CMG Companies
The Firm
CMG Companies is a Plano, Texas group of separate and independent entities investing in multi-unit franchising across restaurants, hotels, retail, sports, automotive, and real estate. Its own description ranks what it is: an operator first, then a sponsor investing its own capital, then a family office whose partners invest together. It has raised more than $500 million in debt and equity across twenty-five-plus years, and its brand page runs from KFC, Taco Bell, Sonic Drive-In, Little Caesars, Dunkin', and Arby's to Rent-A-Center, Ace Hardware, Valvoline Instant Oil Change, and American Freight, plus minority stakes in three professional cricket franchises.
The buy box is published in unusual detail. CMG looks for top-tier franchise systems where corporate refranchising, fragmentation, or an aging franchisee base makes acquisitions available; lower-middle-market deals in the US, Canada, and the Caribbean, typically under $100 million; targets with $1 million to $50 million of EBITDA; and equity checks up to $15 million as a GP or sponsor. The stated edge is operational: run a playbook, become the preferred operator in a system, and consolidate back-office work across brands.
Franchise Times, which has covered the group since its Chalak Mitra Group days, counts 271 Sonic drive-ins, 61 Little Caesars, 40 Ace Hardware stores, and 160 combined KFC and Taco Bell units. It reports 14 deals for 118 locations in 2024, a deliberate 2025 slowdown to integrate them, and a 2026 entry into Arby's at more than 100 stores while the group's first Dunkin' opens with a development pipeline behind it.
For a franchise-resale searcher the published floor is the useful part: $1 million of EBITDA is a multi-unit package, not a single store, so the one-store deal is safe from CMG, but anyone assembling a package inside one of its ten systems will meet it as both rival bidder and likeliest exit. Its criteria page also doubles as a model of how a professional unit buyer underwrites, operations intensity first and back-office leverage second.
What It Buys
Plano, Texas. Ten franchise brands and more than 600 units run from Plano, with a published buy box naming corporate refranchising and the aging franchisee base as its deal supply, Arby's the newest flag.
Selling to them one day, or watching them as the other bidder? Track them in the Contact Book so the relationship has a next-touch date.
Confirmed Deals
2 deals traced to announcements by CMG Companies, 2025 to 2026, newest first. Firms that announce every deal show a fuller run here than firms that report acquisitions as quarterly counts, so read this as the evidence that clears the bar rather than as the firm's whole record.
- More than 100 Arby's restaurants · July 20, 2026
The group's seventh restaurant brand, entered in 2026 at more than 100 stores as a first Dunkin' opens with a pipeline behind it.
- 118 locations across Sonic, Little Caesars, and Ace Hardware · April 24, 2025
Fourteen 2024 deals across three brands, bought from existing franchisees with internal capital.