As a former franchise owner, I can now look back and see some of the misconceptions I had going in.
There will be a number of such stories - for legal reasons I will not mention which franchise.
I can be contacted at this email
The first misconception I had was that I actually owned and operated the franchise as if it were my own business.
This is not true. I was likely naive in thinking that it would be possible to make my own decisions and have my own timetable for how my business progressed - and that buying a franchise would merely simplify or speed up the parts concerning branding, operating model, and so forth.
As my own experience shows, however, the franchise really is farming you for revenue.
How? Because the franchise gets their royalty on your revenue, but this royalty is separate from your profit.
Thus the franchise is perfectly happy if you spend $10,000 a month to achieve $10,000 revenue. Your profit is zero, but they get x% of this revenue.
Why does this matter? Because the franchise may (and probably will) have some minimum revenue goal in the UFOC. Failure to meet this goal opens you to having your franchise revoked (and resold).
Thus when you are doing your due diligence, read the UFOC and make sure you are comfortable with the possible above outcome.
On my own part - certainly I should have focused on revenue earlier. But then again I had a 3 year plan for making the business self sustaining and spent most of the 1st year learning the business - all of which I had made clear to my business advisor from the franchisor.
The next part I will look at my expectations for what the franchise would do for me vs. what I actually received.
