Episode 26: Jeff Dudan | Scaling Success: Insights on Leadership and Growth

I just got off the line interviewing the one and only Jeff Doodin with my partner, Mandy, and we are so excited to bring this next guest to you. He is a franchising entrepreneur, author, and media personality knowing or being known for building AdvantiClean into a national brand. He's now the founder and CEO of Homefront Brand, North America's fastest growing property service franchise platform. As a champion of service, Jeff partners with St. Jude, Operation Homefront, and Carson Scholars as well just to make sure that he contributes in the world.

He's the author of Discernment and host of the top ranked on the Homefront podcast. He's appeared on Undercover Boss and is recognized as a business athlete, husband, father of three, and mentor dedicated to empowering others through better decisions and purpose driven leadership. So excited to bring you Jeff today.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Power Up Your Life podcast. I'm Kelly Resendez. And I'm Mandy McAllister. And I have been so excited to bring this next guest on for so long. Just somebody that is an impressive career and is just making a huge difference in the world.

So my friend, Jeff Doudin from Homefront Brands, welcome. And tell us just a little bit about your history so that we can understand, your journey.

Absolutely, Kelly, Mandy. So glad to be on. I really appreciate the opportunity to spend this time with you.

So for people new to me, look, I I'm a business builder in the franchise space. I've been building businesses for over twenty five years. Well, I guess almost thirty now inside of the franchise space. And, mostly, it's been brands. So my first brand was kind of born out of hurricane Andrew in 1992 in South Florida. It was a restoration remediation franchise that I built over twenty five years to 240 locations, and I sold that in 2019.

Since then, have built a bunch of companies, a franchise sales organization, franchise creation businesses, maybe participate in about 15 or so different brands, whether it be in the fitness concept or, built a infrared sauna concept, light one of those light sauna businesses and things like that. But about two or three years ago, got right back into the home property services space. We think it's a great place for families to create financial freedom and economic security for themselves. There's no shortage of work that needs to be done out there. There's gonna be a 150,000,000 more people in this country by 2050. We have a housing shortage, houses break, and with it comes all the infrastructure.

So that's basically, what I do, on the personal side. Husband, father of the three amazing kids, and they're all I got 27, 24, 21. They're out of the house now. And That's why they're amazing. That's why they're amazing. Any.

And, been a been a been a been a long time coach, whether it be youth sports or entrepreneurs or business builders or emerging franchisors. I just really have a passion for people and excited for what this version, or at least this season of my life is bringing.

Yeah. And you have a podcast as well. We do. We do. On the Homefront with Jeff Dooden. We're actually rebranding it, to take a little bit harder edge for entrepreneurs, and we're calling it unemployable.

Yeah. It's amazing. Just a lot of what you share. I'm gonna kinda dig into a little bit of your entrepreneurial mindset. Like, what do you think it takes for anyone listening?

Because we all have choices. Right? We're told, like, go to college, get a job, any of these other things, but we there is this other path that they can take. What what what's it gonna take for somebody to to tread down that path?

People that get into business, especially for the first time, they find themselves at this inflection point. They know that they wanna do something different. They they they realize what their current life will bring them, And inflection points have three things with them. One, there's people involved, people that you're responsible for, people that you wanna do something with, may sometimes people you wanna get away from. But, like, there's always a people aspect to it. Then there's an adventure or an opportunity. And I think that's the part that a lot of people are missing is they don't have that wanderlust. They don't have that, like, what if inside of them. And that's where franchising gives people an opportunity to maybe get out of a of a grind and and learn what it is to be an entrepreneur. And the last part of it is there's there's a risk of loss because anytime that any of us on this call have done something or gotten something, we generally had to risk something or give something up in favor of it.

