How Ordained Ministers that Perform Services could Benefit from a Church Owned Franchise to Avoid Spiritual Warfare

Perhaps we have all head the story of how Jesus sent demons out of a man who lived in a tomb into a herd of pigs and that the entire herd ran into the sea and died (Matthew 8:28-34).  Although an encounter like this for some fundamentalists may seem ideal when a religious leader encounters a demon possessed manager that crawls out of a corporate tomb to manage a company, the sad truth however is that some religious leaders need jobs outside of their regular religious duties.  Without the church owning the business that your religious leader works at, outside employment for him may be fraught with many challenges to say the least and intense spiritual warfare may be one of the largest of those challenges.

Sure, you might think that if your Pastor has already performed hundreds of funerals and even visited with people who renounced baptism even at death that a man like that could handle working in a secular job even if it is managed by the devil and all his angels.  Perhaps he is the kind of man who has visited with dozens of hardened criminals before they got executed on death row, and he never once flinched even when the executioners fired up the electric chair to put those mass murders to death.  Even if his father had performed autopsies at the morgue in your Pastor’s youth and clothed the entire family with the extra clothing that came from the cadavers at work, don’t you think your Pastor deserves outside employment that don’t give people the creeps or cause a major disturbance in the spiritual realm?

Have you ever imagined that perhaps for your Pastor work in a church owned franchise might be like a unicorn jumping over a rainbow on a sun shiny day compared to some of the alternatives?  Perhaps your Pastor is well acquainted with the man who was going to marry the love of his life only to find after the blood tests had been performed that it was really his sister, but should your pastor really have to work with the two of them at a company as close coworkers with no church oversight?  What if I told you that perhaps your Pastor has had enough drama in his life with the child that simply stares into his window at night when her mother condemns the child ever going to church because of the family’s devotion to the occult?

Sure, your pastor may certainly be the kind of person that diligently prays for the lost, weeps for the soul of the person destined for the fires of hell, and ends the tyranny of evil like a snow cone melting in the noonday heat of summer.  But what if your Pastor needs and wants a regular job like everyone else, and what if he’s the kind of person that could find the love of his life at a secular job and marry her?  Could your church handle an outside employer pulling the strings for the two of them?  Especially, if the company is run by people who all attend that ‘other’ church, and you know how they impose their values on everything!

Even if your Pastor is hired by a company that represents good moral integrity with little to no strings attached in that no real politics, views, and values are preached by the firm’s leadership that are contrary to sacred scripture, you know all too well how the Hebrews went into slavery in Egypt because a new Pharoah arose that knew nothing of Joseph (Exodus 1:8-10).  Perhaps your Pastor may have even been hired by a local firm based on a religious diversity initiative to promote religious diversity and plurality in the workplace, but what happens later if they hire a Satanist bent on evil to manage him?  Would you rather that everyone doubled down on their tithing to help save the day while your Pastor looks for his second job or would you rather find a more permanent solution?

I’m not talking about the church buying a franchise so that your Pastor could have eyes roll like dollar signs like in the case of Scrooge, but I’m also not suggesting that you pay him an Ebenezer wage either.  Although you may not be a business scholar, if you’ve learned anything from seminary, it could be that the institutionalization of sin leads to depravity but that an organization can be managed and run without the love of money.  Have you thus considered that your church could hypothetically own and operate a for-profit franchise even though the church is a tax-free business if the right conditions are met?  Although you should certainly consult an attorney and a tax professional before your church buys a franchise, what should be clear is that nothing is wrong with paying market wages for services rendered.  What if the so called, ‘profits’ from the franchise could be used to care for poverty-stricken people?  If your church is not going to pay your Pastor enough to work at the church as his only vocation, then could you really imagine any good reason for the church not buying a franchise to support his second vocation?

Submitted by Mathew Mount – Franchise Consultant

How to Avoid Others Ruining Your Success, Reputation, and Upward Mobility

If you had been a focused person as a youth who diligently pursued education, religion, business, and/or career opportunities while others partied, had babies, and then got married, then chances are you know how many of the college dropouts may seek to ruin your good reputation, track record, and upward mobility.  Sometimes when a person has a tremendous amount of success at school or work, many people who have been empowered with the tools to ruin your record of success will do just that if they feel that they have had a lot harder life then you have had.  This may be especially true for those who dropped out of college or high school when they began having babies and who may now be seated as members of management over you to train you since they now have the work experience that your college education did not bring.

