Junior Bridgeman - From The Basketball Court To Owerns Of Burger Joints

Former NBA star scores on Wendy's team: Bridgeman takes game to franchise court, retains no. 2 as second-largest player

The GE Capital commerical that is getting significant air play on the business news channels features an NBA player who I had never heard of before. 

Junior Bridgeman is the owner of 160 Wendy's franchises.  The commercial noted how GE assisted him with financing for his expansion.  

Article From 2004

When the National Basketball Association's Milwaukee Bucks retired Ulysses "Junior" Bridgeman's No. 2 in 1988, the man who holds the team's record for most games played walked away from his former career and never looked back.
Bridgeman, who seldom talks about his playing days, now makes a name for himself as businessman, operating 153 Wendy's restaurants and a Baja Fresh Mexican Grill. He is president and chief executive of Bridgeman Foods Inc. of Wauwatosa, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, and BF South, located in Louisville, Ky. His biggest restaurant markets are Milwaukee, with 38 outlets, and Fort Myers, Fla., with 20.
Franchisees like Bridgeman are the lifeblood of the Wendy's brand. Worldwide, franchisees operate 78 percent of the 6,535 Wendy's operating as of June 27. In the United States, for example, there were 4,530 franchised branches, versus 1,288 Wendy's-owned units as of that date.
Bridgeman Foods is the second-largest of Wendy's franchisees, and one of only three that currently have a Baja Fresh franchise. Only WendPartners Group, a 266-unit franchise collective in upstate New York, is larger.
As it happened, Bridgeman chose as his second career a business in which, as with sports, customers would convey almost immediately how well they thought he was performing.
"It's a lot of fun," Bridgeman says of the foodservice industry. "You know right away whether you did a good job, and the job changes every day. That's exciting. Also, food is something everybody has to have. There are always people willing to go out to eat."
When considering a restaurant concept to buy into, he looked at Wendy's because he liked the product.
"I wanted to go with a franchise system because it made the most sense to someone starting out in the business," he explains. "You give yourself the best chance of success when you go with something that is already proven.