franchising
(29)
Ivan Herrera Built UniVista by Betting on the Overlooked
A biology graduate arrived in Miami with a family, a dog and an accent corporate America underestimated. His answer was to learn sales, risk the house and build an insurance company around customers the industry had learned not to see.
Justin Strickland Turned a Scribbled Bar Plan Into Ten-Minute Scale
A grandfather’s $35,000 home-equity gamble gave a rejected lube technician one shot. Justin Strickland answered with a national service business built around a scarce American luxury: getting an errand over with.
Chris Newcomb’s Second Act Began by Taking Down the Wall
The Newk’s co-founder turned an accidental restaurant job into a lifelong study of food, people, and the invisible machinery behind a good lunch.
Tatiane Vita Learned Global Growth From the Shop Floor
She started behind a Chilli Beans counter while studying journalism. Two decades later, Tatiane Vita is applying a field-tested playbook for international growth to schools, founders and a public conversation about who gets chosen to lead.
The Lawn-Care Franchise That Turned One Pickup Truck Into a $350 Million System
Weed Man does not mow lawns. It built something more repeatable: a local-service machine where proprietary fertilizer, protected territories and stubborn follow-through turn seasonal grass problems into recurring revenue.
M&M Food Market Was Frozen in the ’90s - Then It Let Shoppers Open the Freezer
The Canadian frozen-food chain had a tired name, blank white boxes and a counter customers found intimidating. Its comeback began with a wonderfully literal idea: let people browse.
How Pet Valu Turned a $100 Million Warehouse Bet Into an 877-Store Playbook for Neighborhood Retailers
Pet Valu sells the recurring essentials pets cannot postpone, but its real product is local trust at national scale. A four-year logistics overhaul shows how the 50-year-old Canadian chain is trying to make that contradiction pay.
The Firm That Bet Against the Buyout Playbook - and Ran It 40 Years
For four decades, a Beverly Hills firm has invested in middle-market companies by lending and owning at the same time. In July 2025 it closed its seventh flagship fund at over $3.6 billion - proof the contrarian model still sells.
The Backpack That Became Colombia’s Carry-On Economy
TOTTO turned the humble backpack into a durable, compartment-packed companion for school, work and travel. Nearly four decades later, the Bogotá brand is testing how far a Colombian idea can travel without losing its practical center.
The Company Behind the Van in Your Driveway
Authority Brands has assembled 15 familiar home-service businesses under one quiet operating system. The bet is simple: keep the trucks local, but make the machinery behind them national.
The Coffee Chain That Puts a Bean on Top
Founded in a Southern Oregon parking lot in 1998, The Human Bean built a 260-location drive-thru empire on fast espresso, direct-trade beans, and an October fundraiser that has pulled in more than $4 million for breast cancer causes.
The Company Behind Your Oil Change Is Quietly Building Car Care's Operating System
Driven Brands has turned a scattered chore - keeping a car alive - into a portfolio of familiar local shops backed by one shared machine. Its next chapter depends on making that machine simpler, faster and more disciplined.
The Hospitality Giant That Owns Almost No Hotels
Hilton runs more than 8,000 hotels across 140-plus countries and barely holds the deeds to any of them. The real business is a fee machine wrapped around 200 million loyalty members - and it started with one man and a cheap hotel in Cisco, Texas.
The Sandwich Chain Where Every Sub Helps Buy a Fire Truck
Two firefighter brothers turned steamed subs and a fire-station theme into a 1,300-store chain - and a charity that has bought more than $100 million in gear for first responders.
The Smoothie Chain That Quietly Became a $1.5 Billion Food Business
Tropical Smoothie Cafe built a national franchise by treating the smoothie as an invitation, not the whole meal. Now 1,700 cafes, a serious food business and a fast-growing loyalty program reveal what the brand was blending all along.
The Steakhouse Where Dinner Comes to You - Until You Say Stop
A two-color coaster, a procession of skewers and a 47-year-old Brazilian ritual became a 122-restaurant growth machine. Fogo de Chão is selling abundance, control and a night out that behaves nothing like an ordinary steakhouse.
How a Wing Craving in Ohio Became America's Loudest Sports Bar
Two friends could not find a decent wing in Columbus in 1982, so they started frying their own. Four decades later the sauce list has a heat challenge, the sports bar has a takeout spinoff, and a third of the orders never sit down.
