Have you ever thought that your business isn’t one that people wake up thinking, “I want to open one of those franchises?” Meaning, that your business you are looking to franchise or maybe have already franchised, is one that isn’t top of mind for your prospective franchisees? Our guest today is Wade Brannon, who shares with us his experience in building a franchise system with a business he knows is not top of mind for prospective franchisees.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
To help franchisees find success, do not outgrow your systems and attract the best franchisees you can.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- Schedule your free franchise consultation with Big Sky Franchise Team: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.
- You can visit our guest’s website at: · www.pigtailsandcrewcuts.com
- Attend our Franchise Sales Training Workshop:
- https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/franchisesalestraining/
- Connect with our guests on social:
- https://www.facebook.com/pigtailsandcrewcutsfranchise#
- https://www.instagram.com/pigtailsandcrewcuts/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/pigtails-&-crewcuts/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/wade-brannon-a1553418/
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Wade Brannon is the President and CEO of Pigtails & Crewcuts, one of the fastest-growing children’s hair salon franchises in the U.S. With a background in franchise leadership, Wade took a leap in 2004 when he acquired Pigtails & Crewcuts after a chance visit with his son. What started as a single salon is now a thriving national brand with 80+ locations across the country. Wade brings decades of experience in franchise development, business strategy and creating customer-centric experiences. Under his leadership, Pigtails & Crewcuts has become known for turning a routine haircut into a fun, stress-free experience for kids and parents alike.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.
The information provided in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any business decisions. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host, Big Sky Franchise Team, or our affiliates. Additionally, this podcast may feature sponsors or advertisers, but any mention of products or services does not constitute an endorsement. Please do your own research before making any purchasing or business decisions.
TRANSCRIPT
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[00:00:00] Tom DuFore: Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. As we open, I’m wondering if you have ever thought about your business being a type of business that people wake up thinking, “I’m really interested. I want to open up a business like this, or maybe open a franchise.” Meaning that your business is one that maybe if you’ve franchised it or you’re looking to franchise, it’s probably not top of mind of your prospective franchisees. Our guest today is Wade Brannon, who shares with us his experience in building two different franchise systems that probably are not on the top of mind for prospective buyers.
Wade is the President and CEO of Pigtails & Crewcuts, one of the fastest-growing children’s hair salon franchises in the US. With a background in franchise leadership, Wade took a leap in 2004 when he acquired Pigtails & Crewcuts after a chance visit with his son. What started as a single salon is now a thriving national brand with more than 80 locations across the country. Wade brings decades of experience in franchise development, business strategy, and creating customer-centric experience. Under his leadership, Pigtails & Crewcuts has become known for turning a routine haircut into a fun, stress-free experience for kids and parents alike. You’re going to love this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
[00:01:33] Wade Brannon: My name is Wade Brannon. Thanks for having me. I am the President and CEO of Pigtails & Crewcuts, which is a children’s haircut franchise based in Atlanta.
[00:01:43] Tom DuFore: Thank you so much for being here. I find your experience and background in franchising interesting. I’d love just for you to give us a little overview of how you ended up in the franchise world and a little bit of your background there.
[00:01:58] Wade Brannon: It started a long time ago. I had started in the franchise business back in 1984. After college, I moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and ended up working in the first company location of a company called Heavenly Ham, which was a spiral-sliced ham company. We built that into a franchise company. We acquired it, moved up here to Atlanta a few years later, built that into a decent-sized franchise entity, and then sold that to Honey Baked Ham. When my tenure at Honey Baked was over, I was looking for something to do. A lady approached me who had just started Pigtails & Crewcuts here in Atlanta, also.
She asked me for some help in trying to figure out if it was franchisable and, if so, how to do it. I had taken my children there. I have twin girls and a son about 20 months older. I had taken them there, and they loved it. It was one of those things you kind of wake up and go, “This is a cool business concept.” When she approached me, I told her I thought it was very much franchisable. I thought that she should. I had a few meetings with her and told her what the steps were of what you had to do, all the legal requirements, and things like that. She basically said that she wasn’t really going to go down that road, the more she thought about it.
