Scaling a $40M Midas Franchise with Brian Beers – EP 156

Interview with Brian Beers

Scaling a $40M Midas Franchise with Brian Beers

Featured on This Episode: Brian Beers

✅ What he does: Brian Beers is an entrepreneur, investor, podcast host & father. He and his brother grew their small family franchise auto repair business into an enterprise with 33 locations. He’s now on a mission to help others build a fortune through franchising. Brian is also the host of the Business with Beers podcast

💬 Words of wisdom: “People’s biggest challenge in scaling is they just can’t get out of their own way. They can’t delegate, they can’t hire, they want to do everything themselves and they want perfection over progress. That is what holds a lot of people back.” – Brian Beers

🔎 Where to find Brian Beers: Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram

Key Takeaways with Brian Beers

• Bootstrapping a $40M franchise using seller financing
• Hire top talent & replace yourself as an operator
• The best franchise opportunities
• Staying focused on your strengths
• Progress > Perfection
• Building a family business
• Outsourcing to VAs
• Quitting your job to start a business
• Getting unstuck

Brian Beers on Bootstrapping a $40M Franchise with Seller Financing

Free Strategy Session 

The Lifestyle Investor Insider

Brian Beers Tweetables

Resources

• BrianBeers.com
• Brian Beers on Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram
• Business with Beers Podcast
• Midas
• Erik Van Horn
• Codie Sanchez
• GoBundance
• Special Operators Transition Foundation (SOTF)
• Stellar
• Acton Academy
• Jamie Gruber

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Read the Full Transcript with Brian Beers

Justin Donald: What’s up, Brian? Glad to have you on the show.

Brian Beers: Hey, thanks for having me, Justin.

Justin Donald: Well, this is going to be a lot of fun. We’ve got a ton of mutual friends, and I feel like it was inevitable that we were going to connect at some point because I’ve heard about you from a ton of people, Erik Van Horn being the actual linchpin who connected us. But I read a really cool article about you in contrarian thinking with my good friend, Codie Sanchez, and she always interviews awesome and smart people. So, yeah, I’m glad we’re here.

Brian Beers: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Justin Donald: Yeah. So, tell us a little bit about how you got started in the business world because you went from little to no experience to scaling a massive business that is pumping out some serious cash these days.

Brian Beers: Yes. I mean, I’ve always been entrepreneurial in nature from being a kid to however I can make money, reading about Warren Buffett, and just learning everything I could. And so, I went to college in University of Miami down in Florida. I had jobs in South Beach like I was doing software development back then with iPhones and stuff. And it’s kind of always into tech but still more on the business side. And I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do after college. I thought about going kind of maybe the software route and maybe like finance route and then my dad had a small franchise business of a couple of Midas Automotive repair shops that he ran since he was 20 years old, so over 30 years at that point. And it was 2010. You know, ’08 or ’09 had been rough. The business has changed a lot and they weren’t making any money. And he was looking just to sell or just get out of the business. They were kind of ready to retire. And so, I said, “All right. Well, how about instead of selling them, I’ll come and I’ll see if I can make something of it.”

And so, yeah, I joined the family business, knew nothing about cars, nothing about franchising. I never managed people before but I can learn. And so, I traveled around the country. I learned from other franchisees like what were best practices and then I started to implement those things and did that for six years and started like, you know, we were making progress, we were making more money. I wasn’t making any more money really because it was like my dad’s company but I had saved up enough and my brother would come in and we went out and got a loan and we acquired two more locations, like in the Philly market from someone that wanted to sell. And then we just kept compounding it. And so, then in 2017, we bought another location with the money we made from the first two, and then ’18 we opened up another two, and ’19 we did another one and took a break for COVID. And then ’21 we bought seven locations and then another four, another five, another two, and bought my dad out. As of today, we have 33 locations all in the Philadelphia, New Jersey kind of region and, yeah, we’ll do over 40 million in revenue and have about 200 employees and bootstrapped the whole thing. Only went to that bank at one time, actually. All my other deals are seller finance and creative financing and just using cash, just reinvesting back in the business.

Justin Donald: I love it. So, this is awesome because I love finding businesses where you can actually seller finance them. And it’s not weird to seller finance, right? Most businesses, you cannot do this or the seller is not willing to do this. It gives me a ton of confidence seller financing a business with someone because if they’re willing to seller finance it, it tells me it’s a good business, that they’re willing to hang on. And so, walk us through some of the like terms or arrangements that you did on some of these seller finance notes.

