What would you do if your business caught on fire and you lost everything? How would you respond?
Our guest on this episode, Aubrey Janik, shares her story about how her restaurant franchise caught on fire and forced her to “pivot” before it was even a thing. She has taken that lesson and has now created multiple income streams.
Aubrey has an impressive background by having been the youngest franchisee in a franchise system, she has built a social media following of more than 34,000 followers on YouTube, she is a franchise consultant with Big Sky Franchise Team (we love her), and she has a side-hustle with a car rental company. Oh, and by the way, she has done all of this by the time she turned 27!
You can follow Aubrey on YouTube by CLICKING HERE.
If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/contact or by calling Big Sky Franchise Team at: 855-824-4759.
Tom DuFore:
You’ve worked hard to build your business and now it’s time to grow. Welcome to the Multiply Your Success Podcast. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team and a serial entrepreneur. And as we get going today, I have a quick question for you, what would you do if your business caught on fire and you lost everything? What would you do? How would you handle that? How would you respond? How would that impact your life? Especially if you’re in a fixed business, fixed location business?
Tom DuFore:
Well, our guest today Aubrey Janik went through that exact experience. Well, Aubrey, as you’ll find out does recover from this horrible, unfortunate incident, but here’s just a quick background on Aubrey. So Aubrey has built a stock portfolio that she was able to make over $100,000 in the stock market. She has built a car rental business, a YouTube following of over 34,000 followers.
Tom DuFore:
She was a franchisee and was the youngest franchisee actually bought a restaurant franchise by the time she was 22 years old. She is currently a member of the Big Sky Franchise Team. One of the reasons I’m so excited to have her on and share a little background about her and she runs our friend leadership system, and helps with franchise marketing and websites and franchise sales efforts for our clients. And she has done all of this by the time she’s 27 years old. All of these things have happened in such a short time period. It’s really incredible.
Tom DuFore:
And on top of it all, she’s an endurance athlete as you’ll hear more about. So I can’t wait for you to hear about her whole story and have her share her background with you. So without further ado, here is my interview with Aubrey Janik.
Aubrey Janik:
My name is Aubrey Janik, I am a 27-year-old former franchisee franchise consultant. So I got into the world of franchising back in, I think officially back in 2016 but it was quite honestly a few years before that, just because of the process of franchising. But I got started in the franchise industry by opening a franchise of my own. Whenever we opened, I was 22 going on 23 years old.
Aubrey Janik:
And I ran that franchise for a few years, I learned a ton about franchising, a ton about business. And then after a couple of years of running that business, I tragically lost it due to a fire and how to pivot my career in 2018, quite significantly. And in 2018, I transitioned into doing more remote online stuff. So currently in 2020, I do franchise consulting, I work with the Big Sky Franchise Team and I have a YouTube channel with 34,000 subscribers, and I run a peer-to-peer car sharing business with 10 cars that I rent out to people and run it as a kind of part-time side hustle. And so that’s kind of, I would say my summary in a brief statement.
Tom DuFore:
Wow. Well, it sounds like you are a serial entrepreneur who just does not stop here. And I’m sure, at least to me, what catches my eyes or catches my ear, I should say and what may have perked up our audience is when you said that you have 34,000 YouTube subscribers. So, would you mind sharing about that journey and what the content is and what that all looks like?
Aubrey Janik:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think like most people in general but I think especially most people in my age group that grew up with YouTube. I had always wanted to have a YouTube channel and know something, I always wanted to do, but I’d never like, would do it because I was too embarrassed to start a YouTube channel.
Aubrey Janik:
And so almost exactly one year ago, I told myself that I would start a YouTube channel, I would dedicate doing three videos a week to this YouTube channel. And the goal was to get to a thousand subscribers in one year. And regardless of how long it took me to do that, 1000 subscribers, I was going to stick to it for one entire year and then kind of reevaluate from there and see how things are going. And it’s been going extremely well.
Aubrey Janik:
I mean, I talk about just business, I really am passionate about personal finance and just teaching people that making money isn’t as cookie cutter as going to a university, getting a degree, making money in a corporate job, it really is literally hundreds of different ways to make money out there and make a lot of it. And so that’s what the YouTube channel surrounds itself around. And so it’s been a really cool thing to be taking part in and it’s done way better than I would’ve ever anticipated.
Tom DuFore:
Wow, that’s really, really impressive, that’s impressive. And certainly you would be a case study I would imagine for the multiple ways that you’re generating your own personal income through a wide variety of sources here.
