What exactly is a franchise?

The word is used to refer to a business that utilises the logo, name and operation systems providing that they come up with the required funds and are prepared to give the parent company a share of the profits.

Just like any other business there are positives and negatives –the future depends on several factors.

A franchise enables on to hit the ground running – it removes a great deal of the work in simply getting an idea from the head to the planning board to a functioning project.

On the downside franchise fees are usually high – this is the burden of being spoon-fed an entire business – along with this comes the necessity to have sufficient funds laid aside. It could be argued that without sufficient funds the simple act of purchasing a franchise could well be deemed as a burden.

Arguing against that, a franchise has lower risks than a brand new product irrespective of how good the product is. While it is speculation as to whether or not a new business will succeed or fail, one can see the record of the parent company on which to base his/her views.

On the other side, one that owns a franchise must abide by the rules of the parent company-this can have the effect of stifling creative or entrepreneurial thoughts, and as such may inhibit the exploration or challenge of your creativity.

So what affects the success of a franchise?

The type and success of a business-it is important not to franchise from any company but to have a look at the particular success the company is having; also important is to look at the longevity of the company and its product range.

Some franchises require the franchisee to have special qualifications, skills or knowledge of a certain field.

Time and management skills are obviously needed ,thus if one is not willing to spend sufficient time managing the business then it is important to have reliable, dependable and trustworthy people to front the business-could you rely on someone to ensure that your business.

There are many other factors that can and do affect the future of a franchise; however it is essential to make sure that the franchise is really what one wants.

When one examines the possibility of a franchise it is important to take into account of essential factors such as availability of capital, the possibility of hurdles, how many hours are available to spend on the business, the back-up support available in the event of problems etc.

If these factors are all in place and the fundamental examinations have been taken care of then it can most certainly be a good career option.

Should one wish to evaluate the choice there are numerous sources available for advice and numerous articles around giving advice – I have found this to be particularly helpful and the information within excellent.

While it is a natural reaction to think nothing but positive thoughts about an impending venture, it is prudent to dot the “i”and stroke the “t”s.

Do something you really love: Considering the amount of time and energy you are going to spend setting up the business, it is really important that you love what you do and do what you love.

Make a business plan: Put your ideas down on paper and include detailed plans – right from how much money you need to start the business and where you intend to get it from; to what your proposed marketing strategies include and how much profit you hope to make. Remember, if you cannot make your plan work on paper, chances are it may not take off the ground in real life as well.

Do in-depth research: Don’t just skim the surface when researching the business you are planning on starting up. Become an expert in your chosen field. Uncover every stumbling block and loophole you may encounter along the way and plan in advance how to avoid or overcome them.

Be totally committed: Starting up a business requires a lot of long hours and hard toil. Be prepared to spend endless days and sleepless nights as you tie up loose ends and put your plan together.

Sort out your finances: Know in advance where your money is coming from. If you have not managed to save enough, approach potential lenders and investors and figure out what your chances are of raising enough money to start your business and have some extra to fall back on. Don’t presume anything. Check everything out for sure.

Entice your customers before you open shop: Hard sell your product or your service to potential clients before your business officially starts up. Advertise; give away free samples and promos. Good marketing is the key to a successful business.

Get professional help: Don’t try to handle the marketing as well the financial and legal aspects of the business. You’ll soon be overwhelmed by it all and more than likely to give it up. Delegate it to people who know more about it than you do.

Does the opportunity you’re considering have enough support and training to help you through start-up? Depending on your personality and previous experience, you may only require general training, or you might require more personal assistance. If the home business opportunity is run through an already established company, make a thorough inquiry into the level of support they offer. If you can’t get help when you need it, your clients aren’t going to get the service they require. And that spells trouble for you.

What Kind of Compensation is Available?

Are you looking for quick financial rewards, or are you willing to wait a little while longer to see results? If your home based business opportunity is through an established company, check whether they have a rewards or incentive plan for their franchises or home business clients. If the opportunity is more self-driven, can you set realistic goals with this home based business opportunity that are actually achievable and financially rewarding?

Do You Believe in Your Business?
If you’re considering a product-oriented home based business opportunity, do you actually like the products you’re selling? Never buy into a business opportunity unless you’re sure you have a product you can put some passion into selling – no one wants to buy something that the vendor doesn’t really want in the first place! If the opportunity is more service-oriented, do you believe in the services you’re selling? Do you think what you’re offering is beneficial and will actually help others, or are you looking at it as a way to con people out of their hard-earned cash? Scams are easily identified in our tech-savvy society, and unless you’re sincere and actually care about what you’re offering to others, you’re going to sink faster than an old cruise liner in a glacial ocean.

Keeping these things in mind, you should be able to choose a home based business opportunity that is right for you, that you believe in and that you are actually excited about investing your time and money in.

Banner Advertising
A banner ad provides an enticing visual for the internet surfer which encourages them to click through to your site. Create your banner and distribute to a specific audience so that you can receive relevant traffic to your site. There are banner exchange programs that are quite effective, or you may trade links with another site that contains similar subject matter.

