Rent-to-own News - ColorTyme's Childers featured in Franchise Times

ColorTyme Alaska's Mark Childers with his team of sled dogs.

ColorTyme Alaska's Mark Childers is featured in this month's Franchise Times where the company's top franchisee comes clean on his sled dog "lifestyle" and how it has influenced and inspired his rent to own business management sense.

The full article can be found here.

Excerpts below:

"There’s nothing quite like hooking up 16 exuberant dogs to a sled and setting off on a 300-mile race in minus-50 degree weather to get the ole heart pumping. If sleep deprivation is one of the side effects of dog mushing, then the reward is surely the rugged, yet pristine, Alaskan scenery that man and dog witness together at blurring speeds.

Childers and an equity partner built their Washington state ColorTyme franchisee company to 27 stores before selling out to a corporation in 2005. At 41, he retired—for about two weeks. He and his wife, Tracey, decided to move to Alaska, where the noncompete wasn’t in effect, and they could start over. ColorTyme was all he knew, Childers says. He was a delivery driver for the company while in college, and he quit school because he saw more opportunity with the rent-to-own industry than in higher education.

ColorTyme Franchisee Mark Childers runs with the big dogs, when he’s not acquiring more stores so he can keep good employees.

The couple took the profits from the sale and invested in four ColorTyme locations in 18 months. They moved to Knik, Alaska, a town of dog mushers, and when Childers saw the dogs jumping three to four feet off the ground in anticipation of their long run, he was instantly smitten.

To be fair, Childers says he had expressed an interest in the sport, but his wife still was caught off guard when she came upon him on the phone about to order 16 dogs. “She hung up the phone,” he says, laughing. Her next words were: “We gotta talk.”

They did, but she didn’t talk him out of it. Over the summer of 2009, he assembled a team of 12 dogs, which by November became 24 dogs—and then the litter was born, which brought the total of Alaskan Huskies living in their backyard to 30. “I have three acres and from the back deck you see two acres of dogs (on chain- and- pull leads),” he says.

Childers has only raced for a year, but two more races this year and he’ll qualify for the 2013 Iditarod, a 1,150-mile dog sled race which can take between 10 to 17 days in some of the harshest weather conditions known to man. The Iditarod is referred to by locals as the “Last Great Race on Earth.”

Sometimes early success, in business or dog mushing, can be a detriment. Childers placed 12th out of 30 in his first race. “Everything worked perfectly; I was spoiled,” he admits. His next race, however, ended at mile 239 out of 300, when his lead dog went down with an acute case of frostbite to a rather sensitive area of his body near his rear legs. His back-up dog was too young and inexperienced to lead.

The crisis hit when the team crested a hill and then plunged into waist-high, icy water. “Nappy”—the experienced, $4,000 lead dog— became confused and, once frostbitten, twice shy about taking the lead. Once they struggled out of the water, Childers had to remove 32 pairs of shoes before he got to his own.

He rubbed snow, which is absorbent, on the dogs to get rid of the ice, knocked the snow off the sled and found the trail. They went another 20 miles (with Nappy riding in the sled with him), until they broke for camp. Once the dogs saw the straw bedding and five-gallon cooker come out of the sled, they knew they were in for a rest and a hot meal. That leg of the race, which should have been four hours, became 16. He says he did jumping jacks to keep warm and tried to keep a fire going with spruce boughs. He even sang silly songs to the dogs to keep their spirits up.

When temperatures dipped below minus-15, Childers says he broke out the high-tech fabric coats for the dogs, to help trap in their body heat. The next day, he changed the dog duos around to see if he could find a combination that worked best, and then “limped into the checkpoint” where his worried wife waited, along with the trailer to take the dogs and sled home.

A dog-powered sled can go about nine to 10 miles per hour. Just slow enough to take in the view. “Some of the most magnificent sights I’ve seen are on the back of a sled,” he says. He’s seen the Northern Lights “on top of me,” and Alaskan sunsets over endless snow.

Childers can solve the world’s problems on the back of a sled, and also listen to audio books or music. “It’s been some of my best times—and most miserable,” he says.

The deal-breaker may be that “it’s hard to race and maintain a role in your business,” he says. “The dogs are a lifestyle, rather than a hobby.” During race season, a musher needs to spend eight to 14 hours a day with his dogs, and it’s not like he can bring them to the office with him. Still, their store is currently No. 1 in the system, he says.

Off season, Nappy, or Napoleon as his original owner named him, is rewarded for his lead-dog job by being allowed to come into the garage to watch TV. The only show he pays attention to is “The O’Reilly Factor.” “He likes Bill O’Reilly’s voice,” Childers says, laughing.

In the summer, half his dogs are lying in the shade, while the others are working for one of his friends who owns a dog-sled tourist business that targets cruise ships. The dogs who work, he says, are by far the happier ones.

That’s just one more thing he has in common with his dogs."