By Kyla Dufresne, Foxy Box

I started Foxy Box in 2012 with bartending tips, a treatment room, and absolutely no idea how to build a franchise.

I didn’t finish high school. I didn’t have an MBA. I didn’t come from a corporate background, and there was certainly no beautifully mapped-out growth strategy sitting on my desk.

What I did have was an enormous amount of belief, a willingness to figure things out, and probably an unhealthy tolerance for risk. In the early days, those qualities were my superpower. I could make decisions quickly. I could jump behind the front desk, wax a client, train a team member, handle a complaint, create a promotion and clean the bathroom; sometimes all in the same day.

When you’re building a business from nothing, being willing to do everything is often exactly what gets you through. But there comes a point in almost every founder’s journey when the thing that built the company becomes the very thing holding it back.

That’s called The Founder Ceiling. And I know it well.

I Sold a Franchise Before I Understood Franchising

I sold my first franchise before I really understood what franchising meant.

At the time, I thought I was selling someone a Foxy Box. I had built something that worked, people loved it, and I believed I could teach someone else how to do it too. What I didn’t fully understand yet was that I wasn’t just helping someone open another Foxy Box. I was becoming a franchisor. And my job had fundamentally changed. The problem was, I hadn’t changed with it.

I was still in my treatment room waxing clients. I was still deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of my own stores. I was still trying to be the entrepreneur, operator, Vagician, problem solver and culture keeper and now, somehow, franchisor on top of all of it.

I thought working harder was the answer. For a while, you can get away with that.

Founders are scrappy. We fill gaps. We figure things out. We work ridiculous hours and sometimes wear it like a badge of honor. But franchising changes the stakes.

When another person invests their money, time, future and livelihood into your brand, your responsibility changes. It took me hiring a Franchise Business Coach when I knew I was in over my head to truly understand that my job was no longer just to make my business successful.

My job was to build the infrastructure, people, systems and support that gave other people the best possible opportunity to make their businesses successful.

That realization changed everything.

Eventually, I had to do something that felt completely counterintuitive to the entrepreneur in me.

I had to pause. I had to step out of the treatment room and realize that supporting a franchise system required an entirely different kind of work. I had to take everything that had lived in my head — everything we had learned through years of operating Foxy Box — and turn it into something that could actually be replicated.

That meant creating systems and standard operating procedures. Building out detailed build-out guides. Implementing learning management systems. Creating training programs, tools, resources and infrastructure that our franchise partners and their teams could rely on without needing me in the room.

I had to stop being the person who knew how to do everything and start building a company that knew how to do everything without me.

That was the real shift from operator to franchisor.

Hiring People Better Than You

I’ve actually always been comfortable hiring people who are smarter than me. I know what I’m great at and I’m also pretty good at knowing what I’m not great at.

As we’ve grown, I’ve tried to be really intentional about looking at the gaps in my own skill set and hiring people who are strong where I’m not. People with experience I don’t have, expertise I don’t have and different ways of looking at the business.

I don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. In fact, I don’t want to be. My job is to build the right room.

The evolution for me has been learning how to surround myself with those people, give them the space to lead, and trust that they may build something differently — and better — than I would have built it myself.

One of the questions I want to put to the room during The Founder Ceiling, the session I’m organizing for the 2026 Emerging Franchisor Conference, is:

Are you hiring people you’d be nervous to lose to a competitor?

Because I think we should be.

Great leaders shouldn’t exist to make the founder feel more important. They should make the founder less necessary. That can be a hard pill to swallow.

Build a Team, Not a Following

There is a huge difference between building a team and building a following.

A following looks to the founder for answers. A great team brings perspectives, ideas and sometimes hard truths the founder may never have come up with themselves.

I call myself a servant leader. I’m constantly asking tough questions of our system: What’s missing? Where are we falling short? What do you need from us? How can I support you better? How can we improve?

And sometimes you have to be willing to hear answers you don’t necessarily like.

I think that’s part of our responsibility as leaders. We need to create environments where people feel safe enough to challenge us, disagree with us and tell us what’s actually happening — not just what they think we want to hear.

It’s easy to surround yourself with people who feed your ego. People who agree with every idea, tell you you’re doing a great job and happily follow your lead. But that’s not the team that’s going to push you — or your company — to the next level.

As founders, we need to be asking the tough questions and then be brave enough to listen to the answers.

I’ve had to learn that you can’t hire experienced, talented people and then expect them to simply execute every idea exactly as you would. You can’t tell someone you want them to own their seat and then climb into that seat every time they make a decision differently than you would.

If we want great people around us, we have to give up some latitude.

The goal isn’t to build a room full of people who agree with you. It’s to build a room full of people who care enough about the business to challenge you.

My Mistakes Are My Harvard Education

I’ve made plenty of mistakes learning this.

I’ve held onto people longer than I should have.

I’ve jumped back into roles because doing it myself felt faster.

I’ve hired people and then not given them enough room to actually lead.

I’ve learned that sometimes the person who was perfect for one chapter isn’t the person for the next one.

And I’ve learned that sometimes that person is me.

I often say that my mistakes are my Harvard education.

I’ve paid a lot of tuition.

But those mistakes have forced me to become a different kind of leader. The question I’m trying to ask myself more often today isn’t:

“How would I do this?”

It’s: “What does the company need from me now?”

 Sometimes the answer is vision. Sometimes it’s a difficult conversation. Sometimes it’s making the final call.

And increasingly, sometimes the answer is to get out of the way.

The Identity Shift Nobody Talks About

 We talk a lot in franchising about systems, unit economics, franchise development, operations and profitability.

We don’t talk nearly enough about the identity shift that happens when an entrepreneur becomes a franchisor.

When you’ve built something from scratch, the business is deeply personal. You remember the first client. The first employee. The first location. The first time there wasn’t enough money in the bank. The first time you realized this crazy idea might actually work. Your fingerprints are on everything. So stepping away from pieces of it can almost feel like you’re becoming less important to the company you created.

I’m learning that the opposite is true.

The founder’s job isn’t to remain indispensable.

The goal should be to build an organization strong enough that your fingerprints are everywhere, but your hands don’t have to be. And I am still learning how to do that.

That’s exactly why I wanted to organize The Founder Ceiling for the Emerging Franchisor Conference.

I’m not coming into this conversation as someone who has perfectly conquered mine.

I’m coming into it as someone who has hit it, broken through parts of it, rebuilt, made mistakes and am hitting another version of it as we continue to grow.

I want us to talk about the messy part.

How do you transition from being the person who built the business to the person responsible for supporting other people in building theirs?

And perhaps most importantly:

Are we building companies that can grow beyond us — or companies that still need us at the center of everything?

Kyla Dufresne is the founder & CEO of Foxy Box. For more information about IFA franchisor member Foxy Boxy, please visit franchise.org/franchise-opportunities/foxy-box/.