Building a Purpose-Driven Mobility Franchise | Dave Pazgan (Liftology)

Welcome to the 10X Franchise podcast, the show for Franchiseors who refuse to settle for average growth. Each episode dives into real world strategies, frameworks and systems that help Franchise brands multiply their reach, scale their operations, and dominate their category. Today's guest is Dave Pazgan, CEO of Keto Kinetics, a rapidly growing franchise focused on children's fitness and sports enrichment. With over 15 years of experience in franchising, Dave has built and scaled successful franchise systems, including his work at 101 Mobility, and as the founder of Zorform, an executive peer networking platform for Franchiseors. Dave's leadership is centered on empowering franchise partners and driving sustainable. He's here to share his insights on franchise growth, community impact, and the importance of building scalable systems for long term success. Dave, welcome to the show. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on. Man, we love what you're doing with liftology, and for the audience, Dave, if you don't mind just sharing a little bit about what is liftology. The name sounds cool, right? Sounds like biology. But tell us more about it. Well, we are in the business of helping people navigate their homes and communities when their ability to move around starts to falter oftentimes as they get older. So, specifically, we install equipment like stair lifts, wheelchair ramps, vertical platform lifts, in-home elevators, and other types of equipment that are designed to allow folks to either stay in their homes longer as they get older or navigate their homes if they've suffered some sort of an injury and are now maybe bound to a wheelchair or other ability devices. And then in some cases, we also install that same type of equipment in commercial settings, like schools and churches and small office buildings, things along those lines. So, we're here to serve the community that has trouble navigating stairs and, you know, those types of things primarily. It's such a niche product that you don't really think about until you meet it, right? So, I'm glad you're serving that market. Now, how'd you get into this? So, I've been in this industry since 2008. I had started a company with a couple of partners in 2008 called 101 Mobility. And same exact business as Lip Dolly G, installing, you know, lifts and ramps and other types of equipment. We decided to franchise that business in 2010. And we grew that business, the 101 Mobility Company, to right around, I think, a hundred locations is where they stand today. And then I had continued to grow that company until 2020, which point I had left there. And I stayed in franchising and worked on another brand for a few years and decided to get back into the Access and Mobility franchise space, primarily because I see such a big need for it. You know, we see the aging baby boomer phenomenon. There's 26 million people over 80 today. There'll be over 70 million people over 80 years old in a few years. And most of those folks want to stay in home as they get older. They don't want to, you know, they want to avoid assisted living and other options and selling their home and things like that. And they want to stay in their homes as long as they can. But for many of them, that's a challenge as they get older because of, you know, stairs or basements and, you know, other, you know, safety in the bathroom and issues like that. So we're here to address that need, which is about to grow quite a lot in the US over the next decade or so. You're 100% and I think you're in the right spot because they do have Mobility challenges. We weren't working out as, you know, like the kids are these days, right? It wasn't as common. My parents aren't as healthy as I am because I put that first. So their generation was more about just working and kind of making it through and Jim was a second thing. So I can see that being a challenge. They're not going to have the muscles that we are all working on developing. That's right. So I want to ask you this, what was one of your biggest challenges with one on one Mobility that you hoped to not have to deal with this second time around, which by the way, congratulations on doing it over again. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Well, it was a great experience. I think, you know, that ended up being a really good company. I stay in touch with a lot of people there. You know, they're doing well and I'm very glad for their ongoing and continued success. I think in terms of, you know, what we can do different, a few things, specifically, and then this is a, I guess, a similar to the ideas that we had at one at one, but I think it's still really relevant is we're really focused at letology on the customer experience. What we have found is that for many people, you know, this is sometimes a sudden situation and it's very unfamiliar territory. You know, I'm 55, for example, my parents are both 82 and if I were, you know, home over the holidays and maybe I noticed that one of my parents is getting a little bit shaky on the stairs, right? And that maybe it's the first time I'm realizing that like, you know, this is going to be a problem. Well, I'm now in an environment where I've got to start figuring out, you know, what are we going to do about this, like maybe talking with my sister or something. You know, how do we solve for that? Do we, you know, do we need to sell their house and put them in a single story home? You know, it's probably they're probably not ready for assisted living. They're pretty, you know, able bodied, but the