, oh, don't work in your business, work on it. Well, you got to keep on cake. I feel like you got to keep taking the next step, work on the next step. We're on the next step. I, so I stopped actually doing the manual labor. I started doing like sales and marketing things, a lot of networking. I was working on my business in that way. That would that help us grow to that? That December, our business coach had told us that we would meet hit about 25 and we actually did 28,000 that December. 


 Daniel
 So I was super ecstatic about that. That was a really fun moment. That was like, you got to trust the system, trust the process, trust the numbers. 


 Josh
 Yeah. Now we're going to get a little personal kind of behind the scene. So how old are you? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, I'm 32. 


 Josh
 Years old. Give us an idea of where the is at now. Give me whatever you feel comfortable sharing in terms of what you guys do in revenue, how actually part of your disclosures, you have to disclose these kinds of things, ? Give us an idea overview of where you guys are at. 


 Daniel
 Yeah, for sure. In 2021, we did a total of 2.7 million in sales. We have in Minnesota loan, we, I believe just broke 600 routine maintenance clients that were visiting on average. Most of them are we visit once a quarter. We now service Minneapolis and Denver and we are very close to we've finalized that territory. I'd say we're 99% of the way through selling our first franchise. That will be on the west side of Florida. So super excited about that. We have had our failures in 20, 21 week. We hit really hard. We, we grew really fast and we actually edited a handyman division. However we did, we started that in February and we had to close it down in November. We did $424,000 for the handyman work. However, our, just our payroll and materials were 408,000. We like, we, it grew so fast because so many people want handyman like, and we just took the same system, the processes and put them in place like answering the phone, things like that. 


 Daniel
 The problem is there's so many variables in handyman, like, just even talking about this, Josh, you probably have an idea of what a handyman is and I'm thinking about handyman and we're describing two completely different people. So it's, it was very complicated. We grew fast. We had like seven crews running, doing handyman work. We had actually launched a few other states as well. At the end of the day, due to how difficult it is to manage personnel in different states, we had to pull back a few of those in, and we temporarily closed those markets until we can really get a better system process place for managing those people. 


 Josh
 Yeah. Handyman, that is a tough business now. So you're you guys great idea, right? You're already doing maintenance on homes. You're doing air filters and duct cleaning and all these things. Why not add a handyman division? However you saw that the variables, the cost to train all these things were beyond your control. 


 Daniel
 Yeah, for sure. Not to use an excuse, but I will. That's at the pricing prices were changing so rapidly in 2021 on materials that we'd like bid a job out for someone. By the time they approved it, like, three weeks later it was like, oh, well this like the price of lumber increased 25% over that, few weeks or things like that. And it really was, it was difficult. I think someone gave me really good advice. They said that craftsmanship is not scalable. And I would agree with them. It's very difficult. If you're the only one that could do something in your business and you want to scale it's going to be very challenging. 


 Josh
 Yeah. I grew up on a construction site, swinging hammers with my dad. It wasn't until we brought in my thoughts were, if he gets, swinging hammers, he built it, I sell it. Eventually we wound up building multifamily and that's when he started, receiving the great success, but swinging hammers, it's very hard to make money swinging hammers or to scale. At least it's a good living. 


 Daniel
 Yeah. Yeah. For. 


 Josh
 Sure. Scale is difficult. I like that. Craftsmanship is not scalable. Wow. That's interesting. I would love to hear other people's thoughts. So, audience members, what are your thoughts on this? If you are the craftsman, if you are that worker, is that scalable. I loved your thoughts. You could always, push your thoughts on LinkedIn or just in the comments, but super interesting Daniel, as you built this out, you're like, at what point were you saying, we're building this out. I hired a coach and they said, Hey, if you were focusing on this task versus this task, you could be at 25 a month MRR. Right. You're like, holy crap, the lights went on, bought the, bought the van four months later, bought the other van at what point where you're like, I need a franchise. This thing. 


