Franchise vs Business: What is your Personality?

Hey, welcome to my channel. And today we're going to talk about buying a business that's independently operated versus buying a franchise. Answering this question in terms of which way you should go is really going to come down to two main questions that we're going to answer today. Question one is, what is your experience in business? Are you a seasoned entrepreneur or are you just getting started looking to buy your first business? That's a very important question to answer because the franchise model is great for people that don't have a lot of business experience. Because you're going to follow a framework that is step by step, you're going to be connected with hundreds, if not thousands of people that have done exactly what you're trying to do. You're going to be able to leverage best practices and you're going to be able to avoid some of those common pitfalls that people before you have already done. And ultimately you're going to get access to resources that you wouldn't be able to get on your own starting from scratch, such as marketing, legal, back office, team, and all these great resources available to you that aren't going to be available starting from scratch. And it's really, really difficult to do that when you don't have any business experience. Now, the caveat to that is sometimes buying into a franchise, they want to see that you have experience in that industry. So it's kind of like a chicken or egg type of situation, but someone limited in their experience. And maybe you just, maybe you have a lot of experience and maybe you just want to be a passive owner. Owner. That might be a good option for you depending on the franchise and their requirements. Second question I think you need to answer to make that determination of whether you want to go the franchise route or an independent business route is what is your comfortability around control? So what I mean by that is the franchise model, again, is a very structured model that you need to follow in order to succeed. Right? They design it a specific way. They want you to follow in the footsteps of their brand to make sure there's not hundreds of people going off and doing their own thing and creating confusion around customers in terms of brand identity. So all that stuff is put in place for a reason. But you have to be comfortable with following that. And you may even be restricted, like even thinking about there's other franchises with the territory restrictions to where you can only sell in your specific city or your specific state. And they don't want other people competing with you within the franchise network. So that's why they do that, you're not going to have a lot of flexibility. You're not going to have a lot of flexibility in acquiring suppliers. You may have direct relationships through the franchise that you are forced to use for purchasing power reasons. So those are things that you need to think about in terms of how you want to operate within your business. A lot of times, people wanting to start their own business want to escape the control of a 9 to 5 environment. And going the franchise route might feel like a very similar experience to that. So if you really want the flexibility and complete autonomy to do whatever you want, going the independent business route might be the option for you. You have complete control, you have all the reward, but on the same, at the same time, you're taking on all the risk, which can also come with a lot of downsides. If you like this video and you want to learn more about it, check out my next one. I'm going to do a deep dive in the pros and the cons of being involved in a franchise business model that goes into much more than this video does. So go ahead and check it out.