scares, the stairs are getting kind of scary, right? So how do we solve for that? Well, I might start looking for some type of equipment or some way to, you know, help my parents get up and down the stairs safely or maybe be more safe in the bathroom, you know, grab bars and things like that. But I don't, you know, the typical consumer doesn't know much about it. So they've got to go start educating themselves and really learning about it. And what oftentimes people find in many stories we've heard over and over again is it's hard to get those answers. You know, you start to do a little research online. Maybe you make some calls to local companies that offer this equipment. And in many cases, they don't answer the phone. Like, it's hard to get them on the line. We've got many stories from both, you know, consumers we know and franchise candidates that we spoke to that have a personal example like that. You know, I had a good example. I had a candidate I spoke to recently. He learned about the industry because he was trying to get a lift for the pastor of his church. And he called a couple of places in town and couldn't get anybody on the line. He eventually found one that was willing to help them, but it took several weeks to get the lift installed. And it felt, you know, they had to go like, you know, way out of the way to go try the lift. And it wasn't, you know, convenient and it was just not that great of an overall experience. And they, you know, had tried several different local companies. And it wasn't just wasn't that easy to get somebody to respond. And so really focusing on that customer experience is really central to our DNA as a company, making sure that, you know, first things first, right. When we get someone that's interested or need help or just has questions that we answer the phone. In fact, we as part of our business blueprint, part of that process for us is to create what we call our proven process. So we call ours the AAA proven process. And the first A stands for answer the damn phone. It's literally written that way in the document because we know that it's a common issue in our industry. People just don't, you know, our competitors are oftentimes and God bless them. They're just busy, right. But they're so busy that it's hard for them to, you know, be responsive. And so we weave that sort of responsiveness and customer care into our company very tightly as part of our, you know, cultural DNA. Dave, I want to know the other two A's you can leave me hanging. Well, the second A is act quickly and assess the need. So, you know, we need to figure out what it is that the customer may need. You know, there are in many cases we can get those answers just over the phone. Like, you know, where they having trouble tell us a little bit about, let's say the staircase, for example, that you're trying to navigate. We try to assess the need. And then the last A is active ownership. So we expect all of our franchise owners to be very active business owners. I know you have a lot of ties in franchising. So this is probably not news to you. But there are a lot of people in franchising that are trying to buy a franchise as a passive or semi passive or semi absentee, you know, income stream. And lethology is just not that like we are the kind of business that that takes an active owner who's going to pay attention, you know, be involved in the business day to day, build a team. You know, the business does scale really well. So when we say active owner, we're not talking about putting on a tool belt necessarily what we're talking about is, you know, getting up every day and focusing on, you know, helping our customers, building your team, you know, building out your footprint and your territory, you know, all of those kinds of things. So it's answer the damn phone, assess the need and act quickly and then active ownership or the three or our pre-pull 8 premium process. So I love that. That is amazing. That itself is such gold nuggets. So thank you for sharing that. And now this is your second time around, which I don't have a lot of guests that got to do it twice. So really mean it. So I do want to ask you because again, the first time around everybody makes mistakes. So what are some mistakes you see new franchise doors making because you know, I come across so many of them, but I would love to hear your perspective when you look at it from the outside in what are some of those mistakes the franchise doors make. Obviously that that you are you're not going to do it. And so I want to do what what those might be. I often see like two big areas where I feel like franchise doors tend to fall down and one of them is in terms of making sure that they're carefully selecting the right people into the business as franchise owners. It's easy to sort of get tempted by a qualified candidate who can you know, stroke the check right like they can afford the business they can pay your franchise fee. But they may not necessarily have the right skills to be a good owner in your business. And so avoiding that temptation and I will say this like at my last company we at one of them ability we we did really well there like we got a lot of really good owners in the system. Certainly we didn't bat at 1000, but you know, I think we overall did a good job of that. But it's I see just having been in franchising for a long time. I see a lot of that where you know the the candidate kind of glosses over what the real work is going to look like and the franchise or also sort of glosses over what the real work is going to look like. And so they end up with this mismatch of expectations. Candidate kind of has