Get Your Name out There
Your website address should be on everything that you send out or hand out. Your email signature, letterhead, business cards, brochures and flyers should all have your web address. This increases your level of exposure and ignites a curiosity in people, leading them to visit your site. It is also a regular reminder for your site.

Online Contests
Many times, you can draw visitors to your site by running a sweepstakes or contest. Your visitors subscribe to an e-newsletter, complete a survey, fill out a questionnaire or register on your site to receive their free gift. You can offer something from your inventory, a gift certificate or an ecourse as the prize. Many people are very drawn to this type of contest.

Article Advertising
When it comes to the internet, it is content, content, content. Many people or companies will offer free, keyword rich content to other sites on the contingency that it includes a link back to your website. This is a win, win endeavor because your content is attracting traffic to the site it is on and your link is visible so that traffic can click over to your site.

Uniform Advertising
If you are promoting a company website, your URL should be on your employees’ uniforms if possible. This is a great way to provide “walking advertising” for your business and it does attract traffic. Make the site address legible (no fancy fonts), easy to read and somewhat understated so that it is not ostentatious

Promotional Items
Place your website address on your promotional items. This is an inexpensive and quite easy way to advertise while it also serves as a daily reminder of your presence on the web. Coffee mugs, bumper stickers, pens, T-shirts and key chains are all great for this type of advertising.

Yellow Pages
If you place an ad in the Yellow Pages of your telephone directory, make sure that you include the website address. This will draw targeted traffic to your site. If you include an interesting, but simple graphic or illustration and a snappy headline, your ad will be more eye-catching.

Company Vehicle
If you have a company car, you can place a decal with your logo and URL on the side. This way, people will see it and may be inclined to visit your site. If you have trucks that deliver products, they would be optimum for advertising your web address.

Catalogs
Catalogs are a great way for businesses to get information on their products or services in the hand of people who are interested in them. A phone number, preferably toll free, as well as the URL at the bottom of the catalog is highly recommended. Many people will read a catalog, and then place their order over the internet.

Adsense took a beating a short time ago when Google made some changes. But it is still possible to make some extra money with a Web site or two. It is even possible to make a good living with it.

What You Need

You need a domain name, a hosting account, and a niche topic. Preferably the niche is one that you know something about. That makes it easier to fill it with content.

If you want to make a good income with one or two Web sites then good content is a must. Your goal is to create a site that attracts people and keeps them coming back.

There are sites on the Internet, created by people just like you, that are getting thousands of visitors a day. The content is written by the site owner who cares about the subject. They are passionate about the topic and write from their heart.

These sites have grown in popularity simply by word-of-mouth and maybe some simple search engine optimization tactics. Good content will get noticed, although optimizing for the search engines helps.

Getting Traffic to Your New Site

Before your site can become popular through word-of-mouth you need to get the first visitors to your site. How do you let people know about your site?

Free tactics include posting in forums or blogs and putting your URL in the signature, posting on Yahoo’s Answers and again putting your URL in the signature, and writing articles and submitting them to article directories. These are all free, and they work very well.

Here’s a hint: Write an article each week for each site. Do that consistently and you can’t help but get traffic. It’s a great way to get backlinks, too, which are very important in getting ranked high in the search engines.

For further education (and for examples) visit sites like StevePavlina and JackHumphrey. These are two sites that get thousands of visitors a day. They are using the blogging software put out by WordPress, which is free.

Blogs are a simple way to build a Web site. Anyone can start one, and then tweak it as they become more experienced. Jack’s site didn’t start out looking that cool. He’s done some major changes to it in the last year.

Steve’s site looks very plain, but that doesn’t bother the millions of people who regularly visit his site. They are coming for the content.

A simple-looking site can generate several thousand dollars a month in Adsense, affiliate products, and donations. Yes, people actually donate to sites that offer them good content for free. Steve uses a WordPress plugin for collecting donations from visitors who want to give him money as a way of saying “thank you.”

A free forum that can provide a great education on the topic of Internet marketing for any newbie is available at DigitalPoint’s forum site. Be prepared to spend hours there searching through all the posts that give good tips on how to make money online. You can also sign up for free and post questions.

The basics of how to make money online have been described here, along with some examples to study and a forum to learn from. Now it is up to you to get started.

Whatever you do, don’t put it off. You can’t earn money online by just reading about it. You have to take action.

But why does it take so long for some energy technologies to get from the lab and industrial applications to the service of consumers? Take solar panels, for example.

A high-street electronics chain in London now sells educational solar-power kits for around the £20 mark.  Serious, roof-dwelling solar panels that will power equipment in your home sell in DIY superstores at around £2,500. That’s a price-tag for the wealthy or very committed, but at least consumers can push their trolleys past the technology

SOLAR PANELS HAVE ONLY RECENTLY APPEARED on the shelves of retail outlets, so you’d forgive them for posing as new technology.  But they’re not. While England was priming itself for what was to become its most famous World Cup, a contributor to the July 1966 edition of Wireless World faced a copy deadline for the magazine. His name was D. Bollen, and he provided a circuit for a solar-powered battery charger.

