Scaling Smart:

 

Jeff Walter (00:00)

Hi, I’m Jeff Walter and welcome back to the podcast. My guest today is Jake Wharton. Jake is the director of franchise growth at Blooming Blinds. He’s a technical minded, results driven professional with comprehensive background in sales, product management and development, and operational leadership. Paired with a strong analytical and technical skills that are reinforced with his degrees from A and that’s multiple degrees. Good job. Great school. Loved my time there, not as a student, but as a visitor to other students.

 

It was great. I enjoyed my time there. Let’s just say, he’s a professional, his professional journey, includes, in building materials has given them an extensive experience in manufacturing, executing pricing strategies, multi sound channel sales management and team training. Jake, welcome to the podcast and thank you for agreeing, to talk about, blooming blinds and, and, and, and franchise training and all that good stuff.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(00:53)

I’m happy to be here, Jeff. Thanks for having me.

 

Jeff Walter (00:55)

So Jake, I usually I’m always curious about how people end up where they end up. I ended up where I’m at. I never thought ⁓ I’d end up in Michigan and I’ve been here for 25 years. At a school I was down as we were just talking, I was down in Houston and I thought I would never be in a cold weather climate again. And then a little while ago an opportunity came and poof I found myself in Ann Arbor, and I thought I would never see winter snow again and now I’m snowmobiling for

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(01:21)

Now I can’t leave. Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (01:21)

Cronella. Now I can’t leave. Exactly.

 

Exactly. So, but how’d you end up where you’re at at Blooming Blinds? Tell us a little bit Blooming Blinds and your role there and how you ended up there.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(01:31)

Yeah, so Bloomin’ Blinds is a window coverings franchise. We’re specialized in window coverings in the home space, right? So nothing commercial, primarily residential. But I came to know Bloomin’ actually through family. My father was in window coverings for a majority of his career, and he actually got to know the founding family, Stewart brothers, while he was working with Norman Window Fashions.

 

And he came aboard to work with them, I think in 2021, 2022. And they had an opportunity to start opening a new division of theirs in the fabrication space. And they had reached out to me to oversee that division of theirs. And so it would have been, what, about a year and a half ago, maybe 18 months ago. They asked me to come aboard. And so I joined the team to oversee that little division of theirs for a few months.

 

things seem to go relatively well and they decided, I think there may be a good spot for you to come work with us on the business development side and start working with our franchisees as business coach and lead the growth portion of it. And so they brought me on to the corporate team and I’ve been with them ever since. I think that was what, end of February, March of this year. So it’s been a good transition.

 

Jeff Walter (02:41)

So about how many units does French Earth Locations’ Blooming Blinds have?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(02:46)

So right now we’re at 155 units and that’s about 80 franchise locations.

 

Jeff Walter (02:53)

Okay, and when you say franchise ease with multiple locations, that the US?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(02:57)

Correct, yeah, so the

 

territories break out between the 80 franchise owners, right?

 

Jeff Walter (03:04)

Yeah. So, so congratulations. You’ve hit, you passed that hundred unit mark, which is one of those milestones on the branch. mean, you get there, it’s like you’ve arrived. So congratulations.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(03:11)

Yeah.

 

That’s what I’ve been told.

 

Yeah, know. You know, thankfully they set up a good team before I’d gotten here. And so it was just a matter of taking the baton and continuing the growth. But yeah, I they’ve they’ve built a solid foundation for us to work off of. it’s been it’s been quite a ride.

 

Jeff Walter (03:29)

So let’s talk, and it’s interesting because it seems like with your background, know, undergrad, you’re in the building materials, chemistry I think it was, right? And so recently into the franchisee space, we’re working with the network. What’s been the biggest surprise for you there? Just, you know, working with franchisees versus your physical materials.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(03:39)

That’s right. Yeah.

 

You know, I think the biggest shock to me was how similar they are. You know, in previous world, yeah, in previous world, working with a manufacturer, you know, all of our, primarily most of our customers were all independent business owners, right? And so while they were all selling, they were selling our products, you know, they weren’t really tied to us to a certain degree, right? We were always, you know, vouching for them to buy more of ours versus competitors. Whereas now,

 

Jeff Walter (04:07)

Okay.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(04:18)

you know, they are carrying our brand and our title and regardless, they’re always going to be part of our team. But in the same way, I still get

 

carried away calling our franchisees, our dealers, even though they’re there are our team. But it’s funny because we’re still, I’m still coaching the same way I was before, right? It’s just a different relationship we have with them now. Like I’m not actively trying to court them to buy more of our product, but instead we’re actively having meetings with them to go through, okay, are you utilizing the tools we have? Which manufacturers do you have a better relationship with?

 

Jeff Walter (04:30)

Yeah

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(04:50)

How are you utilizing the advantages in your market to continue to grow and build your business? It was just, it was shocking to me how similar the job was before to the one that I’m in now, even though the acronyms are different. The people you work with run or the relationship is so uniquely different, but the roles and responsibilities, the day-to-day piece of the job is so eerily similar.

 

I just did not see that actually working out that way. ⁓

 

Jeff Walter (05:17)

Well, that work great for you though. mean, ⁓ a lot of transferable skill. ⁓

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(05:20)

yeah, no, can’t complain. Yeah. Yeah. You come,

 

you come into it kind of worried like, I’m going have to figure out how to do this. And then you have the first cold meetings. okay. I’ve done this before. Huh.

 

Jeff Walter (05:26)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. So yeah, I guess the brothers were not, naive in what in there and they knew they knew you’d be a fit. Well, know, the other thing too, it’s interesting. Like it’s, you know, I’ve talked to other people and it’s like, you get something like that and it’s similar, but different. And then you approach it slightly differently because I think there’s a tendency sometimes, in the franchise space. Cause they’re a captive audience, right?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(05:35)

They knew something I didn’t know, that’s for sure.

 

Jeff Walter (05:55)

And I’ve seen that in some of the automotive franchises where they’re carrying that brand. You have this captive distribution network, right? sometimes you can, whereas when you’re using distributors or resellers, they’re not captive, right? And they’re usually selling competitors’ products, you said, and you’re vying for ⁓ market share. And so I got to imagine that that

 

that mindset of I want to partner with you to make you successful, which makes me successful, is being very beneficial and is helping with the network, grow the network.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(06:31)

Yeah, I think that it’s that I’m glad you said it that way because I think it’s that attitude or that outside view that I think brought some benefit to the system, right? Is there used to speaking to people that came from the franchising space that treated them a certain way or acted a certain way. And so it was a lot of the same rinse and repeat process. And so having someone from an outside industry, while granted, they may be doing the same thing, but all of a sudden they’re using different words to say the same thing.

 

I don’t know, it almost brought a different level of respect and thought to it. And all of a sudden, when you have a different attitude, you get a different level of buy-in. And it seemed to work, right?

 

Jeff Walter (07:04)

Uh-uh.

