phones have evolved. so isn't it time our networks did too? introducing america's largest, most reliable 4g lte combined with the most wifi hotspots. it's a new kind of network. xfinity mobile. . good morning. coming up op msnbc's your business, i visit the international franchise show where food trucks like these are becoming big business. we head to manassas, virginia with a company is cashing in on this business opportunity by providing food truck owners with everything they need. we meet two companies to find out how they navigate mixing love with business and we talk to the chairwoman of international franchise association about what you need to know if you want to franchise your company. grow fast, work smarter, coming up next on "your business."

"your business" is sponsored by -- hi, everyone. welcome to "your business." how many of you love a good food truck? the meals have definitely come a long way. you no longer have to settle for hot dogs or pretzels. with hungry customers all lined up, two virginia owners have made food trucks their lives. and they started a company eto help others. many food truck owners are now roll in the dough. >> your entire approach to growth is problem solving. growth is painful and uncomfortable. eduardo and jason know it's scary to expand your company. >> when you start a business

you're taking a huge risk. everything we've done has been in response to trying to solve a problem for our customer. >> the owners of east coast mobile business launch pad have so focused on the success of their clients that they've made business decisions designed to support them. >> our intent is to make it easier to run a food truck so that more people can get into the business. and two, now we're focusing on helping people. >> what started as a company that only customized food trucks in 2007 has transformed into a one stop shop that keeps these restaurants on wheels rolling around washington, d.c., maryland and virginia. >> food trucks are now their own attraction. we're firm believers that you don't need to brick and mortar to make money. it's not a location based business, which means that your rent is cheap. and the second thing is, no seating. >> eduardo started east coast after buying his first food

truck in texas. it was an awful experience. and he didn't want anyone else suffering the setback he did. >> i brought it to virginia, had to rebuild it so that i wouldn't die in it. and i was like, i can't be the only person with this problem. if this guy can build nofood trucks, i can build food truck zb. >> both men love food and have worked in many kitchens. it's that expertise that they share with customers buying their first, second and third trucks. >> you have to understand what it takes to put together a dish in order to understand what equipment you need to put that together and in which order it needs to be laid out in order to make it as efficient as possible. >> we know how to value the rusk and assess the risk. >> east coast transformed the food truck industry by offering more and mores is services. the expansion was because of listening to their customers and

needs. >> we're set up to serve the widest possible range of people that want to start a food truck and our services are -- you can take them or leave them. >> nobody offers these services. nobody. >> east coast takes its customers through every step of the process. it now sources trucks, customizes the kitchen were orders equipment, arrangines branding and advises on business structuring and offer advice on what food to sell. >> make sure that the menu makes sense and that eve eaten something similar before. >> there's now a second location in washington, d.c. where operates can have trucks checked out as part of a service deal. the pair financed some of the equipment they've built by using their own profits. >> most people can't come up with $60,000 or $70,000. we were seeing people with good concepts and would be successful if they had the financing. we then had to figure out how to get the sale and if we can

bridge the gap to getting a completed truck, we know they're going to pay us back. the financing then helps us to develop a revenue stream where we've good guaranteed money coming in. >> now they have so many customers on the road locally, nationally and globally, eduardo and jason want to make sure they can keep trucking. >> we want our customeres to succeed. >> many customers don't know it, but eduardo and jason have food trucks of their own. >> one of the things that makes us a successful business is we're really transparent and honest with people. >> it allows them to stay on top of trends and better understand the evolving needs of mobile business owners. >> when i open my food truck, none of that was available. and i made all of the mistakes, burned all kinds of money on all of the wrong things because you

tonig don't know which is the right problem to solve. >> people trust they're in the right hands, questions answered' getting welcome advice. >> he helps translate it down into building a truck. >> all of the work doesn't pale in comparison to their future goals. >> our big picture growth plan is to replicate the auto facility, having service centers in major urban areas around the country where we sell food truck builds, demo them and serve as the local food truck fleet. >> eduardo and jason have made this their mission. they've come up with ways to help their customers succeed and they thoroughly enjoy being by their side every step of the way. >> we've got their back. that they're not alone in starting the business. we want our customers to feel like we're their partner in their endeavor.

