After going through my own incredibly stressful and costly battle with my Franchisor and discovering how little transparency there is around the real life experiences of franchisees, I decided to start this blog covering franchising related topics that I believe need more airtime.

When deciding to start this blog I had two main objectives in mind;

  1. To start a discussion with other franchisees (of any franchise), with the purpose of sharing each other’s learnings and experiences, to help improve the transparency of information about the franchise industry.
  2. To help drive up the standards of Franchising, which will be of benefit to all franchisees, current and future.

In most developed countries Franchising makes up a much larger part of the business eco system than people realise. The last franchise survey in the U.K. in 2018 estimated that there were c. 20k franchisees operating c. 50k units with a combined turnover of c. £17bn. Based on these numbers you would reasonably think that franchising is a successful business model but my experience, and that of many others, is very different. I’ll explain in my blogs why I believe this to be the case and why I believe that the true facts are not visible for everyone to see. But don’t take my word for it…. Peter Jones, the very successful British entrepreneur and Dragons Den investor, when courted by two entrepreneurs in episode 5 of series 19 looking for an investment that involved franchising their idea, made his views on franchising very clear;

‘Why franchise? The reason why I ask that is because there are not many successful franchises out there.’

The franchise industry is regulated in many countries, including the US, but there is no such regulation in the UK. The issue is now beginning to gain traction with many MPs but more needs to be done to highlight the many injustices and the damage this is causing countless peoples’ mental and financial wellbeing. You just need to look at the Post Office scandal, which is also a franchise, (link to a blog about the scandal by a journalist called Nick Wallis) where c. 736 SubPostMasters were wrongly convicted using data from the (now known to be) flawed Horizon IT system. The judges findings in this case are a damning indictment of both the franchise agreements and also the behaviour of the Post Office management and their lawyers. After being contacted by one of his constituents, Sir Geoffrey Cox, the MP and previous Attorney General, has taken up the issue of what he termed ‘unscrupulous and dishonest franchises’ with the ex Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy asking him to look into ‘the existing regulatory regime of the franchise industry’.

Clearly there are many good franchises that provide a healthy income to their franchisees but equally there are many poor franchises and franchisors. For such an important part of the British Eco System I was quite shocked with many of the things I witnessed, and other things I discovered after doing my research. Many of these issues are equally relevant for successful franchises as they are for poor franchises but they may be less prevalent.

I am taking the time to write this blog because I really do not want others to suffer the same fate as me. The focus of this blog will be on making transparent what I believe to be many of the flaws of franchising and what I would do differently knowing what I know now. I want this blog to be about franchising in general rather than about any particular franchise but in order to achieve this requires current and past franchisees from as many franchisors as possible to contribute to the blog and share their real life experiences.

I have included a list of planned blog topics here that I believe warrant some discussion. If you have any experiences related to these topics that you think others would benefit from please contact me using the contact form. Equally, if there are particular topics that I am not planning to cover but you believe should be shared, please get in touch with me and I can either add it to my list of blog topics or invite someone with experience of the topic to write their own ‘guest’ blog.

Please share this blog with other Franchisees as well as anyone you know that may be thinking of investing in a franchise and ask them to subscribe here for future blogs.

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