 Daniel
 Yeah. It came a middle of 20, 21. Actually we had open a few other locations and we are really having challenges, but the demand was there for sure. We opened Dallas in our first month we had 45,000 in sales in Dallas. It was insane. Like we had really, in my opinion, had really figured out. Around the same time were receiving a ton of inquiries from other markets and other locations that people were asking us, Hey, could I pay you to teach me how to do this? Can I run a Cura home here or there? The answer is always no, like, we can't really control our reputation, things like that. Finally, after it was, were getting about one a month for a long time. People reaching out to us, asking if they could start a cure, a home, a brand or version of it that we decided that, Hey, if we want to continue to grow and scale, it's probably best to franchise the model. 


 Josh
 Awesome. Tell us about the name and the brand of your business. 


 Daniel
 For sure. I saw this company, I did not want to name it. Daniel's whole maintenance. My last name is felt and felt home maintenance sounds really strange. I was actually Googling words that meant to care for, because we want to come in and take care of your home for you. By taking care of all his routine maintenance items, right. It's, it's going to run more efficiently, all that good stuff. It goes really deep, but I found the word Kira, if you spell it, C U R a N Kellyanne, it means to care for the problem is that several other people before me have figured that out as well. There's like all these, cure this, cure that. I changed the spelling to a K K U R a and I only compete with a sushi store out of New York and a DJ out of New Mexico. 


 Daniel
 Other than that, feos, we, when that one and cure LLC was available, I love how symmetrical Cura home.com was. And, and I love that people ask, what does it mean? So Kira home was started. 


 Josh
 Okay. If you looked back out of all the years of building businesses and entrepreneurship, what would you say? What's your great, like best deal, worst deal? 


 Daniel
 Yeah. I would say some of our best deals have been really large commercial air duct cleanings, but at the same time, we really get like super ecstatic about doing, like signing up every routine maintenance client. We track every single one, every single person we still serve as client. Number one that's signed on in 2016. So we love our routine managed clients. That's that's the health of the business. So, but the large commercial jobs, I was really excited about it. We didn't, it's not like the profit margin was even that much higher. It was just funny. Cause it was like the first time we did a really large five figure commercial project. So that was really fun. Were able to squeeze it in on the 30th of the month. We got it done on a Saturday, which made it so that month was a record month for us. 


 Daniel
 So, even though it was, it didn't really make that big of a deal, but we got it done on a Saturday. That was really fun to get that one in on the month. We're still the worst thing that we have ever done. What would be that handyman stuff, any project. We, we tried so many different ways Josh, to try to make that profitable. We, I mean everything commission-based, I mean, we, everything you can imagine. We, we, I, to the point where the guys would come back at the end of the day and they would put in their sales, their material costs and the amount of time that they clocked in and they would either give them a green light or red light. There was so many red lights consistently on that Excel file that, ultimately we just had to end that. So it was very our worst deal. 


 Daniel
 The worst thing we ever did was start the handyman division. 


 Josh
 Yeah. How do you approach ideas now? Right. You're building out your franchise and people get together and everybody's shoulds on you, right? Like, Hey, you should do this in your business. How do you, how do you look at an idea to go? This is a good idea and we can do it. This is a, maybe not a good idea for us or at the moment. 


 Daniel
 I think the first thing that I say now is that we can't be everything to everyone and we don't want to be everything to everyone. And so that's number one. Right? There are a ton of ideas that we could go with this, especially with our clientele base. A lot of things, a lot of times we do look really deeply. We look at, is it scalable? Can we train our current employees to do it? It easy to add on and does our clientele want it? We actually added multiple services onto our routine maintenance offering. So the same clients can. Now we also like will like stay in your or Polish your stainless steel appliances. We'll bring in smoke alarms for you now, or excuse me, fire extinguishers, things like that. It very easily fit in to what we needed. We didn't have to buy a different vehicle or train in a different person to do all these things. 


 Daniel
 It fell in place with our current offering. I don't have an exact perfect science to it. What I, I think is way deeper into it. Now, originally we added handyman because if you just add handyman to your website and SEO is going to do its job in any of the ton of people coming to you for routine maintenance, people barely ever Google that. So that was why we added that. Now as you get a little older and a little wiser each year and learn from your mistakes, I would definitely dive very deep before we add another service. 


