Why do you want to buy a franchise? What are your goals?
A surprising number of people don’t have a particular goal. They want to “try it out” or they’ve always dreamed of owning a business or they want to be their own boss. But a new book, Secrets of Franchise Success: The Formula for Becoming and Staying a Top Producing Franchisee by Marc Camras and Melissa Hart Woods, found that the most successful franchisees had something different in mind.
The authors interviewed scads of franchisees. They found that the most common reasons people wanted to own a franchise were their unhappiness in their 9-5 jobs and their desire to be their own bosses.
But when they looked at the goals the top performing franchisees in the group had for their lives and work, they saw something completely different. These franchisees had much bigger goals. They wanted to be the top franchisee in their field. They wanted to own multiple locations. They had five year plans for earning back their investment and specific numbers they wanted to reach in their revenue, their income, and their lives.
What’s more, the franchisees who had big, bold goals approached their work differently. They were more likely to work on their business, as the saying goes, than in it. They followed the franchise system, but they always kept their own goals in mind.
They didn’t approach their businesses as if they were employees. They took responsibility for their outcomes and moved deliberately toward those goals.
But the big ideas are the first step. What is your big, bold goal for your franchise business? Take a minute and write it down.
If you had trouble doing that, it might be for one of these reasons:
- You’re actually looking to buy yourself a job. You want to enjoy your work and have some control over it, but you’re buying a business where you can be a happy worker, not a highly successful business owner. That’s okay, but it can mean that you end up working for a tyrant. Without bigger goals to fire growth, you can easily find yourself working without vacations at a pay scale you wouldn’t have accepted when you were an employee. If this sounds like you, you might want to partner with someone who will keep your business on track to reach a bigger goal.
- You’re afraid to jinx your success. Do you think that setting a high goal might mystically lower your chances of reaching that goal? Think about that for a minute. How would that work, exactly? If you think about it, you’ll see that this is not a rational idea. Go ahead and set yourself a challenging but not impossible goal.
- You don’t want anyone to see you fail. After all, if you say that you want to make your first shop profitable within five years and then open two more shops, how embarrassing will it be if you’re not profitable in five years? Go ahead, imagine it. Your buddies will come up to you and say, “Hey, I thought you were going to own three shops?” No? Probably not.
Your goals can be changed and revised… and they don’t have to be shared. But the actions you take if you plan big will be actions that move you toward a bigger goal than if you plan small.
Write down some big goals, and figure out what you’ll have to do today to move toward those goals.
Then do it.
