Capriotti's: From Near Bankruptcy to National Brand Success!

Speaker A: This is Franchise Today. Franchise Today is your destination for weekly information, conversations and interviews with accomplished industry leaders, all of whom share best practices for sustainable growth and sensible franchising. Here now your host, Stan Friedman, to kick off this week's podcast.

Speaker B: Today is Wednesday, July 1, 2026. I'm Stan Friedman, and this is Franchise Today. Well, I hope you enjoyed last week's conversation with Tom Spadia as, uh, much as I did. Tom is one of the nicest people I know and a fount of knowledge in the worlds of franchising, development and the law. This week we're shooting for a daily double on the affable front as I'll be introducing you today to Ashley Morris, CEO of Capriotti's Sandwich Shops, with another compelling story of grit, determination and growth, as Ashley joins us in celebration of the brand's 50 years in business. Looking back on 1976, I wonder what it was that year that inspired the birth of so many companies that have gone on to become iconic. Capriatis was born that year in Delaware as a single location sandwich shop that 50 years later is a national brand, closing in on 175 locations across the country. And they weren't alone. A great many household names have had their start in 1976. How about Apple or 1-800-Flowers? Acer of the computer company Home Goods. Kate Spade and company, which was the forerunner to Liz Claiborne, all born in 1976. And then what about DJ Max and Ticketmaster, both of whom got their starts as well in 1976. But none of these others can lay claim to having sandwiches that taste as good as a sandwich from Capriotti's. And here to tell us all about it is their cologne owner and CEO, Ashley Morris. Ashley Morris, welcome to Franchise Today.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Stan. I really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. Ashley, as much as I've known of you for years, I just don't know that we've ever really had the opportunity to do what we're going to do today. So I think we've waved hello to each other at trade shows or conventions. I did have David Bloom on about five or so years ago, and I always enjoyed talking with David. But it's time to get to the top of the house. So here we are.

Speaker A: Here we are.

Speaker B: So, Ashley, we're going to talk a lot about 50 years of great things happening at Capriotti. But before we get to that, we always start the same way, with agreement that franchising is an unintentional way of Doing business, we don't find it, it finds us. So what did that look like for you? And when was that?

Speaker A: So, to your point exactly, there was never a time in my childhood or in my young adulthood that I thought, I want to be a franchisee when I grow up. So, uh, you know, exactly what you're saying held true for me as well. I was introduced to the in college. So my best friend Jason and I lived together in a house. And one day I came home from school. I was studying finance. I had known from the time I was about 13 years old that I was going to either work on Wall street or work in finance in some capacity. And that's what I was pursuing as a. As a major and as a career. And I came home one day, and he stopped me at the door and he said, have you ever heard of this place called Capriatis? And I said, no, I never heard of it. And he knows I'm a lover of sandwiches. Always have been, probably always will be. And he said, you gotta try place. This is literally the best sandwich I've ever eaten in my life. And I said, okay, I'll go try it. And so the second day came, and I got stopped at the door again by Jason. And he said, hey, have you tried capriates today? And I said, no, I haven't. I went to school, and now I'm going to go to work. And he goes, okay. And so this happened a couple of days in a row. And by Friday, he stopped me in school, and he goes, hey, man, I've eaten a sandwich every day this week. I'm taking you. And he takes me over there, and he tells me about this sandwich called the Bobby. And he says, look, it's unbelievable. It's Thanksgiving in a sandwich. You have to try it. And I looked at the menu and I thought, stuffing, cranberry, mayonnaise, now I'm out. That's not a sandwich for me. But there's a cheesesteak on the menu. And so I tried the cheesesteak, and we had a healthy debate over that lunch, which sandwich was the best sandwich on the planet. And so I had fallen in love with Capriatis with an entirely different sandwich than he had fallen in love with Capriottis. But nevertheless, we both fell in love with capriatis right then and there. And so really just became a raving fan of the food, a great customer. I started to eat it as many times as I could. And in fact, fun story for you. Lis was up in our apartment. We broke Lease and we moved to another apartment, which was farther from school, but coincidentally shared a wall with a commercial center that had a capriatis. And so now I could walk to Capriotti's to get food. And so sometimes I was eating it twice a day and I had gone through the menu, I had fallen in love with, uh, it, you know, 15 sandwiches on the menu wasn't a bad sandwich there. And that's what it was. And we went on to our respective careers. Jason went into technology and it. I went on to finance. I became a portfolio manager for Private Client Advisors of Wells Fargo. And we just continued to be customers. And we had always wanted to be in business together. We'd actually still live together. So we talk about it a lot, watching TV or hanging out together. And finally we started making enough money in our careers where we had some disposable income and we thought, what a good time to diversify, what should we do? And it only, I mean, literally, we both had one idea, which was get involved with capriatis. We love the brand, we love the product. We could see ourselves doing something in there and being passionate about it. And so we reached out and so we became franchisees of one store in Las Vegas. It turned into two stores, two turned into three. And at three I felt my passion pendulum swing away from finance and financial services and Wells Fargo. And I thought, man, I need to make my life here, I need to make my career in this company. I just love it too much. And so at that moment in time, it was, let's figure out how to do this in a big way.