Brian Beers: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So, they can be anything you want it to be. And that’s what’s the beauty of it. There’s no rules. Like when you deal with a bank, you’ve got certain collateral down payments, interest rates, terms, all this different stuff and so totally flexible. And so, like the first deal we did was we bought a store. I think the purchase price is 350,000. We put $50,000 down. And what he wanted was a ten-year amortization so we’d spread the payments out over ten years but with a five-year balloon. And so, that gave us time to repay $3,000 a month, I think it was and that gave us time to kind of build the business. And that story crushed that store double. We doubled the volume. We had $400,000 in the first 12 months.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Brian Beers: On a 50K investment, it was about 800% return. And then we ended up paying that note off way, way quicker than… We paid off about four years. And so, that was a good deal. That was one of the deals we did. We done a deal? It was $2 million and the guy wanted $50,000 down because he just wanted cash flow. He just wanted payments. As long as I guarantee him to 2 million over the life of the loan, which is about 12 or 13 years, that’s what he wanted. And so, we’re paying him, I don’t know, 12K a month for the next 12 or 13 years, something like that. And so, how I approach is a little bit different than most people. I approach it when I negotiate these things, we just tell them, hey, upfront, “This is how we’re going to buy them. This is how we’ve done all these other deals in the past. This is how we’re going to do this deal.” And we focus on three numbers. We focus on really cash flow. So, like money in so how much money we give you down, how much are we going to pay you every month, and then for how many months. So, those are the three numbers.

And then once we agree on 50K down for 12K a month for the next four, you know, 12 years, 144 months, whatever it is, and we add it all up, then we’ll kind of go back and figure out, “Okay. Well, what’s the purchase price? What’s the interest rate? What’s the amortization schedule look like?” We figure out all the technical things later, but like most of these people, they just want to know what the cash flow is. They care later about the other stuff, but initially, to get them on the hook, we just focus on payments.

Justin Donald: Yeah. That’s incredible. And by the way, I love how you can create a win-win situation. And the whole idea is you ask them, “What do you want? What works for you?” It’s incredible to me that you can get as low as a $50,000 down payment on a $2 million deal or 2.5%.

Brian Beers: Yep. It’s what he asked for. We’re like, “You sure you don’t need more money?”

Justin Donald: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And so, on the other one, I think you said it was a $1 million and $50,000 down.

Brian Beers: No, it was a 350.

Justin Donald: Oh, 350? Okay.

Brian Beers: Yeah. Yeah.

Justin Donald: So, you look at this and you say, you know, like a lot of people are like, “Well, how do you buy a $2 million business or a $350,000 business?” But you make it cash flow, right? And someone that is willing to do five years, ten years, 15, even 20 years, I had a guy do a 20-year note with me with no balloon, right, just an option to maybe just continue at ten years but a 20-year note and it’s like this is a good business, otherwise, they wouldn’t be willing to do that because they wouldn’t make money in future years if it wasn’t a good business. So, it’s a great way to kind of just take the temperature of the seller to make sure that things are really what they say they are and the numbers are not fudged.

Brian Beers: Yeah. And they trust you. I think for a lot of times that works and I think in franchising is everybody gets to know you, right? Like, it’s a private community. It’s a small community once you’re within a franchise and I’ve established myself as one of the top people in the industry or even within our system. I’m on all the advisory boards, like everyone sees me all over the place and so they inherently trust me. And so, at the end of the day, people do business with people they know, like, and trust. I think within the franchise system, it’s very easy to become known, liked, and if you’re a good performer, you can be trusted. And so, that is a huge competitive advantage that as an insider, as a franchisee, you have that. If you’re an outsider, even trying to buy a franchise like they don’t know you, they don’t trust you, like you may screw the whole thing all up. And so, that’s like a huge differentiating factor of why we can get some of these deals that other people can’t.

Justin Donald: And what’s the typical profit margin on a Midas business? I’m sure it varies. It ranges. I mean, after you get it under ownership, it’s probably a little more consistent.

Brian Beers: I mean, all in, we’re around 12%. My best single store like the four-wall profits can be over 25. They do really well. The lowest ones lose money so there’s a range.

