People interested in franchising might well be interested to hear about the Kent Franchising Exhibition happening next month. It’s a show that does what it says on the tin - if you’re thinking of franchising and are in the area the show should give you some ideas.

The interesting thing for me is that this seems to go against a lot of the business advice you’ll get when you start up by yourself. A while back I tried my own business - I managed to start a newsletter operation just as the Internet was about to become popular and offer all the insights I was passing on - the difference being I was charging and the Internet wasn’t. You can imagine what happened. Nevertheless, all the advice available at the time - it would have been 1996 or so - was that you needed real passion. You needed to be more excited about your business than anything else in the world. You needed to eat, sleep and dream your business because no-one else was going to make it happen for you.

Compare and contrast this approach, then, to the idea of picking a business model off the shelf and dedicating yourself to it. You might think at first glance that the ‘go to a show and pick something’ approach is flawed, according to the business rules I was taught.

Until, that is, you get to the part where loads of businesses have worked out very nicely thanks as franchises whereas mine was dead in the water within 12 months. As the Americans say, go figure…

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