Recently by Richard Solomon

Whatever the nature of any agreement, it is a device to obtain expected value. The parties have usually anticipated the ranges of that value over the life of the agreement.

These are goals.

They are not achieved realities.

Is Someone At Fault?

They sometimes don't work out the way you intended and sometimes there is an element of "fault" associated with its not reaching fruition. What usually happens then? In modern America the first reactions include blaming others (often without knowledge of the true entire situation); self justification (also known as covering one's ass); and reactions in furtherance of those first impulses.

Of course it is upsetting. Being upset is a symptom here, not the problem itself. Upset just comes with this territory.

Usually before calling in the lawyers there is some repositioning, gamesmanship so that when the lawyers arrive they are presented with what is hoped/believed will be the basis to enable them to obtain vindication of your interests through enforcement of terms of the agreement.

Should You Make a Demand?

The emphasis now shifts from sorting out the relationship's remaining useful potential to redressing grievances. The launching missile for this is the "demand" letter, essentially a letter insisted upon by your lawyers putting the other side on notice that you claim a breach by them that caused injury to you resulting in damages.

The other side, aware of the rift, sets roughly the same process in motion for the same motivation. The rationale, according to most lawyers, is that without this initial accusatory letter you risk waiving some important right. Now both sides are adversaries. Wasn't that quick and easy now?

It was quick and easy and most of the time about the worst mistake that you could have made in terms of your ever realizing anything worthwhile out of this situation. You can preserve your rights without this approach.

A Different Approach

Another approach is more positively calculated to produce less injury and damage; a shorter path to amicable resolution of everything present; preserve the most that can be preserved out of this bad situation; and save enforcement costs that today often run into hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.

If you want to salvage the most from a deal gone bad, in the shortest time, at the lowest cost, you owe it to yourself to consider the other approach as the first thing you do, not as some afterthought alternative when the well has already been poisoned by following bad legal advice. The legal advice was technically correct but not the best advice and rather immature in almost every instance.

With the better approach you have preserved all your rights and can always go back to warfare if the other side fails to see the potential and reciprocate in kind. The odds are that they will reciprocate, especially if you have not already followed your lawyers into confrontation in which only they end up winners most of the time.

There are usually forces working on you that want to propel you into conflict. They are normal human forces and instincts, but they have to be resisted in favor of a more rational parsing of the values as they now are rather than what you hoped they might be when you entered into the agreement.

Consider, for example, that while the deal may well have been thought out to the point of very high positive probabilities, all deals include risks, many of which are not controllable. No deal entry stage valuations are solid. They are theoretical.

In the best mode you would often have come out with substantially less than expected. Market conditions change.

Globalization expanded the ranges and sources of risks far beyond what they were ten years ago. If you applied formulae that were effective ten years ago to the entry stage evaluation of this deal, and did not adjust for the enhanced risks, the valuations were never realistic in the first instance.

Don't go immediately to war over expectations! Since the value of expectations is now changed due to the pending break up there is now an element of your doing little more than chasing after sunk costs. Chasing sunk costs is usually considered to be a terrible decision. Reassessment of valuations associated with the deal at the time of its impending collapse ought to provide you with serious attitude revision concerning how aggressively you want to pursue vindication of interests that in retrospect may not have been what you thought and hoped. The present tense value of the deal is now far less, and far less should be expended in cash and other resources trying to resurrect those expectations.

Find lawyers who can live outside contract language and "rights and wrongs". While contract language is very important, how you use it when trouble appears can be more important. Call it finesse if you will, but it usually provides much better, swifter, less expensive resolution.

I believe, based upon 50 years in formal dispute resolution practice, that the way businesses usually go about dealing with major problems is wasteful and unnecessary. I have tried the approach of which I speak in this article in several instances in the past few years and it resulted in extremely satisfied clients every time.

It won't always work. Some situations are inherently more difficult to work in due to perceived leverage advantages and ego issues. Those can sometimes be turned around and sometimes not. But with rights reserved in the interim this value preservation approach to dispute resolution will always be worth trying.

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

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The best evidence that franchisors are really human beings is that they do the same things that any normal person does when confronted with a panic-inducing situation.

The first response -- which hopefully, but not always, occurs in private -- is just about always to observe the eleventh guard order, 'When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.' Control during those first moments of spontaneous potentiality is a priceless attribute. 'If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs' (Kipling) should be on a plaque somewhere conspicuous in the executive suite of your mind.

There are several almost universally practiced actions that are always mistakes and that should never happen.

There are mistakes because they tend to make the achievement of a positive result more difficult to attain.

There are mistakes because they are always obvious emotional statements to which little or no competent thought has been given.

There are always mistakes for the additional reason that they are either totally or in important part, quite untrue. They are untrue because of what is affirmatively stated that is false and because of what is omitted that is true but that may not make your company seem perfect.

There are mistakes because the ploy is so overused by so many people who are really scoundrels, that when you use the same approach, you may seem like a scoundrel also.

Do you want that? Of course not. Can you avoid that? Certainly. Here's how.

In that all companies are simply groups of quite fallible, normal, humans, mistakes happen. Some of the mistakes are of little consequence; some are rather huge; some are the product of over reaching and taking unfair advantage; some are stupid and some are intentional. The important fact is that mistakes, small and large, few and many, will occur.

Those who accuse your company, and sometimes you personally, of wrongdoing are sometimes wrong and sometimes right and sometimes somewhere in between, part right and part wrong. The accusations may be made in good faith, or in bad faith, or may be the product of misunderstanding. At the moment you first hear of an accusation of wrongdoing, you really are not certain of all the facts that may relate to it.

It is simply the worst possible moment to make any response about the merit or lack of merit of the accusations. But, at this precise moment, such statements are usually made.

What should be said in response to the first information that accusations have been made against you or your company is that you are just now hearing about it and have not had an opportunity to investigate the matter fully -- and that when you have made a diligent inquiry you may have a statement to make.

That is such a responsible thing to say that one wonders why people don't say that. Instead they say stupid things like 'That is totally false and we will be shown to have been correct.' -- or some such nonsense. Sometimes -- quite often -- the statement is even worse than that, for it may include a statement that the accusations are frivolously made. Even stupider!

It is important that your company have a protocol that everyone is made very aware of requiring any contact concerning negative information be passed to a designated person without comment to the inquiring party. I ll pass this information along to the appropriate person -- that is the only response to be made. The answer to the question 'Who is the appropriate person?' is always 'No comment!' It is also important that everyone knows that public statements that are not specifically authorized are considered a firing offense. People find it hard to resist being 'interviewed'. They have to be frightened for their employment in order to shut them up. Do it.

Next, the company should call together the most involved person(s) and their legal counsel, gather all files that may relate to the dispute or complaint, promptly evaluate the information, including interviews of everyone who may have been involved, and make a decision about how to respond properly. A proper response may not be a total disclosure of the whole truth, but it will not include statements that are untrue in and of themselves. If you have to lie, you need to rethink! That is a bad mistake. No matter what your PR person or your lawyer or anyone else may say, you need to make only responsible statements that instill confidence in your obvious good faith. People expect you sometimes to be wrong. You don t have to say that you screwed up, but do not insist in this early phase upon your rectitude.

Now, if you are dealing in a forthright manner with the issues presented by the accusations, you will not go to the mat in a losing fight. You settle. You adjust. You correct the mistake as best you can. Losing a trial or arbitration does not enhance your stature. An appeal is most likely to result in affirmation of the trial result, so you would only be reinforcing a negative consequence by insisting that facts are found in your favor when the true facts are really not in your favor.

People incorrectly believe that lawyers, if they are good, can manufacture or change facts. That is practically never true. Sometimes that happens, but the odds are so heavily against it that only fools think they can pay a lawyer and get a result to which they are not entitled.

Sometimes your opponent is represented by a moron and you win by default -- but usually that is also not the case. You should assume in your internal deliberations that you will be dealing with competent opposition.

In fact you should hope you are dealing with competent opposition. A competent opponent will understand when a reasonable settlement is being offered. A moron may not. If you have not called your opponent a scoundrel and his lawyer a shyster who brings frivolous lawsuits, a reasonable settlement may be obtainable and serious mistakes corrected without excessive difficulty and expense. A reasonable result is the best result. Insisting upon total vindication is usually a very bad decision, as no one is perfect and in most instances your opponent may be at least partially justified in taking the position he took. Sometimes, even though you were right in what you did, some dolt in your company mishandled the people involved and a conflict resulted that should never have happened. Such ineptitude should be recognized for what it is and dealt with appropriately.

If he gets away with this everyone will do it is sometimes not a proper rationale for a decision to make a fight of it. Maybe, even if your contract says the opposite, someone could be deserving of an exemption if you screwed up. Owning up to a screw up and making amends to the injured people does not usually cause your whole system to fall apart.

Enforcement of covenants not to compete is the most frequent situation in which stupid decisions are made to fight when the real problem is that your company created the problem and should be dealing with it in a more appropriate manner. Handling such instances with grace instead of bombast will do you far more good than fighting. Your long-term credibility as a fair organization that handles its affairs in an equitable manner may be worth more to you than insisting upon your rights in an unworthy situation.

This approach to what not to do and to what you should do when bad things happen will be the best approach, no matter what the right and wrong of the situation turn out to be. You lose nothing by appearing to be an organization that refrains from making irresponsible statements and taking irresponsible positions. If you really are respectable, then you might as well appear to be respectable. And if you are not, well, let's not go there.

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

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The Begging Franchise

I think of franchising as potentially useful for everything on earth that involves either commerce or religion. All religious organizations are constructed on the franchise model, with set operating rules and payments upstream by those downstream. Every religion also claims to be unique just as every franchise, good or bad, claims to have a unique selling proposition.

Like religions, commercial franchising requires its own flag. Flag saluters are called upon to subscribe to the "code" of the concept. They face condemnation should they defect. (There is a franchising hell, but for some it begins before you leave the system. Think of Quiznos and Cold Stone Creameries to mention a few.)

Here in Houston, I believe I have identified a new form of franchising directed to the homeless, destitute, drug enslaved, just out of jail/prison, or high school dropout. I noticed it slowly, over time. Its seasonality is not that of spring, summer, fall or winter, but rather day of the week and hours of the day. When traffic density is high, the franchisee at a traffic light controlled intersection has -for a moment- a captive audience of people in cars and trucks waiting for the light to change.

For that moment, the homeless, destitute, and dropouts are transformed into the begging or panhandling franchisees.

The Somali Pirates

Every Saturday afternoon around four o'clock, for instance, at the intersection of the Beltway and Highway 288, there is a small group (always the same folks) who I call "The Somali Pirates" who aggressively operate a panhandling enterprise targeting folks returning from the beach. This is a multi-lane divided highway intersection and they assign about twenty people -all very threatening- to go up and down the line at every red light accosting drivers and passengers with various messages about why they ought to "contribute" to the pirates. Sometimes they are selling some crap or other but usually they are just "begging".

The same market exists at every urban freeway exit onto a main street, because the traffic is heavier there and each change of traffic light provides a new dozen or so cars in more than one lane, stopped waiting for the next light change. To a similar degree the same venue opportunity is presented on any busy street at any traffic controlled intersection.

The franchisees, with custom but homemade looking signs, go up and down these lines of cars soliciting, sometimes with squeegees washing windshields whether or not solicited by the driver to do so and holding out a hand or bucket or basket into which the driver is asked/intimidated to make a cash deposit/contribution.

On more than one occasion, I have noticed that these small groups of beggar franchisees came together in a common vehicle and that they have several signs with different messages. A local marketing co-op, if you will.

These range from solicitations to finance school band or team trips, church projects like choir competitions in other cities, to claims that the beggar franchisee is homeless and jobless, a disabled military service veteran, just lost his family in some catastrophe, is hungry or needs money for medical attention of some sort.

There is an endless array of "Can you please help me" signage, sometimes revealed by some careless beggar franchisee who failed to remember to put the spare signs away out of sight of passing drivers.

Sometimes the "pitch" is flavored by its being done by a suggestively clad girl with the look of someone that your average man would feel like he might like to help/save/"adopt" (if you catch my meaning). These are more likely to be seen at male dense venues like athletic events just after the game is over and everyone is coming out of the parking lots, again traffic light controlled so as to provide that momentary refreshed inventory of about a dozen or so stopped cars. The signs say different things slanted to pathetic situations in which a young woman might find herself and be in need of a "hero" to help bail her out.

Cripples make excellent beggar franchisees, but they do have to be sufficiently mobile to enable them to get up and down each row of momentarily stopped cars with their signs claiming to be disabled veterans unable to find work and homeless as well as otherwise in need of assistance - the list of "reasons why you should help me" seems endless. Drivers face the dilemma of asking themselves whether this person really is a homeless disabled veteran to whom some help would be appropriate or just another bum with a sign.

The Real Jobs People Do

I live in a thriving big city where no matter what the labor statistics might say no one is really jobless. The grey market here provides more than enough work for those not on some corporate payroll. Lawns get tended. Curbs in front of homes get street numbers painted on them. Cars get detailed in vacant gas station or similar empty commercial locations. Vacated buildings get cleaned out for another tenant. Rent a cop security guards pretend to protect small businesses from anything that isn't dangerous in the first place. Chipped windshields get patched. Vehicles containing all sorts of contraband get driven from here to there. People who thought it wasn't cool to do homework and stay in high school stand in medians of busy streets holding signs proclaiming that you should patronize such and such store located in the strip center right there where the sign holder is standing.

All this is cash fueled with no record keeping and no taxes or other ancillary payments or reports made.

The signs held by the drop outs adverting gold buyer and seller jewelry shops are the funniest. They proclaim that this particular shylock will pay you more for your gold than the filthy shylock just down the street, or that this schmuck will give you a big discount if you buy gold from him. The funniest is the one where you not only get discounted gold but also some free silver if you buy from the adverted establishment. Meanwhile the sign holding dummy is roasting his bloody ass off in the heat of the street, usually drinking some sugar drink and eating something sweet like a Twinkie, Ho Ho or Ding Dong.

There is also a major industry in petty crime just below the level at which enforcement resources might be brought into play. Petty crime in Texas is defined as crime of insufficient seriousness to make the evening local news.

Panhandling Franchises and its Enforcement -Buttercup

The panhandling business, however, in a city like Houston, is well organized, and each intersection where the prospects of favorable demographics, as I have explained, is a micro business locale. Each locale has value expressible as a function of the panhandling revenue obtainable.

This has occurred to the more entrepreneurial amongst the beggars. Why stand in the hot sun for hours when they can take control of worthwhile intersections through threat and force and "license" others to do the begging and pay them the vigorish/royalties attributable to that cash flow?

The most successful of the street intersection franchisors is a person who goes by the name of Buttercup.

I asked around about Buttercup and actually was able to arrange to meet and interview him at a local dive where he hangs out while he enjoyed eats and drinks on my tab, eating slowly but drinking more aggressively as we visited. Buttercup is an ex teamsters union organizer from Detroit with hands that have come into violent contact with many things and many people. He has the look of someone who has left more than several people dying from assault in some cold wet dark alley and his eyes are dead. His speech is slurred but understandable as he goes from communicative grunt to communicative grunt, the real meaning being conveyed by his face as well as by the inflection of each grunt and hand gestures.

He certainly carries weapons of various sorts, but a knife and a gun are the most obvious. He has no concealed carry permit, nor for that matter any license or permit of any kind.

