Coming to The Joint, the concept was sound, but it had a couple of challenges. First, it was taking the franchise units 18 to 24 months to reach breakeven. Based on my background in small box retail, I knew we needed to get that break even to be between 6 to 9 months. We spent a lot of time focusing on how to improve the time to break even so our franchisees would not run out of cash.
The other two challenges were the corporate units. While Corporate was very focused on these corporate-owned units, the franchisees stopped feeling the love. If you have spent any time in the franchise model, if your franchisee stops feeling love, that's a tough place to be. We needed to revitalize and improve on the relationship with our franchise community.
As such, one of the lessons learned from my perspective, is just how critical in life it is that you are vested in what you do. I was reading an article that said 75% of the American workers are disengaged from the work that they do. They don't care. And to me, that was such a horrifying statistic to read because where do we spend most of our time? At work. And so most of us are spending our time at work and we're not engaged in what we do.
What has been so humbling is to see our doctors across the country continue to treat our patients and thus allowing them to stay out of that more traditional healthcare system. The doctors are there, but if the patients feel that this is not essential to them, they do not come in. And again, we have been very fortunate to see our patients truly coming in.
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