Biz Monday: The power of franchises

The former employee of Nino's Italian Restaurants was looking at franchise possibilities while visiting with relatives in North Carolina and didn't see anything he liked until he walked into a Bear Rock.

"I liked what I saw," Firrincielli said. "There was an instant feeling, 'This is what I'm looking for, this would work in Fort Myers.'"

He and his partner, Lou Iamarino, opened the sandwich shop here in October and now they're part of the franchising industry: one that has more than $500 billion in payroll nationwide, and represents 9.5 percent of the country's private sector economy.

As the housing market crash causes tremors in the larger Southwest Florida economy, there's a lot more interest in franchises from people looking to get into business for themselves, said Suzanne Specht, assistant director of the Small Business Development Center at Florida Gulf Coast University.

I'm seeing it a lot more in the people I'm counseling, probably because it's a scary environment and they want to see more in place," she said. "It's a strange market out there ... That's why they usually purchase a franchise.''

But Specht cautions clients to be wary. "I like to see if they've already done some of their market research: investigating other franchises, talking to other franchise owners."

The franchise agreement can be an inch thick and full of legal language that the franchisee doesn't necessarily understand, she said. "I really recommend they talk to a franchise attorney. They need someone on board who has looked at franchises before. They really need to get a hold on what's required of them on a monthly basis. Are they locked in to a supplier, for example?"

Specht recommends that would-be franchisees check out resources such as Entrepreneur magazine's Web site for information and also the U.S. Small Business Administration's franchiseregistry.com for information on whether a particular company is eligible for a federal small-business loan.

For some, the franchise turns into a longtime career.

"I will be open seven years in May," sid Denise Frost, 54, who owns the Curves For Women exercise franchise in North Fort Myers. "It's an awesome business. I just love exercise and I went to the Curves in Cape Coral. I'd just moved here eight or 10 months before and there was no gym at all out here. I liked the concept, worked out for a couple of months and decided what I wanted to do."

Terry Hill, spokesman for the Washington-based International Franchise Association, said franchisees should look more at the business itself and less at whether a particular franchise has grown rapidly. "Just because a company has a lot of franchises doesn't mean it's a solid business."

Mainly, he said, franchises are a way of adapting to a niche in the economy. "If there's something that's a service people want, the franchise model seems able to adapt to it."

For example, Hill said, there's a lot of demand for fitness places like Curves as baby boomers try to stay in shape.

Another hot area these days is the tutoring business, with companies that help children in fields such as math, computers and languages, he said. "I think a lot of it is driven by two-income parents wanting to give their kids a jump on education. They're not home a lot and they need somebody to do it."

One familiar name in Lee County restaurants announced last week that it is going into the franchise business. Bradenton-based First Watch is selling franchises in 35 states for the breakfast-oriented chain that started in 1983.

Some franchises are tailored to the specific conditions in a geographic area.

Joe McKenna, for example, started Orlando-based SKYShades in 2004 because Florida's sometimes brutal heat and sudden thunderstorms made it a good place to sell the company's colorful, high-tech shade structures.

"It was something I'd worked on for years of writing business plans, working out the details of how I was going to start up this business," he said. "I recruited distributors, and midway of last year started a full-fledged franchise operation."

Dale Campion, 52, became the Estero-based SKYShades franchisee for Southwest Florida two months ago but not before doing a lot of research. His territory stretches from Sarasota to Key West.

Campion, who worked for 30 years in corporate sales marketing and management, hired a business broker and found "there was nobody even close" in design and marketing to SKYShades.

He also liked the involvement of golf legend Greg Norman, a co-founder and director in the company.

But not everyone likes the franchise experience.

"I would not open another franchise again," said Jay Connors, who ran a Carvel ice cream store in New Jersey for 20 years before moving to Lee County, where he works for Crystek, a consumer electronics company.

With a franchise, he said, "The company gets all of the money and you do all of the work."

Besides, Connors said, "I was going in at 9 a.m. and getting home at 11 p.m. for weeks at a clip."

Firrincielli said he and Iamarino have spent long hours at the Bear Rock, but that it's been worth it. "My partner and I, one of us is always here. I think it's good for the customers to see Nick or Lou on a consistent basis."

There's no substitute for being there and seeing what customers really want, he said. "A perfect example is that we serve a Reuben sandwich. It's proportioned, laid out as the company says. But the feedback was that the Reuben just wasn't cutting it due to the amount of meat on it."

So, Firrincielli said, "We didn't let that go more than five days. We put more than 50 percent more meat on that particular sandwich, rather than being something people brought up as an issue, now we're getting comments that it's one of the best sandwiches around. Even if we're not making as much money on that sandwich, that's not as important."

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