Sometimes people like this are no moral scholars, and they may simply care less about what is good or right compared to anyone you may know, and they may likely be the very same people that claim that a college degree has nothing to do with the job that you are in that they are training you for even if the requirements of the job show that a Master’s level education is expected.  They may even explain simple details in such a way as if you don’t know how to tie your shoes, and they may even put on a big show in the workplace to make other people see the supposed superiority of their experience over your education as if they are training a dog that is severely disadvantaged.  Even though you may play right along with their shenanigans while you calmy explain things to them in an authoritative voice that shows your superior business acumen, sometimes the loudest voice that people hear is the one that people listen to instead of the voice that is the most reasonable.

What you may not realize is that sometimes corporate leadership and the multi-decade standing-still workforce manager can have starkly contracting visions and goals of what the organization should look like and how it should perform.  In some cases, the top corporate and workforce leadership might focus on either always doing what is right because the cost of doing the wrong thing can be catastrophic or they may instead focus simply on avoiding legal liability at all costs while pursuing their mission of expansion or cost reduction.  In contrast, the multi-decade standing-still workforce manager is likely to only see and understand things from their own position that they may have sacrificed their entire life’s future to secure and obtain, and now any possible hint of a threat to that future can result in an armada of carefully crafted weapons of resistance and preemptive counter strike such that even if the threat is purely only imagined in their own head – they are ready to respond with full blown force!  What I am telling you is that the very moment that you mention to this kind of zoolutoon manager that you have a college degree when they don’t, they have already gone through the arming sequence and flipped the switch in their head to get the engines ready to burn for firing the nukes on your career.

For example, if the job that you are hired into is some kind of management job, and you have your doctorate degree in management, then if you are being trained by a multi-decade standing-still zoolutoon manager who either dropped out of high school or just barely graduated at some kind of firm inspired by Cuban business practices, then you need to be on red alert!  Even if you do the best possible job ever and even if that manager does nothing whatsoever to contribute to the department in any way shape or form, they may still write in your evaluation that you failed to perform satisfactory as a manager and that they know it because they have multiple decades doing the job and only have a high school diploma at best.  If it gets to this point, then you should have known that the reason why they mandated that all communication at the organization had to go through them to the exclusion of you is because they already know how places like Cuba and China operate and they have harnessed that power for your own gains making them the only one in the organization that you are allowed to talk to.

If you are truly tired of the extreme socialist system at work that your manager has created out of their jealously for you and fear of your potential and you have no desire to bunker up with your co-workers to take on the devil and all his angels in a spiritual hand to hand combat for your job and to take over the big controls, then perhaps buying a franchise is for you.  When you buy a franchise, the franchise company wins when you win because you will be paying them royalties.  Instead of being overseen by a manager like Ebeneezer Scrooge, Joseph Stallen or Fidel Castro, you will have a system whose very goal is to make you succeed as a business owner.  If many others have been wronged by the same manager or system of management, then why not let your co-workers have at it as they sue each other and the organization while you simply have no part in it and get the hell out of there before the fur starts to fly.  Really, if you can step out of a bad situation like that without fighting anybody, then you have more than proven that you are among the very best candidates for owning a franchise because you will know how to deal with even the most difficult customers without hurting the brands image.

Submitted by Mathew Mount – Franchise Broker

Are you Tired of Running the Farm with the Same Routine and Want More in your Life?

Why Buying a Franchise for Your Children is Worthwhile

Have you ever known of a time when a manager at your workplace was hired with only a high school diploma because they somehow either cheated the system or had been put into that position by either a friend or a relative?  Perhaps the only two jobs that they could ever do well is to either be a good actor or a good pick pocket.  Typically, people who only have a high school diploma who go into management positions designed for attorneys or MBA graduates in large organizations may not be the kind of people that you would expect to be honest, hardworking, or even successful innovators.  What if I told you that instead this may be the kind of person that has half a dozen or more kids at home who has demanded the wages that they get because the alternative is public welfare as they have only worked hard all these years at extorting their wages from the company through making huge gains from dishonest business owners who are both rich and unqualified to manage anything?  Sometimes if a person like your son or daughter is highly qualified and new to an organization with good moral upbringing and in a job that is a low ranked position compared to their qualifications, then the people that outrank them may see the new hire as a threat.

When an organization is run by a good actor and good pick pocket, they are likely to do everything in their power to play the victim if the new hire fights for what is right and when the new hire greatly succeeds at business wins, they may play the pick pocket by diverting the gains to themselves and away from the new hire.  When a young man fresh out of college or graduate school gets this kind of job and has from it only enough gains to buy limited food at the store, it makes for a very sad situation.  What makes things even worse is if that young man spends 10 or 20 years at that organization at almost the same wage rate while that same supervisor has been promoted to make now over 10 times as much because their pickpocketing skills have really paid off big as they now also have countless children by all kinds of partners!

