Undercover Boss and Franchising Maven with Jeff Dudan

 You're listening to The Radcast, a top 25 worldwide business podcast.
 If it's radical, we cover it.
 Hey guys, what's up?
 Welcome to the latest edition of The Radcast.
 I'm Ryan Offer Your Host.
 We say if it's radical, we cover it.
 My friend, Jeff Duden, is radical.
 Let me tell you, he's the CEO of Homefront Brands.
 He's a podcast host.
 He's becoming a good friend.
 And I hope, at least in my mind, but more than anything, he's a great author and a bad
 ass.
 The franchise.
 I'd like to call him.
 What's up, Jeff?
 Ryan, excited to be here.
 I've been looking forward to this for at least the last 15 minutes.
 Hold it.
 Keep it to a dull roar, if you would.
 The excitement.
 Oh, appreciate you, come on, brother.
 I know you're a busy man and I got your hands and all kind of, you're just the franchise
 king.
 And that's been good for you and good for business.
 But what the hell's going on in your world?
 You hear there everywhere, you're talking, you're writing, you're doing things.
 What's new?
 Yeah, it's great.
 I'm really excited to be on.
 Look up to you and the show, a whole bunch is so much to learn and I'm just really excited
 for the opportunity to be on.
 Now, I just came back from a nine-day speaking tour in the franchise industry.
 I'll do, speaks to large consulting groups, brands, things like that.
 I had to go to Canada and spoke to suppliers for that.
 So really, just spreading the good word of franchising, franchising is the greatest wealth
 creation business model ever invented.
 That's what we believe in this industry.
 785,000 establishments in the United States employing almost 9 million people, which is
 about one in eight of every viable employee works in or around or for a franchise organization.
 So big industry and I fell into it like so many people do.
 There's very few colleges that have a franchising program.
 There's a few now, but when I say few less than five or six out there across the country.
 So everybody in this industry just finds their way into it and then once you get into it,
 you get hooked.
 I am going to keep us from going down a rabbit hole, but I'm going to footnote myself as
 my show.
 I can do it the hell I want.
 I'm footnote because I do want to talk to you about franchising one of my businesses.
 So we're going to footnote that because I need to pick who else am I going to pick the
 brain of than the franchise himself.
 Yes.
 A footnote, social house franchise discussion.
 Jeff Duden, Jeff, let's, you've written a couple books.
 You're on the speaking tour for franchising, but how the hell do you start?
 How does one, like you said, it's not a major, but you've been such a badass in it.
 You've sold a company.
 Now you've got multiple brands underneath the home front, but let's back up for everyone
 and how you either discovered fell into, like, what was that journey to get into franchising?
 I think so many entrepreneurs were forced or were screwed into existence by circumstances.
 I was a Chicago guy, I was an athlete, was chasing a football around.
 I went to University of Northern Iowa for a year at a high school, didn't work out.
 Wasn't a great student.
 I was much better.
 I could catch a ball better than I could do a test in the classroom, but so drop back
 to a junior college in Chicago, and then I got a scholarship out to Appalachian State University
 and there.
 I wanted to stay in the summers.
 Three things happened for me when I showed up.
 First thing that happened was I met my wife.
 I showed up in January.
 I met her February 2nd, 1989.
 She took the project on when you can imagine a guy from urban Chicago showing up on top
 of a mountain in Boone, North Carolina, the culture shock that happened, but we're passionate
 about the same things.
 We're both constantly working on me, and just like my wife, yes, it's a full-time job.
 Oh, man, are you kidding me?
 We're still on it, but then I got serious about school and then the other thing was I wanted
 to stay over the summer because I really knew that was, I was at this turning point in
 my life, but I needed money over the summer.
 The scholarship didn't cover the summer, so I started the painting business.
 I've worked at trades in Chicago and we recruited all of the athletes that were taking classes
 over the summer, so we had basketball players cutting in ceilings and wrestlers doing
 base moldings and football players rolling walls, and we would do 15 to 20 apartments in
 a day, and we made about $76,000 in 1990, which was pretty darn good at that point in time.
 Very good.
