The Right Franchise for You

Escape the 9 to 5, Generate Wealth, & Live Life on your Terms

Faizun Kamal

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642798692
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Franchises
• Index: Business

The Right Franchise for You helps entrepreneurs get started on a path to a fulfilling and lucrative career as a franchise owner.

In The Right Franchise for You, Faizun Kamal, renowned franchise coach and former corporate executive, guides entrepreneurs through her proven process of researching and buying a future franchise. The Right Franchise for You exponentially increases the probability of success. For those who are serious about finding a better career path, then by the end of The Right Franchise for You entrepreneurs will:

• Learn the proven process to find the best franchise
• Uncover the pitfalls to avoid making a costly mistake
• Determine the best way to fund a franchise
• Discover the key to making a franchise search a successful one

Living the American Dream… or Nightmare?

“People are literally dying for a paycheck.”

– Jeffrey Pfeffer

Through the distant recesses of her sleep-filled mind, Sophia hears bells tinkling. Insistently. She finally opens her eyes. It’s four a.m., and the alarm is blaring. Turning it off, she lies in bed looking up at the ceiling. All is quiet. Jonathan is still asleep and won’t be up for another hour or so. Her mind immediately revs up. She starts thinking about the day ahead. What meetings does she have? What deadlines does she have to meet? A lifetime of being in the corporate world had wired her this way. Then she remembers…

It’s Sunday. She let’s out a small sigh of relief. She has a reprieve for at least one more day before she’s back in the office again. As the thought occurs, the familiar deflated feeling pools in the pit of her stomach.

Downstairs, she makes a pot of milk oolong tea. As the water boils and fills the air with the delicate fragrance, Sophia looks out onto the deck. The red cardinal, her very own guardian angel, is sitting on the old oak tree. She smiles involuntarily. She first noticed the little red bird three months ago when Anne, her best friend at work, had gotten laid off. Anne’s layoff had impacted her deeply. This wasn’t the first time that a colleague and friend had been let go by her employer. She couldn’t help but wonder when she would be on the chopping block.

For a moment, Sophia feels paralyzed, panicking. If she gets laid off like Anne, she does not know what she will do. Sipping her steaming, milky tea, a deep sense of exhaustion and emptiness comes over her. Her mind wanders to the situation in her office.

It has been three months since Anne was let go. The company had been going through wave after wave of layoffs. At the office, she hears various euphemisms to describe what is happening: reorganizing, trimming the fat, restructuring. Whatever the term being used, the end result is always the same. Numerous colleagues had left over the past year. When she walks down the hallway at work, she notices more and more dark and empty offices. With her colleagues, she feels that the energy is changed. There is a palpable sense of foreboding and unease among everyone. No one speaks openly about what is happening, but everyone feels the air of uncertainty and thinks about it all the time.

Every Monday, Sophia starts the week with dread wondering if this will be her last week at work. Every Friday, she goes home oddly relieved that she still has a job. While she no longer loves what she does, she is scared of getting laid off. She has been with her company for almost ten years. She is good at what she does; she just does not love it. With each year that goes by, she moves up the proverbial corporate ladder. She makes very good money – money that enables them to live in a sought-after neighborhood, send their two daughters to private schools, and take nice vacations to exotic locales each year.

As the Vice President of Marketing Strategy, she has a fancy title and a corner office. She has a small team that reports to her. And as the saying goes: when you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other! While she has these senior management perks, her work also brings with it an ever-increasing list of headaches. With each additional year in the company, Sophia is given more and more responsibilities without the accompanying support or resources. She is overworked and feels under-appreciated. As the company “tightened its belt” and laid off expensive management staff, they also decreased the bonus payouts each year to continue to “stay lean and competitive.” So, while her responsibilities have increased, there has not been a corresponding increase in her paycheck. With each year that passes, Sophia feels the weight at work get progressively heavier and heavier.

After her best friend’s layoff, these thoughts are ever-present in her mind. She cannot shake off an impending sense of doom, like a ticking time bomb that mocks her as if to say, “You’re next in line!”

More than once, Sophia has talked to her husband about leaving her job, but they will lose the health insurance, the company match into her retirement account, the (shrinking) yearly bonus. With the passage of time, the golden handcuffs around her wrists grow ever tighter…

Over the past ten years, she feels that she has constantly had to choose between work and her family. When she first started at the company, she was forty-one years old. She and Jonathan had been married for a few years. A year later, she had Emma. Her pregnancy was tough, fraught with unknowns. Her doctor labeled her “high risk” because of her age. Emma came into this world through an emergency c-section. Sophia spent the next ten days in the hospital. Twenty-seven days after that, she was back at work in her corner office.