Justin Donald: That’s interesting. And so, with some of these stores that lose money, do you just see them as a loss leader that overall makes the value of the portfolio a lot stronger? Or do you really need to get it into profitability for it to get the multiple?

Brian Beers: Yeah. Well, we definitely need to make them profitable but as you get bigger, we’re able to kind of like weather the storm a little bit so we can buy some of these losing locations and take a hit on our P&L for however long it takes to get the thing going. But when you’re smaller, you can’t really do that if you only had one or two locations. We’ve taken over locations losing $100,000 a year and you’ve got to be willing to be able to sustain that or have very good confidence in your ability to get them going. And so, that is part of the reason we get good deals, too, is some of these are turnaround efforts and you’ve got to be a good operator.

Justin Donald: And so, have you had offers, thus far, to sell your portfolio or are you waiting until a certain point?

Brian Beers: Yeah. I mean, I’m on Twitter. I got private equity guys all the time messaging me on the chat and I talk to them because, for us, it’s kind of like, “Hey, how do we make this thing built to sell? So, how do we…” You know, me and my brother, we own 50/50, right? How do we remove ourselves from the day-to-day? And we do that by hiring really good people in the leadership team, which we’ve done. And then how do we create the roadmap for future success? How do we systematize our business, which is, you know, the franchise itself provides a playbook but as running the business, it’s still we have all the same problems and everything that I think any other independent business would have. And so, yeah, I mean, our goal eventually is to, I don’t know the timeline but, yeah, we want to be in the best position we can.

Justin Donald: And so, with these businesses, with these Midases, obviously, you have a social media presence so that could be one way that you’re able to pick up more locations. But the most important thing I have found to scale outside of like systems, like SOPs is the operator and some can make the case that maybe that is the single most important thing. So, for me, as an investor, I don’t ever want to buy a job. I want to buy a business that has the cash flow to afford a top-notch operator to run that business and compensate them well for the job that they’re doing. So, I’m curious what you have found to be the best way to hire, like to find the right people, like who’s the right match? And then also compensation-wise, what does that look like?

Brian Beers: Yeah. So, like for us, there’s different levels, right? So, in our model, we have a store manager, right, and then this dude’s got like mechanics in the team there. And then we’ll have a district manager that oversees roughly, let’s call it six, seven, eight locations, maybe up to ten if they’re tightly located in high performers. And so, then we’ve got, you know, that’s kind of like a pod, right, or district. And then we’ve got currently for those so each one has roughly eight locations and that gets us to over 32, 33. And then we kind of over that pyramid have a COO who then all the district manager reports in. And so, for us, A, we’d go into a new market, so like we’re looking at new markets all the time, but we need like six locations, like a road map to six locations very quickly in order to support the salary of hiring that district manager role. And so, if someone wants me to buy one store an hour and a half or 2 hours away like it doesn’t really make sense for us because that becomes that job, right, versus if I say, okay, I can start with that one, but I can buy another two.

And then I think within six months I can buy one here. If I can cobble together a market, you know, in a relatively short amount of time, that’s how it’s like this stair step of feeling to build these out. And so, I think that’s part of it. That role pays, you know, they’ll make anywhere from 100 to 125, 130, 140, something in that range. And then for the leader, the higher leadership role, like my COO, I actually got him through, you know, we have a bunch of friends, mutual friends in GoBundance, a bunch of GoBundance guys I knew used an organization that helps place former military special ops guys out of the military into high paying civilian jobs. And so, they had a bunch of success locally in Philly so I reached out to them and said, “Hey, I’m looking to hire a COO.” They brought me somebody and he crushes it. And so, even though these guys have no civilian experience like they’re right out of the military, they are the top 1% of the military and they are excellent leaders or excellent managers. I think they do very good in a process-driven environment which a franchise system is. And so, certainly, I’ve gotten out him kind of over this.

And as we look to expand into other franchise industries, I am tapping that same pool of these special ops, these top-notch guys. And I will train them the franchising thing but they’ve got core leadership skills that I need.

Justin Donald: Yeah. I think that’s a great marriage right there. I mean, we’ve had also a lot of success with Special Forces, former whatever it be, special ops, any type of operations because you have basically someone that’s not going to flake, someone that’s going to work hard and show up every day that is very system oriented and is used to managing a team of people, at least a certain size team of people. So, yeah, I think that’s a great pool to pick from. And for anyone that does have a business and you’re trying to figure out, “How do I remove myself? How do I create more lifestyle and flexibility?” figuring out who’s going to run the day-to-day and finding someone that has that experience, someone that has the discipline that you want, I think that’s a great resource.

