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Search Results for: Home Instead

Is caring for the elderly a profitable business?

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article profiling an in-home elderly care franchisee. Home Instead and the other senior-care franchisees pay caregivers somewhere between $8 and $12 an hour and charge clients about twice that amount. In the highly competitive Chicago market, the Melingers charge clients $18 an hour, with a minimum of two or three hours a day, or $180 a day for 24-hour care. They also provide a “rise and shine” or “tuck in” service, for $200 to $280 a week. The Melingers declined to reveal just how lucrative their business is, but FranchiseHelp, a consulting firm in Elmsford, N.Y., provides some guidelines for similar businesses. In 2002, for example, a franchisee of Homewatch Caregivers in Denver, with 60 workers, took in gross revenues of $1,265,324 and paid out $1,141,578 in expenses that included royalties and the franchisee’s salary, leaving a profit of $123,746. Their isn’t inventory to deal with, which is very nice. But that time is otherwise spent on finding and hiring responsible people they trust enough to send into an elderly person’s home. The franchisee said almost 1/2 the people don’t even show up for the their interviews and many quit after a few days. Ugh! If you can maintain a steady staff, you can easily open a 2nd conierge style business, which we discussed perviously. I’m neutral on elderly care franchises right now because they are heavily commonditized business (the market controls the fee level, it’s hard to charge more than $18/hr with all the competition). I am also hesitant when so much depends on finding qualified low wage employees that must work independently (unlike a retail location where managers can monitor what you do).

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Franchisor Mentions

VERY OUT OF DATE.  Do a search instead.  This was manually updated March 21, 2006 Companies Mentioned in Posts (likely incomplete):Automotive 1-800 RADIATORS Oil Butler Lube N’ Go On-Site-Lube Business & Home Services 1-800-WATER-DAMAGE Bartercard Garagetek Help-U-Sell Home Instead Homewatch Caregivers My Girl Friday PropertyGuys.com Sears Carpet & Upholstery Tax Centers of America Cleaning & Maintenance none Computer & Internet (some are listed in “Retail”) Screenz Food and Restaurant Arby’s Auntie Anne’s Blimpies Cheeburger Cheeburger Chipotle Dippin’ Dots Dream Dinners Doc Green’s Gourmet Salad Dominic’s of New York The Dugout Durango Grill Fazoli’s Fire of Brazil Fogo de Chao Goldstar Chili Jamba Juice Jerq’zine Krispy Kream Lenny’s Sub Shops Mauwi Wauwi Original Hamburger Stand Panaderia Taza Papa John’s Pizza Factory Pizza Patron Pretzel Time Quiznos Red Rock Chili San Francisco Soup Co Shane’s Rib Shack Skyline Chili Smoothie King Smotthie Planet Soup Nazi Steak-out Subway Submarina Sub Station II Super Suppers The Soup Box Supercuts Suzanne’s Kitchen We’re Rolling Pretzel Company Wetzel’s Pretzels Z Pizza Zoup! Fresh Soup Co (List all sub franchises) Health & Fitness Curves Liberty Fitness Home Building & Repair Services See “Business and Home Services” above Personnel & Staffing none Pet Retail and Services Camp Bow Wow Doody Calls The Pet Pantry Wag My Tail Interquest Detection Canines Pets Are Inn Retail Franchises Ace Hardware AuctionDrop Battery Plus Best Cuts GNC Educational Outfitters Fantastic Sams Fastframe Foot Solutions Friendly Computers Geeks on Call GNC Hair Cuttery Herman’s World of Sports Imagine This Sold Orbit Drop Play It Again Sports QuikDrop Roosters Men’s Grooming Centers Screenz Snips Its Sports Clips Stone Mountain Carpet Mill Tom’s Foods We the People Categories: eBay drop offs (generally) Hair Travel & Hotel none Industry Lists & Research 2004 Same Store Sales Growth of QSRs (quick service restaurants) Royalty and Advertising …

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Applebee’s Franchisee Who Pushed for Change

I enjoyed this short discussion with Zane Tankel, a 34-unit Applebee’s franchisee in New York. He pushed corporate for changes such as removing the baggy shirt and tie requirement (he says “who wants to look at girls behind the bar all buttoned up?”). His times square location is the chain’s highest revenue unit at $13.5 million last year. Here’s an example insightful answer: Q. What have you learned about doing business in those neighborhoods? A. When we open a restaurant and are interviewing, we will have guys show up with their pants hanging below their crotch, their hat on sideways, answering our questions antagonistically. Our recruiters will say to them, ‘If you’re here for a job, go home and get dressed like you’re applying for a job and then come back.’ Many will go home, change and come back. I give Applebee’s credit for not axing him from the system, and instead learning to work with him.

