Spencer Grogan

Quick intro, since most of you are new here. • Grew up near Pensacola, FL • Pitched at Oklahoma State, played some minor league ball • 10 years at a Fortune 200 company, then stints at a PE-owned company and a family office • MBA from Rice University along the way • Married since 2009, two beautiful daughters, 8 and 11 • Houston from 2009 to 2023, minus two years in OKC, then back to OKC for good in 2023 • Christian • Bought a couple of existing oil change businesses in Florida with a partner in 2022 and 2023, still own and run them today • Bought a fitness franchise once too, lost money, learned plenty • Looking to buy a few more businesses in OKC and Florida right now, while still working the day job • Hobbies: lifting weights, hunting, and working on my property • Got a hell of a duck dog named Pancho, and a Goldendoodle pup named Simba I'll be documenting the search and the acquisitions as they happen, plus the first year of running each business. No highlight reel. The real thing. If you've ever wanted to own a business but weren't sure you could ever leave the day job, stick around. That's who I'm writing for.

Boring businesses pay for exciting lives. Oil changes bought the land, the tractor, and the food plots the deer are eating tonight.

@technopro61 Agree. FDD’s are only a small part of the DD when looking at what franchisor to partner with.

@Grogan_Spencer Interviewing 9 franchisors before signing is the part most people skip. And the question I'd add: how many of their franchisees went on to open a second unit? That answer tells you more than any FDD page.

"Franchises are a scam. The franchisee always gets taken advantage of." You hear it constantly, and sometimes it's true. I've been the franchisee it didn't work for. I've also been the franchisee it worked very well for. Same buyer. Two opposite outcomes. The difference wasn't luck. The difference was the diligence on the front end, and whether I listened to my gut on one question: does our culture match the franchisor's? Is this someone I'd want to be partners with for the next 15 years? Do they care about their franchisees? Do I trust them? When I went the franchise route on the oil change shops, I interviewed 9 franchisors. Read the FDDs. Met several in person. Dug into how each business performs in different economic cycles. The oil change franchise started near the bottom of my list. Seventh or eith out of nine, somewhere in there. It kept elevating itself the deeper the diligence went. By the end, I didn't buy one flag. I bought five. Two locations are open. We're looking at the next three. Now, the number everybody hates: most franchisors end up taking 10 to 11% of revenue between royalties and marketing. That is not a small number. Paying it blindly is how people end up in the scam camp. So audit the value. Here's what ours looks like: A trainer from the franchisor spent four days at shop 1 and took the average ticket from about $70 to about $95. It didn't hold right away. But it proved to our whole team the number was real. The previous owner ran that shop for a decade and never got close. Not because he was bad. Because he'd never seen it done. Without that partnership, I believe we'd have tapped out around $70-75 a ticket. Instead we sit around $100, and revenue grew 60%. The math on what we pay versus what we would have missed isn't close. The marketing fee? Mostly money you'd spend anyway as an independent, with less leverage. So here's the actual take: the franchise fee isn't the cost of a logo. It's tuition. Whether it's a scam depends almost entirely on how well you pick your teacher. Interview the franchisor like a partner, because that's what they are. Trust your gut on culture. I skipped my gut once. That's the one that cost six figures.

@technopro61 Another positive to dealing with newer franchisors is you usually have better access to the founder or upper mgmt. They are also much more open to feedback and typically more willing to help the franchisee to make sure they succeed.

This matches what I see. A newer franchisor means open territory but a less proven playbook, and that trade off is real. Most candidates only look at the fees. x.com/Grogan_Spencer…

@CostaKapo Yes, Florida has tough competition in the QL market. We have had success there, but the competition is increasing.

@Grogan_Spencer I recognize the name from the FDD. Our charlotte franchisee wanted to go into Panama FL territory. FL is prob toughest market for QL RE thanks to Take 5

I’ve found that really depends on the franchisor. If the franchisor is fairly new the. There will be lots of territories open. We were fortunate to have many areas to choose from and we were treated well. Another franchise we were involved in had very few territories available. We ended up buying a dark asset in a territory that wasn’t our first choice.

