Starting a Preservan Franchise 1 year Later

In June of 2023. I bought a Preservan franchise right here in Orlando. A lot of folks scratched their head asking me why I would buy a wood rot franchise when I already owned a business that does window restoration (which is essentially wood rot repair with the addition of glazing and painting).

It’s a fair question. And when my first post about Preservan went live last year announcing it I was happy to answer folks. There were a couple reasons why I bought the franchise and outlined them in the earlier post in more depth but I figured I’d mention them here too.

1. Start-up Head Start – I didn’t have to do all the legwork creating a website, logo, branding, business listings, etc. It’s a lot of work getting a business setup and the franchisor does so much of the heavy lifting when you buy a franchise.
2. Existing Processes – They had already developed the systems and process that operate the business. I didn’t have to start over from scratch and figure out who to market to (or how to market), how to setup the vehicles, what tools, we’d need, etc. So many things were answered for me.
3. Built-in Mentor – Being a franchisee I get to ask someone with years more experience in my new business their thoughts on how to tackle unique challenges I encounter. People spend thousands of dollars a year to have a mentor like this.

Owning a Preservan Franchise

So I made the jump and bought in. What has the first year been like running a Preservan franchise? It has been eye-opening to say the least. Being that the only home service business I owned previously was a window restoration business I didn’t have a ton of reference points as to what kind of metrics I should expect, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I’ll discuss both the financials and the business itself in the sections below so you can get a sense of how things have been. If you think you might be interested in taking the plunge like I did, fill out a Preservan franchise information request and tell them you heard it from me. If you do decide to become a Preservan franchisee and tell them I referred you, I do receive a commission at no expense to you. Just like anything, I only recommend things I believe in whole-heartedly not because I’m being paid.

Business Structure

I bought the franchise with a 50/50 partner so this is not mine alone. We decided that we wanted to own the franchise because it dovetailed nicely with my window restoration business, but we didn’t want to operate it daily.

For that we hired a Territory Manager, and she runs the entire business for us. We have weekly meetings with her to give her guidance and check metrics to make sure we are on target, but outside of about 3-4 hrs per week we are focused on our other businesses while she does the heavy lifting for us at Preservan Orlando.

Our Territory Manager does sales calls, hires technicians, orders materials, deals with insurance, vehicles, invoicing, scheduling, and everything else necessary to run the business.

At the time of this writing we currently have two full time technicians. These guys are awesome and work their tails off for the company doing rot repair in the challenging Florida weather. One joined us in July 2023 and the other started part time in April of 2024 and became full time in May of that year. They each have a branded Kia Sol (as does our Territory Manager) that is their mobile office with everything they need to get the job done.

Financials

I’m going to be pretty transparent here so you can really understand the financial aspects of our franchise. Every franchise will be different. Different parts of the country will have different results. Different structures will have different results too. There are a lot of variables, but here is how our franchise has done in its first 12 months.

Gross Revenues	$316,606
Cost of Goods Sold	$107,312
Gross Profit	$209,294
Expenses	$183,953
Net Profit	$25,341

This overview includes all the initial startup expenses of tools, vehicle wraps, and all the other big purchases that come with starting business. It does not include the initial purchase price of our franchise territory or the monthly finance payments on the three vehicles, though it does include the interest on the vehicle loans.

I can say for a first year I’m pretty pleased. I certainly haven’t made my initial investment back yet. Far from it, but we knew that getting through this first year paying a full-time Territory Manager it would take us longer to reach a point where we, as the owners, could begin taking home any proceeds from the business. To be clear, we have yet to take any money home from the business at this point.

Turning a net profit of about 8% was exciting for such a small business to me, but the number that excited me the most was the gross profit. At Preservan Orlando we managed to achieve a gross profit of 66%! That is in the profitability range of software companies and I have never heard of a gross profit in that range for a construction or home service business.

As a reference, Austin Historical works hard to realize a 35% gross profit and doesn’t always achieve that. The exciting thing about a gross profit this high is the fact that our overhead expenses won’t be increasing dramatically with more revenues which means there is a great opportunity for higher net profit if we can keep growing.

What We Did Wrong

With the first year under our belts I am very excited about what we can accomplish in year two and here’s why. We have learned some valuable lessons this year and I want to share those with you so you can understand.

Advertise Sooner

The first six months we did very little advertising. I really didn’t have any experience in running online advertising. I’m good with the grass roots advertising (yard signs, workshop, emails, door knocking, etc.), but Ty (Preservan’s founder) kept trying to convince me to start running paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram. I was hesitant and our sales showed it.

When finally started advertising at a rate of about $3,500 per month we saw results in about 45 days. The leads started pouring in and we got busy! At this point we currently get around 100 leads a month from online advertising which is the only way we have reached our revenues so far. Without this our leads would be 10-15 per month.

Lesson learned. If you start a business or buy a franchise, start advertising early and often to get people in the door. The best part is the franchisor handles all the advertising and content for us. We just pay for the costs of ads and they do all the production and monitoring.

Ticket Price vs # of Jobs

In year two we can’t just focus on doing more jobs. We should make sure we are estimating jobs properly based on how long they actually take. That means we need to focus not just on how many jobs we can get approved and how many we can produce. We also can increase our sales and profitability with increasing our price per job. Price fairly so you can get the job done under budget and you can do fewer jobs more profitably.

Final Thoughts

I’m passionate about the work we do. I love saving old things and saving people money by giving them the option to repair versus always running out and replacing things. That mission resonates with me at Preservan and at my other companies as well.

I also invested a significant amount of money in this business and I expect that it should turn a profit to support my growing family. Personally, I don’t feel that those two are in conflict with each other, though I know many folks will feel otherwise.

A profitable business with a mission that rings true to you is what we as business owners should all be reaching for, right? As the saying goes, “No margin, no mission.”

I hope this peak under the hood will give you an idea of what it’s been like owning a Preservan franchise. Like I said earlier, if there is even an inkling that this might be for you reach out to Preservan for more info and see what it would be like to own your own business (and tell them Scott sent you!).

With the advent of AI and the constant march of technology a lot of jobs are going away, but home repair is going to continue to grow because for the foreseeable future these kinds of services will still need people on the ground to take care of our aging housing stock.

Is owning a Preservan franchise for you? I don’t know, but if you still have questions for me you can always connect with me to ask a little more here.