The common thread weaving through the life of Orland Park resident Don Boroian is balance.
It’s not that this man avoids extremes. On the contrary, his life may be nothing if not a string of extremes. No, Boroian’s gift is finding the delicate balance that maintains his spiritual equilibrium in a chaotic world that hasn’t always played fair.
Up and down, in and out, rich and poor, static and dynamic, creative and methodical, all describe Boroian, not only throughout the course of his 58 years but very possibly within a single 24-hour day. To follow him around is to have hold of the last car on a roller coaster.
Don Boroian is a high-powered and capable business leader. He’s an energetic community volunteer and a visionary. He’s a wicked hockey player and a competitive golfer. That’s on the one hand.
On the other hand, those who know him would say Boroian is a devoted parent, husband and brother. He’s a loyal friend and gifted musician. He’s also battled overwhelming physical and financial adversity and triumphed.
Dr. Leo M. Henikoff, president and CEO of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, calls Boroian “all substance.”
“It’s the brilliance of his insight which sets him apart,” said Henikoff.
Keith Magnuson, former Chicago Blackhawk and Boroian’s friend, calls him “an all-around great guy, a very caring individual who is never without a smile.”
Stan Mikita, another former Blackhawk, refers to Boroian simply as “a gentleman,” and also as “an old broken-down hockey player just like me.”
Boroian chairs the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center Leadership Committee. He is a member of the Chicago Blackhawks Alumni Association (which helps former Hawks get a career going after hockey). As a former music major he also serves on the De Paul University School of Music Advisory Board and is a recent recipient of De Paul’s Distinguished Alumni Award.
Upon receipt of that award, which lauds his business success, Boroian quipped, “Probably the biggest contribution I made to music was getting out of the business and making room for someone else to get a job.”
All kidding aside, according to friend and neighbor Sam Carrozza, president of Sterling Spring of Chicago (a firm that manufactures precision springs for industry), “He plays piano like he’s Paderewski’s brother.”
Professionally, Boroian is a certified management consultant and a member of the North American Association of Securities Administrators, the Midwest Securities Commissioners Association and the Institute of Management Consultants. He also has been a member of the Industry Advisory Committee of the Franchise Regulation Committee.
Boroian has co-authored two books on the subject of franchising, “The Franchise Advantage,” with his son Patrick Boroian, and the other, “How to Buy and Manage a Franchise,” with Joseph Mancuso, to be published this fall.
Two things Boroian is never without are a pocket telephone and a tan leatherette daily planner. The latter is dog-eared, well-worn and shaped to the contour of his body from its constant ride in his back pocket.
The telephone is necessary because he never fails to return a call. Carrozza recalled a day when he called Boroian’s office, “just to say hi. He wasn’t there so I told his secretary no message, nothing important. I was just calling to see how he was.”
“The next thing I know Don was calling me back . . . from an airplane flying over Mexico!” Carrozza said, laughing.
Any doubt that the planner is a necessity is allayed by Boroian’s recital of a typical six-week travel schedule.
“Pittsburgh, Louisville, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, New York. Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Mobile. Washington, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia,” Boroian read. He stopped to take a breath.
“Then there’s a week off for our family reunion at Lake Delavan, Wis. Then Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles again, and, finally, New York. That’s it,” he deadpanned. No kidding-the next six weeks look identical.
“My life has been a balance that was fundamentally family-driven,” said this former Chicago South Sider (hailing from the West Pullman neighborhood) and the youngest of eight children born to Armenian immigrants. It’s not hard to believe Boroian is family-driven. His family is bigger than many small corporations-he maintains close ties to his siblings and their families, plus he and wife Sally have five children (all married) and 11 grandchildren.
Speaking of corporations, Boroian is founder, chairman and chief executive officer of an Olympia Fields-based firm called Francorp Inc. It is a franchise consulting firm that will do about $3 million in business this year, according to Boroian.
Francorp has offices in New York and Los Angeles and licenses (or franchises) in Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, Colombia and Ecuador. Boroian claims it is the largest (35 employees at the Olympia Fields office) firm in its industry in the world. It boasts a client list that includes names such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Ace Hardware, Nestle, Ryder Truck Rentals and Discovery Zone.
“Our mission is to work with companies that want to franchise their businesses. That was my dream in putting together this company,” Boroian said recently from his office, which overlooks a sprawling corporate campus.
