Mark Parrish Discusses Owning 22 McDonald's Restaurants, Generating Over $88 Million/Year, And Coaching Others To Scale Their Businesses

Success Profiles Radio - Brian K Wright

Mark Parrish shares his journey from working at McDonald's at age 12 to owning 22 restaurants and generating $88M annually. He discusses leadership, systems, mentorship, and scaling businesses through the 'Franchise Form

Key takeaways

• Recurring revenue models increase business value

Transcript preview

It's time for Success Profiles Radio with your host Brian K Wright. Have you ever wondered if there's more to life than you're currently living? Then Success Profiles Radio is the program for you. Every week we'll explore different aspects of success and how to apply them to your life. Guests will come from many different backgrounds, including expertise and leadership, business, relationships, careers, networking, health, overcoming, overcoming adversity, and much more. Every show is a dose of inspiration. This is Success Profiles Radio. And now here's your host Brian K Wright. Hello and welcome to Success Profiles Radio. I'm your host Brian K Wright and it's an absolute pleasure to be with you here today. I'm honored that you chose to spend part of your day with me here and this is going to be a fantastic and amazing show. I'll be introducing my guest shortly and I promise we're going to have a lot of fun and we're going to learn some things along the way as well. I do. I do thinking about lately and I typically do this every single week. I listen to a book by my friend Scott Duffy called Breakthrough and he mentioned something that hit me pretty hard. He said the most valuable businesses are those that have subscription-based income tied to it. If you think about it it makes a lot of sense. If you can create ways to offer something that people pay for over and over again automatically it's a stream of income you can count on. But if all of your income depends on being paid once for a sale, you'll have to keep looking for more customers and that takes a lot. And that takes a lot to do, and that takes a lot of time, and that takes a lot of money and money and money and money and money and to sell your business someday your buyer will want systems in place that generate regular income so how can you convert some of your one-off income to recurring income that is your question for this week and if you've not download and subscribe to success profiles radio on apple podcast or iTunes please do that leave a five-star review that would be awesome and amazing we've been doing this for over 14 years and I would love for that to happen and I just learned today that success profiles radio is currently ranked at this very moment 132 in the business podcast category on iTunes so that's a huge milestone we are in the top 200 so there are a lot of you out there listening so thank you so much for that your support means everything and with that in mind I want to introduce my very special guests this week his name is Mark Perish let me tell you about him Mark Perish is a seasoned business leader with a proven truck record of success in the fast-paced world of franchise management overseeing 22 McDonald's restaurants and generated more than 75 million an avenue annual revenue expertise in operations, leadership, and strategy. His hands-on business experience has helped him build and manage multi-million dollar franchises and that has made him a sought-after coach and speaker. He offers valuable insights to aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders and beyond all of that he has a passion for mentorship. Whether he speaks to large audiences or provides one-on-one guidance, he helps others unlock their potential and build sustainable business. And he is also the creator of the franchise Formula and author of the golden blueprint. So here we are with my very special guest Mark Parrish. Mark welcome to the show. I'm so glad you're here Brian I'm excited about our conversation we're about to have. Thanks for having me. You're so welcome so the first thing I love asking is did you envision yourself Early on that you'd be where you are right now? No I never did so There's a few key points that you have in life a few times like you graduate high school you go to college like you have those times where you are in your life. No I never did. I never did so going to go forward. So when I graduated high school, the only thing that I knew that I was going to do at that time was I was going to leave and do a Christian mission for two years, which I ended up going to a place called Hisi Fee Brazil. After that, I thought I was going to be an attorney, so I came home and started doing school to become an attorney. None of the stuff that I had really thought about back then had the foresight to see has really happened. It's actually all been better than what I expected in every single way. because sometimes we are so married and attached to the outcome we want that we sometimes forget that when we hear a no or not yet there's actually a much better thing that's on the horizon for you instead and that's a great worldview to have isn't it? Yeah it's a great world view and going into a little bit more in my history like I also so the church that I'm a part of we weren't able to go and serve our mission until we were 19 years old I graduated high school 17. So I had this gap and I'm like do I go to school what do I do in between and I decided to join the military so I was a part of the National Guard US Army for six years active two years inactive which led me to go into Iraq Ramada Iraq between 2005 2006 for 16 months so all of these things were not truly I would say intentional it was just at the moment I was trying to make the best decision for myself understanding where I wanted to be in 30 40 years but but the steps further than I ever wanted to be. When I finally dove into McDonald's, so today I'm a McDonald's franchisee, and I got to fix my bio. I do 88 million a year in annual revenue. But yeah, instead of 75, so it's, you know, just a little typo. But I thought one day I'm like, man, if I can just get to five restaurants, if I can get to six, that'll be plenty, I'll be happy, I won't need anything more. But I've become the kind of person who's, who's, I'm always satisfied, who's, I'm always satisfied, I'm always satisfied, I'm always satisfied, I'm always satisfied, happy but yet I'm also always searching for more because I realize that I've been given tips gifts and talents and I have these abilities and I and as I keep growing and keep expanding I keep seeing what more I can become and who I can become and what I can do and so now I just keep trying to stretch bigger and bigger in every aspect of life not just the financial side and the business side of course. Great. When you were really young you worked for your dad right? Yeah so I started in McDonald's when I was when I was 12 years old became a