Guide To Buying Another Franchise: Evaluate the Culture of the Brand

The choice to invest in a franchise is almost always accompanied by some financial goals, but the business performance of a brand cannot be the only thing you evaluate when you’re researching your next investment. Whether you’re focused on building wealth or working to create a new opportunity that better aligns with your values and goals, culture should be a consideration alongside any systems, training or support you’re evaluating.

1851 Franchise spoke with Ron Holt, founder of Pink Zebra Moving, and Rachel Moehl, a franchisee with Wine & Design, for some insights on finding the franchise brand with a culture that’s right for you.

“We are a franchise brand, which means systems and processes are super important,” said Holt. “But when you have a big dream like we do here at Pink Zebra Moving, then you have to take culture seriously since just executing a task isn't the same as knowing why you should care about executing a task.”

“I really think you should love what you’re buying. There’s something positive to find in everything, and that’s a gut check you have to do,” Moehl said. “You have to have love for [the business], even if you’re thinking financially. There will be ups and downs in any business, and you have to have something to fall back on.”

For Moehl, culture is an especially important part of the business. In an art franchise, she needs to be flexible, person-focused and interested in the “warm and fuzzy” side of things. After years spent in corporate roles where she consistently “felt like a square peg in a round hole,” Moehl made the decision to go out on her own. By starting a business with a brand that she aligned with, she knew she would be working alongside people with similar values. She would also be able to build her own subculture at the unit level. There was a clear alignment, and she continues to be fulfilled by franchise ownership with her brand.

How To Find Your Perfect Fit

While there are some clear-cut cultural questions to consider when evaluating a brand, Moehl said a lot of the process can come back to a gut feeling.

“My first conversation with the CEO was the most casual, human conversation,” she said. “She knew my financials from the paperwork, so we talked about whether my personality was right. She knew I was a people person. I was coming at the business from being such a passionate consumer of the paint-and-sip business, and when I opened my own, I wanted to fix the problems I was seeing.”

Comparing something like a Wine & Design franchise, which encourages personalization and connection each day, with something like Dunkin’, a huge franchise system with clear processes and prescriptive recipes to ensure consistency across units, reveals why the culture evaluation process is so important.

Investors who are looking to sign a multi-unit franchise agreement and quickly scale to grow their portfolios are often less interested in the “warm and fuzzy” cultural aspects of a brand. For growth-focused entrepreneurs, a culture of efficiency, transparency and drive is important. For franchisees looking to go out on their own in search of more personal and professional fulfillment, a culture of connection, flexibility and support is important.

This is not to say that investors cannot focus on the personal side of their businesses or that passion-driven entrepreneurs cannot find great financial success, but it is often pretty easy to tell when goals or priorities just don’t align.

Asking the franchisor about the onboarding and start-up process can be a great way to gauge the brand’s cultural priorities by coming to better understand the steps the leadership sees as essential before a franchisee is considered “ready to go.”

“Our brand's slogan is ‘We make moving fun.’ We take this statement seriously across our franchise network … [and] start every franchisee off the same way. They must graduate from our Customer Experience University, which is a six-week-long curriculum full of books, podcasts, practical exams and zany experiments,” Holt said. “We follow this up with a customer experience boot camp on the ground during the first week of operations. Daily customer experience tips are delivered every day at noon, and monthly customer experience webinars occur across the network as well. We engage with our franchisees as much as possible so that everyone understands the ‘why’ behind our brand.” 

Finding a Balance for Long-Term Satisfaction

Moehl described this balance between culture and financial goals as a sliding scale of sorts. It’s rare that an entrepreneur is entirely dedicated to a warm and fuzzy feeling or an all-business, “get it done” model, but many will fall somewhere on that spectrum. When you’re realistic about where you stand and what is most important to you, you can easily compare your priorities with the franchisor’s to identify your ideal opportunity.

“We ask our candidates to tell us why they want to be a franchisee in our network. Some people say the obvious things, like ‘make more money’ or ‘find happiness,’” Holt said. “Neither of those responses are wrong, but we require every franchise candidate to take their role of industry disruptor seriously. The goal of creating a new category within the local moving industry has to be our franchise candidate's number one reason for wanting to join our network. We simply won't award development to anyone who wants to join the brand for another reason. Discovery goes both ways in franchising. We can't expect franchisees to help the brand chase a dream if they don't agree on the dream in the first place.”

“I think most entrepreneurs would say that about 90% of decision-making is gut-related. You’ll have a visceral reaction when something just doesn’t feel right,” Moehl said. “Going the franchise route, you know you have the benefits of a tried and true system. That’s all very important upfront, but there's a lot of self-assessment involved, too. That’s a really important question: Where’s your heart? What do you love?”

Every great franchisee had help buying a franchise. Want to learn more about how 1851 helps franchisees find the right franchise opportunity? Visit www.1851growthclub.com and start your journey.