 

Yeah, well, at the end of the day, and this is anything, whether it’s business partners or what I’ve noticed with staff or clients, it’s like if you’re going into it with a true partnership mentality and how can we both be better and I respect you and your autonomy, even though we might be bound by some contractual agreement, then people want to work together because you’re looking out for each other’s interests and you’re authentic in what you’re trying to do.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(07:32)

Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (07:32)

that leads to better outcomes.

 

It’s actually kind of cool.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(07:35)

No, I mean,

 

if you think about it, it’s really the only way you want to do business, right? I you think about like I had somebody once mentioned, thankfully, wasn’t referring to us, but someone mentioned it could be like a bad divorce, right? You get into it, you might get into a franchise and you’re married. And if I really went out of this, just, it ends up being just a messy divorce, right? I don’t want to be part of that, but.

 

Jeff Walter (07:48)

Right.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(07:56)

a good relationship ends up being a positive one, right? We work together, this thing works well for me, it works well for you. And the reality is you really only want to be in a business that works that way, or least you should only want to be in one.

 

Jeff Walter (08:00)

Exactly.

 

Well, I kind of going down that trail, know, I’ve before we did latitude learning, which were a software company, but even as latitude learning. But before that was built a couple of consulting practices. And it’s interesting because you see all different types of clients and you know, the ones that treat you as a vendor that way. You know, we just were able to accomplish amazing things. Right. And then we’d have.

 

clients along the way that would be like, no, I’m paying you. do whatever I say, like almost like I own you. And, and it’s like, well, it, you know, that kind of, and, and, and it’s like, okay, well, you know, you’re giving me a dollar to do something. So I’m going to do something, but you don’t get that one plus one equals three thing, right? You get that one plus one equals one and a half, you know, cause there’s this friction going on and, ⁓

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(08:43)

Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (09:01)

But, but switching it back to the, uh, your franchisees, uh, one of the things, uh, that you’re, that my understanding is that you’re responsible for is, is, is getting these guys trained up and onboard and, and tell me about the, how a new franchisee would come in, how you onboard them. Uh, I, I imagine, uh, with the window coverings, you know, they’re on the sales side, there’s obviously a million different options, right? And then, so you’re going to have educated salespeople.

 

But then also the installers, you know, it’s a skill. You got to be able to do it, do it right. And you’re messing with people’s homes or their offices or their places of business. So you want to make sure you don’t screw it up. you know, take us through, you know, what are you guys trying to accomplish when you do the training or your training program? then who are you training and how do you do that? And how do you overcome with the challenges and all that kind of stuff?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(09:52)

Yeah, so mean, with franchising, you’re always it’s a mixed bag with who comes on board, right? I mean, when an owner comes on, their experience could be, you know, just about anything, right? They could have lots of window covering experience coming to work with a competitor before or absolutely none. And the same goes with any kind of organizational experience, whether or not they were in marketing, operations, sales.

 

They’re good with their hands. And so really we have to make sure that we’re entirely comprehensive in every aspect of the business, both knowing how to operate a business in general, regardless whether it’s in window coverings or what have you, and then making them a window coverings expert and then an installation expert as well. And so that process for us really starts with the beginning and understanding they know, we’re setting up your business, right? ⁓

 

Jeff Walter (10:39)

All right.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(10:40)

And then stepping them through each one of those hoops and beginning with the funding piece, right. And beginning with setting up the business, how they’ve chosen to structure it. And then we start going through the process of, okay, now we’re going to start educating you on window coverings, whether it’s a virtual learning process, but we bring them in person to start touching through this stuff. And that’s when the fun, real, at least for me, really begins on when we get to introduce the sales part of it, right. We get to start going through, understanding their market.

 

what their competition looks like, what their strengths are as a professional and how we can leverage those to build their brand presence locally and then how we can build that into whatever their general business plan is. And then hopefully, mean, obviously I’m always preferential to those that have a sales and marketing background because that typically lends to us being able to build out a really robust plan for them. But then laying out the groundwork for how we’re going to

 

essentially attack their market. What are the strengths for them? Do they have a network that already exists wherever they’re starting to set up shop or do we need to start laying out the grassroots marketing plan for how you’re going to start building these relationships locally? The training process as it exists primarily revolves around giving them the knowledge they need in window coverings. It’s very, very seldom that we find somebody that already has that knowledge.

 

Jeff Walter (12:02)

Right.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(12:03)

but it’s a six week course on both primarily focused around that product knowledge piece. And as they get more comfortable with it, we start to integrate the sales into it, right? And then as they get more of that into it, we start to build in the marketing piece to it, the business plan into it, what that strategic step-by-step process looks like into it. And it all sorts to…

 

Jeff Walter (12:11)

Okay.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(12:27)

come together as they walk through this process to the point to where once they’re ready to open their door, they almost have three sets of plans that more or less fold into one so that they’re really just following a recipe like any good franchise will have on what that first year is going to look like for you so you can scale this business into something that’s growing and building for you like you intended when you came to franchising in the first place.

 

Jeff Walter (12:50)

So you mentioned earlier, it’s interesting because I was talking to somebody the other day and they were like, hey, a franchisor needs to do three things for franchisees, right? They need to help them identify prospects and give them the tools to do that, close deals and give them the knowledge and tools to do that, and then deliver whatever the service is or whatever the product is and give them the skills to be able to do that. And so you said you had this six week course. You had mentioned e-learning.

 

New owner comes on board. Is there a is there a regimen of self-study e-learning that they do before and then do they come to headquarters or or how does that work?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(13:29)

Yeah, so I’m probably selling myself short there. So there’s a six week program that involves a onboarding piece that’s e-learning, right? So before, as they onboard, there’s four weeks of that that consists of an e-learning portion, both in the new product training, as well as the business creation portion, right? We want to teach them how to essentially create and run that business from an e-learning perspective. Then we bring them in person, right? We bring them out to Dallas to go through the physical.

 

Jeff Walter (13:36)

Right.

 

Okay.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(13:55)

product knowledge and training with our training team here locally. Once that portion has been completed and they’re actually sent out in the field to open their business, we then have a 12 week post launch post training that is essentially my time with them to start going through the infield process where we get to actually share the experience they’ve had in the field, go through the business plans and the marketing plans they’ve built and start making adjustments and start teeing up to say, okay.

 

which parts of the plan that we built are working, which parts are didn’t, and we get to actually start making adjustments, right?

 

Jeff Walter (14:26)

Okay. So is that more

 

like a 12 week coaching, mentor coaching type of thing? Like, like he came in, we built out your plan and now we’re executing the plan. And so we’ve got this three month co, you know, consultative coaching or advisory or however you want to, but

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(14:31)

a little bit above, right? ⁓

 

Mm-hmm.

 

In a sense…

 

Yeah,

 

in a sense, the only reason I would consider it more of that learning portion of it is because the consultation process, right, and the ability to sell to customers, while we cover a decent chunk of that or…

 

Jeff Walter (14:52)

Right.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(14:58)

a majority of that in the both the e-learning and in the physical in-person training. There’s only so much we can do without actually getting in front of customers. And so once they’re actually in the field and talking to people, actually are all of a sudden now they actually have a taste for it. And so being able to have some coaching back and forth as they’re in the field and doing this, that portion of training while you can.

