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FRANCHISE
REPORT
2016
Despite the threat of increased labor costs, franchising is on the rise in Westchester—in sectors both expected (food) and unexpected (nearly everything else!)
BY DAVID LEVINE
Dan Magnus knew, one night at his Elevation Burger restaurant in Rye Brook, that he had made the right decision to go into franchis- ing. A former publishing executive, he was left without a job when his company was sold. During his one-year, non-compete sever- ance time—“my ‘gardening clause,’ as they call it in Europe,” he says—and with the media business in turmoil, he decided that it was time to move on to something else. He found franchising and opened two county locations of Elevation Burger, a restaurant offering organic, grass-fed beef and other health-conscious food items.
That evening, three C-suite publishing execs whom Magnus knew well happened to walk into his restaurant coincidentally. “They told me: ‘You are the smartest guy in town for getting out of the [publishing] business,” Magnus says.
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