Onyi Odunukwe on How to Build an 8+ Figure Franchise, Delegating as a CEO, & Buying Real Estate

Ane Adan is the founder and CEO of Glow Tanning, which the hosts described as one of the largest sun-spa and tanning franchises in the United States. School of Hard Knocks hosts James, Josh and Jack said content featuring Adan had generated roughly 20 million social-media views.

Glow had grown to more than 75 locations and was moving toward more than 100, while Adan said his five-year target was more than 250 locations. His broader discussion focused heavily on how delegation, systems, memberships and specialization made that scale possible.

Adan is Nigerian, was born in Boston and grew up across several places in the United States and abroad. He mentioned living in Boston, New Jersey, Savannah, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nigeria and briefly London, and was living in Dallas at the time of the conversation.

Adan spent part of middle school in Nigeria and returned to the United States at about age 13, around 2000. His family was living in Savannah, Georgia, and he later attended an all-boys military high school there.

Both of Adan's parents were doctors and placed a heavy emphasis on education. His mother worked in psychology, taught at a university and maintained a private practice, while his father worked as a surgeon and also practiced privately.

His parents followed a conventional professional path rather than an entrepreneurial one. Adan described their model as education, advanced degrees, a stable profession, retirement savings and a highly structured life—the opposite of the independence he wanted.

Living in different countries reinforced gratitude as one of Adan's central personal principles. He repeatedly returned to appreciating one's circumstances, relationships, opportunities and what he considers God's blessings rather than constantly measuring against what is missing.

Adan was making money through small ventures by eighth grade. He and his brother cut lawns for about $20, then used the proceeds to buy full-sized candy bars cheaply and resell them at school for $1 each.

The school candy operation became surprisingly large before administrators stopped it. Adan recalled being caught with roughly 100 candy bars and about $500, being suspended, having the money confiscated and helping identify buyers so money could be returned.

Adan views the lawn and candy businesses as the beginning of his entrepreneurial behavior. He characterized himself as having been a hustler from an early age rather than discovering entrepreneurship later in adulthood.

His decision to work for himself was driven as much by temperament as money. He openly said he dislikes authority, being told what to do and having someone else control where he must be at a particular time.

Adan said he would rather earn $40,000 working for himself than $1 million working for someone else. He did not initially expect entrepreneurship to produce his present level of financial success; independence itself was the original attraction.

He described his three-year-old daughter as showing a similar independent personality. He used this to reinforce his belief that his resistance to being controlled is largely temperamental rather than something inherited from entrepreneurial parents.

Adan argued that the traditional American path of education, employment, homeownership and retirement worked better economically for earlier generations than it does today. He pointed to the GI Bill, union and factory employment, and much lower housing costs relative to income, while arguing that wages have not kept pace with major living costs.

He does not believe everyone should become an entrepreneur. Businesses depend on employees who prefer stability to entrepreneurial risk, and he argued those employees can be just as essential to a company's success as its founder.

Adan rejects the idea that successful founders are truly "self-made." He said mentors, employees and other people inevitably contribute materially, even when a founder did not receive family wealth or a large financial head start.

A former general manager named Tyler was one of the employees Adan credited with materially helping Glow grow from one location to four. He said she cared for the company as if it were her own, and her example later helped him identify and develop another leader who could continue scaling it.

Adan believes unusually committed employees must be rewarded accordingly. His model depends on finding people willing to treat the operation with ownership-level care even though they are not taking the founder's financial risk.

He believes social media badly distorts the economics of entrepreneurship. It disproportionately displays the small group of founders making large amounts of money while hiding failed businesses, years of poor pay, heavy workloads and financial risk.

Adan cautioned against abandoning a highly paid job merely because entrepreneurship appears more glamorous. Someone earning roughly $200,000 in a stable role, he said, has much more existing income at risk than a young person earning relatively little and should not leave without a credible plan.

Starting Glow at about 21 made risk easier for Adan because he had no wife or children depending on his income. His view was that even if he spent several years on a failed venture, he could still restart in his early-to-mid twenties without being far behind his peers.