 

Jeff Walter (15:18)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(15:23)

And you’ve probably gotten familiar with this is I can teach them and coach them up as much as possible, but until they actually get in front of somebody and start having the opportunities to have to say the things and use the verbs that we’ve talked about, until we get to actually run through that over the last 12 weeks of that onboarding process, once they’re actually in the field, they really won’t know, or at least we won’t know how well they’re going to use those techniques.

 

until we get the chance to go through it with them in person. And so that’s the only reason I would treat that as a training prospect because while we are making those changes to their marketing plan, understanding how well they’ll treat a customer, how well they’ll be to react to a customer and make those final sales adjustments have to be done in the field.

 

Jeff Walter (15:55)

Yeah.

 

Well, what I find really interesting, and I agree, agree a hundred percent with you on the, it’s part of the training. you know, because, ⁓ we’re big believers in learn, teach in terms of developing mastery, in terms of pedagogy, right. And one of the interesting things in this industry and being a learning platform, we get to see a lot of different companies. Implement a lot of different trying to training programs and, know, and we help them do that, but you get, you get to see a lot, right. And, ⁓

 

And one of the things, and I said this at the IFA down Miami, one of things we do a really good job as learning and development professionals is we’re really, like, you know, and as an industry from franchising or any type of extended learning, extended enterprise, if you’re training partners, resellers, dealers, suppliers, and employees, we do a really good job on that first part.

 

the learning part, the knowledge acquisition, getting the people to understand, you know, being able, and I always compare it to, getting your driver’s license. And we, as an industry do a really good job on prepping you for the, for the written test, right? They’re getting the knowledge. know what the yellow line means. I know what the red light means. I know what that octagon it’s red means. And I can, I can spew it out on a multiple choice test and I’ve got the knowledge.

 

What’s interesting about your program is I’d say like 90 % or more, maybe 95 % of the programs out there, that’s where they stop. And then the next piece is skilled is the development, the skill development. That’s L and D, learning and development, knowledge acquisition, skill development. And most programs will stop at the D because of what you just laid out.

 

Skill development is about practice and coaching, right? I got to be able to do it or try it Maybe in a safe environment maybe out in the in the the wild But I got to like do it and then I got to have some knowledgeable coach say That was good. But try doing you know when you hit this try doing that right or you know, you’re in it ⁓ and especially in the franchise space because while you’re selling a

 

⁓ the turnkey businesses were with the set of processes, the local environment is always a little different. Like I was talking to a guy yesterday and they focused on their franchise that focuses on, ⁓ senior care. And, and so, not only is the law different from state to state, but the options that are available, they’re like, they’re like a matchmaking service. Right? So you, you.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(18:46)

Okay, yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (18:47)

You know, you’re, you’re, you’re looking for a place either for yourself for long, for long-term care. You have some health needs and, ⁓ you know, maybe you need some in-home help. Maybe you need to go to assistive living or independent living or something like that. And they’re like a matchmaking. But my point is like, there’s all this idiosyncratic local knowledge, right? Because there’s only so many providers in a, in a given area and they all have different quality skill and all that kind of stuff.

 

And so we were talking about how do you get that idiosyncratic knowledge? But what I like about what you were just saying is that the 12 week program is it’s a systematized coaching to develop skills. It’s, it’s, that when the rubber meets the road, I, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s getting out and driving, right? I passed my, written test and then most programs say, okay, here are the keys, go drive. And, and that’s not how we learn how to drive, right? Right. We, we, have.

 

uh, somebody that already knows it might be a paid coach. might be a parent or an older sibling or something like that. they, take you out into a parking lot in a safe environment. And so you can practice and, then they go, okay, let’s pull out onto the street and let’s go. You know, think you’re ready to go hit the street without, you know, killing both of us. So,

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(20:00)

Right. Yeah. It’s unique because even like you just said, at every market, it’s just uniquely different. And then the individuals themselves, you know, how that 12 weeks ends up developing on where their weakness, where their particular strengths and weaknesses lie, changes not only from cohort to cohort, but from individual to individual. mean, they, those coaching calls or even where they end up on week 12 can vary almost by 180 degrees.

 

I mean, I obviously I have that strength or naturally I want to incline to focusing on that sales and marketing perspective, but we’ve had some that really it’s the operational piece, right? How can I focus on making sure I’m getting those measurements right? What are the little tips and tricks that I know to make sure that products are always getting installed and not having a reorder thing? just it’s so, it’s so interesting to see that the person at both the market and personality and how that creates some different path along that 12 very training course. ⁓ but

 

But absolutely right, it’s being able to actually have them walk that walk because you can have a certain level of confidence that people that come into training is like, yeah, I’ve got this. But it’s having a plan and keeping it as soon as you get punched in the mouth.

 

Jeff Walter (21:09)

Yeah. Everybody has a plan, battle plan. And until they get, or no, is it? Mike Tyson said that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. But yeah, and it’s interesting because the gentleman was talking to us, to Patrick Sanchez over at Franchise Fastlane. he’s the one that said three things, prospecting, closing, delivering.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(21:12)

Yeah.

 

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (21:34)

And, and when we were talking about the match and you just kind of hit on it, goes, usually you have somebody who’s good at one of those, maybe two, never three. And so there’s always, like you said, there’s always something different. Okay. So. Got to continue on the journey. It comes in, does the initial six week, which, know, which brilliant, you’ll do the self study. So you get that baseline of knowledge, come to headquarters, you know, to, to, take it to the next level. Cause now you’re dealing with.

 

people that really know this and the new guy has a, the new franchisee, the new owner has a base of civil knowledge. And then they launched and they have the 12 week coaching, which is really fantastic. What happens with their staff? Like that’s on the, that’s on the franchise owner side. Are they usually starting off as a one man show or are they usually ramping up staff? did like, and how does, as they bring staff on, do the staff get educated?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(22:29)

Yeah, typically, now it varies, right? But typically, they start as an owner-operator. Now, depending on what they envision for their business, we’ve had cases where owners have come in and they want to operate as a absentee owner.

 

And so they come in, purchase the business and they’ll come through training, but they’ll bring like a general manager with them or they’ll hire a technician with that general manager with the intent of them operating the business while the owner maintains whatever their previous position or role might’ve been. But typically in that owner operator model, after they hit certain milestones or benchmarks, we’ll begin making suggestions or, you

 

more or less nudging them in the direction of hiring technicians, depending on whether or not they want to follow a certain layout of their business structure. So there’s typically a couple of different roles they can follow, depending on the size. Either A, I mean, the most…

 

The most common one is that typically our owner operators want to continue to operate as their salesmen. They like doing the consultation process, but they no longer want to function in the role where they’re doing the installations for the sales that they make. So they’ll want to hire a technician who will do their installs for them. And that’s typically where we help them, not only identify kind of the traits that they’re looking for in those individuals.

