Kris Stuart spent twelve years as a firefighter and paramedic before taking Bloomin' Blinds from a family business to more than 65 franchise locations, and he leads both the same way. In this conversation with Brendon Dennewill, Kris unpacks why "proven systems" are really just a snapshot in time, how a decision-making framework built for high-stakes emergencies now runs his home office, and why he treats every franchisee relationship like a family handing over something irreplaceable. For franchisors navigating real growth, this is a grounded look at leading with obligation instead of control.
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Kristopher Stuart | Co-founder and CEO at Bloomin' Blinds
Kris Stuart, CFE, is Co-Founder and CEO of Bloomin' Blinds, a mobile window treatment franchise he has grown from a family business into a system of more than 65 locations nationwide, based out of Plano, Texas. Before moving into full-time franchise leadership, Kris spent over 12 years as a firefighter and paramedic in North Texas, an experience that continues to shape his approach to discipline, communication, and leadership under pressure. He's an active voice in the IFA community, and leads with a philosophy centered on trust, accountability, and treating every franchisee relationship as an obligation, not a transaction. |
Brendon Dennewill: Today I'm excited to welcome Kristopher Stuart, co-founder and CEO of Bloomin' Blinds, a family-built mobile window treatments franchise system that has grown to more than sixty-five locations across the country. Krist has been part of the Bloomin' Blinds journey from its early days and now leads the business through a turnaround focused on trust, accountability, and putting franchisees first.
Kris also spent more than twelve years as a firefighter and paramedic in North Texas. That experience became foundational to his leadership philosophy and continues to shape how he thinks about discipline, responsibility, teamwork, and leadership under pressure. What makes Kris' perspective especially valuable is that he brings together hands-on franchise experience and the leadership discipline of the fire service, giving him a unique view on the responsibility of asking franchisees to invest their savings, their family stability, and years of their lives in a system. That shapes his commitment to building a franchise organization grounded in trust, accountability, and long-term thinking. Kris, welcome to the RevOps Champions Podcast.
Kristopher Stuart: Thank you, Brendon.
Brendon Dennewill: Kris, you were with Bloomin' Blinds from the early days and worked your way from the field into executive leadership. What did those early years teach you about building and operating a business that still influences how you lead today?
Kristopher Stuart: Yeah, it was growth through absorption. When we started, it was just a family business. We were selling the products locally with no ambition of becoming a franchise, which is what led to my career in the fire service. I had a job selling, installing, and repairing window coverings, but that wasn't a career, so I ended up bifurcating my life into two directions: public safety and the family business at the same time.
There was a lot of overlap in responsibilities and commitments to others. Trying to juggle both of those consuming identities, when you're in one, you're fully in that one, and when you're in the other, you're fully in that one. There's very little room to consider the other while you're there, so you have to leave it well and leave it done before you start the next.
It was more about understanding and relying on repetitive systems. For us, that meant SOGs, standard operating guidelines, seat assignments, knowing what you're going to do when you arrive. I learned the discipline for business through public safety, and that's really the biggest takeaway I got from blending those two worlds.
There's also a sense of obligation. When you assume that role, whether it's public safety, firefighter, paramedic, police, or franchisor, there's a community of people, whether it's a small family or an entire neighborhood, expecting you to perform well when called on. Sometimes you're called on more than others, but you need to be ready at all times. That's no different for a franchisor than it is for a fire company or an EMS crew. Those disciplines and that feeling of obligation pair very well with franchising's commitment to its franchisees and the business model of franchising.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, again, that discipline is a very powerful thing. In a fire department, for example, it's obviously critical that you have that discipline. You could argue that in most businesses, whether they're a franchise or not, discipline isn't quite as critical, but when you have it, I think, to your point, it's a very powerful thing.
Kristopher Stuart: Yeah, I think it can only be a positive. I've never seen discipline work poorly for somebody.
Brendon Dennewill: Absolutely. So Kris, you were a firefighter for twelve years, six of which were while you were already in franchising. What else from that experience has had the biggest impact on how you lead and make decisions today?
