Franchise Anonymous 21+22: Streamlined kitchens or trampoline parks?

Happy Sunday, folks. 

As a franchise consultant, I hear pitches from hundreds of different franchise concepts every year. 

I’m taking the most interesting ones, and telling you: 

• What sets them apart

• One potential weakness

• Who the ideal buyer is

My promise: you’ll learn something about franchising every time. 

Today’s mystery franchises: a streamlined kitchen remodeling business, and an indoor trampoline park.

The business: Kitchen remodels made simple

Most kitchen remodel businesses feel like a Craigslist gamble: unreliable timelines, scattered communication, and a shrug emoji for service. This one’s different. It’s a design-to-install model focused only on cabinets and countertops, with tech, systems, and support baked in.

What they do differently

• Streamlined focus. No full gut jobs here. They’ve narrowed the scope to just cabinets and counters, which makes training easier, timelines faster, and customer expectations clear.

• Tech-powered sales. The franchise uses proprietary tools and even AI-assisted kitchen design. This isn’t your uncle’s cabinet shop. It’s sleek, efficient, and repeatable.

• Leads delivered to your inbox. Corporate doesn’t just give you branding. They help generate appointments with homeowners, designers, and contractors, and even follow up with people pulling remodel permits in your area.

• 🚩Potential weakness: You need a showroom. Unlike some home service brands, this one requires a retail footprint. That means more upfront effort (and cost) to get open, though their setup support is solid.

The takeaway:

This is a great fit for someone who likes operations and team leadership but doesn’t want to swing a hammer. You don’t need construction experience. Just the ability to follow a process, manage subs, and deliver a high-touch client experience. High-ticket, high-margin, and easy to scale.

Interested? Let’s talk kitchen remodels.

The business: Indoor trampoline parks

Family entertainment centers are usually chaotic, dated, or both. This one’s been around for 20 years and somehow still feels like a juggernaut. Think bounce houses on steroids, with structure, brand power, and seven revenue streams.

What they do differently

• Membership model with real traction. Most play spaces rely on birthday parties and weekend visits. These guys built a gym-style monthly membership that accounts for nearly 40% of total revenue. That kind of recurring income is rare in this category, and massively helpful for smoothing out the seasonality.

• Seven different revenue streams. Birthday parties and open jump hours are the obvious moneymakers, but they also run summer camps, events, memberships, merchandise (including an absurd number of branded socks), and private rentals. It’s a machine… assuming you know how to run it.

• Serious scale, serious support. Over 250 parks, 40M+ guests annually, and they claim more foot traffic than the NBA. Translation: you’re not on your own. This is a corporate-backed, operations-heavy model with playbooks for everything.

• 🚩Potential weakness: It’s a beast to launch. You’re not flipping a light switch here. Start-up costs can stretch to $5M, and you’re managing 25,000+ square feet of real estate with a full-time staff. You’ll have to spend money to make money, so this is not for the faint of heart.

The takeaway:

This one’s built for serious operators. You’ll need capital, comfort with managing a big team, and ideally some background in events, hospitality, or multi-unit retail. But for the right buyer, it’s a defensible, high-traffic business with room to grow. Semi-absentee is possible, but don’t expect it to run on autopilot.

Interested? Let’s talk trampoline parks.

If these aren’t doing it for you, I work with hundreds of other brands. Get in touch and we can find something that scratches the itch.

Thanks for reading!

Connor

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