As her mind wanders into the past, her eyes tear up. To date, the biggest regret of her life is that she has almost completely missed the first year of Emma’s life. Other than a few home videos and pictures that she and her husband had taken, she doesn’t really have a lot of memories of Emma’s first year of life. At fifty-one days old, Emma started daycare. Sophia dropped her off before dawn to head straight to work and picked her up around seven p.m. before returning home. She barely spent any time with her daughter during her waking hours. Looking back at the time, she remembers how she wondered if her daughter even knew who her mother was.

As Sophia entered into an ever-increasing cycle of stress at work with impossible deadlines and multiple bosses with conflicting agendas, she had her second daughter, Isabelle. She tried to be more present in her life, but always felt that she never quite hit the mark with either of them.

As the years went on, Sophia continued to miss milestone events with both of her daughters: Emma’s first basketball game, Isabelle’s school performance at Thanksgiving, and so many others that she has now lost track of… or has she just put it out of her mind to assuage the guilt? The guilt is a dull, dead weight that feels like a hard stone in her chest.

In moments of brutal honesty, she feels that her job has become the proverbial “albatross around her neck.” She needs it to pay the mortgage and all the bills, yet she also feels her soul dying a little bit every single day. Once again the panic rises up like a wave inside her. She feels trapped, her back up against the wall. She has given this job everything but knows that she is just a number on the company’s balance sheet. When the day comes that they deem her “too expensive” to keep around, she too will be let go, just like Anne and all the others before her.

As dawn breaks and wisps of pink light up the morning sky, Sophia starts to cry silently. This job has not just robbed her of precious family moments that she will never get back; it has also robbed her of her health. Four years into her job, she is diagnosed with high blood pressure and diabetes. At every health checkup, her doctor advises her to reduce her stress. “Take a yoga class,” says her doctor. She silently nods her head, knowing exactly what she needs to do to reduce her stress – and it isn’t yoga! “It’s ironic,” she thinks. “The job I have held on to in order to continue to have health insurance for myself and my family is the same job that has stolen my health from me!”

Sipping her tea, she dries her cheeks and looks out over the deck. Cocking its little head, the red cardinal looks intently back at her before flying off. Putting down her cup, she sits up straight, something welling up inside her. “I will not continue to live my life like this. Not anymore. I need more, want more. There must be something else I can do! I’m well-educated, have managed large teams, and solve problems everyday! I cannot stomach the thought of another eight years with the company, assuming of course that they don’t lay me off first! I need more flexibility in my life so I can finally be with my girls and sit down to dinner with my husband without checking my phone fifteen times. I want to make as much money as I now do and more… What can I do?”

Questions swirl in Sophia’s head, and then she remembers. After getting laid off, her friend Anne had attended an event for job seekers and professionals in career transition. The keynote speaker was a franchise expert, a woman who had talked passionately about her own experiences as a corporate executive. After getting laid off by her employer, the franchise expert talked about being a corporate refugee and searching for a career option that allowed her all the things she had craved for years but had not been able to achieve in the corporate world: financial freedom, time flexibility, work/ life balance, personal fulfilment. She had finally found her ideal career and life when she found the world of franchises.

Franchises!?

After the workshop, Anne had gone up to talk to the speaker because her story had resonated so intimately with hers. When Anne told Sophia about the conversation, she heard the excitement in Anne’s voice. She had not heard that in the years that they had worked together. Anne had already set up an appointment with her. “I think I will do the same! I want to find out more about if a franchise makes sense for me and my family!” thought Sophia excitedly.

As she makes up her mind to speak with the franchise expert, more questions pop into her mind. “What franchise is right for me? What skills do I need as a franchisee? Will my skillset be a fit? How much money can I make? What if it doesn’t work out? Will I have to work at it full-time and for how many years? Will I have any flexibility at all? How will I know that the franchise I choose is the right one for me?”

Opening her laptop, she googles “franchises for corporate executives” and the franchise expert’s name. Up pops the search results and the speaker’s book on the very topic of how to find the right franchise! As she reads the book description, Sophia’s excitement grows. The book talks about exactly the questions she has in her mind!

Sophia hits the purchase button. While waiting to receive the book in the mail, she has access to the first chapter online and begins reading. Who is this author, this woman, who seems to know her journey and her pain so intimately? It is almost as though the book is written just for her.

