It’s About More Than Money – Prospects Give Feedback on Most Desirable Characteristics of Franchises
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
March 20, 2024 — While “low cost of entry” and “higher earnings potential” were ranked most important by individuals seeking business ownership, more individual and nuanced drivers appear below the surface.
In the February 2024 FranchiseInsights.com Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™, respondents were asked to rank eight franchise characteristics in order of importance to their ultimate selection, along with a “not important to me” option for each. The data presented are weighted averages of the responses ranked by individual respondents.
Control over working conditions – including “flexibility of work schedule” and “ability to work from home” as a pair were the two next most important characteristics.
While “extensive training and support” and “pandemic resilience” were tied in weighted average at 4.32, in the detailed chart below, which includes “not important to me” (unranked) responses, 24% said “pandemic resilience” was unimportant, almost four times as many as “extensive training and support” which only 6.3% deemed it “not important.”
Surprisingly, “well-known brand” was not important to 15.6% of respondents, who are open to emerging brands, or potentially more sensitive to the investment level required for the most established brands.
Since “low cost of entry” and “high earnings potential” were ranked highly by almost all respondents, and deemed “not important” by 7.3% and 5.2% respectively, it goes without saying that they are top considerations. But while that is useful for honing marketing messages, it means that they are less useful in determining information about what drives the individual decision process of prospects, and insights into their personas, as we first explored in March 2022.
Furthermore, though “ability to work from home” was ranked fourth in weighted average, almost 18% of respondents said that it was “not important” to them.
These divergences call for looking more deeply at relationships between the characteristics, to gain insight into segments of prospective buyers, which we will explore in the coming weeks.
FranchiseInsights.com compiles the monthly Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™ (SSI) of individuals who have recently inquired about businesses for sale.The most recent Startup Sentiment Index™ survey was conducted February 22-29, 2024. See excerpts from prior SSI™ surveys and subscribe to receive the Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™ monthly report when it is released
The Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™ is based on a monthly survey of individuals who have recently inquired about businesses or franchises for sale on the FranchiseVentures lead generation platform.
FranchiseVentures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
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Published on Wednesday, March 20th, 2024.