The government may not even know he exists, although I suspect the police know about him and leave him alone for any of various reasons. One does not ask such a person where he lives or how his family might be, or any other personal question that a paranoiac might feel is intrusive.

Payment is by the day and in advance in cash. The price is whatever Buttercup says it is. I know that the price has not been worked out on any break even or other formula. You can decline but you can't argue, complain, whine or criticize.

You get the "right" to pan handle at that intersection on that day until midnight. You buy a full day. You can buy one corner or up to all four corners of the intersection. If someone else comes along and tries to pan handle in your intersection during your tenure, he or she will be instructed by you to leave on pain of serious injury or worse. Few fail to get the message as it is well known throughout the potential pan handler community how this business works and that if Buttercup needs to be summoned to deal with you your Medicaid coverage will probably not see you all the way through to useful recovery.

But, I suspect that Buttercup probably has another identity that is well financed by his franchise operations. He has money "out on the street" as Tony Soprano would say. The loan shark business fits right in with everything else about Buttercup. Between the franchise business and the loan sharking operations, I have a feeling that Buttercup is rather comfortable by just about any standard. However, when he is seen driving it is in a car that looks as though it probably would not make it to the next corner. God only knows how many aliases he has. I am rather certain that he is better off than most lawyers.

Where does Buttercup fit in the world of franchising? I strongly believe that his franchisees attain a higher return on invested capital than those of most franchise companies in America today. Their executives may dress and talk in a more sophisticated manner but the contracts they use are the high tone legal equivalent of the Buttercup approach to system governance.

In fact, Buttercup probably offers gentler terms because you don't have to wake up the next morning and go back to work as a Buttercup franchisee if you don't like it.

Before you look down your nose at Buttercup consider that he probably - at his level of micro franchising - does a lot better for his franchisees than most so called franchise companies in America today. Any Cold Stone Creamery or Quiznos franchisee would envy the ability to walk away free and clear after any day on which he decided that the investment was not paying off satisfactorily.

Looking to exit your system and their Buttercup, talk to with an experienced franchise attorney who can deal with Buttercup.

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Throughout the United States franchisors have been able to enforce choice of law and venue selection provisions in their franchise agreements with few exceptions. A few states have proactively limited venue selection, but in the absence of rule or statute the U S Supreme Court has exonerated venue selection in the franchisor's home state as reasonable (Burger King leading case). On the issue of choice of law the primary confrontations have been over post termination covenants not to compete.

One state, California, prohibits them by statute (but see the Schlotzky's case where the California court permitted a restriction against making the Schlotzsky sandwich that was held to have secondary meaning as a source identifier for Schlotzskys).

Elsewhere when a franchisor chose its own state as the choice of law and the law of its home state was more permissive about use of post termination restrictive covenants, the question was whether the more expansive permitted use infringed the public policy of the franchisee's state. In those instances courts customarily reduce the scope of the covenant to the point at which the confrontation with public policy is eliminated.

The current direction of the law on post termination restrictive covenants, except in California, is simply to enforce them. The franchise can be old to the point of moribund and the market can already be so flooded with direct competition that enforcement of the covenant really bestows no material benefit to the franchisor other than a vendetta interest. Competent drafting of restrictive clauses today usually tie the clause in with the protection of confidential information and the non disclosure clause.

Venue selection has received little attention except for the rare prohibitory statute or rule.

Most large franchisors have now expanded extensively into foreign markets. Many of them still keep the domestic venue selection clause that facially requires franchisees in foreign countries to come to the United States and litigate or arbitrate disputes in the franchisor's home town. Just such a situation arises now in the context of an American franchisor requiring its European Community franchisees to resolve disputes here in America.

The agreement also prevents class treatment of disputes and groups as joint complainants. The EU franchisees would have to come to America one at a time and hire a USA lawyer to have their disputes sorted out by a court or arbitrator.

In the situation of poorly performing franchise systems, the franchisees' position is that this makes dispute resolution effectively unavailable to EU franchisees. This is, to be certain, part the purpose of this contractual configuration. This article offers a road map through the issues that will have to be dealt with if EU franchisees decided to attempt to defeat the USA venue selection clause.

INHERENT PRO FRANCHISOR BIAS IN THE USA

Over the last 25 years franchise law produced from decisions in dispute resolution has become more and more favorable to franchisors. Part of the reason for this tectonic shift may be attributed to the fact that every time a major court resolves a significant issue in favor of a franchisee, lawyers representing franchisor groups immediately redraft applicable franchise agreement provisions to circumvent that ruling. The "draft around" exercise has paid off handsomely for franchisors, and one would indeed be foolish not to avail itself of that technique. That is one reason lawyers go to annual seminars where they receive the benefit of the shrewd draftsmanship of the industry's best and brightest nit pickers. There is actual biblical precedent for this, but that is better left for drinking parties.

For these reasons alone, EU franchisees would win a substantial tactical and perhaps strategic advantage if they first found a way to defeat the international venue selection clause and were then able to have their disputes with their franchisors resolved in their own courts and arbitration resources, in their own languages and in context of the fairness balancing influences of their own countries and cultures.

Inasmuch as there is now no significant history of franchise litigation in EU countries, there is an opportunity for EU courts to approach franchising issues free of the pro franchisor bias so pervasive in the USA. How might one go about accomplishing that What are the issues and salient fact patterns relevant to confrontation of international venue selection provisions

THE ISSUES AND THE FACT PATTERNS

In the USA the ruling case law is that a franchisor may compel dispute resolution in its home jurisdiction under the law of its home jurisdiction. That is long established law. The rationale is that the franchisor ought to be able to operate its system in accordance with one set of legal principles and requirements and avoid the vagaries of local law that on the whole provide no significantly better legal climate than the law of the franchisor's home jurisdiction.

Even in this system, franchisors are required to provide a section of their disclosure package (FDD) that deals with state specific law that may affect the enforceability of various provisions of the franchise agreement. The shibboleth is that the essence of uniformity lies in its variables. There is essential uniformity, but not absolute uniformity from state to state.

Recognizing that the International Franchise Association spends a fortune every year to lobby franchisor favorable positions in every jurisdiction, nationally and internationally, one must begin by acquiring command of the jurisdictional trends and precedents in the EU countries relating to franchising dispute management to ascertain the extent to which there remains a meaningful opportunity to defeat an international venue selection provision under any circumstances at all. This involves the EU itself and the individual member states.

If the matter remains unsettled, then where does one initiate a proceeding seeking to upset a particular venue selection provision One thing is certain. One does not go to any USA court to try to achieve this.

It would be a total waste of resources with an almost guaranteed adverse result. This may mean a race to raise the question first, as one tribunal might not wish to devote its resources to an important question that is already before another tribunal. If the first tribunal decides the issue in a manner and pursuant to a rationale with which the EU tribunal would be comfortable, the ability to seek consideration of the matter before a potentially more sympathetic body is simply lost.

For this reason, I am somewhat surprised that USA court determination of these issues has not already been sought by the USA franchising community via declaratory judgment actions in American courts. By the time this article circulates, that tactic may be initiated as a possible means to preempt EU rulings on it. L'audace! L'audace! Toujours l'audace!

The salient fact issues will be distance, language, economic preclusion of a right to fair adjudication and the equities of the particular fact pattern before the court. It will be essential that the franchisee(s) in the case be essentially compliant even though contentious. You don't take a scoundrel to a court seeking fairness and equity.

If the initiator is a group of franchisees, it would be worthwhile to screen out the bad apples and proceed on behalf only of the more platinum plaintiffs/complainants. How that screening is accomplished is a subject for a totally separate article all by itself. Underlying every technical decision is an inherent, even though unspoken, issue of whether the party seeking relief is deserving of the relief.

With respect to the issue of distance, be mindful that a venue selection clause in an American franchise agreement may impose a more than 3,000 mile distance disadvantage, and that has not been the basis of an unreasonability ruling in a USA court. Distance from the EU to the east coast of the USA may not be much more than that. For this reason one should never raise the distance issue in isolation, but in every case in combination with language and other issues.

Consideration should be sought in light of the fact that the USA franchisor does not deem it inconvenient in any economic or distance sense to franchise its business in the EU as well as comply with EU and member state laws and regulations applicable to franchising there.

The distance and language issues should always be raised in combination with the franchisor's willingness to subject itself to EU and member state laws that enable and permit the enterprise from which the franchisor derives substantial financial benefit. That will go a long way toward blunting franchisor arguments before a European tribunal but probably not here in America.

The other crucial fulcrum of decision in this project will be the economic argument (which also would not prevail in the USA.) In the USA the concept of business risk, its assumption when you buy a franchise, not being a child or other person in need of special attention and protection in any business to business transaction tend to foreclose sympathy for "the downtrodden" in the sense of poor unprofitable franchise owners.

These so called victims, when applying to purchase the franchise, portrayed themselves to be financially and experientially capable of accepting the risks. Moreover, there are competent pre-investment due diligence assistance resources if they are not themselves astute at small business investment vetting. Additionally, the fact that the franchise agreements are in every instance rather draconian does not affect the pitch of the playing field in this discussion.

If you sign an agreement that permits the opposite party to take financial advantage of the situation and you do not expect that to happen, you are simply a fool. Actually, very few of these investors ever avail themselves of really competent pre-investment due diligence assistance at a meaningful level of competence simply because the services are not cheap. But that is their choice freely made.

There are escape hatch clauses in every franchise agreement plus a pre closing escape hatch questionnaire that further disable claims of being taken advantage of even when they have been taken advantage of in many cases and know about that before they sign the agreement.

So in the USA the "Oh poor me" gambit is usually worthless. Whether EU or member state tribunals are more receptive to the "poor me" arguments than USA courts remains to be seen. Ultimately, the USA is absolutely the worst place in the world to try franchise fraud and abuse cases today. There is no downside to trying to escape to another jurisdiction for resolution of disputes.

What constitutes an actionable complaint is probably different in the USA than elsewhere also. Notions of good faith and fair dealing are litigated here every year, and every year courts seem to find ways to deny their application other than lip service. What we just yawn at here in the USA could be a major offense against any fairness concept under EU or member state law. Equitable considerations are essentially worthless in the USA in business to business disputes. The free market means just that - the wild west.

Where then is the touchstone combination of circumstances in the making of a competent economic/predation case for escaping a venue selection and a choice of law provision in a franchise contract between an American franchisor and an EU franchisee I suggest the following approach.

Take seriously into account that an American court would accord no significance to the fact that the franchisee(s) are from another country and use another language. There will be absolutely no respect for a position that is a function of nationality. EU franchisees should make that clear to the EU or member state tribunal and suggest that a USA franchisor not be accorded preferential treatment.

The contract will have been drafted in the USA and will be in English.

There will be a local language version, but in the event of a disparity of meaning in any provision there will probably be a clause that says the English language version rules.

The EU franchisees will have been at a decided disadvantage in almost every instance when the "deal" was originally made.

One should suggest to the tribunal that one of the purposes of the EU and member state commercial law structure includes taking into account every way in which the EU party may have been disadvantageously positioned and make compensation for that by at least placing disputes before an EU or member state tribunal and applying the law of the franchisee's home country.

THE ECONOMIC POSITIONS

Usually the situation at hand will involve franchisees who invested in a franchise opportunity upon the stated or obviously implied representation that the franchised business model was a proven business concept capable of being operated by an investor acceptable to the franchisor with a positive financial performance profile.

If it is the case that the franchisees in the EU country are, as a group, unable to succeed in the business as licensed, that should be strong evidence that the opportunity was not investment worthy for this country/market and that the franchisor had no business selling it in the EU. If it is also the case that the franchisees in the USA are not doing well, that should be considered a strengthening of the conclusion that the transaction was not investment worthy in the beginning, much as a court would deal with a security that was not investment worthy.

There is a duty in all jurisdictions relevant to this discussion that the seller disclose material information that would cause a potential investor to make a negative investment decision.

In the face of such evidence, the franchisor should never be allowed to impose upon the EU franchisees an obligation to submit disputes to an American dispute resolution resource. The franchisees will be economically preempted from obtaining justice as a matter of simple economics, and no company selling investments should ever be allowed to put a victimized investor to that disadvantage. The argument that this requires prejudgment of the ultimate issue does not meet logical criteria here because we would be litigating jurisdictional issues and the findings would be for that limited use only.

In the USA the same standard is used in deciding whether preliminary relief should be granted in the course of deciding the issue whether the party seeking relief has "a likelihood of ultimate success on the merits. Taking this approach in protecting EU franchisees would not be a departure from American legal standards, and because of that the American franchisor should have no grounds to complain.

There is a countervailing argument available to franchisors in this instance. Regardless where EU franchisees must litigate their disputes, they will have to come up with resources to hire competent counsel, very few of which in the USA will accept them as clients on a contingent fee arrangement. In the EU contingent fee arrangements are much less condoned than in the USA.

The same requirements exist in the USA, and the cost of really competent representation is not going to be that different than in the EU. Depositions can be held in the locales of the witnesses, eliminating travel of everyone internationally before there is actually a trial. In each event the franchisees will need to create a common fund to share litigation costs, so there is no venue difference on that issue.

The adverse economics issue must be presented in a logical connection to other important issues rather than as a stand alone basis for decision.

If in addition to such a scenario (or even without it for that matter) the EU franchisee(s) can make a case of post execution abuses that materially adversely impacted the ability of the franchisees to make a reasonable financial return, that alone should make out a case that the franchisor is perfectly willing to engage in predatory practices no matter the impact upon the franchisees. A comparison of the measurable relationship cost as stated in the FDD to the actual costs, including extraneous revenues from franchisee operations not quantifiable from the information provided in the FDD, should serve to show that a franchise portrayed in the FDD as having a relationship cost of 15 % of gross sales actually has a relationship cost of from 20% to 25%. That would be very strong evidence of predation by the franchisor. Ten to fifteen percent of gross sales usually will equate to a negative impact of from 30 % to 50% of net profit. That is more than substantial impact to justify an EU or member state tribunal refusing to enforce a venue/choice of law provision in a franchise agreement.

How one goes about preparing such a case and obtaining evidence of sufficient quality is not part of this article, as that will vary with each case. Suffice it to say that counsel with very extensive experience in preparing and trying lawsuits involving franchise fraud and abuse should be tasked with assisting EU counsel in the entire proceeding. Knowing the theories and the art of expressing the theories effectively will not suffice without a record of competent evidence to support them.

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

For the 5 Most Fascinating Stories in Franchising, a weekly report, click here & sign up.

Bad Earnings Claims in Item 19

Liar Number Two does provide earnings claims information in Item 19 which is not reliable for the following reasons, among others:

Especially if the franchisor is a relatively new franchisor, numbers are inherently less reliable if there are none of the franchised stores in the market you intend for your location. That stores seem to be doing well in one part of the country means nothing if you aren't going to be in those markets, for many reasons.

If your intended location is 'out of the loop' geographically, your support and advert economies won't be the same either. The advert economies associated with several stores all in one market are important expense issues. If you need a penetration level for your advert message that can be effectively afforded only by a group of stores sharing the budget, the numbers in Item 19 will be significantly out of whack for you.

If the stores are only a few years old, the system has not had time to 'prove' itself. Many things change in a franchise system as the franchisor decides to mandate changes without first proving them out in test market in company owned stores. Without that prove-out test market, every change is just a crap shoot.