franchisee. He started when he was 16 became a franchisee when he was 37. And so because of that there's no child labor laws when you're working in the family business. So I was working in McDonald's a 12. Wow. Yeah. What is it like working for your family? Yeah. So in the beginning it wasn't too bad. I mean I had my brothers and sisters all working in the business with us but it would be like a bus would show up at the restaurant. We only had one lived in Holders Nebraska. I we'd help get the bus done, right? So get those 40 to 100 customers done and on their way as quickly as possible. After I came home, and this is from Iraq, and I decided that I truly wanted to be a part of the McDonald's system. Because until then, I had been in and out of the McDonald's system, and I wasn't satisfied. I didn't think I wanted to do a long term. I'd seen the pain and struggle that my parents had gone through financially trying to make it work. And then I saw the effort and I'm like, man, man, it's just not, it's just not, it's just not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's back in return. But anyway, after I come home from Iraq, I decided then that, hey, I was going to try and make McDonald's a career. My dad had gotten his organization to five restaurants, which at the time was, for us, it was amazing, right? Going from him being a crew person at 16 to becoming a franchisee and having five restaurants we thought was awesome. Now I've been able to grow the organization to 22. And so did I ever, so my mind has been blown away, right. with what I've been able to achieve and did I ever think that I would do what I'm doing today? No, I didn't. But every step I took, so every time I left McDonald's, I was able to come back and, oh, so that the relationship with me and my dad was very strange when I first came back from Iraq. When I committed to McDonald's and I said this is going to be my path, it was something that he forced himself to do and I forced myself to do for a while. There were probably two years of him wanting to quit on a daily basis. And a lot of it was because he was kind of a micromanager. And so when I say he had those five restaurants and I became, I was a general manager for him, just running one restaurant. There was twice that he demoted my, or well he lowered my pay. He left me in the same position, but he lowered my pay twice. And so when you think about it, for a dad to be able to do that to their child and understand the struggles and everything that comes with it, it was, it was him giving me satisfied with where you are today and his expectations for me definitely were higher than those outside of the family and so was it was it fair completely he's my dad he wants me to succeed at the highest level he understands my potential more than anybody else so why wouldn't he drive and push me harder than he than he would a normal person absolutely so in the opening bit I talked about passive income and I've heard yeah what you can confirm or deny whether this is true or not I have heard that might be toying with the idea of a monthly subscription option. Is that happening and would it work? So yeah, I've heard this too, but I haven't been able to confirm that myself. So I've heard of the subscription being somewhere around 55, 58 dollars where you could eat and I think it was one or two times per week and that's kind of your subscription. Your openings comment about subscriptions is amazing because right now I'm a part of a group that we call Op-Net and so there's 53 franchisees across the US system. that get to spend or choose where $1.9 million of marketing budget is spent in a year. And so I'm one of those guys that every year we're trying to always tell our story to our customers to bring them in. And so right now we're doing the FIFA World Cup, right? So the FIFA World Cup, we've got the cups, we've got nine different players on those cups, but that was one of the decisions we made. We made the decision to bring on those players. We made the decision to spend money on the money on the money in order in order to bring the advertise with them. So we do that every year. I mean, imagine if you could just sign somebody up, you sell them once and they keep coming back month after month, year after year, year after year, I mean your costs would drop immensely. We only spend though about 4% of our revenue on advertising. But that's because of golden arches are so well known. I think that businesses that are smaller or don't have the name recognition that McDonald's has. I think they have to spend a little bit more money. But us, the group of 14,000 restaurants across the US. Yeah, we're spending 1.9 billion a year. That's absolutely amazing. We've got less than two minutes to our first break. Okay. The highest value skill that anyone can develop. So the highest value skill is really, it's a people skill and it's one of the things that has made everybody successful that has achieved it because you can look at the technical things. You can always teach the technical. But can somebody inspire us. other people, can they motivate other people, can they tell a vision in such a way that an influence is change among people? I think, and a lot of people would call that cells, and I agree that it really is sell. You're selling a vision, you're selling what you can do and what you want to aspire to do, and I think that is the greatest attribute. And when people talk about AI, how can you, this is the one thing AI can't replace. People have to lead people. People want to follow great leaders and great leaders and great vision. So that's what I would say. We are coming up against our very first break. My special guest is Mark Parrish and when we come back I'm going to ask him what is the most expensive mistake he's ever made. I will also address something about mindset and we will talk about his weekly planning sessions for him and his team and the challenge of staying hands on when you are expanding like Mark has expanded his empire of stores. We have so much more to talk about. I cannot wait to dive in deep and we're going to do that with Mark with Mark when we come back. back. This is Success Profiles Radio. Please stay with us. Don't go away. We are going to have an awesome and amazing show. We will be right back on the other side. Don't go away. The mission is to motivate and inspire others to discover their unique talents and follow their dreams in life. This is Success Profiles Radio. You have probably heard about the Ring Video Doorbell App. It has a motion sensor that alerts your cell phone if someone is on your porch or rings a doorbell. All you have to do is tap your phone and you can see who is at your door and talk to them through a remote mounted camera and speaker. My husband thought this would be a good idea to have for our home. However, I had no idea he had installed it while I was out of town. 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