Why Franchising Made Sense (for Sophia and Anne)

As you may have guessed by now, Sophia was a client of mine. As she tells her story, she found me through her best friend, Anne, another client. Both Sophia and Anne are now franchisees in two of the most reputable and well-known franchise brands in the country. Their lives now, compared to when they were corporate executives, could not be any more different.

As professional women, they spent decades of their lives dedicated to producing the best work for their employers. In the process, they sacrificed much. When the pain of the status quo became too great, they finally made the decision to define success on their own terms, achieved it by their own rules and built full lives that they are now proud to live. As franchise business owners, they have the control over their lives that they were missing as employees.

Climbing the corporate ladder is always hard, but it is especially tricky for women. Often, they are considered unambitious compared to male peers, because though they work, they are still the primary care-takers of their families. Some may have to leave the office at 5pm to pick up children from daycare, others cannot attend 7pm meetings because they don’t have child-care. Many cannot break away from home for overnight work trips. And for women who took time off to raise their kids, it becomes even more challenging to get back in the workforce. All of these realities chop away at a woman’s opportunity for success in the corporate world.

This is why so many ambitious women are opting out of Corporate America and choosing to go the franchise route. Investing in a franchise becomes a very effective, and ultimately very fulfilling way to brave the workforce–but this time, on their own terms and not their employer’s.

Owning a franchise is a great option for women who want to work and earn income, but cannot put in the hours that traditional corporate jobs demand. Business ownership gives women the flexibility to grow at their own pace, while working hours that fit with their personal responsibilities.

So, if you are a professional woman who is exhausted of struggling through a corporate career and wants a job that offers lucrative incomes and work-life balance, there may be a franchise out there for you!

Every female client of mine cited flexibility as one of their top reasons for considering a franchise. Having been employees all their lives and intimately understanding the limitations of working for someone else, they were eager to finally find work that they truly had control over. By becoming their own boss, many women feel that they become more productive professionally and more fulfilled personally in their family lives.

Into the Looking Glass

I shared Sophia’s story with you because it is the story of so many others! In our country, I believe we are in the midst of a huge silent social epidemic. Thousands of well-qualified and well-educated professionals, both women and men, feel disenfranchised in their careers and their jobs. They feel like they are living life at half measure. There is little to no joy in their professional lives. Their job is not a fit with what they are good at. Every day at the office is soul-crushing. They desperately want to do something different, something that “fits” who they are. They feel stuck because they don’t know what “it” is or where to begin to find it.

As you read about Sophia, does something stir inside you? Does it bring up similar feelings that you have had for years that you have pushed aside? Can you almost feel the unwanted weight of your frustrations buried beneath your everyday thoughts? Had you suspected that unpacking your frustrations could change your life and the lives of others? If you have picked up this book and have read this far, then I suspect your answer is a resounding “Yes!”

Did you find parallels of your own life in Sophia’s story? If so, read on.

My own story is very similar to Sophia’s and, maybe, yours as well.

Coloring Outside the Lines

“Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?”

– Amelia Earhart

Charting an Unconventional Path

“You have to be odd to be number one,” said Dr Seuss. For the majority of my life, I was always the “odd one” out but never felt like number one.

In 1980, growing up in Nigeria as an expat, I stuck out like a sore thumb. In a school of hundreds, I was the only kid with straight hair and Asian features. Years later, in a Bangladesh high school filled with popular kids, I wasn’t particularly cool. This trend of never really “fitting in” would continue through the years.

After graduating with a dual degree in women’s studies and environmental studies from college, I began working at the World Bank in Bangladesh. As one of the youngest bank employees, I traveled around the region, meeting with villagers to assess the efficacy of bank-funded projects. From there, I then went on to work with the Swiss and Canadian Development Agencies for a couple more years. I liked the work, but again, it felt like I was “out of place.” As I progressed through my career, I would create additional responsibilities that were not in my job description. In every job I held, I seemed to always be looking for something more.

For the next decade, I would continue to “color outside the lines” and create an unconventional career path as I searched for my calling.

After graduating with a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Johns Hopkins University, I began working for an international development organization. It was work with heart providing people in developing countries with resources to improve their lives. I spent several years there implementing the organization’s eighteen-month strategic planning process between headquarters (U.S.) and its three regional offices (India, Guatemala, Burkina Faso). While I enjoyed the work and learned new skills, I continued to wonder whether this was my path.

After a few years there, I went on to work for another non-profit organization that provided healthcare training in developing countries. I spent the next five years there establishing and managing a $22 million country portfolio across Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. I traveled extensively, hiring and building teams, and setting up program offices across these regions.

While working there, I had slowly started to get an inkling of w...