If the franchise is one in which a major segment of your cash flow is not paid directly to the franchisee, but is paid first to the franchisor who then makes deductions and, supposedly, passed the net of those deductions on to the franchisee, you are dealing with a thief. Anyone who can come between you and your cash flow will always find ways to nick you. Channeling the money in that manner is the hallmark of the crooked franchise.

If company owned stores' financial information is part of the mix that went into the earnings claim data, that is being done only because those company owned stores are performing better than franchisee owned stores. That skews the earnings claims and makes them false as applied to what you would be doing if you were to buy the franchise. One way the liar reassures you is to say that the stores are identical to the kind of stores that you would be operating as a franchisee. The may be identical in the sense that the sell the same products or services, but they are not identical in any sense relating to financial performance prospects for any franchised store.

If the working capital requirements do not include money for you to live on until you reach break even, then the working capital number in the total investment required disclosure is inadequate. If it doesn't say that living expenses are included in working capital, then living expenses are not included. If it does say that living expenses are included in working capital, you need to have that broken out. The odds are that you are being short changed.

If the earnings claims say that the information was compiled in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, that is probably not true, and it is a hallmark of misrepresentation. The purpose of making that statement is to make the numbers seem more reliable than they are. There is no other purpose to make that statement. Ask to see substantiation of the Item 19 information. If they won't show it to you before you sign a franchise agreement, it's a scam. If they tell you stories like they can't show it to you before you sign the contract because it's a trade secret, you know you are dealing with hard core crooks.

If after you make adjustments for royalties, advertising fund requirements, lease and other occupancy expenses for the area where you intend to locate, insurance expenses for your area, labor expenses for your area, state and local taxes for your area, and every other expense you can think of, you end up with less than 15% of gross sales as your pre tax net income, you are just buying a job, not a real business, and there will be no room for any adverse change in any significant expense item.

One thing that is never covered in the earnings claims data is the cost of borrowed money -- the interest and the principal payments that you will have to make every month. You need to add that information to the equation. You will be told that that money comes out of the non cash deductions on your tax return -- the depreciation and amortization expenses that are not actual cash payments.

You need to figure out whether that is correct arithmetic or not. If the total of all payments to the franchisor, other than for goods you have to buy from them, approaches 10% of gross sales, then the franchisor has an effective 40% share of your total potential pretax net profit (if you do as well as the earnings claims data suggests) with no investment risk in your business.

Moreover, the franchisor's income expectation from your business is a function of gross sales and does not require that you make any profit at all before those payments are owed. If you can't find a better way to get into that business, you might be better off keeping your day job. There are some exceptions to this statement, but they are very rare.

Conclusion

If Item 19 of the UFOC states that no one is authorized to provide any information regarding sales or profits other than what is stated right there in Item 19, and the sales person does provide other or additional information regarding prospective profitability, then you ought to be able to recognize that you have just been lied to in Item 19.

And it is important to recognize that the same techniques of arranging for third parties to provide the earnings claims information, or approving or praising the pro forma information in your business plan, also make the disclaimer in Item 19 a falsehood, just as in the instance of the franchisor who claimed not to provide any earnings claim information at all.

Franchisors who provide sales information in Item 19, but who do not provide additional profitability information there, and whose employee or sales representative provides the additional information to enable a profitability estimate to be prepared, or who arrange for a third party to provide it, or who do it by approving or praising your business plan pro forma, are also lying to you when they deny that such information is provided as part of their franchise sales procedure.

They know that you are not buying any business opportunity in order to achieve sales numbers, and that it is only profit potential that you are seeking. They also know that by using only gross sales numbers in the 'official' statement made in Item 19, they don't have to tell you how many of their franchisees are achieving that level of profit performance. Gross income isn't net income. DUH!

These are just a few of the many issues that you will encounter in trying to figure out where the ball is being hidden in the Item 19 disclosures. The inventiveness of the crooked mind is limitless. Regulations can't protect you. You have to protect yourself.

You cannot allow yourself to sign contracts in which you agree that something that happened, and that you ought to know happened if you were paying attention, did not happen.

You have to go through what was said to you and see whether the contract is requiring you to agree that something that was an important consideration to you in making your investment decision did not in fact ever happen. If things important to you are excluded, either by not being provided for in the contract or by your having to pretend that they never happened, you are dealing with a thief.

That's another reason always to take careful notes on everything that is said to you, orally or in some brochure or written on a cocktail napkin. Being alert and diligent throughout the sales process can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost investment, lost profits and attorney fees and expenses.

If you really want to know how the system is performing, you should include as part of your due diligence contacting business brokers in cities where this franchisor has franchised stores located, and finding out whether any of them are for sale.

If you agree to sign a confidentiality agreement that says you are using access to the financial information only in connection with your effort to find a business to buy, you will be able to find out which of this franchisor's franchisees is trying to sell the franchised business and get access to the federal tax returns and the profit and loss/operating statements and balance sheets for the past five years. Compare that to what the franchisor is telling you in Item 19.

Do the same thing with businesses in the same business that are for sale and that are not affiliated with this franchisor. No one ever overstates profitability on their tax return.

When someone tells you things that you could figure out are untrue if you just pay attention, and you then sign a contract in which you agree that they didn't tell you that, and you later find out that there are many things that are not as they were described to be, after you have parted with your investment funds and taken on a lot of debt and other liabilities, is it realistic for you to expect to find an effective remedy in a lawsuit or in arbitration?

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

For the 5 Most Fascinating Stories in Franchising, a weekly report, click here & sign up.

This is the first of a three articles intended to raise investment care sensitivities. They are offered as a gesture of concern about what I see happening to people who invest in new and in old/over the hill franchise opportunities.

The purpose of the deceits practiced by these two groups of franchisor companies is, in the first instance, to portray itself as the investment quality equivalent of an already proven franchise concept/model, and, in the second instance, to portray itself as still being as good an investment vehicle as it once may have been but no longer is.

Is it possible for franchisors to say to prospective franchisees that profitability information is not provided when they do they provide profitability information?

It is also a very logical question to ask whether a franchisor can provide false or misleading profitability information so long as a warning is also given that there is no guaranty that you will achieve profitability and that you assume the risk of profit or loss and that there are risks.

Since risk is inherent in any investment, warnings about risks do not include or excuse risks that are produced by false statements made to induce the investor to part with his money in the first place.

How does someone who is thinking of investing in a franchise go about vetting the numbers?

This is the hottest button issue in disclosure, because assurances of potential profit are the most effective way to sell a franchise. Only an imbecile buys a franchise because of the bullshit. Real people want to know whether they will make a profit and how much, and how long it will take to reach profitability, and how much it will cost to get there.

Many years ago I published a suggestion in the ABA Franchise Newsletter that, since every franchise agreement empowers the franchisor to receive copies of periodic financial information and tax returns generated by its franchisees, compiling that information ought to be made mandatory, and that information ought to have to be disclosed in a way that displays how the franchisees are really doing.

This would include grouping franchisee performance information by levels of profitability (top third, middle third, bottom third), by region of the country, and by showing seasonality if seasonality is a significant factor. I also suggested that the information could be handled in such a way as to eliminate the impact of different franchisees treating various expenses differently for accounting or tax purposes.

If that were to happen, people might be able to appreciate at a higher level of quality just what the performance expectancies might be.

Franchisors, of course, howled at the thought. Why, if that were done, people might be able to see whether your franchise system was more profitable for its franchisees than someone else's franchise system, and the lower performing franchise systems would have a harder time selling franchises. DUH! That's one of the best reasons for doing it!

Since a potential franchisee will not receive that quality of prospective financial performance information, it remains necessary to have access to a fairly high level of sophistication in dealing with what is provided.

This article is intended to help to deal with the garbage that is thrown at you now.

Reading this article does not make you my client, and there are many other things that must be accounted for than just the questions raised here. But you can take this to your lawyer or accountant/financial planner, and maybe it will help you both better understand what you are being handed.

Are there Franchise Consultants? No.

Let's get started. Start by first asking yourself who it is that you are dealing with -- who is behind the face you are looking at when you are dealing with the person who is providing you with initial information about a franchise opportunity? If that person identifies himself/herself as a 'FRANCHISE CONSULTANT', you know you are dealing with a liar.

There is no such thing as a franchise consultant who sells franchises. While many people do that, they are not consultants in any functional meaning.

The reason for that is that they only get paid for selling franchises -- usually by a commission. That's a salesperson, not a consultant. And even if they were consultants, they aren't working for you to help you.

If you aren't the only one paying them for assistance, they are salespeople. When they tell you that they are there to help you get the right deal for your circumstances, that is total bullshit. They are there to sell you a franchise -- any franchise that will pay them a commission. You have to be extremely cynical about everything you are told.

Doubt everything until it is proven -- and you need to know what proof looks like.

What they call proof usually isn't. In once case in my office, the franchisor sales person claimed to be a vice president when he wasn't even an employee of the company. He was an outside salesman. You have to doubt EVERYTHING.

Item 19 Traps

a) - No Item 19 earnings claim is a Lie

Liar Number One tells you in Item 19 of the UFOC that the company does not give out earnings claims and that no one is authorized to provide earnings information in connection with the sale of its franchises.

This is an obvious lie for several reasons. The first reason is that the only reason to make an investment is to make a profitable return on that investment. If there is no representation of profitability potential/earnings potential, then there cannot be any reason on earth to make an investment in their franchise.

The second reason is that every one of these franchise companies does make earnings claim information to every potential franchise purchaser. The earnings claims information isn't in Item 19 of their UFOC, but it is provided by other means.

Among these other means you will see one or several of the following:

The franchise sales person provides the information either orally, on a blackboard, on a random piece of scrap paper/cocktail napkin/table cloth (and if you hang on to that piece of paper you may have a great exhibit when things later don't go as you thought they should).

b) Franchisee Verifications cannot be relied upon

The franchise sales person invites other franchisees to come appear at a meeting of franchisee prospects to tell of their experience as a franchisee. These folks always tell about their own wonderful financial performance. The presentation is intended to tell you that this is what you can expect if you buy the franchise.

The selected franchisee spokespeople are either all very successful or just shills lying through their teeth. In some instances these shills also receive a 'commission' on every franchise fee taken from each person attending that meeting who buys a franchise.

There are probably some successful franchisees in the system, but the point is that you are being provided with information that the franchisor denies providing to you, and that the information -- since it is denied it was ever given anyway -- is never reliable.

If you do buy the franchise, you will see in the franchise agreement an Acknowledgement clause that says that you agree that you were never given any earnings claims information.

If you sign that agreement knowing that you were in fact given earnings claim information, you may be out of luck even getting it admitted into evidence in court or in arbitration of any fraud claim you may later seek to assert.

Some courts are allowing the Acknowledgement clause to exonerate misrepresentation, making the defrauded franchisee seek reversal of those rulings in courts of appeal. That adds time and expense to obtaining relief.

You are provided, as is required, a list of the names, addresses and telephone numbers of all the franchisees of that franchisor so that you can contact them as part of your investigation/due diligence before you buy the franchise, to see what kind of experience they are having with the franchise.

But the franchise sales person steers you to certain franchisees. These will always say they are making tons of money and are just thrilled with the franchisor who provides great training and support. If you do buy the franchise, the sales person usually gives them a percentage of the sales commission, or they receive some other form of consideration for their assistance.

The franchisor's position is that, notwithstanding the steering, they have no part in providing you with earnings claims information. If you buy that you are too stupid for words. While it may in some strict sense be true that someone else, not the franchisor, provided you with the information, the fact is that the information was provided to you through the efforts of someone affiliated with the franchisor.

c) Financial Assistance for SBA Loans, but no Item 19

The franchisor who claims not to provide earnings claims information to persuade you to buy the franchise, does offer to assist you in seeking an SBA loan. The loan requires that you prepare a 'business plan' (another work of sheer fiction). The business plan requires a pro forma operating statement and balance sheet statement to show the lender what you expect by way of financial performance of the business for which you are borrowing the money.

The franchisor either provides you with information to use in preparing the business plan, including the financial pro forma, or steers you to a 'consultant' to assist you and the consultant provides financial pro forma information that the consultant obtained from the franchisor.

Then of course, you take your business plan to the franchisor for review, before submitting it to the SBA lender, and the franchisor tells you that you 'did a good job' or that 'your numbers are reasonable', vouching for the numbers/earnings claims information.

The lying franchisor's position is that they provided nothing and that you got that only from some third party, not from the franchisor. The franchisor's back up position is that they didn't provide you with the information in order to get you to buy the franchise. They just provided information to help you get a loan.

DUH! And -- I actually heard a franchisor person testify to this once -- the ultimate fall back position if the information is false is that the false information wasn't provided to you, but was provided to the lender.

There are other ploys by which franchisors who state in Item 19 of their UFOC that they don't give out earnings claims financial information actually do in some fashion provide it.

The fact is that it is almost never true that they don't provide earnings claim information, and if they provide it while insisting that they are not providing it, they are lying to you and you need to run like hell, not buy the franchise.

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

For the 5 Most Fascinating Stories in Franchising, a weekly report, click here & sign up.

Franchise agreements were always too long - twenty years - in the early days of franchising. But you couldn't get a bank to loan mortgage money for a store build out on a twenty year note if you didn't have a twenty year franchise agreement. You didn't know that? That's why the agreements were for such long terms.

And, to make matters worse, in those days they usually provided for renewal of 'this agreement', rather than for renewal on the terms of whatever contract was then being used for new franchisees.

So the contract engineering failed to provide for system wide currency and essentially harmonized and rationalized terms of dealing across the scope of the system.

Now, franchise agreements tend to be for ten years, with renewal on the contract then being used for new franchisees.

The Evolution of Business Models

But the rates of change and evolutionary development in practically every business and market have escalated greatly. E-Commerce has further accelerated the ease and the speed of new competitive entry into any business when demand boosts appear.

Think of franchises that have typically sold products from expensive mall store locations, only to find that those formerly 'special' or 'exclusive' products started showing up in supermarkets and discount stores, and now on the Internet, making them more easily and less expensively accessible from sources other than those mall locations.

Food gift baskets, spiral sliced hams, vitamins and health foods are examples. Sam's club now carries Starbucks Coffee. Toys-R-Us is having a tough time due to toys being merely a group of hundreds of product groups available in enormous multi-category retail operations.

When a specialty product ends up in a supermarket or discount store where it is one of thousands of products available at a single location, the store can 'football' discount the specialty as a traffic builder and make its margins on its other products.

The mall site franchisee selling that single product line does not have that opportunity.

How does he sell at mall retail prices what the supermarket is using as a leader at much lower prices, where shoppers can simply throw the product in the cart and not have to carry it all over the mall?

With similar economic effect, saturation in the fast food business has destroyed margins and return on investment. Franchisees are less willing to invest in updating stores with lessened prospects for returns on that expenditure, and less willing to renew agreements on less favorable terms in order to remain in a business that is in the mature or decay stage of its life cycle.

The point of all this is that market changes are rapidly making franchise agreements less reliable as the set of rules by which a franchise system is operated.

Renewals - Is there Value?

More and more, your most successful franchisees are not interested in renewing their franchise agreements, not interested in continuing in the franchise relationship. They perceive little incremental value in associating with you for another term, because your techniques, like the techniques of everyone else, are not capable of turning back the clock to the easier money days when your concept was new and fresh and almost no one else was doing the same thing.

