West Virginia Feature Articles

Dennis Hitzeman has had some legendary mentors in his life. First there was McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, who hired the 16-year-old Hitzeman as a crew member for his third location. Later, as a West Point Cadet, he played football for assistant coach Bill Parcells and studied under Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr.

What if there were a way to hire great, energetic franchisees who not only were excited about the brand, but also already knew it inside and out? Your next great franchise operators might be sitting right beside you at your next internal meeting.

Ella Avery-Smothers may have been a C-level student in high school, but she's far from average. This 63-year-old multi-unit owner, who operates seven Burger Kings in the Los Angeles area, pulled herself out of poverty as a child to become a player in the franchise restaurant industry. And she's just opened two El Pollo Locos, with two more under construction.

Over the past several years, we have spoken with business owners around the country who had decided they had reached the point of being ready to leave their businesses. However, no one was stepping up to provide them the exit results they wanted. These owners had spent all of their time aggressively working in their business, but had spent little time aggressively working on how they would eventually exit their business. They found themselves late in the game with few options to achieve their exit objectives. Simply put, they were too late.

Many franchisors have reached their limit on expanding into suburbia, but the imperative to grow remains strong. In response, an increasing number are training their sights on America's cities.The move to the suburbs has been a decades-long trend in the United States, and franchisors have followed suit. But more than half of the U.S. population live in the country's top 25 metropolitan areas, and nearly 80 percent live in the top 100 metro areas.Cities are complex, crowded places, running the gamut from blighted ghettos to luxury high-rises. Suburban commuters flood into them by the millions each day to work and shop, creating a vibrant marketplace. And the under-served inner cities are hungry for retail goods and services, jobs, and entrepreneurial opportunity, making them fertile ground for franchisors who take the time to learn, understand, and develop relationships with the people who live there.The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), founded in 1994 by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, studies inner cities with a focus on economic development. According to ICIC, "[T]he inner city retail market offers significant profit potential for retail companies now operating in the highly competitive, over-saturated suburban markets." According to an ICIC study, the country's inner cities contain:

It was like a gut punch for Charlie Marshall. In less than a year's time, the Spring-Green Lawn Care multi-unit franchisee went from paying $12 per bag for lawn fertilizer to more than $25 per bag. "That will make you look for ways to streamline and cut costs," says Marshall. To add insult to injury, gasoline prices were skyrocketing, making it even more expensive to fire up his seven trucks and dispatch crews to care for his customers' lawns each day.

All franchisors place a high priority on gaining new recruits and responding to contacts from prospective franchisees. But who's setting the pace on performance? Once again, Franchise UPDATE's mystery shoppers hit the phones--and the websites--checking out franchisors from coast to coast to see which were doing the very best work. The best and the brightest were recognized in the 10th annual STAR (Speaking To And Responding) Awards--from the three top national performers to the companies that excelled at fielding telephone contacts or quickly getting back to website leads.

This article from 2008 could almost be written today. Learn how the more things change, the more they stay the same (except for Covid, of course).

Franchise Update Media Group, the leading industry resource for franchise development, is a sponsor of the second annual Women's Franchise Network Reception, which will be held Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008 from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. at the offices of Davis Wright, Tremaine in Los Angeles. The topic for this year's event is "Show Me the Money" and focuses on financing options for franchisors in today's uncertain market.

Let there be no misunderstanding: financial performance representations (formerly referred to as "earnings claims" and referred to below as "FPRs") are powerful tools in the franchise sales process.

The current economic climate remains high in the minds of both state Senate candidates for District 14. Democrat Bob Williams and Republican Gary Howell are both vying for the seat that would represent Barbour, Mineral, Preston, Taylor and Tucker counties as well as part of Grant and Monongalia counties.

"As a brand, people know Denny's," says Doug Wong, Denny's director of franchise development at the iconic, 56-year-old American breakfast franchise. "But they don't know who we are today." That goes for customers as well as potential Denny's franchisees.

It started with a desperate phone call from a distraught daughter at her wit's end. Patricia Maisano was on the receiving end of that call. The woman on the other end of the phone was searching for assistance in caring for her elderly mother. At the time, Maisano was running a health care consulting business in Philadelphia. She was a registered nurse and well-versed in case management. And the phone call had a significant impact on her.

