Corey Robinson Ran Up 12 Batteries Plus Stores in Under Two Years

The Setup Corey Robinson spent years assembling a 140-door rental real estate portfolio and discovered the hard truth most landlords eventually confront. The cashflow per door was too thin to replace a W-2. Appreciation is not groceries. A mastermind group pointed him at operating businesses, where cash yields are measured in tens of points rather than low single digits, and he started hunting. He landed on franchise buying. The appeal was concrete. A proven unit economic model, a franchisor-supplied playbook, a known brand at the curb, and a national network of existing owners willing to sell. For a first-time operator coming out of real estate, that scaffolding collapses the learning curve. The Deal In November 2022, Corey bought a 4-location portfolio of Batteries Plus stores. Batteries Plus is a specialty retail franchise that sells batteries, bulbs, and device repair to both walk-in retail customers and a commercial B2B book. Multi-unit franchise portfolios trade with real operating leverage already baked in. Shared management, shared back office, shared vendor terms. Specific purchase price and financing structure were not disclosed in the episode. What was disclosed is the growth trajectory. He moved from 4 units to 12 units in less than two years, with 2 more locations under LOI at the time of recording. That is programmatic acquisition inside a single franchise system, essentially running a mini roll-up where every target is pre-qualified by the franchisor. Operating Moves - Treated franchise M&A as the growth engine rather than same-store sales heroics. When the unit model works, adding units compounds faster than squeezing any single box. - Used franchisor relationships to source deals. Inside a franchise system, the franchisor knows which owners are tired, which territories are coming up, and which transfers will get approved. - Built a small corporate overhead that could absorb new stores without re-staffing each acquisition. That is where the EBITDA leverage lives in a retail roll-up. - Ran the P&L toward a double-digit EBITDA margin. ~$10M revenue and $1M+ EBITDA across 12 units works out to roughly $80-85K EBITDA per store, modest per unit but meaningful in aggregate. A Second Bet That Did Not Work Alongside the franchise roll-up, Corey bought an independent ~$4M HVAC and plumbing business. He describes it as not performing. Two lessons sit inside that one line. First, operating bandwidth is finite; running a fast-growing retail roll-up and a home services platform at the same time is two full-time CEO jobs. Second, the scaffolding that makes franchise buying forgiving (brand, playbook, peer network) is absent in an independent acquisition, and a buyer who leaned on that scaffolding for his first deal loses his training wheels on the second. Operating Lessons - Franchise roll-ups compress the learning curve. If you are a first-time operator with capital and organizational skill but no industry reps, a multi-unit franchise purchase is a legitimate on-ramp. - Programmatic M&A inside one system beats scattered bets. Every new store plugs into the same systems, same vendors, same reporting. - Rapid growth has...