Along with their view of their own suffering, their franchisors are seeing lower initial fee income as fewer new franchises can be sold, more expensive operating costs at company owned stores with competition inhibiting price increases to keep up with expenses. Franchisors typically increase the number of stores as best they can, flooding markets and increasing the animosity that comes when one's franchisor is competing with him.

Franchisors are going on the Internet also, and these sales rarely are directed to the franchisees, but are taken more and more by the franchisor through direct on line sales.

Animosity keeps growing, and revolts happen.

Unfortunately, most franchisors are looking to their franchise agreements more than to what is happening in the market place, trying to force a relationship to work according to the agreed model rather than the reality model.

Termination Conditions - Legal and Business Reality

Attitudes about franchisees having to stick it out and play your tune because the contract says they must, and that you have a covenant not to compete to enforce if they leave, or a provision that allows you to take over their store if they leave, cause franchisors to mislead themselves into believing that they are more powerful than they really are sometimes.

But these scenarios are really more correctly evaluated from the perspective of chaos theory, because there are so many dependent variables at work that predictability of outcome is not just the product of contract drafting and market fluctuation.

Franchisees Revolt

Franchisees do not run to join in a fight as much as people would like to think.

There are techniques that tend to (but not always) isolate the leader(s) from the rest of the franchisee pack. Although few people think of it this way, the Protestant Reformation and the American Revolution worked in the exact same dynamic as a franchisee revolt.

Very few colonists fought King George. Most lay in the weeds, unwilling to take the risk of confrontation. They rightly believed, in the case of the American Revolution, that whatever the fighting colonists won would be winnings for all the colonies.

It isn't like that in franchise revolts, however. The folks who stand up and fight do not obtain anything for those who lacked the commitment to the struggle.

All too many times I have represented such franchisee groups, had many drop out or not join in the first place on the idea that they will get whatever the fighters win. In every instance, I have later heard from the less brave, wanting to get in on something that is already over, to board a train that left without them. Usually they simply get ground out or bought out very cheaply.

The management of franchisee dissidence is facilitated by tuning into what is happening in the system, not by seeing dissent and cowering in denial until you are in court as the franchisor defendant, in a fight not of your choosing, where you didn't get to pick or to frame the issues, where you go last and not first. When you are sufficiently alert to see it coming and to start planning for it, you have many, many more options.

Unfortunately, however, most franchisors wait until they are in court as defendants or until the franchisees start leaving and litigation to enforce post termination 'rights' becomes inevitable, on the belief that if you let one get away with it, the rest will follow.

When I evaluate a potential or actual revolt situation, I analyze it in multivariate contexts. There is no 'do this first' kind of approach. It is all done simultaneously in every mode. The order in which they are presented here is for convenience of expression only, and is not intended to be directional.

1. There is a need to understand what the market environment is doing to the system.

2. There is the issue of what that environment is doing to the franchisor and what the franchisor is doing to react to it.

3. There is the issue of what the franchisor's reaction is doing to the franchisees.

Structural considerations come into play-does the franchisor have company operated stores, and, if so, what are they contributing, if anything, to the perceived problems. The same questions are addressed to e-commerce, if that is a factor, and to how it is structured and how it is being operated. At the same time, advertising fund management is very frequently a focus of contention.

Then you look at the range of franchise agreement terms under which the system operates, and you ask questions to determine whether whatever it is the franchisor is doing conforms to those agreements, or at least, may be permitted by those agreements.

Along with this inquiry is the issue of whether, even though in conformity with terms of agreements, is what the franchisor is doing quite different from what was represented to the franchisees when they bought their franchises. This is more than technical, for even though statutes of limitation may have run out on misrepresentation claims in court, that plays a large role in how you manage the contention.

Ultimately, if the franchisor is doing everything right, in the sense that his agreements permit what he is doing, the franchisor has to make economic decisions. There are costs in ignoring the problems, and there are certainly costs in trying to solve the problems.

Trying to decide which costs to accept, and how much of them to accept, and to manage the enforcement of 'rights' issues, and to manage the 'propaganda' and 'political' issues are all absolutely obligatory aspects of franchisee revolt management.

There are no hard and fast rules, for the reason that each franchise system has its own 'baggage'. That baggage may be heavier or lighter depending upon whether there is more or less professional management in place, how difficult it is to deal with corporate ego issues that grew out of certain people having become addicted to always being told they are right.

Now that you are at the end of this article, do you feel like you have not been given a road map for franchisee revolt management? Good! There ain't no road map.

It''s a matter of complexity and sophistication that must be dealt with one situation at a time. Too many variables prevent a simple directional tutorial on how to do it for your company. What works for one company in this situation may be totally wrong for most other companies. It''s exactly like a recipe for making chili. Every ten miles down any road in Texas, the recipe for chili is different. Handling franchisee revolts for franchisors is just like that.

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

For the 5 Most Fascinating Stories in Franchising, a weekly report, click here & sign up.

It seems to me, looking at this phenomenon over the 53 year history of my practice as a conflicts specialist/litigator, that most of what I have to try (or where I have had to be sufficiently aggressive to cause my adversaries to lower their demands to an acceptable level) could have been remedied in one tenth the time & for one tenth the expense.

The introductory phase of conflict presents rather similarly across the range of dispute causes/subjects.

They begin and develop in the same manner. There is a grain of dissatisfaction over some subject/event/program or other that is either not identified as it first begins to sprout or is given almost no weight.

Ignore Some Irritations

Many times, ignoring that first flicker of annoyance is the sensible thing to do, judging by hindsight because it never developed into fulminating melee.

Sensible people appreciate that no relationship, business or personal, is without occasional inconvenience.

Sensible people absorb the minor shocks/vicissitudes of ongoing relationships because the value of the relationship itself is an overall positive. With quality control relationship management the difference between the ebb and flow of normal relationships and problem development is much more discernible.

But that is relative, not an absolute, and the value morphs as the relationship develops over years - sometimes becoming more valuable and sometimes less.

There is a dependent relationship that is expressible quantitatively between length of relationship/severity and frequency of difficulties/quality of reward for staying in the relationship. An econometrician could assign values to each of these factors and the passage of time would cause them to move along lines that diverge and intersect in trends to provide a mean scale within which, given a large enough sample, one could posit relative satisfaction generalities and, by measuring deviations from the mean, posit the potential for eruptions. I promise that at this point I will stop all this econometric mumbo jumbo and get down to brass tacks.

The major target of this discussion is distributive systems, vertical in the instance of managing franchise and dealer relationships. The application is the same in all business relationships that endure over a significant period of time, but I am going to use the vertical distributive relationship as the focus of this article.

Frequently people enter commercial relationships with unrealistic expectations. This is sometimes the product of hype and sometimes worse than that. If there is no enforceable agreement providing for a term of years, the situation is easily remedied.

The remedy is not always cheap as investments in infrastructure may have been made in expectation of success.

If there is an agreement for a period of years the exit cost is often extremely high, both in terms of cash and other non cash elements (think move out/covenant not to compete/transfer of customer loyalties). Often the deal is as expected but does not succeed for other reasons, some economic and some just a failure of relationship management skill.

Those involved can sense when the tension begins to rise and can also appreciate when the tensions increase. They suppress the angst for as long as possible because they simply dislike confrontation and don't want to waste money lawyering up every time there is a pissing contest. Somehow they never just sit down and try to find a path to YES. Maybe even if they did that path would not be available for one or both. Why is that so frequently the case?

The process of a relationship becoming disputatious is similar to that of an illness progressing from a sneeze or cough to pneumonia. The issue is when to intervene and how to arrest this progression. There is no magic point. How that point is identified is affected by attitudes of caring or not caring; of follow up quality control communication or simply leaving the strategic health to the care of the tactical functionaries. But everyone reports to upstairs, and dissatisfaction where the rubber meets the road becomes amplified as it effervesces upward.

Large institutional companies operate upon the assumption that all is automatically normal and positive because in some sense the belief is that anything but utter calamity is affordable and someone down below may always be thrown under the bus in the process of cosmetic accountability.

But most of us aren't General Motors and most of us can't afford the General Motors attitude - nothing matters because we are professional grade people. Sadly, even calamity failed to alleviate the kind of arrogance that persists even today in that company - and in more like it.

In many companies there is official doctrine. One must agree with the official proclamation of what and where and how or be moved out of the organization. This reduces the potential value of internally generated relationship quality control.

In short, people are afraid of speaking up when their doing so could be extremely helpful if only there were open minds.

Where the game is to "make it" through your assignment and move on, leaving problems to the poor bastard who will take over from you in this position, effective trigger point spotting will simply not occur. In so many companies there is the middle management belief that upstairs never wants to hear anything except positive reports and will punish in one way or another those who raise "issues". They really don't give a damn, won't bother monitoring what is going on until it is lawyer up time.

Even at the General Motors level of wealth that system doesn't work. What then for the rest of the rational commercial world?

But, When Is It Just Too Much To Take?

Real people managing real companies that have to face real vicissitudes of relationship quality fluctuations have to be alert to trigger points that, if left unattended to, may sour important ongoing transactional success. Left unmonitored, even the best commercial relationship tends eventually to unravel.

For instance, your largest customer begins to believe that he is too important to you and that you will absorb all sorts of impositions in order to keep his business. This would include, stretching/exceeding credit terms, taking unauthorized discounts and allowances, making demands that you the seller, absorb the freight, seeking "gifts" and inclusion in perquisites that few others ever receive. The list goes on and on.

Many companies fail to recognize at an early point in this progression that some relationship discipline must be imposed to prevent this kind of malignancy from metastasizing. While the customer may be important to you, on these facts you are also important to him as a critical supplier on whose products or services he makes a lot of money downstream.

Doing nothing leads only to ultimate confrontation, because the more the customer gets away with these ploys the more he demands. Too much is never enough.

I start trial in such a case in three months. My client let this customer get away with far too much for too long, and when the axe finally had to fall, the customer sued. This particular scenario is one in which the customer has used similar tactics on others of his critical suppliers and has also ended up suing them.

The abusing customer should never win, but everything positive that might have been preserved is destroyed by failure to see the truth about the coming threat in time to defuse it.

Why The C-Suite Gets Bad Information

It is perhaps not fair to expect the people at the low end of the ladder to deal with their opposite numbers in client companies in handling potential problems. In an ideal environment they would report the issue upstream and a conscientious middle manager would take it to his boss for consideration. Then one of those people would take the initiative to contact his opposite number in the other company and deal with whatever it is that needs attention.

No one will say this, but making people fearful of expressing themselves in any way but the approved way for fear of infliction of punishment is precisely what Lenin and Stalin did following the Russian revolution. If you thought of how something may be working in your company to make it look like that, perhaps the failure of that method and the need to correct those impressions would be easier to recognize.

In a more advanced mode there could be a company ombudsman to whom people could go with identified oncoming issues, and the ombudsman would pull the laboring oar in getting upper management to address it positively. And if the ombudsman also had the authority to go consult with critical professional resources (legal, financial), including outside resources, the ability to head trouble off at the pass would indeed be enhanced.

Novel Retainer

I have my own way to handle this problem. I urge non litigation clients not to hire me on an hourly fee structure, but rather on a monthly or quarterly retainer that covers absolutely everything other than litigation/arbitration and out of pocket expenses.

That prevents people not calling me for assistance because they dislike knowing that when I pick up the phone the damn meter starts running. I am available 24/7 under that arrangement. The initial period of the retention is one of adjustment regarding whether the anticipated work turns out to be more or less than anticipated for the flat fee retainer, but as time passes the retainer gets adjusted up or down to keep it fair to everyone.

I urge consideration of this mode of relationship configuration upon my brother and sister attorneys. It may be less remunerative in the short term, but it builds a much better attorney-client relationship, so that in the longer term the economics are rather favorable.

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Just back from the wars, so to speak, I found that most folks are too socially emasculated through the process of institutionalized position sensitivity to even have an inkling about what to do when a dominant position person goes off the deep end and his actions threaten to destroy businesses if not brought to a screeching halt. Such was the war just concluded, in which we represented numerous franchisees of a franchisor who's point person thought and acted like a white bread Benito Mussolini.

This was a renewal issue in which the franchisees had the right to renew on the same terms they currently enjoyed unless the franchisor was then selling new franchises, in which instance they would have to sign the then current franchise agreement in order to renew.

Obviously, new franchise agreements are historically upon worse terms for franchisees than expiring agreements. At least that is the predominant experience in the franchising business.

Money, restrictions, franchisor prerogatives and other matters that impact the relative economics of a franchise relationship tend to move in favor of the franchisor with each new iteration of the agreement.

This franchisor was a more than over the hill operation and had not sold new franchises for about twenty years. It had seen the attrition of most of its franchisee population and did not even have an operations manual.

Peter the Point Man decided that the value of being his franchisee was far above then current relative economics and that he was not going to be so foolish as to honor renewal terms, no matter how clearly they may be stated in the soon to expire current agreements of my clients. They were the best performing franchisees, historically, in the system and had been there for about forty years. Had Old Pete been possessed of any good sense, he would have paid them to show him how to operate the company owned units which lost money while theirs prospered every year more and more.

Any econometrician would tell you that in these circumstances the relative value of the relationship among the parties were indeed skewed, but in favor of the franchisees rather than the franchisor. Had Old Pete simply gifted these franchisees with the entire company, he would have come out far better off economically compared to facing years upon years of continuing losses eventuating in the bankruptcy of his company.

These franchisees had been clients of mine for over thirty five years, having once before been confronted by an earlier edition of delusional point person. I sued the franchisor on their behalf then, and the results of that litigation was the ultimate cause of their having favorable contract terms now.

My clients believed that when renewal time came around this Bozo had plans to try to rip them off, and so we had almost a year head start in setting Him up for his comeuppance.

Franchisors love discussions. Discussions leave no tracks. Writings are tracks, and thus are despised by franchisors, especially if they have an agenda to be predatory and need deniability in case there is strong push back by the franchisees. Peter the Point Man, however, failed to recognize that our insistence upon having email confirmations and exchanges to prevent negotiations from being nothing more than conversations was providing us with a plainly visible trail of the development of his entire program to rip us off.

His arrogant lack of subtlety even went so far as to acknowledge his obligation to negotiate terms with us and then insist that the negotiations be restricted to only those issues raised by the franchisor.

He even went to the trouble to have his lawyers send us a proposed contract amendment saying just that.

No one signed that, on advice of counsel.

He then told us that business requirements prevented him from being able to negotiate the renewal terms right now and offered a one year extension of the same terms to accommodate his claimed business needs. In fact, what he did during that extension period was to have his lawyers create a spurious FDD, which he registered in Virginia so that he could claim that he was in reality engaged in selling new franchises and therefore exonerated from having to negotiate new terms with us or to offer renewal upon the same terms as before. He then imperiously insisted that we sign his new franchise agreement, which was full of incredibly stupid positions that no competent franchisor would ever put into his agreement.

To be sure, he also changed the economics drastically in his own favor (as if that needed to be said). The State of Virginia took one look at his company financial reports and immediately slapped him with an initial fee impound.

My clients had been successful business operators for over forty years, and had been in only one real battle royal in their entire lives, the earlier litigation with this same franchisor under other "leadership". They found it very out of character for me to insist that they seriously do things to bring about the entrapment of the present franchisor management. I had constantly to explain to them that if they didn't handle the situation as a prelude to a main battle they were going to lose their businesses.

