Over the past two weeks I’ve spent time with two individuals who represent the largest minority group in the United States: Americans with disabilities. The first, Ric Nelson, is a 37-year-old entrepreneur in Anchorage Alaska. Nelson has cerebral palsy and requires full-time assistance to manage his physical needs. Nelson is academically brilliant and highly energized to advance the interests of the disabled. He graduated in the top 10 percent of his high school class and, against high odds, used the scholarship he obtained to secure associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in Small Business Management and Business Administration. Most recently, he completed a master’s degree in Public Administration.
Nelson serves on multiple boards and after eight years of service became chair of the Governor’s Council on Disabilities and Special Education (GCDSE) for Alaska, where he is currently employed as Employment Program Coordinator. I learned from my discussion with Nelson the full extent of the plight of disabled employees.
The National Council on Disabilities (NCD) estimates between 40 and 57 million people in the U.S. are disabled. As of 2018, only 18 percent were employed. Statistics from the Census Bureau show the sum inched up slightly in 2019 but reached only 19.3 percent even prior to the global health crisis.
Not surprisingly, the COVID recession has been disproportionately hard for the disabled, who’ve lost nearly one million U.S. jobs between March and May of this year. Complicating factors include jobs ended due to the extra risk of immunocompromised conditions and the predominance of disabled workers in lower-level positions in industries such as food and service that have been most heavily hit. Concerns for the ability to comply with ADA (American Disability Act) requirements in work-from-home arrangements have also been a factor. Funding for private organizations to support the disabled have suffered as well.
However, Nelson notes that entrepreneurship could be an answer to some of these needs.
One disabled entrepreneur’s story
Christopher Casson agrees. Casson, who just turned 35, is an event and commercial photographer who is on the autistic spectrum. Instead of viewing his traits as a hindrance, he considers them a gift that gives him an unusually high level of focus and allows him to help other employees and entrepreneurs as an activist for disability needs.
In 2018, Casson launched the Autism To ARTism movement to eliminate negative stigma and emphasize strengths and raise awareness for the challenges autistic adults face, as current systems tend to leave them forgotten after high school. After completing associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in graphic design and computer animation, Casson interned with a wedding photography studio and in 2019 established Christopher Casson Photography, LLC.
I met Casson while serving as a coach for the Next Impactor competition that culminated in Chicago in August 2019. Casson was the fourth place winner and also received the Video Vanguard award for a video challenge he’d led.
Six months ago, Casson’s business was ready for launch in March 2020, and then, of course, we all know what happened next. The events industry that had been his primary target disappeared on a dime.
On the advice of an advisor, Casson is now hoping to shift to real estate photography, which is showing steady and even increasing demand. Is this a good idea?
Gallery: How Many Franchise Locations Should You Own? (Entrepreneur)
The difference between owning a single franchise location and multiple franchise locations can be vast. But with each added storefront or territory, the challenges (and often, benefits!) increase. To figure out the best approach, explore the lessons learned by these multi-unit franchisees—who respectively run 2, 3, 34, 75, and 770 locations.
What’s it like to own 2 franchise territories?
Big challenge: Building a team from scratch
In January, Evette Hunter retired after serving 25 years in the Army. And in February, she became a franchisee with Color World Housepainting.
“I’d always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” says Hunter, who learned about Color World through Boots to Business, an SBA training program that’s part of the Department of Defense’s Transition Assistance Program. “But I wanted something where I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, and this gave me the formula to be successful.”
After just one month running a single territory for Color World — which operates in 15 states across the country — Hunter trusted the formula enough to expand to a second territory, and she now works across 50 zip codes in Georgia and South Carolina.
But as she works largely with contractors and subcontractors to complete various jobs, from house painting to power washing and gutter installation, this year has been a crash course in finding reliable talent. “I’m more about quality than quantity,” Hunter says of the jobs she takes on. “But I’m finding that a lot of people want to do the work real fast and get paid.”
To identify and retain the best talent, Hunter is open to offering individual contractors full-time employment after six months. “They know that possibility is there,” she says. “And this gives me time to know they have my same work ethic.”
For now, two territories is plenty as she builds her operation and team — but she sees more in the future. “The Color World team wants everyone to win;
I ain’t just a number,” she says.
“I want to give myself two years to get really comfortable with this business, and then hopefully we will expand further.”
Years ago, when Jennifer Tribble took her 2-year-old son to get a haircut in Orlando, she experienced some dreadful customer service. “Two stylists got in an argument about who ‘had’ to cut the kid’s hair,” she recalls. “[I thought], This is your pride and joy, not a burden! In the land of Disney, why is there no great place for kids to get a haircut?”
That bad haircut gave her an idea — and in 2013, she opened her first Pigtails & Crewcuts salon, a space that caters exclusively to kids, with 66 locations across the country.
“My stylists are saints, and we give parents peace of mind,” she says. “The kids love it. We play movies, and we have a Nintendo Switch, themed chairs, snacks, prizes — we’ve thought of everything.”
