Starting From Scratch: Secrets from 22 Ordinary People Who Made the Entrepreneurial Leap by Moss Wes

Author:Moss, Wes [Moss, Wes]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Kaplan
Published: 2009-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Alan Thompson, Founder of the Off The Grill franchise

Work the System

Tired of his sales job in commercial real estate, Alan Thompson built his own restaurant system by making a lot of mistakes along the way. Now his system has him at the top of a growing, multimillion-dollar empire—the Off The Grill restaurant franchise. Alan’s story shows the restaurant franchising business from both sides: franchisee and franchisor.

Alan’s career took a winding route, but he always had a system. Whether it was cutting lawns, selling real estate, or selling take-out dinners, Alan broke down his business ideas step-by-step and figured out how he was going to make money. For example, as a kid, just like me, he started cutting lawns for people at $5 per yard. But then he realized he could get other kids to do the work for $2.50—that’s a 50 percent profit margin if you don’t count the gasoline. Soon he had a lawn-cutting empire. By age 15 he had bought his own car with $1,500 cash. That’s a lot of green for a kid.

Alan’s lawn-cutting work took him to some surprising places. Cutting grass one day at an office building near his college, Alan met a businessman looking to buy the property. They got to talking, and the older man shared his system for selling real estate. Alan was hooked. Originally, his plan was to get a pharmacy degree and partner with a family friend looking to expand his drugstore business. But Alan couldn’t hack his organic chemistry class, and real estate started to look very good. His father was an engineer, the first in his family to ever go to college, so there was a lot of pressure for Alan to finish college. He didn’t, and instead started working for sales commissions in commercial real estate.

The thing about commercial real estate is that it’s feast or famine, and at first Alan saw only the feast. He got on board in 1984 at the beginning of the savings and loan crisis, when banks were heating up the market by unloading foreclosed commercial properties. Alan hooked up with an attorney and former banker who needed a salesperson to work their simple system. They would fix up the foreclosed properties for the savings and loans, lease them up, and sell to investors—all at a profit to the savings and loan and to themselves. “We made a lot of money doing it,” recalls Alan, who went from making $5 an hour to $20,000 a month. “At age 21, you don’t see an end to that. I was young and stupid and I thought making a living was pretty easy. I thought I was invincible.”

Business is all about change, and the market opportunity that made for easy money in commercial real estate eventually changed. It happened when the federal government’s Resolution Trust Corp. stepped in and changed the game by selling off the savings and loan properties before they could be renovated or leased.

As one developer after another went belly up, Alan saw the writing on the wall and started hunting for the next opportunity.

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