• Pharmacy franchise industry snapshot
• Sponsoring little league baseball teams can be a cost-efficient marketing strategy
• Take-n-bake pizza (Papa Murphy focused)
• An MRI franchisee that I know did not have this kind of success with his recruiting business (he recently closed it down when he couldn’t take the cash drain anymore).
• Aaron Rents same-store sales up 6.9%
• GNC - Again, company owned store have higher sales than franchised stores - sales growth of 11.7% for company-owned stores and 7.0% for franchise. Some franchises have higher franchisee sales rates, such as Denny’s where company unit same-store sales increased 4.2% and franchised unit same-store sales increased 4.7%, and Panera where September same-store sales grew 5.2 percent in company-owned stores and 6.2 percent in franchise-operated stores
• Independent businesses may freely copy a franchisee’s best ideas:

Seafood restaurant owner - “We’ve had a decent to-go business, but nowhere to put the to-go orders,” Chase said. “It was a 30-minute to two-hour wait in the summer. It was hard to get a space to sit.”

As she pondered solutions, she called Outback Steakhouse, who took her order, asked for details on her car and told her to park in a specialized location. Once she did, a camera notified wait staff to walk out with her order and take her money. It was effortless.
Inspiration struck the seafood restaurant owner, and it smelled like beef. “I sat there and laughed,” she said. “I thought, ‘This is my answer. What am I thinking?’ So it just went from there, and we fine-tuned it from there.”

Instituting the same to-go program as the 915-restaurant chain, Adams unknotted the bar’s tangled crowd flow. Take-out orders swelled from a few dozen to 130-170 orders during season.

• Recent Same-Store Sales Rundown
• Same-store sales roundup
• 2006 First Quarter - Yummy Same Store Sales Increase
• Same-Store sales report
• Papa John’s franchisees average $705K in annual sales?