Multi-Unit Franchisee Magazine Issue II, 2016 | Page 32

MULTI

BRAND

and we both enjoy success,” says Charles.
“Knowing that our success depends on each
other has created a mutual respect. We’re
not the same person and don’t attack situations in the same way, so we have more
opportunities to solve problems.”
By the time Jesse graduated from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, he’d
begun working for some friends who had
started a successful dot.com company. “I
was making a lot more money working in
technology and that was important to me,
so I left grad school after six weeks,” he
recalled. “I told Charles to go ahead and
graduate, and that I’d spend those years
saving money so we could go into business

together. Since he was interested in food
and the restaurant business, I suggested
that he go for a degree in restaurant/hotel
management. When he graduated from
Southern Illinois, we bought our first Little
Caesars. After a year, I quit my job to help
Charles open our second store.”
The Keysers came to franchising after
some good advice they received while looking at restaurants. “Our original idea was
to buy out the existing pizzeria we’d eaten
at in college,” says Jesse. “It was a great
product and we liked the location, but it
had been mismanaged and was in a death
spiral. As we were planning to talk to the
owner about buying it, one of my bosses at

the tech company said, ‘Your first business
needs to be franchised. It’s an already established system and it will teach you to run a
business.’ That made perfect sense to us.”
The brothers began to look at pizza
franchises, and since they were still young
enough to think Carbondale was the “center
of the universe,” as they put it, they asked
about locations there. After some initial
stumbles, they found Little Caesars online.
“We didn’t know much about them because
there were none in our area. They’d just
started doing the $5 pizza deal, which was
so brand new it wasn’t even on the national
website yet. We thought that was such a hot
concept that we opened our first restaurant

PERSONAL
First job: De-tasseling corn in Hoopeston, Ill., when we were kids.
Formative influences/events: Jesse: Having a franchise rep sit us down,
be frank, and tell us we were not running our business in a way that would
make them feel comfortable granting us a second location. We were young and
could throw out tons of excuses, but they were all shut down with, “It doesn’t
matter.” Because of that one meeting, we looked at the way a company
should be run completely differently. It gave us the discipline and motivation to
open units faster than our peers.
Key accomplishments: Owner of the Year for Sport Clips, New Franchisee
of the Year for Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning.
Biggest current challenge: Jesse: Deciding which market to go into
next, or what concept to look at next. Just because you have the ability to
chase after a good deal doesn’t mean it’s a great deal for you in the long run.
Charles: Both Little Caesars and Sport Clips are brick-and-mortar concepts, while
Oxi Fresh is not, so my biggest challenge right now is learning the best way to
operate Oxi Fresh.

Best advice you ever got: Jesse: