Take 5 Franchisees Merge Into Largest Operator

Take 5 Carolinas and ClayCon Oil, the first and third franchisees ever signed into the Take 5 Oil Change system, combined this week to form Founders Automotive Services Team. The new platform, called FAST, now owns and operates 52 service centers across North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, and Colorado, making it the largest Take 5 Oil Change franchisee in the country by revenue. The deal unites the brand's first and third-ever franchise partners under a single operating company.

Why Two Rivals Chose to Combine

Take 5 Carolinas and ClayCon built separate operations inside the same brand for years, competing for territory while sharing a playbook. Merging removes that duplication: one leadership team, one back office, and one growth plan replace two, freeing up capital that used to fund overlapping infrastructure and giving both former owners more scale to negotiate with vendors and lenders.

A Leadership Team That Already Scaled the Brand

FAST is run by Brannan Lahoda, who previously ran all of Take 5's company-owned operations in North America while the chain grew from 65 to 650 locations. That experience matters more than the merger itself: Lahoda has already managed the exact kind of rapid, multi-state expansion FAST says it wants to repeat as an independent franchisee, and the company says it already has a pipeline of new stores in development.

What It Signals for Multi-Unit Operators

Franchisee consolidation is becoming its own growth strategy inside mature systems, not just a fallback when an owner wants to exit. For operators sitting on adjacent territories in the same brand, FAST is a working example of how combining fleets, staff, and vendor contracts can outcompete two smaller operations run separately, without waiting on the franchisor to bless a formal roll-up.