Speaker B: And so what came next?

Speaker A: So I went back to the founder who was a very, very, she was an incredible woman. Unfortunately she's passed, but she was an incredible woman and she knew what she want and she knew what she didn't want it. And she very, very rarely wavered. And so we talked about taking a larger territory and possibly uprooting our lives and moving to Arizona or moving somewhere where we could open a territory of 10 or 15 or 20 more units. And it sort of fell on deaf ears with her because at the time there were only about 35 operating stores and she's got these 25 year old kids sitting in her house saying, we want to open 30 restaurants. And frankly, I was probably a pretty big pain in her butt because I'd asked for crazy things like point of sale systems and I wanted to do external marketing with emerging technologies that were online and she really just didn't have an appetite for any of that. Stuff. So I think we were a little bit oil and water when it came to discussing the business. And so she kept telling me no. And after about a year of her saying no, no, no, no, no, you can't have any more stores other than three, I gave up and I actually started looking at other franchises because now I have been successful in franchising. I had learned the business, I understood the franchise Model M well, it's best somebody who experience and was 25 years old could. So there was a lot of naivety there for sure. But we went and we looked at other businesses and we looked at, we actually looked at Buffalo Wild Wings, we looked at a handful of others. And when we got to the finish line with a bunch of those businesses, Jason and I looked at each other and said, we just don't love it the way we love Capriottis. We have to figure capriatis out. And so I was sitting, this is a fun story. I was sitting on my sister's couch one weekend watching a World Poker Tour event. And so I'm going back 2007 where World Series of Poker Poker was, you know, the rage on ESPN. You could find a poker game on TV almost, you know, 24 7. And I'm watching this and a 22 year old wins $2 million. And he's holding these stacks of cash up. He's raising the roof with these stacks of cash. And the announcer comes on and says, there you have it folks, 22 years old is the new prime in poker. And if you're 26, you're a dinosaur and you can't win. And a wave of emotion just exploded in my brain and I, I had this aha moment and I, and I said, holy crap, the announcer is right. I'm 26 years old and uh, he just called me a dinosaur. And I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be 40 and I'm going to look back and say I didn't get to accomplish my dreams. Because I accepted no for an answer. So I immediately picked up the phone, I called the founder and I said, hey, if you're not going to sell us any more stores and you're going to sell us the whole company. And then, then we were off and we sat down and were able to come to agreement on terms. And then it was a, uh, labor of money raising. And had I known you stand back then, you'd have definitely gotten a phone call. So it was everybody I knew because I certainly couldn't aff buy the business myself. I went on about an eight month money raising trail, was able to raise the capital and we closed on this business January 1, 2008. And so I bought a company that had 38 operating units with not enough capital. I was under capitalized, I was undermanned, I was under knowledged. And but what I knew is we had this extraordinary name, we had a 32 year history, we had this extraordinary menu, and we had 35ish, very passionate franchisees that were executing their brand in Las Vegas and in Delaware.

Speaker B: Uh, didn't you also have a problem in 8 with access to capital? I mean, not just your own, but for potential franchisees to get capitalized? Those were some rough years.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, we had a great business plan that I wrote. And so the way I decided I was going to get my quote unquote franchise education, I had not known about the ifa. I had not known about CFE programs. You know, really back when there were bookstores, I walked into the bookstore and I bought every book on franchising that they sold and I read, um, them. And so in 2007 I read like 15 books on franchising to get an idea of the landscape of the industry. And when we closed the deal, I had this great business plan that was probably 100 pages long that talked about the next five years. And within 90 days you had a global financial crisis and that business plan went in the trash. And the company had not experienced the negative same store sales in the history that I was with them. Um, and according to the founder, they had not really ever experienced negative same store sales. And we started to experience negative same store Sal within 90 days of me owning the place. So it was a real Fun time. January 08 was an interesting time. There were no access to capital. We really weren't going to grow units. We went into survival mode and tried to make sure we didn't lose the investment that we had just made.