 

Jeff Walter (23:34)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(23:45)

but once they’ve had a chance to maybe find someone that they like, bring them on board and shadow them for a while, we’ll bring them back in for that initial two week training course where we can get them on board to go through whatever training it is that they went through during their onboarding process ⁓ and then release them back out. So they don’t do the entire owner’s training, but they do the product portion of that training that we have in person here in Dallas.

 

Jeff Walter (24:01)

Okay.

 

Right.

 

Okay. So, so, so I’m, I’m a new owner. go through it. I launched the thing. Um, you know, initially I want to be an owner operator. got the, the blooming brands. It’s great. Uh, it, you know, it’s a great brand. I’m out there. I’m selling and all of a sudden I get more work than I can do. I want to bring somebody in to, to, to do the installs. Right. So, um, so I hire a technician and are those.

 

e-learning courses available. Like do they do the same thing? They go through some e-learning path, you know, not the entire thing because they’re not learning how to run a business and do marketing sales, but you know, a subset that’s geared towards technicians, right? Did they do that and then do the in-person training back in Dallas? Is that how that works?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(24:43)

Sure.

 

Correct, yeah.

 

So they’ll essentially do that one, there’s a one week portion of that course that’s product specific, right? So we’ll run them through that portion of the course and that’s before they essentially have to pass that portion of the course before they’ll come in for the two week in-person. Now, what we typically recommend for those individuals that are coming in for technician training is that they spend some time with the owner in the van prior to coming to in-person training. ⁓

 

Jeff Walter (24:58)

Okay.

 

Okay.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(25:19)

for a couple of reasons. One, we want them to get some field experience since they have the ability to do so with the owner, primarily because we’ve had some cases where an owner has hired somebody and wanting to get them on board as quickly as possible doesn’t get the chance to spend as much field time with that individual as we’d like them to. They may have interviewed them a couple of times, decided this guy’s good, and then brought them on board and then sent them right to training. Well, they didn’t really get to know them all that well first. They didn’t get to learn their work aptitudes.

 

how well they handle in the van, how well they are in front of customers. So we encourage them to spend some time with them at least four to six weeks shadowing them, or at least having this new technician shadow them in the van, get to know them little bit, or make sure they can pick up on these things before they decide to put the initial investment into sending them into Texas to participate in that training process. ⁓

 

Jeff Walter (25:57)

Okay.

 

Right.

 

And I would imagine

 

during that four to six weeks, that’s when they’re the online, you know, they’re, they’re that, that one week online course, which, you know, it’s self-paced. you do it whenever you.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(26:13)

Correct. Yeah.

 

Now we’d have, we still have

 

them complete that basically towards the end or right before they would come into taxes. We wouldn’t necessarily have them do that essentially right after they’re hiring. But we do that essentially once they’ve had the opportunity to fully vet them. We wouldn’t want to have a case where they’ve started investing additional assets into someone not knowing if they are there for the long haul, so to speak.

 

Jeff Walter (26:27)

Okay.

 

Okay. All right. So, so then

 

from an employee standpoint, franchise employee, you know, typical first thing that they would do is end up hiring sale technicians. It’s a typical owner operator situation. Then you’re bringing in technicians because you know, they tend, they’re, selling more than they can deliver or they’ve been doing it a while and they won’t want to, they don’t want to do the installs anymore. Right. I mean, either, or depending on what lifestyle that you want.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(27:03)

Yeah. And what you’ll see, yeah.

 

And more often than not, Jeff, what we see is that there, what happens early on, at least when a franchisee begins to hit their stride is they’ll get into this sort of oscillating cycle of sales to where it will actually get a, they’ll end up having their first good month. And then the next month they’ll spend a majority of their time installing.

 

Jeff Walter (27:18)

Right.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(27:26)

all of those jobs they just sold. And because of that, their schedule is so full that they actually can’t get to all the consultations they had before until the following month. And so they’ll have a high month in sales, then the next month will be a little lower because they installed all that work. And then the next month they’ll jump back up again, and then the next month they’ll go back down. That’s usually the first indicated, it’s like, okay, we’re getting to that point now where we know you need to have at least a part-time or a third-party installer to free up your time so you can get back out there and keep selling.

 

Jeff Walter (27:39)

Ha

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(27:55)

But that’s usually the first indicator. We can see that oscillating margin start to move.

 

Jeff Walter (28:00)

Yeah, I’m laughing because as you’re saying that it brought back these memories. So, it said earlier, you know, before, before, ⁓ I started latitude, as a software company, I built a number of, ⁓ practice IT consulting practices for some of the organizations out there. And, and, and, and usually start from scratch, right? You know, ⁓ as a practice manager, which is a couple of people, and I’m laughing because we experienced the exact same thing.

 

Right? Like you’d have a senior guy like myself, a practice leader who understands the market and he’s out there pressure and flash and, know, identifying prospects, closing deals. And it’s like, okay, we got this project, let’s go. And then I put on my project management hat, right? I take off my sales hat. Yeah. I got my sales hat on and I put on my project management hat and I’ve got like more business. You know, I’ve got like half a dozen, you know, when we’re starting off, you got a couple of people, half a dozen dozen people. I got them all booked for the next two, three months. we’re like,

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(28:44)

Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (28:57)

I got no time to go out and sell because I oversold, right? And then, and then all of a sudden it’s like this cliff happens. And, know, we used to call it the cliff. The cliff is coming, cliff is coming. I got to stop doing the work. I got to get back out and sell cause everybody’s going to end up on the beach soon. And then, and then you had this like, like you said, this oscillating roller coaster of, now, you know, put on a sales ad again, go back out and, and eventually you got to, okay, I need a project manager. can trust to actually deliver this.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(29:02)

Yeah.

 

Get back out there.

 

Jeff Walter (29:26)

So we can focus on It’s some completely different business models, right? But it’s the same type of thing. It’s that owner operator, that startup thing. It’s yeah, it’s very, very interesting. That’s, that’s why I was, I was laughing. So, so then it, and then if, somebody grows to a point where they, they, would imagine a number of your franchisees, you know, they would, they, they bring on more technicians and they start, you know, as they’re growing, they bring on sales folks. Is it the same type of process for bringing on a sales folk?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(29:34)

It’s the exact same problem, yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (29:56)

you know, like shadow do the, you know, the portion of the e-learning that is related to your marketing and sales, and then come into headquarters to get some additional training or is it, or is it, or, know, or how does that work for sales?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(30:10)

Yeah,

 

that first process would follow the exact same model. Now, what I would add to that is typically that salesperson and what we’ve started to implement now is that supplemental training for that sales individual. So similar to what the owner had where we have that 12 week course where we’re now meeting with them regularly as they onboarded, we do something similar for those salespeople to where now they’re having something shorter but in

 

something equivalent to where we’re actually going to consistently meet with them to go over how these consultations went. So we can continue to help coach them into understanding how to leverage certain situations and continue to use the verbiage that we went over like we had with the owner the first time they came on board. Primarily because we want them to be able to utilize that same the same coaching we had done with the owner, right? So we can start to utilize what they had practiced in training.