 So when I graduated, I just didn't really take a job, just ran the painting business, and
 then my buddy called me from South Florida and said, hey, this massive hurricane hit South
 Florida, and my painting partner and I jumped in our little truck and drove down there to check
 it out, and he ended up coming back three years later with a business after we cut our
 teeth and helping the people with South Florida recover from the hurricane, moved up to Central
 Florida in 94, started the business that I would sell some 24 years and 11 months later,
 and in 95, moved back up to the Carolinas to start multiple offices, our second location,
 $10 to $20 million dollar-year business, disaster response, mold remediation, air duct cleaning,
 really, environmental services type business, and about my last partner, I'm 2004, and hired
 some consultants, and I knew that I wanted to franchise the business because I recognized that
 in this industry, it was largely franchised, and I also knew that we were had some scaling issues,
 so six-month engagement, seven-page purpose vision mission statement led us to invest heavily
 in a fleet of generators and semi-trucks and pickup trucks with diesel tanks in it, and sure
 enough, preparation met opportunity. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, we responded
 and set up a four-year massive storm response down there, but I was driving back and at the time
 in my life, I had three small children, and they were, I was missing my son's first football season,
 and I realized that history was repeating itself because I was never home, and I grew up in a
 home where parents work home, and I just made that decision because our true values are what we
 tolerate, and what we endorse, it's what we endorse, and what we do, so I decided in the middle
 of the night driving through Atlanta that I was going to sell all of our company stores under
 a franchise model, so I did that in 2006, 2007, and 2008, we launched to the marketplace with
 Advanna Clean as a franchise offering in 2009. Four years later, we had 130 offices open,
 and I sold the business January 1st, 2019, with 240 locations and 37 states, and they, it was
 24 years and 11 months after I started it, and they did not need me, and I was done and done
 at the time. So my brother, who was actually going to the same Juco in Chicago, came out, took over
 the painting business, put himself through school, got a job with Arthur Anderson, doing audit and
 tax, public accounting firm, and then he left there and went to the Carolina Panthers football team,
 he was there 16 years, finished as their CFO, and ultimately helped facilitate the deal from Mr.
 Richardson to the Tepper group in 2018 when he sold the team for $2.4 billion, which was the largest
 transaction in sports history at the time. It doesn't seem like a lot of money now, Ryan,
 the Commodore's just sold for $6 billion or whatever, and we got back together in 2019 and created
 a Duden group where we invested, stood up for interest companies, we invested in emerging brands,
 we consulted, and then about two years later, which was about maybe two, two, two and a half years
 ago, after it being taken investors' posture and really working in FITNA, now we own a fitness
 concept called Rockbox Fitness, we've stood up an incredible beam lights on a concept with that
 in a platform called Thrivemore with our business partners over there, which is a really fat,
 we've got 200-ish locations already moved in that in about the first year in the beam.
 Rockbox is a great business doing very well, but looking across personal services and fitness
 and food and working with all of these different companies, what I realized was the fundamentals of
 property services was something that were very attractive to me, and also with the economic
 headwinds, rising interest rates, corporate uncertainty, more people are open to the idea of
 doing a franchise when the economy slows just a little bit, and then when you look at interest
 rates going up, the lower investments like a property service business, where you really
 $100,000, $150,000 all in, including the van, you sign today, you train next month,
 you're in business generating revenue to 60 days from now, it's very attractive to people,
 so we went out and decided to, we asked ourselves a couple of big questions, Ryan, we said,
 if we could build the most responsible franchise platform that we could possibly imagine,
 what would that look like by every measure? So from people to technology, to territory design,
 to marketing and call center combo, to learning management, we knew from being in the industry,
 what which companies did those things the very best and the most responsible?