He considers family obligations a major constraint on entrepreneurial risk. Referring to a message from a 32-year-old with five children seeking advice, Adan said he could not responsibly tell someone with dependents to quit a reliable job for an uncertain business.

The hosts and Adan strongly endorsed The E-Myth Revisited, particularly its distinction between owning a business and merely owning a job. Adan regarded delegation and removing the owner from day-to-day production as fundamental.

Adan's test for a genuine business is whether it can be sold and continue operating without the founder personally delivering the product or service. Under his definition, a solo technician earning good money is still essentially self-employed if the income disappears when that person stops working.

He illustrated this with a lash technician operating alone from a salon suite. A stronger model would recruit and train other technicians, provide space and customers, potentially use a commission split such as 70/30, maintain quality standards and move the founder out of actually performing lashes.

Once the owner is no longer the technician, the operation acquires independent value. Adan illustrated a hypothetical lash studio with $1 million in annual revenue, roughly $700,000 in labor and $100,000 in other expenses, leaving about $200,000 in profit; at a three-times multiple, he suggested a buyer might value it around $600,000.

One of the hosts said he had dropped out of college at about 20 and started a business without entrepreneurial relatives or mentors. Looking back, he said he would not recommend simply trying to figure everything out alone.

Adan's first recommendation to aspiring business owners is to read extensively about business fundamentals. His second is to find someone who has already built what they hope to build and learn directly from that person's experience.

He believes many successful people genuinely enjoy mentoring others, but advised approaching people who are not direct competitors. He would not teach somebody how to open a competing tanning business in a market where Glow already operates, but said he would gladly advise someone building a noncompeting franchise in another field.

Adan said he would not erase or redo any of his past business mistakes. His reasoning is that negative experiences produced knowledge he would otherwise lack; he may avoid repeating a mistake, but only because making it taught him the lesson.

What he wishes he understood earlier is that he could have set substantially larger goals. His present view is that goals can be extremely ambitious as long as he can genuinely visualize a viable path toward them.

Adan generally works with one-, three- and five-year goals rather than relying primarily on distant ten-year targets. He said he had achieved every major goal he had set for himself and gradually increased their scale as earlier targets became real.

Visualization is a regular part of his goal-setting process. He described mentally seeing completed projects before they exist, including imagining himself arriving at a development of 12 townhomes he was building in Tampa.

His visualization practice is informal rather than a structured meditation ritual. He said he often daydreams late at night or during idle moments, mentally placing himself inside the result he is trying to produce.

Adan said he typically finished emails around 10–11:30 p.m., watched television briefly, went to bed around midnight or 1 a.m. and woke around 7 a.m. Some of that late-night period was spent scrolling social media while thinking about goals and future projects.

Written goals and to-do lists are more important to him than visualization alone. He records his goals and shares them electronically with close friends, his brother and others so that other people can see what he committed to achieving.

He separates personal goals from business goals and shares business targets with his partner for accountability. The purpose is to make it harder for either partner to quietly abandon commitments made at the beginning of the year.

Glow uses concepts from the EOS operating system, including quarterly "rocks." Adan and his partner also complete an annual goal-alignment exercise covering roughly one-, five- and ten-year objectives, while placing the strongest operational emphasis on the next year.

Glow Tanning originated almost accidentally from excess space in a second supplement-store location. Adan's original supplement shop was on the north side of Fayetteville, Arkansas, while the University of Arkansas and the students he knew were concentrated farther south.

When Adan sought a south-side location, the available space was about 2,700 square feet—far more than the roughly 500–1,000 square feet he believed a supplement store needed. He initially considered putting a personal-training or fitness operation in the extra space.

He rejected the fitness-studio idea partly because he was already trying to stop personally working inside every business. He instead reasoned that customers interested in fitness and appearance might also buy tanning services.

Adan believed Fayetteville's tanning market was underserved, particularly for affluent University of Arkansas students from Texas. Women he knew from Dallas told him the local tanning experience was substantially worse than what they were accustomed to at home.

