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Expert Advice

Actionable insights and strategic guidance from franchise industry leaders, consultants, and successful franchise owners.

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The Many Advantages of Multi-Unit Ownership

Chris Conner

Expert Advice

The Many Advantages of Multi-Unit Ownership

If you’re just starting out in business ownership, the first step can be intimidating. And with good reason. There are start-up costs, build-out considerations, real estate selection, and plenty of other decisions to make before you ever open the doors.

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How Inflation Is Affecting Franchise Owners

Sarah Kulbatski

Expert Advice

How Inflation Is Affecting Franchise Owners

Inflation remains one of the biggest challenges facing franchise owners driving up the cost of labour, food, supplies, rent, utilities, transportation, insurance, financing and other day-to-day operations. At the same time, cautious consumer spending, higher wage demands and unpredictable supply chains are putting additional pressure on profitability and long term stability.

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How to Find Buyers Outside of a Franchisor’s Listings

Jon Franz

Expert Advice

How to Find Buyers Outside of a Franchisor’s Listings

A question that often comes up: “Can I sell my franchise without the franchisor’s approval?” The short answer is no. Every franchisor must approve a buyer before you can close a deal. However, that doesn’t mean that listing with corporate is your only means to find buyers.

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Evan Hackel, CFE

Expert Advice

Who Moved the Franchise?

There is a wonderful little book about change called Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr. Spencer Johnson. It tells a simple story about characters living in a maze who discover that the cheese they have depended on is suddenly gone.

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Lucas Frey

Expert Advice

What Franchise Founders Can’t Delegate

In the early stages, founders create enormous value through proximity. They know the business, understand the customer, recognize when something feels wrong and can usually make decisions faster than anyone around them. That ability helped build the core business and often carries the first franchise locations through uncertainty.

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George Knauf

Expert Advice

NOBODY WARNS YOU ABOUT TUESDAY

A record producer released a book this month about failure. I bought it expecting nothing. I finished it thinking he had described the actual experience of business ownership more honestly than most of what our industry publishes.

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Ricky Kalmon

Expert Advice

Structure Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling

For more than three decades, I have demonstrated that the same instructions, resources, and opportunities can still produce completely different results because structure may provide the path, but mindset ultimately determines how each person navigates it.

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Beyond AI Content: How Franchise Brands Can Stand Out in a Sea of Sameness

Steve Buors

Expert Advice

Beyond AI Content: How Franchise Brands Can Stand Out in a Sea of Sameness

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become one of the most influential forces in modern marketing. New platforms and tools appear almost daily, each promising faster execution, lower costs, and greater productivity. Marketing leaders are being encouraged to embrace AI as a way to accomplish more while operating with increasingly limited resources.

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How Multi-Tiered Dispute Resolution Systems Can Resolve Disputes More Efficiently and Effectively than Arbitration or Litigation—and even Strengthen Franchise Relationships

David G Thomas

Expert Advice

How Multi-Tiered Dispute Resolution Systems Can Resolve Disputes More Efficiently and Effectively than Arbitration or Litigation—and even Strengthen Franchise Relationships

Disputes are an inevitable part of doing business, particularly when parties are in business together within a franchise system. For many franchisors and franchisees, arbitration has long been viewed as a faster, less expensive alternative to litigation. Although arbitration often delivers efficiencies, it is still at its core a rights-based dispute resolution process, i.e., like litigation, arbitration places the outcome of a dispute in the hands of a third party.

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Behind Every Franchisee Is a Story Worth Telling

By Scott White, Co-Founder & CEO, Thunderly

Expert Advice

Behind Every Franchisee Is a Story Worth Telling

I’ve spent more than three decades in franchise marketing. In that time, I’ve had a front-row seat to thousands of stories that don’t get told often enough and are often the best part of the business.

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Keeping Pace with Change Starts by Living Your Values

By Evan Hackel

Expert Advice

Keeping Pace with Change Starts by Living Your Values

The pace of change has never been faster - and it will never again be this slow.

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Lucas Frey

Expert Advice

Your Calendar Reveals Your Brand's Ceiling

Your Calendar Reveals Your Brand's Ceiling As a franchise organization grows, a founder’s calendar can quietly become its greatest constraint. The same habits and responsibilities that helped build the business can eventually prevent it from scaling. In “Your Calendar Reveals Your Brand's Ceiling,” discover how leadership time becomes one of the most valuable forms of organizational capital—and why sustainable growth depends on shifting from doing the work to building the systems, leaders, and capabilities that allow others to do it. Take a closer look at where your time is going, what it is truly producing, and whether your calendar is building the future of your franchise—or limiting it.

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The Question Most Franchise Investors Never Ask Themselves

BY GEORGE KNAUF | FRANCHISE INVESTMENT STRATEGIST | FOUNDER, ORCA FRANCHISING

Expert Advice

The Question Most Franchise Investors Never Ask Themselves

You’ve done the research. You know the numbers. You’ve looked at the brands. But there’s one question that will determine everything — and most people avoid it entirely.

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By Marshall Reddy

Expert Advice

How Much Do You Want It?

If you have a lawn, you’ve met a weed. Some weeds seem unstoppable; you can cut them, pull them, cover them with a barrier and a bag of gravel, and in a couple of weeks, they’ll be pushing their way up to the sunlight. They survive. They persist, no matter what you throw at them. For many, being employed can feel just like being a weed.

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The Many Markets of Childhood: An Industry Where Opportunities Abound

Chris Conner

Expert Advice

The Many Markets of Childhood: An Industry Where Opportunities Abound

Shoes are outgrown as soon as you buy them. Toys are loved and then quietly replaced with new favorites. Tastes change without warning. And that activity you were once convinced your child would love for years? The wind changed.

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