To help franchisees determine which brands to purchase, Hashim founded NRD Capital, the first multi-unit franchisee sponsored and managed private equity firm. “If you want to buy shares of Coca-Cola, you can read hundreds of analyst reviews on that, but if you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something that could be life-changing like purchasing a franchise, there’s nowhere to go,” he says. “Most investors in franchising are truly financial. They’re bankers who are managing people’s money and making decisions on franchising based on their financial point of view. As operators, our team at NRD is able to pick winners and losers a little more reliably since our metrics for whether we can buy a franchisor is based in large part on whether we’d be a franchisee of that system.”

Most of the investors in NRD Capital are multi-unit franchisees. “It’s the most natural hedge of all for a franchisee to have some money invested in a franchisor,” says Hashim. “If you’re a franchisee, you’d want to have money in a franchisor someplace because then you’re participating on both sides of the trade. On one hand, you’re paying royalties for a living, but on the other hand, you have investments in the royalty collection business.”