Kristopher Stuart: I'd say it's the downstream effect on the team that works here in the home office with me, and trying to convey to them the importance of their position and how they serve in those similar roles. In the fire department, I was a lieutenant and had a crew assigned to me. I couldn't do their job, but I needed to make sure they knew the importance of their job so they could do it with the full vigor available to them, because the net effect was worth all of that effort.
I see my home office team in franchising very similarly. There are nine of us in the office, not much larger than a lot of fire companies, but we're a group of people from disassociated backgrounds all working on a topic we don't get to actually do, but need to be experts on when called upon by others who need us to perform that role. In our case, it's window coverings and franchising. They're inseparable because franchising is always there. Our widget is window coverings, so my team studies window coverings day in and day out, and they study franchising day in and day out.
When that family gives us their life savings, or that trust, or that understanding that we promise to be there when they need it, that commitment carries longer than five p.m. We work nine to five, like bankers' hours, but these families have needs from five a.m. when they wake up, to midnight when they lay their head on the pillow and it never stops spinning about whatever that topic is. We may get an email at midnight. I don't ask anybody to respond, but it's amazing the response you get the next day at eight when you replied at eleven and gave that franchisee the peace of mind they were looking for.
That commitment, that demand for service, never stops. Once you accept that role, it needs to be respected and fulfilled at any time. I'm respectful of my people and their personal lives, but I think they carry that feeling of obligation too. I think they see themselves as somewhat of the firefighters for the Bloomin' Blinds brand and the franchisees, who are the customers we serve.
Brendon Dennewill: Very cool. So Kris, as Bloomin' Blinds has grown, what has become more difficult about keeping people aligned and maintaining the standards and culture that helped the business succeed in the first place?
Kristopher Stuart: It's the same thing that makes it the best part of it, and that's the people. There's one process, one system that's built, and then sixty-five different personalities get to exercise it. Those sixty-five personalities are the best part of Bloomin' Blinds, they're the representatives of the brand in their local communities, wearing pink in their communities. But in all honesty, that's also the most difficult part: trying to maintain that one process, that one system meant to be a repetitive franchise model, while bringing sixty-five different personalities, experiences, and viewpoints on life together and accelerating them both to a better place.
I'm asking for change in my system, and I don't avoid system change, it's progress. I invite it gleefully. We have to be willing to accept it, and they have to be willing to push it a little harder, and that's easier for some than others. I'd say it's the best and the worst of the same thing, and that's what makes it fun. When you really get that camaraderie, that cohesion amongst the brand, that's when the most potential for opportunity opens up, because everybody, even in different locales, gets elevated collectively.
When New Hampshire gets it the same way the Seattle guy does, there's an energy there that's unavoidable. It's all driven by people. We can have any widget in the world, but it's all driven by a human pulse behind it.
Brendon Dennewill: That reminds me, when you and I were both at the franchise summit in Minneapolis recently, you spoke on the emerging franchise brand panel and your insights were super valuable for the room. In another conversation, about brands further along in their journey and grappling with different growth challenges, we talked about succeeding with single-unit franchisees as well as multi-unit franchisees. A well-respected person in the industry told me that single-unit franchisees are typically where the innovation happens. Is that something you'd agree with? As a franchisor, a lot of the innovation comes from you, but have you seen innovation coming from individual franchisees who find a better or different way to do something?
Kristopher Stuart: Yeah, tremendously. And it's a catch-22, because some franchisees have a wealth of experience behind them that drives a very clear thought process toward an innovative point or change they're trying to put forward. Others have a different experience: maybe something was tried before, maybe someone else brought it forward and it didn't work, but there's an emotional attachment to it because that experience taught them change happens differently in their world.