Tribble opened her second location in 2016 and her third in December 2019. “Because we’ve built a reputation, the first month at our newest location did more than double what my other two stores opened at,” Tribble says. “It was already covering its cost — until this tragedy hit.”
Sales fell in March by about 30 percent, and by July, as cases spiked in Florida, Tribble’s business was still feeling the effects of the crisis. More locations does mean more responsibilities, but Tribble says they also provide a cushion. “If one store runs out of photo paper, we go get it from the other store,” she says. “I have 19 stylists I can pull from. Multi-location is ideal for me, and experience is your best friend. You’re not as scared by the nuances of business.”
Eric Danver has never owned just one franchise location — and that’s by design.
“Mom-and-pop operators are just married to their location,” he says. “I wanted a different quality of life.”
Danver learned the ropes of franchising in the ’90s, when he got involved with the Papa John’s brand and eventually operated 53 stores across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. (He still owns 18.) There, he quickly came to understand the value of building an empowered team that could handle daily operations and allow him to focus on the growth of the business.
Two decades later, when he opened two Virginia locations of Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa, he thought he could just run the same game plan — but was startled by the differences in running the two brands. “The pizza delivery business is laser-focused; it’s all about speed, getting that pizza to the customer’s door as fast as possible,” he says. “The spa is all about relaxation and the client experience, and the staffing challenges are very different.”
Danver enlisted his two daughters to run day-to-day operations at those first two spas, where they built a reliable clientele that pays a monthly membership fee. (“That revenue model was very appealing to me,” Danver says.) He then went back to focusing on growth, but he tweaked his strategy to focus on acquiring existing locations from other franchisees.
“I learned pretty quickly that it’s easy to take somebody’s existing spa and make it better,” Danver says. “When you build from the ground up, it can take you a year to attract 500 members. When I do an acquisition, I start out with up to 1,000 members. So that’s the way we grow now.”
The strategy worked. Danver now operates 16 Hand & Stone locations and anticipates growing to 20 before the end of the year. (Business, of course, was impacted by Covid-19, but he is optimistic.) He has been focused on securing fast-moving cash deals to acquire new locations while trusting his expanding team to run daily operations.
“It’s a tough business, and if you’re an owner-operator and you’re in there every day, you’re dealing with a lot of headaches,” he says. “But I’ve got a lot of young kids who are energized and enthusiastic and love the business, and they’re ready to handle it. That’s our model.”
Shirin Kanji works for his family’s business. But it’s a far cry from a mom-and-pop operation.
Kanji serves as president of Impact RTO Holdings, a subsidiary of Impact Properties, a company his father started 35 years ago that’s focused on multi-unit franchising within hotels, restaurants, and retail. Kanji and his team focus primarily on the organization’s retail arm, specifically the 75 Rent-A-Centers they operate across eight states in the Southeast.
“I created our retail division in 2015 with the acquisition of 40 Rent-A-Center stores, and now we have almost doubled that count, which is fast,” Kanji says. “This business for us has always been about people, and how we treat our customers and our employees. We want the presence and culture of our family to be felt, even as we grow.”
But with more than 600 employees, that can be a challenge. So Kanji makes a concerted effort to put in face time at his locations and make sure he’s seen as an accessible leader, by both his employees and the people they serve.
“It’s not the fanciest solution, but it is just about increased presence, physically,” he says. “I’m on the road, my VP of operations is traveling, our regional directors are traveling. We can directly interact with the staff at each location and help them solve their issues internally, and externally with their customers.”
To do that, Kanji prescribes a combination of “rolling up the sleeves and getting in it” and leveraging technology. The latter has become increasingly important in recent months as his businesses have worked to adapt to changing restrictions brought on by the global pandemic, as well as changing consumer wants and needs.
Kanji’s retail businesses saw steady demand during quarantine, even while engaging remotely, and have seen an uptick as regions have moved toward reopening. But he knows some changes will stick with the company long after COVID-19 is no longer a threat — and that’s a good thing.
“Operating with fewer resources can really create a grit or a strong sense of will, and we’ve learned to be leaner in some areas, and that will probably stick,” he says, citing more team meetings via Zoom and more customer communication via digital channels. “We’ll carry some of those innovations with us, which will help us create a better customer service option.”
Michael Kulp started working in restaurants when he was 14 years old. He spent time in the kitchen, he spent time working the front of house, and eventually, he spent time working within a small organization that owned franchise locations of quick-service restaurants. That’s where he saw a big opportunity in small business.
Today, Kulp is the CEO of KBP Foods, a multi-unit franchisee of Yum! brands, operating primarily KFC and Taco Bell restaurants. Based in Overland Park, Kans., KBP launched in 1999 and now operates 770 locations. Annual revenue is approaching $1 billion, and KBP is responsible for 15,000 employees.
