Lane Martin

About Lane Martin

Lane Martin is the co-founder of Modern PURAIR, one of North America's fastest-growing indoor air quality companies and franchise systems. From its headquarters in Kelowna, British Columbia, he has grown the business from a local service operation into a multi-location brand across Canada and into the United States, with 38 territories, 22 franchises, and more than $20 million in system sales. Franchise locations succeed in markets as small as 50,000 people, and more than half of them now clear $1 million in annual revenue.

A second-generation entrepreneur, Martin grew up in the industry his father helped pioneer in the 1970s. He bought into the family business in 1992, sold it in 1996, lost a quarter of a million dollars in an unrelated furniture venture, and returned to duct cleaning in 2001 out of necessity. Under his leadership Modern PURAIR has won Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year in 2009 and Small Business of the Year in 2021, and was a finalist for Medium Business of the Year in 2022. He also supports children in need through the PURKIDS Foundation.

On The Daily Mastermind, Martin sat down with George Wright III to explain how a founder stops being the technician and becomes the architect of a system that scales without him. He covered the year and a half he spent convincing his own father to hire the first technician, the hour with Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? that became his franchise blueprint, and his case for the overlooked category he calls boring but essential: unglamorous businesses that solve real problems and generate predictable, recurring revenue.