 

Jeff Walter (30:59)

All right.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(31:03)

and then start to understand how they can best leverage it in real world scenarios.

 

Jeff Walter (31:03)

Okay.

 

So on the sales side, did they come to Dallas or do they go right from the e-learning to the coaching?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(31:15)

They’ll still come to Dallas and do product training. They’ll do the e-learning portion of the products, then come to Dallas doing the product training. But then we’ll have a segment essentially that’s coaching specifically towards the sales process. Be shorter, they won’t require as much time because we won’t have a business plan, a marketing plan to go over, but we’ll be strictly going over their consultations and reviewing how they’re utilizing the verbiage and the certain manufacturers and levering them in situations. So we can…

 

Jeff Walter (31:17)

Okay.

 

Right.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(31:42)

go through how they’ve been practicing, what their closing ratios are like, and maybe run through some certain scenarios and objections and how they can overcome them as they start to find them and see them more in the wild.

 

Jeff Walter (31:56)

So they have that similar type of process that you have for the owner, but it’s all geared towards marketing and sales, right? Identifying prospects and closing them. Right. Removal. Right. And then I would imagine from what you said on the technician side, once they get that training for headquarters, you’re then relying on the owner operator to certify or to verify that the ⁓

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(32:02)

Right. We’ll remove all the, exactly, we’ll remove all the owner specific items.

 

Jeff Walter (32:21)

the, to help to do the coaching on the skill development for the technician, right? Like they’re, you know, that they install the properly, you know, they do the visual, they stop by, they, you know, make sure it’s going well, address any installation issues that might be happening because, know, it’s a slightly different, you know, situation. And how do I, how do I, how do I do it with this particular type of window and these particular type of coverings, right?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(32:30)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

 

Right.

 

those pro like in examples like that, where we have a, owner that’s obviously it’s following up to make sure that installer is now functioning as a proper member of their team. those, that constant coaching, right. The, the,

 

unscheduled regular cadence calls that we’ll have with owners to go through their KPIs to see some of these operational measurements to see how they’re performing. Those are usually some of the first items that we’ll discuss is how the new team members performing and how they’ve affected some of those operational measurements. So what their reorder rate is like, if there has been any change in their Google rating.

 

since that person was brought on board. We’ll kind of look over those things, but more often than not, the owner is aware of those issues before I actually get a chance to discuss it with them, just because they’re so in tuned and more than likely they’re hearing about it from their customers before I have a chance to even see it at end of a month.

 

Jeff Walter (33:34)

Bye.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(33:41)

And schedule a call to go through. it looks like we’re seeing something here. Um, it’s affecting some, some numbers for.

 

Jeff Walter (33:48)

Okay.

 

That’s interesting that, ⁓ that you’re, you’re then looking at the, you know, the Google ratings or the trust advisory, you know, the online ratings, to, see, Hey, in this, ⁓ geography and this MSA, are we seeing, you know, any dip and does, you know, is it, and then you’re sitting there because you’re training all these people, you know, we just trained bill and two months later, the, you know, they went from a five star to a four star, right?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(34:16)

Right.

 

Jeff Walter (34:16)

and I’ll see you later. Yeah.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(34:17)

Or how do we see, how do we see the ratings over the last, what are the ratings of the last four months isolated to compared to what they were before? Right. Like we all, you’re a four star over the last four months, or we saw your RGAs over the last four months pop up or increase. you know, are we seeing a consistent reorder or mis-measurement item here or

 

Jeff Walter (34:24)

Yeah, that’s what I mean. Like, yeah, they were like.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(34:37)

We’re seeing your operating expenses have increased as a disproportionate amount of your revenue. All of a sudden there’s something fishy going on here. Are you aware of it? Let’s dive deeper into it and find the issue before it becomes a bigger problem.

 

Jeff Walter (34:42)

Right.

 

That’s really cool. Yeah.

 

And again, this has been really interesting because like I said, you usually don’t see in franchise systems, first the coaching element of the training program. You’ll see it initially with the owner operator, right? Like, I think as an industry, we do a good job on getting those owner operators up to speed, launched, train.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(35:02)

Mm-mm.

 

Jeff Walter (35:10)

their initial set of staff, if it’s a larger type of operation where you have to bring staff on initially and provide that initial guidance. But then six months later, when they start bringing in other people, I think as an industry, maybe we’ve got the knowledge acquisition side, but we don’t have the skill building side. And so the interesting thing here is you’ve got that all built into your model, but then…

 

Just like, you know, it’s the five to 10 % that we see the skill building side. We very rarely see the performance metric side. Right. And it’s really, yeah. Which, which takes you to the next level, which is you’re not just competent. You just don’t have that skill competency. You’re actually at a, you’re talking about performance levels and things like rework rates or reorder rates, uh, you know, um, or, or, uh, customer satisfaction metrics. Like, you know, it could be Google ratings. could be surveys that go out.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(35:44)

Yeah, but-

 

Jeff Walter (36:03)

So I think that’s fascinating. That’s really great. You really are incorporating a number of very sophisticated things into your program. It’s really cool to see.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(36:11)

Yeah, and

 

to be honest with that’s probably the part that I enjoy the most is being able to actually back data into it and going through that with the owners that have been in place for a long time. then obviously that helps their validation calls as well because now they can actually provide answers into.

 

very specific questions that can come up during those calls. I’m only starting to get into that process and seeing how the franchise development side works. more often than not, I used to see a lot of these questions come in to where, is someone coming in to explore the franchisee space? More often than not, they really don’t know what it is they don’t know.

 

Jeff Walter (36:45)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(36:49)

And so they don’t have the knowledge to ask the questions that they think would be most beneficial. And so actually teeing up existing owners with a lot of that data that they previously may not have had or utilized, lets them lead the conversation to kind of.

 

Jeff Walter (36:49)

Right, right.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(37:03)

approach a potential franchisee to ask the right questions that they feel as though would be the most beneficial, right? A current franchisee can say, I know that if I was in your shoes, I would have wanted to know more about X, Y, and Z because before I didn’t know it up until recently, right? And now you can basically show them this information before they even knew it was available.

 

Jeff Walter (37:26)

Yeah, it’s interesting you that because there are those three categories like, you know what you know, you know what you don’t know, and then you don’t know what you don’t know. And it’s that last category that can really nail you. That’s the tough one. So let me circle back. When a franchisee brings somebody on, are they required to send that person through that training or is that at the franchisee’s discretion? Because you know, it’s not an inexpensive…

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(37:32)

Yeah, that’s a tough one. Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (37:53)

thing to send somebody to a week or two of training at headquarters. You that’s a, got to pay the guy. Uh, you got this travel expense, you know, it’s not, it’s not cheap. Is that, you know, is that a requirement or is that at the franchisee’s discretion and they’re highly encouraged to do it or are they incented to do it?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(38:08)

Yeah, I would tell.