I ended up with two of my old ham partners. We acquired the company with the intent of building it into a replicable model that we could franchise. We saw a lot of similarities to the ham business. We put our heads together and figured out this was an interesting opportunity.
[00:03:49] Tom DuFore: Kind of like the franchise folklore stories of what Ray Kroc did. See an opportunity, saw a business, and you saw an opportunity with this new franchise, and were able to come in and take that over now. You do that, and it happens. Talk through your launching and growth, and a little bit about where you are today.
[00:04:10] Wade Brannon: We’ve just had our 20-year anniversary franchise conference. I did the first one for 20 years, and this one now for 20 years. It’s been an interesting growth. We’ve been through a recession. We’ve been through a recession. We’ve been through a pandemic. I spent about a year collecting some of our old team members from the ham business and kind of got the band back together. The similarities between the two businesses are large. You’re doing something for a child that the parents can do in their bathroom, give them a haircut. Now, they may not be very good, but we’re trying to make it a great experience, make it the highest quality experience that it can be, and truthfully charge a premium for it.
It was not dissimilar from the ham business. You could buy a cheap ham, or you could buy the best. We were selling the best. A lot of our model is based on making this experience, which can be very disturbing to some children, can be very mundane to others, and making it in a place for the children and for the parents that is comfortable and enjoyable. We had to create those systems to do that so that it was replicable here, there, and throughout the country.
We put those systems in place, and we started searching for good franchisees, good operators. We’ve got about 90 locations now. We’ve got another 10 or so committed to. We’ve got in about 25 different states. We’re growing. We’ve had a good year. We’ve added a lot of the locations that have opened this year. Unit economics are good. They’ve continued to grow. We’ve got a good story to tell.
[00:06:08] Tom DuFore: You’ve built now two brands, really, from the ground up, and starting to expand through franchising. What are some of the challenges along the way that you saw that you worked through? Certainly, some of these big economic shock factors, like you mentioned earlier. From a growth perspective, as a franchisor, when you have one or two franchises versus having 50 or 100.
[00:06:31] Wade Brannon: I think it’s like any business when you’re opening a new location. If you’re the operator, there are stressful things. There is the labor component. How do you create a team and build the culture of that team to retain them? That’s probably the more difficult challenge that we face right now and have for a number of years. We work through it, but it’s always a challenge. How do you teach them, lack of a better way of calling it, the Pigtails way? Because you can experience dilution. The message, the memo, the look, the feel can be diluted if you’re not careful.
What I mean by diluted is it’s like the story of the children in a circle. You start the story with one child, and then as it goes around, they tell the next person, they tell the next child, and it comes back around, and it doesn’t sound anything like what the starting story was. We have to be very careful about how we do that. We’re very conscious of regular meetings. We’re very conscious of regular visits, regular calls, regular communication, and adding it not just to the owners but to managers and all the way down to team members, so that they understand that Pigtails & Crewcuts is bigger than just their one local salon.
I think that’s what all franchisors face, and big entities. There can easily be dilution. Some of the challenges have been the technology has changed. Radically different from where we were in 2004 when we started this business, to what we do now. The method for bookkeeping, the methodology for communication, the methodology for marketing to customers, for attracting customers. All of those things has changed so dramatically with the advent of new technology that we’ve had to adapt. Any business has to adapt, or they just won’t move along.
[00:08:42] Tom DuFore: Great points. I think it’s interesting you talked about this technology piece, which gets me thinking about franchisee support. One thing I’ve seen in my 20 years in franchising is the brands that seem to stick around for a while and do a great job have a nice support structure in place, or at least have figured it out. Maybe they didn’t at one point, but they figured it out now. Talk about how you help support your franchisees with things like the technology, or keeping up with trends, or even just maintaining that consistency that you were talking about.
