How not to Buy a Money Burning Franchise
How Not to Buy a Money Burning Franchise
Frank Ho
Ho Math and Chess Learning Centre
BC certified Teacher
Vancouver, BC, Canada
In my 10 years of tutoring business, I have seen so many learning centers come and go in Vancouver, Canada. I had a binder full of names of learning centers which were set up in the past 10 years but most of them are gone now, no where to be found. So if anyone tells you that the learning center is a very easy to run business. Don’t believe it.
To think by joining a franchise, it would be easier to run than running on your own is also a mistake. My answer to this kind of thinking is caveat emptor!
There are so called XXX Learning Center Franchises out there to just want to take upfront hefty franchise fee from you and if you could succeed or not, it is an entire different story. The way to make money for this kind of Learning Center Franchise is to multiply as soon as they can and milk upfront fee as much as they can out of each franchise. For example, if you pay upfront $25,000 to XXX Learning Center Franchise then if they can convince 200 franchisees to join then how much can they get out of the entire fiasco? Let’s do the math.
$25,000 times 100 franchisees = $2,500,000,
Over 2 millions in a few years for the franchisor, not bad Oh? What happens for the franchisee? If the majority of them are struggling for survival but just don’t have the courage to close the learning centers since each franchisee paid $25,000 for it and just could not let it go? It is a sad story.
Do you like the landlord who gives a 20% rent increase when comes to renewal time with no justification? Unexpected and sad surprise, who needs this kind of life?
Don’t burn your money by buying a bad learning center franchise. Buy a good and reputable one with very reasonable franchise fee.
Many learning centre franchises give you the “big” talk and mumble and jumble about how great their material or teaching method is but if you examine carefully then you would find most of their description about how wonderful their material is has no real substance.
How is their math material different from others? Or Is it different from the textbooks used at school? Is it different only in quantity? Are the questions only harder? Why the material increases children’s ability in thinking skills? Are there any research papers done on the kind of materials been promoted?
Most of the math learning center could not answer the above questions clearly or will elude the question by answering something like our material is great and our students like them etc. without touching the real issue that is how is the material unique?
You got to know what product you are buying after spending $25,000 upfront fee. This is the most important discriminating factor in buying a math learning center franchise.
If the founder of the learning center did not have any specific philosophy on how math should be taught when set up a learning center many years ago then how could we expect him/her to have one 10 years later? It is a joke. to read their statement on why their math material is good and useful to children when they did not have any clue in setting up their first math learning center.
Ho Math and Chess Learning Centre started with the view that math should be taught in a multi-sensory way that is to not just do computations. There are hundreds of research reports on learning chess benefit kids in many different ways. The only problem is there were no materials which integrate math and chess together so kids could learn math and chess all in one until I created them and started to use it at Ho Math and Chess learning center.
We have the world first, one of its kind, very unique and copyright protected math product for grade 1 to grade 7. You can examine my math products on the web right in front of your eyes. Go to www.mathandchess.com and download a few samples of my worksheets, take a look.
The math learning center business is very competitive and only the best will survive in the years to come, so don’t buy into a math franchise with no unique product. Buy a math learning center with unique, marketable and effective product.
You should not just buy the franchise name, the product is equally important.
About the Author
Frank Ho, a Canadian certified math teacher, coined the learning centre term Math and Chess and he also founded the world’s first math and chess learning centre by creating the world’s first math and chess integrated workbooks for elementary students in Vancouver, Canada. He invented Frankho Symbolic Chess Language, intriguing Frankho Chess Maze, and also an unique new chess teaching set. He published math and chess teaching theoretic basis in a Canadian math journal. The USA Illinois research data has shown statistically significant that Ho Math and Chess teaching method increases children’s math marks and also improves children’s critical thinking skills. The Ho Math and Chess Teaching Set can improve children’s memory by playing half-blind chess. More details, please visit www.mathandchess.com.
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