Why He Turned Down a $1 Million Job Offer to Start a Franchise

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Key Takeaways

- Aaron Harper walked away from a $1 million-a-year VP role at Belfor Franchise Group to build his own franchise system instead.

- He used a “franchise through acquisition” model to turn 35-year-old Rolling Suds into a franchisor.

- From January 2023 to about three years later, Rolling Suds has scaled from one location to 356 territories across 37 states and $22 million in systemwide revenue.

Aaron Harper sent the email that blew up his career on an ordinary weekday afternoon. His boss at Belfor Franchise Group had asked for a project update, and Harper, moving fast as usual, fired off a reply without checking which inbox he was in.

It turns out, he sent the email from his account at Franchise Overdrive, the single-member LLC he had quietly formed to go out on his own. He had already started hunting for a lucrative business to franchise.

“What’s Franchise Overdrive?” his boss asked in front of other executives on a call. Moments later, his boss asked the question that made it all real: “Aaron, do we need to have a meeting after this?”

Harper said yes. He came clean and told his boss that he was exploring a venture of his own. His boss was supportive, saying that he would rather Harper start a company than go work for the competition.

Still, Belfor wasn’t ready to let Harper go without a fight. Shortly after, Harper turned down the kind of offer most corporate climbers dream about: a vice president role at Belfor with on-target earnings of around $860,000 a year and a clear path to seven figures after bonuses. He wanted to build his own franchise system instead.

“Even if I stayed at that company and made a million bucks a year, I knew that I would’ve had to basically be more reactive in hiring and recruiting and building the systems than I would want to be,” Harper tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “I turned the job down because I had an incredible sense of purpose.”

Harper had a “great idea” — to acquire a local business by having them come on as an investor in a newly created entity. He didn’t want to buy the operating business in the traditional sense. Instead, he wanted to engineer what he calls “franchise through acquisition.” Rather than pay a premium for the local company and then still need millions of dollars more to build out their franchise system, he aimed to create a new franchise entity, raise capital for that entity and bring the founders in as minority equity partners. The founders kept ownership of their original power washing operation.

“All of the capital that I invest is gonna go into supporting franchisees and building the franchise system,” he explains. “The founders get to now have ownership in two companies.”

Aaron Harper. Credit: Rolling Suds

Engineering a franchise through acquisition

Instead of taking the promotion, Harper bet on a different playbook. He began systematically evaluating service businesses he could turn into franchises, about 23 different industries across the country. He looked at everything from roofing to plumbing, exploring industries like solar, tree care and insulation. He wasn’t looking for a trendy startup; he was looking for an overlooked workhorse that could be professionalized and scaled.

He eventually found it in a 35-year-old power washing company in suburban Pennsylvania called Rolling Suds, a family business started in 1990 with strong unit economics and no national competitor in its category. “I knew I could replicate that company in every market after I dug into the power washing industry as a whole,” he says. “It was largely made up of mom and pop operators with no defined national player in the industry.”

Harper put $155,000 of his own money into the deal and raised additional capital from six other investors, including former International Franchise Association chair David Barr and Fishman PR founder Brad Fishman. He acquired the brand in January 2023, launched the first franchisee in June 2023 and then stepped on the gas. Within three years, as CEO, he grew Rolling Suds from a single-location power washing business to 356 territories across 37 states, with about 100 franchise owners and $22 million in systemwide revenue.

How he grew the company

That kind of hypergrowth didn’t happen by accident. Harper spent six to nine months before the first franchise launch quietly building the infrastructure franchising requires: suppliers, call centers, accounting partners, marketing vendors and outbound call centers. “The franchisees who sign up are gonna say, ‘Who’s gonna answer the phones? Where are my leads gonna come from? How am I gonna find employees?’” he says. “If you, as a franchisor, don’t have the answers to every single one of those questions, it’s gonna be very difficult to award franchises.”

Once the foundation was in place, he moved into a sprint that blurred the boundaries between work and life. His daily schedule stacked one demanding job on top of another: “I woul