It goes back to how you manage the people behind the idea. The idea is an inanimate object, measurable by math. People are not. So it's about communication. Taking it back to the fire service, in nearly every critical incident, communication is almost always listed as one of the top three things that contributed to a negative outcome, whether it's a line-of-duty incident, a near miss, or whatever it is. The innovation, the change to the system, isn't the delicate part. The delicacy is in the communication and the response back and forth.
Brendon Dennewill: On a similar note, with franchisees running their own businesses and making significant personal investments, how do you balance giving them the autonomy to operate with making sure everyone is working toward the same goals?
Kristopher Stuart: That goes back to the first introduction, how the brand positions itself as to what the expectation is, who the brand is, who they're looking for, and what that partnership looks like. If it's a "follow our recipe" model, a quarter cup of this, a teaspoon of that, served in a twelve-ounce cup, that's pretty easy. We're a home-based service business, and our products are custom-ordered by the needs and requests of the customer. It all revolves around that human being going into somebody's most sacred space, the home, and being able to be trusted and convey information that isn't seen as a sales pitch, the same way we approach our franchise sales.
When you come into our environment, you have to be able to trust us and believe the things we're saying, providing those expectations right up front. I think that's the answer to your question: clear expectations before you ever begin. Whether you're selling blinds or selling a franchise, doing that well in the beginning eliminates most of the friction when someone later says, "Well, I think you should do it this way."
Obviously we'll take comments on anything, we appreciate everything we can learn from everybody. But when franchisees understand that their primary functions are in a particular lane, it's easier for them to see, "I've only got three of my ten accomplished, I've got seven more to do. And once I get all ten and I'm looking for something else, then I'll come dig through my pile too." Again, it's communication and setting clear expectations from the beginning. Whether it's a cup of ice cream, blinds, or a franchise, that pretty much encompasses everything that follows.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, again, that communication of what we know works, what we know doesn't work, and being clear about what we're...
Kristopher Stuart: And what we're willing to take fluid movement on, from the beginning.
Brendon Dennewill: Kris, when a company is growing quickly, it can be tempting to focus on expansion and the next opportunity. How do you determine when the business needs to slow down, get back to fundamentals, and strengthen operations before pushing forward again?
Kristopher Stuart: They'll tell you. Your customers will tell you, and you'll refuse to listen because you think they don't know. Initially, we did that. They were telling us, and we thought we knew better. Then came the realization that if that's your customer, you listen to them. Every company listens to its customers, and if they don't, they suffer the will of their customer fully.
I think it's a balance point. One of the things we didn't convey well to our franchisees, partially because of naive understanding, was the value proposition of a growing brand. Why you buy into a franchise is the growth, the exponential growth beyond an independent operation, the national exposure, being able to move from one city to another and get the same treatment and product. I don't know that franchisees really understood that maximum value benefit coming in, and I think we should have explained it better in the beginning stages.
So we chased growth without understanding the pull that creates. When your franchisees say, "Hey, you're growing too fast, what about me?" there should be an e-brake pull, the car should come to a screeching stop and start turning back toward them. It's very difficult. It's like asking, "When are you ready to have a child?" At some point you have to take a leap, but if you feel like you can't control the car, you slow down.
Sometimes in business we get so committed to a choice or an idea that we emotionally refuse to change it, especially for new franchisors. There's a critical element in that emerging-franchisor stage that isn't recognized enough: they're going through a process very similar to what a new franchisee experiences. Someone who just left a stable corporate job and entered franchising goes through an emotional journey very similar to a franchisor who left owning their widget store and is now running a national, or burgeoning, franchise.
There's not a lot of conversational opportunity in that space for the franchisor, but they need to realize they're going to encounter the same emotional pitfalls and decision-making trials as their franchisees. If both parties are open and honest about that part of the journey, the human side of business, they can do it better together than if one postures proudly, "I'm perfect, I've got it all together," when the whole world knows we don't. When either party does that and barricades out input from their partner, and we are very much partnered here, it ends up more negative than it needs to be.