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To Franchise or Not to Franchise?

Performance differences between corporate-owned and franchised hotels are slim to none, according to new research. Leah Sipher-Mann h Sipher-Mann writes in Michigan in the News that, for a company pondering the question, “To franchise or not to franchise?” new research from Michigan’s Ross School of Business suggests that performance differences between corporate-owned and franchised outlets, when chosen right, could be slim to none. Ross Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy Francine Lafontaine and colleagues Renáta Kosová of Cornell University and Rozenn Perrigot of University of Rennes, studied the effect of vertical integration on the performance of individual hotels. They found that a company’s decision whether to franchise or own a particular hotel has little effect on yield (average price) or performance. Lafontaine and her team studied an unnamed multi-chain hotel company that has both franchised and corporate-owned hotels under each of its several brands, running the gamut from budget to luxury. They collected data to determine whether organizational form for each hotel has an effect on any of three outcomes: monthly revenues per available room (i.e., what the industry calls “RevPar”), price or yield (average room rate per month), and monthly occupancy rate. Across all three variables, Lafontaine and her colleagues found that franchising per se does not have a statistically significant effect. “We conclude that the firm chooses which outlets to franchise and which to own in a way that yields no differences in pricing or performance, in the end, between the two sets of hotels,” the authors state. “This result is important as it suggests that when firms can choose, they indeed adjust organizational form in such a way that there are no real differences in outcomes.” “This does not mean that franchising and company operations do not have different incentive effects, because they do,” says …

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Franchise Alternative

Life is Good has another simpler method of selling its t-shirts to the public instead of using corporate owned or franchised storefronts (Inc. magazine): The ubiquity of its products notwithstanding, Life Is Good doesn’t want to be Starbucks. The Jacobses detest the homogenization of retail that is turning downtowns into Stepford zones and possess an abiding affection for the mom-and-pops that have always been their backbone. Rather than Gap-ify, they plan to open no more than five to 10 corporate stores in total. But without a glut of company stores, Life Is Good had no widespread physical showcase for its eclectic product line, which fills a 136-page catalog and includes tire covers, picture frames, and dog toys. Franchising would send the iconoclastic Jacobses down cookie-cutter lane and entail the assumption of legal liabilities; in addition franchisees couldn’t benefit from corporate advertising, given that Life Is Good doesn’t do any. So the brothers hit upon an intriguing alternative: Genuine Neighborhood Shoppes. A GNS is an independently owned and operated business that sells Life Is Good products and nothing else. GNS owners get some signage, a 10 percent discount on merchandise, a few exclusive products, and as much or as little help setting up stores as they desire. They pay no franchise fees, but they do agree to propagate the Life Is Good philanthropy model (more on that later) in their communities. The company expects to eventually have 300 such stores; there are now 40, most run by retailers who have a history with the company or by former or current Life Is Good employees. So, for example, Shannon and Michael Bourassa and Shannon’s brother Sean Patel recently opened Blue Monkey Trading Co., a GNS in Tucson. The Bourassas are steeped in Life Is Good culture–Michael has worked there for five …

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Example of a Clever Seasonal Menu

As you probably know, I’m positive on soup franchises. The Soup Box, an independent soup restaurant, supplements their summer months with Italian ice (gelato) made from scratch with natural fruits and juices. They coined the summer months storefront name as the “The Ice box” instead of “The Soup Box”. It provides a selecton of 12 hot homemade soups in the winter, and 6 in the summer when they make the Italian ice. Menus are posted daily on the Internet as well. It’s a small location, but I thought the idea was clever enough to mention as an example of maximizing the resources and opportunities. Does your restaurant franchise have a seasonal offering? I know the franchisee has little or no control over what they can sell, but it should be an evaluation point on hedging sales year-round.  When a customer wants to get into the Christmas spirit, why wouldn’t they (subconsciously) gravitate towards the fun, encouraging store that has their seasonal favorite flavors? Seasonal menus tend to do quite well. Ever have the Gingerbread Latte at Starbucks? Yum! The seasonal menu builds repeat customer business to predictably provide new selections that build on the goodwill and joy of the season. Good reviews for The Soup Box. The business also provides a good example of the flexibility a non-franchised store has over their business, compared to those locked in very strict franchise agreements that usually prevent any deviation from the standard offering.

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