Brian Beers: Yep. 100% I would. Yeah. The organization we use is called SOTF.org, Special Operators Transition Foundation. So, if anybody’s looking for somebody, I highly recommend to check them out.

Justin Donald: I love it. And with Midas, so it’s interesting, I don’t know that a lot of people would look at that business and say, “Wow, what a huge opportunity there,” like, even just mechanic shops in general. By the way, at one point in time, I almost did a triple-net lease with one of them. And maybe at some point, I will. Just getting into that business where it’s corporately guaranteed more on the real estate side than the business side. But what other businesses like are there other? Do you feel like in the mechanics space, there are other businesses comparable to Midas? Do you feel like this is an outlier? Are there other businesses, other franchises, and other industries that maybe have a similar profile, similar profit margin ability to get to profit quickly?

Brian Beers: Yeah. I mean, let’s take a step back. I guess in the Midas system, 66% of franchisees are single-store operators. So, we’re in a system where two of the three are single-store operators. And so, it’s not necessarily like Midas itself was built to have all these multi-unit operators, like a Wingstop or Burger King or Chick-fil-A, or not Chick-fil-A, but these other fast food restaurants and models do. And so, part of that just proves that if we can do it in a system where two-thirds are not doing it, the principles can apply to any different industry. And so, I’ve got friends in other industries doing the exact same thing as me. Then there are two different routes, like there’s the route, like we’ve gone the roll-up route primarily but a big reason why is real estate’s a huge constraint for us to find 4,000 square foot space in a major retail road that’s not too close, etcetera. But I’ve got friends in territory-based businesses, mobile businesses, that don’t have real estate constraints where they can just open up new territories. They launch it with some marketing, maybe they’ve got like a warehouse or whatever, but they can grow really quickly.

And so, the industries that I like are in the trades. That’s what I’m in. I like the more skilled trade. I think it is harder to hire but generally easier to keep people once you hire them because you’re not going to lose them to do some other random like labor job. I think there’s always a need for the trades and I think the culture these days is shifting heavily towards do it for me as opposed to like our parents it was like I’ll do it myself, I DIY, and now it’s DIF whatever. And so, anyway, so anything home services like fixing a home, painting a home, cleaning, HVAC, electrical, like anything in the trades, anything that’s a repair oriented, the people are using their hands, I think there is always going to be a need and it’s only going to get bigger.

Justin Donald: Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more. I started a company called Stellar with a couple of buddies and that company has taken off and it’s all in single-family home maintenance on an institutional side, right, volume play. And we saw some huge profit margins. I mean, based on doing every single job under the sun for maintenance, we found the highest profit margin activities or trades that exist and then we kind of doubled down on those trades. But I would agree with you. I think home services is hugely important. It’s going to continue to grow. It’s a mainstay in a down economic time. It’s still going to be a very robust business, especially if the business itself is built well and built right. Something else I’m curious about, because Codie’s all about, Codie Sanchez, who has contrarian thinking, for those of you that are unfamiliar with her, she talks a lot about buying boring businesses. And she’s spoken at a number of our events and she just always does such a great job. Your strategy is different but similar, right, because you’re kind of more in the franchise route and she’s done less on the franchise and more on one of the one-off routes.

We bought a business at one point in time a dog training company that we thought, “You know what, we could probably turn this single location into a multi-location site or turn it into a franchise, but there’s a lot of work to that.” So, I’m curious if you’ve gone down the path of like, “Hey, do I buy other businesses and franchise them or do I just buy businesses in mass? Or do I stick to this strategy with Midas and continue growing that?”

Brian Beers: Yeah. So, I mean, I’m a believer in the phrase, “Chase two rabbits, catch none.” And so, I’m trying to stay as focused as I can. If I want to expand, I mean, similar to you, I want to hire a partner or an operator who will chase that rabbit together or he’ll chase and I’ll provide them the gun, whatever it is. And so, I’m not really interested in buying your random small business that Codie would talk about. For me, even other franchises if I’m going to go to another franchise, and we’re looking now and into getting another one, like I’m going to go all-in to that one in terms of like we’re not going to have one, we’re going to have ten because I need ten or whatever the number is to support the salary to pay a really good guy who can actually make it into something. It’s kind of like a chicken and egg problem. If you don’t have enough like volume, you can’t pay the guy to actually can get it to the point that it makes sense and not to be this like burden on too much of a burden on me.

