@redacted‌ came through SMBootcamp's 19th cohort in February. From Columbus, OH, 8.5 years as COO of Tellerex, looking for a business to own and operate. Franchises weren't on his list. He kept searching the way most of you are. Brokers, off-market outreach, the usual grind. Then along the way he started running a franchise lane in parallel. Not instead of the search, alongside it. Same underwriting discipline, same questions about unit economics and owner time, just a different set of sellers. That lane is the one that won. He launched a Joshua Tree Experts territory covering Central Ohio. Tree care, lawn, plant health, pest control. New territory, not an existing business, so he's building the book from zero with a playbook and a brand behind him. I'm not here to argue franchise vs. acquisition. Plenty of franchise deals are bad and plenty of searches end in a great close. What strikes me is how few searchers I meet run two lanes deliberately. Most pick one on day one and treat the other as a failure mode. Brian's operating background probably made the franchise math work better for him than it would for a first-time manager. That's a fair caveat. But the parallel approach is the part I'd copy regardless. So I'm curious. For those of you mid-search right now, have you looked at franchise territories alongside existing businesses, or did you rule that out early? And if you ruled it out, what was the reason? Link to Brian's announcement in the comments.