Perhaps you were at lunch with a friend who suggested you start a new franchise as your next step. Or perhaps you were brainstorming ways to shift your professional goals to earn more money, build a legacy for your family, or have more flexibility in your professional life. No matter the reason, you’ve stumbled upon the idea of franchising.
No matter how you’ve decided to search for a new franchise, you’re here checking out the opportunities. In doing so, you might be scratching your head about how to sift through the many options available.
Searching for a new franchise can be overwhelming when you have so many quality choices. If you’re unsure on how to continue, here are five questions to ask yourself as you narrow your search.
1. How Do You Truly Feel About the Idea of Owning a Business?
Before you narrow your search, let’s narrow your reasons for looking for a new franchise in the first place. Why did you ultimately decide to start poking around at the possibilities of franchise ownership? How do you really feel about owning a business?
Franchise ownership isn’t for everyone and requires a lot of hard work. By nailing down why you’re searching for a new franchise, you can better understand what’s driving your decision to pursue this path. That knowledge will help you filter out franchises that don’t align with your primary goals and aims as a new business owner.
2. What Options Align with Your Why?
With your why in mind, it’s time to filter out the franchise options that answer why you pursued franchise ownership initially.
This filtering process allows you to weed out any areas that might sound compelling but won’t serve your desire for your lifestyle as a franchise owner. For example, suppose you want to lead a team and have employee support to build a franchise that allows you to give back to your community. In that case, you might want to narrow your search to a coffee franchise, children’s franchise, or even an automotive franchise.
3. What Options Catch Your Interest?
Now, it’s time to go to your gut when looking at the list before you. To be successful as a franchise owner, you must love what you do and believe in what you offer. If something doesn’t light a fire in your belly when you think about it, it might not be the right choice.
Enthusiasm is the biggest driver of productivity, so having a positive and excited attitude going into franchise ownership is critical. Look over your narrowed list and cross off franchises that don’t quite feel exciting.
4. What Options Align with Your Skills?
Aligning a franchise with your why can still give you a diverse set of options to choose from. Now, based on that reduced list from options that align with your why, let’s continue eliminating options that might not be as well-suited to your talents.
What skills and interests can you bring to the franchise ownership table? Answering this question will help you further filter down your list of potential franchises.
However, this is where the franchising model can make things a little tricky. For example, if you have interest in or passion for cars but not a lot of automotive skill, you can seek franchises with training options that will allow you to build your skills in that area.
5. What Options Have the Most Potential in Your Area?
The final step towards narrowing your search is to look at what’s happening in your area. What does your community need? Will you have a market that will want to buy what you have to sell when you open your doors?
Finding a franchise that feels good to you is only part of the equation. You must also know what’s happening within your area and the opportunity for success. If you don’t have potential customers who will buy when you open your doors, you will have an uphill battle. However, if you have a wide network of customers who are eager for the ideas you’re considering bringing to your area, then you can have more confidence as you begin your franchising journey.
Don’t let the overwhelming list of options stop you from moving forward with your franchising journey. By filtering down your long list of potential franchises using these questions, you can focus on the possibilities and move closer to franchise ownership faster.
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Kimberly Crossland is the founder of Roadpreneur and Cruisin' + Campfires, two companies designed to keep families together and living in freedom through travel and entrepreneurship. The goal of both businesses is to inspire meaningful change through the power of a strategic, thoughtful approach to life and business. In her free time, you can find her looking for a new adventure together with her two boys.