Is franchising really worth it ?
Time and time again, I hear about people going into franchising. Time and time again people ask me to buy a franchise. It’s true that in the past few years franchising has really taken off, business start up’s in general tend in increase in time’s of economic downturn as people who are laid off simply can’t get a job so go it alone.
Franchising ‘claims’ to offer that needed helping hand into the scary scary world of business, you buy into a brand, they help you set up, you pay them a fee and an ongoing % and we are all millionaires. Easy right ? No actually, 2 out of 3 new start ups go to the wall within the first 18 months and franchises are certainly not exempt from these statistics.
If you are thinking of buying a franchise, you need to ask yourself one simple (double barreled) question.
Is it worth it & could I do it cheaper and better myself ?
Jim’s mowing service is case and point of what I am talking about here. For £15,000 and around 7 – 12% of your annual takings, Jim will essentially teach you how to cut grass. Worth while I reckon if that includes the training, the van, the trailer, the mowers and the cutters…………. eh no. For £15,000 Jim will teach you how to cut grass and build a business, you still have to buy the rest of the kit yourself. (more…)
The great eBay rip off
It has been a while since I sold anything on eBay and I was discussing it last week with my brother. Did you know they now charge 10% of the final price plus the listing fee’s ? He asked. I thought, no that can’t be right.
It appear’s he was absolutely right.
Here is a breakdown of the closing fee’s (and don’t forget you have to pay to list the damn thing as well)
Final Selling Price : Final Value Fee
| £0.01 and above
|
10.0% of the amount of the winning bid, up to a maximum Final Value Fee of £40.00 |
and for business users (more…)
Is the reception area in a budget hotel really necessary ?
My business is built around the hotel industry so I spend my days meeting with general managers and hotel owners of every kind of hotel from a 12 bedroom one man ran operation to a sprawling 1000 acre 5 star estate.
Because the nation’s best hotels are not built within a 100 radius of my house, I often sleep in them too. Sometimes I am the mood for 5 star luxury and sometimes I just was peace, quiet and a bed.
Tonight, I just want the latter so I am staying in a Travelodge. Travelodge are a fantastic business which get a lot of flack but really, a clean room, flat screen TV and a shower for €35 – what could be better?
Obviously to get all this for €35 you lose a lot of the ‘extras’ other hotels give you. There is no porter for example, no breakfast, no bar, no foyer to speak off, no leisure club, no gym the list is endless but Travelodge do this to give you a quality room at a reasonable price. (more…)
Can a change of fuel make that much of a difference ?
You might remember at the beginning of the year I had all that trouble with my trusty vRS.
Well it is all beginning to worry me slightly, not about the car but about the fuel I was putting into it (and the car a bit too). You see around 3 weeks before Skodagate, my company changed my fuel suppliers from Maxol Ireland to Direct Fuels UK. Direct Fuels do not have any actual stations however are more of a network of affiliated garages.
I had been using Maxol in Moira ever since I bought the vRS but as Maxol was not on the Direct Fuels approved list, I switched to the BP garage on the Glenavy Road, just off the Moira road roundabout. 3 weeks later my car was getting pulled into the garage for a major overhaul of broken parts. At the time I was asked had I put any dodgy fuel into the car, I told them I used BP and they (Skoda) seemed to accept that and rulled a fuel issue out of the equation. (more…)
Pornography to get its own space on the Interwebs but will it work?
After a ten year battle between Icann (the people who look after the www. protocol) and Stuart Lawley a British internet entrepreneur the .xxx domain has finally been approved.
The idea is that all pornography or ‘top shelf’ related material will move from .com, .co.uk, .net, .mobi etc to the new .xxx domain. Porn is still the most searched item on the web but it is only in the last two year’s that sites like Facebook and Twitter have kicked the porn sites from the Alexa top 50
It’s a good idea as it makes the Internet as easier place to police, it also makes it a lot easier for parents to content filter what their kids are looking at online by simply blocking the .xxx domain on their machines. Companies like NetNanny who specialise in web filtering will surely welcome the new domain and anyone operating a public machine will see the benefits.
That said, it will never work (in its current form). Believe it or not porn sites actually want you to look at their sites, no matter who you are so they go out of their way to step around web content filtering, this new domain is simply that, a new domain. It has been set up by a business man not an authority or a Government so it cannot be policed. Porn sites cannot be forced to use the domain and they are surely not going to give up their valuable .com domains in a hurry, In 2007 porn.com was sold for $12m and there has been a near 20 year battle over sex.com. (more…)
Cheaper by the dozen ? Not any more !
A new barmy law has been passed down from our good old buddies in the European Union. All food sold in EU stores must be advertised, priced and sold by weight and not quantity.
Until now, Britain has been exempt from EU regulations that forbid the selling of goods by number. But last week MEPs voted to end Britain’s deal despite objections from UK members.
This means Eggs, bread rolls and oranges too, so gone will be the day of buying a box of 6 egg’s for 99p.
Now you will have to buy 382grams of egg’s or 396grams of eggs depending which box you pick up, no box of 6 egg’s will ending up the same price as the next as it is nearly impossible to get 6 egg’s to weigh the same, unless we can somehow program the chickens to fire out 50gram eggs on comand but that would probably be in human.
What a load of balls, not two balls of course, a load of balls. Who thinks of these stupid laws? How is this helpful to the general public ? I want 6 egg’s, I’m quite happy to open the box and judge if the egg’s I am buying are big enough after all, I am not a complete moran ! (more…)
Flashforward – well they didn’t see that one coming !
One of the better cult TV drama’s to hit the screens in the last few years has no sooner gained traction only to be binned by its owner ‘ABC’
Looking at the American viewer numbers its quite easy to why, over 12 million viewers in the first episode falling to nearly a third of that in the last few episodes. Easy to see why they cancelled it, that is, if you are in fact a complete moron and don’t look at all the facts.
Let’s compare it, if you will to one of the other large ‘TV’ chart toppers of the last decade ‘lost’.
Lost first aired in 2004 with a whopping (in TV terms) to (just under) 16 million viewers and the show was syndicated to around 180 countries. (more…)
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