Brendon Dennewill: Kris, you're now at sixty-five locations. Making it to sixty-five units is already one heck of a feat, because most brands don't get past ten units. The ones that do want to get to thirty, but a lot has to change between ten and thirty. Then once you hit thirty, you think you're on your way to a hundred, and the next thing you know you hit thirty-six or thirty-seven and everything grinds to a halt, because things have to change again. One of the most common sayings we hear as suppliers in the franchise space is, "What got us here isn't going to get us to where we're going." Franchisors with that mindset know they're going to hit these inflection points. So you're at a really interesting inflection point now, because the next stop is a hundred. You don't have to go into details, but how many inflection points do you think you've gone through, from under ten units to where you are now at sixty-five?
Kristopher Stuart: I could look back and call out four or five significant seasonal shifts. I don't know that you identify them while you're in them, they're always retrospective. That's the evolution: if you've never done it before, you can't identify when it's coming, only experience it yourself.
If you're willing to be introspective and absorb those learnings, not losses, to their core, you can package them into that season of change and say, "That helped us get to this, and that helped us form this." Sometimes it's a single event with such a powerful downstream effect that it influences six or seven different departments.
I sometimes have issue with the phrase "the proven system," because it's really only proven for the moment. Change is inevitable. Ask us how computers were going to be five years ago. Now, with AI and everything else, what was so proven five years ago is automated. I think we need to acknowledge that a bold statement so many make as factual is really just a snapshot in time. We're proven right now, it all works really well, until the next thing changes, the next societal or regulatory shift, whatever it may be.
In our case, window coverings, cords are being eliminated by the federal government. Not a bad thing, it hurts a lot of children every year, but it changes our pricing, our product delivery, our customer usage. A lot of things that were fine three or four years ago are now unavailable, and the entire industry is having to make a shift. Our franchisees feel it on the ground and think, "What's happening to me?" And we say, "Look a little higher, this is what's happening to the entire marketplace." Perspective matters, but change is inevitable and it's coming. That's why I think franchising does a good job talking about system change and how to navigate it. It's a very necessary conversation, and I'm glad it's out there.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, I think that's really the only part that's proven in any business, whether it's franchising or not: that it's going to change. As long as you're growing, it's going to change, and sometimes it changes even if you're not growing, because technology is going to change continuously. But to me, the only thing that's proven is that it's going to change, and the more you're growing, the faster it's going to change.
Kristopher Stuart: If we don't start our franchisees with that understanding, we're creating a fight that's just waiting to happen later. If we tell them, "This is proven, it's stable, it'll never change," that's what they'll expect. But if we tell them we're going to change as little as possible but as much as we need to, there's a different perspective entering the system, almost expectant. It becomes, "Where's the next thing? You told me it was coming, what are you working on?" Which I find motivating, I need to go pursue something, find the next thing to bring to them. Where's the value-add that makes them gleeful to submit that royalty payment every month, instead of horrified, or calling it blood money? If we do our job as franchisors, that royalty should be a benefit, not a burden, to the franchisee.
Brendon Dennewill: So you're touching on a few things here. Like any growing business, you're dealing with pressure, competing priorities, and difficult decisions. How do you determine what really matters and keep the organization focused on the mission?
Kristopher Stuart: I take it back to those six years when I had the dual role. It's chaos management. You show up to an environment, whether it's a disgruntled group of franchisees, a vendor problem, a manufacturer shortfall, or a team dynamic issue. It's assess, prioritize, and act. In public safety, we used something called the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, and act. It's decades old, developed for military and police approaches to high-dynamic engagements, but if you slow it down and look at it, that's how we do everything.
If you're willing to be observant, you use your experience to consider what you've just taken in. The next step is an action or a decision to act, and then you evaluate it again. I talk about this in the office a lot with my team. It's commonly viewed two-dimensionally, as a flat circle that just goes round and round, but if you look at it as forward progress, it's a corkscrew. That next decision to act should advance the needle, because you're constantly moving forward, and every observation from a previous action should lead to the next.