They, like most folks, erroneously believed that they had obvious rights and that that was all that was necessary for the correct result to ensue.

They were initially incredulous when I explained to them that there is no right on earth that is self-executing, not even those in the Constitution. If you don't stand and defend your rights, they can easily be taken from you, and this was an obvious situation in which that was exactly what would happen unless we succeeded in entrapping the franchisor into revealing his hand in an evidentiarily usable manner.

They had never heard of such a thing, and their regular lawyers had no inkling or experience with this sort of confrontation technique. They were always fearful of giving offense and messing up their negotiating posture. They refused at first to believe that there was in this instance no such thing as negotiations and accordingly no such thing as a proper negotiating posture. Fearful of burning bridges and self-destructing, it required a lot of tough love quasi-military training to get them to go along with my urgings.

Only as the unfolding of the fact pattern revealed that I had absolutely correctly assessed the risk and danger profile did they come to accept the ancient truth that the only way to deal with a bully is to whip his ass half to death - or at least until he came to terms.

Peter the Point Man had no experience in working with a company that was actively selling franchises. His overlord had once before been with a franchising company that had, under his leadership, gone into bankruptcy. Between them both, they were playing with far less than a full deck - were several bricks short of a load.

Accordingly, they compounded mistake upon mistake. They failed totally to do what every real franchisor always does to market a franchise program. They even sent us a letter half way through the litigation saying that they hoped soon to have an operations manual ready for review. The list of bozo mistakes would provide a standup comic with at least fifteen minutes of material.

They informed the court that their position was that the issuance of the spurious FDD was all they needed to prove that they were indeed engaged in selling new franchises. They could not have posited a more ridiculous strategy. This was the easiest possible position for us to defeat. Four days before we were to take their depositions in anticipation of an immediate preliminary injunction hearing, they had an epiphany, and about a week later the case was resolved upon very favorable terms for my clients.

The lesson here is that while it is nice to have polished manners and live by reasonable rules of commercial civilization, there comes the moment when those rules do not apply. If you continue to live by those rules you will simply be eaten alive. In times like that you need representation that understands and understands how to execute battle plans that level any playing field.

When someone decides that a business relationship is there to serve the terms of an agreement rather than the agreement being there to serve the quality of the business relationship, the result will be calamity if not immediately changed. Usually that change can only be brought about by aggressive confrontation.

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As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

The Vanishing Competent Franchisor

Franchise investors find, often too late, that the unique systems and concepts in which they have invested are neither unique nor have even competent execution by the franchisor.

The reasons for this are several. Some of them are the natural vicissitudes of living in any competitive marketplace over time, but others are fault ridden. Which is which? What are the identifiers? How early can they be spotted and what can be done to avoid or thwart them?

So far the courts have not seemed hospitable to the notion of going beyond the explicit wording of carefully drafted agreements entered into by seemingly sentient adults. From a macroeconomic perspective this is exactly what courts should be doing, as enforceable agreements are indispensable capital that underlie the value of enterprises.

But are the franchisees caught in an ever tightening noose of business contraction so constrained by contract language that the only diagnosis is: suffer a financially excruciating death? Should bankruptcy be the only resort/cure to being in contract with people who rely on legal enforceability?

How far can franchisees go without violating fundamental contract rights and thereby effectively changing franchisor inability into franchisee liability? Where is the line between act or die on the one hand and legal suicide on the other?

The Legal Framework

In today's franchise agreement one finds that the mission statement is not a term of the agreement. None of the hortatory rhetoric of the sales pitch/marketing materials is ever to be found anywhere in the actual contract language.

There is a bright line between all the positive reasons for investment and the machinery by which the investment, once made, is to be managed, performed and observed.

Investors seem not to notice that what convinced them to invest in the first place is nowhere to be found in the agreement itself. Franchise investors are in the main due diligence illiterate.

The agreement always provides that the goodwill of the business and the brands are all the sole and exclusive property of the franchisor and that the franchisor may change its configuration at any time, for any reason and without having to field test and performance prove any change before compliance with it is demanded of the franchisees.

The franchisees covenant to execute the business model as directed by the franchisor in the manual and otherwise, including participation in all programs mandated by the franchisor on the terms stated, all as may vary from time to time, and to guaranty the payment of royalties out to the end of the contract term regardless of termination or other reason for failure.

All fault for nonperformance is placed upon the franchisees while all decision making prerogatives belong exclusively to the franchisor.

Many attempts to modify the absolutist right versus wrong, franchisee versus franchisor abrasive interface have been tried and they have all come to naught.

Most of them have been in the guise of an imaginary unwritten covenant of good faith and fair dealing and more recently in the form of a so called franchisee bill of rights that exists neither in statute, ordinance or other document having any legal force whatsoever.

Finding Operational Salvation

Where does that leave the franchisees who see themselves caught in abandonment of the brand by the franchisor and in the inability of the franchisor to respond effectively to changes in market conditions?

Litigation/confrontation seems not to provide a remedy. Self help so often leads to litigation/confrontation.

And yet no one can live at sword points.

The only present tense answer to this problem lies in effective but insistent relationship management that is initiated by the franchisees acting mostly in concert with organization and a high level of competence that seems at such moments to be available only from the franchisees themselves.

How does that work?

Up to now it doesn't work at all/yet. Commitment at any effective level seems not to be an ability of groups of franchisees. As their collective minds now work, they feel entitled to competence/protection as a matter of "right" (whatever that is) and because of that they are simply waiting for someone to provide it.

Since no "right" on earth is self executing, no matter what they taught you in political science class, attitudes of entitlement produce nothing useful. Why can't franchisees seem to recognize that obvious fact?

They didn't get what they bargained for - in their minds - and want "justice". Inasmuch as what they signed on to did not provide for what they thought they were getting, they, as adults, in law are getting what they bargained for. The correct analysis is that they failed to recognize that the agreements they signed never said that they get what the sales pitch/marketing materials said they were getting.

They are not a "family".

They are in business by themselves.

They are not their own boss.

Nor, have they invested in any commercial vehicle that has prospects for a successful future -without a lot of work being done.

The courts enforce what they signed, not what they later wish they had signed.

Where does that leave them? It leaves them with only self help and self help is fraught with liability risk. The choice in a franchise system that is draining away their resources is between slow financial death and taking the risk associated with a turnaround through self help. How in hell does one accomplish that?

The Road To Glory

The road to glory is paved with personalities. There are definable personalities who are running your franchisor company. Their characteristics are known, unfortunately not any more deeply that epithetically. The things that need to be fixed spring from what is happening in the market place and the fact that their abilities to guide the company through the happenings without hurting franchisee financial performance are inadequate.

A method of approach has to be configured. It is not realistic to expect collaboration from people if your opening gambit is to itemize in loudly proclaimed expressions all their perceived shortcomings.

There is, after all, a bit of sonofabitch in each of us. We aren't perfect either. At least tacit recognition needs to be given to the fact that a close evaluation of our own constituency would uncover some warts too.

I am good and you are awful will not yield a desired response or open that door through which you must walk. This is reality.

I have sat in too many franchisee association meetings listening to epithets hurled at franchisor managers by people who were chronically late with many obligations, to put it mildly - and the principal reason for not doing what was agreed to was always self serving opportunism.

In some instances the franchisor was aware of the defaults but tolerating them for later use as bargaining chips - something that every franchise agreement specifically allows the franchisor to do but not the franchisee.

When the pain in the ass franchisee wants consent to open additional stores there will always be this stuff in his file to justify a refusal of consent. The same goes for anything else a franchisee might want to do that requires franchisor consent. The uses of those seemingly small peccadillos are many and delicious, which I have elaborated elsewhere.

While the personality profile of the people we must deal with is configured, and we have devised a few plans for how best to make the approaches we want to make, a goals agenda should be made and ranked in order of priorities. There are several, time being one and cost efficient feasibility being another. Rank the goals. Some goals will be interrelated so that they may be presented and achieved as a package, while others may need spacing.

Goals and projects need responsible people to take charge of their execution. Within your group there will probably be more than one person with a special interest in particular goals as well as the skill sets necessary to accomplish them. Identify them and privately vet their suitability and willingness to put forth the effort in a timely manner.

Each goal must have its own business plan. The plan must be cross examined viciously before it is presented, because that is exactly what management is going to do. If you cannot defend your thesis you have just wasted a lot of time and your credibility. Debug the plan to the greatest extent possible. There is an inside track for the plan. Find the management person who controls the track and win his/her support.

Until you have actually proved your ability to create and execute brand enhancing new concepts it is a hard sell. Once you have made your bones life will become easier unless you get cocky or careless.

You save up reputational wampum just like you save money. Don't spend your credibility before you make your bones on the next projects. Winners know how to share credit and shut the hell up about how great they think they are.

The road to franchisee primary participation in brand enhancement is not easy at first.

There will always be detours. It has to be managed and counseled by people who understand the process. Find such people and bring them on board to help guide you.

Theirs will be the job to ask the tough questions that members of your group will not want to ask for reasons of political correctness.

They pull their weight.

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Tamerlane group's purpose is to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot when you see a bad event threaten to develop.

Our focused expertise in crisis management can prevent these situations from developing if we are called before someone makes self-humiliating public statements/files absurd lawsuits.

There are in every segment of our economy, at every moment of the day companies/people who sense that some significant project for which they bear responsibility is starting to move in a bad direction.

Whether it is:

1. A franchise system filling with disenchantment due to market changes for which requisite adjustments have not been found and made-

2. A fashion house trying to cope with designer disputes and threatened license terminations-

3. Dealers that need to be terminated in order to more effectively aligning the company's direction with its marketing strategy or foreign trade issues -

4. How to build a more international network and mitigate exposure to foreign jurisdictions should things not go as planned -

The list is endless - that movement from well being to impending serious difficulty arises.

The people to whom you regularly turn for guidance in more normal circumstances are less helpful when life starts to get tougher.

They may have long tenure and vast company and specific industry knowledge as well as knowledge of the people involved. However, theirs is not responsibility for stepping away from the immediate picture and providing calibrated options that can with econometric reliability be sorted and prioritized.

Finally, let us assume that the situation/company/relationships now coming into higher risk are worth saving. Some are so desperate that the die has been cast.

Most of these relationships are founded upon written agreements containing clauses taught in law school or by long custom that are terrible impediments to braking as brinks are more closely approached. Feeling trapped by inopportune language, most law firms I have encountered advise the pulling of triggers, giving notice of claim or default, stated in those stilted lawyerese that so endears our profession to the rest of the world.

But contracts have other clauses, largely unwritten in the traditional sense. They have become incorporated into the business model of the agreement by the force of experience and change. Lawyers who can read often can't find these clauses due to lack of substantive insight. They may be legal scholars, but this isn't a law school final exam.

If pulling triggers for fear of being accused of not exercising one's rights and thereby losing them could without sacrifice of position be replaced, would you consider it?

And what factors would you have to take into account to decide to take a more unorthodox approach to dispute avoidance that could save the deal/relationship/realignment project that you really wish to implement?

Begin with the metrics. The metrics are not a set of likely numbers if one approach is chosen. The metrics are differentials between performance number sets when alternatives are not only netted against each other, but considered in series. Yes. You can do both. If you know you can still fight if the preferred approach doesn't work, with no loss of position, could you ever even think of not doing this as I suggest you should?

Obviously this is not addressed to scorched earth egoists who like fiddle music in the midst of conflagration. Most companies are rational. It is to those rational companies that our approach makes the most sense.

Few people are always or absolutely right. In most instances there is room for adjustment. The passage of time alone suggests market changes that make old agreements less suitable to modern issue resolution.

Lawyers who believe only in contract language can never accomplish what I am speaking of.

If you would like to explore this avenue to rational prosperous relationship preservation, give us a call 281-584-0519.

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My education and experience in crisis avoidance and - if that fails - crisis management began rather early in my now more than 50 year professional practice.

The purpose of this article is to illustrate how the seeds of disaster are planted and grow, slowly at first in many instances and then explosively, and how best to avoid or manage those life threatening events.

The context is a story of three companies' experiences. One probably could not be avoided, as it was the product of the human tendencies that operate as it approaches critical mass and then explodes.

The other two were instances of avoidable mismanagement coupled with refusal to deal with anything that was not openly supportive of the agenda of a limited leader/owner - bullying as we conveniently call it today.

1. Let's deal with the giant company syndrome first.

It was the company's heyday. It led its field in almost everything it attempted. It had more money that just about any enterprise on earth. Its sales were more than the gross national product of several countries combined and its profits were mind boggling.

Department heads worried more that if they failed to go over their budgets the budgets would be reduced the following year. While enjoying an as yet unearned designation as an antitrust specialist, I was the lowest of the low in an enormous group of highly educated experienced people. What I really got to do was observe and learn.

No confidential information will be revealed in this article. Everything here is of public record and very old. Most of the people involved are long since gone to heaven.

In retrospect I think it is probably impossible for normal human beings to remain modest, humble and maintain their essential humanity in the face of so much wealth and power. I am not against wealth and power, but in this instance we are speaking of national level wealth and power - supernormal even for large companies.

Oddly enough, while antitrust enforcers sought and failed to bring it down, it ultimately brought itself down with inbred delusionality.

2. What I quickly learned was that most crises come from management blindness and resulting gross miscalculation.

The notion that one may be possessed of so much power, authority and wealth as to be immune from disastrous consequences is practically always the seed from which the tree of emergencies grows. This company was an extreme example of that, far more so than any other place I have ever been.

What I observed that opened my eyes to the notion that no one is sufficiently powerful to be immune to disaster was a trio of catastrophic instances of management arrogance and of management being oblivious to the opportunities for change in the marketplace.

• The management arrogance incident involved attempting to destroy a critic who had put his finger on a fundamental product weakness.

• No one was to be permitted publicly to suggest that this company was imperfect.

• The corporate braggadocios included such things as boasting that it was four deep in every position - the definition of wastefulness - and that its law department was The Praetorian Guard of the World's Largest Industrial Organization.

You just can't make this kind of stuff up.

The consequence of the incompetent attempt to destroy the critic was the establishment of organized insistence upon better automotive safety and the enactment of laws addressed to that and several other issues on which prior to that moment in history the company had had its own way. The genesis of the plot was laid to the law department.

Oddly enough, at the same time, its most effective potential competitor came out with a revolutionary design named The Ford Mustang that swept the market with excitement. Lee Iacocca really was the smartest man in the room.

Within a very short few years the Japanese, led by Honda, took up where Ford had begun and the era of the giant, powerful, fast, quick, gas guzzling behemoth of an automobile began to fade.

Ultimately, the product of such ingrained arrogance was the failure of the entire company and a federal bailout to try to save the jobs it potentially represented. In such a rarified atmosphere it is probably unrealistic to expect what would seem rational to normal people.

A very long time ago (about 15 years) I wrote about why new franchisors fail.

During that 15 year period we lawyers have "improved" upon the legal infrastructure of the franchisor quite substantially.

As you may know, the franchise legal infrastructure, a/k/a franchise agreements and FDDs, have moved significantly along the road to elimination of all legal risks for franchisors, except maybe for the more hard core thugs.

If you are not and do not intend to become a hard core thug, you might just want to read all of this.

