You Will Lose Sleep if You DONT Ask These 17 Franchisor Questions

Are you looking at different franchise opportunities? If so, here are 17 questions you’ll want to make sure you ask the franchisor so that you don’t lose sleep.

Investing in a franchise is a big decision … and a big investment. No doubt about it. There are many questions you’ll likely want to ask a franchisor, but make sure these are on the top of your list. They’ll help you open up the conversation and get better answers that will help you make an informed decision. 

If you know our story (please feel free to ask), I wish we would have asked all these questions when interviewing our franchisor back when we were going through the research process.

17 Questions To Ask The Franchisor

Here are 17 questions you should ask a potential franchisor. These questions are intended as a starting point for your analysis, so do not look at them as a complete list.

1. What is happening in the marketplace? Is it growing? Shrinking? What is your strategy to be the leading brand? 

2. Who is the competition? Especially those operating in my local market. Is there room for another player?

3. What do the next 10 years look like for the industry? For your brand? What impact will that have on marketing? Operations?

4. Who is your customer at the end-user level? What is happening to this market? How can I find these customers to market to?

5. What makes you unique in the marketplace? What are you doing to differentiate yourself from the competition? Why would customers/clients choose to do business with your brand?

6. How are you planning to respond to the competitive threat posed by current competitors? Who are the potential competitors that may come into my area?

7. What major changes has the brand implemented recently, or in the past three years? What was the underlying reason for those changes? Is this part of an overall strategy?

8. Who are your major vendors? Do they give terms on initial inventory? What terms? How long have they partnered with you? What does the ordering process look like?

9. What are you doing to secure the best prices on products? Do you help franchisees secure relationships with other vendors? For example, insurance, office equipment, et cetera?

10. Is your franchise involved in any current litigation? If the franchisor has been involved in a bankruptcy, ask.

11. What differentiates your top performing franchisees from the bottom performing franchisees? If their franchisor has a significant number of franchise failures, ask about them. If the franchisor has been involved in a bankruptcy, ask.

12. What is your biggest franchise disaster? Why did it occur? What has been done to prevent a recurrence? What is the name of the franchisee involved?

13. What marketing and advertising support do you do on a national level? Regional? How do you support franchisees on a local level with marketing? Who is your agency? Why did you choose them?

14. What key performance indicators, KPIs, do you share with franchisees? In what way is the information shared?

15. How do you collect best practices and share them with franchisees in your system?

16. What support do you provide to franchisees that helps them build revenues during their first six to 12 months of operation?

17. What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in growing your franchise brand?