>> food as we just saw is a real passion for a lot of people. and that love spawns many businesses. but what happens when you take your love for food and business and mix it with your love for your partner. nbc chenille jones talks to two entrepreneurial couples to find out. >> this couple has been flipping over flapjacks long before they said i do. >> pancakes are an american staple. everyone has eat an pancake in their lifetime. we wanted to do something that relied on everyone's personal experiences with pancakes. we started this business right out of college, we got married a couple of years ago. >> six years ago, 20-somethings fresh out of college grid ld up their all natural all american organic pancake and waffle mix, birch benders. >> the initial idea came about when i woke up one morning, i was really hungry and wanted

pancakes but didn't want to go through the hassle of making pan takes. >> based in denver, the husband and wife due so said it took 99 taste tests to settle on their one step recipes. only requiring water. >> we wanted to make the best possible pancake experience requiring the least amount of work. >> there wasn't anything like that and i truly fundamentally from the bottom of my heart believed it would work. but it took a while. >> we would go to the stores and do two a day demos every day for a year. >> the concept paid off, taking a bite out of an industry that serves un2p 200 million america a year. >> we have sweet potato, pumpkin spice, original, buttermilk. >> sold at 6,000 frogroceries a

big box retailers across the country. >> pillow talk is a lot of pancake talk. >> talking of mixing business and pleasure, there's plenty of sweet talk between this california couple. four years ago josh and rosie fit their jobs in toys and tech and started a grown up candy boutique. >> the story has followed our love story. josh took me to see willie wonka and the chocolate factory. it seems obviously candy for grown ups, it hasn't been done before. >> the company sells millions of pounds of candy a year. >> we thought it was going to be a hobby and the response is amazing. i think people really got it. >> last summer sugissuing sugar

blast. >> i got to do the more boring things. >> he's good at the boring stuff. >> i think we're always on a constant sugar high. that helps our relationship. >> and that has translated squarely into success. >> we know how lucky we are that we get to spend every day together, we get to travel, taste and experiment new candies. it's a pretty amazing experience. >> awww. >> we're happy today to have with us an incredibly successful entrepreneur, a pillar of the business company. his rags to riches biography is featured in a documentary. john paul, thank you so much more joining us today.

>> my pleasure. you've got a great station and you're super cool. >> i wish we could talk with you the whole day but you've been so successful in yuour life. i know you started, you were homeless and things were hard. but i would love to hear from someone who is so successful about the time when you felt i need to give this all up. did that ever happen to you. was it ever so hard that you thought i can't do it. >> so many times i was so down i would look up and see an ant. >> we only started for 700 dollars. every day for two years we should have gone bankrupt. it was hand to mouth. very difficult. why are we doing this. i can't pay the bills, i can't sleep at night. that happened many times. people are saying no. i can't get this from this person. a lot of times. but deep inside it was, i know what we have is the greatest product for hair, i know if i

keep on talking about it to enough people and they try it, they're going to reorder it. after two years, a big movement for us, after two years we were able to pay our bills on time. not off but on time. now since that time are there ups and downs, of course there were. but what you've got to do is realize that don't take your mind off of the goal. obstacles are things we'll always see but you put your mind on the goal and go like a river, go around the problems. because many times people pay attention to the trivia many. but then you learn after a while, pay attention to the vital few. not the trivial many. >> duping you were a go getter, an optimist and ambitious or is there something that you did in the middle of the night when you were up at 2:00 a.m. worried. >> it didn't help any. the bills were still there the

next day. that didn't help at all. after a couple of years i started writing before i went to bed challenges down. writing them down on a piece of paper. instead of thinking about them all night long like most people do, i put it in the bathroom. you get up in the morning, it's still there. i could read every problem i had. didn't have to think about it all the time. >> i believe in all of those little tips and tricks that you can do to help yourself get through the day. every successful entrepreneur i've interviewed have this same attitude which is i dreamed so big, ridiculously big. and when somebody didn't agree with me, instead of listening to them. i think that's where a lot of people get stuck. >> that's true. >> they think their dreams are too large so they don't let themselves believe in them. >> or our original dream is only if we can do $5 million a year

at paul mitchell we would make $250,000 each. we're set for life. we realized we could do much better and we learned how to be bigger and bigger. we thought we could do 100,000 case as year. little did we know we would get into the millions. and i know in the news here recently was that they had sold one particular tequila company, michael millman was involved in, george clooney. >> $700 million. >> a billion dollars it sold for. this they do 120 ca,000 cases a year. we have more money to give away and help the world with. >> you are a big fiphilanthropi. you're such an inspiring story. i e encourage everyone to watch the documentary and read the book. >> and i want people to remember that the american dream is alive and we business people can make it. keep your eye on the goal.

