Pet Feature Articles

Let's face it. From a franchisee's perspective, the single most important piece of information to gather during the sales process is the likely return on investment. Any franchise salesperson will tell you that the most frequently asked questions by prospective franchisees during the sales process are: "How much can I make?" and "What do similar units earn?"

There's no place like home - and for an increasing number of Americans, there's no business like home business. The rise of home-based franchise opportunities coincides with the shift to a service economy in the United States. As more households with two working adults struggle to make ends meet, a combination of factors has made working from home an increasingly attractive option.

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery. If that's true, discount giants Wal-Mart and Target have paid a glowing compliment to small but booming dollar stores, including franchises such as My Dollar Store, Dollar Castle, Just-A-Buck and Dollar Discount. Wal-Mart is testing "Pennies-n-Cents" sections in 20 of their Supercenters, and Target has launched The I Spot in the front of about 125 of its stores.

In taking various licensed concepts to some 70 countries, we have seen numerous approaches to how licensors evaluate new countries. These approaches can be classified into three basic categories: the reactive approach, the shotgun approach and the predictive approach.

Got a qualified prospect interested in opening up a new franchise but who has never seen one of your stores? No problem for Long Beach, Calif.-based It's A Grind Coffee House, which utilizes a web-based program that allows prospects with a password to get behind a computer screen, log on, and view real-time streaming video of the action inside a store. A camera located behind the counter offers online viewers a live feed of what's going on inside an It's A Grind Coffee House. Prospects can see the store's layout, decor, customers and employees engaged in transactions.