Speaker B: So what did that look like coming out the other side of that keyhole?

Speaker A: Oh, man. I mean, you want to talk about getting a hard knocks education about as fast as you could drink through a fire hose? We did, but we put the blinders on. We went back to the franchisees and said, look, the brand's 32 years old at that time. What's made this brand special is its food, its service, and the quality of what the product is. Right. We're the only brand in the country that roast its own turkeys day in and day out. So you come into capriatis and you get a turkey sandwich our turkey has one ingredient. Turkey. We take 26 pound whole birds and slow cook them, um, every night for 12 hours. We pull them apart every morning, put them in the sandwich. If you went to Thomas Keller or any of the renowned chefs on the planet that serve the highest quality food and said, make me a higher quality turkey sandwich, they literally couldn't do it. It's impossible. We are using the highest quality. The same with our beef. We're using Snake River Farms, American Wagyu. It's literally the highest delineation of beef in America that you can get. So again, if you went to Thomas Keller and said, make me a higher quality cheesesteak, make me a higher quality beef sandwich, the answer is I could make it taste different, but I could not make it higher quality. So we just, we laid on that and said, look, this is what we do day in and day out. We homemake our stuffings, we homemake our coleslaws, we do everything. This is a kitchen, a scratch kitchen that acts like fast food franchise. Let's just put our heads down and go to work. And we did. And we managed through 08, I was able to raise more capital. Towards the end of 08 and between 08 and probably 2012, 2013, we learned 10,000 ways to not build a successful franchise organization. But then it clicked. We grew up a little bit, we learned the business, we got our 10,000 hours, we built a team of people, an extraordinary team of people who then helped us get traction and we were off to the races. And so that's when, after about those five years of us really just growing organically, that's when we went out and said we're going to go create a national brand. And that's when really we started hitting our stride.

Speaker B: How do you delineate responsibilities between you and Jason, who does what?

Speaker A: So Jason's the president of the company, I'm the chief executive officer. Well, first of all, he's way smarter than me, but he's much better at, uh, day to day getting things done from point A to point B, project management. So he's the perfect fit for managing projects and getting things done. I'm a highly creative, very financial minded person. So I am, um, on the finance side as well as setting strategy. But we do have a senior leadership team. We have a great chief marketing officer, we have a great chief development officer. So we have a rounded out development team. But Jason primarily handles all things operations, uh, overseas marketing, overseas construction, real estate, all that under our franchise development team. And I set the strategy. Oh, Jason and I talk and then I do all the finance pieces.

Speaker B: So it's a QSR without a drive thru.

Speaker A: Yeah, without a QSR without a drive.

Speaker B: But in that competitive set, how do you put a quality product like that out there competitively? And how do you get to the price point between labor and cost of goods?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean the founder was incredible at ah, recipes. And look, we can't take credit for most of the recipes on the menu. I mean we've added a few sandwiches here and there along the way. But the primary recipe book was Lois's and we continue to execute that book. And uh, today we have some competitive advantages. So we are the largest buyer of whole birds in America. So we're able to, to keep that price in line. We're one of the largest buyers of Snake River Farms product in America. So we have size and we're able to manage that the best way that we can. But look, I'll tell you, we're not the same price as Subway. We're more or less the same price as your leader in the industry, your Jersey Mike's. Right. So price per inch, we're the same as Jersey Mike's, but quality per inch, we're night and day different.

Speaker B: And Jersey Mike's is not a bad product. So that speaks fine. Yeah, that's pretty amazing that you've been able to do that. But there you go, that's the economies of scale at work. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. And then look, we are different, right? In Jersey mice, you go down an assembly line and you say, give me this, give me that, give me this, give me that. We are, for lack of a better word, it's chef driven.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It's curated sandwiches. You walk in, you order off a menu and you say, I want the Bobby, I want the capistrami, I want these created crafted sandwiches that taste unbelievable. Of course you can make changes to them, but that's the main differentiator.