this rosy view of what it's gonna be like as an owner and maybe how much time and effort it's gonna take on their part. And also what skills are needed to be successful in that business. And then the franchise or didn't really dig in enough on that to make sure that the candidate really fully understands what that landscape looks like. And so they get this mismatch. So then the franchise owner on boards and starts operating and they realize pretty quickly this is a lot harder than I thought it was gonna be. And some of the things that I'm being asked to do here, I'm not good at or don't wanna do, right? So avoiding that is a really key thing that I think a lot of franchiseors, you know, you just get tempted, right? As you're trying to grow your business, you need those initial franchise fee dollars to build what you're trying to build infrastructure and all of that. So being disciplined around, we think of it as curation. You know, we wanna curate a relatively small number of the right owners for our business. And our US footprint will probably look like somewhere between 70 and 90 locations in the US. And so that's 70-ish probably owners. Maybe they'll have a few that own more than one location. But that's not a huge number, right? Like somebody, so many franchises are thinking, I'm gonna have hundreds or thousands of franchise owners. You know, we will have less than a hundred. So we can, I think from that perspective, we have to be careful about making sure that we bring the right people in, that it's a right fit on both sides. You know, good fit for us, good fit for them. They have the skills to execute on the business and so on. This episode is brought to you by IMS, an integrated marketing system that helps brands grow smarter and faster. If you wanna scale your brand without the headaches, check out how IMS can make that happen. Visit us online at IMS.net. (upbeat music) And then I would say the second area where I think a lot of times, franchise systems fall a little bit short, is in the support infrastructure, in particular, like most franchises, I think get good systems. You know, generally they've got good operating systems to run the business. That's fairly common these days. You know, some of them use proprietary systems, some buy off the shelf systems and modify them. And any of that can really work if they're decent. Where I think a lot of times, franchises don't do a great job, is in terms of the people who are actually supporting the franchises day to day, you know, those franchise business coaches, are they really helping? Like do they really know how to help a franchise owner? I feel like at Lathology, we're in a kind of a unique position there, because my two business partners are former franchise owners from 101 Mobility. They built one of the bigger locations at 101 and have ultimately sold it back to the home office in 2020. And so they're coming at this from a perspective of support coaches who have been there and done that. They built a sizable business, big enough to be attractive to private equity. They successfully built and sold that business in a eight year time frame. They, you know, had a good size team, 16 people, you know, we're operating across multiple locations. And so they've, you know, they can really speak from experience as business coaches. So what it takes to be successful, build a business that's profitable, that has low turnover for your employees and your team, high satisfaction rates for your customers. And it's not very common in franchising where the franchise business coaches are people who have been there and done that. You know, they're more often, you know, nice people with some good skills that have been hired, but they often tend to be more like, you know, traffic costs than actually effective help. You know, I can help you get to the right people at the home office that can give you what you're looking for, but I'm not really in a position to sit down with you and do a half a day strategic planning session and help you figure out how to go from, you know, two million to four million in revenue, for example, where our, and that's their main role here, Jen and Gordon are my partners. Their primary goal and role at the company is to help play that franchise business coach, you know, position and help our franchises be successful. And so those are two big areas I think that are really important that oftentimes franchises or tend to miss out on. Love that. And I do appreciate you sharing that because it is true. When you see money, you're like gravitated towards it and you bring on the wrong people, it can mess up the whole system, right? So yeah. Well, and I even, even beyond that, like a, you know, just as an observer of franchise systems and you see this a lot when they become owned by private equity because oftentimes private equity firms have relatively short investment horizons, you know, two year, three year, five year, summer and that timeframe, usually not longer than that. So in many cases, what you see them do the behavior is, let's get as many pins on the map as we can. And that might be in some cases selling to the wrong people who are maybe not fully qualified or even worse just selling more territory to your existing franchises, you know, whether they have a good expansion plan or not and franchisees have a tendency to be a little bit, you know, they want to protect future territory growth opportunities. So they take franchisee orders up on that deal. But then what do you end up with? You have a franchisee that has way more territory than they really have the time or resources to develop. But the franchise, the