Thoughts from Mike.

One of the first things I try to figure out with a candidate isn't which brand they should look at. It's which kind of owner they actually want to be. People use the words "passive," "semi-absentee," and "owner-operator" like they're interchangeable, and they're not. Picking the wrong model for your temperament is one of the more avoidable mistakes I see.

Somewhere in the last few years, franchising picked up a reputation as a way to own a business you don't have to run.

There's a step in the franchise evaluation process called validation, and it's the single most underused tool candidates have. It's simple: you call existing franchisees and ask them what ownership is actually like. And yet I regularly meet people who are ready to sign before they've made more than one or two of those calls.

The most valuable hours in this whole process are the ones you spend on the phone with people who already own the business you're considering.

Sooner or later in this process somebody hands you a document a few hundred pages long, and one section of it is the one everybody flips to first.

The most common reason somebody I talk to doesn't end up buying a business has nothing to do with money, the brand, or the market.