Franchise Update Magazine Issue III, 2016 | Page 82

GROWING YOUR SYSTEM

Market
trends
Protecting the Model

Defining and defending franchising in 2016
BY DARRELL JOHNSON

W

e all get the calls: “What’s the
best franchise these days?”
How do you answer that?
Usually, the answer is a muddled, meandering set of comments. Before I get
into why we should find it easy to answer
that question and how to do so, I think it’s
important to know what the cost is of not
being able to answer that question. How
about the future vitality of the franchise
business model?
I think it is reasonable to associate a
significant portion of franchising’s inability
to answer that question with more than
30 state legislative initiatives, periodic
federal legislative efforts (two bills now
pending), countless legal proceedings,
regulatory attacks on many fronts, and
plenty of negative press. Most of this
came about because of the absence of a
common understanding of the business
model and a common way to assess its
strengths and weaknesses.
A necessary first step is to get a common understanding of the business model
solved. This is what the IFA is taking on
with its initiative to “change the narrative,” led by IFA Chair Aziz Hashim. That
is necessary, but no