I've really gotten to this concept of subtracting to add, and I I just realized that the more that we simplify our life, the more we get out of our own way, the bigger it becomes. The more people we include, the more people we get aligned, the more clearly we communicate to people and educate. All of a sudden, it's like I was working so, so, so hard to build something, and I just felt like I was climbing up a hill. And then you just get out of the way and you get great people involved, and all of a sudden scale seems to happen. And I think that many business owners have to go through the trenches to really internalize what those types of things mean.

So really, you know, the first action is to take an action and to start and not you can't over plan it. You've you've just gotta say, I'm I wanna do something. I don't know exactly where it's gonna end up. I've got a great idea. I've got these skills. I got these capabilities. I've got this network. I see a problem that needs to be solved. You just need to start.

Yeah. And and so what is it what is it what are the filters that you need to remove from yourself to be able to get into that entrepreneurial mindset? It's fear. It's realizing that nothing is fatal. Nothing in business is generally fatal. It's not gonna kill you. You have to, not be worried about what other people think. You've gotta be almost too stupid to fail in that you have to really believe that no matter what you have to go through, there's gonna be something that's worthwhile for people on the other end of it.

And it's it's like, I I and I I'm so passionate about this, because I see it every single day. You know, we thirty months ago, we started this home front brands platform. We're one of the fastest growing in North America. We've got two fifty owners already in inside of thirty months. And, operating about 800 different markets. And it's the same. It's like Groundhog Day over and over again. Like they all come in with the same trepidation, you know, they're excited, but they're cautious.

And, you know, they're and and so for people like that, having a set of guardrails and, an operating an operating system to follow, but yet having the risk that, like, you will lose money if you don't do it. Like, if you don't show up, you will lose like, you can fail. I mean, we we almost we almost tell them, when we're talking to it's not a sales process. It's an awards process. Like, you will fail if you don't do it. And the reason I wanna tell them that upfront is because I don't if people are hedging it all, I don't want them to do it.

Yeah. Because as they're failing, I am I am giving a mouth to mouth resuscitation the entire way trying to save them, And it takes so much energy to do. Yeah. And, you know, but at the end of the day, people that can just kind of, you know, lift their head, put their shoulders back, take a deep breath, and just wade into the jungle and just start whacking, Like, those are the types of people that will will find a path.

I love them. I let's talk about the other side of the coin, though, because failure does sometimes happen. Right? And we know that new businesses, you know I I've acquired some businesses because they've been around a while in hopes that they continue to be around for a long time. But you you've got this sample size of of hundreds of entrepreneurs. Can you tell me about some patterns of those who actually do give up or do fail? What do you see in that?

Number one, internal versus external locus of control. Oh. Once I learned this from a guy named Chris Collins, who wrote incredible set of books called I Am Leader, it just came out right now. $250 for these two books, by the way. About 12 pounds of books. But probably one of the most thoughtful you you know how you say, like like, it takes a lot to get something simple? Like, big, big words, lots of pictures, and just this perfect message about who you need to be and how to what's your operating system. And then the second book is called leader, and just a case study on leadership.

And and once I saw this in there, in ninety percent of people have, at some point, have an external locus of control, meaning something happens and we look for something to blame. Okay? You know, I I I it's the market. It's the leads. It's this assistant. It's this employee. It's the salesperson. It's the customer. It's the vendor. And you just wrap wrap yourself around this blame of everything that's not you. People that are success people that fail cannot stop blaming circumstances, other people. They just can't take the responsibility for it. And by the way, many failures happen and it's not your fault. But it doesn't matter because blaming everybody else is just a waste of your time.

So people that basically and it's it sounds it's a very trite phrase, but, you know, the world is happening, for me, but not to me. Like, that's a that is a mouthful of truth. Yeah. And, you know, like, I mean, I I I am I am in a year of conflict right now. I've got I've I had all of these businesses that I started in 1920, and '21 have gone through some sort of a sale. You've got partners in there. And, by the way, become learning to become a good partner. And a a couple of models of thought I've learned around those are, are are another thing that that is kind of advanced business ownership, and we could speak to that.