war gets to say, well, hey, we sold X amount more territories this year or this quarter or whatever. But the long term, how that plays out over long term is not the healthiest way to approach growing your system. - I 100% agree. And also if you don't have good coaches, like you mentioned, then you don't have a good support system for those people on the ground, right? Boots on the ground, they're like, we don't know what we're doing. And they're not gonna ask Dave for help. Dave's not the right person to ask for help. - Yeah, and I can be, I can be. I think that's another thing too, is that, you know, 'cause I've been in, I've been also a franchisee a couple of times and I have, you know, some sense of that as well. And, you know, I'll tell you like my pet peeve when you are a franchisee and you need some sort of support. A couple of things that always bother me, we like, you know, they'd have various emails for different things, right? And this one company had, they had one for marketing, one for advertising and one for, I think, social media or something like three different ones that were all marketing related. And so if you got it wrong, right? Let's say you needed help developing an ad for a magazine or something. And so you reached out to marketing app and they said, you know, they would respond and go, oh, you sent this to the wrong place. You need to send that request to advertising ad. I'm like, okay, well, can't you just forward it? Like, why are you making me do that extra work? Like, you know, it's probably the same person, you know? And I'd realize you're running a queue and you're trying to keep tickets and all of that, but just can you just do it for me? And why, and then, you know, the automated email response that you get back is like, oh, we have up to 72 hours to respond to your request. And please don't send in multiple requests unless it's been more than 72 hours. And it's like, how about, you know, I like a good friend of mine has a good saying, like many times people are looking at their calendar and I'm looking at my watch, you know? You're like, well, what about next week? I'm like, what about right now? Like just, it's gonna be the same 10 minute task in a week as it is right now. Let's just do it now, you know? So, it's just so excited that this is a bookmark episode. (laughing) Dave, you're just dropping tons of wisdom. So, I wanna go back to your story again. You being that entrepreneur from 2008 to 2020, you blew up 100 locations. Was there a time that you could think of that was kind of like the turning point, just explosive growth? If there was such a time when things were taking off, do you remember what you did or what happened? Was it economy? Was it just good timing? Yeah, I think, well, you know, when we launched that business, there really wasn't another franchise in that industry. And so it was a bit of a gamble from the start because we just didn't know how that was gonna play out. The supplier companies that we work with, that make the ramps and all that, and the stair lifts and so on, you know, they hadn't really seen an approach like that before. So, there was some trepidation in the early stages around, you know, what exactly is gonna happen here? Like, will this really work as a franchise in this industry? And, you know, so first few years, we were kinda like, well, it's, you know, we're gonna do everything we can to help our franchise be successful. So, let's start with that. And so, I think we did a good job there. I think we got really lucky with some of the first owners that we brought in that's always super crucial for a new franchise or actually all of the, we started awarding franchises there in 2010. All of the ones we awarded in 2010 are still there 15 years later. So, I think that kinda speaks to like getting it right out of the gate, which again, is a fair bit of that as luck, right? We just sort of got good owners. We had a good program. The industry was a good business and it was growing at the time and that type of thing. I would say once we got around the corner of like 20 to 25 locations that when that's when we started to feel like, okay, this is starting to show signs of working. Like it was, you know, up to that point was working good enough. But you still kinda wonder like, is there, is there gonna be a shoot to drop here? Like is there something that's gonna come along that's gonna derail where this is headed? But once we got to, you know, maybe over 20 owners, then I would say that's when we started to feel like, okay, we're feeling the groove here. The industry continues to grow. The industry seems to like franchising as a model and an approach to the industry. There are ways that a franchise or can add value in this equation. We saw another couple of franchise companies, you know, come up, you know, get launched after we did. So we were like, okay, there's others kind of following the path here. So it was around that point, I think, that we started to feel comfortable. - Love that. I appreciate you sharing that. - I know baby boomers is all in all 50 states. Do you have a preference on which markets to enter or do you decide is it anyone anywhere and everywhere? - Yeah, I mean, we're focused on a US based footprint. So, you know, people all over the country have these needs. There are a few things in our industry that are sort of industry specific around, you know, licensing what it takes to be able to operate these businesses in your market. There are a lot of states where that's really difficult, but it is a factor. So that's where we wanna make sure we have, you know, in states where that is an issue, we