68 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / September 2019What services have you built
to help your franchisees?
Imagine you’re cleaning carpet
and a customer calls your
cellphone to book an appoint-
ment. You’d have to tell your
current customer to hold on,
then answer the phone and try
to schedule another job while
trying to focus on your current
one. Our call center is at the
heart of the Oxi Fresh business:
We answer the phones for
all our franchisees across the
country so they can prioritize
working on their businesses. It
also allows them to scale, to let
go in order to grow.Back when you first launched,
was it challenging to putYou started this company as a
way to fund your true passion.
What was that?
International outreach through
basketball. I’d played in college,
and I went on to launch an
organization called Crossover
International. We’d bring
American basketball players to
other countries to play against
teams of young people and talk
about the Bible. For the 10 years
Crossover was active, my carpet-
cleaning business was a way to
fund that passion. And a lot of
the basketball players who partic-
ipated in Crossover ended up as
some of my first franchisees.I bet you felt especially
invested in those franchisees’a new spin on a traditional
service?
There were about four different
methods of cleaning at the time,
and I tried to combine them. But
I’m not a chemist. When you
mix these methods, it sometimes
doesn’t work. So I met with a few
different chemists who could
help me. My grandpa always
taught me to operate as if you
have the green light until you get
the red light; never wait until
something’s perfect. So I didn’t
actually have a perfect system
when we launched. I had to hear
a lot of complaints. But the key
was being willing to change and
adapt. And now, at this point in
the game, my job as the franchi-
sor is to listen to the franchisees.success. How have you con-
tinued to support them?
One thing that separates us
big-time is our “protected
territories.” Each franchisee
is assigned to 110,000 house-
holds, so when a customer calls
in, their address tells us which
franchisee’s territory they live
in. The fact that our franchisees
aren’t competing for the same
customers makes them want to
share what’s working, and that
gives us a huge advantage at
our annual conference. We put
the most successful franchisees
onstage to talk about what
they’re doing, and I get to listen
and learn from them. It’s like a
big family, and this model is one
reason we’re growing so fast.Franchisor
W
hen Jonathan Barnett launched Oxi
Fresh Carpet Cleaning in 2006, at the
age of 26, he had one goal in mind:
Make enough money to be able to
explore his true passions—which, truth
be told, did not include carpet clean-
ing. (He was more of a basketball kind
of guy.) Still, he took his new business
seriously. He knew he’d entered a crowded marketplace,
so to differentiate himself, he enlisted chemists to help
him develop a cleaning system with a one-hour drying
time that uses just two gallons of water per home. That
was a big improvement over the industry standard of
40 to 60 gallons. Customers came calling—and so did
franchising. Today he has nearly 400 Oxi Fresh franchi-
sees, and he understands if carpet cleaning isn’t their
lifelong dream. But he’s found a passion in supporting
his owners...and in turn, he believes he can help them
build a business they’re passionate about, too.It’s Not About Carpet
How do you build a great company if you’re not interested in what the company does?
Jonathan Barnett, founder of Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning, has an answer: It’s about people. by HAYDEN FIELDPHOTOGRAPHCOURTESY^ OF^ OXIFRESH^ CARPET^ CLEANING