There is still a lot of room for sound concepts to be developed into investment worthy business replication models. And the fact that in doing that your legal infrastructure has morphed into much better protection should be a positive influence for you.

After all, isn't risk reduction what this is all about after you demonstrate to yourself that you have a profitable model and that you can translate that into a profitable business for others even after loading onto it the costs of being in a franchise relationship?

The Current Franchise Landscape

Even in the old days there were dodgy franchisors:

• They sold tons of franchises and opened very few.
• They made profit representations that were total fiction and impossible to achieve.
• They said things about where the business was positioned and about the quality of the support they provided that were outright falsehoods.

In the 1960s some states began enacting franchise disclosure and relationship laws modeled somewhat upon the laws regulating securities selling.

But there were also a lot of really good, serious opportunity franchisors, and a reasonably careful person with some professional help could buy into such things as KFC, McDonalds, Little Caesars Pizza, Pizza Hut, Wendy's and Burger King, among others.

Today there are many more dodgy deals being put out for investment to less able investors.

The techniques for getting around the law one way or another have become more sophisticated. Analysis of potential franchise investments is more complicated. Most lawyers shrink from giving any business advice or analysis for fear of professional liability lawsuits. Asked about an opinion whether a particular franchise is a good investment, the lawyers say that it might be if they are telling you the truth, and stop there - utterly useless.

Franchise blog sites abound on the Internet, chock a block with broke and whining franchisees on their way to bankruptcy and unable to afford legal representation. Class action lawsuits against tough franchisors take years and are rarely certified by the courts. When they are, they drone on for a few years and settle out for paying the lawyers, with the franchisee class members getting little or nothing.

Where Does That Leave You?

If you really have long term intentions regarding the health and survivability of your franchisees, it helps to build a dynamic financial model of what the business is that your franchisees have to live in.

(None of the bozos do this. They don't really care anyway. All they want is as much fast revenue as they can squeeze out of the system)

For the serious long term franchisor, departure from the IFA norm can really help you measure the health of your system.

But you have to make the franchisees send in the tax returns their agreements require anyway, and from those, you can build the dynamic financial model, making the adjustments to derive an approximate EBITDA. It is not the impossible project that the IFA says it is. 

The reason it isn't thought to be a smart move is that then you would eventually find out which franchise system in any business segment is the most profitable, and once that got out no one would ever buy any of the others in that segment. Nobody wants to be known as tail end Charlie on producing positive cash flow.

The IFA also fears that such activity will one day lead to compulsory financial performance disclosure, which is a distinct possibility only if the IFA lobbying arm, Franpac, runs out of money.

So it is a bit of a dilemma. You really cannot count on the information not getting out. On the other hand, since the franchisees will soon be doing this for themselves, there is little justification for you to deprive yourself of the information. Dynamic financial modeling will enable you to see what the traffic can bear and continue to have positive, meaningful yield potential for your franchisees.

If your franchisees start a lawsuit or arbitration proceeding using dynamic financial modeling to show that you are tearing the financial heart out of the business they invested in, you would have to build your own model to dispute theirs, and yours might have to be rather contrived and convoluted in its attempt to show that theirs is not reliable.

Econometric modeling of markets has been used for decades in antitrust litigation, to positive effect. The government lost its first merger case under Section 7 of the Clayton Act because the target defendant used competent econometric modeling. The same thing soon after that happened when the FTC lost the breakfast cereal oligopoly case. I know because I brought econometric modeling into both those cases.

Financial Models for Franchise Systems

Financial modelling of franchise systems is not more complicated than that.

The universal solvent would be a cooperative project that produces a really high value dynamic financial model. That, as we say in Texas, ain't gonna happen.

Franchisors that operate numerous company stores, if they are going to consider this, should have a separate financial model for the company stores. While it may lack positive sales information potential, the ability to compare company owned versus franchisee owned financial results probably would yield marketing information. It would show what we have always believed to be true, that absent artificially imposed barriers to positive cash flow, franchisees really do better than the company does in producing cash flow.

But the really important value of dynamic financial modeling would be that it would tell you when you are approaching marginalization of the franchisees through add on extraneous periodic charges. If you went just one step further, you would also know your franchisees' debt structure profile and would be able to determine what they can afford in terms of remodeling the stores and even to prearrange the financing of large projects before you impose them.

Lenders pay commissions to those who bring them large deals like that.

In this interim before everyone is doing it, you can designate all information regarding financial modeling to be a highly secret body of information and treat it as such. If you designate it secret but everyone in the company has access to it, you are just kidding yourself. If more than five people have access to it you can forget confidentiality. The grunts who churn the basic data can be controlled if you don't fire them every now and again.

Attitude Issues

No franchisor is ever going to be loved by her franchisees. That is axiomatic. Within a year or two of becoming anyone's franchisee, the attitude becomes one of disbelief that there is anything special or unusual in being your franchisee.

They believe your support sucks and that they are getting little or no value from being affiliated with you. How virulent this attitude is will be the only variable. If you don't have a competent information management protocol in place your franchisees will rob you blind. There are just as many cheating franchisees as there ever were dodgy franchisors.

Back in the days when franchisees filled out monthly paper sales reports, the audit of their actual performance was their biggest fear. Of the literally hundreds of depositions I took in cases having to do with under reporting terminations, not one franchisee was ever under reporting unintentionally.

Some of the stories of whining franchisees and what they were charging to the business would make your eyes roll back. One franchisee in Florida was writing off a twin engine airplane against the revenue of a print shop with a three mile territory. His lawyer went ape when that part of the examination happened. Lawyers rarely make the effort to understand the finances of their clients before the horse leaves the barn, and clients never tell you where the bad stuff is hidden. If you don't find it yourself, you can usually bet that your opponent will.

Since you will never be loved in franchising, your contentment will come in providing a working positive cash flow franchise model from which you will become wealthy. If you need more than that, well, be prepared for large legal bills.

The Ultimate Franchise Solution

The ultimate franchise solution for anyone wanting to begin or expand a franchise system is to provide a concept that you have field tested and proven to be revenue credible in a franchise mode, and then to continue to measure its financial performance through dynamic modeling. To be sure, you will also have to improve its appeal to its customer base, but that is what you tell your franchisee prospects that you do best. It helps is that is true.

(I am publishing another article about the risks of becoming a franchisee. If you read that you might be offended. Franchisees who see that I drive both sides of the franchise road often criticize me for that, and some franchisors wouldn't touch me with a stick because I represent franchisees too from time to time. I never worry about that, but be aware that I see this business from both sides all the time, every year, year after year. My feelings about franchising are really love - hate, but that is because I wish I could make it better and that people could more safely invest in franchise opportunities.)

As always, you can call me, Richard Solomon,  at 281-584-0519.

Many years ago I was pulled away from my usual assignments to do a major product production tolling agreement between two of America's larger food companies.

It was a stroke of luck for me because it provided something new for my interest in multivariate risks management. Since then I have prepared many multivariate high risk agreements, and it is always an enjoyable as well as remunerative adventure.

When you think of every brand as a franchise in itself, it fits perfectly into my customary practice of managing franchise relationship disconnect issues.

Recently, I have been able to mix some of my more basic interests, consuming olive oil, with my interest in being able to negotiate and prepare the enabling agreements that bring together great marketing companies in America. More specifically, working with the best producers of great Extra Virgin Olive Oil and managing risks inherent in horticulture to delivery.

This is a wonderful exercise in multivariate risk management.

Olive Oil - Fraud and Standards

The notoriety of product purity fraud in the extra virgin olive oil business has stimulated my interest intensely. I love good olive oil to a degree that borders upon religion, I think that I probably consume good olive oil at the level of a Greek.

I am now eating the world's most incredible and unquestionably pure olive oil, and every meal is almost a religious ritual.

Olive oil is something with soul. You consume it with such incredible gratitude. I long ago gave up on European wines, with occasional ventures back there only when the auguries compel it.

California and the American Pacific Northwest is to me the world's most fantastic wine producing area, but has yet to arrive when it comes to top quality and taste olive oil.

Inasmuch as good wine also enjoys the presumptuousness of highly specific imprimatur, especially in France and, to a somewhat similar degree elsewhere in Europe, one might well expect that the snooty who insist upon their nomenclature prerogatives would, when put to it, lie cheat and steal to keep the black ink flowing on their financial statements.

Tom Mueller's book and blog, Extra Virginity, depicts the degree of hardship that olive oil producers are facing in the current economic difficulties and the "blending" that has become rampant to enable what is labeled Extra Virgin Olive Oil, "EVOO", to be sold profitability.

What is blended into it is often not even olive oil.

What most Americans buy as EVOO isn't, to make a long story short.

Whole Foods Market and Standards

However, there is some hope.

I was browsing in a new Whole Foods Market in Houston last Sunday, sitting at their new wine bar placed next to the olive oil shelves.

A rather nice looking woman was looking rather lost as she tried to determine which bottle of olive oil to select.

I walked the few steps over to her and pointed to the Lapas olive oil. She asked why I suggested that and I explained to her that it was from a reliable producer and told her that it was a house brand for Whole Foods Company, one of the very few trustworthy house brands in the world olive oil trade and completely organic.

She smiled and took the Lapas bottle as her selection.

Risk Management of Sole Source Producers

Whole Foods Company had to have carefully researched this project. Contracting for a single source agricultural product in a distant and troubled economy is high risk to say the least.

I know what terms the agreement has to include, but I wondered how each of the contract risks in the Whole Foods - Blauel Group agreement was dealt with.

Fritz Blauel is an Austrian who went to Greece in the 1970s and became interested in olive oil production and cultivation in the Peloponnesus and Kalamata in particular.

The Greeks of that area were still using rather ancient methods, and he sought to influence the producers of the area in totally organic methods.

To make a long story short, he succeeded, and Whole Foods Company's house brand of really top grade olive oil (not their 360 brand), Lapas, comes entirely from Blauel's operation. He produces about 650 tons of organic top grade olive oil each year within his group of farmers, and it may be found also under the brands Mani Organic and Kalamata Gold.

The Challenge and Rewards of Risk Management

What does one think of when contemplating the establishment of such a relationship, beyond the market research and the position of the brand as a "fit" within one's business?

For the lawyer crafting the seminal protocol it is a wonderful challenge. It requires input from several specialists who will probably be found within the client company or be on retainer for the client company.

In the matter of food and agricultural products, those would include not just the market research folks but also the agronomists, food chemists, manufacturing technique specialists, those in transportation and delivery as well as the financial staff.

The issues, especially in the instance of purchasing foreign agricultural output from a single producer or single group of producers include the management of numerous risks.

When you have accounted for absolutely everything you and the group can think of you have to start playing "what if..." games. The what if games should continue throughout the process of building the relationship and the agreement, right up to the moment of signatures.

Even then you can be assured that there are contingencies you missed. When that jumps up and stares you in the face you have to rely for relief upon the credibility and trust you were able to build up during the relationship right up to the moment when the event arises, and your approach to dealing with it must be obviously fair for it to be successful.

By way of illustration, a client lost total supply from a sole source vendor for a whole product line because someone served a subpoena on the vendor without handling the diplomacy properly.

The vendor was in Iceland and it required a several day long "social event" with its Vikingesque CEO just to get talks started on the real problem. It took a few weeks to recover from the "social event". You simply cannot think of everything.

Particularly in the instance of olive oil being produced at an exceptionally high level of quality within one of the most troubled economies on the planet where no one feels secure, just the notion that minute controls can be expressed in a single writing seems farfetched.

The cultural and economic divides standing alone would be insurmountable without bringing into acute focus many talents and skills in common easy to read and effective ways.

The resulting economic engine microcosmically and with mutual compassion and grace generates profitable product integrity without sacrificing the art or the nuances of timeless beauty encapsulated within a sacred tree fruit. We are speaking of olive oil, sacred, healthful and delicious.

Commercial lawyers rarely get to work on a symphony of nuances that embrace a fundamental expression of an entire culture. Smoothing the contrapuntal rhythms into a composed useful protocol calls upon artistry of expression as it seems to seek a trivializing of the ephemeral, a capturing of spirituality.

This is an example of the grace notes of law practice. It comes to very few.

What must be produced is a reliable encapsulation of many inherently indefinite forces that are answerable in the normal course to the uncertainties of agricultural crops and worked on by farmers and associated trades as well as social and political upheaval.
At many points along the lines potential leakage can occur if care and sensitivity are not brought to bear. Investing in great things is not to be approached without the willingness to support a work of very fine art as well as a mundane agricultural food product.

Doing that with an eye upon effective economics is rather breathtaking. If you are already in this business as you read this you understand the nuances and risks.

I really enjoy this kind of work because I find myself working with extremely competent committed people who take an almost worshipful approach to the products.

Whenever I get such an assignment it is a call to celebration and wall to wall happy in addition to remunerative. Professional life doesn't get much better than that.

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon,  at 281-584-0519.

Lawsuits and arbitrations often sort out disputes in their legal sense.

They rarely sort out disputes in a satisfactory personal, business or financial sense.

Anyone familiar with the litigation and arbitration process can tell you about how unsatisfactory the result was in most instances.

• They cost a fortune.
• Think of the legal fees.
• Think of the administrative costs (court reporters, expert witnesses, transcripts, travel, and the value of company resources wasted in the process).
• Think of how little you achieved compared to what you hoped to achieve.

A few people come out of the process glad that they did it. Many do not.

There are better ways to manage disputes. After fifty years of law practice, I have learned how to avoid them rather than embrace them. The difference is incredibly better.

In any business context people can begin to become unhappy with their relationship.

The reasons for that are almost endless. The buildup of every full blown dispute began substantially before it came to "lawyering up" and the end of it came long after.

A large part of the reason is that people naturally seek to avoid confrontation. They don't want to deal with it. It isn't high on anyone's list. And so in most instances it gets worse rather than better.

Positions are taken that are defensive in the confrontation sense - what if we come to blows kinds of things. People write things, memos, emails, instructions that make matters worse rather than better.

Months and sometimes years are spent in mutual distrust (to put it nicely) and people do all the wrong things, like send each other accusatory emails and far worse.

The value of whatever the relationship may have been intended to be in the beginning is lost, at least to one side of this, but it keeps on going, more weed than flower.

That's how conflict and dispute management usually works. Anyone in business for a long time has probably experienced some or all of this. Not everything we do works out the way we intended.

How can we change the way this is traditionally handled so that the length of its infectious presence is minimized and its cost greatly reduced?

Where do you begin in trying to answer the question whether to try this better way of conflict avoidance?

To begin, one truth needs to be recognized: Anger has a Value of Zero.

If you can convince yourself of the truth that anger has no value, and if you can see that earlier rather than later dispute avoidance effort holds significant potential for favorable results, we can begin to bring costly confrontations to less destructive conclusions more quickly.

At the point at which you are thinking of sending someone an accusatory email, you are about at the end of confrontation avoidance at reasonable economic cost. If you have just received an accusatory email, this is your last practical chance to step back from the brink.

Part of the war persona is the ancient battle boast - I am wonderful and you are terrible.

If someone made you read BEOWULF in high school or college then you know what that ritual is all about. This is a tipping point that people do not recognize. They think it is a beginning. It is way past the beginning. This problem began way before that email, and if you had recognized it well before that moment you might never be sending or receiving it.

When you think of all you spent after that email went out in your last "fight to the death", you will understand the savings of funds and resources associated with my approach.

