In 2016 I was fixing my plate at lunch of our Annual Franchise Reunion when a seasoned franchisee walked up and said something I wasn’t expecting.

“You know, people want to be part of a community.”

That was it. No long speech. No formal feedback session. Just one sentence from someone who had been in the trenches with us long enough to see what I was missing.

I had been so focused on making each franchisee individually successful that I’d overlooked what made this worth doing at all…the fact that we were building something together.

As a franchisor, you get caught up.

✔ Operations
✔ Marketing
✔ Franchisee performance
✔ The Grind of making the model work

All of it necessary. None of it the whole story.

That one sentence stopped me. It changed how I lead. It changed what I pay attention to. It eventually changed the entire direction of how I think about business and purpose.

I’ve been building 360clean since 2005. That moment in 2016 is when I started understanding what I was actually building.

Community isn’t a feature of a good franchise system. It’s the foundation.

And I almost missed it entirely.