 

Yeah, it’s a highly encouraged thing to do. You know, we like to tell the franchisees that we want, we need them to do it. But because of the level of involvement that they may have or where their business may be and at what level of involvement that particular employee may have, like I would tell you one of the big steps in that growth phase is the part-time employee.

 

Jeff Walter (38:13)

Okay.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(38:34)

So before a benchmark for a franchisee to hire that full-time individual, they need to be utilizing third-party workers or a part-time individual. And usually that’s because they really can’t afford to keep somebody full-time yet. And to have them or require them to send somebody like that to training,

 

Jeff Walter (38:37)

Mm.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(38:54)

it’s too much of a financial burden, especially early on to warrant that. so encouraging them to keep it as a highly encouraged piece, especially if it’s somebody that’s part-time, gives them that fluidity to where they can actually give them one, do the vetting on their own to say, okay, you can more than likely find somebody that has the required experience, especially as an installer, really just looking for someone that has the handyman capabilities to…

 

rinse and repeat what you have already shown them or you already know. But should they, after they’ve been with you for so long, they’ll pick this stuff up relatively quickly. And then once you’re actually giving them to a position where they can be facing to a customer and you’ve gotten to this next benchmark where you are comfortable and we feel as though you can bring them on full time, let’s invest the rest of that into a full training process, right?

 

And typically once we get to that point, I can’t think of many cases where we’ve gotten someone that hasn’t want to make the investment in someone to go through the proper training process.

 

Jeff Walter (39:51)

So question, since you’re looking at those backend metrics have, and you’re having those, ⁓ regular touch bases with the, with the franchise owner, has, has it ever come up that the metrics were slipping and then you discovered that they brought somebody on board that had not been properly trained.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(40:08)

⁓ yeah. Once or twice. Yeah. Noticed it.

 

Jeff Walter (40:10)

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We were like, well,

 

because I asked that because that type of metric is, I’ve seen it at some clients. Like I said, only a handful of companies actually get down to that level of business impact. But the best example I saw for that was, know, Chrysler was a client of ours for a long time and they…

 

had that data that a trained salesperson sold twice as many vehicles as a untrained salesperson. And a trained technician, you know, had a fixed first visit score, which is that reorder thing. You know, it’s the fixed first visit score that was 15 points higher than an untrained technician. And then everybody could do the math. You know, the average sales guy says, sell so many vehicles. And so if you can double that, it’s worth X dollars to the company. And you know,

 

The average repair is X dollars. And if you can do that and the average tech does so many repairs a year, and you can figure out the math of what it’s worth to the company. And relatively quickly. And the cool thing is that that metric of trained versus untrained went viral through the company. It’s a large company, right? Went viral through the company. It was so viral that back in 2009, when they went through bankruptcy, level of training.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(41:08)

Yeah, relatively quickly,

 

Jeff Walter (41:28)

had a dealership was part of the equation as to which dealers they closed. When they, you know, if you remember back in the great recession, GM, Ford and well, GM and Chrysler went through bankruptcy, Ford went through a contract. Yeah, they all went through a contraction. And I was like, it’s kind of a negative example, but it shows you when, training becomes a real strategic asset. If you’re up there and you’re talking about the survival of the company and you’re bringing in training.

 

as one of the metrics, right? Not the only, but one of the things you consider when like, what partners am I keeping? What car is I dumping? And so that’s why I asked the question is I saw how that performance of trained versus untrained just goes viral and then gets up to, you know, is easy to communicate. And so if you had, you know, anecdotal evidence of, oh, we’ve seen that, you know, we got a once, you know,

 

There’s been a number of times when people didn’t go through this and we saw a five point increase in a reorder rate or ⁓ a one star reduction in there. That sells the program more than anything I’ve seen, especially to the franchisees. Because not only did it go viral up through the organization, but it went viral through the dealer community.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(42:44)

community.

 

Yeah, I can imagine. No, and it’s funny you say that because it’s not only the situation where we’ve had, you know, technicians, right, that haven’t gone through training, but more often than not, you know, we’ll have ownership groups that’ll come in, right, and they’ll typically assign an executive to participate in training. And we’ve even had situations to where maybe another owner

 

that hasn’t participated in our training program during the onboarding process is actually the individual that started getting involved in the business. And they’re the ones that triggered the slip in the metrics, right? So it’s actually maybe not necessarily ⁓ a technician, but maybe somebody that was originally part of the ownership group, but there’s didn’t come through someone else that didn’t come through the training process. But sure, sure. But they all of a sudden they decided to step in and start.

 

Jeff Walter (43:18)

Right, right, right.

 

Yeah, they were one of the three partners that didn’t show up, right?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(43:30)

taking a bigger responsibility in the business and, okay, well, maybe you should come to this a little bit. Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (43:33)

Yeah. Yeah. If you’ve got that anecdotal evidence, my

 

suggestion would be if you had that, if you have that information and it’s really cool that you’ve gone down to the performance metrics to come back. If you can tease out the impact of a trained technician, a trained salesperson, trained owner, and, and, and it, just is, it’s so much of what we do on the, on the learning development side. It’s really hard to prove.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(43:43)

Yeah, I’m gonna need to do that now.

 

Jeff Walter (44:01)

that this training caused this increase in performance, right? Because that’s a causal relationship. You need advanced statistics. It’s not even correlation. It’s Bayesian analysis. Nobody knows how to do it. And especially nobody in, you know, I don’t know how to do it. And I’m pretty, I’m a math geek. But you know, it’s, it’s, it’s very, it’s sophisticated and statistics and most of us don’t know how to do it. But also most people don’t know how to interpret the results, even if you have somebody do it for you. But that

 

that train versus untrained, everybody gets that. Everybody gets that. Everybody understands. And then everybody can do the math of what that means. so if you’ve gone to the, if you, since you’re going and getting that performance feedback loop in anything you can do to say train versus untrained. Yeah.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(44:41)

Yeah, we’re gonna start using that. I

 

had to make a note because that’s something we’re gonna have to start advertising a little bit more to the group.

 

Jeff Walter (44:48)

Yeah, yeah, no, it helps with the compliance of getting them come in. If you have data that says that, then it’s like, yeah, it’s not just a good thing. It’s like, can tell you, I can predict what’s going to happen. ⁓

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(44:53)

buy it.

 

Well, right now it’s funny because we

 

do the same thing for marketing techniques, right? mean, and those can vary based on market conditions, but I’ll do the same thing to get buy-in for certain tactics that way. But haven’t tried the same thing for like an internal training program. So that’s interesting to put it back that way.