Speaker B: Well, that's an amazing story. So what would another milestone be before we get to a break? That would maybe get us up to Covid times and how much life might have changed then.

Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. I think getting it out of the home markets really was a milestone for us. We have found it can be very difficult to get outside of your home market with a brand that doesn't have name recognition.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You know, these national brands that have this extraordinary name recognition across the country, it's easy to add units anywhere. But when you have a regional brand and you have stores in primarily the mid Atlantic and then Las Vegas, Nevada. Las Vegas, unfortunately, there is no way to be concentric. Every direction you travel, north, south, east or west, is surrounded by 250 miles of desert. Desert. So, you know, the next city to the north is Reno. The next city to the south is in Arizona. The next city to the west is Barstow and California. So we didn't have the luxury of being able to just grow concentrically from there. So when we made the jump to going outside of our sphere of influence, that was a huge learning. And as we've gotten very good at that, in fact, I would say we are probably one of the best in class at that today. So when we go into new markets now, we can be thousands of miles away from a store and we're still generating huge grand opening opening numbers. In fact, the best vintage of stores we have is the newest vintage of stores we have. So we've really built the brand halo across the country so that we can grow in areas that we don't have current name recognition. That was a big unlock for us. And then obviously with that comes distribution. How do you distribute to areas where you don't have size? And we have an incredible supply chain team that has helped us do that. And those two pieces together was the unlock that allowed us to say, now we can become a national brand.

Speaker B: Brand. We're going to come back and ask you to open the second half. Talking a little bit about COVID and what that looked like, but we do need to take a time out right about now, Ashley, and pay some bills. And then we'll come back and pick up where we left off with. Ashley Morris, CEO of Capriotti Sandwich Shop, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2026. A lot of great companies were born in 1976, Ashley. Capriotti's wasn't alone. We'll touch on that too when we come right back. I'm Stan Friedman. This is Franchise Today. Don't go anywhere. We're just getting started.

Speaker A: Franchise Today will be right back. But first, a word from our sponsors.

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Speaker A: Sounds good.

Speaker B: So what did that look like for you guys?

Speaker A: By far the most interesting time in my business career was Covid. And there was a couple of things externally that happened to me that I think also shaped my opinion, one of which was I had M. My third child, my first daughter, January 2, 2020, and Covid was 90 days later. And my daughter spent the first week of her life in the NICU and was at risk of not making it for some things. And so first week of her life was very, very stressful, where we're not sleeping, we're in the NICU and all the things that go on with it. And then the doctor leaves us with be very careful over the first two to four years of her life because she could be immunocompromised. And literally 90 days later, Covid hits right, and this pandemic comes out and says, we don't know what's happening to young children and older individuals. Be very careful. And so not only did my business get the stress of COVID but my family also got the stress of COVID And so I was managing both at the same time. So I'm glad to be through it and, and never going back there, hopefully. So with respect to the business we like, uh, everybody experienced the shutdown and when the shutdown came Obviously, sales went to zero for those two weeks where everything shut down. And I remember getting with my board and getting with my partners and sitting down with them and saying, how much Runway do we have?

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Like if no one's gonna pay the bills and the stores are gonna be shut down, we didn't know if it was gonna be shut down for two weeks or two months or two years or. We didn't know. Right. And so we determined that we had basically nine months of cash before we had to start put of ourselves to keep the company going. And so I said, okay, well if we have nine months, then we started to learn quickly that they were going to let everybody open again. I said, let's take two months worth of that cash and let's go advertise as heavy and loud as we can that we're open and we're built for this environment. We wrap all of our sandwiches to go. We're primarily a, uh, takeout place anyways. So let's tell the world we're open and let's tell the world we're safe. And let's tell the world we're ready to help them eat an extraordinary sandwich. And so while everyone was pulling their money off of the ad space, right, if you're a car dealership, you're not selling cars, so you stopped advertising. And if you're retail, you're not selling retail, you stopped advertising. We went in heavy and bought all that ad space and thought, well, the worst that happens is we raise money in seven months instead of nine and went after it. And I think that our sales went down for the two weeks. We experienced one month of negative sales and then we turned the Corner and experienced 8 to 12 months of just extraordinary rip roaring positive sales. And I really think it was because we sort of ran at that from a advertising perspective and said, hey, let's just make a bet and go. And it worked. And so we were able to keep the vast majority of our stores open through Covid and post Covid. It seemed like a big win for us. So we got, we got lucky in that regard.

