Franchisee
64 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / March 2020
How did Tesla prepare you for
life as a franchisee?
Tesla works on a very con-
densed timeline, and it takes
some getting used to that cul-
ture. A lot of people might
think, Yeah, it’s impossible to
get that task done on this day
or this week or this quarter.
But Tesla taught me not to
waste energy thinking about
why something’s impossible.
Instead, focus on solutions.That drives me today as a
business owner.Was transitioning to electron-
ics repairs easy because of
your tech background?
Even though I was an engineer
and understood the technology,
repairing a phone is a lot dif-
ferent from doing engineering
work. When we went through
our initial three weeks of corpo-
rate training, learning to takeapart an iPhone or a Samsung
device and do the physical
repair, I was overwhelmed. A
lot of the other guys at the train-
ing had repaired thousands of
devices before, and I was like,
How can I ever become a tech
wizard like them? It took time.Plus you were figuring out how
to run a business.
There’s so much unknown
when it comes to opening abusiness, and it’s all in the
details. Do you choose an LLC
or a corporation? If it’s a cor-
poration, what type? How
do you find a contractor you
can trust? How much should
they cost? They were exciting
decisions, but scary when you
have no experience. We really
looked to our own network and
thought about who might have
that expertise or be able to offer
guidance. Who can answer
our questions, and how can we
learn what we need to know?How did your work-life balance
change once your stores were
up and running?
At Tesla, I was working the
hardest I’d ever worked—three
months straight, no days off, com-
ing in on weekends. When people
told me starting my own business
would be even harder, I was skep-
tical. But it was a transition from
working a lot at Tesla to working
a lot more as a business owner. It
wasn’t a turnoff, though. I knew
I was building something that
would be like my baby.Your location in Fremont has
quickly become one of the
brand’s top-performing stores.
Was it an immediate success?
A new store starts off pretty
slow, so when we opened, I was
still investing time at our other
stores. But customers kept com-
ing to me, having been referred
by the Fremont store, which
didn’t have all the necessary
parts to do certain repairs. It
was a big inventory issue, and I
realized a lot of it had to do with
that team’s mindset—they were
very shy about what jobs they
would take on, what they were
capable of. So I really shifted
my attention to that store and
that staff and their systems, and
slowly we started growing by 10
or 20 percent every month. It’s
just about figuring out what’s
getting in the way of growth and
removing those obstacles.W
hen Minhthe Nguyen started working at Tesla in 2012, he was overseeing
a team of 20 at the Fremont, Calif., factory, which was producing a single
car each week. Less than three years later, his team had grown beyond
400 people, and they were producing 1,200 cars a week. Having witnessed
and contributed to that kind of rapid growth, Nguyen felt empowered to
take a leap he’d long dreamed about: owning a business. Coming from
the corporate world, he found the structure and support of franchising
appealing, and when he learned about uBreakiFix—an electronics-repair franchise
with 548 locations across North America—it seemed like the perfect fit for his skills and
passions. Today, with his business partner and fellow Tesla vet Emmanuel Marti, Nguyen
operates five locations across California. Their sales and staff are growing fast—but as they
learned at Tesla, there’s always room to improve.→ FINDING THE FIX
Nguyen mid-repair
at his San Jose,
Calif., location.