 Josh
 At the time of this recording, you're this close to selling your first franchise. I don't know how many details you can give. I know that some of the things you have to, I guess, disclose different ways, but like what does a franchise like? I'm a potential franchisee right now. What does that look like if we're having our initial conversations? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, for sure. We can give you a lot of information. A lot of financials, things they're all audited through, auditors and lawyers and attorneys and all that good stuff. What I can tell you is that we would award you a population. Our population may be changing, but right now it's up to 250,000 people. Then, and so you have your territory and that is negotiable, but it, the buy-in is $45,000. That gives you basically every single system. Every single process is as if it's as if you now like that on locks, my brain in every system, every document I've ever created. We have a 600 page manual that we would give to you. You come to Minneapolis, you spent two weeks with us training. You have to buy your own vehicle and equipment. It's about $7,000 with equipment. You can finance a van if you want, but it's on the low end. 


 Daniel
 You can get into a franchise. You can be servicing your first client for about 60 to $65,000. If you want to go buy a really like a Mercedes work van, for example, it's going to, it could cost you up to 125,000 to get rocking and rolling. But from there's no guarantees. There's no promises. I could tell you can make 10 million. I could tell you make a dollar your first year. I can't even guarantee that you make a dollar your first year, but essentially what it is you're buying into our brand and we're allowing you to use our brand. And, and we will walk side by side with you to help you become successful in that once you're up and running, you, we do collect a 7%, 7% royalty. We host your website and posts all over the place on social media for you. We do collect 2% of each dollar to do that. 


 Josh
 Cool. All right. As you're building these out, those numbers might change in the future. Things might, you know, things might grow. What does the future look like for you though? Like what do you want to see this thing do? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, ultimately I think where I think it would be really cool. Like it's like, wow, that's awesome. There, it changes regularly, but there's roughly 195 metropolitan areas in America that have a million plus people in them. I think every single one of those could support a year home franchise. Right now the ultimate goal is to be, have a franchisee in each one of those hundred 95 metropolitan areas. 


 Josh
 Super cool. What kind of things keep you up at night? Now you have a multimillion dollar business, right? You're married two kids, right. Living the good life, got two golden retrievers. What, what kind of things as you're building, what are, what's some business challenges that you are working through in your brain now? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, I think it's figuring out like the next step, like certain things come up and are available. For example, investing in real estate, we have an opportunity to acquire another business that does air, duct cleaning, things like that. It's really deciding, how much are you gonna do and what are you gonna do really well? It's because I think you can push yourself to the max and really try to get all these things done. I do have a golden rule that I never missed dinner with my family. I'm always home by 5, 5 30, and sure I can jump on afterwards if needed, but it's figuring out what can we do and keeps the quality really high. There are things sometimes that pull me back down into the business, really deep, like a customer complaint. Sometimes I jump in on that to handle it. Sometimes just having the title owner really helps that conversation goes smoothly with a potential person, but I try really hard to equip my team members to successfully handle things like that. 


 Daniel
 I would say it's a next big thing for your home, right? Like selling a franchisee, that's a huge deal. Someone's leaving their job there. They have the potential to do these things, but they're buying into you and your brand and we want them to be successful. We don't want them to fail. It's making sure that we've done everything we know to do all of our due diligence to make sure that have you, have we documented that what we do so that person can prevent one more call back, which helps their profitability. Things like that is really making sure that have we crossed all of our T's and dotted all of our eyes on the systems and processes, 


 Josh
 You and I are hanging out at a coffee shop in the ideal frame, potential franchisee, right. Comes across. I'm like, Hey, I want to introduce you to my buddy. Yeah. All right. What does an ideal franchisee kind of give us the characteristics of what they look? Yeah. 