For us, it's very easy: if the franchisee has a need, it's top priority. If our statement is "the franchisee is first," then the rest of the decision-making has that as the guide. That's the very easy filter for what comes first: is it helping the franchisee, or is it helping the brand, the market, or me? Some decisions we've made have been controversial to the broader viewpoint of franchising, but under that lens, they were simple to make: this served the franchisee better than it served the brand, therefore it must be.
It's just prioritization and implementation of a plan. You look at how it worked and do the thing again until you get the desired result, which might mean doing it two or three times to find the right one. But like I said, I've never lost, only learned. Everything is either a pertinent negative or a positive, nothing is simply negative. A pertinent negative applies in a very particular way to inform something else. I learned that there, and I apply it here.
Brendon Dennewill: You're reminding me, are you a Ted Lasso fan? I'm a big Ted Lasso fan, and you're reminding me of one of his great quotes: it's never the wrong thing to do the right thing. It's so true, right?
Kristopher Stuart: It may be hard, but that's okay. No one said this would be easy.
Brendon Dennewill: Kris, as we start wrapping up here, what's one thing you've changed your mind about over the course of your career?
Kristopher Stuart: Definitely my participation with the IFA and my understanding of franchising. The IFA helped me see that we were so naive about the obligation of the business model, and more so to the franchisee, when we engaged. For anyone in the seat where we were twelve years ago, it's so much more than just teaching the job and waiting for the check to arrive. It's an emotional attachment. It's a commitment to somebody else at the moment of their need. That was a huge change.
The people within the IFA community are so generous and willing to share best practices, and pour into anybody willing to ask the question. Our brand got exponentially better when those lessons were applied, when we took what others had spent so much capital, tears, stress, and disrupted families and lives to amass into that central pool of information. That was the key point where we started saying, "Wait a second, there's a better way to do this, and we're a bit behind. We need to pick up the pace."
I've always liked people. So it was the understanding that the franchise business model is its own business model and has nothing to do with the widget, but there's a way to do it correctly. That changed, and it was like we let a rocket loose under our brand when we started applying those lessons.
Brendon Dennewill: That's awesome. So, if there's anyone still in the emerging stage right now, what advice would you give them?
Kristopher Stuart: It's worth every second in this space. If you like to serve people and gain success from doing so, I've recently found the term "reciprocal altruism." It's a forward pour into the world, never looking back, but you can always feel the push it gives you. If that's the type of person you are, or want to be, franchising is worth every tear, every drop of blood, every doctor visit, and every yelling match, because it's worth it. It's the best environment, the best people, the greatest opportunity for success, and you don't have to be greedy about it.
You get the pull-through effect of this environment, and doing things the way franchising promotes business and life, I think it's truly altruistic with a known return to it. I can't think of a better way to go through life than to never have to remember what you said, just being able to find someone and give something to them. When you look back, you realize there's a line of a hundred people waiting to do it for you as well.
So anyone who's thinking about it, do it. Listen to the community, they've all done it before. To have that much experience willing to be shared, and not take advantage of it, is a fool's errand if there ever was one.
Brendon Dennewill: That's really good advice, and I'd double down on that last one. I don't think people realize how giving the franchise community is. Everyone always says just find trusted advisors in the franchise space, no matter their expertise, pick up the phone or send an email and set up a call. It's shocking, every single one of them will meet with you and they don't expect anything in return, because they've been there and they have the space to make the whole industry a success.
Kristopher Stuart: That's right.
Brendon Dennewill: Exactly. Kris what's a principle or mantra you lean into during tough decisions or uncertain growth phases?
Kristopher Stuart: I don't know if there's one driving principle. If there was, I'd say it's obligation. That's easier for me to demonstrate through action than through explanation, because everyone brings their own level of commitment based on their own experience. I'm fortunate to come from an environment where the training included the concept that the job may be all-encompassing, that if you work that hard for somebody else, there may be a finality to that function. So I was kind of born into this idea of obligation, that it may be the last obligation you fulfill. Franchising doesn't carry that risk, but it carries every bit of that expectation.