 

Jeff Walter (45:15)

Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it,

 

yeah. Especially since you’ve already gone. mean, I mentioned that to all of our clients, but like I said, the vast majority of the industry is still trying to go from knowledge acquisition to skill development and then much less, you know, performance impact. Right. So they’re still trying to make that first jump. You’ve already made the two jumps of you’ve, you’ve got the knowledge acquisition. You’ve got the skill development.

 

And now you’re focused on performance and you’ve got the performance feedback mechanism, the performance metrics that coming in. I, so, all right, I said enough about that, but, that’s really cool. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s really cool. So, you know, just, I’m having a lot of fun. So I hope you’re having a lot of ⁓ yeah.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(45:52)

Yeah, thanks.

 

No, this is honestly, this has been great. I’m glad that you had me on. is this been a lot of

 

you’ve made me feel like I’m doing a lot of good work here. It’s good.

 

Jeff Walter (46:08)

I think

 

you had a really interesting program going on, so we should be shouting from the rooftops here, as this is a great thing to emulate. What are the biggest challenges you face when you’re trying to do this? mean, it sounds like you got a pretty good way to get buy-in, right? Because it’s voluntary, even without the metrics specifically.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(46:15)

I’ll start doing more of that.

 

Jeff Walter (46:30)

Sounds like you have a high compliance people doing it a lot. And it’s the exception when it’s not happening and then it’s showing up and you’re like, see. so what are the biggest challenges you guys face in, trying to drive that training program?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(46:40)

For me, to be honest with you, going back to the data, to me, it’s showing the validity in that information. It’s the data itself. I think that because of how much information we’re tracking and then how it compares to what a certain owner may feel being in the field day in and day out, when we go through some of this information and I show, talking about closing ratios, for example,

 

how they may have been closing in the last 30 days versus what they may think they’ve been closing in the last 30 days. It’s pretty common that they get the feeling that they’ve been closing better than or worse even than what I may be showing them. And even just that discrepancy in gut, I lose buy-in sometimes in the data that I’m showing them. And then it starts putting a question into, okay, what else is it that I don’t?

 

trust or what else is it that I don’t see in this that, I can utilize, right? And it really just takes one set of data for, for a customer. say, see, I’m doing it again. I’m talking about customers, not franchisees. But it takes one set of data for a franchisee to go into and all of a sudden put into question everything else in front of them. And so to me, that’s kind of been where my, my struggle has been is to wanting to get, or continued buy-in from metrics that, you know, granted that,

 

Jeff Walter (47:30)

Bye.

 

Alright.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(47:59)

I believe them to be very true, right? Because I’ve built out how they’re collected, how they’re calculated. But even then, we can make the assumption, let’s say they’re not perfect, right? And you probably know this as well, Jeff, is if even if they weren’t, we know that the trends that exist in this data set are true. And that’s in reality, that’s what we really are gunning after. As long as the trends hold true, while the data may not be perfect, the trends that they’re showing are.

 

Jeff Walter (48:08)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(48:26)

And that’s really what’s going to show us what actions we need to take. may not have been closing at 80, but we do know that whatever this number was calculating, you went from 80 to 60. And whatever that delta is shows a problem. And so we need to be able to make that change and make that adjustment. And so being able to relay that kind of information to somebody that maybe doesn’t come from a statistics background or data analytics background,

 

Jeff Walter (48:26)

100 percent.

 

Yeah.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(48:52)

can sometimes be difficult to bridge, but it just takes a little bit of time, effort, and continued coaching to help bring them around to understanding that piece of it. And ultimately, seeing where their bottom line currently is and being the one that’s helping them get back to where they need to be helps bring them back around to buy into it.

 

Jeff Walter (49:12)

Yeah, that’s interesting because I’ve had a lot of, if I take my, my, my training hat on or my, you know, I put my, manager hat on, especially in the, in marketing and sales. I’ve had a lot of discussions over the years with, with, staff of that exact issue. Um, which is, you know, we’ll say, Oh, you know, the, close rate, you know, you’re, closing, you know, 20 % of qualified leads or whatever. Right.

 

And we’ll argue about the number, right? Like it’s like, no, it’s 50, you know, I’m trying to come closing 30. Yeah. Or like, like, and, and all the data is, you know, um, I had a marketing research professor and, know, when I was getting my MBA and the first thing she did on the board and there you know, and we had a bunch of engineers and I was one of them, uh, in, in our class. And the first thing she does, he goes, this is market research.

 

And I know you got a lot of, you know, engineering math type folks here. So I’m just going to put this up on the board now and goes, when you do market research, need to assume this is, you know, and, and, and you’re going to put models in place to try and approximate reality, but you, they will not be the ultimate reality. But then to your point, which is interesting is what doesn’t really matter to me, whether the true closing rate was.

 

20 or 25, the question is, what was it a year ago and what is it today and what direction are we heading in? Right? And the directional, the trend data, I think that’s a really important thing. And I think it’s something people have a hard time with because they like to argue the validity of the number. And you’re like, okay, well, whatever systematic, systemic discrepancy there was in collecting the number,

 

It’s consistent, right?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(51:04)

Right,

 

that’s really all it is. It’s not about the number, it’s about how the number is calculated and then it’s done the same way every day and how it’s been done in the history of how we’ve been collecting this information. Because it’s all about the trend. We just want to know that when we started doing whatever change that is we did, it was this number. And then when we completed whatever test it is we were doing, it was now this number. Well, did it go up or down?

 

What went up? Okay, good. We need to do more of what we just did. Did it go down? Okay, we need to do less of what we just did because we want that number to go back up again. But no, it’s those things. It’s those little nuances over the little pieces of data about arguing the finite number versus the trend that exists in any one of the sets of data that we track and utilize to make those business adjustments.

 

Jeff Walter (51:55)

Yeah. I, you know, it’s, on the trend, which I, again, I think a lot of people don’t get, um, in their guts. Uh, one thing I’ve found that that helps is I use, uh, physical directions, right? It’s like, look, if we’re really precise, it means I’m giving you the directions to get from Ann Arbor to San Francisco, right? Go down 23 hop on 80 and go right. And you’ll be in San Francisco. That’s a very precise number, right? That’s, that’s a very precise, yo.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(52:17)

Yes.

 

Jeff Walter (52:25)

I’ve done the statistics, I got the R values, blah, blah, blah. But there’s a lot of value just in knowing I’m heading West and I’m not heading East. Right. And so trends are about I’m heading West. Right. And I’m moving towards my goal of California or San Francisco. And even if I don’t have the precision that we would all like, I still know I’m heading towards the goal as opposed to away from the goal. And then that’s, or I’m heading East and I’m not

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(52:31)

Right, yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (52:52)

definitely not gonna, it’s gonna take a long time to get to San Francisco.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(52:54)

Well,

 

and then depending on the system you’re using, you there was a time and you can appreciate this is getting to that level of precision. How much time and energy are you going to spend, especially when you’re a you’re a single owner operator, are you willing to spend, you know, not with a customer trying to sell more product to get that level of precision? When in reality, if I just know I need to go West, I can get halfway there by the time you figure out exactly where I need to go.

