As Valentine’s Day approaches, I am thinking about a special kind of love. It’s a love for the family business. Neighborly brands recently hosted our annual Leadership Summit in the Bahamas. It’s a yearly event that brings together the top performing franchisees across all of our Neighborly brands. These are our top-gunners, the franchisees who have been honored with the coveted Top Gun status for achieving exceptional results at our annual reunion.

This is a VIP event like no other. We usually gather at an exclusive resort to talk best practices, introduce amazing guest speakers, and take advantage of an incredible brain trust that helps the very best to keep getting better. After all, these are the franchisees who continue to raise the bar for the rest of their fellow franchisees to emulate. But it goes so much deeper than the bottom line. These franchisees have a real love for the business, and it’s often a wonderful family affair.

The strength of a family can impact the strength of a business.

Neighborly’s Chief Operating Officer Mary Thompson was addressing the crowd at our Leadership Summit when she asked the crowd to stand if they had been married more than 5 years. The room was full of standing couples! Then she asked who had been married more than 20 years, and half of the room seemed to still be standing. It was overwhelming. Here was a room showcasing Neighborly at its finest. Not only were these strong business owners, these were committed families in the room.

On top of that, I know that a few of the attendees were second-generation franchisees. They were running award-winning businesses while mom and dad were already out of the day-to-day of the business. Perhaps they were even enjoying retirement as their kids were in the Bahamas taking the franchise to the next level.

Now that’s a real love for the business!

In my book Live R.I.C.H. I shared that our company’s founder, my father Don Dwyer, would say that his proudest accomplishment was realized when franchisees thanked him for helping them achieve their dreams. He said, “The strength of a business’s foundation depends entirely on the values of the owner and of the people who operate the business.”

Our leadership team today feels this deeply. And as we saw at Leadership Summit, these are not just incredible people. These are incredible families.

If you’re the kind of family that longs for the same thing, you can find out more about our Neighborly brands HERE.

And to show my love, here’s a Neighborly discount for any of our service brands HERE.