I spent eighteen years in technology and banking before I owned anything.

The corporate years.

I started as a software developer, moved into account management, and spent the bulk of my career at Bank of America — technology and operations, business support, sales support, and lending product management.

It was a good career. I learned how large organizations actually work, how credit decisions get made, and what a lender looks for when someone asks to borrow against a business plan. That last part turned out to matter more than I expected.

What I didn't have was control over my own direction. I had an itch to own the outcome — and enough confidence in myself to believe I could.

I became the candidate.

I found StretchLab in a Wall Street Journal article. That was it — no grand plan, just something I read that stuck with me and that I started looking into.

Then I worked with a franchise consultant, and he did something I wouldn't have done on my own. Instead of taking me straight to the brand I'd walked in attracted to, he had me look at businesses with similar models and characteristics — including the only other assisted stretching concept franchising at the time.

That's the part worth understanding about this process. I arrived with an answer. A good consultant made me examine the question. I still chose StretchLab, but I chose it having actually compared it to something, which is a different thing than choosing it because it's what I happened to read about.

I remember the rest of it too. Not knowing which questions were the important ones. Reading an FDD for the first time and not being sure what I was supposed to be alarmed by. Talking to existing franchisees and trying to work out whether the enthusiastic ones were telling me the truth.

Stacey and I signed our first agreement that year, while I was still at the bank. We were named Rookie of the Year.

Ten months in, the world closed.

We opened our first studio ten months before the pandemic hit. A business built entirely on hands-on, one-on-one contact — and suddenly nobody could touch anybody. We were the antithesis to social distancing.

We furloughed ninety-five percent of our team and kept the critical few. Then, as a path forward started to become visible, we brought people back deliberately — the teammates we had confidence in — and used the reset to upskill the team rather than simply restaff it.

I'm not going to dress that up as a growth opportunity. It was the hardest stretch of my working life. But it taught me something about this business that eight normal years wouldn't have: what a franchise system can offer when things go wrong, which parts of the model are load-bearing, and how much of the outcome comes down to the people you've hired.

Going all in.

I left Bank of America in 2022, once I knew my time was better spent building the business than straddling the fence.

That's the honest version of the decision. Not a dramatic exit — an arithmetic one. There came a point where the constraint on the business was me, and continuing to split my attention was costing more than the salary was worth.

We operate seven studios across Charlotte and Columbia, South Carolina today.

I've also seen it from the other side of the table.

Beyond running the studios, I've served on brand, technology, and franchisee advocacy committees within the StretchLab system.

That work is less visible than opening locations, and in some ways it taught me more. Committees are where franchisees and the franchisor actually negotiate — over what gets built, what gets standardized, what the system asks of its owners and what it owes them in return. You see how decisions get made, who gets listened to, and what happens when the two sides disagree.

Most candidates evaluating a franchise focus almost entirely on the concept: the model, the margins, the market. That's the easy part, and it's what the discovery process is built to show you. The harder question — and the one that determines what the next ten years actually feel like — is what kind of partner the franchisor is. Whether they listen. Whether the support is real or a line item. Whether the system improves when franchisees push back.

I know what that looks like from the inside, and it's a large part of what I listen for when I'm evaluating a brand for someone.