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Frank Kisias podcast, the podcast, the number 1 podcast, bilingual podcast in the nation in English and Spanish.

And today we have a great, a great guest, a great speaker.

We have someone that is a trendsetter in the franchising industry, has been collaborating, connecting, providing so much support to the fabric of the franchising industry for many, many, many, many years.

And for me, it is a great honor for me to introduce to you Dr.

John Hiaas, the Chair of Title Center for Franchising, live from West Palm Beach, Florida.

I'm happy and excited to have you as a guest in our podcast.

I mean, I know that you live in the heart of what we, Florida is what?

The heart of the Latino community in the nation.

I mean, that's not like the capital, Miami is the capital of Latin America, sort of, per se.

So you are very well connected with a lot of Latinos, and I'm sure that you know exactly what Latinos are doing in the franchising industry.

Thank you for taking the time to be here today and to talk about all your great accomplishments.

So why don't we start by you telling us, I mean, who is Dr.

So why don't we start by, where were you born?

And grew up there and went to college there at Kent State University.

And I left Ohio when I was about 25 years old.

I had earned my bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism and I was writing for a newspaper.

And then I had an opportunity to teach journalism for Kent State University.

I got an opportunity to go to Philadelphia, Temple University in Philadelphia.

They said, if you come here and teach the magazine writing program at Temple University, we will pay for you to get your PhD.

I got master's degree free from Kent State.

and Took me about 9 years to complete my PhD, about 7 years until I started the program.

But I was teaching full-time and working on my degree at the same time.

And loved being in Philadelphia, that was terrific.

so you got to know the Philly metro area very well

I did and I was in New York a lot because I was the the New York markets editor for writers digest magazine which would every month I would go into the city, I would interview editors and publishers of magazines and books and find out what they were looking for from writers.

It would come out in Writers Digest Magazine.

Living in Philadelphia, you have great access to New York City, have great access by train to Washington, DC.

You can drive up to the Pocono Mountains and enjoy yourself.

It was a great living there, but too many snow storms.

So you, right out of college, I guess you started working as a journalist.

Do you work for, I mean, besides whatever the work you did in Philly, do you work for any particular, I guess, entity or company in Ohio, right out of college, Or were you involved?

Right out of college, I got hired by State University to teach basic journalism classes.

And they said, if you'll do that, we'll pay for you to get your master's degree in journalism and you teach for us.

And so that took me about maybe a year, year and a half to finish my master's degree.

And so I continued teaching for Kent State.

That was my first real job out of college.

And I love that, but I continued to freelance because college professors don't make any money.

And it's 9 months out of the year, but I had to teach in the summer as well in order to make enough money to live.

So I was writing constantly, newspapers, magazines, started writing books when I was in Philadelphia.

Tell me about the first 1, the first book that you wrote, what about, about what?

The first book was a biography of the world's master wood carver, who I grew up his backyard in little Dover, Ohio.

And he was of Swiss descent and He used to take wood and whittle it in his spare time, but he's got, Mooney Warder is his name.

You ever go to Ohio, go down 77, get off at Dover and go see the Warder Museum?

He was probably, oh, he was at least in his 70s when I was living there as a kid in high school.

We used to go visit him and we would listen to his stories and watch him carve.

I mean, he carved the Lincoln Memorial funeral train in ebony and ivory.

It's in his museum in Little Dover, Ohio, along with probably 50, 60 other locomotives that he carved.

So I'm assuming that you, I mean, that was your first book.

And I'm assuming that you have written a significant, out of all of those 20 plus, How many of those books are related to the franchising industry?

8 of them maybe are related to business topics because I also co-authored some books.

So I wrote network marketing for dummies with Zig Ziglar, big motivational speaker

So that's not about franchising, but it's about business.

And then I wrote books for other people, which is how I got to write about franchising.

So it looks to me that you, I mean, I know I can tell that you're a great speaker.

So you started developing your speaking or your motivation of speaking, I guess career, if I should call it, at an early stage, what should I say or not?

Like your motivation, I see that you are a professional speaker.

You do a lot of speaking engagement and you speak very well and very eloquently.

The question is, how early would you develop those skills to be able to become

Oh yeah, I was speaking When I was at Kent State, I would get invited by, you know, the Lions Club, the Rotary Club, the Elks, the Optimist Club, different organizations would ask me to come and Maybe it was a topic on something that I had written that was in the newspaper.

And they would want me to come and talk about that.

I would get invited to speak about James Michener.

He was a very famous novelist, but he also wrote nonfiction.

He wrote books like Hawaii, Iberia, The Source, Iberia, you know, all about Spain.

It was big, people would read that novel that he wrote and book their trip to Spain as a result.

Unfortunately, he's been dead since the mid 1990s or so.

And his books are still well known, but not a lot of people know him anymore.

But I wrote a biography of James Michener.

It was actually my doctoral dissertation.

So I still get invited to speak about him and a lot of other topics But mostly like I'm doing a half a dozen speeches this summer including Frankezia fest.

I'm really looking forward to that It's an exciting place to be It's for the Latino world.

I think that this is amazing that that's happening.

