Is a Franchise The Business For You?

If you are thinking of starting a home-based business a franchise is one option to consider. I owned both a franchise and a startup business of my own and there were benefits to having a franchise over starting one for yourself, but with this benefit there is a price. It’s great to know the differences between the two before you start your business venture and to understand the positives and negatives of each. Hopefully in this article, I can help you identify which business model would be best for you.

Starting a franchise has many benefits, one of the major benefits is that they should have a system and/or process available to you from day one of opening your door. To me you cannot underestimate the value of having a process and system in place that works as your customers begin to arrive. This will save you hours and hours of frustration and will also add to your profits. You may ask yourself, how does the process or system do that well, take for example a sandwich shop that builds sandwiches for customers. When you don’t know how to order the best meet at the cheapest prices and where to get the meat from, you guessed it, you will spend more money for each ingredient of that sandwich than you would if you already knew where to buy it. Or, another good example is dealing with employees. With a franchise, they will tell you what paperwork your employees will need for government accountability and without a franchise, you will have to figure that out.

So you can see from the list above that there are a number of items that a franchise can help you with that will save you frustration and hours worth of work. However there is a flipside to owning a franchise. Most franchises, you have to do everything as the franchise says that you must do it. So for example say you want to advertise in your local newspaper, but the franchise doesn’t allow it, you will not be able to do so under the terms of your contract as a franchisee. Or, following the example above, maybe you found that your customers prefer a different type of meat for a sandwich, but your franchise doesn’t provide it. They may keep you from using that meat just because it doesn’t fit into the process or system of the franchise.

If you are considering starting a business and you have no previous business experience, owning a franchise would probably work best for you with the processes and systems available to you that will hopefully ensure a better chance of success. However, if you’ve already owned a business or was the manager of the business, you may be able to get by without buying a franchise and just figure it out for yourself. I recommend that you do your research and take a look at both options before you start a business. Be piece of advice I heard is, if you want to start a business, go work for a business just like it first so you can learn the ropes on someone else’s dime.