What is the Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD) in 6 Minutes or Less

20.09.22 12:34 PM By Stacey Riska

What is the Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD) in 6 Minutes or Less


We're going to cover the exciting topic of the Franchise Disclosure Document. What is a Franchise Disclosure Document? It's often referred to as the FDD, has a whole mess of Items (Sections) and is often a massive document. Before we dig in I'm going to start off with a disclaimer. We are not attorneys, and we highly recommend that you get and seek legal advice when reviewing this document.

What we're going to be doing is just reviewing the FDD in concept. What we've seen is that with the FDDs that we have had the opportunity to look at is that they all follow the same framework to a great degree, but we find that they're all not a hundred percent consistent. Meaning that the Items (Sections) are all there, but the language is much different. So again, we highly recommend that you hire your own professional to help you evaluate this document. 

We suggest that you read this overview which comes from Wikipedia or watch our video below that gives a bit of history and a brief description of the 23 Items (sections) of the FDD. 
Assuming you listened in on the above, fun, right? Not so much. It's a handful for sure: 23 Items (sections). What we're going to do from here is in some of our next posts is we're going to go through and we're going to actually break out each Item (section). We're going to give our take on each Item (section) and give a little bit of commentary about it to help you evaluate that Item (section). 

We also have a great organizing questionnaire (just ask us for a copy) that we give out to our franchise candidates that really helps them put together their thoughts about an FDD as they evaluate different types of franchises. 

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 Author Bio


I’m Stacey Riska aka “Small Business Stacey”, your franchise placement specialist. I help aspiring business owners find the PERFECT franchise so they can get to the next level in life and business.
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Stacey Riska