Things I've Learned... Continued

by Jeff Northrop

If you missed my last post, here is a brief summary: We established that I was a tried and true geek, and we learned what a merkin is. Now on to lesson #2.

One of the things I realized early on here at FBR is how difficult it is to find a solid information about almost any franchise online. If you've done some research yourself you know what I'm talking about.Everything else worth researching can be thoroughly vetted online  but its not the case with franchising – not by a long shot. Now I understand that purchasing a franchisee is a huge investment and I would never suggest that you could garner enough information to make a decision like that just based on Internet research but I would have thought you could at least get a good start.

Do a Google search for "franchise." Go ahead, I'll wait... What did you get? Nothing but a long list of advertising sites I'll bet. Now these sites advertise good opportunities, but most have no compunction about advertising bad ones either and they're certainly not in the business of making distinctions between good and bad ones. So where can you find reliable, open and honest information? Excellent question that I can't answer. I'm not at all embarrassed to say that FBR is one of the few places that does offer honest information (our information contains the good, the bad and the ugly).

Next time I'm going to talk about why even the best franchise opportunities have angry franchisees and why the best opportunities don't try to hide them.