Boroian is a soft-spoken man of small physical stature (Mikita jokingly calls him “short!”) at around 5 feet 7 inches and 160 pounds, but his presence is enormous. Henikoff of St. Luke’s calls him “much more than energetic. Energetic is too small a word to describe him.”
Eighteen years ago, Boroian said, he saw the need for a company that could put all the services that a franchisor needed under one roof. Those services include, he said, feasibility studies, business plans, franchise agreements and offering circulars. They also process state registrations and federal compliances and write operations manuals.
Francorp also videotapes training films and franchise sales films. Additionally, it acts as an advertising agency, Boroian explained, everything the franchisor could need.
“There was no such firm then and there is no such firm (other than Francorp) now. There are a lot of sole practitioners who sub-contract work out, but no one who has what we have here,” he said, his hand sweeping an arc in the air as if encasing both floors of Francorp in his grasp.
“Over the last 18 years we’ve consulted for probably 5,000 companies and done more than 500 total franchise development projects,” said Boroian. The company receives in excess of 10,000 telephone calls per year, according to a company spokesperson, inquiring one way or another about the franchise business. Francorp puts on more than 150 franchising seminars a year as well.
“It’s an expansion business,” Boroian noted. And in these economic times the easiest and least expensive way for a company to expand is through franchising, where the franchisee puts up the money for expansion, he said.
Boroian is proud of the work his company does. He pointed to Francorp client Discovery Zone, which provides indoor children’s play areas, as one shining example of the way franchising works best.
“Three years ago they had a net worth of $10 million and had one store. Today the company’s worth $460 million. They sold 160 franchises in their first 18 months-out of a strategy that we developed for them,” Boroian said.
On the other hand, he asserted he is equally proud of smaller companies that have more moderate, less explosive growth.
“Success is setting goals and accomplishing those goals. You don’t have to be a big business tycoon to be successful in life,” he said. “I measure success day by day. I’m in control of my own destiny and I can’t wait to come in here every day.”
If Boroian measures success day by day, it may be because he values each day as a success, according to Sally, who has been married to him for 38 years. “She was my childhood sweetheart,” he said.
In 1963, Don Boroian was given six months to live. His doctors had discovered melanoma, a skin cancer, in his right shoulder. According to Sally, the tumor was removed during five hours of surgery, similar to the mastectomy that is performed on women. His chest muscle was also removed.
Sally’s voice cracks as she recalls the fear and uncertainty the whole family suffered. The couple had four children at the time, all under the age of 7. Boroian was self-employed as a music teacher.
“Thank goodness he pulled through and everything turned out all right,” Sally sighed.
It was shortly after that Boroian took up hockey, as a result of involvement with his two sons who enjoyed playing the sport. “I played a little as a kid but never very seriously,” he recalled.
But as an adult Boroian found he had a knack for the game that he’d previously delighted in from the stands. He’s a 30-year Blackhawks’ season ticket-holder. Many’s the night that he returns from out of town only to be driven by his chauffeur to some ice arena for a game in one of the two leagues in which he plays.
It’s through his interest and numerous trips to NHL fantasy camps that Boroian met several hockey notables. Besides Mikita and Magnuson, Boroian counts among his friends Dennis Hull, Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Hull and Gordie Howe, among others. His office walls are plastered with photographs of Boroian playing hockey with these and others.
“The games are late at night usually, so it doesn’t interfere with my work or my family life,” he said. His family often watches him play.
“I learned a long time ago that I needed to know about and like hockey or I’d be in trouble,” Sally said. Now she claims to have been spoiled by the fast pace of the game. “I can’t sit and enjoy a baseball game because it’s too slow-moving,” she said.
Boroian brings to hockey the same fire he brings to everything else in his life. Eldest sister Anita Boroian, 82, of Tinley Park, calls this aspect of her baby brother’s personality “warm-blooded.” He returns the compliment.
“Everything I am today I owe to my sisters,” declared Boroian, whose father died when the boy was just 9 years old. Since Don is 10 years younger than his next closest sibling, he recalls sitting around the dinner table listening to each brother and sister’s account of their day’s work.
“I couldn’t wait to go to work,” Boroian said. He wanted more than anything, Anita said, to be able to buy nice things for their mother. “He wanted to buy her a fur coat,” she recalled, which he eventually did.