[00:09:17] Wade Brannon: It starts with our team here. I’ve always believed that, and I think if you walk down the hall and asked everybody what’s our job, our job is to help franchisees be successful. It’s not about making money for us. It’s not about X number of growth of units, anything like that. It is about our franchisees being successful. We all know, and we all believe that if they are successful, then we will be successful. That’s job one. Beyond that, the support mechanism starts at site selection. It starts at helping them identify and secure a lease for retail space. It then moves to construction.
How do we help them create blueprints, secure contractors, and work through the construction phase? We’ve got to assign people for that. Then once they secure a space, they come to training here while it’s under construction, and they’re here for a week. We assign a franchise support specialist directly to them who really is responsible for that franchisee. They’ve got one person to call. They don’t have to call the marketing guy or the staffing guy or the this, that, or the other. They’ve got one person that they reach out to.
They build a rapport, they build a relationship, we understand what they’re going through, and they’ve got a regular shoulder to lean on and cry on and stand on as they move through. We have regular visits. We have something called “Shear Excellence,” where you just play on words, obviously, but it’s regular visits to the salon to see what they’re doing. We help them score, they help us score, and see how they’re performing to a series of standards. We have regular communications. I send out videos regularly. All our teams send stuff out.
We have a library that’s being developed of training videos. Some of it already exists, but we’re collating it into a bigger library. We have franchise conferences every 18 months where everybody gets together, and they get to support each other. The franchise owners have their own Facebook page where they can communicate with each other and support each other. It’s really all of that. That’s really what we do. We’re always looking for new ways to support the franchisees.
[00:11:53] Tom DuFore: It seems like with something like Facebook, you’d probably more likely to get franchisee engagement through something they’re already using on a personal level.
[00:12:02] Wade Brannon: In the old business, this technology didn’t exist. As it came online over the years, one side of you says, “Gosh, I don’t want somebody who’s negative talking to somebody who’s positive and bringing them down.” By the same token, I want somebody positive who can help prop up the guy who’s struggling a little bit. You’re right, Facebook has been a great, simple, easy platform to communicate. They talk about everything there. They talk about staffing challenges, they talk about their wins, their successes. It’s a great tool, and sometimes they talk about us.
[00:12:41] Tom DuFore: I’d love for you to talk just a little bit about some of those unique attributes for your business.
[00:12:45] Wade Brannon: I think Pigtails & Crewcuts is well-positioned in the industry first and foremost. Nobody wakes up one day and goes, “I’m thinking I want to get in the kids’ haircut business.” It just doesn’t really flow. I might want to get in the restaurant business, I might want to get in the car dealer business, but it doesn’t really happen that way. People call me all the time and just say, “Hey, I’m thinking about a franchise,” and I’ll talk to them about anything. “Understand the model, look at the model, look at it, and see if it fits into your family.”
We get a lot of people who are interested in this because they have younger children. A lot of times, people are going back to work after having a child. They want to be in that ownership control situation and have the flexibility to have a family. This lends itself to that because they’re reasonable hours of operation. It’s enjoyable, but make sure first and foremost that it fits into what your family structure is. Do your due diligence. Make sure you understand really what the challenges are with the business because anybody who tells you it’s all easy is not telling you the truth.
I think the more information you can gather is so important. This industry is fascinating, the hair care industry. I never thought about it. Look at me. I don’t have a whole lot of hair. As I started looking at it, I drove around, and I’m like, “My goodness, there’s a hair salon on every street corner.” They’re everywhere. It’s an enormous $60 billion industry, and the kids segment is estimated to be about $7 billion. With somebody who can help you run it right, it can be a very successful business that you can scale if it fits into your family. Again, it’s all about what fits into your life and your family situation, and I think that’s the most important part of it.
[00:14:51] Tom DuFore: I want to go back to a comment. You were talking about going in for site visits or field visits to see franchisees and providing that ongoing support. What kind of schedule are you on? Is this every week? Is it every month? Is it once a year?
