Welcome to the How of Business with Henry Lopez and David Begin, the podcast that helps you start, run, and grow your small business. And now here are your hosts.

Welcome to this episode of The How of Business. This is Henry Lopez. And this is a shorter special topic

episode on the topic of franchising. Franchising is a popular choice for first-time business

owners in particular. And there are so many misconceptions and misunderstandings about franchising

that I thought it would be valid to revisit this topic. I'm going to start with some new content

or thoughts that I have on franchising, and then this episode will continue with a replay of an

episode I created back in middle of 2016, so quite a while back, episode 16, on this concept of what

I call the three critical franchising benefits.

If you want to receive more information about the How of Business, including links to the show

note pages, just text the word biz, B-I-Z to 31996. So let's get started with some of the common

misconceptions that I often hear or encounter when I work in my clients.

And the number one is certainly that there's this misconception that you can't fail if you have a franchise,

that a franchise assures you success.

And of course, that's simply not true.

While, of course, if we pick the right franchise and they're doing their job and they're providing us with the systems and the knowledge and the

training and the support that we need to be successful, then our probability for success is a lot

higher. That's why we go the franchising route. But everything is a unique

situation. Every location is different. Something that might work for one franchisee in one location,

may not work in another. And so you have to be very aware and go into it with eyes wide open

that you still have a very high probability of

failure depending on various factors. So there's no guarantee that just because it's a franchise,

you can't fail. Another misconception is that I will get all of the leads, that you'll get all of

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