 So we went out and we acquired six companies over about eight months, starting in November of 21
 through maybe June of 22, and then we spent all of 22 investing millions of dollars in an
 infrastructure and a platform and a team, so that these businesses could scale together in the
 most responsible way, that we could possibly put together and we're having great results with it,
 we care very much about what's happening on Main Street USA, creating opportunities that are
 big enough to create generational wealth for families in every town in this country, we care a lot
 about having dynasties size type franchise ease where they can have one or more of our brands
 and build material businesses that would be attractive for resale, to private equity or kind of
 buyers, and then we're also care a lot about education and transition in US veterans. Those are
 problems we set out to solve, that was our thesis when we went to it and candidly it's going so much
 better than we could have possibly imagined. It's a message that's really resonating with people
 today, detracting, really qualified investors and franchisees to the platform, and we're having a lot
 of fun with it. I love it man, a lot to unpack there talking to the franchise, Jeff Duden, his new name
 just named by me, but he is the franchise, so if it's just for me, but Jeff, I'm like my mind's
 swirling a bit like you just you gave me like I'm usually like okay they gave me two questions
 you gave me like seven. So here question number one, what makes for a good franchise? Like when
 like obviously the home services thing for someone that thinks they have a business and they're
 going to franchise that are things like that, what are the building blocks and what are the starting
 points is it's clearly not everything, but there's probably you've probably done this long enough
 to know what are those variables that okay this can be a franchise. Yeah 100% brands that we look for
 need to have been in business for at least five years and they need to we're looking for businesses
 that are doing at least a million but preferably two to three million dollars per location
 in a business. There is no outcome without income and there needs to be an addressable market
 for a business. Number one, it needs to have a proven business model that performs financially,
 right? If the first business is making a little bit of money and the second one is open is
 breaking even losing money, you're not ready to franchise that business. It really you're not
 ready to take people's hard earned money, they're 401k, however they're funding this thing and
 put that into a business that you don't have a real way for them to likely be successful. Not
 not everybody's going to be successful in a business because the biggest variable is the franchise
 e and they have to execute the model. The second thing that we look for is really some sort of a
 competitive advantage. There needs to be some sort of a differentiator, some little niche in the
 market that they're really good at and it doesn't have to be like a crazy niche or crazy differentiator
 but it could be a customer acquisition lead generation. It could be supply chain efficiencies
 or a slightly different mix of products but it needs to be something that there's enough
 differentiation in the market to where 100 or 200 or 300 other people in the country can
 repeat that play and can exploit that niche. I look for an inspired leader because early phase
 stage franchising is really reliant upon the founder and the owner, people have to they're
 going to look at the business, they're going to be like yeah but there's only two of these so
 they're going to be looking at that person and trying to make and you have to look at it and say
 franchising is 100% different than running your aquarium cleaning business or whatever it is.
 It's 100%, it is nothing to do with the business, it has everything to do with adult education,
 building a brand, lead generation, technology, the conferences, events, all of that,
 sometimes real estate. What it took for you to be successful in one or two locations is nothing
 to do with what it's going to be successful as a franchise or it's I'm not going to say it's a
 higher order of execution but it's certainly different. They have to be inspired and they have to
 be willing to carry that ball. Then the other thing is you really, and I've found this to be very
 true, you need a franchise guru, you need somebody that's done it before. If you look at all of the
 great brand many, and I got they all, you know, you sort of all, if you look at many of the great
 brands that are out there today, the the the surf pro family many decades ago I believe were
 came out of the service master franchise. If you look at the orange theory people, I think many of
 them have roots in massage envy. So if you got to have people, it's a counterintuitive business
 as opposed to a direct business. So getting somebody on the team or on the advisory board that
 has franchise experience that you just can't afford to make mistakes with franchisees money
 and time and energy. So getting a franchise guru and then it does take some capital. How much
 capital depends on a variety of factors. If you can barely afford to pay your lawyer for your
 franchise documents and you know, you had to scrape up to do it. You're probably not ready to
 franchise. You need to because you've got to hire some people and you got to provide some services
 really ahead of revenue. We only get paid nickels on the back end in terms of royalty. So
 you've got to have some staying power to be able to get the system. It's kind of like water scheme
 and like you got to fight to get yourself up on them. And then once you're moving, you're on top
 of the water and you're going, but you got to fight to get yourself there. What about the whole
 licensing versus franchising people that make that decision? I mean, that's not your cup of tea,
 but I don't know. I hear those two things like tossed around when people talk about
 franchising or expansion. It is something that we're familiar with quite a bit. Now I'm not
 an attorney, but the states take issue with licensing operations that masks themselves as such,
 but they're really operating as a franchise. Generally, some of the differentiators are if you're
 a franchise system, you are going to have very rigorous standards about how the brand is used,
 how the brand is displayed, how it's marketed. You're going to have to approve a lot of things
 where if it's a licensing model, they can do whatever they want. You might have a supply chain
 agreement, so it might be a licensed train HVAC dealer. But I'm Jeff's HVAC and they'll help me
 co-op marketing. They'll give me advice, but I can pretty much do what I want to do. And as long
 as I keep buying the product and I keep hitting my numbers, they'll keep selling it to me and they'll
 give me the discounts that I get. But there's more licensing models or more suggestions where a
 franchising model is pretty rigorous in terms of complying with the brand standards.
