Starting a Business All-In-One For Dummies

Chapter 3

Setting Your Franchise's Wheels in Motion

In This Chapter

• Evaluating and choosing a location for your franchise
• Keeping an eye out for encroachment
• Buying, receiving, and storing goods and supplies
• Getting good training before and after you open your franchise

Franchising is most successful when each and every location in the chain operates in a way that ensures customers a consistent level of quality and service, regardless of which location they're visiting.

But being consistent isn't an easy thing to do (in the business realm, that is). The location's design has to feel right to the customers, and the business needs to be placed where it's convenient for customers to shop. The quality of the products and services you deliver to the customers can't vary much at all from their last experience — they're coming for the experience of shopping with you, which requires your management and staff to be up to the task of delivering on your brand's promise to them. Giving customers that level of reliability is what franchisees do (or should, anyway) every day.

To reach that level of delivery you have to know where you should place your business and how to build it; find the vendors that have the products you need; and understand how to recruit, train, motivate, and manage your staff. Great franchisors teach you how to do all these things. In short, great franchisors share their formula for success.

Surveying Your Options for Locale

Depending on your franchise, you will be confronted ...