Aubrey Janik:
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I definitely practice what I preach, I’m a big believer in having multiple streams of income and really trying to figure out creative ways to leverage your time and your expertise and your resources to… I don’t want to say, make as much money as possible because money isn’t the only thing that matters, but to really put yourself in the best position as possible to take advantage of any opportunities you want to.
Tom DuFore:
Sure, sure. Well, and at the end of the day, money is the instrument that we use to buy things or do the things that we want to do, whether that’s buying freedom or buying things that you enjoy or buying vacations, whatever that might be.
Aubrey Janik:
Absolutely. I mean, I think that as much as we don’t want to admit it, I mean, money is a huge factor and almost anything that we decide to do. And I think that you hit the nail on the head is deciding and putting yourself in a position to when you don’t have to trade your time for money, and it’s more of a choice rather than a thing that you’re forced to do. It makes all the difference.
Tom DuFore:
Wow. Well, and Aubrey, one of the things I’d love for you to share with the audience here, and this is one of the most impressive things for me having worked with you now for the last almost what, I guess, two years it’s been, is the idea that of when you decided you wanted to go into business and decided to buy a franchise.
Tom DuFore:
And at the time when you bought into your franchise, you were the youngest franchisee in your system, and I think that’s incredible for a young early 20s person to go and do that. So would you mind talking through that evolution? Our audience, we’ve got a lot of franchise ores and growing small businesses that are thinking about franchising and maybe share, share a little bit about that journey and how you came to thinking about doing the franchise.
Aubrey Janik:
Yeah, absolutely. So, the kind of process of me becoming a franchisee was definitely one that was a really long thought process, it wasn’t something that I thought of, and then the next week I went through the process. It was years in the making. Like I said earlier, I’ve always been interested in making money in business and investing.
Aubrey Janik:
And so I started investing in the stock market at a really young age. I dipped my toes into it with an account and my dad’s name at 16, because you can’t have an account on your own whenever you’re 16. So I started learning the stock market through my dad’s name at 16, and then once I was 18 on my birthday, I opened my own Scottrade stock trading account. So that’s like what I did in my free time whenever I was a junior and senior in high school.
Aubrey Janik:
And I ended up getting really lucky in the stock market when I invested in American Airlines during their peak bankruptcy stage. And so I invested in American Airlines, my senior year of high school. And to preface as well, like I hated school. I was really bad at it, I’m dyslexic and so I have always been a horrible student, I’m horrible at reading, I am not good in the classroom setting.
Aubrey Janik:
So while I’m at home learning how to start businesses and invest, I was in school, completely failing all my classes. And so I had hated school and I was looking like, really from the moment that I entered high school in alternative route, I was like, “I can’t go to college like, I am absolutely miserable in school. I do not like it, I’m not going to do well, I can’t go to college.”
Aubrey Janik:
And so I started investing in high school and I didn’t have going to college for two years and I ended up dropping out my sophomore year. But by the time I had dropped out of school, my second semester of sophomore year, I had close to $100,000 in that Scottrade account. And so that was in my eyes, like the ticket to what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I’m like, “Okay, I have this money, it was found money in my eyes because the majority of it, 99% of it was not my own, it was just the amount that I made.”
Aubrey Janik:
And now I want to invest into something and it worked out with franchising because at the time my dad was working on the corporate side of franchising. From his perspective, I was meeting these franchisees with 20, 30, in some cases, hundreds of units of different franchises. And I was able to talk with them, pick their brain, kind of see like what they were doing and how they were becoming successful.
Aubrey Janik:
And that was what made me want to open a franchise, was like seeing these people who had, I think the largest franchisee I spoke to had 150 subways at one point. And I just saw his success and I was like, “Okay, that’s what I want to do.”
Tom DuFore:
Wow. Wow. And that is an impressive ride. So taking your investment, starting investing at 16, it’s just funny. When you turned 18, you hear stories, people turn 18 and they go to the local gas station or convenience store and they buy a pack of cigarettes or something just because they can, even if they don’t smoke.
Tom DuFore:
And well not Aubrey, you open up an investment account because now you’re officially 18 and you can start your own investments. So I love that story. That’s amazing.
Aubrey Janik:
It definitely, I think shows to my personality of how I operate. I did buy a pack of cigarettes, I do not smoke, but I did buy a pack of cigarettes that day. I remember as well just because I could, but I mean, it really was in my eyes, I look at it from like the perspective of 10 years later, because now I’m 27. So it was about 10 years ago that it happened.
Aubrey Janik:
And I mean, it’s ridiculously lucky that I was able to do so well in the stock market because it’s a perfect example of, I knew just enough to take advantage of the stock market, but I didn’t know enough to realize that what I was doing was so risky.
