Ray Titus and the business of passing it on

Before Ray Titus had a franchise to sell, he had a school paper to write. His subject, in eighth grade, was how to start a franchise. Most children have to leave home to discover what business looks like. Titus could look across the dining-room table. His father, Roy, founded Minuteman Press; the family vocabulary already included the possibility that a shop could become a system, and that the system could become somebody else's livelihood.

The paper is a small beginning for a career now measured in countries. It also supplies a useful clue. Titus's story keeps returning to the same question: how does knowledge move from someone who has done the work to someone who is about to try? In his family, business advice has travelled through school assignments, sports practice and the journey to class. The delivery methods have occasionally been more memorable than the advice.

Today he is chairman and CEO of United Franchise Group, and the co-founder of Signarama. UFG’s affiliated brands encompass more than 1,800 franchises in over 80 countries. Ray and his wife, Andrea, have made Palm Beach County their home for more than 35 years. The business has expanded far beyond the family; the family remains closely involved in the business. Three sons, three nephews and daughters-in-law have chosen careers within it.

The coach changes courts

Basketball offered an earlier route into adult life. Titus learned the game as a child on Long Island, then attended St. John Fisher College and Florida Southern College on basketball scholarships. He enjoyed the pace. The sport also gave him a vocabulary for work: practice, repetition, arriving early and staying after everyone else had finished. These are familiar coaching instructions. They are less glamorous than a theory of entrepreneurial genius, and considerably easier to put on tomorrow's calendar.

He later coached his three boys and spent almost a decade coaching junior varsity basketball at The King's Academy, while also assisting the varsity team. In 2022, he described a half-court basketball facility at UFG and a weekly game. There is a pleasing consistency here. A person who explains sales through practice has left room at the office for the activity that taught him to practise.

In the photograph, Titus sends a basketball towards the camera with a broad smile. A boardroom portrait would have been easier to arrange. This one catches the part of his working philosophy that a suit cannot explain: improvement requires another attempt, and a team gives that attempt somewhere to go.

A weekend education in management

In 1986, Ray and Roy opened Signarama in Farmingdale, New York. The intention was to franchise the concept. Franchising followed in 1987. Ray was 23 when the first store opened, young enough to discover that being in charge and knowing what to do were separate accomplishments.

He tells a story about an early Friday meeting with the shop's small staff. An employee suggested strategic planning. Titus agreed enthusiastically, then postponed the discussion until Monday. Once the meeting ended, he admitted to himself that he had no idea what strategic planning meant. The weekend suddenly had an agenda.

He went to the library, found a management book and studied a chapter on planning. On Monday he adapted what he had learned to the sign shop. An employee praised his command of the subject. Titus remembers laughing behind his office door. The joke was on the timetable: Friday's ignorance had become Monday's apparent expertise.

The useful part of the episode is his willingness to describe it. A polished founder story usually edits out the moment when the founder needs instructions. Here, the instructions are the point. An employee supplied the question; a book helped him prepare an answer. His habit of reading grew from that discovery.

“One of my personal goals is to continue to be a lifelong learner.”

Ray Titus, 2019

The shop becomes a family of businesses

Signarama supplied the first long stretch of the company's development. Its 300th store opened in 1996. In 2000 came EmbroidMe, the embroidery and promotional-products business later renamed Fully Promoted. The United Franchise Group name was officially established in 2005. Each date marks a different kind of expansion: another shop, another service, then an organization able to work across brands.

Transworld Business Advisors followed in 2010. UFG entered food and coworking in 2016 with Jon Smith Subs and Venture X. Office Evolution was acquired in 2022, and Black Optix Tint joined the group in 2025. Signs, business brokerage, shared offices and food have different customers and operating demands. The common work at the parent level is developing and supporting franchise systems.

Titus has described his own change in perspective. At first he thought of himself as working in signs and helping customers grow their businesses. After building, buying and selling brands, he came to understand the broader business as franchising. That distinction matters to the career. It explains how a founder can spend decades moving beyond his original product without abandoning the experience that taught him how to operate.

The customer behind the customer

The owner of a local Signarama serves the businesses that need signs. The franchisor has a different immediate customer: the franchise owner. UFG's mission puts the relationship plainly: “We have one customer: Our Franchisee. When they are successful, we are successful.”

Titus's advice about growth starts with making the existing business work. He emphasizes relationships with employees, customers, suppliers and the community. He also names communication and a positive attitude as daily choices. There is nothing particularly exotic about the ingredients. The difficulty lies in repeating them when a business is busy, when it is quiet, and when a person would prefer to be doing something else.