To that end Boroian shoveled snow, mowed lawns, raked leaves, had a paper route, sold seeds at school and in general did every odd job he could, Anita said. He worked hard, studied hard and, upon graduation from Fenger High School, attended De Paul University, majoring in music education.
“I graduated in 2 1/2 years. I graduated on Monday and on Saturday Sally and I were married,” Boroian recounted. Eleven months later their first child was born, 14 months after that the second, and so on until, before she was 25, Sally had four children.
Boroian had wanted to become a grade school band director but was unable to land his dream job because of school funding cutbacks. In 1955, he worked as a 4th-grade teacher in Park Forest and in the evenings and on weekends ran a music program at West Pullman Park in Chicago.
It occurred to Boroian that he could perform a similar service for schools. He proposed to school administrators the idea of running a music program funded by the children. The music students each paid $10 per month and he taught music and directed the band using the school’s facility.
The idea caught on, and before long Boroian had more requests from schools than he could feasibly handle. He decided to franchise. Ray Kroc was enjoying some success with his hamburger franchise (McDonald’s), Boroian reasoned, so why couldn’t he do likewise? Band directors paid him a fee and a percentage of their monthly gross in exchange for services he performed for them.
“I did all the billing. I furnished all the instruments. I did the recruiting and furnished specialized teachers,” Boroian explained.
Boroian’s former Fenger High School band director, Andy Lumbrazo, who is retired and living in South Holland, recalled: “He took a lot of kids and gave them the love of music. His bands won many music championships.”
Boroian credits Lumbrazo with “having a major impact on my life. He treated us like professionals. No other teacher had ever spoken to us like individuals before.” He and Lumbrazo still keep in touch.
By the mid-60s Boroian’s company, called Music Education Service, had expanded to include 160 schools throughout the South Side and south suburbs. It had gone as far as he wanted to go with it. He sold it and went to work as director of franchise sales for Chicken Unlimited.
By 1976, Boroian had advanced to executive vice president of Chicken Unlimited, which was by then an American Stock Exchange company with 300 restaurants. He decided to pursue another dream and started the franchising consulting business.
Born as Franchise Concepts, the business did quite well and in 1978 it purchased a business called Resellit Shop for a half-million dollars. According to Boroian, he put another half-million dollars into it and increased the number of stores to 40. He had guaranteed all the loans with Franchise Concepts and his own personal assets.
Resellit Shop was a consignment business that turned around used merchandise, such as furniture. The idea seemed a good one: Sell a sofa, buy two chairs, said Boroian. Trouble was, he said, the company couldn’t bring in used merchandise fast enough.
Resellit Shop went bankrupt in 1980. It took with it not only money from Franchise Concepts but Boroian’s Flossmoor home-“The bank auctioned it off”-and his car. “They towed it away at 3 o’clock in the morning. I was wiped out,” he said.
Sally recalled that they had three children in college at the time. “That was hard,” she acknowledged, but not as hard as their bout with cancer.
“Once you’ve gone through a serious, life-threatening, health problem where you think you’re going to be gone, financial problems are not so bad,” Sally said. “I always had faith things would come out okay. I knew he’d always done well, he always would do well. It was just a matter of getting through the day-to-day.”
Boroian also had faith, and so, too, did the many employees who went without salaries for a time while he reorganized the business under the name of Francorp.
Mary Kennedy, Boroian’s assistant who has been with Francorp for 10 years, said, “If I had been working for Don at the time, I would have stayed on, too. He’s giving, fair and brilliant. I consider him one of my best friends.”
Boroian also acknowledges the clients who stuck with him through the difficult period. “I just started all over again,” he said.
The success of Francorp now speaks for itself as Boroian works to steer the firm through the uncertain waters of today’s economy.
“I believe what we’re seeing right now is not so much a recession as it is a change in the way we’re doing business in the world. We’ve not seen this kind of dramatic change since the Industrial Revolution,” Boroian said. As managers, he believes he and other business leaders are being challenged to find the best ways to operate in a much more competitive world.
And about his work on the Rush Alzheimer’s leadership committee (“I didn’t want to be on a rubber-stamp committee. I wanted to be where they had the biggest challenges”), Henikoff marvels at Boroian’s level of involvement.
“He’s doing one whale of a job for us,” Henikoff said.
That is typical of Boroian’s unique style-balance by giving 100 percent of himself to whatever he’s doing at the time.
