How to build a basic set of financial projections (your mini business plan in numerical form) to estimate the potential profit of a franchise investment.
At FranchiseHelp, we see thousands of visitors each month from budding entrepreneurs who think that selling coffee to their fellow caffeine addicts could make for an exciting and lucrative venture.
If you served in our nation's military, you've acquired a unique and valuable
set of personal strengths. These aren't always easy to explain in a
traditional job application or resume, but they spell success when it comes to
running your own business.
Many of the franchisees we talked with had to make a decision first on whether
they would open an independent business or a franchised one. A few of their
stories follow.
One critical factor to consider when you are thinking about opening a
franchise is whether your location is suited for a franchise and which
franchise suits your area the best. One thing that makes this consideration
slightly easier is the notion of franchise territories. Most, but not all,
franchises in the US are set up so that they grant exclusive territorial
franchise rights to their franchisees to help prevent the issue of geographic
competition.
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.
History has shown that a
struggling economy encourages entrepreneurship, which leads to a significant
increase in new start-up businesses. But what if you are a hard-working
professional with limited business knowledge and resources? You are motivated
and more than willing to do the work, but you need a roadmap to guide your
efforts. In that case, franchising may be a good option for you.
Many of the characteristics of
the perfect franchisee are shared by both a franchisee and a franchisor, but
there are also some slight differences. A franchisor is more concerned with
how an individual franchisee will fit into their business as a whole, and not
necessarily how the single franchise will operate on a day to day basis
(although that’s still important to them). Meanwhile the franchisee cares
almost exclusively about the success of that individual.