there's a lot of things along the way that will discourage you. as long as you know there's rejection coming, it doesn't hurt you as much. >> you are the example. homeless to think. thank you so much c. >> you're very welcome. thank you. it makes it aa lot harder to be a leader if you don't put focus on your own well-being. we have these high impact ways for business leaders to increase their productive tiff. one, get a good sleep. lack of sleep can reduce your focus and limit high brain functions. get 6 to 8 hours a night for peek performance. >> two, work on your eating habits. our food is our body's fuel. put bad stuff in, get bad stuff out. fatty foods take energy to break down and cause you to feel drained. three, get out and exercise. regular exercise can help you be

a better leader. exercise reduces stress, fights depression, improves confidence and boosts your creativity. four, make time to meditate. no matter how spiritual you are, you can improve your performance by taking some time to unplug, five to ten minutes reflecting a and keeping yourself grounded every day. and five, read voraciously. reading has a direct impact on your emotional awareness. read everything to stay balanced and well-informed. i recently stopped by the international franchise expoe in new york city where company were whoaing potential fan chiez e f. the ceo of health care staffing company bright star care with more than 300 locations

nationwide. she knows what she's talking about. we asked her to give us a nitty-gritty of what you need to do if you want to franchise your business. >> i think from a franchiser perspective, people need to know they have a successful business mod model. they've done it once, replicated it a second or third time to know that it wasn't just luck and making sure it's something that's needed by the consumer on a national scale, not a local or regional fad . and there are skill sets they have with their own schooling. >> what are the mistakes that people make. a lot of people say i have a great company, i want to franchise it and don't understand this is going to be hard work. >> i think there's a few. i think one most are not properly capitalized. like building a house, be done faster and cost less than it will actually.

that's one. the second is i think they really under estimate the skill sets of the franchisees coming in have and therefore what we need to provide in terms of training. for example we had really robust training programs for our franchisees in terms of operations, sales and clinical. multiple weeks. but we realized most of our franchisees have never looked at a profit and loss statement. they don't have finance skills. we had to teach our franchisees that. >> you need to put together back for training. >> exactly. one of two of my people go out to the location to refine the med mods l bel of having accesse and think team, i get to do that in the training process. >> do you think it's critical to have a company owned franchise. >> i think that's critical. i don't know how you train for something you haven't done.

>> before you franchise, was everything buttoned up? >> i think for us it was very buttoned. it was everyone written down. there's things that as you do the business for a few years you might assume it's known so i think you're kind of fine-tuning -- >> write everything down. >> you're fine-tuning to make sure everything is written down. that's critical. >> what's the biggest mistake that people make in getting franchisees. >> they're anxious to grow the brand and might not have the standards that they need. but there's multiple criteria and it gets better with more franchisees. they need to have a certain amount of money, a certain skill set whether they're going to be in an operations role or a sales roll, whatever that is going to look like. and then have they led people. in our organization, once a franchisee gets to a large scale, they may have direct and indirect employees of 400.

someone who hasn't managed white collar and blue collar labor when we're utilizing low wage employees for some of our offersings. we're going to need franchisees fng that have a skill set. so that's one. then i think as we grow in scale we've used profiling tools so we could see who made frayed franchisees and were had a ep. >> as you grow it's great to use data. thank you so much, elie. i really appreciate. congratulations on the growth of your company, of this organization. it's been great talking to you. >> thank you, my pleasure sneefr wun stick around because coming up on "your business" we talk to our brain trust about should you build an app for your company and if you do how do you get people to download it? should yor company and if you do how do you get people to download it? trust app for your company and if you do how do you get people to download it? should you build anr company and if you do how do you get people to download it? trust app for your company and if you do how do you get people to

download it? i kind of feel like it's a game changer. i wouldn't go that far. are you there? he's probably on mute. yeah... gary won't like it. why? because he's gary. (phone ringing) what? keep going! yeah... (laughs) (voice on phone) it's not millennial enough. there are a lot of ways to say no. thank you so much. thank you! so we're doing it. yes! start saying yes to your company's best ideas. let us help with money and know-how, so you can get business done. american express open. from selling enterprise software at a prototype level to being able to license it out at a large scale in a few years? >> so we want to take our software that's like in a prototype and we want to sell it and license it out to like larger companies and you can do this, this happens all the time. some advice for you, first of

all, in the world of business it's all about connections. you need to see who you are connected to. if you are going to be doing business with some larger software company go through your linked in connections, ask your friends, see if there is some type of referral, some type of human interaction that you can get. somebody that you know or that somebody knows because in business you have to trust these people and hope they are not going to steal your idea. filing for a patent or talking to a patent attorney to make sure that your intellectual property is pro ticketed, that is something you should absolutely do before you talk to somebody on the outside. and finally if you don't know anybody or if just you're really not sure go on to site like linked in, skerch for people in your industry that have the title of business development. business development people at corporations those are the people tasked with doing deals, development arrangements, partnerships, that's your first entryway into talking to somebody about the product that you want to sell or to license to them. when you are making big decisions for your company or the group that you're leading

you need a brain trust, people who can be really honest with and get their feedback. today we have chris meyers who is the co-founder and ceo of bode tree a financial services company which works with a million is it? >> about a million small businesses. >> congratulations on that. we have melinda nicki, how long ago did you start your company? >> two and a half years ago. >> you've grown so much. congratulations to you. >> thank you. >> baby to body and it's a platform for expecting and new moms. all right. you have an app, you have to get people to download things. i find when i talk to people it is nearly impossible to get people to download an app, they may love your company but to actually download an app is a lot. it is a big ask. so how do you get people to do it and should you have an app? >> well, there was a question we thought long and hard about but our users were asking for an app. i think moms and pregnant women and our target audience are app