 Yeah, it's so different. You nailed it. When you're talking about franchising, you're growing a
 business in a brand like you did with your company, but then the business of taking other people's
 money and them relying on you, those dynamics are just so different. It's one thing when you've
 built it yourself and most, if not all the risk is on your shoulders, it's a whole little
 another ball of wax when you feel like you've got a great model, you've done all the right things,
 you've done these things. But inevitably, there's going to be people that maybe weren't cut out for
 it that invest in it and do it. And no matter your best intentions and your best guides and everything
 that you had right, it strikes me as being a lot to bear. I don't know.
 It is. And it's a fantastic business model. Franchising does a variety of things. First of all,
 it creates great leverage. Brands invest a lot in the marketing and the public relations and the
 technology and the customer acquisition and the standards for the stores and all of that kind of
 stuff. Somebody can pay a very nominal franchise fee and join a brand and the speed to which they
 have a proficient business generating dollars is so much faster than if they just went out and tried
 to do it themselves because they have to create all that. You've got to get trademarks. That might
 be a year. You've got to build your websites. You've got to do all of this stuff and at the end of
 the day, you're paying pennies on the dollar for all of this stuff and you get all of these shared
 services. So it's really transitional for people too. People can pay $49,000 to $54,000 for a
 franchise fee and be in business in 60 or 90 days and then create something that they can build a big
 multi-million dollar business and sell for maybe multi-million dollars. And then if it's a good
 franchise and they maintain a pipeline of people that want to join the brand, they have a clear path
 to exit. So it's easy in, speed to revenue and then easy out. A lot of people will do a franchise
 as their first business and they'll spend five, six, seven, eight years doing it, have a great
 experience and then they're going to go off and be entrepreneurial in some other way. I see that
 all the time and I'm really proud of it too. We have so many of our business owners that we put in
 business through Evangelion that I'm still connected with that are just doing incredible things
 out there. But the fundamental of what they are doing was all of the things that they learned by
 being operated within our system. I love that. I want to pivot here shortly to some personal
 things, some experiences you've had, the podcast, a little TV show, maybe a few people have heard of.
 But let's last kind of question. You mentioned the trademark thing. It made me think like, would you
 ever start a franchise if you don't have a trademark on your name? Is that just, is that like
 rule one? Let's say you're someone that's, you've built one or two locations and they're super
 successful and like, I'm ready to franchise. But you just happen to have a name that you didn't
 trademark or can't trademark. Do you need it? Do you need to trade, get a different name?
 Yes, so those are two different things. So didn't trademark. Yes, you can start. You would disclose
 that in your disclosure documents that say we have a trademark applied for. Here is the application
 number. Here's the date that we filed for it. And now if you get denied on that, then that requires
 an additional disclosure immediately. So you've got to do that. Now if you went to a trademark
 attorney and they said, no way. Yeah, you're smith fitness, like smith fitness. And it's wonderful.
 You're making millions. You know that it's a, everything can be transitioned to a successful
 franchise. But smith fitness, what you started out with and what you built with just happens to be
 a non trademark. It's the way I need to change my name. I don't know. It made me think of that when
 you started. I'm like, now how many people I started on this path and they've got an amazing
 business. But maybe they didn't think about it or they just pick something too common.
 I learned a long time ago that if I'm going to be broke, I don't want to be tired too.
 Can you imagine if I'm going to be broke, like I'm going to be comfortably laid up on catfish
 and somewhere in a garbage pick lawn lawn chair? No, but look, you build this whole brand and then
 the equity is in the name. When you go to sell your franchise system, a lot of it has to do with
 what's the equity in the brand? People know the brand. So if you don't own it, you've just built,
 I'm not going to say you built it for nothing, but that would be a non-starter if you can't get a
 trademark. I don't think anyone would do that. So yes, you would have to go through a rebrand
 and you would think that in this day and age that every good name's taken, but it's not true.
 There's all kinds of variations of things you can get. You can make up words.
 Get a little bit creative. Google is a neat thing. You have 30 years ago or 25,
 probably not that long ago, but Jeff, I know you've had some incredible experiences through your
 success and what you've done. Let's go right ad undercover boss. I know our audience has probably
 heard of that. Maybe even seen you, I may have gone, I recognize that guy. He had to go T and
 they were trying to put it together. Talk about how that came about and just the overall experience.
 Yeah, still we had a really good episode. It still plays a lot. It plays overseas. I'll know when
 it plays in Australia or in Europe somewhere because I'll get a bunch of weird Facebook messages
 No, so in 2016, they were filming season A and they had somebody drop out at the last minute. So
 one of the things in life is if there's no reason to say no, then you say yes. So they came to us
 and said, we've got two weeks to do this. We've got seven or eight people that we're talking to.
