Franchisee resource center

The franchise agreement should also address who gets to use the franchisee’s phone numbers after the franchise agreement expires. Traditionally, this right has belonged to the franchisor, but with home-based businesses becoming the norm, franchisors that allowed franchisees to use their home phones or existing cell phone numbers might have an issue regaining control of this component of their former franchisees’ business presence.

With a second lease on life and control of the franchisor squarely in the hands of private equity professionals, will Quiznos be able to navigate a still-shaky economy, challenge Subway for supremacy, and win back the trust of its surviving franchisees?

Consumer social networking sites are not only transforming how people live their daily lives, they are also influencing several business-related functions. More and more of these socially-enabled tools, platforms, and best practices are fundamentally changing the way companies handle data, manage customers, and perform market research. Businesses can harness the power of socially-enabled tools that promote collaboration and eliminate departmental boundaries that might inhibit innovation. We aren’t talking about the need for small business to have and manage their own social media accounts. At this point, such initiatives should be a given. The focus is on ways social sharing is altering business processes at a core level, transforming how people “work.”

Luca studied the effects of Yelp ratings on the revenue of restaurants and discovered several interesting findings. Studying the relationships of restaurants' revenues to their Yelp reviews in Seattle over a period from 2003 to 2009, he found a significant relationship between a restaurant’s average rating and revenue. One star’s worth of improvement on Yelp leads, he found, on average to an increase of between 5 and 9 percent in revenue. The average rating is more important than the review, as many Yelp users are overwhelmed by the sheer number of reviews on manyrestaurantpages and find it easier to consult the star rating. Luca also found two features which exacerbate the effect on revenue Yelp has. First, the more reviews a restaurant has, the more impact an increase in its Yelp rating will have on its revenue. Second, the more reviews by Yelp “elite” members, the more impact; “elite” reviews have almost twice as much impact as other reviews.

Moneyball is a film about baseball, but on a deeper level, it’s about how to succeed in life through a series of broader principles, which can be applied to many areas, including business. Here are five such principles that business owners can utilize.

Several other big-name corporations have been in the news recently for raising similar issues. Nike recently sent a letter to someone selling “Just Jesu It” t-shirts. Best Buy sent a letter to Geek On. Hell’s Angels sent a letter to a designer in California.

So, what do you do, then, when your fellow franchisees start using rougher towels, or take the milkshake off of the menu? Now all of a sudden some of the inherent value in your franchise is gone. Your hotel chain is seen as declining in value, and out-of-towners stay away because they think that you, too, have taken their favorite milkshake off of the menu.

A critical part of the due diligence process for prospective franchisees is trying to discern (to the extent reasonably possible) whether the franchisor will be around for the long haul. After all, much of what you pay for in a franchise opportunity is the right to be associated with the franchisor’s brand and system, the right to use the franchisor’s proprietary materials, and in some cases, the right to an exclusive territory. If the franchisor goes out of business, all of these rights go up in the air (if not out the window), and you may well be left in a worse position than if you had just gone into business on your own in the first place.