How to tell if business ownership is right for you
Updated: 4 days ago
Many of the people who sit down with me never buy a franchise.
I say that out loud on the first call, usually in the first ten minutes, and it still catches people off guard. They came in braced for a pitch. What they get instead is an honest approach, me telling them that one likely outcome of this conversation is that they go back to their life.
It shouldn't be surprising. A process that only ever ends in a yes isn't a process. It's a sales funnel with a longer runway.
What I'm actually
testing for
When someone tells me they're thinking about owning a business, I'm not trying to work out which franchise they should buy. That question comes much later, and some of the time it never comes at all.
The question I'm working on first is whether ownership fits the person in front of me. Not whether they're capable of it. Most people who reach out to me are perfectly capable. The question is whether it's a good fit for their temperament, their family, their appetite for uncertainty, and the particular season of life they're in right now.
Those four things are not negotiable, and they are not fixable by picking a better brand. If someone needs certainty, no franchise agreement will supply it. If a spouse is quietly against the whole idea, no amount of enthusiasm on the other side will carry it. If the timeline is short and the pressure is real, that pressure will make the decision instead of the person.
So a lot of what I do is look for those things early, before they invest their hard earned money into a business.
The five reasons people decide business ownership is not for them
After a couple of decades of talking with family, freinds and referrals about business ownership, the reasons cluster. Here are the ones I see most.
The spouse/partner was never in. This is the most common and the most consequential. One person is energized and the other is polite. Politeness is misread as agreement right up until the first hard month. I've watched this go badly enough times that I now ask about it directly on the first call, and it's better to discuss this openly and honestly.
They wanted something passive. People come in having heard that you can own a franchise without running the day to day. There is real truth in that. Some models are genuinely built for an owner who manages a manager rather than doing the day-to-day activities. But there is a wide gap between semi-passive or manager-run and truly passive ownership, and in my experience, semi-passive still means 15-25 hours a week. It's your business and you need to put your DNA into it.
They won't or are unable to follow a system. They wanted to do their own thing. That is a completely respectable answer and some of the best conversations I've had ended there. When you buy a franchise, you are buying a system, hopefully a well-developed and proven one. The franchisor has already done the hard work for you, and you just need to execute it, but you must follow their system. Great franchises do evolve over time, often with the input of the franchisees, but the franchisor determines if and when things change, not the franchisee. If that is not you, then franchising is not for you.
The clock was too short. Somebody has a corporate exit package and a small window, and the window is closing. I understand the arithmetic and I'm sympathetic to it. But deciding under a deadline is where expensive mistakes get made, and a business bought in a hurry doesn't get less expensive because the reason was good. Sometimes the honest recommendation is to take a job, get the clock off the table, and revisit from a position of choice rather than pressure.
They found out they were happier than they thought. This is rarer and it's my favorite. Somebody spends an hour describing what they'd want their days to look like, and about forty minutes in they hear themselves describing a version of the job they already have. What they were actually frustrated with was one manager, or one reorganization, or one bad quarter. That's a real answer too, and it costs nothing to arrive at.
Four of those five are good outcomes. The fifth, the short clock, is a not-yet rather than a no.
Why I can say this with a straight face
I'm not making an argument from theory. My family and I bought and ran three franchises across three different industries starting in 2004 — coffee, hair care, and box lunch delivery and catering. Different business models, different states, different sets of circumstances.
I've signed the agreement. I've opened the doors. I've had a first year that was harder than anything I'd done before, while in a demanding career that included launching medical devices in about fifty countries. I've made payroll in a month when I wasn't sure I could. And I've sold when the time was right, which is its own skill in and of itself. But I loved the challenge and I did it with the help of my wife and children.
That experience is the reason I'm careful. I know the challenges that any business owner faces.
The week the business disappeared
The clearest example I have is the catering business, which my wife and two of our daughters ran with me. Our business was drop off corporate lunch catering, primarily box lunches or hot entrees. We had an amazing first year and then the global pandemic hit and most of our customers disappeared from the offices overnight.
So, rather than panic, we went and found the companies whose people were still coming to work. We found parcel delivery and logistics companies, beverage and ice cream facilities, etc., all still showing up for work. Our model had to change from lunch to round-the-clock deliveries, but we not only survived, we increased our business greatly.
Then during the unrest in the Twin Cities that year, Homeland Security called and asked whether we could feed roughly seven hundred personnel, three meals a day plus a snack at three in the morning. I rented a refrigerated truck and we called in fifty family members and friends as volunteers, and we did it.
I don't tell that story because it's dramatic. I tell it because it's the actual job. We had a blast doing it.
A franchise gives you a proven system, training, and a network of people to support you for whatever challenges you face. What it does not give you is a business that runs itself. You have to be a problem solver. You must be willing to work on the business and not only in it.
If the unexpected energizes you, this can be the best thing you ever do. If it drains you, that is genuinely useful information in your decision process.
What a clear yes or no is worth
People assume a no means the process failed. I'd argue the opposite.
New businesses usually are in the red before they are in the black. That's just the nature of business ownership. If that causes you to lose sleep at night, then that may be useful information in your decision process. If you go into the process understanding the risks, but also excited about the rewards of building something of your own, managing your own destiny, and owning your own schedule, then maybe business ownership is right for you. The cost of finding out which one better describes you is a handful of hours.
I've had people go through this whole thing, decide it wasn't for them, and thank me for it. Some of them have referred others to me because of my honest approach. Others have moved forward and it was a positive, life-changing decision.
I'd rather be the person who gave you enough information to make an informed decision so you can make a choice that is right for you.
If you want to find out which one you are
There's no cost for a conversation with me and nothing to sign to have one. I'll ask about your background, what you're good at, what energizes you, what you want your days to look like, and who else is part of the decision. You'll ask me whatever you want. At the end we'll both have a sense of whether it's worth going further, and if it isn't, I'll be honest with you.
That's the offer. A process that helps you better understand if business ownership is right for you.
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