Perhaps you never thought about this kind of future when you sent your children to college and graduate school as you also strictly opposed public welfare for people who have dozens of children from dozens of partners.  In your day and age business people and successful people in companies may have only been understood to be people of good moral and spiritual character who had a profound reputation for being trustworthy and true, but now the unthinkable has happened.  What if I told you that the uneducated polymorphic pansexual pickpocketing zoo-lu-toon managers have become filthy rich off of the hard work, investment, and development of the talents of your offspring, and now the only way that your children can afford to have children is to own a thriving business and flip the script?

Would you believe that if those key players that are highly talented and low paid who support the entire organization are suddenly removed and put into their own businesses to act as competitors that the evil empire will in time collapse?  What is even better is that when you buy a franchise, you are getting a proven business model, and when you buy a franchise from a franchisor that has dozens or hundreds of successful franchises, you are getting a well-honed business model that can often be used as a primary source of income for an entire family when property implemented.  I say this especially because with a franchise that allows the owner to hire workers, both the owner and his entire family may all be able to work together for the success of the business while all drawing wages and also saving on expenses.  Also in this case when the business makes a profit, it could be shared with the entire family.

Perhaps you are the kind of person that is getting old and gray and you really like the feeling of security and stability that investing your money into the blue-chip stock market stocks brings even if you are merely only profiting a little by helping someone else get rich off of your own money.  Maybe you don’t even mind feeding your offspring to the zoolutoon managers for them to do things that ought not ever be done to a highly qualified person.  How will people remember you when you’re gone?  Will they morn over your gravesite because you have really truly done so much for them to make them better and to help them grow, or will they throw a party because they are finally free of you?

When you buy a franchise for your children, you may very well be saving them from zoolutoon managers that would otherwise eat them up, give them poor evaluations, and use them only as a cheep tool to poop out an even cheaper product that only menaces those members of the public that can’t afford to buy anything else.  Are you ready to wait another 10 or 20 years, sit back, and watch the unfolding of the fortune of your family without having made any investment into their long-term prosperity?  Or are you ready to buy the best franchise that you possibly can, put them all into the business, and watch what your hard-earned money can do when you invest it back into your own family?  The time is now!  The choice is yours!

Submitted by Franchise Consultant Matthew Mount

How a Good Franchise System is Made, what it is, and What it is Not

Some people that are new to exploring franchise opportunities may think that all franchises are some kind of magic or that the gains made by franchise owners are too good to be true.  And yes, it is certainly true that sometimes franchise companies may show their system though a really rosy lens.  Doing business with a franchise should however not be a mystery at all, and this article should help to reduce or eliminate the mystery behind a good franchise system.

A good franchise system starts with a good business model that has had a lot of success over time, and it should be duplicatable in other locations that it can be successful at as well.  It most importantly should offer a product or service that fulfills a customer’s specific need better than any other product or service in that location.  Oftentimes such businesses know that the focus is on making a single dollar and then finding how to get the same kind of customers again and how to duplicate the thing that made that dollar.

To illustrate the point with car dealerships (that are often independent businesses or corporately owned), the cars at those dealerships can have many different combinations of price and value.  The dealerships as a whole however will usually appeal to a particular customer.  As an example, a business executive may go to a new high-end car brand dealership while a custodian that works part-time might get a car at a roadside used independent car dealer that operates by his home.  Much like car dealerships in this example, a good franchise system will know who their customer is and how best to sell to them, and they will be structured around the kind of customer that they want to attract.

When for example, we see a fast-food restaurant that has a western appearance and offers roast beef, we know that it is differentiating itself from a price leader that offers the lowest price on fast food.  I say this because not everyone likes roast beef and not everyone likes a western look to a store, so they may not get the customer volume to have the lowest prices in town.  The restaurant knows who their customers are, and they have designed the restaurant appropriately to attract them from all around and as far as they are willing to drive.

In this example the restaurant also knows how to make a single dollar well in that they have designed different kinds of sandwiches such that they only make a single dollar perhaps at most on each one when the expenses are deducted.  They make the same sandwiches again and again with each being identical to the other when you order a sandwich according to the few choices that the customer has available.  They may have for example eight or ten options because those are as many options that they have available that they are sure that they can make a dollar on each or some fraction of it.  If they offer too many options, waste may occur, and too few options may reduce their customer volume.