have owners have the capability to either find and hire somebody that they need or you know can get those requirements satisfied in one way or another. So there's a little bit of that and then of course as you know there's you know franchise registration states. So we issued our FDD in October. It would have made sense to try to get registered in those states between October and the turn of the FDD in April anyway. So we're not offering in any of those states currently at least not the you know the review states but we will be eventually. So it'll it'll pretty much be I mean if you look at the footprint of our competitors you know they're pretty well distributed nationally. Gotcha. And I do want to ask about what advice would you give somebody who's considering liftology versus another opportunity. I would say focus you know go deep on on the team and on the you know the business and the industry like I feel like many people who end up entering into a franchise haven't done enough homework really. They yeah then the folks really need to understand you know they're in the industry better you know what it takes to be successful in that industry. Do you know good validation like talk to other people in that industry that are in it and doing it every day. A great question I think franchises should you know candidates should ask but they're often afraid to ask is what's really hard about this business like what's the part that most people go then this part really sucks like what's that part look like. So ask those kind of questions and then I think a lot of the two comes down to who who was the leadership team that you're going to be dealing with what do they care about what are their goals and objectives. Can you feel like you can get really comfortable with them because there's a fair amount of trust I think that goes into these kinds of relationships and you know there's many many books and webinars and all kinds of material out there about you know franchisee franchisee or relationships and some franchisee or have overall fairly positive strong relationships with their franchisees and some don't and so try to understand that too because it's a recipe for frustration if it turns out you join a system and most of the franchisees there are just generally not that happy with the home office and the support that they get for one reason or another. So dig in on those kinds of things and you know specific to lethology like try to understand the business that we're in like if you're you know we're in a lot of people's homes like the new owner inevitably is going to be out you know installing we're not necessarily installing but you know consulting with customers in their homes doing some selling there's not a lot of businesses where there isn't some sales component and so get comfortable with that component you know get comfortable with the sales part and if you're not that person like you don't really want to do sales okay that that might be okay but what's your plan like who is going to be doing that part of your business because no no no transactions generally happen until somebody sells something so you got to figure that part out so I think that this is true really of any franchise you're investigating gets a really no one understand what the key levers are for success gets no one understand the team behind the brand who's going to be providing the support you feel comfortable with them like they've got your best interest set at our and then do good validation not just at that brand but in the industry you know talk to people that are participants in that industry and just try to get a feel for you know what it's like to run one of those businesses I absolutely agree you're right on the money there because it is somewhat of a marriage yeah like we were working with it is well you know our agreement like most is 10 year agreement right so long time like and it may be longer like I said all of the franchises we awarded at 101 back in 2010 are still there so that's you know that's 15 years now so you know these are long long term decisions that you're making don't enter them lightly yep and also one thing I was going to say is there's a reason why Chuck Philly doesn't let you have a second location yeah it's not a passive income that's right yeah they have very strict rules around you know they have very few owners as a couple maybe a handful that have more than one store but then you know you also are expected to be at that location like on site six days a week I know exactly so well Dave where can they learn more about you and let's go to our website letology.com there's plenty of good information about the company and and products that we offer there's some some information about the franchise business there as well you know if you want to learn more and dig in a bit you can just inquire through the website and we'd be happy to chat with you about you know your interest and talk about your market specifically and all of those kinds of things. Well thank you so much for coming I do appreciate you taking time out of your crazy day but yeah I hope to have you come back because I do see some fun future ahead for your technology that's great sounds good well I appreciate you having me on. That's a wrap for today's episode of 10X franchise podcast if you enjoyed this conversation be sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode and remember when you're ready to take your brand and your franchise to the next level visit us at ims.net or if you're a franchise you can also visit us at franchicemarketing.io thank you so much for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.