5 Tips for Finding the Right Franchise
Contributed by Guidant Financial Group.
So you’ve decided that a franchise is the right path for you? Now comes the exciting part—choosing among hundreds of franchise opportunities. Here are questions to ask yourself to help narrow the field:
1. What captures your interest?
If you’ve always been a gear head, maybe a Jiffy- Lube or Snap-on Tools franchise would be right for you. If you love to travel, it may thrill you to help others with a cruise planning franchise or similar travel-based brand. On the flip side, no matter how great the ROI is, if fast-food makes you queasy, you probably won’t be happy being a burger-and-fries franchisee.
2. Do you want to run a business from home?
Home-based franchises have relatively low start-up costs. Some of the most successful are in the commercial cleaning category (Jan- Pro, System4, and Vanguard are Entrepreneur magazine’s top three home-based franchises for 2013). Tools, lawn care, and travel planning are also great opportunities.
3. Does this product or service have staying power?
Franchises that are hot right now may not be in a decade. Check into recession-proof services (pipes will burst, cars will break down, and people will spend money on their kids and pets no matter what) and franchises that target growing population sectors such as seniors and Latinos.
4. How much do you want to invest?
There are franchise opportunities in nearly every price range from a big- ticket McDonald’s ($1.03M) to home-based, low-startup cost franchises that you can get into for under $10K such as CruiseOne or Jazzercise. Getting a business loan is an option, as is rolling over a retirement account to purchase a franchise. The latter is complex if you want to avoid taxes so it’s best to obtain professional help.
5. Is the franchise a good fit?
When you’ve got your options narrowed to one or two, you’ll want to do some serious homework on the franchisors including talking to current and former franchisees, carefully reading over the Franchise Disclosure Document looking for red flags, hidden fees, and any history of litigation. It may also be prudent to seek the help of a franchise consultant—their services are typically free and they know the industry well.
Once you’ve done your soul-searching about the kind of business you want, narrowed the field, done due diligence on all the details and finally made your decision, take a deep breath and step into your future with confidence.
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Top 5 Reasons to Join an Emerging Franchise
Investing in any franchise is a risk. You’re counting on franchisors for guidance; other franchisees for support and you’re investing a ton of money to build your business. Now add the risk factor of investing in an emerging franchise, a franchise with only a few franchisees. Does it add risk? Maybe, but there are far more benefits of investing in an emerging franchise that the little added risk, is a fleeting concern. Your voice is not only heard by the franchisors, but it’s also helping to make positive changes for future franchisees. Take a extremely large franchise such as, McDonalds or Hilton. Can you imagine a franchisee picking up the phone to call the President of the company to share an idea they had on how to make franchisees daily operations more efficient? In an emerging franchise, you are able to have a close relationship with the corporate team behind the concept and your ideas will be taken seriously. They believe in you as much as you believe in them. Here are five more reasons to join an emerging franchise:
How Much Do You Have to Spend?
Whether you’re purchasing a whopper from Burger King or joining the Burger King franchise system, the old mantra holds true: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. When you first get started running a franchise you need to pay a fee to allow you to enter into that franchise. These fees are the largest fees that you will normally pay a franchisor and typically range between $5,000 and $1,000,000 depending on the franchise. The franchisor charges this fee as a way to recoup the costs of expanding the franchise and to continue to grow. From a franchisee perspective, this is a major outlay and can take a long time to make back, but is a necessary step. Aspiring business owners must understand how much capital is available to them so they can ascertain how much they can afford. The cash you have at your disposal is known as liquidity, and there are numerous ways to increase your liquidity above the balance in your bank account. As a result, many people don’t realize how much capital they actually can use for investments, like launching a franchise branch. We’ll run through some of those methods below.
MinorityFran Changing the Game for Minorities in Franchising
As far as the incentives go, there are three main categories that franchisors tend to work with when they're looking to increase access to their systems for minorities. The most popular method used, by far, is to offer discounts on initial franchise fees. The second most popular incentive offered to minorities by franchisors is financing assistance and other discounts to help pay off the sizable franchising fees that new franchisees incur. Finally, in rare instances, franchisors offer minority franchisees administrative and development support above and beyond what they provide to the non-minority franchisees in the system. Here is a list of franchises that have gone the extra mile to reach out to minorities looking to get involved in franchising.