 We'd have to fly out from California tomorrow or shoot a sizzle reel, put it together,
 pitch it to NBC and they would, there was a CBS. I think it was CBS. Pitch it to the networks.
 Yeah, pitch it to CBS and they would have to decide. So we did that and really quick it came back
 that they were interested in having us on. So then we went through the rooms and rooms of paperwork
 and it was, we went out on the show, we went out on the road maybe like a month later
 and it was a surreal experience for those people that haven't been behind the scenes in a production
 like that. It was really cool. I know I signed a bunch of confidentiality stuff and I really don't
 want to do anything to, I don't want to say anything that makes it harder for them to do the show.
 But it just, it seems to me, Ryan, every year the show is canceled.
 Yeah. And then somehow it comes back for another, but it pulled us. It's such a well-known show,
 but I will tell you the way that this is done, there is, it is so, it is done so well and so over
 the top that you would not think like you, people do is this undercover boss and then as this is
 going on, they're like, no, it's not, it's clearly not, but it really is. So yeah, it was great.
 We ended up being on the road for, we had a couple of little hiccups with a couple of things that
 were going on politically where they, we shot some stuff in North Carolina and then they're like,
 oh, we don't want to shoot North Korea to reshoot stuff. So they had to fly my family, we did all
 the family stuff, right? We went, we did the office stuff, we did the b-roll at the office and then
 we went to the house and I'm cooking hot dogs on the grill, dogs just went in the pool, all that
 and they're like, we can't use any of that because there was some political thing going on and there
 was a, one of those things and so then they, we go on the road for a week, we film two or three segments,
 they fly my family to this wonderful resort somewhere in Georgia and we reshoot all of the family
 stuff and then we go on the road, it's not on the road for a total of 16 days and it was a great
 experience and I will tell you that we had five episodes that we had to cut one that many shows
 would have killed to have. Our franchisees were absolutely amazing, they lived the values of our
 company, they were out there trying to do the best thing for the customer, they were highly
 empathetic, I could have picked it a few things here and there but at the end of the day we had,
 we ended up with four great segments, I got busted twice, they showed one of them and but it was
 I think what's interesting about the process is we have a, you haven't been here yet, I think
 you're coming but I don't think you haven't been here yet but we have 22,000 square foot building on
 a five-acre campus, it's got broad shoulders and I coached over 30 seasons of my kids sports and
 we would do my daughter's basketball team of practice in our warehouse, I lined the side yard
 as a football field and that's where I coached our P.W. football teams when the kids were growing up
 and people didn't even know I owned the business, that's how we rolled, like we never,
 we didn't, people had no idea really what we did, the scale of the enterprise,
 it didn't know that oh it's nice, they let you practice here, that stuff and so like we were
 pretty under the radar and I sat my kids down on the couch in our bonus room and above it
 is a quote on the wall we put and it has the kids pictures of them doing whatever it is they did
 that we wanted them to think we were proud of them for and then it had this quote from Jerry
 Moore, the football coach at Appalachian State, it's always do more than is expected and then we
 had our family values up on our little plaque there and stuff and one of the family values is
 trust yourself to take chances, fail fast and move forward, always do more than is expected
 when all of that and it's and I said, I say guys this is going to change things and this is
 it's get it might change things at your school, we're given, we're going to be giving away a
 quarter million dollars worth of stuff people are clearly going to know that that whatever it is
 that makes the show but when you looked at our values it's like we couldn't say no and they're
 just like okay we're willing to take the consequences of it and and we did and we ended up having
 a great show and they all got a little bit of time on it so that was cool they got like a flash
 across the screen yeah they're 15 seconds of fame yeah 15 seconds of fame and then we had
 when it showed with the night that it showed in January of 17 we rented out an entire bar there was
 250 oh and I had my little football the little football team was coaching at the time like they
 were on it so that was cool so we had about 250 people came kids that I've coached their families
 all the employees their families the local news and we saw it for the first time along with 7.1
 million other people and I'm telling you it was a great show and it did so much for the business
 and the brand and the franchisees really just confirming really living the values that we had
 that we knew that we lived within the four walls of the business but being able to display it to
 the world and put the franchisees front and center was just an incredible opportunity so I always
 encourage people to say yes and there's risk because if you watch that show some of them go very
 poorly and you have no control and I will tell you man they tried to wear me out like early late
 three times a day an hour in front of the camera asking me probing questions that would be
 incendiary trying to get me to break and I just said I took the whole position that said
 if I don't I they can't use anything that I don't say yeah that's smart I've got a