As he put it: ‘The ability of solar cells to convert sunlight directly into useful electrical energy has been well demonstrated in satellite applications. An advantage of the solar battery is that is allows true, unattended operation in locations remote from a power supply and…promises an outstanding degree of reliability.’ (Wireless World: 343)

Over four meticulously-illustrated pages, Bollen goes on to provide a blueprint for a circuit that will trickle-charge a battery from a solar cell.  Bollen shows that you can run something that uses one milliamp of current for ‘2.74 hours’ in a 24 hour period. He leaves us guessing what application he had in mind for this tiny current, but the rig could also have powered the bulb of a toy torch for a few seconds a day.

Still, the circuit is there and the date is mid-1966. Don’t be distracted by Bollen’s talk of ‘satellite applications’. His circuit is a million miles from rocket-science – in fact it’s the simplest of the bunch in this edition of a magazine that was pitched at everyone between novice constructor and electronics professional.

Someone with barely any experience could have thrown a demonstration version of this circuit together in fifteen minutes flat. And all the parts were available from specialist suppliers in London and south-east England.

The listed supplier for ‘assorted selenium and silicon cells’   is International Rectifier. I contacted the company to find out how much a similar solar-cell cost at the time Bollen wrote his feature.

A single cell measuring about a centimetre by two centimetres cost four dollars, right up to 1966.  In his feature, Bollen describes various combinations between one cell and four, so the most expensive part of his circuit cost between four and 16 dollars, or about $25-100 dollars in today’s money.
World’s first solar-powered car: 1912

But what came back from International Rectifier (IR) proved far more interesting than price information. It turns out that the company had demonstrated the world’s first solar-powered car – a 1912 model of the Baker Electric – as early as 1958. They achieved the stunt by making a high-output solar panel – less than two metres long and just over a metre wide – from a whole bank of little solar cells.

Commercial, industrial and military customers went on to buy solar panels from International Rectifier.

SO WHY HAS IT TAKEN ALMOST FIFTY YEARS for solar panels to reach our shops?

Southface, a non-profit, sustainable-living organisation based in the USA, point out that solar-cell technology has had been uselessly competing against the relative fall in price that occurred in the fossil-fuel market in the nineties.

But Southface believe that major orders of consumer solar cell units in countries such as Japan may finally signal the start of an era when solar cell production will benefit from economies of scale.

I hope so. In the meantime, it’s anyone’s guess how long will it take for the consumer-led technology revolution to swat our energy problems.
©Alistair Siddons, 2006

No longer do people have the luxury of arriving at work, completing their assigned tasks, and going home, thinking, magically, that everything will continue to work out as before. We are experiencing a rapidly changing business climate, which demands shifts in attitudes and creative thinking in order to meet the challenges of the future.

How can your company accomplish this throughout your organization?

Beginning, as author Steven Covey, reminds us, “with the end in mind.” As an executive, you must ask yourself and your team what the “ideal” looks like in each key area. In sales, for example, what would be the ideal situation? How would it appear? What about manufacturing, administration, and distribution? If everything were operating perfectly, how would you describe it?

Bringing key management together for this type of strategic planing session will result in your having identified a crystal clear vision for the entire organization, with each and every segment of the business functioning at it’s optimal level.

This visioning exercise can then be adapted and used by each department to create a “mini” version for their own area of responsibility and, further, to the individual, enabling she or he to relate their job to the bigger picture as well as their personal goals.

Once you have a clear vision of what the ideal would be in each area of your organization, the next step is to identify several goals by which you can measure your progress. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll use a one year time frame, since this is a reasonable period to institute change, while allowing you to experience success early on.

Looking at each segment of your business, what would have to happen to accomplish your ideal vision? If, for example, in distribution, the ideal was to achieve 100% on time delivery and no more than a 72 hour turnaround, what are the measurable goals that would support it’s accomplishment?

When setting goals, it is important to use the S.M.A.R.T. method , whereby each goals is Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timed. Specifically, what will you accomplish by when? Then, from your list of goals, you can develop 30–90 day milestones and further reduce those to identify the daily actions that must be taken in order to succeed.

For example, part of the vision for your sales department might be, “To be the best in our industry. To be the ‘gold standard’ by which our competition measures itself against.” This will likely translate to an increase in sales, improved customer retention, better referrals and so on.

From this, the sales woman in your New Jersey territory may, looking at her personal vision and goals, decide she wants to earn 50% more in commissions and calculates that this would require XX dollars in sales each quarter. From this, she has determined, based on past performance, how many sales per month she needs and, further, how many presentations she needs to make each week. This breaks down further into how many calls she needs to make each day in order to accomplish this, what additional systems she might implement to achieve better customer retention, and which networking functions would best support her vision.

With each and every individual, in each and every department, holding the same, clear vision and knowing their role in it’s accomplishment, you will experience a level of success beyond your wildest expectations.