StartUp or Franchise?
Are you at a junction in your life? Then the possibility of being your own boss with your own business must be on your mind, which presents one huge question, how do you get started?
- Firstly, learn from other people’s mistakes rather than make your own. When you take a blank sheet of paper to create your own business empire, you have all of the opportunities, including the mistakes, ahead of you. A franchise is a tried and tested business model, the only mistakes you can make are not putting in the effort or not following the model.
- Second, another person’s pain doesn’t have to be your pain. Business mistakes and learning curves can be very costly causing massive emotional distress and it doesn’t matter how much you prepare or qualify, I can guarantee you will not see all of these coming in time to create an escape route. With a franchise, the business model should prevent you from encountering big jeopardy and the franchise family should mentor you steering you away from problems and towards success. It’s in their interest.
- Thirdly, not everyone around you is a friend once you start your own business. Some will consider you to have become quite mad which is a reflection of their own confidence. Others will suddenly become expert advisors although they have never run successful businesses themselves (and generally share duff suggestions) which is a reflection of their ego. This bunch are actually quite jealous that you’ve found the courage to take this step but their need to destroy as a result is very powerful. Surrounded by a franchise family, locked into a proven business model, your sanity is saved, your courage and conviction protected by business experts who not only want you to succeed, they need you to succeed.
- Finally, if you find it easy to block out the destructors and love a roller coaster, please do go ahead and create a wonderful business from scratch and enjoy the ride, I did. But only on one condition: please build it with strong scalable processes so that when the time comes you can franchise your business model for everyone else to enjoy who wishes to remain sane.
I’m Sam Acton. I’ve been in your shoes. After my second redundancy experience, I established my own business, Domestic Angels. I created it from scratch and several years later went on to convert it to a franchise. I am probably better positioned than most to talk you through the benefits of franchising versus starting your own business from scratch. If you’d like to know more please get in touch
07985281120