[00:15:06] Wade Brannon: We are a minimum of once a year, and we have monthly scheduled calls with each franchisee. In those, we’re talking about face-to-face once a year in their salon at least. Regular monthly calls to talk about business practices. How’s your bookkeeping going? How’s your marketing going? Are we getting timely and accurate financial statements? If so, let’s review those each month and see, how you’re doing compared to others, and being a part of a system and being able to compare your KPIs to others. What are the targets that we’re trying to hit to help you be successful?
It’s continuous, but face-to-face at least once a year inside the salon and monthly at least on a phone call. Those start out weekly. They start out twice a week, as you’re new and you need that extra handholding. Then it slowly, “Yes, we got this, we’ll back off a little bit,” but we still want to talk at least once a month to take a pulse.
[00:16:12] Tom DuFore: Oh, that’s great. Thank you for sharing that. What advice would you give to a new franchisor or emerging brand as they’re starting to grow or launch into franchising?
[00:16:23] Wade Brannon: I truly believe that the biggest, best piece of advice I can give is attract the best franchisees you possibly can and help them as much as you can afford to. You got to make sure the systems are right. You got to make sure the systems work. You got to make sure that the systems can be replicated all over. Don’t outgrow yourself just for the sake of growth. Grow strategically, grow organically, grow appropriately to the level of your infrastructure.
Everybody wants to grow as fast as you can, as much as you can, but it’s got to be good growth. Bad growth is a disaster. We did it one year back in the ham business, and I remember it well. We outgrew, we outsold our infrastructure, and it really hampered us for a year to two years because we had to rebuild the trust, we had to rebuild the relationships, we had to rebuild our support mechanisms. We came out stronger on the other side, but it was a challenge. Make sure your systems work and grow at the appropriate speed.
[00:17:46] Tom DuFore: Real quick, what’s the best way for someone to get in contact with you or with Pigtails & Crewcuts to learn a little bit more about what you’re doing?
[00:17:54] Wade Brannon: We’ve got contact information on the web, there’s Facebook, there’s all the normal communications platforms. We’re readily available.
[00:18:02] Tom DuFore: Wade, this is a great time in the show. We ask every guest the same four questions before they go. The first question we ask is, “Have you had a miss or two on your journey, and something you learned from it?”
[00:18:14] Wade Brannon: A recent miss was, interestingly enough, as recent as 2020 in March. I think it was March 13th, the world kind of shut down. I didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t know what it meant, but I thought it was going to be short-lived. We’d been hearing about it for months, and then all of a sudden it got really, really serious. We immediately had Zoom calls with our whole system, system-wide calls, and I said, “Look, you got to hang on to your staff. You got to do everything you can to hang on your staff. This should be over fairly soon. You got to keep your people because that’s our biggest asset.” Our employees are our biggest asset. Honestly, I was wrong. I was mistaken. Fortunately, a lot of the states were very helpful with unemployment.
We would’ve broken the bank if we had tried to hang on to all our employees. We had to help them get unemployment through the state governments. I missed on that. It was tragic. It was very difficult. A lot of those people have still not ever gone back to work throughout the country, and I’m not talking about Pigtails people. I’m just talking about people in general. They’ve just never gone back to work. It was just so incredibly traumatic for people. An interesting thing that came out of it, though, is we were always a walk-in model, meaning you didn’t have to schedule an appointment.
I fought appointments forever because we’re talking about another miss here. You asked for two, but it was the same timing. We were always a walk-in model because nobody’s ever on time with their children. It’s just impossible. If you’ve got appointments every 15 or 20 minutes and you’re late, it messes up the rest of the day and this, that, and the other. We fought it for a long time. With the mandates put in place, we had to go to an appointments model because you couldn’t have too many people in the salon at one time.