 Daniel
 A lot of people that are inquiring, they're the people that are looking at a long-term wealth strategy. They're looking for something that is buildable that scalable. They can sell it for, for a amount they're not looking to either. They're not looking for the great, the get rich quick scheme. They, they're looking for a long-term wealth. They're usually between the ages of like late twenties to early fifties, maybe they're looking at retirement and they realize that the stock market might not be for them. This is an awesome opportunity to build something for the next five to 15 years and run it for the rest of your life or sell it at retirement and cash out. 


 Josh
 That's super cool. All right. As you're building this, w give us an idea of how many team members do you have now? 


 Daniel
 Yeah. Right now we have 22 team members. We have one in Denver and the rest are in our Minneapolis market. 


 Josh
 What was the most important hire that you've made while building this? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, we hired my wife. Well, actually the very first one was my wife. I, we, I convinced her to leave her day job and come and run the office for cure home. Our sales had a huge jump. Like you look at the stepping stones of a company, right. And, and the numbers always tell of a story, but there's always, a couple of facts and details behind that. When my wife left her full-time job and started running the office, and she came in with also like, knowing that a, like now this has to work because now we both our income is coming from the company. It has to work at, it has to grow. That passion behind that person answering the phones and making sure that this person has followed up with things like that super important. When she had our first child, I, our next super her replacement was crazy, crucial, important. 


 Daniel
 Our office manager, super important that like you would think it's technicians. We can train anyone on how to be a great technician with our system and process. Having that person who can think quickly on their feet and run your office, I would say anyone who's talking about thinking about running a, a service-based business. I originally thought I'd go hire an administrative assistant and I was wrong. You need to hire like a client care coordinator and office manager. You like someone who could work at like a car dealership and be like, thank you for calling. How can I direct your call? That's not who you need at a service-based business. You need someone who's like very smart, very quick on their feet savvy who can really think outside the box and take care of these little problems that if you're out giving estimates or training and technicians are doing whatever you're doing during the day, the office is running smoothly. 


 Josh
 Yeah. It's not just a, an executive assistant or an assistant. This is someone who can run an office. Right. They're, it's a, it's a more experienced, what does that hire? Right. So, yes. How, how did you learn that? Right. I know that there's probably of story and I do want to protect, past people, but like, what are the, some of the key components that you saw that you were like, okay, we need to hire a different caliber of expertise. 


 Daniel
 Yeah. We learned it through mistakes, you hire someone and you say, Hey, can you email all of our routine maintenance clients? They're all CC better than BCC or things like that you're like, come on. Like, this has to be, normal things. Luckily with technology, you can pull the email back quickly and things like that, but you just learn through so many mistakes. I think when you're as a business owner or a manager, if you're really frustrated with the people, and maybe you need to look inward and say, what am I doing wrong? That they're not being successful rather than being like, you're not getting it. Like, how do you not get this so simple? It's not the case. You, you need to do a better job of hiring and training. 


 Josh
 Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Now that the wife is now out of the business, right. She came in the business, huge spike in sales. Like you're like, wow, that was brilliant. Right. Placed. What did, how did things change there? Like, did you guys like working really well together or did you find a better husband and wife? 


 Daniel
 Yeah. She only cried once a while we were working together. Yeah. She, it was, it was so dumb, right. She was thinking on her feet and refunded a customer. I, and I thought that we could have corrected the issue differently. Like we could've gone back or whatever it is. And, and, and I think it was pretty stressful at the time, like there's calls are coming in and so only cried wants, but I would say, 99.9% of time, it was really fun and really rewarding to run a business together. It was nice. Cause I got to, if we want to go somewhere with like a long weekend, like were still working together, like she'd be answering phones on the way up north to go camping or whatever. I'm talking to this person about that and we're still kind of working until, two or three in the afternoon or whatever time it was. 


 Daniel
 But, but we both understood, like you're answering it, you're scheduling people and I'm hoping a technician with this at that time. And now we have people in place. Now that she's out of the business, I, my wife does an incredible job of taking care of our son and keeping her house, like she's asked me before, like what's really important to you. I'm like, honestly, like if the world is perfect, like I love coming home to like a clean home and a meal like that, but I know that's not always going to happen. And, and she does a lot of things to enable it so that when I'm at work, I can give it 110% and go all in and not have to be worried about what's going on at home. When I come home, you bet I'm, I'm tapping in, I'm clocking in, and I'm full on dad duty where more lawn together and doing all that stuff. 


