Franchising your business

[Quinten]

Does anyone here franchise their business? As in have multiple stores in a city or state, or even around the country? I would love to own a business where I can franchise it out to other locations, because I think that would be a fun way to make a living. And then I can travel from one business to the other, meeting the people working for me. 

Anyway, this is not about my wants. What is it like franchising a business? Have you ever franchised a business? How was the process? 

If you own any franchises, how many do you have so far? 

[James]

Good set of questions and at one point I looked into this. 

First you need to prove out a model. Then you there is a ton of paper work and regulations to work through. Then you need to sell the franchise on the other side. It was really expensive to work through the process and seemed like it would take a lot of time. It was definitely harder then I thought it was going to be and so we did not follow through with the idea. 

I have looked into buying franchises before as having a business packaged up with the process already defined is priceless. It takes a lot of time to develop those things and costs a lot of money in mistakes made along the way. Every time though I talk to a franchise sales person the full sales funnel just seems a bit off to me. 

Sure I know the model works. Look at McDonalds. 

If you are buying into a franchise make sure to do all your due diligence. There is a huge document they will send you at some point in the sales funnel called the franchise disclosure document (FDD). Read that all the way through as it has all the information you will need for what you are responsible for, all the costs, performance of other franchisees. 

 

[Brenden]

I don't think I could make my own business, but I think franchising a business would be more doable for me. I wouldn't mind starting up my own Subway or maybe McDonalds even. My location doesn't have either, so it's open right now. 

[Scarlett]

You mean like what McDonald's does? 

I have never really thought about anything like this but I know this is more about real estate than an actual restaurant. I watched a long video on it. It is quite fascinating.