Operator · Acquirer · Franchisor
“I spent 17 years fighting the commodity battle.”
Then he went looking for a business that couldn’t be commoditized.
Founder & CEO, TPLC Systems / President, Tommy Pollina Landscape Co.
Freight broker. Trucking owner. Searcher. Now the man turning 45 years of Chicago drainage know-how into a franchise system.
B.S. in Logistics & Supply Chain Management from the Eli Broad College of Business. He moved to Chicago the day after graduation. The job was already waiting.
Nine years on the carrier sales floor, where he learned freight from the inside and trained the reps who came after him.
He quit a safe job and bought three trucks. The freight market fell apart that same month. Year one paid almost nothing. He kept going.
He opened RDX’s Chicago division with his college best friend. Seven trucks became roughly twenty. Drivers stayed for years, because he made sure they made money.
The worst freight market in a generation. Buyers did full diligence, then disappeared. He sold the trucks and walked away with nothing. He calls it the biggest failure of his life, and the best education he ever paid for.
After a self-funded search he closed on Tommy Pollina Landscape Co., a Chicago North Shore institution, on the morning he turned forty.
Since 1982
Founded by Joe Pollina with one truck on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Today it is a drainage-first, design-build firm serving the North Shore, and the company people call when others have already tried and failed. Joe still runs day-to-day operations.
tommypollina.com →Franchisor
The first franchise built by a Searcher, for Searchers™. Forty-five years of methods, estimating and field knowledge, written down and built into a system for serious operators. Not passive. Not for everyone. That’s the point.
tplcsystems.com →“If your competition is a preteen with a paint brush, a middle schooler with a mower, or a high schooler with a hose, you don’t need a franchise. Go start it yourself.”
The internet is full of people selling the dream that anyone with a W-2 can buy a boring business and coast. Most of them make their money from courses, masterminds and clicks, not from running anything.
Dan’s view is the opposite. Good businesses have complexity and a moat. They solve hard problems for customers who trust you. They take real operators. He has run trucks, made payroll and lost a sale, so he says it plainly.
14 October 2026 · MIT CSAIL, Cambridge MA
Invited to present TPLC Systems inside MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, alongside Chick-fil-A and four other franchise brands.
Topics: buying versus building, why commodity businesses lose, and what a search teaches you that an MBA won’t.
Watch the webinar
Booking a speaker for searchers, ETA or franchise audiences? Searching yourself and want to compare notes? Start here.