 media training before that sounds like you did no I didn't but knew I knew that I had a
 irresponsibly quick mouth and I needed to put a clap a clap a lock on it but we did two
 questions on that for transition like first and you mentioned it it was good for the business
 I tell people that they don't completely recognize like when which things like Shark Tank and
 things like these things where you can get your company like out there like the monetary and
 brand impact of that awareness that you can't buy by the way or you can or it's just way more
 than you'd ever spend I'm assuming there was some rebound from like some upshot from that on some
 level it was immediate we ran a call center we answered 250,000 inbound phone calls for our
 franchisees we did it very well and there was many jobs that said I saw your company on undercover
 boss and I'm giving you this job for like they were touched by the episode and franchisees
 directly got work attributed to it there wasn't there was a spike in franchise sales but it wasn't
 I mean it wasn't massive it was but also but being able to use that episode as a as a piece of
 content during the process to really exemplify what we stood for how we rolled it tells my gosh
 it tells the story of our brand they did obviously a great job with it and little graphics and
 little trucks and a map but not so you could watch the first four or five minutes of that thing
 and you get our whole company history and in a high production quality so just that what it was worth
 $250,000 yeah but think about who you just said it's not just like the immediate okay I sold
 X-Temor franchise or Eastern job the recruitment benefits like yeah how many more people were you
 able to recruit there were high quality people that wanted to work with you and what was
 the long game monetary benefit of that is probably greater than what we could ever calculate
 to to this day it's a banner on my LinkedIn so if you reach if you you Jeff dude and at LinkedIn
 anybody out there you want to connect with me and you want to watch the episode it's 42 minutes of
 your life you'll never get back go to my LinkedIn profile just scroll down three inches and it's the
 big banner right there and if you click on it it will take you to a vimeo page it's free and you get
 to watch the episode franchise candidates that we work with today at home from brands are interested
 in seeing who we are really and how we roll it continues to pay dividends it's just a very high
 quality piece of independent content final question on that on the show editing is always so
 interesting yeah I've been in the business for 22 years on the commercial side that I've
 done enough production to know what you shoot and what it gets edited the stories can change and
 all that or you it sounds like you're generally still pleased but was there any editing magic that
 you were a little mmm didn't love no it was I was fine with all of it okay but I'm I'm pretty easy
 to get like I found it but one thing I found really interesting we had a guy in there named Barry
 and Barry at one point they had him do a like a Superman like how fast can you get out of the crawl space
 and then at another point we were having a conversation about snakes or something like that
 and then so they took two or three different really disassociated pieces of content and they put
 them all together in a sequence that basically said oh man I see a snake I'm out of here and they
 had them scooting out it so it made it look like created a little a little drama that didn't exist
 yeah but it all happened but it just didn't happen exactly in that order but other than that we
 played it really straight yeah there wasn't we didn't give them anything that that wasn't that
 wasn't authentic and then the other side of it is it must be good because it plays all the time
 it is funny like my daughter she went to Clemson and it was probably two years in
 and she doesn't she doesn't say anything about anything we don't we just don't like so anyway
 they're sitting there and I guess I guess it comes on the TV or they were at a somehow they found
 out about it or whatever there's a year and a half two years afterwards or she's with her soccer
 team and you're at the hotel waiting to go to dinner and the TV's on and the hotel lobby and
 they're all just hanging out there waiting for everybody to load up and go to dinner and it's
 on the television and it's and she'll try to turn it off if she can but whatever so it's really
 interesting that it plays as much as it does and we continue to get left from it love it talking
 to CEO of Homefront Brands Jeff Duden find more about Jeff at JeffDuden.com we'll also give some
 of his other links as we move along Jeff so we're podcasting on the home front you've done a
 couple others we're going to get met at here on the podcast talking about your podcasting
 did you just see the wave you're like I can do this what got you interested in it and how's it
 been going it's been going well if I had the guests we've got 15 to 20 in the can right now we've
 been releasing one a week I've been excited about the caliber of guests that we've been able to get
 on we've been able to get on first of all the great Ryan Ulfert's been on the show made it must be
 really impressive it is it is and then stepping down from there but in a carrot golden the founder
 a hint water is a 500 million dollar business she sold a stacey Madison founder stacey's
 pita chips Dave Sisson who's a primal we've got Chris Voss scheduled to come on next month it's
 kind of a drop right there somebody that I've seen a lot of yeah social media and he's out there a lot
 yeah so we've had a lot of really great guests too many to name right now but it's been good and
 of course I'm just working my way into doing the best I can to figure out how to be a good host