Speaker B: Oh, that's great. And how about your franchisees? Did you lose any?

Speaker A: Yeah, we lost a few. We lost stores that had been non traditional that were not allowed to open. And so we had lost some stores like that. But the vast majority of the traditional locations that are in line on the street we were able to preserve and, and actually grow in terms of unit volume.

Speaker B: I'm looking at my last count for you is about 175 nationwide. How does that stand today?

Speaker A: Yeah, we're approaching that. We'll probably be at that number close to the end of the year. We'll be where we're at. We're building about 20 to 25 restaurants a year currently, is our plan. That's the availability of what we can do at this time.

Speaker B: All right, time to break out some tea leaves and look forward. You've given us a great understanding of who you are and where you came from and how, uh, you and Jason built this empire literally, I mean, literally out of college. You guys were doing your first jobs, not nearly as long as you've been doing these. And it's the only thing you've done which is just so commendable to who you are and what you're about. So I used to ask for one, three and five year projections, but now, between the post Covid world and the AI world that we live in, asking CEOs for any longer than three years, they give me looks like, really, you can't possibly think I know what's going to happen in three years. What do you see? Where are we heading as an industry, both in franchising and in the restaurant world?

Speaker A: Yeah, that is a, uh, question I think about quite often. And I would agree. They call it the singularity for a reason. Right. Nobody really knows what's on the other side. And so as I think about this, the world is going to change over the next five years. The world is going to change so rapidly and so vastly that it is really hard to project and in fact, you know, borderline impossible to project on so many levels because we really are, you, uh, know, on a train ride, going up a hill. And we know that we're eventually going to get to the top of the hill and go down to the other side, but we don't really know what the other side looks like. And so. So that is the challenge we're up against. Right. As the strategists of companies. So I am an optimist. By just general happenstance, I look at sort of pessimistic data and I look at how we can take that data and turn it into an opportunity. First of all, I think franchising is going to be the strongest part of this singularity versus individual small businesses. I think the landscape when you have a franchise organization that you're part of, you have scale on so many levels and you have power by numbers. And so when things change rapidly or disruption occurs, what I have found in the 18 years I've been doing this is the ones that seem to figure it out faster are the ones that work together collectively. Right. And so we have this 170/unit chain that's doing lots of revenue, 150, $160 million a year in top line sales. That's going to help us get through any disruption better than if we were a single unit on the street. Right. So, so as things change, I think being involved in a franchise and having the power of the franchise system and franchisor is such a competitive advantage over doing something yourself. So number one, uh, franchising is uniquely positioned to tackle disruption I think in a better way. When I look at the disruption I see some periods where I think AI helps our business immensely. We're using it in our support center now. I think it's going to help us in every facet of this business from figuring out what customers want faster to being able to get real time data to decide what menu items to put on, how to run labor better, how to run food better, how to run your P and L better, having creative systems that you're creating yourself through agenic type things to having franchisor support center creating agents that help your business. And just the landscape all in all I think there's just incredible opportunity from a sort of service AI landscape. Long term I think you have a robotic component, right? You have automation. And so restaurants, if I was really reading the tea leaves, I can't tell you what's going to happen in five years but I do believe in 10 years you're going to see really two types of restaurants. You're going to see a restaurant that is experiential, right? Stan, you and I are going to go celebrate your birthday. Let's go have a steak dinner. Let's go somewhere where we're going to sit down and break bread and have a drink drink and enjoy each other's company. That is going to be restaurant type one and then restaurant type two is really going to be. I need fuel to live my life. Whether that's breakfast, lunch or dinner. I need something good, I need something fast. And that fuel, which is less experiential, is going to most likely be delivered to you because you have autonomous driving. You have these aggregators that are bringing you food conveniently you're going to find that that continues because people value the convenience and value their time. And so it's like hey, I want Mexican food today. Here's the five places I E uh at and it shows up at my door at 12 o' clock noon. So you have Experiential restaurants and you have fuel and you have to find in the restaurant space which one you want to participate or how you participate in. But a lot of it will be automated. The fuel will have a lot of automation. You'll see restaurants fully automated. Look, McDonald's is already on that track, right? They're not maybe as vocal about it, but you can go into several McDonald's that have absolutely no employees other than them smiling and waving and make it seem like they do. But the food is completely automated. They're obviously the leader. You have Chipotle and they're making guacamole automated. You have chips being made automated that they're testing. You have Panda Express, that's automating the walk system. So you're going to get a lot of automation in that fuel category that I think as a franchisee or a franchise or I look at this as a really interesting opportunity because the two most expensive pieces of your P and L is food and labor and the restaurant business. And if labor gets cut in half because you can automate, then you have a best in class P and L, then the restaurant business is no longer low to mid mid margin. All of a sudden they start talking about restaurants being a high margin business. And that's super exciting to me. So when I look at it, I say, how do we live in the post singularity world and tackle this automation and tackle the AI disruption and take what we can from it and use it to our advantage. And again, by the nature of just being in a franchise, you're going to have your likelihood for adopting that stuff is a hundredfold better than if you were a single unit operator on the the street.

