franchising
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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.
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.
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.
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.