A Battery Franchise Gets Juiced Meet Jason Fry, lottery millionaire and Battery King of South Florida.

For Jason Fry, 2008 was a bad Hank Williams song. The Florida native was working three jobs--bartending, pouring concrete and digging wells--and still faced bankruptcy. The housing bubble put a sure-thing investment property underwater; he was expecting his second child; and his marriage was on the skids. Christmas was just three days away. "I don't know why, but I bought a lottery ticket," Fry says. "It's something I've only done a handful of times in my life."

That whim turned out to be a $47 million payday. For the next year, Fry did what you'd expect a millionaire in his 30s to do--he bought a boat, an Escalade, a Shelby Mustang, a motorcycle and a house in Fort Myers. He played golf every chance he got and invested in a driving range with a golf pro.

But the life of leisure made Fry antsy, so when an old college roommate showed him around his Batteries Plus operation in Orlando, the seed was planted. Fry went back to the golf course, but when he found out the franchise had the Cape Coral area available, he bought the territory and persuaded the owner of the Fort Myers location to sell.