Kevin Blanchard sees colors brighter now and enjoys every moment of life. He’s studied cooking and photography in South America, where he ate a lot of empanadas and learned to communicate through his photos.
He’s learned smiling often can make your body feel better. And he’s discovering whether his dream of doing something entrepreneurial can be accomplished as a franchisee by working as a coordinator of research and strategic initiatives for the International Franchise Association.
Kevin Blanchard’s passion for franchising led to working with the IFA.
All in all, he’s using his laser-like focus to live life to the fullest. While we can all learn from Blanchard’s journey, none of us would want to travel his pathway to reach enlightenment.
Blanchard was attending community college when 9/11 happened. The son of a Marine, he enlisted, where the structure in boot camp was so intense and so rigid, he was required to always put his left sock on first—in less than 30 seconds. He turned 19 on the base at Paris Island, South Carolina, where he missed both his birthday and Christmas with family that year and was only allowed one phone call during the 13-week training.
"I wanted to do infantry…to crawl through the mud, basically," he said. "My view of the military wasn’t an office job." He wanted to be part of a team that was family. To that end, he was trained as a combat engineer, arming and disarming bombs.
On June 30, 2005, he was driving a truck in Iraq on patrol, when it ran over an IED, which is programed to blow up inward in order to take out the driver’s legs. He lost his left leg and part of his right, and suffered a head injury.
After makeshift care on the side of the road, Blanchard was placed in a drug-induced coma for 10 days. His parents were told to fly to his bedside in Germany to say good-bye, a formality that turned out not to be necessary.
It took 30 surgeries to rebuild his right leg and four on his left. He had to learn to walk and to manage lifelong pain.
Blanchard still has a constant burning sensation, and his injuries set a new "pain threshold that’s hard to get used to." And yet, "It builds character," he says. "It lets me know I’m alive."
Wanting to feel alive in the metaphoric sense led to his trip to South America. It was a painful trip, literally. He hiked miles on uneven terrain and learned to speak Spanish and how to squeeze lime into contaminated water to make it drinkable. "It was all about survival," he says. Through a guide, he discovered an Amazonian tribe that he visited for nine days.
At the end of his "vacation," he learned "the world’s not as scary as it seems." At least if you surround yourself with good people and always ask questions.
Blanchard’s current career in franchising came about when he met Josh Merin, IFA’s senior manager of research and strategic initiatives, at the association’s public affairs conference last year. Blanchard helped do business development in an effort to sell Merin on his value as a team member, and when a job opened up, he was in.
He’s a natural for the association’s VetFran program, which introduces franchises to military personnel, and vice versa. He also works on international projects.
Blanchard is finishing up his MBA, and "I’m 95 percent sure, I want to be a franchisee and that I’d be good at it," he said at a franchise expo several months ago. But he’s also good at what he does at IFA and wants to climb the ladder there first. "We’re all going to get someplace. Just some of us have to work harder (to get there),"he said.
