IAM2240 – The Power of Franchising in Business Growth

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Transcription:

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Intro 00:01

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:28

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I'm super excited to share with you a special episode of the I AM CEO Podcast.

And we're going to talk about something that we've kind of flirted with, and we've had a little bit of information and conversation about which is franchising.

Franchising is kind of a niche within entrepreneurship, and I think sometimes it might be a really great route for people, which is why we're exploring this a little bit more in this episode.

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Gonna touch on it a little bit, but I'm hoping to work on some things that can hopefully help people to learn more about franchising, learn more about options, and maybe even be able to connect people with the opportunity to be franchisors as well, too.

But for this episode, I just really want to delve down, not even deep. I'm just going to stay in this shallow end around franchising because it could be something that could be a really great fit for people.

So today I hope to go a little bit more into what franchising is, where and how it's impacting the business community.

And then maybe just explore a little bit like what it might look like if you're interested, and go a little bit more in there.

But my goal with this is really to give you a little bit more idea of what franchising is.

The more I started to read and understand about it, I realized how much it is literally around everything that we're doing, whether we're going to rent cars or we're going to get a hamburger or potentially even get our carpets clean.

Franchising can literally be within these organizations and we often don't know because of the brand and because there in so many different places that it is actually a franchise.

So it's something that I've learned a little bit more about and hope to delve down a little bit deeper in.

But to truly understand what franchising is, we actually need to, like, rewind the clock. Like I usually say.

That actually comes back from the middle ages, apparently, where landowners used to gain and grant certain rights to others to sell goods or operate their business under their protection.

But pretty much the word franchise in and what we know from a modern standpoint actually began in the 19th century under someone named Isaac Singer, the inventor of the singer sewing machine.

And singer didn't have the capital to actually manufacture and sell his machines nationwide, so he allowed others to buy the rights to sell them.

And that was the birth of the idea of a franchise. And it's really more of, I think, a business model.

And I'm going to learn a lot more about, like, what that is and what that looks like. But we fast forward to the 1950s.

We're talking about the quote-unquote golden age of franchising, where we're talking about McDonald's Dunkin Donuts on how all these successful businesses were able to scale out their operations because of franchising.

And if you haven't checked out the Netflix documentary, it talks a lot around that and starts to really kind of delve down a little bit deeper. And it's called the founder.

So if you haven't checked out the founder, make sure you add that to the list. I'll have a link in the show notes as well, too.

But it goes beyond just selling a product. It actually is a complete business system. Branding, operations, marketing, training, all those things are incorporated in these systems.

So when people are looking to invest in franchises, they're not investing in just the product, they're investing in the actual system to be able to operate that.

So sometimes, for a lot of people, I don't want to say they're not entrepreneurs, that they are.

I think the people that are a little bit more maybe trailblazing, might want to create all of that themselves, whereas somebody might just want to create that generational wealth and ownership and opportunity, and might explore it from that standpoint.

So in the late 20th century, it exploded into various industries, including food, retail, retail, services, and really a different way, I think, to operate business.

So now, going back a little bit, and I'm going to delve down deeper, hopefully in further episodes about that.

According to the International Franchise association, there are over 780,000 franchise establishments in the US alone. Contributes over 787 billion to the economy.

And some of the biggest names we know, of course, are your McDonald's, your subways, even Marriotts are. They're all franchise based business.

And it isn't just limited to the fast food or retail. Talking about fitness, healthcare, education, home services, there's a huge range of what is under that business model.

But I think one of the big things around is franchising, right. For an individual really comes down to the individual.

I don't think even when I started my business, I didn't think I was necessarily a great fit for franchise because I wanted to literally build everything.

I wanted to do all the things, I wanted to learn all the things. And I think that one thing that that does is that route allows you to really like learn more about what it looks like to run a business, what all the aspects are.

And sometimes when you go through that process, you realize you don't want to do that again.

But sometimes that is, what is that entrepreneurial spirit that you ultimately want? But for others that may want more of a repeatable process that they can execute, still kind of deal with some of the things that are happening within business, or potentially don't want to go at it completely alone.

This is where franchising, I think, ends up being like a really great. So 90% of franchise businesses report profitability.

But a lot of it depends on the business that you are investing in, whereas 15% of new independent startups don't make it past the first year.

So again, you're just trying to increase your likelihood of success. But of course, with that likelihood of success, there are trade offs.

You have to follow the franchisor's rules and systems closely. You're buying into a brand in their playbook, not creating everything from your own scratch, from scratch.

And you also need to invest upfront fees, which is usually a lot more sizable than sometimes going the startup route.

So if it's something you know that you're ultimately thinking about, look for us creating more and more content around there.

I just wanted to kind of give you a little bit more of an idea of like some of the things, maybe even another site that we're going to launch and some of that information there.

But this is Gresh signing out. If that's something that you are doing or looking more into doing, definitely check out some of the things that we're going to have kind of rolling out from there.

So this is Gresh signing out. Maybe franchising is something that's for you, maybe it's not. Either way, we want to help to increase the business success rate.

So I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day. Let us know how we can help.

Outro 06:32

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and everywhere you listen to podcasts, subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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