But, you know, I'm I'm in a I'm in a year of conflict, but at the end of the day, when I come in, am I gonna hit the floor like a Christmas ornament because I've gotta deal with conflict and just break into a million pieces, or am I gonna bounce like a Super Bowl and just, you know, come right back at it? Because at the end of the day, you know, the three little words that I learned, changed my life, back about four years ago, and they're rushed to conflict. K. There's always gonna be conflict, and you can't build anything great without a certain amount of conflict. If you're gonna build a great company, you're probably gonna have to go through 500 conflicts over a five to ten year period, a thousand conflicts. So you might as well just wade into them.

And when you have an external locus of control and something goes wrong, the guy didn't show up. The truck broke down. The customer's a jerk. Right? All of us you just get all you can't recover from it. And it it, you know, and it gets to your heart. Yeah. Like, it gets like, you can't let stuff like that get to your heart. Yeah. Because then it's just like it's just like body blows all day long. Now if you say, alright. Well, that happened. So here's three things. Here's three options, and then you just get on with it. So what I see people being successful is they just get on with it.

Yeah. And, and by the way, if you, if you've got a bad business partner or a bad customer, you just slow you back away. Like, you know, you see those people at Yellowstone when they encounter the bear, you just kinda, you know, don't run. Right. Just, you know, just, you know, maybe walk a little faster than your partner or spouse. But, you know, but like just, just back away from those people and go another path and but don't let yourself get eaten up over it.

I you know, people that just accumulate this baggage about things that have happened to them, those are the people that ultimately get so exhausted. Their will gets exhausted, and then they just, it's too hard for them to continue. So Yeah. That's something that I always done. I've said, I mean, like, I've I've I've made a career being too stupid to fail. I mean, I just keep going.

That's awesome. What would you say is, like, really unconventional about your mindset or philosophy around scaling a business? We've got a lot of business owners that listen to this within the community. And

Look. I'm I'm I'm not a special operator. I'm not you know, I I saw that you had Jeff Hoffman on. K. That's that's something special, that guy. Right? And, I really enjoyed listening to that, by the way. That was a great show that you guys had. Thank you. And, but I think You. If if anything, it's you have to win the opportunity that you're in to get the next opportunity. And if you're constantly building blocks in your foundation, the next opportunity is always gonna be bigger.

So, like, the only reason if if, you know, if if I don't end up being a multibillionaire, it's only because I've run out of time. Mhmm. You know, I started as a I I failed out of my first college. I had a 180 credits of first aid and, you know, CPR at my second college, Olympic weightlifting, you know, one through 16. You know, and then I my third college, graduated with honors marketing business management, started a painting business. From there, started a restoration business from a single location. Did you know, I've done a thousand water damage toilet cleanups personally myself, You know? Then you built that then we built that to a, you know, a company that did a $100,000,000 over four years just after Katrina and worked all over The Caribbean and government contracting and California, all over the place. Then we turned that to a a a national franchise. And then I got involved in 12 or 15 building national franchises, and now I'm building one of the fastest growing franchise platforms.

So you just have to keep accumulating capabilities and confidence as you Mhmm. As you go through your career, and it doesn't matter where you start. K? And you need to be proud of where you are. Like, whatever you're doing, if you're if you're, you know, making brownies and selling them around your neighborhood, like, that's a start, but you have to win it. You're gonna win that, and then you can decide it's not worth it because it won't scale, but you take those skills and that money and whatever you did, and you go to the next thing. Mhmm. And you just have to keep the building. The you know, success is not is not around or backing up. It's usually through. You've gotta go through the opportunity that you're in, and then you have the next success. And the only reason you will ever fail is if you quit, or you run out of time. You know? You die you die before you get it done.