 and how to keep it interesting but it's just it's something that I'm at my heart I'm a coach
 like I've coached over 30 seasons of kid sports everything I do is like team building culture
 execution why like you've got to be at work anyway why aren't we being trying to do this in
 the very best way possible and like winning with a team and so from the person and what the podcast
 has done for me personally is has reignited my curiosity and I say that because now as you get
 really busy with lots of things sometimes your reading falls behind and I've always been a
 voracious reader but my reading hasn't been where it needs to be and just they're continuing to
 really pour into myself preparing for a podcast with a guest I will research for our team will do
 some research I'll study the research but I will consume at least an hour to three hours of
 their live content and it's always available it seems that you can find people doing things
 I've read a whole book I read Kara Golden's book which my name escapes me right now I've actually
 got the copy of it right over there but it was fantastic book so that Sunday I consumed the whole
 thing and it was just at a great show with her if I'm learning and I'm having a good time
 and the guest then if you consume other people's live content what it allows me to do is it allows me
 to because my one of my personality profiles is a chameleon so I will talk to them as if
 if they're talking to themselves and it gets people comfortable and we end up having a really
 good time and that's it now if other people enjoy it because we're having a good time and we're
 laughing and we're we're talking about interesting things that they have a strong command of a subject
 matter then that's great so yeah we're really excited we're putting resources behind it we're
 working with you to help understand how we can be better it's a real passion play for me and I've
 taken a big chunk of my calendar and allocated it specifically to it yeah it's a wonderful medium
 I think for all the reasons you mentioned but the relationship building and the it is I'm a
 curious guy too and I think but it has definitely done similar things for me because you get
 when you're researching the person is on and then the the actual interview looks like this you
 shut everything down and you're like actually having a conversation and it's sad but it's so
 you don't have this those kind of discussions anymore you got I've got the headphones on you and
 I are kind of locked in we're having a dialogue and yes it's an interview but like where you're
 just truly actively listening and no matter how good your listener you think you are and all those
 things but when you have guests and you do these things it's just on a different level and I was
 that's where I someone that's a hair AD it locks me in it for good I'm focused on one thing and
 that's the guest and I learned a lot more about them and then I'm actually absorbing like the
 lessons like that you've given here today and like other guests that I have I'm like okay like
 banking knowledge and it's great yeah yeah I couldn't agree more and just anecdotally I
 podcast are probably my number one thing that I consume now above anything else so from at the gym
 or working out or walking the dog or driving there is a podcast on so it's clearly because it's
 a real conversation so as opposed to that's the great thing about non-scripted television
 and that's reality it's non-scripted but it's edited but podcasts are they're edited but they're
 even more non-scripted yeah they're 100% yeah what I have guests like Jeff dude and they're not
 even edited it's like we just roll it's getting in and we hey I gave myself a license this is what
 I say at my agency there's two things so I say this at my agency I named the agency radical I
 am giving you a fucking license to be and come up with anything because anyone that hires us
 if they come to me they call Ryan the owner they go Ryan what is your team thinking why you
 hire a legacy named radical what do you want and the radcast so did radical we cover it so
 they gives me a lot of I don't know bandwidth or license to expand go down those rabbit holes
 but I love it talk with Jeff dude and CEO of Homefront Brands host of on the Homefront
 podcast I know we got a couple books here we're closing out I want to mention these far listeners
 we've got hey coach we've got discernment the business athletes regimen for a great life
 through better decisions it talked to me about the books yeah I tend to write a book when I come
 to the end of the phase in my life so I wrote hey coach after I knew that I was pretty much done
 coaching my three kids in all the athletics and I I was doing that while I was building a national
 company in the similarities between getting a group of 11 12 13 year old men or women to
 play fast play lose play within a system play for one another really get better learn something
 it was just it was all of those lessons of communication and structure and autonomy giving the
 team to them as the season progressed we ended up with a completely different looking team usually
 at the end of the season then your typical little team just because of the of our process that we
 developed over many seasons with some other great assistant coaches and whatnot so I really wanted
 to document that and put that into a book and I did that in hey coach so it's it is out there
 and available and then discernment is what I wrote really in 2019 after I sold it vanicling
 and it was all these models of thought around how to make how to really be thoughtful and
 intentional about decision making when you're at an inflection point in your life and all the things
 that I think went into it businesses a full context for the quality of our decisions determines
