Meet the Ambitious Franchisees Who Turned Modest Investments Into Bustling Businesses
In late 2013, Matthew Sprague was feeling aimless. After a tour in Iraq, where he injured his back, he left the Army and was living in Pasadena, Calif., with his wife and new baby. Then he saw an advertisement for a franchise expo, and an unexpected path emerged.
“I’d never really thought about franchising,” he says. “I met a franchise broker at the expo. We started going through concepts, and I found Bar-B-Clean. I decided that’s the one I’m going with.”
Sprague says he had no expectations when he took on the grill-cleaning franchise, which set him back roughly $20,000. But anything, he believed, would be better than the $10 per hour he’d been making at a rental-car company. Little did he know the business would heat up so fast.
In 2014 his Bar-B-Clean business made $60,000, so he bought three more territories. Now Sprague says he’s on track to gross nearly $200,000 in 2015, and he recently hired his first two employees. He