So I just I'm I'm really I'm really passionate about about in franchising, by the way, corporate people don't do well in it because you can't fire these people. Like, you your empathy has to be pretty high to be a good franchisor because you're in life with these people. And, you know, when they sign and we sign, like, it's commitment. I mean, it's we don't do it on the courthouse steps, but, you know, the average franchise agreement actually lasts longer than the average, marriage in this country. So, I mean, you're you're in it. I mean, you know everything about them. You you you get the best, you get the worst.

And by the way, in our 250 owners in thirty months, we've had, a family die in a plane crash with their two children. We've had, divorces. We've had rehabs. We've had suicide attempts. I mean, it's it's life. Mhmm. And in corporate America, you just send them to HR, and they go do what they do. But, like, in we have to we have to salvage those businesses and get the money to their families, you know, in those situations. So it it's really a it you know, to be a good franchisor, man, it is a it is a it's a it's a it's a love. You gotta you gotta really wanna do it. Yeah. Love the people. Yeah.

Now at the end of the day, it's very recurring, and they're very, very valuable businesses. But but there's no but there's absolutely no shortcut. If you know what you're doing, you can go through the cycles faster, but you can't skip them.

Absolutely. Did you say that you have 15 businesses you're scaling right now?

No. I had I had about fifth from '19 2019 to 2021 after I sold my business. I I I got very broad in a consulting advisory role, and then I actually we, you know, invested, bought the majority of several businesses. Sure.

And then through my franchise sales organization, we worked with hundreds. We we we grew national brands as their sales arm. So I got to look at hundreds of companies through that and pick which ones I want to invest.

This subtract to add idea. I absolutely love that idea. I personally am in kind of five big different silos, and I feel like I'm losing my damn mind. Right?

So when you are trying to oversee and grow a bunch of different stuff all at the same time, talk to me about some strategies that you've got to make sure that the ball is moving forward in everything when you can't be everywhere at once. Okay.

This has taken me a while to come to, but it's a combination of putting hard parameters on how much money that you need to make in an hour. And the way that is calculated is the money that you will make, whatever there'd be wage or profits or whatever, commission however you make it, plus the exit value divided by the total hours that you're gonna have to invest over the life of that project. Okay. Okay.

So if you wanna make a 100,000 if you wanna make a $100 an hour or $200,000 a year, you can do literally tens of thousands of things to make $200,000 a year. There's so many things that you can do. Okay. What if you wanna make $500 an hour? Alright. Now that's, you know, that's a million dollars. Right? Or is it a million dollars? I don't know. Anyway, if I yeah. If it's a million dollars an hour because it's two two thousand hours a year. Alright. Now there's less things that you can do. Alright. Well, what if you wanna make $5,000 an hour? What if you wanna make $10,000 an hour? Every time you ratchet it up, there's either less time that you can invest or it has to have a bigger outcome.

So I can't touch anything that's not gonna not gonna return to me a $100,000,000 based on my what I chose as a number. Mhmm. Right? Now I can if it's going to if I can cut my time in half, the time that I allocate. So there's this Rubik's cube of saying, I can allocate I can either spend less time to get the return or I can make the business bigger.

So what that does is that informs your that gives you discernment in the opportunities that you focus on. And just with that one discernment filter, you can go and you can say, well, I these are the three or four businesses that I need to get out of. Or this is the one business that will never return to me my dollar per hour that I'm looking for. Yeah. So good.

So, Jeff, you know, a lot of what you do is on the residential side. Right? I mean, you tell us a little bit about those brands, but how do you see AI impacting the industries that you're in?

A lot of people are running around in fear right now that a lot of jobs are gonna be lost. Like, what should I do on a go forward basis?

Obviously, AI can't come into your home and do a lot of what what you're doing, but how are you leveraging it?

Well, if you're an entrepreneur, there's gonna be more change in twenty four months than there's been in the last twenty four years. And it's the most exciting time because the riches are always in the niches. And this is gonna create huge rifts in different businesses.

