[Jason G]

Hi everyone,

I have been doing an extensive amount of research on franchises and wanting to know everyone thoughts on them?

[toptemp]

Care to be more specific... What about them? Starting one? Buying and running one?

[Jason G]

1.)Well, for starters have you or have you known of someone owning a franchise.

2.) What made you/them decide to buy into a franchise? Why not just open your own business?

3.)How profitable are franchises? Now I know that is not a very logical question due to the write contract by the franchiser, however I would like to know on a personal level of your franchise.

Just general info

[jdoc]

Read this:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/franzone...,5831,,00.html

I doubt you'll get much response without more specific questions unless someone is a franchise owner here (haven't met too many).

[Jason G]

I've have noticed more and more that Young Entrepreneur is geared to online businesses rather than offline. I'm not complaining, however I would like to see more off line business discussions.

Thanks for the link jdoc

[Bscivolette]

Hey Jason,

These days even "brick and mortar" businesses have to focus online. My moving company focuses almost 70% of our advertising online. While it is still vital to be effective offline, online advertising and exposure will find you more clients as more and more people jump on the Internet.

[toptemp]

What do you want to know about "offline business"? I find that people just aren't asking too many questions about it... not that there aren't answers. As far as franchising goes, I can't say I know too much about returns, ease of running, etc... but I do know that if you're running an offline business and it has market opportunity on a large-scale, I'd totally be thinking about setting it up as a franchise eventually.

I actually think that one of the most popular books on this kind of thinking is written my Michael Gerber. I wrote a review detailing "his" ideas a bit.

[nado]

I've read a few chapters in a couple of books about the guy who runs Jims Lawn Mowing in Australia and a few other countries. (I think he does more than mowing now).

But in general from what I've read....

2) Franchises are basically the quickest way to grow your business across the country or world and to get your brand name out there quickly before competition start to enter the market.

Opening 100s and 1000s of businesses yourself across the country and world and managing every aspect of it is almost impossible

3) Franchises don't make terribly much money, but it does add up. Since the majority of the profits stay with the individual franchise (perhaps 80-95%), you at the top see very little of the profits. However in Jims case he has 1000s of franchises across the world and I thinik he was saying for every lawn mowed he only receives about 5c... but there are 1000s of lawns mowed every day so the business is still making profits in the millions and Jim is still pocketing a nice sum.