PayMore recently signed a deal with Volt Resale’s CEO Bobby Reedy for 25 units to be built across Michigan.
Electronics resale company PayMore signed a 25-unit deal with Volt Resale, a franchise group led by Bobby Reedy.
The deal brings PayMore to Michigan. Volt Resale is a sister company to Kava Restaurants, a Tim Hortons franchisee group founded by Tom Reedy and Steve Williams.
“We think it’s the perfect brand for us to get into with their focus on technology and our background in tech,” said Reedy. “A lot of the fundamentals of PayMore really excited us to be our second brand.”
Founded in 2011 by President Erik Helgesen and CEO Stephen Preuss, PayMore is meant to be a greener way to get rid of old electronics. Instead of filling landfills, those electronics can be fixed, cleaned and resold. The brand’s name refers to customers getting paid more for their old electronics. It has 16 locations across the United States.
PayMore’s venture with Volt comes after Kava shrunk its Tim Hortons footprint during the coronavirus pandemic.
Bobby Reedy
“We started with around 25 units, pretty quickly scaled to being the largest franchisee of Tim Horton’s globally,” said Reedy. “We had over 80 restaurants in five different states across the Midwest.”
The restructure turned Kava into “a smaller, more nimble organization,” Reedy said. It now has 13 Tim Hortons stores, along with four Cold Stone Creamery locations across Michigan.
It took about two years of searching before the team found PayMore. Kava had been looking for restaurant brands and “hadn’t considered retail as heavily,” said Reedy, but PayMore caught the team’s attention.
“Hearing the pitch of PayMore really jumped out to us,” said Reedy. “We were really excited to get in at the ground floor of a growing concept.”
Among the standouts was the ease of operations, Reedy added. The team was also impressed with the founders’ leadership abilities. The tech stacks the pair had built were a particular bright spot in building confidence for the success of Volt’s stores.
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Electronics reseller PayMore has 16 open stores.
The team settled on 25 stores to start as “we believe that’s what the Michigan market can support,” said Reedy. The plan is to open the first store in the Detroit area by the end of the year. The rest will be spread in the major metros of Michigan, including Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo.
“We think this is a brand and concept that should exist in every metro area in the country,” said Reedy.
Reedy estimated that opening the planned locations will take roughly five years. The team at Kava and Volt plan to bring their experience to the table through communication and sharing ideas with PayMore’s founders.
This is already standard practice at PayMore and it’s yet another aspect that attracted Reedy, he said. Volt is also planning to leverage resources from the Dillon Kane Group, a financial partner and technology consultant firm in Chicago.
The initial investment for a PayMore location ranges between $152,050 to $242,450.
“We feel it’s a really good marriage between two organizations,” said Reedy. “We really wanted to be that keystone partner for PayMore in Michigan.”