So when that family surrenders... I use this analogy a lot. There's a frequent situation in public safety where there's a child with croup or some breathing problem at three o'clock in the morning, and the family calls 911. A fire truck and an ambulance show up, and that family hands that child to paramedics they've met for ten seconds. They show up with that trust and belief that the people in those trucks, wearing those uniforms, are going to take good care of this most precious thing, because they need it to work, so they're willing to hand it over and defer that treatment to those who know. I think it's a very similar posture in franchising, or at least I view it that way.
That's the same obligation I feel our job as franchisors is to franchisees. They're handing over everything they've worked for, in a lot of cases, for a lot of home service businesses, it's everything they've got. They believe, based on that brand, the shiny red truck, or in our case, that pink brand, and the people wearing those uniforms, that it's a trusted place to give all their most precious things. When they do that, they're deferring that care and treatment to those other people. That obligation is what I tell my team we're fulfilling in this job.
An IV hurts, but it delivers medicine. So there's the dichotomy: is it helpful, or is it just harmful? If the definition of harmful is pain, you'd stop there. But if you stretch that out past the pain point to the effect of the device, the medication, the process, or system, the downstream effect matters. There's a fear the franchisee has of pain, of the unknown. There's a confidence that the franchisor, or the paramedic, has in the delivery of that IV. How well that paramedic explains it to the patient determines how well it's received, whether the arm pulls back, or whether they're willing to engage that new platform.
So it's communication amidst that obligation. We have the obligation. The franchisee has selected it. They have a duration where they come in and then go out, but through that beginning, middle, and end, ours doesn't change. If there was one concept I'd say applies to all franchisors, or people who work for franchisors, it's to embrace the obligation they've accepted by taking on that role for their franchisees. And really, it's all the people who came before us who made that red truck, or that brand, worthy of that trust and reputation. Those who come after need us to protect it just the same.
Brendon Dennewill: That sense of responsibility, I really like that. As you were giving the analogy of a parent handing over their child to a paramedic, it's almost like in the franchise space, not necessarily a life-or-death situation, but as a franchisor, you're doing that sixty-five times, in your case, handing over that responsibility. Because of the way this business model works, you don't just have one, two, three, four children, you have sixty-five, and you carry that sense of responsibility. The reason I'm giggling internally is because we see this a lot: when a franchise system is ready for a new technology platform, all franchisees are thinking about is the pain of the IV going into one arm, never mind sixty-five arms, because they don't get to the other side of it, what it'll do for all franchisees. But you've got to get past the pain. I'm definitely going to unpack that analogy a little more, I might use it.
Kristopher Stuart: I think a lot of new franchisees have never had that IV. It's always been administered, or they've been the one having to do it for their team or company. So the fear is more impactful than the actual benefit, because they've never been in that space, and that's the delicate part of the humanity we're all experiencing. Certainly, we widget guys have never done system change of that scale, so a little bit of grace can go a long way, with the expectation that no one wants any mistakes. There are no drug calculation errors allowed. But we all understand we're human, so it's a delicate balance, and grace can go a long way in a lot of those interactions.
Brendon Dennewill: And I think also, going back to your point about obligation and responsibility, what you're saying is you're in a position of service. Are you familiar with the book The Go-Giver? For the folks listening, that's a really good place to think about this, how to change how you go through life, because those of us lucky enough to grow up in this society were raised to be competitive, rewarded for being a go-getter. But what you're describing is what that book talks about: being a go-giver instead of a go-getter. When you're a go-giver, like the example you gave, there'll be a hundred people waiting in line to help you. That's how it works.
Kristopher Stuart: Yep. Pay it forward every time.
Brendon Dennewill: Kris, it's been an absolute pleasure and a lot of fun having you on. Thanks so much for joining me today. I hope we get to chat again soon.
Kristopher Stuart: You too, Brendon. Thanks, sir.
Brendon Dennewill: Thanks. Take care.