And so, the strategy we’re moving forward is find the guys who have the time, who have the leadership skills, but maybe don’t have the money and, yeah, we marry that with the money plus in my franchising experience, I kind of get an idea of what are the models that I really like that I think would do well in my market that I don’t have to get on an airplane or whatever to kind of go and oversee. And so, that’s kind of my main focus of what we’re going to try next is, A, continue to grow Midas. I’ve got a really good leadership team in there so I’m not involved in the day-to-day anymore and then see if we can duplicate that success in the franchise model but I don’t want to have my own business. I don’t want to have to turn something into a franchise because like all that, you know, all it’s like work but what I’m really good at is like show me how to make money. Just give me the playbook and let me go to work. Let me hire the people and we can train them, we can hold them accountable, we can drive sales, and we can drive margins. All that like operations and financial like analysis and the P&Ls and all that stuff is what we’re really good at.

What I’m not good at is like coming up with the brand and here’s how we’re going to market it and here’s like all these other relationships that we need to create and here’s how we’re going to… I have no problem letting the franchise owner handle all that stuff, paying 6% or whatever it is, and me not have to worry about any of it because then in my mind, I can build a much bigger business if there’s less things that I have to worry about. And so, I’m happy to make 6% less money but have double or triple or quadruple the amount of actual profit dollars because I’m only focused on the few things that matter, that I’m really good at.

Justin Donald: Yeah, You know, having a franchise is kind of like having a back office, right? They take care of a lot of the things. I mean, you’ve got to have your own back office to a certain degree but there is a back office that operates corporately. So, for people that are trying to say, “Hey, how do I transition from W2 to owning my own business?” a franchise is a great option because you have a playbook that works. It’s duplicable and you’ve got other people, other operators, and franchisees that you can reach out to for help, which is nice. And I like real estate as well, you know, so franchises, real estate, you could buy the right mom-and-pop business. And by the way, we’re going to have tons of businesses up for sale including franchises in the coming 10, 15, 20 years because all the baby boomers are retiring and a lot of these people are owning either a one-off business or a franchise. Their kids don’t want to take it over or maybe they don’t have kids. And so, you can scoop these up for incredible deals because they may not even know what the value is or they may not even know that they can sell it. They may not even want to sell it. So, I mean, I’ve talked to several people that bought businesses from baby boomers, and they were planning to just shut it down because they didn’t think anyone would be interested in buying it. It’s crazy.

Brian Beers: Yeah. Even for a franchise in like in my case in Midas here like back to like two-thirds of single-store operators. So, for those people, the franchise is a job for them. So, in their mind, the value is like they are selling their job to somebody else. So, they put less value to it than I would, which is, hey, this is an investment. This is a real business. Like, I deserve a, you know, it’s worth a lot of money, right? And so, that’s like there’s this arbitrage between what you think it’s worth and what they think it’s worth as long as you’re running this like consolidation play, which is what franchises are really meant to do like they’re meant to be scalable. They’re meant to be, you know, you can operate in multiple markets and you can systematize it. And people’s biggest challenge in scaling is they just can’t get out of their own way, they can’t delegate, they can’t hire, they want to do everything themselves and they want perfection over progress. And that is what then holds a lot of people back.

Justin Donald: That’s good. Perfection over progress is…

Brian Beers: We’re on the opposite.

Justin Donald: Yeah. It’s an easy way to fail, right? I mean, at my daughter’s school, when she went to Acton Academy, they would always talk about how perfection is the enemy and progress is what you want. So, always subbing out the word perfection for progress. So, what a great lesson. So, talk about what it’s like working with your brother because I have to imagine a lot of people would have a hard time wrapping their mind around working with a family member and how is that going to go out. What roles do each of you play and how do you manage the family relationship and the business relationship?

