To be truthful – I have not seen the posts you are speaking about. I made my mind up many, many months ago to not participate in forums or blogs where people can post anonymously. My rationale for this is how can my company’s integrity and honesty be up for question – when the person posting is not under the same scrutiny?
However I can see how for someone doing their due diligence – that you would want answers.
We have three types of franchisees. Master Licensees, Firm Owners and Practice Owners.
Our Master Franchisees generally own a country or state. Their job is to recruit Firms and Practice Owners and help them be successful.
Firm Owners are sort of like Accountancy Firms. They employ Business Coaches inside their firm.
Practice Owners are sort of like independent consultants – often working from a home office.
Our early Practice franchises (some still in existence) allowed nominated operators – where multi-unit owner franchisees contracted or employed Business Coaches who were nominated operators of the franchise.
The number of franchises are reported to Entrepreneur once a year. The number of franchisees differs from the number of Business Coaches because many of our Firm Owners employ Business Coaches who are Nominated Operators of the franchise. In the case of the current Firm agreement – the license is counted as one franchise even though there could be 8 or more business coaches.
There are many benefits to an employee/ contractor model. It is easy to find employees/ contractors than business investors. Plus there are many great prospective coaches out there – who want to be part of a team rather than work from home or own their own business. However employees/ contractors are a lot more fluid than a franchisee. They move around (sometimes into another Firm in another State) or they move on. In fact one our nominated operators from Perth, Australia took our concept to Kenya, Africa. Another coach moved from Brazil to Canada (updated his address) and guess what – he disappeared from Brazil (temporarily) and showed up in Canada – although his business and coaches operated in Brazil. In our system – we close out licenses for many reasons. Sometimes exiting coaches are employees or team members of coaches. Sometimes the franchisee had to close out an old license and move to a new state or country.
From what my TEAM tells me – the data does not take this into account. It also doesn’t take into account that the main database on our website sometimes redirects to regional and firm websites and non-english websites host an entirely different database.
At the end of the day – here is what I can tell you. We report our numbers yearly. The franchising industry is highly regulated. We tell the truth.
If you really want to know about me, or my business – then please go to my coaches (www.actioncoach.tv) or better still our clients (www.actionspeakslouderthanwords.com) That is where you will find out about the culture of my company and its’ people.
All the best,
Brad Sugars