Regis Corporation
The company that quietly cuts millions of heads of hair a year runs almost no salons of its own. Here is how a 100-year-old chain rebuilt itself around franchisees, royalties and the corner-strip haircut.
Planet Fitness
Planet Fitness built a 21.5-million-member business by treating intimidation as the real barrier to exercise. Its low-price, franchise-powered model turned the people traditional gyms overlooked into the center of the fitness market.
Sport Clips Haircuts
How a Wharton MBA and former Air Force pilot turned the men's haircut into a sports-bar ritual - and built one of North America's biggest haircare franchises around the games already on TV.
Handel's Homemade Ice Cream
An 80-year-old Ohio ice cream counter is becoming a national franchise without outsourcing its central ritual: every parlor still makes the product on site. The constraint is also the pitch.
Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
Jeni Britton turned a spoonful of cayenne-spiked chocolate into a national premium ice cream business. Now Jeni's is testing whether the same craft, curiosity, and neighborhood warmth can survive grocery scale, frozen shipping, and franchising.
Applebee's Neighborhood Grill + Bar
How a Georgia "Rx for Edibles & Elixirs" grew into a 1,500-restaurant franchise machine that runs on riblets, dollar margaritas, and the promise that you already belong.
Blueground
Blueground is a global proptech operator of furnished, move-in-ready apartments rented on flexible terms for stays of 30 days or more. Founded in 2013 by Alex Chatzieleftheriou after years of consultant hotel-living, the company leases, designs and manages thousands of apartments across dozens of cities, pairs them with proprietary technology and a guest app, and serves both relocating individuals and thousands of corporate clients. Through acquisitions, franchising and a partner network, Blueground has expanded from an Athens startup into one of the largest curated networks of flexible furnished homes worldwide.
Tom James
Tom James is a Certified Franchise Consultant and the founder of Prophecy Consulting, a Fort Worth, Texas advisory practice that helps corporate executives and military veterans decide whether to buy a franchise, and if so which one. A FranServe affiliate and member of the International Franchise Association, he matches candidates across 700-plus franchise brands through a free, structured coaching process. His approach is shaped by having owned a franchise himself, a SpeedPro large-format printing operation in the Los Angeles area, and by a corporate career spanning HR, IT, operations, project management, finance, and sales and marketing.
Oakscale Franchise Partners
Oakscale Franchise Partners is a New York-based, tech-enabled franchise development company that helps emerging brands scale into national franchise systems. It combines hands-on franchise consulting, data-driven lead generation and matchmaking, marketing, and selective equity investment - handling the full journey from concept to signed franchise agreements. Founded in 2017 by Joshua Kovacs and now part of Metric Collective, Oakscale has facilitated millions of franchise searches and worked with thousands of franchisor clients across fast-casual, pet care, mobility, and specialty retail.
Robert Huntington
Robert (Rob) Huntington is the CEO of Oakscale Franchise Partners and of Metric Collective, a New York-based group that builds, markets, and invests in franchise brands. A former high-school history teacher who ran the single largest Huntington Learning Center before earning an MBA at Kellogg and consulting at BCG, he now applies data, software, and digital marketing to a slow-moving industry, connecting entrepreneurs with franchise concepts and helping emerging brands scale. He led the angel round that seeded Oakscale with $1.2M in 2019 and frames franchising's challenge bluntly: the industry has been coasting downhill and now has to pedal.
Vessel Technologies, Inc.
Vessel Technologies is a New York-based housing product company that designs, manufactures, and franchises attainably priced apartment buildings for the 'missing middle' - working people who earn too much for subsidized housing and too little for market-rate rents. Using a panelized, IKEA-style off-site construction system, Vessel builds all-electric, solar-powered, universally accessible apartments that fit on small urban lots and go up in under a year for a fraction of conventional cost.
Scott Shane
Scott Andrew Shane is one of the most cited entrepreneurship scholars alive, holding the A. Malachi Mixon III Professorship at Case Western Reserve University while simultaneously running Comeback Capital, a pre-seed VC fund backing Heartland startups, and advising Right Side Capital Management. He has written or edited 16 books, published over 94 scholarly articles, won the 2009 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, and manages a personal angel portfolio of 50+ companies - all while arguing, with data, that most things people believe about entrepreneurship are wrong.