 the quality of our life and the velocity of our business and wisdom is really a cumulative asset
 wisdom is really just models of thought that you've accumulated over experiences in your life
 and you take them and you put them into models and then you apply them to present-day situations
 and you test them against that so things like what are the various types of equity as people that we
 build we build relationship equity we build and that's really important in franchising because
 it's a relationship business it's not you can't fire a franchise either we're in this thing
 together so we got to make it work franchise agreements at 10 years I think are longer than the
 average marriage in this country now rep reputational equity your health equity your wellness your
 fitness all of those things play into what kind of decision you're making how you occur in the world
 and I think the I think the big takeaway is that everything nothing is a hundred percent and
 anything you go to zero and the probability of success is just notching up one percentage point
 of the time one way or another based on the decisions that you're making every single day starting
 with what do you do the first thing when you wake up in the morning how do you occur are you a
 transact how do you make your money are you a transactional type business builder or are you a
 long-term equity company value type business builder and all of those types of things so that's
 really what decisions are because bad decisions are a debt on your future time energy money
 the end of the day you we carry the burden of bad decisions on our back sometimes for our entire
 life and those are decisions that we made haphazardly without any fundamental basis for making them
 how do you use a set of values personally we have a set of family values live fun be humble respect
 others be a servant leader fail fast and move forward trust yourself to take chances always do
 more than as expected man okay there's a lot there's a lot on pack inside of that but like when
 you're making big life decisions how do how does that lay against those set of values and
 companies have sets of values really using these different filters as you go through your decision
 making process really homes your probability of success in those outcomes and that's what I try to
 pack into it for people that are in the right place it's not like a book that's flying off the
 shelf or anything like that but man more and more people are asking for it they're buying these
 and giving them out at the talks that I'm doing and I'm getting a lot of people coming back to me
 and saying I highlighted like a hundred things in that book it's the flow is fine there's a ton of
 stories because we're tribal people right are people remember stories so there's a ton of stories
 in it but there's also good really tactical tools for people to use especially people that are
 looking at embarking on a business or making some sort of a life change or an inflection point.
 I love it man one of my favorite people in marketing makes a statement it's called we need
 more thinking about thinking and that's where my mind goes when I think about discernment
 the discerning takes thinking and and you don't want paralysis from analysis there's a
 fine line of that but at the same time like it's just important that we really think through
 things and think a little harder we've got everything's got so convenient though critical thinking
 is still a really important skill especially if you want to live a life of abundance and at a
 higher threshold and so that's where the where my mind goes when I think about this and I hope
 people go to Amazon check it out discernment the business athletes regimen for a great life
 through better decisions Jeff I think we've come to the end my friend it's never the end but
 we'll just we'll just take a break for now how about that yeah break for now we'll have we'll do
 around to and Jeff writes a new book or his podcast overtakes like every one or one including
 the radcast everything else we'll bring Jeff back and shit we probably I know we go even deeper
 on the whole franchise thing I think people are gonna get a lot of value out of your insight
 on that and I know you're available if they go find you're working and they keep up with
 the great Jeff dude linked in is probably my preferred network so just Jeff dude and J.E.F.D.
 U.D.A.N. and you will find me there you can see undercover boss on there if you want to find out
 about our brands or right on the homefront website is homefrontbrands.com is links to Spotify and
 all the places where the homefront podcast is and you can also click through on all of our six
 brands and see what's going on there whether you want a top rail fence or a temporary wall or
 window hero or designry kitchen bath or any of those they're all on there for you to look at
 and then Instagram seems to be the other place where I spent a lot of time so just Jeff dude and
 they're right on Instagram there you have it the franchise the new nickname at least for me
 for Jeff thank you Ryan this is the flow that has been great really appreciate you coming on and
 appreciate our growing and burgeoning relationships so we'll stay in touch hey guys to find us
 the radcast.com search for Jeff dude you'll find all the highlight clips and the full episode from
 today wherever whenever you are we love you we appreciate you for making us the number two
 business and marketing podcast in the US on Apple we really appreciate everyone that listens and
 you know to find me at Ryan offered on Instagram on tiktok on you see that blue check you know where
 you're at that's me we'll see you next time on radcast to listen and watch full episodes visit us
 on the web at the radcast.com or follow us on social media at our Instagram account v dot rad dot
 cast or at Ryan Altered stay radical