Before opening, Adan walked into an existing tanning salon and directly asked a co-owner whether tanning was a good business. He now describes that approach as naive because he was effectively asking a future competitor for market intelligence.

Glow opened around 2009 with a deliberately different aesthetic from the casual tanning salons Adan saw in the market. He wanted something closer to a polished hotel environment rather than the palm-tree, teenage-counter-staff atmosphere he associated with conventional tanning salons.

His original target customer was the relatively affluent, appearance-conscious college student who valued both convenience and a premium setting. He said the concept immediately found demand.

Despite the promising opening, Glow remained relatively small for several years and produced only about $40,000 in annual profit at one stage. Adan attributes the slow progress largely to dividing his attention among too many businesses.

Adan and his brother jointly owned about five different businesses at the time. These included Glow, a supplement operation, a marketing agency, laser hair/tattoo-removal services and a limousine or chauffeur business.

Adan eventually decided that running five businesses made him "a slave to many and master of none." He and his brother began considering which companies to sell so they could concentrate their attention.

Adan actually tried to sell Glow before it became the centerpiece of his business career. He approached another tanning operator and left information offering the salon for sale, but the prospective buyer never called him.

A tanning-industry mentor connected Adan with another experienced operator who persuaded him not to sell Glow. The new mentor asked him to give the business another year and offered a specific operating playbook.

The advice created a strategic split between Adan and his brother. Adan became convinced Glow had major potential while his brother remained unconvinced, leading them to divide the businesses they had built together.

The brothers effectively had a business "divorce," with each taking the ventures he had primarily started. They also sold the limousine business, allowing Adan to concentrate much more heavily on Glow.

In 2014, Adan took on more debt than Glow was generating in annual revenue to implement the mentor's recommendations. The money went into upgraded equipment and a redesigned business model.

The crucial operating change was moving Glow toward recurring memberships rather than relying mainly on individual tanning sessions and packages. Adan said performance improved roughly two to three times over the previous year.

Within several months of that turnaround, Adan was already searching for another Glow location. He now believes diversification and lack of focus delayed this breakthrough by several years.

Adan considers recurring memberships one of the mentor's most valuable lessons. His argument is that predictable recurring revenue works because many members underuse what they pay for, while only a small minority consume enough service to become economically expensive.

The second major lesson was adding value without automatically raising the price. Rather than charging separately each time Glow introduced another spa feature, the company often folded additional services into the existing membership to make the offer feel unusually generous.

Glow was an early adopter of combining tanning with additional spa services, though Adan acknowledged that being first into a category does not automatically guarantee long-term success.

Delegation at Glow is inseparable from what Adan calls "no ego." He said he once enjoyed being recognized as the owner but gradually concluded that needing public recognition actively interferes with building a scalable organization.

For roughly the previous six to eight years, Adan had preferred customers not know he owned Glow. He said employees are instructed not to identify him when he visits locations, and he typically arrives dressed casually in inexpensive shirts, sweatpants and slides.

Adan refers to the people working at Glow as "co-workers" rather than emphasizing that they work for him. He dislikes owner-versus-employee language that implies the founder is inherently more important than the people actually operating the company.

He expects every specialist he hires to become better at that function than he is. If he hires somebody as the expert in a field and still has to outperform or continually rescue that person, he sees little reason for the role to exist.

Adan said the business was approaching what he described as "10-figure" scale, making specialization increasingly important. At that size, he wants roles designed around narrow ownership rather than employees simultaneously wearing many unrelated hats.

His organizational preference is one major responsibility per person wherever scale makes that possible. Concentrating five essential functions in one employee creates dangerous key-person risk because losing that employee can cripple multiple departments at once.

When Glow cannot justify a full-time specialist, Adan prefers outsourcing the function to an outside company rather than loading it onto an unrelated employee. The vendor then bears responsibility for replacing its personnel if someone leaves.

