 |
 |
|
 Print Friendly
 Email to Friend
|
|
How To Choose a Franchise
|
|
|
Article 5: Other Considerations
Once you’ve evaluated yourself, look for franchises that match your style.
Your personal skills and experience are important. People usually are good at sales or marketing or operations, but seldom all three. Find a franchise that fits your expertise.
Operating a restaurant is management and operations oriented. A maid service manages teams. Managing young people requires a different temperament than overseeing junior execs.
If you’re sales oriented, you’re probably better suited to selling and promoting than managing. Restaurant franchises bring national brand awareness, but an advertising franchise may require you to personally drum up clients.
A common mistake is to assume that because your corporate job was, for example, in high technology, computer-related franchises are a good fit. That’s not necessarily so. Look beyond your experience. Don’t limit yourself to an industry. Instead, match up skills and preferences, not labels. Technological skills can be transferred to many different industries.
Examine your underlying skills, not necessarily your past job descriptions. If you have people skills, why restrict yourself to an insulated administrative role?
Bill Pinkerton is a business coach who gives career assessments and addresses three basic questions:
1. “What are you passionate about?”
Pinkerton says even though you are running a franchise for a franchisor, “You’re still an entrepreneur, you’re just not starting it from scratch.”
More importantly, “You may not have come up with [the concept], but you are going to live it.” Therefore, make sure you choose a franchise that gets your blood pumping.
“If you are going to be successful you have to be passionate about it.”
2. “What you can be the best in the world at?”
By “the world,” Pinkerton means your world. Determine where you are going to do business and attract business from. Then, ask yourself, “What is it about your combination of talents and drive that allows you to be the best in your world?”
“If you don’t think you can be the best in your world, why are you doing it? Find something else you can be the best at. Define your world.”
Pinkerton advises clients that if they cannot imagine themselves as “the best” in their chosen niche, “you don’t have the right frame of mind. It’s like saying let’s run the race, but I don’t plan on winning.”
3. “What drives your economic engine?”
“What do you need to have in order to say from a financial perspective, ‘I’m successful’? Saying, ‘make lots of money’ doesn’t cut it. What’s ‘lots?’ Be specific.”
“It’s easy to understand; it’s hard to get people to sit down and do it,” Pinkerton says.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Print Friendly
Email to Friend
|
|
|
 |
|
|
How To Choose A Franchise
|
 |
|
|
 |
| Select an online seminar from the Success Skills Archives:
|
|
|
 |
|
|
If you liked
this seminar, check out these related topics:
|
|
