Franchisee Resource Center

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.

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.

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.

The franchise agreement should spell out all initial and continuing training obligations of the franchisor in detail. You should also query the franchisor about the following:

Once you've found a franchise (or multiple franchises) that you are interested, the real research and diligence process begins. You need to figure out whether the franchise you are looking at really makes sense for you from a financial and lifestyle perspective. Your best source of information for all of this is the Franchise Disclosure Document, or FDD.

When people think of the costs of opening a franchise they typically just think about the franchise fee. That makes sense, seeing as the franchise fee is typically a substantial cost, ranging from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand dollars. But, this isn't the only payment a franchisee needs to make to the franchisor. Once operations start a franchisee typically needs to pay some form of ongoing royalties to the franchisor.

Reading through a FDD is a key part of your research, but it can’t answer all the potential questions you might have about how it is to actually operate a given franchise. The best way to do this is actually to start talking to current franchisees. The best way is to this is to call or visit a franchisee, don’t just email them. You might need to be a bit persistent, but if you are then you can get all of your questions and concerns answered.

Now that we’ve discussed the franchisor’s point of view and arguments towards negotiating the franchise agreement, here are a couple of tips for not wasting time on trying to negotiate items which franchisors do not alter and concentrating on the change-able clauses in the Franchise Agreement.

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.