Aubrey Janik:
Unfortunately, I didn’t really have a whole lot of money in it of my own, but it really was. And that’s when I talked to people that are younger and they asked… Well, it doesn’t happen often, but whenever I do talk to anybody younger and I mentioned about what you do in high school does matter.
Aubrey Janik:
And I really do think that like that decision to open a Scottrade account at 18 and then invested in American Airlines a few months later, that really did, I think set the tone for the rest of my life going into current day, and it really did make a big difference.
Tom DuFore:
That’s amazing. And so now you take this investment and you buy into a franchise, you do your vetting and you’re searching on that. Now, all the while this is going on, and we’ve worked together now for a while. So I know part of this backstory, but talk about this…
Tom DuFore:
So we’re going to take a twist here listeners, and for Aubrey here. So she is also a competitive, what is the long distance…?
Aubrey Janik:
I would say endurance sports would probably be the term.
Tom DuFore:
Endurance sports.
Aubrey Janik:
Yeah, so Ironman-
Tom DuFore:
So talk about that.
Aubrey Janik:
Yeah, absolutely. So I do Ironman races, I’m currently training for a 50-mile ultra marathon, so it’s a 50-mile run race, which is happening in February. I guess I got into endurance sports my freshman and sophomore year of college. I have repeatedly told, I think everybody in my life that my two years in college were the worst two years of my life, I was just really miserable. I didn’t like school, I don’t like doing things I’m not good at, which is probably not a great character trait, but I really have a hard time dealing with things that I’m really, really bad at.
Aubrey Janik:
So in college, I was horrible at college, especially coming from the perspective of my dad and my two sisters did extremely well in school. In fact, my sister was the number one student at the University of Texas, her graduating year, so she’s incredibly smart. And then here I am at community college, flunking all my classes, and I had a really hard time dealing with that.
Aubrey Janik:
And so throughout college, I gained a lot of weight. I was struggling with anxiety, I was just having a lot of issues coping with the fact that I was in school, I wasn’t doing well and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life but I had this money that I knew I wanted to invest.
Aubrey Janik:
And I told myself around the same time that I decided I wanted to open a franchise. I was like, “Okay, I’m not happy with what’s going on with my life right now, I’m going to figure out what my plan is going to be.” And that’s ultimately when I decided to start a franchise or open a franchise. And I said, “I’m going to sign up for a marathon and I’m going to go vegan.” So that six-month period I went vegan, so I stopped eating anything with dairy or eggs.
Aubrey Janik:
I was already a vegetarian before but I went completely vegan, I started training for a marathon and then I started the process of opening up the franchise. And after my first marathon, I was just hooked, I absolutely loved the competitiveness of the sport. I love the fact that you weren’t kind of measured by… like you can measure your own success rather than going with the team and feeling like you’re being compared all the time.
Aubrey Janik:
And I’ve really just loved the sport so much. So as of right now, I’ve done, I think seven or eight and a half Ironmans, I’ve done four or five marathons, two full distance Ironmans, and then I’m doing an ultra here a few months.
Tom DuFore:
That is incredible. So just out of curiosity, I mean, what does preparation look like for that? What’s a workout routine or how do you condition for 50 miles? That’s a lot.
Aubrey Janik:
Yeah, it’s a lot. So I’ve been training for this ultra for a year now, I decided around this time last year that I was going to do it, and I’m actually doing it with my dad. And so it’s really nice because we do all of our long runs together which makes it, I think, much more enjoyable. But so for an example, I run probably between 40 and 60 miles a week depending on what’s happening that week.
Aubrey Janik:
And to give you kind of a glimpse into that, like this week I ran 12 miles on Sunday. My rest day is Monday and Friday, and then I ran five miles Tuesday, six miles Wednesday, five miles yesterday, I’m running five miles today, I’m off tomorrow, and then I have a 22-mile run on Sunday. And so it’s just like long runs on the weekend have been shorter more robust workouts on the weekdays.
Tom DuFore:
Interesting. And all the while doing this, when we came together and started working together as well here. So you’re training, you’re doing this, you’re doing your investing, you’re helping build our friend leadership system, and the websites that you’re doing. So talk a little bit about your work here with Big Sky.
Aubrey Janik:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I would say my work with Big Sky is all over the place, honestly. I think like whenever I have to describe what I do with the company, I always have a hard time describing because it’s just really, truly is all over the place.
Aubrey Janik:
So, I mean, I started working, I think it might be closer to three years now that we’ve known each other and then two years since we’ve really been working together. But I started initially working on frame leadership and trying to figure out a way to help each other, build out a platform to train franchisees and franchisors, how to effectively just operate a franchise.