 

Jeff Walter (53:05)

Exactly.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(53:21)

And I’m going to beat you there, you know? ⁓

 

Jeff Walter (53:23)

Yeah. Right.

 

Exactly. Well, exactly. Exactly. You keep working out the maps. I’m just heading on 80 West. I’m going to start going and I’m going to, And you know, when the sun starts setting, as long as I’m going in that it’s it, but it’s, it’s interesting. I noticed that, that, that, that, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s those things that help people kind of feel it. And it’s pretty interesting. So shift, you know, kind of wrapping up the training.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(53:28)

Yep, I’m gonna start running. Yeah, I’m gonna hop in the car and go and I’ll be there. Yeah

 

Jeff Walter (53:47)

What’s in the future for the you know, what do you see coming down the pipe with you know, everybody’s talking about AI and you know, you know Generative AI and all that kind of fun stuff. What?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(53:53)

Yeah. you know, for us, I

 

think it actually ties in really well with what we’re talking about is that the level of precision and accuracy and being able to see those trends, populate automatically with our, you know, dashboard software that basically captures all this information that we’re talking about. For me, being able to have automatic notifications for any issues that may pop up before they populate, you know, we have a good understanding of what

 

Jeff Walter (54:03)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(54:21)

metrics indicate red flags, if you will, with franchisees and essentially giving that information to artificial intelligence or integrating it into those existing dashboards to basically tell me before I have the opportunity to do the research myself, say, hey, it looks like these locations are going to need some method of conversation coming up regarding these metrics or these changes have taken place. These are probably

 

or with likely probability, the items that are needed to be discussed coming up. Or better yet, some of the other writers you talked about is talking about those experimental tests when it comes to sales and marketing. Okay, well, let’s say I’m gonna run a television ad for my franchise location in San Francisco for the next three months. Well, let me let my KPI tracker know that. And so for the next three months, let it…

 

manage and keep tabs on all of my measurables. And then once my experiment is done, let it tell me what it’s done to my metrics. What was the impact of that ad campaign that I ran? And then let me compile that data at a franchise level to say, okay, now instead of me having to capture all this information relatively manually, let the artificial intelligence capture this and then give me a case study on, ⁓ what has the impact been with this particular style of ad campaign?

 

And now let’s distribute that to the franchise system so they can start utilizing it. And that’s just, you know, thinking strictly about the sales and marketing aspect of it. But, you know, we start implementing that into a training portion of it. What about the next iteration of training? If I wanted to have an advanced level sales process that we offered to franchisees once they’ve been in the system for a handful of years, right? We want to start really getting granular with how we can

 

boost sales, maybe we do something similar to that, right? That’s how I see us integrating artificial intelligence release. That’s how we started to integrate it with our system today.

 

Jeff Walter (56:15)

I really like, you know, I really like it and it goes to the completeness of your program, which is really very cool. Very unusual is that you’re starting with the end in mind, right? It’s like, it’s, this is the impact. I want to hit this impact and let me work my way backwards. How do I change my processes? How do I, you know, change the content and then how do I change the training? And I think it’s brilliant. So that’s, good.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(56:25)

Yeah.

 

It’s scientific. It’s fallen.

 

You talk about the engineering background, the chemistry background is the same way. It’s really just following the scientific method. You test something, you see how it works, and you go back and make adjustments until you get the result you want. It’s funny how much it relates to business.

 

Jeff Walter (56:51)

Yes, yes, definitely. shifting gears a little, ⁓ one thing I mentioned to you earlier was I’m doing this workshop for emerging franchise oars in February at the IFA annual convention. You guys hit that magic number of 100 plus units and you continue to cruise up there. What?

 

advice would you have for an emerging franchise or that might have, you know, a handful of corporate units and maybe a handful of franchise units out there in terms of scaling and, but scaling without sacrificing quality, right? Like that’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a hard thing because you get the thing going and you got the one guy that has, or the handful of people that have everything in their heads. yeah, what, what are some of the things you would suggest?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(57:36)

it’s probably the same thing you would, Jeff. I mean, it’s the SOPs, it’s the processes, it’s writing all this stuff down. mean, it’s, what’s the book? We were talking about, we talked about E-Myth.

 

The one that I’m talking about, shoot, it’s gonna drive me crazy thinking about it. But essentially, having all of these things written, building the basis of your systems and your processes and procedures down so that you can start onboarding the individuals that are gonna start taking over each one of these steps for you. Because I mean, our brand was no different from it where we literally had the family, the Stewart brothers, did every aspect of.

 

Um, onboarding training and the ongoing training of our franchise system up until what five years ago. Um, and it was only because they had developed these processes out to where they could start one by one hiring other members to, okay, I’m going to slowly offload the onboarding process to somebody. Okay. I’m going to slowly offboard the product training and ongoing support to somebody. Okay. I’m going to slowly onboard someone for the franchise development to somebody.

 

And they were only able to transition to that in a level of quality because they had built out processes to allow them to follow exactly what their recipe was, kind of similar to how you would with a franchise anyway. so that they could, without skipping a beat, continue what they had already built on and leveraged. And thankfully, because they’re still involved with the business, if there ever was a question or something that wasn’t built out, it’s just a matter of kind of turning around and reaching over to ask a question. and just going from there. So it’s.

 

Jeff Walter (58:51)

⁓

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(59:09)

just creating that repeatable process so that even if someone isn’t in the office, it’s step one, step two, step three, and always having it accessible.

 

Jeff Walter (59:19)

So, you know, go back to what you said. It’s the SOP, it’s the standard process, the process, the process, the process, and then having the systems in place to support the process. Does that be a good, like…

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(59:33)

Yeah,

 

it sounds like a good Jason Garrett impersonation, but yeah, exactly.

 

Jeff Walter (59:36)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time. Before we go, is there anything else you want to convey to the audience or out there? We’ve covered a lot of ground. I really appreciate the insights that you’ve provided.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(59:50)

No,

 

this was a lot of fun. I’m glad you had me on. Now, I guess the only plug I’d have is, you if anyone’s interested in checking out Blooming Blinds, they can reach out to me. My email is jake.worton at bloomingblinds.com. But no, seriously, I had a lot of fun today. I’m glad we got to cover so much. And anytime you want to have me back on, I’m game.

 

Jeff Walter (1:00:12)

Yeah, by any chance, are you guys going be at the IFA convention in February?

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(1:00:17)

Yeah,

 

there’ll be probably a few team members of ours at IFA this year.

 

Jeff Walter (1:00:19)

Okay,

 

well let’s make sure we get together and at least have a beer or something. We get to shake hands. Hey, thanks a lot for your time, Jake. I really appreciate it. It was really informative and I think people are going love this. So thank you. And to everybody out there, all the listeners and viewers, thank you for your time and focus and we appreciate your continued viewership and listening. So have a good one.

 

Jake Wharton of Bloomin’ Blinds(1:00:23)

Yeah, that’d be great. Love it.

 

Thanks, everybody.