Buying Into A Franchise System PE Wants To Own Next

The Setup Alicia Miller was in her early 40s, working a corporate job that kept her on planes, with a toddler at home. The math on another decade of that life did not work. She wanted ownership, control over her calendar, and equity that compounded for her instead of a stock plan she did not control. She arrived at the acquisition thesis on her own. No search fund community, no Stanford GSB primer, no Acquiring Minds podcast to binge. She reasoned that buying a business with existing customers, staff, and cash flow beat starting from zero. Inside that frame, she went a step further: a franchise system would give her an operating playbook, a brand, and a network of peers to learn from. The risk profile fit a first-time operator with a young family better than a greenfield startup. The Deal In 2013 she stepped into Sylvan Learning, the tutoring franchise. She did not buy one unit and call it a career. She assembled a portfolio, ultimately 12 locations. Multi-unit from the start is the meaningful choice here. One location is a job. A portfolio is a platform: shared back office, shared marketing spend, shared hiring pipeline, and an asset a strategic or financial buyer can actually underwrite on exit. Specific purchase price and capital structure were not disclosed in the interview. What is disclosed is the shape of the bet: education services, recurring customer relationships, a franchise brand with national recognition, and a fragmented local operator base where a consolidator could add value. Operating Moves Miller improved and grew the portfolio before selling. The public record of the moves is thin, but the archetype is familiar to anyone who has run multi-unit consumer services: - Standardize the operating motion across locations so one center's best practice becomes the portfolio's baseline. - Centralize what should be centralized (marketing, scheduling systems, hiring, finance) and leave instruction quality local. - Build a bench of center directors who can run a location without the owner on site. - Treat the portfolio as a single P&L with location-level scorecards, not 12 separate businesses. The quiet result: a portfolio clean enough to diligence and big enough to matter to a buyer. Where They Are Now Miller sold the portfolio a few years after acquisition. Post-exit she did not retire into advisory fog. She went deeper into the structural story she had lived through, which is private equity's arrival inside franchising. She now writes and advises on the intersection, and published Big Money in Franchising, a book on how PE capital is reshaping franchise systems at both the franchisor and the multi-unit franchisee level. Operating Lessons - Pick a franchise system where PE is already active or clearly will be. Your exit multiple is set by who is buying, and PE-backed consolidators pay more for clean multi-unit platforms than individual operators do. - Buy multi-unit on day one if you can, or buy with a credible path to multi-unit. A single location is a job with...