"Stay connected to stay successful."
Welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine, where we bring you exclusive insights from some of the most inspiring leaders and visionaries in the business world. Today, we are thrilled to introduce you to Aaron Cash, the co-founder and President of Garage Living Franchise Systems, a company that has made an indelible mark by transforming the way we perceive and utilize our garages.
In this exclusive interview, Aaron Cash shares the remarkable journey of Garage Living, a business venture born out of the realization that garages are often underappreciated and undervalued spaces within our homes.
With a design-centric approach, a commitment to high-quality products, and a dedication to customer service rarely seen in residential home improvement, Aaron and his partners embarked on a mission to redefine the garage experience.
Over the years, Garage Living has not only pioneered a category but has also significantly added value to clients’ homes, completing over 7500 garage projects annually. Aaron’s passion for his work extends beyond the office, as he balances his role as a husband and father with a love for watersports.
Join us as we delve into Aaron Cash’s insights, experiences, and wisdom, and discover the secrets behind Garage Living’s impressive success story.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Aaron Cash: My name is Aaron Cash, and I am a co-founder and President of Garage Living Franchise Systems. My partners and I started Garage Living in 2005 after recognizing the garage as an often overlooked, underappreciated, and wildly undervalued room in the home.
We knew that with a designed-based approach, high-quality products, and customer service uncommon in residential home improvement, Garage Living would quickly pioneer a category, change the perception of the garage, and grow rapidly.
We spent the first ten years building a business and an organization that opened our first franchise locations in 2015 and will reach 50 by the end of 2023. Together with our franchise partners, we complete over 7500 garage projects each year, add millions of dollars of value to our clients’ homes, and continue to drive both category and brand awareness. Outside the office, I am a husband, father of two, and lover of all watersports.
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Aaron Cash: The pandemic created extraordinary demand for our products and services. The market, combined with global supply chain disruptions, created a very challenging operating environment.
Every member of our team, at head office and in local offices across North America, rolled up their sleeves and worked hard to ensure every client and project was satisfied and completed.
We sometimes had difficult conversations about delays, substitutions, and alternatives. We approached each situation with honesty, integrity, and transparency. Our values served us well, and we strengthened our team and our brand.
What advice do you wish you had received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Aaron Cash: Many founders have business plans and strategies they know by heart and execute daily. As you grow and expand to many locations and with teams in multiple departments, defining that strategy and sharing it with every team member at every level of the organization is critical.
We share our goals at quarterly meetings and yearly conferences, but we will be doing a better job in the coming months to define our strategy, detail our objectives, and articulate how each team member’s goals tie into the big picture.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Aaron Cash: Given the nature of our business, we will continue to add value by being face-to-face with our clients. Focusing on personal connections and onsite meetings differentiates our company from e-stores and digital meetings.
We will leverage online tools for effective and efficient communication. We are investing heavily to digitize elements of our design process for our clients to make the process efficient and hassle-free.
A shift to online shopping and virtual delivery of services will forever impact some retailers. I think we will continue to see greater demand for in-person consultations, site visits, and showroom visits in the future.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Aaron Cash: Economic uncertainty has become a hot topic over the last six months. Our growth opportunities exist in several areas.
- Our target market is homeowners with significant sources of disposable income. This population segment is the least and last impacted by economic downturns. We will have to work hard to demonstrate value, but our quality, customer service, reputation, and branding put us in a strong position.
- The labor market may become less constrained, and we will have the opportunity to recruit and hire great team members.
- The competitive landscape changes as weak competitors cease to exist, and we can pick up market share.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Aaron Cash: Once you build a company and have a team around you, there is a perception that you are detached from what’s going on at the ground level. As you grow, it is often underestimated how important it is to stay connected with our customers and staff who deliver on our brand promise.
We started our business as a single location, and we still operate that business as our corporate franchise. This has been an amazing asset to remain connected with our teams who are working with our clients and executing our projects.
In addition, I meet regularly with our local sales and installation teams as well as teams in our franchise markets on many infield visits throughout the year.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Aaron Cash: That’s easy—the ability to see into the future. The pace of change in our business environment can change rapidly, and it would be helpful to know what’s around the corner.
In the absence of this superpower, we are constantly talking about possible changes and how we can best prepare ourselves for the unknown.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Aaron Cash for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Aaron Cash or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