Glow had recently hired a full-time photographer and graphic designer after previously outsourcing those functions. Adan also described separate responsibility for photography, design, social content, search advertising and social-media advertising rather than assigning everything to one marketing generalist.

He applies the same sellability test even to people earning six figures alone. In his view, a carpenter personally earning hundreds of thousands of dollars building cabinets still owns a job, not a transferable company, if there is no team or operating system a buyer can acquire.

Adan evaluates both employees and potential business partners around three core values: integrity, coachability and hard work. Technical skill matters less to him because somebody who works hard and accepts coaching can usually be taught the required skill.

Integrity is the first filter because Adan does not want relationships that require constant monitoring. If he has to wonder whether a partner is stealing, manipulating the books or preparing to betray him, he considers the relationship unusable.

Coachability matters because an oversized ego prevents improvement. Adan believes someone who assumes they already know everything cannot absorb feedback even when the feedback would make the business better.

Hard work completes the formula because effort turns coaching into improved performance. He said he has repeatedly seen weak performers become good employees when they possess integrity, accept coaching and consistently work.

Adan's current expansion philosophy is increasingly based on vertical integration. When an outside vendor repeatedly earns significant money from Glow, he asks whether Glow could internalize that capability and eventually sell it to others as another business.

He cited Amazon's expansion into data-center and cloud infrastructure as the model for this thinking. His interpretation is that a company can turn a large internal operating expense into a capability, then turn that capability into an outside revenue stream.

Commercial real estate brokerage is one function Adan wants to bring inside his organization. He was personally involved in negotiating roughly 15–30 Glow leases at a time, alongside a franchise real-estate director, while outside brokers continued collecting commissions.

Adan questioned why outside brokers should receive substantial commissions when Glow itself finds many sites and does much of the negotiating. In one Dallas example, he said he located the space, Glow used a standard letter of intent, its in-house attorney reviewed the lease and the broker's role was comparatively limited.

His proposed brokerage would give agents a 50/50 split on transactions Glow feeds them while allowing a more traditional agent-favorable split on business they originate themselves. Glow would capture part of the commissions it currently sends outside while building an internal team already trained on its preferred lease terms.

The brokerage would also reduce Adan's personal workload. After agents participate in enough Glow negotiations, he expects them to know which terms are automatically unacceptable and handle much of the process without repeatedly involving him.

Adan said the company was generating enough leasing activity that outside real-estate commissions could total hundreds of thousands of dollars in a busy month. That recurring expense is what made an owned brokerage commercially attractive to him.

Outside Glow, Adan was already active in real estate through commercial properties, house-flipping arrangements and development projects. He often provided capital while friends or operators handled more of the construction work in exchange for fees.

He does not primarily view real estate as money to spend today; he views it as a long-term wealth and debt-paydown vehicle. Although the properties generate cash, he said he does not use real-estate distributions to buy watches, cars or fund his personal lifestyle.

Glow is the cash-producing engine that funds Adan's lifestyle and investments. He estimated that he reinvests roughly 90% of what he makes and lives on the remaining 10%.

Adan's real-estate strategy relies heavily on debt and creative financing rather than simply paying large amounts of cash upfront. He believes understanding financing becomes more important—not less important—as an investor accumulates money.

He illustrated the strategy with a hypothetical commercial building worth roughly $4 million but listed around $4.5 million. Rather than simply bidding the lowest price, he might offer approximately $4.3 million if the seller agrees to carry about $800,000 as a second mortgage.

The seller-financing structure could allow the seller to receive roughly $3.5 million at closing while carrying the rest at a relatively low rate, potentially with interest-only payments and a three-year balloon. Adan would then use the three years to improve the property, raise rents or add tenants.

After improving the building, he would seek conventional refinancing and use the new loan to repay the seller-financed balance. The objective is to minimize his initial cash contribution while letting the building service its own debt.

His wealth thesis is based on simultaneous appreciation and debt reduction rather than near-term distributions. A property bought in his mid-thirties could be substantially more valuable and largely or completely debt-free by his mid-fifties, creating a large asset even if he spent little or none of its interim cash flow.