So, I mean, the customer acquisition side in the property service space with AI, it's allowing for both franchises and independent companies, the people that can adopt and implement quicker, the they're winning faster. So there is gonna be it is gonna drive more rapid consolidation within within the property service space because there's just some people that have that got it right, and they're just turning into gorillas really quickly.

Now AI has its limitations in property services because our services are delivered our products and services are delivered by people today. Yeah. Now if you look at the Tesla robot dancing around and being unpacked at, you know, the Jenner's homes or whoever, you know, the Kardashians, over at the Kardashians as they unpack their robot, I mean,

there's Do you watch that, Jeff?

No. I I haven't seen it. You just heard about it. Although although, you know, you have a big audience. So if they're listening, I am a fan, but, I don't, I don't record it. No.

The, but look. I mean, there's there's some robotics happening. Like, we're we're looking, of course, at all the all the regular things. So customer acquisition, obviously, the ability to engage customers that way. From our business analytics and insight perspectives that we deliver to our franchise owners, huge.

Yeah. You know, taking all of our you know, we're a big Microsoft shop, so we invested deeply in Microsoft early. And, you know, we we do have a data lake, and we've got all of our data running to the right places. So now because we set the infrastructure up and we had the foresight to get all of our franchise owners and all of their employees participating in that environment, Now we can deploy AI across that environment, and we can instead of having to have teams of people going to get the insights and the research, we can we can compile that much quicker and take our human assets and work on activation with our franchise owners more readily.

Yeah. And saying, okay. Here's what it means and here's what it is. So we can really level up our coaching, level up our insights, change management, and and all of that, using AI.

And and I think, you know, we're we we're trying to be, we spend a lot of time out in industry, you know, at odd places where things are we try to be where things are happening out even a lot of it's outside the franchise industry because you go where the good stuff is and you go where things are happening. So we're we try to stay pretty current in that way and then bring it back into our company. I have no idea if we're ahead or behind or where we rank in that because everything's moving so quickly.

But from the perspective of people needing their roof repaired or people needing construction services, it's probably gonna be a minute before it's an army of robots that are coming out and doing that for you. I would hope. I I I hope so.

I love it. Changing the TV. Connection. No. So you're leveraging AI to be able to have deeper and more meaningful connections with your with your companies.

Yeah. I mean, one one marker of a caliber of a franchise system because of the disparate nature of ownership and is really the adoption rate. How quick how because your adoption rate is a proxy to trust. Exactly. If you screw a bunch of stuff up and you give it to the franchise owners and they spend time and money implementing and it didn't work it didn't provide any benefit to them Yeah. The next time they're gonna be like, I'm gonna let everybody else do it first and see.

Yeah. So, you know, so it's really important for us to, within our communities, have, you know, be data first. I mean, great Yeah. Great companies lead with data. Good ones lead with words. I use a lot of words, but we have, you know, we have it here.

I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, all businesses, just two things. It's people and math.

Yeah. I think where I'm seeing and there there's been quite a few reports coming out recently now that they're studying that laziness and is increasing and lack of creativity is increasing. And they're actually seeing that people that are using it too much are taking a step backwards. And they're not realizing they're not because we need to be challenging our brain.

It's a machine. Right? You've gotta be constantly training your brain the same way that you would train AI. And so giving giving a little bit of space, I know you didn't get where you are because you were out there getting information.

Back in the day, not it was, do we let them have calculators in math class? Yeah. Exactly. Right? And and it was for a long time, it was no. And it was like, oh, do we let them have computers in school? And then for a long time, it was no. And then finally, computers come in. And those certainly have enhanced the educational experience.

However, we've never had a technology like AI that can I mean, there's there's no reason I got a beautifully written email follow-up to a meeting on Friday from our call center director, and it was perfect? And it had all the information, and it was incredibly well written. And I'm like, well, there's there's Copilot, Microsoft Copilot for you. It was it was perfect. And now how what does that do for students and people that, you know, need to attach the pen to the hand, to the head, to the paper?