Aubrey Janik:
And then from there, it’s really spun out into other things, dealing with sales accounts and helping selling franchises, and then going into the website development as well, and helping build companies websites, and helping them more optimized their online presence as a whole through either social media marketing, building a website, keeping that website updated and those sorts of things.
Tom DuFore:
Phenomenal, phenomenal. Well, thanks for giving that little overview there, Aubrey. And as we’re here, why don’t we jump into the little formula for the show here? And we talk about this idea of misses makes and multipliers. So would you mind sharing, is there a miss or two that maybe happened or came along the way? And what you did?
Aubrey Janik:
Oh, gosh. I mean, I think that there’s definitely more than two misses that’s for sure. I mean, ultimately, my experience with franchising was one that I thought was super valuable in the sense that it taught me so many lessons, but it was a really, really hard journey for just a number of different reasons from maybe not choosing the best franchise to be a part of. And then ultimately the franchise ended up closing due to a fire.
Aubrey Janik:
And the aftermath of that fire was really, really tough. I mean, I mentioned earlier that, I often say that my sophomore and freshman year of college was the worst year of my life. I think maybe the end of 2018 may have taught that of like the worst three to four month period of my life was the aftermath of that fire.
Aubrey Janik:
And it’s hard to look back at that period of time and not regret it and say, “If I would’ve never opened a franchise, I would have never been in that position to have to deal with that fire.” And then like, who knows where I would have been?
Aubrey Janik:
And so I definitely think that I would consider that a miss, just because the fact that I had a franchise allowed that franchise to then have a fire which then made it close, which then had that financial aftermath that followed.
Aubrey Janik:
But oftentimes, I don’t like to look at things like that just because I think that if I didn’t have the franchise, I wouldn’t have ended up being where I am today. I don’t know even really what I would have been doing today. So I definitely think that there has been hard portions of the last 10 years of my career, but I don’t think that I would consider the misses just because I think that they ultimately led to where I am today.
Tom DuFore:
Great. Well, thank you for sharing that. And let’s take a look at the other side. Let’s talk about a make or two, and is there anything that you’d like to share or re-emphasize that maybe you’ve already spoken about here?
Aubrey Janik:
I would say number one is, little things matter. I’m a big believer in like doing small things compound on one another to make a really big change. And I practice this in every aspect of my life from fitness to eating, to work, to really everything, and it really makes a huge difference. I think that so often people, they want to make one big change just by jumping into it and then hoping that their life changes from that big change. But an actuality change comes from a bunch of little things.
Aubrey Janik:
So I would say that for me, a big kind of success would be, making the effort to do work out. And that would be a big thing that I would look back on and say, that was a big success is making the decision to eat healthy and to train for a marathon. Starting the YouTube channel, I think is one that’s top of mind. I mean, working with Big Sky I think is definitely in the top three of kind of big success moments in my career. And I think that none of those were like huge moments at the time, but then they spun out to be big moments in my career overall.
Tom DuFore:
Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that. And certainly, I really liked that idea with the health aspect, because that’s such a with eating and keeping your body healthy, and then just training for these endurance events and endurance races that you’re doing. Just keeping your body in excellent shape and condition. That then spills into every other aspect of your life.
Aubrey Janik:
Oh yeah. I mean, 100%. I think that everybody wants instant gratification and I even want it myself, I think everybody wants it. And that’s one of the things that I love about endurance sports is that if you’re wanting for a sport that you can get good at quickly, endurance sports is not the sport for you, because, I mean, for example, I’ve been doing endurance sports now since I was 20 so seven years.
Aubrey Janik:
And I’m just now becoming to the point where I’m fast enough to be competitive, like whenever I first started I was always the back of the pack, I was always one of the slowest competitors. And it was very literally seven years of consistent eating healthy, consistent training, consistent working with my coach to get to the point where I’m at a point where I’m actually competitive in the sport.
Aubrey Janik:
And I think that that is a pretty good reflection of life in general, like everything is just small actions that compound on top of one another to make some big change.
Tom DuFore:
Well, I love that. I mean, you set us up perfectly for the next question here about multipliers. And is there any multiplier that you’ve used in your life and in your career in anything that you’ve been doing here that’s really stood out?
Aubrey Janik:
I think that, I mean, just to reiterate from the last question is just like small daily effort. I think that I try to make sure that everything I do in life is intentional. Whether it’s like through work, whether it’s working out, whether it’s spending time and your relationships with the people around you.