orientated. they like to have the app on your home screen, open it up and do something. there's actually in stores as well. lots of people download but not everybody completes it. it's the install that's the most important thing. that first activation when they download it, they put it in their phone and then it's signing up, it's putting in their details and you are asking a lot from them to do that. so really -- you really have to sell the benefits early on so that they understand exactly what they're going to get by giving you that information. so it's that whole model of like i'm going to give you this information but here is what i'm going to give you in return. so you have to make sure that that is a good kind of transaction with them spending the time, taking the effort to do it and then also giving them back something, but making sure that the consumer understands exactly what they're going to get for that energy and effort that they put? >> thshe's absolutely right. due to that we went the opposite direction.

we don't have a mobile app. >> you just have a mobile site. >> we just have a mobile site. when we were thinking through all of those things that you talked about ultimately we realized there was too much there in our system because we're dealing with numbers and financial management to put into an actual phone app. and that's been kind of a tough choice because a lot of people say we really want an app, we really want to move in that direction but we have had to really hold the line and say, guys, it doesn't lend itself to that model. >> and you already have their attention, right? they already can open their browser. >> exactly. >> on their phone and get to your site which that's an easier ask than getting them to download an install your app. >> we have both. sorry, chris. we have both. we have nearly 600,000 people who have -- who signed up to get their e-mails with us, so they're getting that content and they're coming back to the site, to the mobile site and website, but we only have 25,000 on our app. which is really interesting. >> and --

>> well, actually the app users are very, very engaged. >> right. >> they are probably the most engaged because they have invested so much into, you know, down loading the app, installing it, it's taking up a little space on their phone, might be taking up their memory, so that's a big investment. so once you -- once you have them and you are delivering on that those people are your big advocates and that's what we found as well. those are the people that will go and tell their friends about us, that will use us every single day and we've got really good engagement from those people. >> we actually adopted more of a push model for people. so instead of saying, hey, you should download this app and here is how you can engage and get all that information we just said, look, we're going to push the relevant information to you directly to drive that engagement. >> got it. >> yeah. >> so in an e-mail. >> e-mail, text messages, that sort of thing. >> and when you are trying to make this decision between an app or a mobile site, do you feel like you can launch your app with an mvp as you would a

normal product or no because -- no? >> so i think it has to be -- mvp has to be kind of well thought through. >> right. >> i think it has to be a minimal valuable product. >> great. thank you. very good discussion. thanks both of you. >> thank you. what really helped us make the leap was we reduced our customer base from 230 down to 8 and we did this basically in year two, we went through what's called an 80/20 process and got rid of customers that were not profitable and freed up capacity. >> the biggest reason we've grown the last few months is the opening of our schengen office, having office to 850 million customers in china has allowed us to grow at over 200% in the past few months. >> a couple years into our business life we discovered that everything we're doing is vendor griffin and so everything is based on referrals, vendors, manufacturers and our customers

like things that are simple and reliable. we've been very fortunate that 6 6 62% of our business last year, the new contracts, was actually repeat business from existing customers. >> to grow our small business what we did was we tried to outsource people before we bring someone in because it's more flexible for us and as a business that has tight resources while you're grog that always seemed to be helpful. >> this week's your biz selfie comes from ed roth who owns stencil 1 in brooklyn, new york, it creates logos, stencil growthing and supplies. it is so fantastic to see these companies from around the country. send in your selfie to your business@msnbc.com. include your name, the name of your business and location and do not forget to use the

hashtag #yourbizselfie. thank you so much for joining us. we would love to hear from you. if you have anything to say, any questions, in i comments e-mail us at yourbusiness@msnbc.com. we put up all the segments from today's show plus a whole lot more for you. we look forward to seeing you next time. until then i'm j jchlj ramberg remember we make your business our business. thank you so much. thank you! so we're a go? yes! we got a yes! what does that mean for purchasing? purchase. let's do this. got it. book the flights! hai! si! si! ya! ya! ya! what does that mean for us? we can get stuff. what's it mean for shipping? ship the goods. you're a go!

you got the green light. that means go! oh, yeah. start saying yes to your company's best ideas. we're gonna hit our launch date! (scream) thank you! goodbye! let us help with money and know-how, so you can get business done. american express open. good morning and welcome to "politics nation." this week a series of no convictions in fatal shootings of black men reignited outrage over police brutality. i have strong opinions on the matter and we will get to that later in the show. but first republicans unveiled their healthcare bill this week and it seems that it is already on life support. as some republicans are not in