There is a photograph Steve Lee has kept for almost fifty years. In it, a small boy sits up in bed, holding a soft toy penguin, round, orange, black and white, having just arrived in England from Afghanistan. He still has the penguin.
He tells this story at the start of a book on franchising because the most powerful lessons he has ever learned about building something stable and lasting did not come from a boardroom or a business school. They came from the first seven years of his life, mostly spent in a country that, by the time his family left it, was being dismantled by war.
Bought In is not a textbook. It is the account of someone who has been through franchising as a franchisee in two different industries, as a consultant helping others navigate it, and as the person who bought a franchise consultancy out of administration and had to rebuild it from the ground up. Along the way, a single conviction kept showing up: the businesses that last are the ones with proper systems underneath them.
