Top 5 Reasons to Invest in a Franchise
You’re tired of working for someone else, putting in all the effort and not reaping the benefit of your ideas and efforts. Or worse, you’ve been laid off a few times and don’t think you have it in you to go through that again. You‘ve always fantasized about owning your own business. Chances are you have been bitten by the entrepreneur bug. But that doesn’t mean franchising will satisfy that itch. Franchising provides you with a fairly rigorous structure within which to run your business. If you’re too entrepreneurial, you will chafe at the reins and want to do it Your Way (Frank singing in the background). If you take direction well, don’t want to reinvent the wheel but DO want to control your own destiny, you’re a definite maybe.
You want to leave a (business) legacy for your kids. Honorable. Goal worthy. However, there’s some bad news around that. According to the Family Business Institute only 12% of family businesses survive to the third generation. The reasons are myriad: improper business succession planning, no interest on the part of the kids, no management team in place to arrange for orderly transition and most importantly – just because you feel passionate about this business doesn’t mean your kids will.
You want to move. You live in the Boston area and you swore you’re not going to endure another winter there. This is a viable reason to look toward franchising and one for which franchising can, very often, provide an elegant solution. This requires a lot of due diligence in terms of researching where you want to be and finding a good business fit for that area, based on its demographics and a whole host of other parameters. I love helping people live in a place that makes them happy.
You want to provide your children with a business because they’re having trouble “finding their way”. Red flags are waving! Does this child have the maturity to run a business and follow the roadmap of the franchise model? Does this child have a terrific work ethic? Is this child knowledgeable and have skill sets that lend themselves to business ownership? If those answers are ALL yes, then perhaps this is an avenue you can consider. I would advise you to be sure your son or daughter is an active participant (more so than you) in the research and due diligence process.
You retired. Then after a few years you grew bored, restless and found yourself signing up for job postings through Indeed and snooping around on LinkedIn. You’re tired of living on a budget, you long for the free spending days of yore when there was no budget. You miss the game. You love business. Oh wait, I’m describing me awhile back! But guess what? If that describes you too, we should talk…soon.
If you’d like to see if you are a Franchisee in the making, take this quiz put out a few years back by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB)
http://www.nfib.com/article/quiz-are-you-cut-out-for-franchising-51892/