Franchising is an adaptive business model. Find an appealing economic sector where branding can be a growth factor and you’ll likely see franchising move in. I’m going to put a bunch of trends together here and see if anything can be connected to the future of franchising. To do that we need to look at […]
Private equity (PE) funds awash in capital face a growing need to put large amounts of money to work. Despite the strong pace of investment since 2014, PE dry powder, or uncalled capital, has been on the rise since 2012 and hit a record high of $2 trillion in December 2018 across all fund types. […]
Building a multi-unit future While some franchisors have owner-operator models, most would like to attract more multi-unit operators (MUOs). Let’s look more deeply at MUOs. How do MUOs look demographically? What common underlying characteristics do they have that can be used to identify the prospects who will become the MUOs of tomorrow? I’ll start with […]
As we head toward 2019 how should we describe today’s multi-unit (MU) and multi-brand (MB) operators? I suspect the answer to that question is about to change. Let’s look at what’s happening to this very important part of the franchise business model and see if we can understand what it means for the future. MU […]
It is increasingly clear that we are near the end of the current economic expansion. While it hasn’t been a robust period, it has been a persistently improving one–and the second-longest growth period in modern U.S. history. What comes next? We have two sets of franchise-related insights into the economic period we’re likely heading into […]