Adan believes diversification should come only after the original business produces far more cash than the founder's lifestyle consumes. His rough threshold is being able to put about half of available profit into something else after covering living costs, savings and retirement.

He illustrated the distinction by comparing a business earning $300,000 in profit while the owner spends $250,000 annually with one earning $500,000 against the same lifestyle. In the first case, he considers diversification premature; in the second, roughly $250,000 remains available for investment.

Even after a founder has the money to diversify, Adan prefers adjacent expansion over jumping randomly into unrelated industries. A company should first exploit skills, systems, employees and distribution it already possesses.

For the School of Hard Knocks team, he suggested expanding from general business content into adjacent media such as a dedicated real-estate brand. That would reuse their existing production knowledge and audience rather than forcing them to learn an unrelated business from zero.

He compared that approach to media companies creating specialized sub-brands inside an existing ecosystem. The central advantage is that processes, personnel and know-how already exist, reducing the cost and risk of the next venture.

Adan applies this principle to his own side projects by reusing Glow's internal resources. Photographers, videographers, designers and other team members can support real-estate or new-business projects instead of forcing every venture to build a completely separate infrastructure.

Adan wants his personal legacy to be that people were better off after knowing him. He said that several years earlier he consciously decided that interactions and relationships should, where possible, leave the other person in an improved position.

He said he rarely approaches relationships by asking what somebody can do for him. His preferred question is what value he can add, including sharing business lessons that might help younger entrepreneurs avoid mistakes he had to learn personally.

He described mentoring the podcast hosts in the same way. He did not claim credit for their existing success but wanted to pass along knowledge that might help them skip unnecessary mistakes as they scaled.

His preferred formulation is to give people a "hand up," not a handout. He wants to create opportunities or knowledge that help somebody improve their situation rather than simply providing something without responsibility.

Adan's first guiding principle for younger people is gratitude. He argues that focusing constantly on what someone else owns prevents appreciation of the opportunities, relationships and even basic fact of being alive that a person already has.

His second principle is to live in the present while still planning for the future. He believes people can become so fixated on distant ambitions that they fail to execute the work directly in front of them.

Delegation is another of his core principles because the founder cannot remain the bottleneck for every decision and task. The company must eventually operate through people and systems rather than the founder's individual effort.

"No ego" is equally important in Adan's framework. He views strong listeners as more capable of learning than people who constantly interrupt to demonstrate their own knowledge, arguing that a person cannot learn much while talking.

He repeatedly warned that comparison is "the thief of joy." Social media intensifies the problem because people compare ordinary daily life against somebody else's most flattering and carefully selected moments.

Adan described social-media imagery as a highly manipulated highlight reel. Someone can take 100 pictures, choose the best one, edit it heavily and publish that single moment, while another person then compares their entire appearance or life against it.

He urged people to define success against their own desired life rather than somebody else's income, possessions or public image. A person earning $50,000 and genuinely satisfied with family, work and leisure may be happier than someone with vastly greater wealth.

Adan admitted that contentment is personally difficult for him. He can reach a goal—even one originally designed as a five-year target—and almost immediately move mentally to the next objective rather than spending much time enjoying the achievement.

He sometimes attaches a major purchase to a specific goal so the object becomes a physical reminder that the milestone was achieved. A Rolls-Royce was one example: although he could have bought it earlier, he withheld the purchase until reaching the target he had associated with it.

He used extreme contrasts in wealth to argue that money and happiness are not mechanically connected. His broader point was that somebody with modest income can feel successful and secure while an extremely wealthy person can experience a financial decline as catastrophic because happiness depends heavily on expectations and perspective.

The conversation ultimately presented Adan's operating philosophy as focus first, build a sellable system, delegate aggressively, reward strong people, reinvest heavily and diversify only after the core engine is genuinely strong. His own path—from five scattered businesses and an attempted sale of Glow to concentrating on one scalable company—was the main evidence he used for that conclusion.