When we visited with Hank Huth last year, the franchising veteran was keeping busy overseeing his 23 Blockbuster Video locations and 7 Palm Beach Tan units. He had an eye on expanding his Palm Beach Tan portfolio and he did just that in 2007, adding 3 more and winning the company's 2007 Developer of the Year Award. But that's not all he's been busy developing.

Growing up with a father who owned a Burger King gave Will Bigham an early look into the back room operations of fast food franchising, laying the groundwork for his own career.

When Lino DeFeo bought a Sign-A-Rama franchise in West Palm Beach, Fla., he didn't know much about signs. That was about 15 years ago. DeFeo had sold his trucking business in Manhattan and moved to Florida with his wife Maria and their two young children to join a family business. But that didn't work out exactly as planned. "I got out before we totally killed each other," he says with a laugh.

Bill Dalton owned eight Grease Monkey franchises in the Seattle metro area. Today he owns one--a five-month-old, state-of-the-art facility in his home of Montgomery, Texas.

Franchise UPDATE recently sat in on a seminar for aspiring franchisees. One of about 150 such events held each year in the U.S. held by Francorp Consulting, this session was led by veteran industry consultant Don Boroian, who founded Francorp 31 years ago.

1987 was a good year for franchising. Up to then, franchising was young, brash, and not always professional. Franchises weren’t much concerned with history. They were built mostly by young entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity and grabbed it, looking forward, not backward. The first 30 years of modern business format franchising had the feeling of the Wild West (like the Internet of the last 10 years).

In the chronicles of franchising history, some names come immediately to mind - Ray Kroc, S. Truett Cathy, Dave Thomas. The names conjure up images of independent-minded entrepreneurs with the savvy, know-how, and vision to create successful business models replicable anywhere. As part of the celebration of Franchise UPDATE's 20th anniversary, we look back at some of these colorful, inspiring, and sometimes controversial characters.

In 2005, Mike Scruggs, Sr., was senior vice president of global operations at Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc. in Detroit. A year later, he was a Little Caesars franchisee operating two stores with his wife, Deb, and his son, Mike II, in Colorado Springs. By April 2007, he'd opened his fifth restaurant. Today he has plans for more, lots more!

The Little Caesars Pizza story is… well, quite a story. Founded by Mike and Marian Ilitch, first-generation Americans of Macedonian descent, the company is approaching its 50th anniversary. Still family owned and operated, Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc. has grown prodigiously since its first store opening in 1959 in Garden City, Mich.

Since 1653, when Izaak Walton published The Compleat Angler, "compleat" has come to mean many things beyond what Walton described as "a Discourse on Fish and Fishing." The dictionary tells us it means classic or quintessential. But compleat also implies mastery far beyond the basics, conjuring up words like visionary, leader, even master.

Vaughn Hayes, the Virginia area developer for Salad Creations, had an early exposure to franchising - and it was a missed opportunity.

Innovation has played a progressive role in franchising since the beginning. Over the years, there have been new spins and fresh angles on all kinds of products, services, and concepts. As if there were any doubt, consider the more than 300 new franchise concepts introduced last year alone, according to franchise research firm FRANdata.

In 2007, chances are there's a sign franchise near you--offering customers a wider array of choices than ever before, thanks to continuing technological advances, especially in communications and digital imaging.

Financial experts agree it’s a good idea to help existing and future franchisees find the best financing methods to launch or expand a franchise. While you may not be able to offer franchisees a financing package, it makes good business sense to provide as much practical information as possible concerning where to apply for and successfully land business loans.

Google can search the equivalent of a stack of paper 70 miles high and find any piece of information in that pile in less than half a second. And it's better information, more relevant information, than any other search engine. That's why people love it.

As more franchise brands push outward from their local or regional base seeking growth on the national stage, choosing the right city or designated market area (DMA) is always a critical factor in success.

Franchising is founded on the concept of replicating success at the unit level. But Mary Rogers is taking that premise one better: she's replicating success at the franchisor level.