Brian Beers: Yeah. And so, yeah, I get that question all the time and we have a great relationship, fortunately, but there are many people, many brothers that I know in the Midas system that ripped the family apart. And so, it could go really one way or another. You know, we’re yin yang of skill sets. And so, I think that helps. So, he really runs like the back office, like he oversees the finances, the technology. He’s a tech nerd. And so, we’ve built a lot of custom stuff to allow us to scale it very inexpensively our back office using [Outs-Phil – 24:59]. We have almost 100% Filipinos and, anyway, lots of different things we’ve done to kind of scale and use technology. And so, almost he runs all of that. And then he’s the detail guy. I’m the like bigger picture and the vision. I’m the one who’s more forward-facing on the podcast and the one’s coming up with the new deals and getting the vision, and he was really good at helping execute the vision that I have. So, it works as I think where we have offsetting skills. If we both work the same way, we’re both the visionary and neither of us actually wanted to do the detail work. I think we would struggle and if both of us did detail work, I don’t think we’d have as big of a company as we do today because a lot of the acquisitions are through relationships that I’d built over the years.

Justin Donald: Oh, it’s great. And so, what are some of the things that you feel comfortable outsourcing to VAs or building systems around to just be more automatic than manual?

Brian Beers: Yeah. So, I mean, almost our entire back office. So, as of today, we just hired a third. I would say we have a CFO, a CF or COA, chief administrative officer, and somebody who helps with accounts payable here in the US over 200 people company. The rest of our team is in the Philippines. So, we have our controller, multiple accounts payable, accounts receivable, someone who helps with HR and onboarding and like they do all, you know, what they do. I mean, they have their bank account information, they’re reconciling, they do credit cards. I mean, they do payroll like we have a trusted person that just helps us with payroll. So, it’s extremely cost-effective and we can hire a high-quality person for $1,200 a month compared to what would be $5,000, $6,000 here in the U.S. and then we got benefits and all the other payroll taxes. And then we do all of our IT. I mean, we’re now looking into recruiting. We tried doing a call center. It didn’t really work for a couple of different reasons. I do all my social media and we probably have 15 people, maybe more. I think it’s great. I mean, I would encourage anybody to, you can do anything you want pretty much if you find the right people and set them up with instructions.

Justin Donald: I love it. And by the way, I’ve built a call center before. I mean, that is some true chaos right there. By the way, I know people that have done it and done it well but that is an operation that needs constant management, and finding the right people and retention is tricky. It’s an interesting business.

Brian Beers: And ours was 100% remote but our issue was the disconnect between the people calling, wanting to come in like right now to get the car fixed and then the people on the phone, like, what are they telling them? And our rule is like say, yes, bring them in, like we want the business. But then the managers would call the call center people and say, “Oh, no, I’m shut off for the day. I don’t have this, I don’t have that. We’re too busy,” and then we get pissed off by like hearing that they’re shutting down business and there is this whole thing.

Justin Donald: I love it. So, what would you say to someone who is working a job right now? And maybe they are super comfortable, they’ve got the golden handcuffs, they make good money. So, it’s hard to leave because they become accustomed to a certain lifestyle but they want to leave because they’re just so sick and tired of what they’re doing and it doesn’t inspire them anymore.

Brian Beers: Yeah. I mean, we talk to people every single day who are in that situation and I’ve got a team. We help people do that exact same thing. How do you transition out of corporate America into being your own business owner? And at the end of the day, I mean, you got one life to live. Like, what do you want to do with it? And I think, you know Jamie Gruber, right?

Justin Donald: I know the name.

Brian Beers: GoBundance? Anyway, he’s a friend. He’s a good friend. But he had this real good saying about leaving his job and the way he kind of talked about it was like, you know, what’s the worst that happened? So, you quit this job, start this business, you know, maybe it doesn’t work out. Most of the people who buy franchises are highly employable. Like, they have really good resumes. They’ve got huge networks. Like, if it didn’t work out, yes, you lose some money, but then you kind of go back probably to the same job that you’re at today. And so, like the downside risk is somewhat minimal compared to you look at the flip side of what the upside is that you could create this business. You can make a lot more money, you could have a lot more time, you could have a lot more fun, and you can really live the lifestyle that you really want to live. And it’s there like, if I can do it, like you can do it. It’s not rocket science. I don’t have an MBA. I didn’t invent anything. I didn’t solve a new problem. I just said, “Show me how to make money and I’ll just go and do that.” I think it takes time to learn. It’s not for everybody. You got to be driven and you got to really want it. But for those that do and make the jump, I mean, the rewards can be astronomical.

Justin Donald: Oh, totally. How old are you now and how old were you when you started, when you took over your first Midas?

