While real estate investors often aim for a 12-16% IRR, successful franchisees target returns north of 25%. This superior cash-on-cash return, separate from the final enterprise value at sale, highlights the model's potential for rapid wealth creation compared to other asset classes.

The margins of a single restaurant are too thin to justify the operational complexity and stress. Profitability and a sustainable business model emerge only when you scale to multiple locations, allowing you to amortize fixed costs and achieve operational efficiencies.

Coca-Cola gave away bottling rights for free in a perpetual contract. This seemingly terrible deal offloaded capital expenditure and operational complexity, enabling rapid, asset-light scaling through a franchised network of local entrepreneurs who built the distribution system.

Coca-Cola's relationship with McDonald's became a powerful symbiotic partnership. Coke helped McDonald's expand globally by providing office space and local relationships. In return, Coke received a massive, loyal sales channel with preferential treatment, demonstrating how deep partnerships create value far beyond simple transactions.

Franchising has evolved beyond a mom-and-pop model into a sophisticated asset class. Private equity firms and former investment bankers are now actively acquiring and rolling up large franchise portfolios, signaling a shift towards treating them as major institutional investments.

The creators of the McDonald's system were content with their single, successful location. Their desire for a peaceful life and avoidance of the "problems" associated with scaling prevented them from capitalizing on their own invention, creating the opportunity for an ambitious operator like Ray Kroc to step in.

The Filet-O-Fish, Big Mac, and Egg McMuffin were all created by local operators solving specific customer problems in their markets. This demonstrates the immense power of a decentralized innovation model where the best ideas flow from the frontline, not just from the top down.

The best business for investment isn't the single world-class location, but the one with a systematized, repeatable model. True reinvestment potential lies in the ability to replicate excellence at scale, not just achieve it once.

The scale of wealth creation in franchising is vastly underestimated. A surprising statistic reveals that the franchise business model has produced more millionaires than the total number of players who have ever participated in the NFL, highlighting its power as a consistent, repeatable path to wealth.