Things like that. One of the things that we do at Homefront brands is we build reading rooms, good old fashioned reading rooms in schools. And so we get to, we get a we we find a school, they cost about $20,000 and we will go in there and they will give us a space and we will decorate it with furniture and books and it's and programs or children to get their hands on good old fashioned books. Oh. And I love that.

You know, it's it's I mean, look. I wasn't a great traditional student, but, like, I will tell you, I read everything. Everything I could get my hands on. I just was a voracious reader. That's the way my mind operated. I wanted to see stories in my head, and that's the way that I learned.

And right now, I mean, I I'm look. I'm not a scientist or anything, but I get it just as addicted to my phone doing nonsensical stuff as anybody else does. Yeah. And I have to I have to put limits on it. And but when I pick up a book or I'm disciplined about my reading, thirty minutes in the morning, or my journaling, I'm so much more my brain works better all day long. So Yep. Absolutely. Yeah.

So it's interesting what what what AI is gonna do in the educational space because it and, you know, I had a great I had a great guest on, doctor Abby Maronio on on the podcast. And she's a, you know, 20 multiple PhD psychology, one of these young upcoming, psychology stars. They're really sharp. And we were talking about in her in her business how you really need to understand the research to make an I asked her about NLP, neurolinguistic program, and she's like, mhmm. Not a fan. And and she she says because so many people use it, but they don't understand the science beneath it, so they end up you can make wrong you can make wrong reads on things because you don't it's not always. Right? Yeah.

And and I'm a I love NLP, by the way, but, you know, but I like parlor I like magicians. I like Chuck E. Cheese. I like, you know, you like the Kardashians like that. So I'm not so, you know, I like so, you know, but it's the same thing with physics. Like, think of think of a student's in physics now, but they don't go through two or three hundred years of fundamental building blocks to learn that. How can they evolve it? Yeah. And by the way, chat's wrong a lot.

Yeah. A lot.

I use chat. A lot. I use Grock. It spits facts at me, and then I then I'm like, that's but you it's actually not true. Yeah. It's kinda what you said before. You can speed up the process of the steps, but you still have to do the steps in the same order. Yes. You know? That that formula is always the same.

Using AI as a thought partner or or an idea partner, that that is the real way that people will continue to be able to think in my opinion. But there are so many, truth bombs and brilliant pieces of information beyond just the Kardashians.

I I love this idea of you've gotta subtract to add. I I'm gonna do a full on audit of my own stuff after this and filtering through this idea of how much per hour am I willing to work for. Kelly, what were some takeaways you had? Amazing. I wish we had so much more time, Jeff. I know that you

number one, you're just so selfless with what you wanna give to the world too. Right? You know, you obviously are growing home front brands, but you also wanna help entrepreneurs. I know you're super involved in organizations in your area like, what entrepreneurs. I know you're super involved in organizations in your area like YPO and other things too for that reason.

But, you know, the biggest one is just fear can't you just gotta push past the fear and take a risk. And, really, if you wanna create the life that you want, you gotta go this direction of entrepreneurship in order to really be able to do that.

So, I mean, you've been an incredible guest today. And what we'd always love to ask is, like, what's one way that we can support you, and how can our listeners find you?

You can find me at jeffduden.com, or you can check us out at homefrontbrands.com. And we are always interested in getting in conversations with people who are up to something, going somewhere, and interested in looking at a business, which is an incredibly high class asset.

We have a lot of sophisticated, high net worth existing business owners at Homefront Brands. Because of the quality of our businesses and the caliber of our platform. So if anybody's interested in expanding their portfolio of businesses or being a business owner for the first time, we are always willing and interested to talk to them.

Awesome. Well, thank you again, Jeff, and we'll make sure that we put this in the show notes too. So if you love this episode, share it, like it, bring it to everyone that you know, and thank you again for joining the Power Up Your Life podcast brought to you by GoBundance Women, and we will see you next time. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you, Mandy. Thank you.