There were challenges with scheduling people. We set up appointments, and I was wrong all these years. I was wrong because it has helped us become immensely more profitable, because now we control labor based on our appointments as opposed to just probably overstaffing and creating this backlog of customers just because we didn’t know how many were coming in. I missed on that one, too, but both of them worked out pretty well.
[00:21:08] Tom DuFore: Thank you for sharing. I always appreciate that. Let’s talk about a make or two, a highlight.
[00:21:15] Wade Brannon: Well, I guess I can go back to the appointments model because it really did add a lot to our bottom line. I don’t count on my successes. I faced more of my failures. We weren’t together for a while because of travel restrictions and things like that after the pandemic. Once we got back together face-to-face, we had a lot of growth. Our franchisees had been through the trenches; they’d been through the battles that came out of that, and they wanted to add more units, they wanted to grow. I think that was a great win. People realized, “You know what? This is a good business. We’re doing really well in it, and we want to expand our footprint.” That’s been great. That’s where a lot of our growth has come from.
[00:22:01] Tom DuFore: The name of the show is Multiply Your Success. We always like to ask every guest, “Have you used a multiplier to multiply yourself personally, professionally, or any of the organizations you’ve run?”
[00:22:13] Wade Brannon: I have a very smart wife, and she is a real estate attorney. We have different businesses. If I had to pick somebody or something that has guided me through ethically, decision-making-wise, and otherwise, it’s probably my wife. We don’t talk about our businesses all the time because we’re in very different businesses, and we both own our gigs. She is a great resource and has been over the years. When Chief Dark Cloud appears in my mind, or Chief Super Ego appears in my mind, she’s always there to bring me back to center.
When you’re taking on a business as a franchisee or a new franchisor or something like that, you got to have a support mechanism because you’re not in it alone. She’s been a great one for me. That’s probably my best multiplier that I could come up with.
[00:23:18] Tom DuFore: Thank you, Wade. The final question we ask every guest is, “What does success mean to you?”
[00:23:24] Wade Brannon: I want my team to be successful and happy with their growth in their careers. I want our franchisees to be happy and successful with their growth in Pigtails & Crewcuts. Everything else will follow. Everything else is just going to flow right out of that. If they’re all doing well, then I’ll consider myself to be successful.
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[00:23:51] Tom DuFore: Wade, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one is when Wade talked about how he asks his team what their job is. He said their job is to help franchisees be successful. He said, “Our job is to help our franchisees be successful.” Love that focus. Takeaway number two is when he talked about some advice for emerging franchisors and emerging franchise brands. He said, “Attract the best franchisees you possibly can and help them as much as you possibly can afford to.” I thought that was just a great takeaway. He said, “Don’t grow for the sake of growth. It just needs to be good growth and don’t outgrow your franchise systems.”
Takeaway number three is when he said, “No one wakes up one day and says, ‘I want to open up and buy a Pigtails & Crewcuts franchise.'” What he was saying is that his business model type is not necessarily on the top of mind for a prospective franchisee, and maybe your brand falls into that category. I thought that was a nice little nugget and takeaway for you to think about for your own system. Does your business fall into that category as well? If so, then you need to think a little bit differently in terms of how you might get in front of, or be exposed to, potential franchise buyers. Now it’s time for today’s Win-Win.
Today’s Win-Win comes from the comment when Wade was talking about how to help grow and support franchise systems. I just love how he said our job as a franchisor is to help our franchisees to be successful. One of the things he said is, you can do this if you don’t outgrow your systems and attract the best franchisees that you can. I think what he means, or was meaning to say, by outgrowing your systems, is that don’t grow for the sake of growth as you start to expand systems. Meaning it could be technological systems, but it also could be internal processes and procedures that you need to adjust and adapt as your system starts to grow.
I just thought that was a great takeaway because if you can focus on your franchisees’ success and growing with the best franchisees you can and really summarizing it the way you said, “Attract the best franchisees you possibly can and help them as much as you possibly can afford to do so.” That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review, and remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise your business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com to schedule your free, no-obligation consultation with one of our team members and consultants. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
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