There is a pigeonhole practice for dispute avoidance called Conciliatory Law Practice.

But, what I am suggesting is way beyond that, far from any touchy feely politically correct exercise. This is hardball played with intellectual acuity rather than with noise.

Specifically, there are always ways to derive valuations of potential conflict results. Among those valuations there is one or more that both you and your potential adversary can live with, no matter what the nature of the dispute. These valuations are not solely derived through accounting exercises.

Accounting is a numbers only game.

If you have ever seen this work you will never handle potential disputes in any other manner?

Can a completely unreasonable person refuse to participate as a matter of irrational obstinacy? Sure. Then you can always go back to wasting resources in all out confrontation with nothing lost by way of positions having been compromised. Is that likely to happen?

Probably not. I have seen very angry people awaken to the realization that this is the best way possible to deal with disagreement. It is how you find the leverage point that makes this work.

Often that requires some very outside the box thinking.

A large portion of the difficulty and expense of dispute resolution is that there are pre-emergence symptoms that are not recognized and dealt with.

Financial advisors evaluate and assist in the management of financial variables. There are other kinds of variables that impact the humanities side of company performance as well as its financials. If these are taught about in school, few people get passing grades and most don't take the course.

Business degree curricula being certificate oriented and template compliant regimes such as they are, the analysis and competent management of non-arithmetic variables are beyond their scope and capability.

What is taught is that nice people do right and you are a nice person so you must be doing right all/most of the time. Since neither proposition is regularly true in most instances, troubles happen.

No amount of instruction can rule out disputes. Disputatious situations will arise no matter what. What is unfortunate is that they are not identified with sufficient anticipation and not competently managed so that their impact is negated or minimized. Dispute anticipation can't be taught. This comes only with years of actual dispute management/resolution experience that enables one to see what it was that caused the disputes to arise in the first place and in retrospect identify when a dispute began to take root.

I have spent so much time over so many years going through case files and interviewing the people involved in so many lawsuits that a sensitivity to moment of arising and methods of avoidance simply became part of my psyche. In later years I can recall conversations with client managers in which the real goal was not in the resolution of the situation but in the avoidance of blame for its having happened. This, simply put, is unnecessary.

How does one go about not having to worry about blame for difficulties?

Dispute forecasting is both art and science. It does not readily lend itself to hourly rated retention, as the passage of time during which difficulties are identified/anticipated, how best to manage them is identified through collegial consensus, and the chosen method(s) implemented make hourly rated expenses prohibitive. Mission creep and the incentive to maximize billing poison the quality of the endeavor.

In addition, the resource to provide the expertise is not usually conducive to appointment to officer or director status. The resource needs to remain outside and to be involved in doing the same things for other companies in order to maximize its usefulness. A resource with only one client quickly becomes more fearful of alienating that client than focused on confronting root causes of difficulties. The ability to move on without suffering economic dislocation is indispensable to this kind of work.

How then does one establish and carry out being someone's effective dispute avoidance/management resource?

I believe the most effective relationship in the performance of these functions is a continuous presence/availability. Now that we have such things as email and electronic file transfer, we do not need to be constantly under foot. We can be available for face to face meetings at client need or convenience, but most of this can be performed remotely.

Retention terms should be periodic but not hourly. The resource and the client can come to mutually acceptable terms per month or quarter so that mission creep and billing incentives are removed from the scene. Since this kind of work requires the establishment of trusting relationships with relevant management and open channels of communication with no increase in project cost, this longer periodic arrangement fits/works better than any other.

The alternative is what companies suffer through now. A conflict on any given situation begins to arise. It is swept under the rug for as long as possible. Eventually it grows, like Rossini's description of slander, from a whisper to cannon fire. During this period of development, memos are written, emails are sent, and angry conversations occur that are later received in evidence or memorialized in deposition testimony transcripts and dueling affidavits. When the lawyers finally get involved the situation is on fire, the expenses are horrific (including management dislocation), and in many cases the resulting damages can destroy or financially undermine a company.

This unfortunate set of circumstances is no longer necessary. People need to feel free to deal up front with negative issues without career threatening consequences. When significant disputes can be avoided through competent variable management techniques, these negative impacts can be eliminated or so mitigated that threat levels are not critical. Of course conscious, intentional misconduct is an exception that nothing can eliminate. However, vindictiveness and scofflaw behavior are rare notwithstanding all the attention they get in the newspapers and on TV.

Most folks want to play reasonably close to the rules. The more you think about this the better it sounds and the more you will want to consider this approach.

Tamerlane group's purpose is to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot when you see a bad event threaten to develop. Our focused expertise in crisis management can prevent these situations from developing if we are called before someone makes self-humiliating public statements/files absurd lawsuits. 

There are in every segment of our economy, at every moment of the day companies/people who sense that some significant project for which they bear responsibility is starting to move in a bad direction.

Whether it is a franchise system filling with disenchantment due to market changes for which requisite adjustments have not been found and made; or a fashion house trying to cope with designer disputes and threatened license terminations; dealers that need to be terminated in order to more effectively aligning the company's direction with its marketing strategy or foreign trade issues - how to build a more international network and mitigate exposure to foreign jurisdictions should things not go as planned - the list is endless - that movement from well being to impending serious difficulty arises.

The people to whom you regularly turn for guidance in more normal circumstances are less helpful when life starts to get tougher. They may have long tenure and vast company and specific industry knowledge as well as knowledge of the people involved. However, theirs is not responsibility for stepping away from the immediate picture and providing calibrated options that can with econometric reliability be sorted and prioritized.

Finally, let us assume that the situation/company/relationships now coming into higher risk are worth saving. Some are so desperate that the die has been cast.

Most of these relationships are founded upon written agreements containing clauses taught in law school or by long custom that are terrible impediments to braking as brinks are more closely approached. Feeling trapped by inopportune language, most law firms I have encountered advise the pulling of triggers, giving notice of claim or default, stated in those stilted lawyerese that so endears our profession to the rest of the world.

But contracts have other clauses, largely unwritten in the traditional sense. They have become incorporated into the business model of the agreement by the force of experience and change. Lawyers who can read often can't find these clauses due to lack of substantive insight. They may be legal scholars, but this isn't a law school final exam.

If pulling triggers for fear of being accused of not exercising one's rights and thereby losing them could without sacrifice of position be replaced, would you consider it? And what factors would you have to take into account to decide to take a more unorthodox approach to dispute avoidance that could save the deal/relationship/realignment project that you really wish to implement?

Begin with the metrics. The metrics are not a set of likely numbers if one approach is chosen. The metrics are differentials between performance number sets when alternatives are not only netted against each other, but considered in series. Yes. You can do both. If you know you can still fight if the preferred approach doesn't work, with no loss of position, could you ever even think of not doing this as I suggest you should?

Obviously this is not addressed to scorched earth egoists who like fiddle music in the midst of conflagration. Most companies are rational. It is to those rational companies that our approach makes the most sense. Few people are always or absolutely right. In most instances there is room for adjustment. The passage of time alone suggests market changes that make old agreements less suitable to modern issue resolution. Lawyers who believe only in contract language can never accomplish what I am speaking of.

If you would like to explore this avenue to rational prosperous relationship preservation, give us a call at 281-584-0519.

Trouble hides in the weeds for a while before it actually strikes out and bites.

There is little difference between finding out where and what it is and snake hunting.

In the corporate world, the two most probable snake hunters will be the General Counsel and the Chief Financial Officer.

The CEO/Chairman may liminally sense it but people in that role tend to deny it for as long as possible.

They don't want to be distracted or confronted by it and they don't want to think about the expense of dealing with it. That allows it to fester a bit.

Eventually someone with awareness of the situation will walk into the General Counsel's or CFO"s office and start a conversation that leads to revealing what is hiding in the weeds..

The GC or CFO will be the person who brings it to the attention of the CEO, at which point the CEO recognizes as the result of that conversation that this must be dealt with or the costs associated with dealing with it will get out of control.

Real trouble can't be dealt with via publicity or advertising.

General Motors has been advertising for years that its management are all "professional grade" and they are going to take at least a $ 750,000,000 hit for shoving its faulty ignition switch issue under the rug for several years and for power steering malfunctions of several year's standing - about 3.5 million cars.

Toyota is about to take a similar hit.

Johnson & Johnson has been doing this for decades.

Someone in the past knew of the problem and decided to try to conceal it and fix the aboveground part of it on the cheap. That almost never works. The company is just deluding itself.

Scores of other companies do this every year.

They never seem to learn.

Denial is a very strong impulse.

Waiting to deal with it until after your potential adversaries have already lawyered up is a very wasteful approach. You can make a much better arrangement for your company if you lead the way. The humiliation and injury to sense of integrity associated with GM's head engineer on this particular matter testifying under oath at his deposition that he does not recall the matter; when it came up; making any decision not to fix the defective cars that already went out to the market, but just to correct it going forward are simply tragic.

When those who know are so afraid to tell the truth for fear of being fired, your company had made a terrible blunder.

Even if GM can afford $300,000,000. In addition GM has now taken the Chevrolet Cruze off the market and Edsels itself beyond anything in history. Professional grade? Yeah right! This is what comes from head in the sand techniques of dealing with impending crises. These were known long ago and nothing helpful was done.

Your company may not have the financial depth to take these hits periodically.

My belief regarding who are the first to begin to register impending trouble is based on the fact that it is always the General Counsel or the CFO who is the first to call me and suggest we visit.

They are the two most likely places that management go to for consolation and direction when bad things are on the horizon. They are usually the people in whom most managers have the most confidence.

Those are the guys to talk to if you are a crisis avoidance specialist.

Sometimes it is their outside law firm if company management does not want it known that they have brought in a crisis specialist,

If potential crisis is perceived it should never be taken by a company's regular law firm.

The reason for that is that they have an inherent conflict. Their first concern is always going to be for self preservation. Either they may have had a hand in the trouble - think Enron - or they tend generally to be ultra possessive about other lawyers being allowed to get close to their clients. If you have ever watched them at a convention with a client person, it is fun to watch them cling to these folks constantly to avoid any other lawyer getting a chance to be alone with them, even for a second. If you know what to watch for, it is hilarious.

Many a crisis situation has been mishandled for just that reason. Confidentiality obligations keep me from telling some horror stories.

They tend to call who they know. The worse the matter is perceived to be, the more likely it should and will go to a specialist rather than to their usual law firm.

There may be liaison with both groups for a short period, but the crisis specialist has a different perception of how potential bet the company situations should be handled. For one thing, putting a lid on the PR folks is an immediate must. What goes out of a company has to be carefully and centrally controlled, and PR template denials are usually the worst opening gambit. If you are being compelled to say something by a stock exchange you are very late in knowing about the issues arising.

But even then the PR auto deny gambit is usually a wrong move. In this day of people tweeting their bloody lives away, control over unvetted public statements by the company itself must be as tight as possible.

Sometimes it isn't a business dispute, but a problem of some key person or group being involved in improper and potentially embarrassing conduct, the scope of which is limited only by the human imagination. Corporate board room types are not well versed in how to manage this kind of damage control, but the first place the news will go is to the GC or the CFO in all likelihood. That is the moment when (after the CEO is advised) the potential crisis management specialist needs to be called.

Misconduct by a key person may be exploited for economic advantage and it may have been engineered deliberately just for that purpose.

Anywhere in the world. Any kind of matter at all.

The difference between the normal course difficult situation and the impending potential crisis is that the latter cannot be dealt with using template approaches.

Template approaches are taught in every law and business school and is practiced by every medium/large law firm and PR group.

Why that is inappropriate and why it usually leads to a terrible result is another story, but it usually does not get you where you want to be. In a really terrible situation, a bet the company problem template approaches are regularly disastrous.

Finally, another nice attribute of the crisis specialist is that, since he won't be anything like the people you socialize with, you are done with him after the conclusion of this one situation.

You can then go back to the golf pals with no bad blood hanging over those relationships.

For the 5 Most Fascinating Stories, a weekly report, click here & sign up.

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

The temptation is to think of this title as some word game without substance. If you give yourself a chance here you may see something very worthwhile and you may even want to put your company on this regimen rather than what you now have/use.

Litigation management is currently thought by most companies to consist of having an in house ex litigator monitor and work with the company's outside law firm(s) to shepherd cases through their lifecycle, relieving management of that burden and trying to keep a lid on outside law firm litigation expenses.

It quickly becomes rather inbred in many dimensional facets that have negative or at best neutral implications.

That is a really costly way to proceed and promises no happier resolution of disagreements that what I am going to propose here.

The system was born of less than imaginative contract draftsmanship (in cases dealing with accused default behavior in contract settings).

Since the scope of this can be made rather large, I will confine this discussion, the first in an intended series, to business disputes arising out of contractual relationships and in some instances tortious behavior as well.

Franchising is full of these instances. The fashion world is full of these instances. Just about all licensing of technology and the performing arts are very similar.

(I would prefer at this point to exclude from this discussion the extremely large technology licensing dispute territory for the reasons that there we are usually talking about giant parties to which legal expenses are thought of as chump change, and that antitrust and market opening considerations are always hovering over every aspect of these disputes. They are in those respects somewhat different in their management profiles than "normal" business dispute management.)

Almost all substantial business agreements provide that in the event there is a claim by one party that another party is engaging in behavior amounting to a default, prompt notice must be given in writing by the complaining party.

To be sure, some of the personalities involved have already discussed the issues and failed to resolve them, which is why the contract requires trigger pulling.

In my never humble opinion the main reason why this trigger is so often pulled is that in this stage of dealing with the problem the specific management resources have no resort to expert dispute resolution assistance.

Very few companies can afford or justify having a dispute resolution management expert on the payroll, and almost none of their outside firms have anyone capable and prepared to perform that role.

Actually, it is much more profitable for the outside law firm for the situation not to be resolved quickly and amicably at that point.

The pulling of this trigger inevitably calls for the writing of a strongly accusatory letter to the opposite party setting forth the complaining party's position in rather aggressive terms.

This, of course, though professionally correct, is really calculated to throw down a gauntlet, the single worst thing that could be done at this moment. It also starts a quick clock in most instances within which one must sort it out or whip it out, as we say in Texas.

This is the standard of American commercial corporate law practice, taught in every law school and practiced by all the right law firms - and it is the worst approach that could be devised.

Obviously the parties may "grant" each other extensions of time to do this or that, but the tone has now been set.

They aren't getting ready to get this resolved.

They are getting ready to go to war over it. In any privately held company where the leader is spending his/her own money, unless there are giant ego issues, this should instantly be recognized as insane and the company's lawyers should be asked to explain why such a terrible regimen has been inflicted on the company by those believed to be protecting its best interests.

Just about every time I get called in to help with a bad situation, this nonsense is inevitably what I find has been done.

The standard reasons given for the terrible first letter is that supposedly if you don't laundry list every blemish on the opposing party's face you will be claimed to have waived what was omitted and to have ratified that omission as now a part of the working agreement in question.

Rubbish! It really is the obvious primeval gauntlet throwing.

What should be done, even in the presence of gauntlet throwing contract clauses, is for disagreements with third parties should be given professional attention as they arise.

That is the moment when management can most profit from professional expert guidance.

Since your company's current legal resources do not include this focused resource, it should be found and summoned for discussion re how best to proceed, and then a decision made whether the recommendation is worth pursuing.