Aubrey Janik:
I think that one of the most detrimental things to anybody’s life, whether it’s fitness, their home life, their social life, their work life is just going through the motions. And so it’s like you only get 24 hours in a day, and so making sure that everything you’re doing, you’re doing with intention behind it, and you’re not just going through the motions of your day to day tasks. I think for me, that’s a pretty big multiplier because it’s just everything.
Aubrey Janik:
I try to pack everything I can into one single day, and then I make sure that that day is super productive and super full of meaningful things that I completed. So I would say that’s definitely one of them is just working with real significant intention behind everything.
Tom DuFore:
I really, really liked that. And you’re right, when I find, I can tell you just from my own life that when I’m not being intentional, you used a great word, you just drift and you just kind of float and it’s like, “Oh, snap back to reality, you got to be focused intentional.” Be right on that, I love that piece there.
Tom DuFore:
Well, Aubrey, as a final question, we like to ask every guest on every episode is, what does success mean to you?
Aubrey Janik:
Gosh, I mean, if you would have asked me this question 10 years ago, I would have said it was having a Lamborghini, living in a mansion somewhere and I don’t know, driving three different exotic cars. It would have been a totally different definition than it is today.
Aubrey Janik:
I think that for me, and it’s changed so significantly from year to year, but I think that I’ve settled at the definition of, I want to be in a position to where I just am able to do what I want to do. I mean, I love to work and I feel really fortunate to be in the situation that I’m in now because of the fact that, I mean, I very literally work every single day. Like before I got on this podcast, I was responding to emails and doing some work, and it’s nice because it doesn’t feel like work, it’s just something that I like to do.
Aubrey Janik:
And for me, I think that success would be being able to continue doing that throughout my career. And then also getting to a financial situation to where number one, I want to be in a position to where money isn’t a big issue, but number two, to be able to help the people that I love.
Aubrey Janik:
So being able to be as generous as I would like to be, is something that is super important. I mean, you see those TV shows or even on YouTube, you see it, of people who like buy their parents a house or by their siblings a house. And that’s something that I would love to get to that point where I could just do those hugely generous things and not even think twice about it. So that’s definitely, I would say my picture perfect vision of success.
Tom DuFore:
Oh, I love that. Well, and I can attest to the audience here. You are a go getter, you’re a hard worker, but you enjoy what you’re doing. You can tell you’re having fun when you’re doing it, whatever you’re doing-
Aubrey Janik:
Absolutely.
Tom DuFore:
… training, working, whatever, whatever you’re working on. And Aubrey, as we close things out here, is there anything you’d like to share with the audience that you maybe wanted to, and we rushed past something or anything else you’d like to leave?
Aubrey Janik:
I would just say kind of reiterate what I mentioned earlier of, I think that with social media and the internet today over glamorizing almost every single aspect of life. I think that too many people, especially too many young people look at the figures on the internet and say, “I want to be like them.”
Aubrey Janik:
And they just want it to happen now within the next like week or 24 hours or 48 hours. And I think that the biggest thing that I’ve learned in my career so far is number one, small actions matter, and then number two is things take time. And it’s crazy to look back on where I was four years ago. And at that time, thinking to myself like having a vision of what my life would look like today, and it looks completely different.
Aubrey Janik:
And so I would say small actions better, and number two is, things take time and a lot can change in a relatively quick period of time.
Tom DuFore:
Well, Aubrey, thank you so much for being here, what an awesome story, and thank you for sharing that with our audience today. And let’s go ahead and jump into today’s key takeaways. So our first key takeaway today that Aubrey mentioned several times is that little things matter and that little things matter and they compound. So be focused on those little things. And she mentioned little things that she did which was changing the way she was eating and working out, and other related things like that in her business life as well.
Tom DuFore:
Number two was to be intentional. So those little things matter, number one. And number two is to be intentional, be present, be intentional with what you are doing. And number three, I really liked this takeaway that success for her was helping the people that she loves. I think that’s beautiful, I think that’s… And now it’s time for today’s win-win.
Tom DuFore:
So today’s win-win comes from Aubrey when she talked about things just take time, things that you want, good things that come along, they take time. And I really like her talking about being an endurance athlete, because just the fact of being an endurance athlete is incredible, running 50 miles at a time or Ironman races and these marathons and so on that she runs. These things take time and it takes time to train for them.
Tom DuFore:
So the old adage of good things come to those who wait kind of an idea, but you’re not sitting around and waiting. You’re actually doing something you’re practicing, you’re preparing, you’re getting ready for that. And so that’s our episode today folks, thanks for tuning in. Please subscribe, share this with your friends, and anyone you think who could benefit from listening to our podcast. And we’ll see you back here next week.
