Summit Property Group Founders Mark and Tom Share Thoughts From the Top

This Summit Property Group Canada video is structured as a leadership-level conversation between the two founders, Mark and Tom. The format is a podcast-style chat — the founders' first such recording together — that introduces the partnership, the origin of the business, and how Summit Property Group has gotten to its current position as a franchise opportunity. Tom describes the Summit origin story. Around twenty years ago, he started a maintenance business at the simplest end of the category — straightforward maintenance work that has, over two decades, grown into a substantial business. The move into franchising is more recent, and Tom is candid about the steepness of the learning curve in moving from operating the business directly to packaging it for franchisees. Mark adds the partnership story. Mark and Tom have known each other for forty-five years — their wives were high school friends — and Mark previously worked alongside Tom in a different business for forty-plus years. Mark's own track record includes building a global oils and lubricants organization. After selling that business, Tom invited Mark to look at Summit and weigh in. Mark joined as a partner in October of the prior year, with serious franchise momentum building from approximately March of this year onward. The most distinctive part of the conversation is Summit's approach to franchise discovery. Mark and Tom describe an explicit invitation: prospective franchisees come visit Summit in person. The framing is direct — pure gold is not afraid of the refiner's fire — meaning Summit welcomes deep candidate scrutiny. This stands in contrast to the more rigid, process-driven discovery approach common across the franchise industry. Summit's process is structured but relational, with the goal of producing true partners rather than transactional franchise sales. The early results are described in concrete terms. In the first seven months of active franchising, Summit signed ten franchisees — growth Mark describes as phenomenal for the industry. The encouragement, however, comes less from volume and more from the quality of work the new franchise partners are doing on the ground. This watch page is part of the Summit Property Group Canada content series on Franchise Direct Canada.