The recruitment process offers a more concrete view. In 2025, Titus described between 1,300 and 1,500 individual Discovery Day tours a year, roughly 90 percent virtual. Prospective owners were expected to visit an operating location and talk with two or three franchisees beforehand. Department leaders then explained their parts of the business. That sequence gives the prospective owner several people to question before making a commitment.

It also makes room for the prospective owner to be evaluated. A franchise relationship lasts beyond the sales conversation; both sides have work ahead. The educational purpose of those meetings fits Titus's recurring interest in preparation. Someone must explain how the system works before someone else agrees to work inside it.

The surname does not finish the job

A family business creates an awkward question for everyone carrying the family name: what, exactly, have you earned? Titus's answer involved giving his children work that other people did not want. Andrew, the youngest, began at Fully Promoted in maintenance. “I'm old school,” Ray says. A first job with a broom has the advantage of making the organizational chart temporarily irrelevant.

Andrew became president of Fully Promoted at the end of 2022. During his first six months, he visited 70 locations to hear what owners wanted fixed. In 2026, he moved to the presidency of UFG, while Walter Miska became Fully Promoted's brand president. Miska had previously mentored Andrew. The succession therefore includes a relationship built outside the father-son pair, an important detail in a company so closely associated with its founding family.

Ray's other sons have also built careers within the organization. A.J. leads Signarama; Austin leads Accurate Franchising. The different businesses give relatives different responsibilities. Family proximity may open the door, but people on the other side still need a leader who understands their problems. A name can introduce you. It cannot take every franchisee's call for you.

Eighteen lessons on the way to school

The more intimate version of Titus's management education happened in a car. Driving young A.J. to school, Ray passed along principles about life and leadership. A.J. eventually gathered 18 of them into The List: Lessons from a Father, published in 2022 as he became a parent himself.

The book also carries a lesson from A.J.'s grandfather, J.J. Prendamano, UFG's former general manager and Ray's father-in-law. When A.J. arrived late for a meeting, J.J. wrote a reminder about respecting time on a five-dollar bill and tore it in half. The other half would come when A.J. respected other people's time. A.J. kept the bill. Few calendar alerts have that kind of staying power.

The story is amusing because the prop is so exact. Five dollars is enough to be real money, little enough to be sacrificed to the demonstration, and difficult to spend in two pieces. The lesson survives as an object as well as a sentence. It is a small example of the family's preference for advice that attaches itself to an experience.

There is another change of ownership here. The boy receiving instructions on the school run becomes the father deciding which instructions to preserve. Ray's ideas leave the car, enter a book and reach readers who have never met the family. Passing something on requires the next person to do some work with it.

A classroom with room for strangers

The Titus Center for Franchising at Palm Beach Atlantic University gives that process a public home. It was endowed through a $1.5 million contribution from Titus. Students can study franchising, while the center also brings business people into educational and professional conversations. The same subject that occupied his eighth-grade paper has become a place where other students can begin.

Other donors have added opportunities of their own. In 2020, Ed and Becky Kobel established a $300,000 challenge fund to help eligible students and graduates purchase a first franchise. The program paired funding with mentoring and required recipients to operate their businesses full-time and repay the money over three years. Teaching ownership and helping someone attempt ownership are different undertakings. The center provides a setting for both.

In 2021, PBA awarded Titus its American Free Enterprise Medal. Addressing students, he spoke about purpose and profit being compatible. He also announced a further family commitment for a franchising museum honoring center director John P. Hayes. The gesture connected his own recognition to someone whose work helped build the educational program.

That is a quieter part of this career than the international store count, but it changes who can participate in the story. A student need not have grown up with a franchise founder at the dinner table to meet people who know the trade.

Still doing the homework

Titus set himself a goal of reading 50 books in 2019. He linked the effort to his responsibility to prepare the next generation to run the company in its own way. That is a revealing qualification: handing over a business requires more than teaching someone to imitate its founder. The person inheriting responsibility will face different circumstances and make different decisions.

His recent work returns to practical questions. In March 2026, UFG announced his book How To Become The Most Popular Business In Your Town, about visibility, trust, referrals and local relationships. In September, he published an article on how CEOs can narrow their focus and avoid getting absorbed in everyday operational details. Forty years after Signarama opened, his subjects still concern what a business owner does with an ordinary working day.

His 2026 induction into the Global Franchise Awards Hall of Fame marks recognition from the industry. Yet the more telling image may remain the young owner preparing for Monday, or the father using a school run to teach his son. A franchise grows by repeating a business. A family passes on its lessons by giving the next person a chance to practise. Titus has spent much of his career arranging opportunities for both.