When Patrick J. Pitrone took over as president of USA Insulation Franchise Corp. seven years ago, he had to overcome the hurdle of being the founder’s son.
He made sure he did every aspect of the insulation business himself so that he never asked someone to do something that he didn’t know how to do or wasn’t willing to do himself. As a result, he earned the respect of the company’s 135 employees.
Four years ago, he started turning the organization toward growth by transforming it into a franchisor. There weren’t any insulation franchise businesses, so the field was wide open.
Smart Business spoke with Pitrone about how he led the business into this new endeavor.
How did you start franchising your business?
It did take some hard knocks and learning initially. We knew our business very well, but we didn’t know the franchise business — how to take our model and carbon copy it across the country. We learned a lot about ourselves, and we found out that we’ve learned a lot about our business, but we never took the time to put it all down and hand it over to somebody. We had to go back to the drawing board and bring some consultants on board to frame out a system to put in place and put everything out on the table and give them a launch process and how we can help them operate.
The key to that area was bringing people on board who knew the franchise business and could mold it with the existing insulation process and be able to craft a system that can make people successful in this business.
How did you select consultants to help you?
We had some referrals of people who had done this before. There’s nobody in the insulation franchising business, so that was out the window, so we had to look for people who had similar service businesses or folks we met at the International Franchise Association’s annual meeting. It was bringing people on board who knew franchise businesses and molding it with ours.
In choosing a consultant, we made a mistake. Initially, we hired someone who was a fair amount of money, and you don’t know what you don’t know starting out, and we thought we had the right company there.
What tips would you give for hiring a consultant?
Spend time with them to get a sense of the people they were. [Ask] questions to get to where you felt comfortable with them.
I wanted to find out initially how they took companies from ground zero up to 10,000 feet or so. I wanted to find out not only if they did but what they did to bring companies that have been doing one particular thing in one location for X amount of time, and how did they build that business? How did they take a company and build their manuals, build their jump systems for new locations, how did they build the marketing and legal pieces? … Initially we didn’t know what questions to ask, so we had to make a couple of mistakes in the beginning — they were costly mistakes, but they helped us choose that next consultant, the one that has really gotten us to where we are now. So knowing what questions to ask initially was a pretty big thing, and we had to learn the hard way of asking the wrong ones first and learning the second time the right ones to ask.
What are some good questions to ask?
One question that I have asked before is, ‘Give me a reason why I would hire you and a reason why I wouldn’t.’ They’re sort of behavioral-based questions. Give me examples of times and things you’ve done. The closed questions won’t get as many answers.
The best questions are to ask the folks they’ve worked with and the referrals. I’ve actually been a referral now for this consultant, and people talk to me for a half hour at a time. They wanted to do their due diligence. … Those questions can be — the expectations that were set, did they meet your expectations, was the price that you paid the right amount of money for the services you got, or what are the biggest weaknesses that they’ve had in the first six months of getting started? Presentations are presentations. You can have consultants come and go through the front door, but unless you talk to the folks they work with, it’s difficult to get a sense of what they’re all about.
What have you learned from this process?
It takes longer than you think, and it takes more work than you think and you don’t always see progress when you want to see it. But it’s funny, the longer you do it, the more people from the outside looking in give you some perspective on how far you’ve come. It’s been [more than] three years now and we have 17 locations and that’s more than I thought I’d have right now. It’s interesting to see the growth of our company. It’s fun.
How to reach: USA Insulation Franchise Corp., (866) 602-4107 or www.usainsulation.net
