Most people who talk to me don't buy a franchise

Most 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 a stranger telling them that the likeliest 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 most 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 fits their temperament, their household, 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, while looking for them is still free.

The five reasons people walk away

After a couple of decades of informally pointing friends and family toward this and a few years of doing it on purpose, the reasons cluster. Here are the ones I see most.

The spouse was never in. This is the most common and the most consequential. One person is energized and the other is polite. Politeness reads as agreement right up until the first hard month, and then it doesn't. I've watched this go badly enough times that I now ask about it directly on the first call, and I'd rather find it in an hour than a year.

They wanted something passive. People come in having heard that you can own a franchise without running it. There is real truth in that. Some models are genuinely built for an owner who manages a manager rather than working the counter. But there is a wide gap between less hands-on and hands-off, and nothing in this category runs itself. When someone is looking for an investment they can forget about, franchising is the wrong shelf entirely, and I'd rather say so than sell them a version of the story that isn't true.

They didn't want a system. They wanted their own thing. This one I have a lot of respect for. A franchise system is the actual product you're buying: the playbook, the training, the supply chain, the brand that people already recognize. If your instinct is to redesign the menu, rewrite the process, and put your own stamp on all of it, you don't want a franchise. You want your own business. That is a completely respectable answer and some of the best conversations I've had ended there.

The clock was too short. Somebody has a package and a 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 this in eighteen months 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, in a career that had already 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 nobody warns you about.

That experience is the reason I'm careful. I know exactly what I'd be handing someone.

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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 corporate lunch orders. In the spring of 2020, corporate lunch stopped existing.

So we went and found the companies whose people were still coming to work. Delivery hubs, a beverage bottler, a dairy. We ran across three shifts, around the clock, to a completely different kind of customer than the one we'd built the business for.

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 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.

A franchise gives you a proven system, real training, and a network of people who have solved the problem you're hitting this week. What it does not give you is a business that runs itself, and it will not tell you what to do the week everything changes. Nothing in any manual covered that spring. You have to be a problem solver. You have to 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, and you want it before you sign anything rather than after.

What a clear no is worth

People assume a no means the process failed. I'd argue the opposite.

Most new businesses lose money before they make it. The cost of finding out that ownership isn't for you after you've signed a long-term agreement, taken on debt, and given notice at a job you were good at is enormous, and it isn't only financial. The cost of finding out during a few conversations 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 sent me three other people since. Those conversations are among the most useful ones I have, and they're a large part of why the practice works at all.

I'd rather be the person who talked you out of the wrong business than the one who talked you into it.

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 actually good at, 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 tell you.

That's the whole offer. A better version of the question you've been asking yourself, and an honest answer either way.