Today we’d like to introduce you to John Frank.
Thanks for sharing your story with us John. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
After graduating from the University of Illinois in May 2000, I spent the first 13 years of my career on Wall Street analyzing and managing hundreds (if not thousands) of investments, with the vast majority of those investments being in junk bonds and distressed debt. Those experiences taught me a ton about how to look at businesses/investments from a holistic perspective, meaning not just looking at existing financial metrics, but also relative value and what qualitative factors would suggest about the ability of that investment to perform and improve over time.
In April of 2013, I left Wall Street, my wife and I sold our home to downsize, and I accepted a position as the COO/CFO of our church. The church was just over a year old at the time, had been growing very rapidly, and needed someone that could shoulder building out the financial and operational infrastructure required to thrive for a long time. My wife and I felt called to help and we happily made the commitment.
While working for the church, I began having business owners ask me to help them run their businesses strategically, financially and operationally a few days per month, which was fun, exciting, and financially rewarding. I continued to perform work as side projects before I had the epiphany one day that I was essentially helping the church AND the other businesses do the same thing. That realization led to the formation of Third Road Management.
Although formed legally in late 2015, I have only spent the last 18 months working on Third Road Management full time. We exist to provide an alternative route where business owners are, and where they want to be. We plan to help 1,000 businesses bridge the gap between their present reality and preferred future by 2025.
In terms of industry, we’re neutral. We tend to focus on the aspects that connect all businesses (strategy, accounting, finance, marketing, human resources, IT, processes, purchasing, etc.) than the ones that distinguish them. The only industries we fairly stay away from are industries that require an exceptional amount of tribal knowledge to fully understand, such as hospitals. Our clients include non-profits, a commercial printer, a temporary fencing company, a specialty chemicals manufacturer, an interior design firm, a real estate development company, a commercial paving company, a law firm, a venture capital firm, a family office and a specialty spirits producer, among others. Can’t get much more diverse than that group!
Our team is the glue that makes everything possible. They are wise, fun and trustworthy, and I am incredibly grateful for everything they do for our clients.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I don’t think that any businesses, new or mature, are immune to challenges. In fact, our company email tagline is “Every business has problems. We help leaders solve them.”
The biggest challenge that we’ve faced thus far is scaling the business without seeking outside capital. While additional capital would be helpful in terms of being able to bring on more full-time staff and invest more in business development, I haven’t been interested in diluting equity or answering to outside investors. We’ve grown significantly, but it has all been via word of mouth. In a way, that is rewarding though because it means that our clients are experiencing excess value in the services that we are providing.
Third Road Management – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Third Road Management partners with business owners in bringing top-tier strategic and operational talent to the lower middle market. Whereas a single lower middle market business may not be able to attract that type of talent without a significant salary and/or granting an equity stake, we’re able to share our consultants across multiple businesses, minimizing the cost to each company while rewarding our consultants both financially and intellectually. Our team is full of individuals that thrive off working with multiple organizations.
We’re differentiated from our competition in a few ways. First, there are many fractional CFO alternatives our there, and we are not one of them. We are more interested in interpreting the financial information and using it to effectuate growth in a strategic way than solely producing the information. In other words, we’re more interested in what the numbers mean and how to use them than what the numbers are. In this sense, we are a more a fractional COO organization. Secondarily, we focus on organizations with $1 million to $10 million of earnings, so we fly under the radar of larger consulting firms. Lastly, we focus on long-term relationships with business owners versus short-term projects or temporary staffing. While we may work on a short-term project with a new client, the goal of that engagement is to provide enough value in that time to them that they desire to continue to work with us every month for the foreseeable future.
As a company, I’m most proud of the fact that all of our growth to date has been via referral by existing clients and friends. That means that we are treating people right and providing enough value for those clients to want to pass that news along to others.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, right? I’ve found that feeling success is the result of creating winnable strategies consisting of many small steps that collectively result in solving a problem and executing on those strategies. There are many tools that help with strategic execution. Personally, I really enjoy the 4 Disciplines of Execution methodology from FranklinCovey that which involves distilling down the many projects that you can possibly work on to the very few that are most important right now and putting the rest of the projects to the side until later. Narrower focus helps deepen the impact, and I’ve found this methodology helpful in achieving success.
On the personal side, I think success is relative to every person. As long as people can feel the intrinsic satisfaction of knowing they did their best, that’s enough.
Contact Info:
- Address: 528 Pennsylvania Avenue
#692
Glen Ellyn, IL 60138 - Website: www.thirdroadmgmt.com
- Email: info@thirdroadmgmt.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thirdroadmanagement/?ref=bookmarks
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/third-road-management-llc/
Image Credit:
Nathan Wiens
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