DEVELOPING SUCCESS
Former cotton picker now harvests $141 million a year in quick photo service.
IMOTO PHOTO AT-A-GLANCE
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4444 Lake Center Drive
Dayton, OH 45426
937-854-6686
Moto Photo has 420 locations in the United States, Canada and Norway; 371 are franchised and 49 are company owned.
The total start-up costs for a Moto Photo varies upon location but is in the range of $300,000-$325,000. With the company's Quick Start II financing program, a store location can be opened with $60,000 cash.
Customers may join the Moto Photo Club and receive discounts and a quarterly magazine covering topics on how to improve photography layouts and composition.
CAPTION: Frank Montano is the president & CEO of Moto Photo, Inc., a photo center that is a self-contained, on-site photo processing mini-lab. Volume comes from one-hour processing and digital services. Some of the stores also include an in-house portrait studio. Frank once picked cotton before finding his fortune with Moto Photo.
By everyone else's standard, Frank Montano had arrived long ago. His business career was an unqualified success. But had he lived up to the expectations of the man who knew him only as "Pancho," the man who had spent a good part of his life picking cotton and later laying railroad track?
Ricardo Montano was a proud man. He had worked for years in the cotton fields of southeastern Arizona, but in 1958 he'd managed to scrape together enough money for a down payment on a two bedroom home so that his family could move from their adobe house with mud walls, dirt floors and an outhouse. They could finally afford the $4800 house because Ricardo's new job as a laborer with the Southern Pacific Railroad meant a steady paycheck.
Ricardo loved his only son, he knew what he could achieve. And in the Hispanic culture, that meant he had to be pushed. "It's a very macho culture," said Frank Montano, president and chief operating officer of Moto Photo, who is know to his family as "Pancho."
"Love in the Hispanic culture meant being demanding. Love was setting high standards. You don't realize it until you're older, but my father was saying to me..although he never came out and said it, 'I believe in you so much that I'm going to demand the world out of you because I know you've got it inside to do it.'
"My dad said, 'Pancho, I know what you are doing. I've been in your shoes at a different place, even though I was just picking cotton. You are spending your life proving yourself to me. You no longer have to do it. In my eyes, you have arrived 100-fold.'
"I started to cry and hugged my father. It brought closure to a part of our relationship. We had some rough times when I was growing up. Whatever I did never seemed good enough for him. But now my father is my best friend. For a father to recognize that and bring closure to it with his own son was phenomenal."
It's been eight years since Montano came to Dayton, Ohio, to go to work for Moto Photo, America's largest franchisor of one-hour photo processing and portrait stores, with more than 400 locations in the United States, Canada and Norway. It was the 36th time that Montano had moved in 25 years.
Hired as executive vice president and in 1992 named Moto Photo president in 1997,
Montano still regrets dropping out of school after his freshman year at the University of Arizona to go to work as an assistant manager at a McDonald's in Tucson, Arizona. He never went back to school.Instead, Montano worked as hard as he could. From McDonald's he went to Arby's. He later worked for The Marriott Corporation and then Sbarro, the Italian Eatery, where he was chief operating officer until leaving to work for Moto Photo. It was a non-stop ladder for a Hispanic kid who had helped his mother and father pick cotton when he was only 4 years old, and who didn't speak English until he began school at age 7.
"I always had the voice of my dad in the back of my mind saying, 'You've got to work hard,' because we always saw ourselves as the underdog," Montano said. "We always felt we had to work twice as hard as the other guy to show the same benefit."
Montano brought his belief in goal-setting to Moto Photo, an industry leader in the $11 billion photo-processing business. Moto Photo's average U.S. store processes more than 450 rolls per week, almost double that of other specialty photo retailers, mass merchants and drug stores with on-site processing.
As Moto Photo president, Montano is responsible for the company's day-to-day operations. He also sits on the executive committee, which outlines strategies and concepts for the future. Lastly, he's responsible for making the dreams of CEO Michael Adler, whom Montano calls, "unbelievably creative," come alive.
"We try to teach goal-setting as much as we can," Montano said. "We try to get people to see that the real achievers are ordinary people who do extraordinary things only because they've got the guts to do it. While everyone else is spending time talking about it, they're out there making things happen."
The week that Montano was asked to come to Moto Photo, he also received two other offers: one from a weight loss company in Akron, Ohio, and the other from a real estate company in Boston. Moto Photo's offer was the lest lucrative. But Montano and his wife, Laurie, while sipping margaritas at a hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, decided the Moto Photo offer had the most appeal.
"We asked ourselves, 'How do we stop being gypsies?'" Montano said. "What was important to me was to be in a job where I loved the people and what I was doing instead of paying the price in order to advance. We sacrificed dollars to seek a different kind of happiness that dollars couldn't fulfill."
Moto Photo is a company with system wide revenues of $141 million. The stores are primarily located in strip malls. The company recently introduced a new store design catering to their largely female clientele.
It places greater emphasis on merchandising photo-display products and services and a new accent on making the Moto Photo retail experience as inviting as possible and also highlights the state-of-the-art photographic technology that still drives the company's ability to satisfy customers, said Montano.
MotoWizard is a new tool that is helping Moto Photo Inc. and its franchisees avoid dead-end sites and hone in on the gold mines in local markets. MotoWizard is a proprietary economic-modeling program that combines demographic data about market locations with information about trade areas and specific potential sites, as well as profiles that Moto Photo has developed of its key customer groups.
MotoWizard crunches the data and helps lead company executives and franchisees to savvy site decisions--affirmative decisions that give them a confidence level and produce results way beyond the company's previous capabilities.
Franchisees participate in a six-week training program. The first three weeks are conducted at the corporate offices with instruction on technical and management issues.
The next two weeks are spent with another franchise owner in the franchisee's market. The final week of training is done on-site to help with employee training and opening day. Franchisees receive ongoing support through Moto Photo's software programs.
For more information on the franchise opportunity, see the sidebar.
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