From Engineering Patents to 6 Crumbl Cookie Locations: Systems, Service, and Scale With Nate Tulett

I've been doing this show long enough now to recognize when a conversation has something extra in it. This one did. Nate Tulett is someone I've gotten to know over the past few years, we first crossed paths at Friday night concerts at Mapleside, talking shop while walking the grounds. At the time he had four Crumbl Cookie franchise locations and was about to open two more. Today he operates six locations across the greater Cleveland area. And watching how his mind works has been one of the genuinely great privileges of building this community. Here's the thing about Nate that took me a while to fully articulate: he's an engineer who wandered into the cookie business and found out that it was actually manufacturing the whole time. Mechanical engineer by training, window cleaning entrepreneur by necessity, Crumbl franchisee by calculated instinct. He sees raw materials, value-added processes, and quality control where the rest of us just see pink boxes and rotating menus. And that way of seeing things turns out to be a real asset in the franchise world, because whatever Crumbl corporate hands you, the back-end operation is entirely yours to build. What I didn't expect from this conversation, and what I think will stay with you, is the story he tells about a window cleaning customer from his early days. An elderly woman called in a complaint. He went to investigate. She turned out to be legally blind. And what she was actually asking for, underneath the complaint, had nothing to do with the windows. That story is why I do this show. It says something true about every transaction any of us has ever been part of. We also dig into: how Crumbl's rotating menu creates a recurring engagement loop that most businesses can't manufacture; the psychology behind why bad customer service makes the product itself taste worse; Nate's plans to build a genuine sales culture across six locations rather than a passive one; and why his engineering background gives him a vocabulary most entrepreneurs lack, the expectation that version one fails, and that's not a setback, that's the process. Nate is also among the first Crumbl operators in the country to roll out the new flavored soda program, and his take on how complementary products build customer relationships rather than just upsell opportunities is worth the listen on its own. The LEAP framework, Learn, Evaluate, Act, Protect the Dream, runs underneath this whole conversation, even when we're not naming it explicitly. Nate knows where he's been, he's honest about where he is, and he's calling his shot about where he's going. That's the whole game. This is one of my favorites. I hope it's one of yours. Topics covered: Mechanical engineering background and the leap into franchise ownership Building and selling a 3,500-customer window cleaning business from scratch Why franchises are still independent businesses, and what that demands of operators Customer service psychology: peak memories, high/low points, and the Chick-fil-A "my pleasure" effect The rotating Crumbl menu and why flavor novelty drives engagement Launching the dirty soda program as one of the first 75 U.S. operators Building a sales-minded culture vs. a passive one AI and workflow automation as operational tools for multi-location businesses The engineering "version one always fails" framework applied to business iteration