 Daniel
 So it's really fun stage in life. 


 Josh
 Super cool. This year, a chance to get some brownie points. What, what is the wife in, in her business? And, when she was in the office, what was her superpower and business? I asked her what was hers? 


 Daniel
 Yeah. She had a way of really making whoever she felt on the phone feel like were really good friends and just a really unique gift that I don't think everyone has. And, and there's little tips and tricks that we have trained on with people, smiling while you're on the phone and laughing with people in our script. We even have a spot like, it helps if you laugh here, right? So there's little things that really help. She created a lot of those things and really found those by testing and measuring. She really had a unique way of increasing our close rate by making people feel comfortable and know that, Hey, you are talking to another person on the phone. I'm not a robot or, some random person from across the world. 


 Josh
 Super cool. Daniel Daniel, during this interview, we mentioned, what an ideal franchisee looks like. You mentioned the different territories that you guys are in the future of where you guys are heading. Do you plan on having one of these franchises in every major city, across the U S. 


 Daniel
 Yeah. That's I, that's the thing is I, I, sometimes I like, I it's like, how big do you dream? Cause like, some people are like, dude, you're nuts. Like you want to have a franchise in every single county or every single major metropolitan area. And it's like, yeah, why not? We haven't looked at going into other areas of the world, but at the same time, I think if that opportunity comes up, we would for sure take it. I would, I don't think you could ever ask me a question, be like, Hey, you have the potential to follow this path and grow faster. Do you want to do it? I, I'm not like, no, like we're willing to try it. I always say like, one of my big things is when I'm at the end of my working career and let's just say 65, but I'm sure I'll work along in that. 


 Daniel
 Cause I love it. At the end, I don't want to look back and say, oh man, I really wish we would have tried that. I would much rather be able to tell you the story on how miserably we failed at handyman services. Right? Like we tried it and we failed. We lost some money, but guess what? We made it through. And now we know that doesn't work. I'm definitely willing to take some risk on some things. If people want it and we can be successful together that franchise or franchisee relationship, and that happens to be in Ontario or wherever, like let's go. 


 Josh
 Cool. Super cool. With that, where can people go to connect with you? Find out more, maybe they're an ideal franchisee. Maybe they're an end user. Where could they go to learn about you and do more deals? 


 Daniel
 Yeah, for sure. Follow us on all the social medias, Instagram and Facebook take doc. We're super active connect with me personally on LinkedIn. Daniel felt, but our website has a ton of information. If you're interested in being a franchisee, either connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can submit a form on our website and we'd love to connect with you. Worst case scenario, follow us on social media and you might just become a better homeowner at maintenance. 


 Josh
 Super cool. What questions should I have asked you that I screwed up and did not ask you? 


 Daniel
 I don't think a single one. I've really enjoyed our conversation today. 


 Josh
 Super cool. Super cool. Let's do this fellow deal makers out there in the audience. If what Daniel's saying resonates with you, reach out to them directly. All their contact information will be in the show notes below. Reach out to our guests. Thanks for being on the show and maybe pick up one of their franchisees and help other people with their home maintenance till then you guys have a wonderful day. Talk to you all on the next episode. See you guys. 

Daniel FeltProfile Photo

Daniel Felt

CEO

Daniel Felt is the Founder and CEO of Kura Home. Since starting in 2016, Kura Home has grown from Daniels garage to four different states and 32 employees. Focusing on high quality work at a fair price, Kura Home services over 600 homes on a quarterly basis completing their routine maintenance needs. In his free time, Daniel enjoys being a husband, father, camping, hiking, marathons, ultra marathons, and Ironman triathlons. He is also a private pilot and certified home inspector.

Daniel's goals for 2022 include selling 10 franchises, reading (listening to) 52 books, and servicing a total of 1000 homes' routine maintenance needs.