I wish I could deliver my speech in Spanish, but I won't be able to.

People will understand you for sure, no problem.

But most of the, most all of my speeches now are related to franchising, helping people.

How do you connect it with the franchising industry?

I was at Temple University teaching, making no money.

a year as an assistant professor, head of the magazine writing program.

So I couldn't make any money and I was freelancing.

And I thought, you know, I've got to do something better than, you know, getting paid for articles because you don't get paid that much as a freelancer.

So I decided, the university asked me, do you have a topic you want to teach about on a Saturday morning and we'll pay you

I'd like to teach a course called How to Write a Book to Promote your business.

And I hadn't done that yet, but I knew it was right.

I knew that the media, if you give the media a book, they'll say you're an expert, whether you are or not.

It's fake media, but it existed long before Donald Trump.

So I knew that that was the thing to do, help people in business write a book And they would have money to pay me.

At the time, it doesn't seem like very much money now, but at the time I said, I will write your book for

And I immediately, I never taught that class.

Nobody signed up for the class, but 3 people said, here's my name and my phone number, I can't make the class on Saturday, please call me.

Let's go to lunch, I wanna talk about you writing my book.

And the first 1 was a lawyer and I wrote his book.

The second 1 was a manufacturing guru, a consultant.

I wrote, I wrote, How to Win Productivity in Manufacturing.

It doesn't sound interesting, but I got $10,000 to write it.

The American Management Association published the book and this man was a consultant.

He gave the book away to try to get clients And it worked very well for him because everybody has a brochure.

You know, this was way before the internet.

Everybody has a brochure, but who reads a brochure?

You look at the brochure, you're not, you're gonna throw

He got publicized in books, in magazines, in newspapers, as a result of having a book.

So the third guy who called me said that he was a franchisor.

And the dictionary didn't have the word franchisor.

So I said to him, his name was John Kinch.

And I said to him, what kind of business is it that you have?

And he said, it's cooperative direct mail advertising.

And first I told him, no, I couldn't write.

He said, you know, I franchise like McDonald's.

Okay, well, I knew I couldn't write about cooperative direct mail advertising.

Wait a minute, this is about franchising.

So I ran to the library to look up titles of books in the card catalog, which nobody seems to know how to do anymore, because again, we got the internet.

And it said, there was no book on franchising.

I called him up and I said I'll write your book it's going to be called Franchising the Inside Story.

He said go for it where do I send the money and I got 10000 dollars for that book And usually I would write these books and when I was done writing it and turned it in, that was it, I didn't do any more.

I walked onto the next book looking for my next $10,000.

But the franchising book never went away.

I could never walk away from it because media would call me and say, can we interview you about franchising?

International Franchise Association called me.

said, can we excerpt your book in our magazine?

Can you, I had so many offers from franchise companies.

So when I got my PhD in 1985, the university said, this is great.

We're gonna promote you to associate professor and we're gonna pay you $18,000 a year.

And woo, and I said, I'm sorry, I'm going to resign.

I'll come back to teach when I can afford a professor's salary.

I can't afford to do that because I was making $100,000 already.

She thought she was so proud of her son, the professor at Temple University.

I left it because we don't value education in America.

So, you know, they don't get paid anything.

So technically that book became like your ticket to the franchising industry in a way?

That was absolutely my ticket to franchising.

And the media made it possible for me because, frankly, I knew nothing about franchising.

I'd interview anybody who had anything to do with franchising, founders of companies, franchisees, lawyers, anybody who was involved in franchising, I would interview.

I wrote the book in less than 6 months' time.

And then the book was published about, I don't know, it took another 4 or 5 months till the book was published.

Then the publisher asked me to do radio interviews, much like this interview I'm doing with you, but it was all by telephone.

I would be in Philadelphia, but in Chicago, a radio station would interview me 1 morning.

And the next day, somebody from Chicago who heard that interview would say, hey, I need you, can you write this?

But the book, the media said I was the world authority on franchising, I was not.

All I did was spend 6 months interviewing 100 people and writing a book.

And in the media's eyes, that made me the expert.

Well, thank God it did, because over the years I got better and better and better, I did own franchise companies.

I became the president of a big major franchise brand.

I went back to the university where I love being at a university.

So, so, so technically you never, you never became like a franchisee.

I owned a franchise of that brand in Dallas, Texas.

And I made a lot of money from that, but I had a partner doing all the work.

Then Home Visitors of America, We Buy Ugly Houses, asked me to join their board of directors.

I was on the Dwyer Group board of directors.

It's now known as Neighborly, 1 of the biggest conglomerates in franchising, 30 some brands.

So I was on the Dwyer Group board, I was on the Homevestors board.

While I was on the board at Homevestors, the founder got ill and died very quickly.

In the process while he was dying, He and his family said, we want you to succeed me as the president and CEO of We Buy Ugly Houses.

I'm 1 of the few people, you don't know too many people who have been a supplier to franchise companies, working in a support area, a franchisee and a franchisor.

Wow, so you've been, So technically you play all the bases.

See all Mister Franquicias Podcast transcripts on Youtube

EP. 40: Dr John Hayes, Chair Titus Center for Franchising