@CostaKapo @Grogan_Spencer Territory choice is where a lot of franchisees win or lose before they even open. Curious how much of that call you leave to them versus steer yourself.

@CostaKapo Yes, we are in the Strickland system. Nothing but good things to say about that group.

@Grogan_Spencer Weren’t / Aren’t

I’m following this one. We run quick lube shops. Been trying to find out next three shops for a while and are struggling. Not really interested in doing a BTS, but there aren’t many mom and pops left in the area we want to expand. A dark asset and a then an expensive conversion. I’m interested to see how the economics work out. Good luck!

I’ve run out of auto repair shops to buy (Own 36 right now) So now I’m looking at converting dark pharmacies like this one We’ll find out in three weeks if I can make the numbers work

@matt_gray_ The blue-collar version of this is the oil menu. Conventional, blend, full synthetic. Every customer sees the ladder on the wall and knows exactly what the next rung is.

Your product ladder should feel like Apple's. One entry product. One core. One premium. One inner circle. The client should always know the next step, and the next step should always feel obvious.

@dickiebush Every budget I ever ran in corporate was wrong. Building it was still the most valuable week of the year. It forced you to learn every lever and every dependency. The document expired almost immediately. The understanding is what you actually walked out with.

Mantra I am repeating often: Plans are useless. Planning is everything.

The rooms part is dead right. The acting part has a shelf life. Sooner or later someone asks a question that confidence can’t answer, and the bluff costs more than looking green would have. The durable version of willing-to-look-stupid is asking the dumb question out loud. Asking your direct reports stupid questions is also a great way to develop them. Even if you know the answers, it forces them to think more.

Career hack: Get in rooms where you don’t belong. I used to sit in meetings with people way more experienced than me and just talk like I belonged there. Nobody checked my credentials. They just believed me because I acted confident. The person willing to look stupid moves faster than the person waiting to feel ready.

One honest edit to the middle line. The think-about-it-less part is real but it’s year three, not day one. Every business is loud at first, including the boring ones. Ours took a few manager hires and fires before the quiet showed up. You don’t buy a business you think about less, you build one into that.

You're allowed to start something you're not passionate about. You're allowed to build a business specifically so you can think about it less. You're allowed to want a boring company and a loud life instead of the other way around. The hustle bro's don't want you to see this.

Day one under new ownership. Half a day dark for the new systems, and the cars came anyway.

You can see a day’s work on land. Try that with a day of email. Planted food plots one spring evening and watched the proof come up all summer.

Nobody warns you the hardest part of the oil change business has nothing to do with oil. It’s the people. Finding them, hiring them, keeping them. And figuring out that a great worker and a great teammate aren’t always the same guy. The cars are the easy part. A car shows up every morning. A car doesn’t have a buddy’s wedding three counties away, or a truck that won’t start, or a new job it forgot to mention until 10:05. A car’s never once called in sick on a Saturday in July. I can teach a guy to run the equipment in a week. The people part I’m still figuring out. Another one from the shop.

Most hiring problems are screening problems wearing a disguise.

Start every review with two questions: what’s going well, and what would you improve? People defend conclusions handed to them. They act on their own.

@TheNolanGore I bet good. Nothing wrong with bringing a little real life go it. They were probably thinking “this guy is in the zone, doesn’t care about social norms, has no idea he has 2 hats on, LFG”.

I put this second hat on my head this morning to put in my car Then I forgot about it And did the entire morning sending off our 20 crews Just realized it Is it a good or bad sign that no one told me/ asked about it?

@fasterfreedom 👊👊

@Grogan_Spencer 👊👊👊👊

If it makes you happy… It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else.

Bought the shops to control my own destiny. My destiny now depends heavily on whether the parts truck shows up and the weekly oil delivery arrives...