7 Awful Franchise Things You Will Hate About Being a New Franchisor

You decided to become a newly minted franchisor.

And when that day finally arrived how exciting was that?

You were going to conquer the world with your franchise brand.

Here's what you did right.

Started with a tested business model with a verifiable proof of concept.

Hired a competent and experienced franchise attorney to develop your franchise agreement and franchise disclosure document - FDD.

Your franchise attorney strongly suggested (or insisted) since you have a strong proof of concept for your franchise model that you include an Item 19 Financial Performance Representation - FPR and you did it.

Developed an operations manual, training system and support system that is scalable as you grow your franchise system.

You had a reasonable budget to market for franchise recruitment.

But, after a while, you will hate being a franchisor. Here are your 7 biggest beefs.

1. Early franchisees you selected seemed very passionate about being franchise owner/operators but they are not living up to what they promised and you're more than disappointed.
2. Multi-unit franchisees are not current with their development objectives and they expect you to not hold them to what everyone agreed to. They want some or all of the following extensions, refunds or credits against franchise fees and in return you get nothing. Not even what you originally bargained for.
3. You have a great training program and franchisees are shortcutting what your program offers and requires.
4. Franchisee local market success depends on local store marketing, your franchisees don't make the investment in it. And they complain to you that sales are too low and your brand is not well known enough in their area.
5. Franchise owners expect you to fix their unit level problems with employees, landlords, suppliers, insurance, local municipality, their business & operating partners. You had no idea that you'd be expected to do so much hand holding and babysitting when you set out selling & opening franchises.
6. Franchise recruitment for a new franchisor is tough. However you couldn't have imagined how difficult generating and managing leads would be. And the cost per new franchise recruited is far more than you anticipated.
7. You discovered that your management team had a much greater learning curve for transitioning your business to a franchise development and operations company. And now you're faced with some tough staffing decisions as you move forward.

This is not an exhaustive list of awful franchise things and readers can feel free to add to the list.

Good news is that you had a good underlying business at the outset. And all these franchising challenges can be remedied.

If this sounds llike your franchising story & you want some help solving your problems call me at 443.502.2636 [email protected]. Lease the talents of 20+ year proven franchise executive, who has seen and solved these problems before.