Tag Archives: Business and Economy

September 4, 2019 · 9:47 am

For Yourself, Not By Yourself

I left corporate America at the end of 2007. In the dozen years since I’ve worked for myself. Oh sure, I have always considered the clients for whom I consulted to be my bosses, but at the end of the day, I was on my own.

If any of you have been, or are, in a similar circumstance, you know that it’s both a liberating and terrifying feeling. There is the freedom to spend a beautiful day at the beach or on a golf course instead of working. After all, you’re the boss. Along with that freedom, at least for me, there was always guilt that I had taken the day to play or run errands rather than grinding it out as I had done for the 30+ prior years of my business life. I guess the Protestant work ethic applies even to Jews…

While I’m still working for myself, the last year I’ve not been BY myself. As a franchise consultant, I’m a part of a much broader network of several hundred other coaches. We share information, I have access to ongoing education about franchises and how to do my job more effectively, there is someone doing collections for me, and the network actually even finds leads for me if I want. I’m in business for myself but not by myself, as is the case with any franchise.

Candidates (people considering investing in a franchise) sometimes ask why they should go with a franchise instead of using their capital to start up their own business. The statistics answer that question for me. 90% of new businesses fail in anywhere from the first five years to as little as the first four months. 90% of franchises are still in business after five years. There is a reason for that, which is that you’re investing in a proven concept. The mistakes have been made, the operation has been refined, marketing plans have been tweaked, and all of that is being handed to you as part of your investment along with training that can last from a few days to weeks, with ongoing mentoring and education for much longer. Pretty spiffy, and a route I wish I had taken a dozen years ago instead of trying to figure it all out on my own.

So what can go wrong with a franchise? I think the two biggest sources of problems are when franchisees don’t follow the model or when they are undercapitalized. In the first case, ignoring the model is basically throwing away what you paid for and diminishing your success rate quite a bit. In the second case, ANY business will fail if it’s undercapitalized no matter how well-run it is. Counting on immediate cash flow to support the operation (or your ability to eat!) is short-sighted. That’s why franchising makes even more sense since there is a track record of what capital is needed to get the business up and running for the first few months. It’s actually so clear that the franchises put those costs in their Franchise Disclosure Document (item 7) and those are numbers I have and discuss with folks as they are looking at investing.

Being in business for yourself is great. It’s even better when you’re not by yourself. I can show you how to make that happen for you. Just click here and let’s get started.

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August 30, 2019 · 3:40 pm

A Yankee In Tailgateland

Not only is today Foodie Friday but it’s also the day before the college football season begins in earnest. While I’ve always been a fan of the college game, it wasn’t until I relocated down here in the South that I fully understood the passion and deep community involvement my neighbors have with their college football teams.

Photo courtesy Jonathan Ray

If you’ve read this screed for any amount of time you know that I root for the Michigan Wolverines. That said, I hold season tickets for NC State, one of the local teams. Frankly, given what I’m about to write, I’m not even sure that the tickets are necessary but it’s the only way to get a decent parking spot so you can TAILGATE!

Yes, I’ve learned the joy of tailgating, which is something Southerners appear to do not only at football games but damn near everything else from hockey games to concerts. I suppose some of them are pre-gaming a funeral as we speak…

In any event, tailgating is BIG business all across parking lots. I’d seen some of it when I went to games at Michigan, but it’s NOTHING compared to what goes on here. I suspect that a good number of folks really do just sit in the parking lot without game tickets and watch on TV. The food is sometimes your basic hot dogs and burgers but there are incredibly elaborate spreads too. At some southern schools, there are $25,000 spreads put on for hundreds of people as well as repurposed shipping containers made into tailgating palaces.

What’s the business point today? Had someone come to me for a business idea in my previous life in the sports business, I would never have thought to look at tailgating. I would have been missing a fantastic, and still growing, business. It’s a good reminder that we need to get outside of our little bubbles. Yankees don’t really have anything like this at games up north and although I went to dozens of venues in the South for games, I was working and didn’t hang out in the parking lot.

Our personal bubbles restrict the news we see, the information we digest and the decisions we make. It isn’t until we break out of them, either purposefully or by accident as happened to me with tailgating, that we grow. As people say to me when offering some odd-looking pregame snack, try it – you’ll like it!

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August 28, 2019 · 10:45 am

Back To School Again

It’s the time of year when the kids head back to school. I wish I could join them. Knowing what I know now, and more importantly, what I don’t know now, I’d make better use of my time there. Of course, like the quote commonly attributed to Mark Twain, I tried not to let my schooling interfere with my education.

I’ve written before what I think the only two things one needs to learn while in school, but to sum them up it’s the ability to:

  • Acquire pieces of information, figure out which pieces are accurate and synthesize your own ideas or opinions based on them;
  • Express those ideas or opinions clearly both verbally and in writing.

Does that make you smart? Not exactly although you certainly will sound a heck of a lot smarter. It does make you well-educated in the sense that you’ve obtained the most important skills education can provide. Smart, however, is an entirely different deal and I want us to think for a few minutes today about the different kinds of smart one can be regardless of education.

I’ve never made it a secret that I have a deep affection for smart people, especially those smarter than I am. I always tried to find job candidates who were, above all, really smart in every sense of the word. What do I mean?

First, there is the kind of smart where one is able to synthesize information and develop great insights. Yes, that kind of matched the first part of being well-educated. I’d couple that with intellectual curiosity, however, to make one smart.

Second is what many people would call educated. This is being full of information, what some might call book-learned. However, just because you can puke back a lot of facts, which might make you great at Trivial Pursuit or the trivia contest at your local tavern, you can’t really fool me that you’re smart unless you couple it with the other two parts.

The third part is being emotionally intelligent. As Wikipedia defines it, this is

the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one’s goal(s).

In many ways, this is the most important of the three “smarts” in business since it’s the one that helps you behave optimally in areas like customer service, employee management, and partner relations. I know there are other kinds of “smart” – street smart that is probably the personification of Twain’s statement, IQ-smart, which is just raw brainpower to name just two, but I think my three are the ones most critical to business – and life – success since they can be learned and developed while most others one either has or doesn’t.

So as the kids head back to school, maybe this is a good time for each of us to think about how we can get smarter too. What do you think?

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