First Franchise Sale for Waffles & Whatnot

Guzman has been working alongside Waffles and Whatnot since 2022, first retailing its foods at his Elim Café and, since that business closed, as a direct employee.

“Since day one,” when he saw “what we do with the food and the way that people were treated,” Guzman says he wanted to be part of Waffles and Whatnot.

Why the franchise route, rather than hand over the keys to a successor? Green says a 2019 conference played a key role in his journey toward the franchising model. While there, he says one attendee asked him what it would take to bring ten stores to Australia. Green had recently closed his first Waffles and Whatnot location in Eagle River, so the question got him thinking about what a future version of Waffles and Whatnot might look like.

“I started to learn that there are so many entrepreneurs out there or people that know how to cook, but they don’t necessarily know how to run a business,” Green says. Even those who know how to run a business “may not know how to manage their numbers to actually profit from the business,” he adds.

“There’s a lot of challenges, like especially financial challenges, to running a restaurant,” says Jared Reynolds, executive director of the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development and a former restaurant owner himself. The kind of mentorship and support Green plans to offer franchisees “would be very beneficial” to a new restaurant owner, Reynolds says.

Drawing on what he learned during two decades in the military, Green has developed a “proprietary system” to streamline restaurant operations and help franchise owners like Guzman succeed.

“It’s made my life easier,” Guzman says. “I’m a chef, and I can cook and do all these things, but I didn’t have the time to create systems for my restaurant.” Thanks to Green’s tracking system, he can quickly see how much the restaurant made in a week, manage inventory, or review costs.

It makes a big difference. “In every aspect of the restaurant business, there’s a platform that Derrick built,” Guzman says. “It has every little step: how to operate a restaurant from day one to ten years.”

Green describes his role as a facilitator: “As much as I can, I build systems that allow Kelvin to show up and… manage his people.”

Now that Guzman owns the Muldoon location, he wants to focus on growing the franchise. Long term, he hopes to own a few stores. Green has heard requests for Waffles and Whatnot in Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, and Kodiak. Alaska expansion depends on further market analysis.

Green plans to focus on growing the franchise more broadly. He also hopes to offer his franchise management system publicly at some point, for use in both the restaurant industry and beyond. “To reduce the barriers for community to develop,” he says, “because God knows there’s enough stuff in the world to divide us.”