“The bigger we get, the easier it becomes to find areas of our company where we’re just mediocre,” Kulp says. “The restaurants at the very top get a lot of attention, and the ones at the very bottom get a lot of attention. But whether it’s the way we communicate, build relationships, or reward and incentivize, we must focus on never allowing any units or performance or behavior to become mediocre just because we’ve gotten larger. It’s probably our biggest challenge.”
Kulp wants his entire team to keep that in mind, so the phrase “Fight for Great” is used often across all of KBP. But Kulp knows that encouraging words aren’t enough. To keep all employees motivated, KBP has created a variety of incentive programs.
At the restaurant level, Kulp and his team have created performance-based incentives that reward employees directly when their store is performing well. For folks a little higher up the company org chart who’d like to invest in the company but don’t necessarily have the means to, a two-year program called Partner Track teaches them about investing, and a matching program built around bonus dollars helps those employees earn ownership in the business. For folks even higher up the corporate ladder, it’s not uncommon to have more than 50 percent of their net worth invested in KBP.
“I’m a big believer that if you walk into a casino and hand somebody a stack of chips, they’ll behave very differently than if they had to purchase that stack of chips themselves,” Kulp says.
He sees these programs as a big reason why KBP has been able to attract top talent as it continues to grow rapidly. (The business opens or acquires nearly 100 new stores a year.) “We have the ability to provide people with upward mobility, unique career trajectory, and financial upside that they can’t find other places,” he says. “And we firmly believe that tacos and chicken are the two sexiest businesses you could ever be in.”
6/6 SLIDES
To find out, I interviewed Michael Schoenfeld, a 35-year experienced photographer and cinematographer at the helm of Michael Schoenfeld Studio in Salt Lake City. Schoenfeld is the photographer my agency has used for our own needs and recommended to clients. Schoenfeld has received a number of awards, including multiple Graphis Platinum awards, and was selected as a judge of the Graphis 2020 New talent Annual this year.
Of most interest to me, however, he successfully pivoted from individual photographer to program head of a giant initiative for one of the nation’s top three self-storage companies 1,600 U.S. sites. The company wanted a high-level library of photographs at each U.S. site. When we last spoke about the project in 2018, he was in the midst of bidding, hiring, and organizing an enterprise project levels beyond anything he’d encountered in his photographic career.
“How did it go?” I asked. “And what would be your words of advice to an emerging photographer like Casson?”
An expert weighs in
Schoenfeld was candid. He noted that by and large, photographers enter their industry based on interest and talents, but with virtually zero experience in managing a business or succeeding as an entrepreneur. Failure rates are dismal. Of those who survive, many are capable of producing only $18-20,000 a year.
“Find a way to get some entrepreneurial training early,” he said. “Work you’re a** off. That’s my biggest secret.”
In his own case, Schoenfeld’s enterprise project for his giant and publicly-traded client was every bit as challenging as he believed it would be. The program tested his ability to plan and execute as a program director. He rightly anticipated the variance of abilities in the regional photographers he commissioned was less an issue than the process and rules for tweaking the results to make them consistent across all states. While he met the deadlines and executed properly in year one, he quickly determined success would come more readily in years two and three by engaging a smaller field of photographers who were tested and proven and assigning a larger regional territory to each. The strategy succeeded, as the program is now in its third year and on schedule for successful 2020 completion in spite of the interruptions from the health crisis.
Similarly, he noted that the region’s largest hospital, which previously engaged him for most of its advertising photography, suddenly noted that it wouldn’t dare to use the photography now as it depicts patients receiving flu shots from practitioners who are not wearing masks.
The hospital asked if it would be possible to photoshop masks into the photos.
Again, it was entrepreneurial problem solving and project/budget management, along with photographic skills, that let him succeed. As he’d kept records of the lighting, color, and specifications for every photograph he’d created, Schoenfeld was able to recreate each photo setting and photograph masks positioned exactly where the people in the original photographs had been. This allowed him to cut and photoshop the masks onto the original photos while maintaining the quality the client required.
Entrepreneurial skills are necessary amidst crisis
Beyond artistic skills and the ability of any photographer, disabled or not, to move beyond being a barely successful practitioner to a growing and sustainable business requires entrepreneurial skills and an unfailing work ethic to succeed. In fact, Schoenfeld notes, it is this set of requirements that is allowing so many international photographers from regions such as India to become surprisingly adept at stepping in and meeting the needs that U.S. photographers would otherwise be able to fill as “their biggest resource is time,” Schoenfeld notes, and they are willing to invest any number of hours required to hone their skills to succeed.
In the U.S., Casson is one of the millions of entrepreneurs and I fully believe he’s honed the traits to succeed. For those who’d like to follow his progress, he is documenting his own journey and the issues he is advocating with the help of others in his podcast “Thru Autistic Eyes,” which is syndicated on Apple.
For disabled individuals in the U.S. who are leading or contemplating the launch of a business, Entrepreneur has published a list of grants and funding resources here.
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