Learn Why Private Equity Investors Are Fueling Lightbridge Academy’s Franchise Growth

Lightbridge Academy, one of the nation’s leading early education and child care providers, is making serious waves in the franchise industry. Over the past few years, the brand has expanded outside its East Coast base and seen exceptional growth across its system. In 2021, this momentum caught the attention of Brian Burke, managing partner of Elmsley Capital and Ross Brendel, principal and co-founder of Westerly Group. The two friends teamed up for the first time as investors and purchased a majority stake in Lightbridge Academy, marking their first acquisition in franchising. Both have family offices as investors. 

Brendel and Burke met at Harvard Business School. Brendel comes from a private equity background, working for a firm that invested in smaller businesses and multi-billion-dollar private organizations. He started his own independent investment firm a few years ago to partner with long-term, family office investors, focusing on fragmented industries with significant tailwinds to acquire stable, mission-critical businesses. Burke spent most of his career as part of a consumer services private equity firm focused on the middle-market side of multi-unit consumer businesses. Burke was also a VP at a large Burger King franchise and has a background in real estate.

The two friends came together and started to look for investments in the early childhood education space of the franchise industry. “Ross and I have both been franchisees with established franchise concepts and invested in franchisors, so we’ve been on both sides of the equation,” said Burke. “When we saw that Lightbridge Academy was looking to work with larger, multi-unit institutional investors, we knew we could bring that experience, balance sheet, skill set and capital to help grow the franchise and take some of the pressure off the franchisor.”

Brendel says everything about Lightbridge Academy was attractive from an investment standpoint, including its exciting position in the booming early childhood education industry, its culture-driven leadership team, its impressive unit-level economics and its decade’s worth of infrastructure. 

“We knew we wanted to invest in a system with a lot of brand equity and operating history, but still a lot of potential to grow,” said Brendel. “There are not a lot of large-scale franchisors in this industry, and the biggest ones are already completely tapped out when it comes to franchise growth, especially for multi-unit agreements. Lightbridge Academy already has a solid infrastructure but with a lot of white space in prime markets across the country. This is a $34 billion industry that is consistently growing, but even our largest competitors only have a 1% share, so there is tremendous opportunity. Lightbridge Academy is on the cusp of really becoming a national brand. That is pretty rare and special.”

Burke added, “We had spent a lot of time in and around early education before this deal, so we knew what we were looking for, understood the industry, and we had pretty strong opinions on what separated a good operator from a bad operator. When we found Lightbridge Academy, it really checked all the boxes, and we immediately fell in love with the opportunity.”

Additionally, Brendel says one of the factors that impressed him the most about Lightbridge was the consistently strong performance across all schools in the systems, even those opening in brand-new markets. 

“There is already a lot of brand recognition in the Northeast, and our core business and legacy geographies have always been strong performers, but as we move into new high-growth states in the Southeast, those numbers are improving even more,” Brendel said. “You don’t often see franchise locations start to outperform original corporate locations, but it showcases how great some of these markets are, as well as the fact that we are constantly improving our systems, processes and structure.”

With such an attractive model, Burke says he and Brendel were confident that Lightbridge Academy would appeal to other multi-unit, high-net-worth franchisees looking to invest in the brand as well.

“The ideal buyer is probably going to have deeper pockets than other franchise concepts because opening a school is more expensive,” said Burke. “So, the profile of a prospective franchisee will be someone who understands that the investment may be higher, but the return will also be stronger. They need to be willing to put up more capital upfront to operate a business that will generate high ROI instead of just buying a job, which is often the case with many smaller franchise opportunities. As we grow the system, we are also looking to partner with more institutional capital that can expand alongside us.”

Looking ahead, Brendal and Burke say they are eager to continue building out the systems, processes and platforms that will help the Lightbridge Academy system grow and position individual franchisees for success. 

“This investment will allow us to be caretakers in the business for many years to come, providing continuity and support to multi-unit franchisees who want to help us take the system to the next level,” Brendal said.

For example, Burke says, in the past, the timeline from signing to opening may have taken a bit longer than would be ideal, especially for first-time franchisees who were learning the ropes of negotiating commercial real estate. 

“We are looking to take a more active role in that real estate process by developing units on our own balance sheet and facilitating more of a turnkey solution for franchisees,” he said. “That will be one of many options we provide to our franchisees, but we are excited to streamline those types of processes. We are long-term investors trying to provide more value to franchisees in every way we can.”

And Burke says the beauty of investing in Lightbridge Academy is that there are so many things the brand has already got right. Westerly Group and Elmsley Capital can now utilize their resources to make it even better. 

“From the culture to the business model, Lightbridge Academy has a long and successful history in the early childhood education space,” said Burke. “Our goal is to put in place the right capital foundation, add to the corporate infrastructure and fill out the seats to really step on the gas and grow the system.” 

Watch the full interview here.

Learn more about franchise opportunities at https://lightbridgeacademyfranchise.com/.