While vacations are great mental health breaks and allow you to get caught up with family and friends — when you’re in the midst of evaluating franchise opportunities, it helps to be mentally prepared for what happens when you let people know what you’re up to.
Although, many folks come back energized with great support from family and friends, I have also experienced the opposite. Franchise candidates who come back from holidays questioning their own ability to run a business were not prepared for the input from well meaning family or friends. For this reason, I have compiled a few tips for mental preparation:
- Keep your focus. Remember you are the one doing the evaluation and have likely already spent a good deal of time in the evaluation process.
- Realize that this time of preparation is not something anyone else has gone through so it would be hard for family/friends to know what you know.
- Knowing yourself is the key to a successful future in any franchise business, strengths, flatspots, financial wherewithal and acumen.
- When Uncle Bob starts talking about a neighbor that once owned a franchise and it failed, realize he means well in warning you to be careful, but every situation is unique and no one can truly know the circumstances behind a failure.
- While there are situations like deaths, divorces, lack of financial acumen that can contribute to failure, my years in franchising has shown that failures also occur due to unrealistic expectations. There are no shortcuts to success in life including this “homework,” you are now doing, especially when it comes to eventually talking to current franchisees and digesting financial information.
- While most family and friends are supportive, I have also come across candidates who returned disappointed in family and friends who were not supportive. Reality is not everyone is going to be supportive of your efforts. Human nature is sometimes a funny thing. Taking the step of becoming an entrepreneur is a big one and while many people dream of taking this step, most never do. Not all, but sometimes the very people who are not supportive, secretly desire to do what you are thinking about doing, but for whatever reason don’t feel empowered to do so.
- Fear is normal. If you have not experienced the emotional roller coaster by now, you may not be human. It will ebb and flow until you get enough information. Turn concerns into questions. Fear subsides with information that empowers you to make good decisions whether those decisions are to continue forward in your evaluation or move on from one concept to another. Realize that fear becomes much lower towards the end of an evaluation process, but never completely gone if you are human. It is partly what drives us to make things happen.
- Bottom Line: Should you have concerns that come up from good family conversations, write them down and turn them into questions. Get them answered by your franchise representative when you return. Make good solid decisions based on facts vs. preconceived notions.
Article By Jo Gonzalez, Your Franchise Success