Speaker B: What about franchisees? Who are you looking for? Are you doing multi unit or are you doing single or both?

Speaker A: The sweet spot in our brand is smaller multi unit. We're at the point where we're not really looking for someone to have 30 or 50 or 100 of these things. We're looking for really passionate operators who want to grow to three to five units in their market, who want to bring something they can be proud of to their area and open it up and grow from there.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Ah, will they get to 10? Hopefully. But the sweet spot for us is looking for franchise partners who, who are going to work in the restaurant or are going to work in the business day in and day out and have aspirations to build up to five of them.

Speaker B: Awesome. Well, we're coming to the final turn here. Ashley, before I ask you for contact info, I've Got to ask you if there's anything at all burning in your brain that you wish I'd have asked and didn't.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So as we wrapped our brain around the 50 years and we are all incredibly proud of that milestone. Right. Certainly I didn't start the company, but I was blessed with the opportunity of carrying the torch from an extraordinary founder who had a vision unlike anyone else in the space. And so as I'm carrying the torch, I thought, how do we celebrate the success both customer facing and franchisee facing? And so for the first time ever, certainly in 50 years, we've come up with an incentive, a, uh, franchise incentive called the 505050 plan, which is for our 50 years, we will be giving 50% off our franchise fee and over 50,000 dol worth of incentives for new store developers for up to 50 people. So it's our 50, 50, 50 incentive. It'll only be here for a year. It'll be gone January 1st next year. But it's a celebration of us turning 50 and saying, hey, how do we look at this and really have everyone participate? You know, we're going to do a lot of consumer facing things, but from a franchisee perspective, we are giving a huge incentive to continue operating and developing.

Speaker B: I love it. All right, we've come to the place where it's time. I got to ask you for how to let people find you.

Speaker A: Yeah. So the best way to do it is just to go right onto our website@capriottis.com if you're interested. As a consumer, that's going to give you the best quick view of the brand. If you're interested in potentially franchising the brand and bringing something you can be super passionate to to your hometown, you can get all the information there as well. And we have a lot of information posted there to educate people for whatever their desire is.

Speaker B: Fantastic. Well, thank you for making the time to spend some time here with us, dropping a wealth of knowledge and nuggets to an audience that aspires to reach a 50 year anniversary and a couple hundred stores somewhere down the road themselves. And so it's much appreciated that you paid forward the way you do. And I can't thank you enough for coming here to do just that.

Speaker A: Uh, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker B: Ashley Morris, CEO, Capriottis, thanks again for joining us.

Speaker A: Thanks, Dan. Take care.

Speaker B: Well, that's a wrap for today. Next week we head to the Pacific Northwest and across the border to speak with Vancouver's own Steve Whitestone, founder and CEO of the Franchise Leadership Institute and author of Lead with Purpose, Live With Balance and Thrive and his latest and best selling book, the Happy Franchisee. If you enjoyed this week's conversation, please share it with a colleague or friend. You can subscribe to Franchise Today wherever you chase podcasts. And it's okay too, to leave us a review. And as we go deeper into July, why you'll be hearing from pertech USA and Canada CEO Kim Gubera Homefront Brand CEO Jeff Dudin, who scores a return appearance on a Franchise Today to talk about his recent reacquisition of Advantaclean. Uh, until next week, I'm Stan Friedman. Wishing you the best, the very best of all things franchising and Franchise Today is out. Join Stan every Wednesday at noon Eastern

Speaker A: for another episode of Franchise Today.