If the decision is to go with this approach, the gauntlet throwing contract clauses can be finessed as the immediate situation dictates it be handled, hopefully prior to the name calling stage of the relationship, but even if it is already too late for that to be avoided. After all, if you have already called someone a sonofabitch, s/he has also done the same to you, so the books are balanced albeit not at the optimum level.

If you like what you see, retain the resolution expert and observe how this approach works as well as how it preserves everyone's right to revert to combat in the event it is not bearing fruit.

No positions are compromised when this is done correctly. There is no downside risk other than that you may miss out on an expensive fight.

(As odd as it may seem, some clients have actually received CYA letters from their outside law firms disclaiming responsibility if following my approach backfires and bites them in the ass.

That has never happened yet, thank goodness. This doesn't always work. When it doesn't work no rights, positions or leverage have been lost and very little money has been spent, comparatively speaking. When it does work, which is most of the time, it works wonderfully.)

For the 5 Most Fascinating Stories, a weekly report, click here & sign up.

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

The next major economic blunder I witnessed enabled me for the first time to take the matter out of the hands of the blunderers.

A major client had acquired the leading company in its industry segment. The government attacked the acquisition under the antitrust laws.

The company's large Wall Street outside law firm with a partner on the company board recommended that the company simply roll over and agree to divestiture because no company had ever beaten the government in a merger case brought under Section 7 of the Clayton Act.

I opposed that and, to make a long story short, that was the first time the government ever lost a merger case under Section 7 of the Clayton Act.

It was then I began to realize that not having over the horizon insight into crisis avoidance/management did not have to be an incurable disease. You must immediately look beyond your normal representational resources for a specialist who can handle bet the company situations.

Later, after I had established my own law practice as a boutique business litigation resource, I had many more occasions to be that specialist.

A couple of other stories will help the reader with insight into how I handle potentially disastrous situations by going outside the box and looking back into the interstices of how the issues began to develop. I can now usually head them off or resolve them if I wasn't lucky enough to have been brought in at the very beginning before it went viral.

These examples developed in the following manner and they blew up in the clients' faces at just about exactly the same moment.

1. CEO - Great Leader, Terrible Witness

In the first such instance my client's former trial firm had garnered the account by agreeing with everything the head honcho said, telling him that he was absolutely right and that if he didn't make his stand on the issue in this case he could kiss his business advantages goodbye.

None of that was true and a competent law firm would have known that. To this day I don't know whether they knew it and misrepresented the situation in order to get the case or whether they really were that ignorant. They made their stand and lost the case. That was the point at which I was contacted.

The client wanted to appeal. The client wanted to sue the lawyers for not putting the president back on the witness stand for further testimony.

What an appeal would have accomplished would have been to take a lower court's correct rulings and have them confirmed by a federal court of appeals for a more potent precedent to be used against the company in all future cases on this pivotal issue - and there were a lot of them waiting in the wings.

When a franchise company loses a major case its franchisees see it as a wounded animal and close in for the kill.

I almost got fired because I urged them not to appeal but to simply take the defeat and move on.

I again almost got fired when I privately told the president that he was the worst prepared witness I had seen in years and that putting him back on the stand would have only made things much worse.

But I urged him not to sue the other lawyers because there were far more important things needing attention and there was no high probability of success in the malpractice suit anyway.

I think I was kept on because I was willing to be the first lawyer to say no to the president and take my chances on his being mature enough to recognize what it takes to do that.

There were more than a couple dozen other cases pending in courts all over the country to deal with, all previously "handled" by the same predecessor law firm, and they were all potential time bombs. We either favorably settled or tried to a victory over 15 of these lawsuits, whereupon the company started to shrink from the sheer weight of pervasive contention.

2. Winning Lawsuits versus Good Business

Winning lawsuits does not automatically translate into marketplace success, and this company turned out to be a one trick pony left behind by advances in its core technology.

Illustratively, when I suggested diversification over dinner one evening, the response was "When I want a goddam lawyer to tell me how to run my business I'll ask him".

The opportunity to avoid becoming irrelevant arose early and often. The company was enabled by a technological change in its industry, and it had mastered that technology. However change continued and its owner refused to adjust even though many asked him to.

"That's not part of our franchise" was his stock response to requests from his franchisees for support on the implementation of the newer technology in their franchises.

Told that the new technology was not part of the franchise, they opened separate businesses to exploit the new technology, using other names, and paid no royalties on that business.

Then the owner of the franchisor became furious and began accusing these franchisees of stealing from him. These were many of those other lawsuits I inherited from the prior law firm that had obviously not done any homework or saw the problem and pretended it wasn't there for the sake of the monthly bills.

The hardest of these were the California cases where covenants not to compete are not enforceable in franchise settings. Fortunately for my client, counsel for the franchisees was no more astute than that and mispleaded their claims so poorly that they could be defended to the point at least of them paying us money in most instances as the price for a release from an unenforceable covenant not to compete and a franchise agreement.

Configuring a potential loss into a revenue event allows it to be reported rather favorably.

3. Mass fraud claims

Next, in another case over 120 franchisees joined together as joint plaintiffs in a gigantic racketeering and antitrust case with pendant fraud claims, asking the court for $ 62,000,000. The company's CPAs threatened not to give a going concern opinion because of that case.

As tough as it was - and 120 plaintiffs with the same history tend to be believed by judges and juries - the franchisees actually paid us $ 750,000 to settle the case they had brought.

The real point of this story is that the owner of this franchisor had so cowed his officers and senior managers that they were afraid of making any gesture in the direction of the newer technology.

The man bullied everyone but me, it seemed. One of his officers once told me that they tried to keep us apart because at least now they were not losing lawsuits and they wanted us to continue as the company's counsel.

In the end our attorney client relationship was somewhat taken for granted to put it nicely and I asked them to obtain other counsel.

They threatened in writing to sue me for leaving them and went around telling people in town that they had fired me for incompetence.

No one believed that and I just ignored it.

That was the right decision. The company has since slipped into almost total oblivion, still unable to accept the notion that it has to evolve in order to enjoy continued success. I can keep the wolves from the door, but no trial lawyer can force any company to open its eyes to realities it wishes were not so.

The last of these stories involves another franchise company whose owner rose to the point of being delusional about almost everything.

4. Wasting your empire.

This last company, also a franchisor, benefited mightily from the advent of the personal computer. Its market position was so strong for several years that it could require its franchisees to buy their PC and other inventory from them and to pay in advance for it. It too was the largest distribution resource in its field.

Ultimately the market began to evolve and its hundreds of franchisees were seeing other avenues they wanted to investigate. The VAR and VAD - value added retailer and value added distributor - were making their entrance into the market and wanting recognition.

The company began to lose its grip on its franchisees, partly from the changes in the market and partly from the delusionality of its owner.

It had come to me before becoming my client and been turned down because the lawsuit it wanted to bring simply did not include any valid claims. When I told this to its in house general counsel his response was that they would find and hire a lawyer who agreed with them. They did. They lost.

The owner had once borrowed a rather small amount of money - around $ 250,000 - giving a note that, in the event of default, would be convertible into a large percentage of the company's stock. The note holder sold the note to someone else, which was his right to do. The maker, owner of a by now very successful franchising company, decided that it was inappropriate for the holder of the note to sell it and announced that he would refuse to pay it. The note holder gave notice of intent to convert the note into shares of the company, which the owner refused to recognize.

The head of the company refused to honor what was essentially a slam dunk obligation and hired the same firm to represent him and the company in that debacle as well. He lost control of the company; had to pay the note plus interest; and had to pay the expenses and attorney fees of the suing note holder. The franchisees, as could be expected, saw this as the pregnant moment to strike and they did so.

While this was going on I had favorably settled or prevailed in 14 straight franchisee cases in courts all over the United States. Ultimately those victories were to no avail.

That franchise system is now no more than a shadow of its previous self. Its former owner fled to a pacific island and continued to get into more trouble until he was kicked off the island.

The enterprise was literally wasted because its controlling interest refused to deal effectively and immediately with impending negative prospects.

As odd as one might think it, similar lapses occur all over the United States. Company leadership seems to feel that by taking a fresh look at a bad situation there is an inherent exposure to criticism. Fear of "embarrassment" and wishful thinking lead to these companies doing and saying the wrong and most damaging things imaginable, urged on by the two most inept resources at hand.

One should never follow the advice of its PR people when bad things happen. PR people do not deal in reality and do not know how to address tough situations in other than formulaic ways, assuming that all situations, no matter what, can be made to fit into their templates. That is simply wrong. At its best it is inadequate.

Similarly, a company facing distress should not give responsibility for addressing it to the accountants or law firms that were associated with the conduct that is being challenged. Those law firms and accountants are almost always preoccupied with covering their own potential liability and for that reason have a poisonous conflict of interest. Get new resources in there and see whether there is a more realistic way to go about addressing difficulties when they arise. For examples of what to do or not do, seehttp://www.franchiseremedies.com/Franchisor_Mishaps.htm.

If you really do want to minimize injury and damages from impending difficulties, you need to make yourself open to critical assessment.

People with confrontation avoidance capability need to be able to speak to you about the situation in real terms in real time.

You are not right because you say you are right.

Even when you really are right the circumstances may be such that you would better serve your own interests by considering compromises of less than indispensable issues and principles.

Disputes are never about "the principle of the thing". They are always about several principles that are vying with each other for priority of consideration.

With the passage of an amazingly short period of time the leading principle may seem less important and other considerations may call more heavily for your attention. Life is fluid, not static.

Get an expert and watch better things happen to you.

As always, you can call me, RIchard Solomon, at 281-584-0519.

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There are exceptions to Blaise Pascal's suggestion that the more things change the more they are really the same - Le plus ca change le plus c'est la meme chose. Franchise branding is one of those situations from the perspective of many legal doctrines.

This case study is somewhat dear to my heart because it involves a company that in years past I used to represent from time to time until it decided to hire its own in house general counsel, a man who's entrepreneurial spirit caused him to think it was just fine to demand a kickback/referral fee from outside law firms he hired to represent the company in lawsuits.

When I declined to pay him for the company's legal business, for reasons just about anyone can appreciate, the company and I parted ways.

To be sure, there were other ways in which the gentleman derived extraneous income from his client's business, and it might be a good story scenario for Saturday Night Live, but not here.

Fortunately, there were other firms that also declined his blandishments that in desperation were hired anyway because the company's situation was rather desperate and the firms were ethical enough to just say no.

In these desperate situations the large firms did not produce victories and charged a bloody fortune to obtain settlements that were hardly favorable, in one instance charging $16,000,000 before fessing up that they were unable to present a plausible case.

The latest of these exceptional situations came to a bad end recently and represents a good case study about a company's management believing it could simply spend its way to victory no matter what.

It happened eventually to General Motors, so for a privately owned franchise company to convince itself that a litigation budget was the road to invincibility is an exceptional case study in arrogance and one worth discussing.

There is a doctrine in intellectual property law known as "secondary meaning". Secondary meaning imputes to a "look" the value and power of a trade or service mark when that "look" becomes so identified in the public mind with the company that the look alone becomes an automatic source identifier. Imagine that the Golden Arches were not registered intellectual property of McDonalds. Even without that statutory protection they so speak to McDonalds in the mind of the public that one would say with confidence that they had secondary meaning.

Not all things that could eventually have secondary meaning as source identifiers attain that status, and some that do eventually lose it because the "look" becomes generic to that segment of trade, mainly through its functionality aspects.

Functionality is a secondary meaning killer because serving a function common to most companies in that business inherently means that all will adopt it. In the beginning, however, for a fleeting moment something functional could be a source identifier in that interim before others start using it throughout the industry. Think of the "serpentine" line up of customers waiting for service back in the early days of Wendy's when Wendy's was the only company using it. There was actually a case on that subject in Tennessee back in the day (Judy's Hamburgers).

In normal circumstances functional features do not achieve secondary meaning status. This case study involves the assertion of an incredibly ridiculous claim that the interior appearance of this brand of restaurant was itself a brand identifier. Impossible and absurd on its face in all but the most exceptional situation (which this was not), but insisted upon as the product of arrogance and stupidity by company management and by the large nationally known law firm it hired to make that assertion in court. The legal expenses were outrageously huge.

One could posit that they were not outrageous on the theory that the firm had to know it was a balls out loser and would only make the assertion if it could find a client dumb enough to pay a fortune to finance the effort. It would be difficult to find a competent trade dress lawyer to give an opinion that the functional aspects of the interior of any chain restaurant had secondary meaning.

Face it, the interior contains tables, chairs, counters, maybe a bar, and any kind of "back of the house" configuration you like. Paint and decor could be extremely distinctive, but that could be fixed by an accused infringer with a cheap paint job on a weekend.

No one litigates over something curable by a cheap paint job.

Where it is a paint job resolution the accused infringer has to be a fool for refusing to redecorate and the franchisor has to be a fool for not being able to resolve it short of the cost of full blown litigation to a verdict. That is a total failure of relationship management as well as dispute resolution management. But this company and its former franchisee did exactly that.

Moreover, the company hired one of the country's major franchise litigating firms to handle it. No large firm can afford to turn down a big fee with all that overhead, no matter how stupid the position it has to take in a public forum.

Let's take a second look at this and give someone the benefit of the doubt by suggesting that the decor infringement claims were really just the manure spread across a field planted with the seeds of a post termination covenant not to compete. If that is the case, then the franchisor is doubly stupid. If the covenant is enforceable, why screw it up with BS? And if the covenant claims are worthless, is the BS decor infringement claim going to put lipstick on this pig? This is wall to wall stupidity no matter how you slice it.

Something tells me that maybe this client went through a number of competent firms with self respect who turned it down before it came upon a firm who, for the right money, would represent anyone on any claim regardless of the merits. There's a song about a girl who just can't say no, and this is that kind of firm. I know this company's regular firm - went to school with one of its partners, and he is smart enough to know better than to do this to a regular client. I also know the trial firm who took the case, and this is the kind of trash they will roast in a slow oven for a long time and tell you it's good brisket. If you are a spoilt child client who will pay anything to have someone tell you that you can have your way, I guess you really deserve this kind of result. Intelligent folks don't shoot themselves in the foot (or elsewhere on their anatomy) like this.

One could posit that the usefulness of this court's ruling to other departing franchisees represents an enormous impact loss. Almost all franchise contracts and disclosure documents claim great value in distinctive decor. Will their next step be to try to force franchisee investment in a new decor that is distinctive, an investment that at this stage if its life cycle holds no promise of generating ROI. When arrogance trumps analysis the result is always to ignore realities.

Certain kinds of relationships - franchising is one of them - tend to imbue the lead player with a sense of entitlement that simply won't work all the time. The passage of time - the impact of history - changes in technology, market and company life cycle changes all coalesce to erode balances of power. What once may have been a reliable option may, even with the same contract language over time become less useful and even dangerous. That's called reality. Refusal to take hard looks at your situation when trouble arises often leads to unnecessary expenses of large magnitudes and to serious structural damage to your future potentialities. The insights borne of crisis management experience transfer well from industry to industry and company to company. Don't let your access to this resource go unused. It may save your company, your distributive systems and your future.

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Tamerlane group's purpose is to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot when you see a bad event threaten to develop. Our focused expertise in crisis management can prevent these situations from developing if we are called before someone makes self-humiliating public statements/files absurd lawsuits.