Brian Beers: Well, I’m 35 and I bought my first one of my own 2016 so six years ago, seven years ago.

Justin Donald: And so, what were you doing then for money prior to Midas? Like, what was your career?

Brian Beers: I was at college. I had jobs doing like some software development stuff, but I wasn’t making much. Even when I did that, I started in the family business, I don’t know, $50,000 a year maybe.

Justin Donald: I get it because when you’re in that space, it can be tough to say, “Well, what if I don’t do well? I’m walking away from all the money I’m making like this is scary.” But the flip side of that is, yeah, you can also go get another job making the same amount likely even more if you’re just willing to like go out there and look. But I think that’s the tough part is change is hard. You get used to something. You get used to a certain amount of pay for a certain activity. You’re good at it. You may not like it but there’s this factor of what is known. And then over here, there’s this factor of this unknown that just feels scary because it’s unknown. Even though the skills may fall much more beautifully into your skill set.

Brian Beers: Yup. Yeah. No, it’s definitely a big commitment and I think it’s for those who really want it.

Justin Donald: That’s cool.

Brian Beers: So, you got to have that why. That driving why I think is that why has got to be bigger than any of the downside or any of the fears.

Justin Donald: Yeah. Any last thoughts you want to share with our audience today about what you’ve done? And my goal is that I’m always bringing guests on that have advice, that have experience, that have strategies that they can copy. You said it perfectly yourself or you said, “Hey, this isn’t rocket science. These skills are not challenging skills. I just find someone that’s done it and I copy them,” and I feel like that’s what I’ve done in my career. So, I’ve just found people that figured out a playbook and I just copy that playbook and it works.

Brian Beers: Yeah. I mean, that’s what all franchising is about. So, yeah, I mean, I think the parting words would be, yeah, I think some people may have preconceived notions about franchising that they think a McDonald’s, they think of food, they think of like huge multimillion dollar or they think it’s like buying themselves a job and it’s like 100K a year. But in reality, there’s just like all of these different industries, you name it, with home industry, you get health care, you got pets. We got like auto fitness. I mean, almost anything you can get into and you can build a significant sized business. I mean, ordinary people every day are building tremendous amounts of wealth that people don’t even realize, just like following the playbook. And so, it’s not for everyone. It’s not easy but like the road is paved and it’s just up to the people who want to get on it.

Justin Donald: And I’ll throw one other thing out there about this is that sometimes it’s not whether it’s easy or hard. Sometimes it’s not whether it’s safe or risky. Sometimes it’s that you just need something new to get you to bring back the passion and bring back the excitement, bring back the desire to learn and grow. And when you’re stuck in a rut or stuck in the same thing, it often can be hard to make that move. But the move like that, a lot of people are like, “Oh, I would want to move for this great opportunity.” Well, what if the opportunity is not great, but it unleashes something in you that really fosters this new motivation, this new eagerness to learn or to network or connect and it leads you to the next thing? Maybe the next thing isn’t the first thing you do. It’s the second or third or fourth thing. But just the newness of something that you don’t know well and the variety that creates and the force learning that really comes into play, I think that in itself is just like one of the greatest gifts in the world.

Brian Beers: Yeah. That’s extremely well said.

Justin Donald: So, where can people find out more about you, Brian, if they want to learn about what you’re up to and connect with you? I know you’ve got a big social media presence, especially on Twitter.

Brian Beers: Yeah. Twitter is probably my biggest platform right now, @BrianBeers. And also, I’m trying to do a little bit more on LinkedIn. I’ve got a podcast as well. It’s called Business With Beers, where I bring on franchisees, franchiseurs. We also talk about once you’re making money, how do you invest it into passive syndications? And I think all the stuff you’re doing would be really cool to talk about. Yes, that would be the best place is Twitter. And from there, you can find everything else.

Justin Donald: I love it. Well, this has been just a ton of fun. And by the way, I love the catchy name of Interview with Beers. I mean, that’s really fun, Podcasting with Beers. Okay. So, I love ending every episode asking our audience one simple question. So, this is a question that I really want you to answer yourselves but that’s this: What’s one step you can take today based on the information you learned from Brian that sets you on a path towards financial freedom and really living life on your terms, one that is full of intentionality and really kind of evokes that desire so not a life by default, but a life by design? What’s that one thing and can you take action on it today? Thanks, as always. And we’ll catch you next week.