Grease Monkey Franchisee Starts Anew In His Home Town

Franchising.com:

Bill Dalton owned 8 Grease Monkey franchises in the Seattle metro area. Today he owns 1 - a 5-month-old, state-of-the-art facility in his home of Montgomery, Texas.

Dalton, who lives in Montgomery, had purchased 8 Grease Monkeys in Seattle as an investment, added 1 more, and ran them for about 4 and a half years before selling them. He also owned a Grease Monkey franchise territory in Arizona, but traded that for the territory he now has in Montgomery County.

Yes, he was commuting 2,500 miles to Seattle, once a month for a week at a time for those 4 and a half years. During his week in Seattle, he would review the prior month’s sales, visit all the stores, meet with all the managers, and set criteria for the upcoming month. Once back in Texas, he left the operations to his managers, but he was in touch with them every day.

The Seattle units, at about 10 years old, were relatively mature, with a solid cash flow when he bought them. ‘They were fine, but I’d reached the point where I’d taken them to the level I could without moving to Seattle,’ he says. He closed one in 2005, sold another in 2006, and sold the remaining 6 in 2007.