Jim Penman tells someone nervous about buying a franchise to shadow existing operators, talk to many people, and be honest about whether franchising suits you. A good franchise weathered recent crises better than salaried jobs, and you can scale by hiring staff or becoming a franchisor yourself.
Do your research. Do your research really carefully. Talk to as many people as possible. And I would also say get out on the road. Go out on the road. Actually work with people who are established now. A lot of them work at weekends to, like, Saturdays, go out on a Saturday, spend the day working with somebody, going through the testing and tagging or the gardening or the pest control. Find out what it's actually like and really get a feel for what you'd like to do. Just proper research is what I would recommend. It's not for everybody. That's one thing I would say. It's just simply not a case. And one of the things I would tell my franchisors very strongly is there are certain people you should be knocking back. And it's actually quite immoral to sell a business to somebody you don't think is going to succeed. So it's up to franchisors to be selective. But you've got to be self selective too. You've got to be the kind of person that wants to be persistent at something, prepared to go in and keep on working and keep on trying and understand there's going to be disappointments. Having a supportive family is very important. You shouldn't go into business if your partner is not in favour because it's too tough. By and large, you shouldn't go into business if you can't afford to get the money yourself. Don't let somebody else buy their business. That's one thing we find very high failure rate. When a young guy can't get a job, father buys the business for them. Now, that's if I get to hear about such things. I would roast the franchise over the Coles because we know it's a very high failure rate. Interesting thing about too is security. And in a sense, people have always had to say, I've got a nice secure job, so why would I go into business by myself where it's so insecure? Actual fact, with this recent crisis, one of the things it tells you is that in fact, we've got some of the most secure business in the country because our franchisees have not run short of work. The vast majority of divisions have actually sailed through it. In fact, leads are up since last year. So this is unsackable. You can't offend your boss. You can't have your company sold and you're out of a job. You can't get too old, you know, hanging. You're over 50, we don't want you anymore because we want young turks to come in and take over your job. The workforce isn't that secure. In actual fact, a good business of your own is a very, very secure sort of business. And there's really no reason why you need to retire, because if you're good enough at what you do, you can actually put on workers to work for you. Quite a few of our franchisees are off the tools, or they become franchisors, they start new divisions, new regions and so forth, and completely go beyond that SA.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
