66 Business View - January 2015
people who’ve at least had experience operating a
business, and who arrive with sales skills.
The combination of leadership acumen and corporate
nimbleness yields benefits, he said.
“If they’re run a business or been a general manager
of a franchise location, those are the people we find
that have the highest degree of success,” Harris said.
“We believe that the model that we have is that we’re
very agile. We have the resources to do whatever we
need to do, and some other people can do the same
things, but it just takes them a much longer time to
deploy it, to alter it, to change it.
“We’re also very simple. The offering that we have is
very bite-sized, very light and very easy for them to un-
derstand. We’ve put a ton of money into the technol-
ogy to make it where it’s very easy for them to do their
business. And we put a lot of brilliant people behind
that. The amount of experience that we went out and
invested in, those are the differentiators we have.
“My goal was to see that our clients would get results,
but their workload was lighter.”
Company revenue has spiked from $38.6 million in
2010 to $104.8 million in 2013, a 171-percent growth
spurt that’s yielded multiple inclusions on Inc. mag-
azine’s list of the country’s 5,000 fastest-growing
businesses. BlueGrace was as high as No. 20 on the
overall list in 2012, and remained at No. 52 among
companies in the logistics/transportation sector for
2014.
“We have a department that looks for the right peo-
ple, and we have others that will contact us out of the
blue because they know of us or they heard of us in
the market or they know another franchise owner,” he
said. “It’s kind of a mix.”
FRANCHISE