Imagine this same principle applied to other industries like retail, senior care, pet care, service brands, and such.  With retail as an example, you may have many different kinds of bar soap with most of it being about the same basic substance, but the options may differ by color, smell, size, and brand.  Each bar soap brand knows exactly what kind of customer that they are trying to attract.  Also, too the bar soap company likely knows how much they get for each bar, they may divide their overhead by the number of bars to find fixed cost per bar, and they may also know their total sales volume.  In short, the manufacturer will know the profit per bar at different sales volume levels, and the retail store will know their profit per pack (or they may have a good idea of it) at different sales volume levels.  The store will have a display and a design that will fit their customer’s needs, and they will merchandise the options accordingly.

As with the example of retail, because they may not know exactly how many sales that they have and what their exact overhead will be until all the data has been collected what they may do is to track profit margins per product or service.  One way to do this is to rank the different products or services with grades like a person gets in school, and this would be the grades of A, B, C, D, and F.  With A being something of little cost with a high gain and F being something that has a high cost with little gain or even a loss.  Typically, the store will have a strategy for making the most net gain and controlling the customer flow as they may highly promote an F-type product with all their might that makes no direct financial gain, and they do this to get the customer in the door in order that they may buy A or B products as these may be some kind of sweet treat that the customer buys to reward themselves for buying something that they really don’t want to buy but need to buy.  For C and D products, these might be the things that go with the F product that the customer came into the door for.  In this example, an F product might be something like hotdogs, while C and D products are buns and ketchup.  The customer also buys a small soft drink and relish, and in this example the soft drink would be an A product and the relish would be a B product.  Overall, the things that the customer really needs but does not want to buy like toilet paper, milk, dish soap, and such are things that the store may take a loss on while candy and soft-drinks at the register are the rewards to the customer that may make the store profitable.

If we had a retail franchise that utilized this model, then it might also have a strategy for how to setup shelf displays for maximizing profitability.  They would likely be well aware that customers mainly only notice the things that are at eye level, so they may merchandize larger value packs of the products on the bottom shelf so that only customers determined to get a deal find them.  They might also merchandise premium brands on the top shelves that are less popular because most customers might be discouraged to shop in the store if they mainly only noticed the price on the premium brands.  If you setup a store without a franchise system showing you how to utilize such strategies, then you may put some products on some shelves without any particular winning strategy with aisles too narrow and not know the reason for your failure.

What makes buying a franchise a lot different from opening your own restaurant, store, and such that you create on your own is that the franchise company has an almost exactly honed knowledge of what makes success and they often have negotiated large volume pricing with vendors.  They know exactly (or as close to it as they can) who the customer is that buys the product, how to get them in the door, and how to produce or sell the product or service in such a way that ideally at least a little bit is made on each one.  If the franchise utilizes a lot of cheap labor like in a cleaning franchise or fast-food franchise, then only a small amount of money is made for the franchise on each unit of product or service produced (sometimes a dollar or less).  By utilizing some kind of employee training and management system that comes from the franchise company, each employee is typically specifically trained to operate in the most efficient way to produce that one unit of product or service.  The franchise if managed optimally will typically have as many employees that do this work until all the customer need is filled in that location.

A good franchise is not simply a building that you buy with a suggestion on what you should sell along with the resources to buy the supplies.  It is also not a huge system developed and designed with lots of rules for how to do businesses with only the hope that somehow customers will exist to buy the products or services.  It is not like getting any old random building and imagining what might work, and then putting your friends and relatives in that place to discover the keys to success.

Since a good franchise system with tens or hundreds of stores typically already knows what success is and how they are successful, they have already spent all the costly time and resources to get as close to perfection as they can.  When you buy a franchise from a good franchise system, you are taking their pattern of success and making it your own pattern of success and only changing it to fit you when they find it appropriate.  Also too, they win through the payment of their royalties when you win, and if you lose, then they lose.

If they are reputable, then they will care a lot about the integrity of their brand and will do everything they can for you to succeed.  When you step up from being an employee minded individual to becoming a business owner, you are taking a share of the profits or losses and are committing your own financial resources and financial future to the success of the business.  When you buy that really great franchise, you are locked into it like buying a house or a car, and so you need to make it a good one that really fits you well.

Keep in mind too that in business there is no guarantee of success and you really can have losses.  Also, note that the common figures often quoted are that one business in every twelve is a franchise in the United States, and over 90% of all the franchises continue to be in business after 7 years of operation while less than 20% of independent businesses remain open after the same 7-year window.  If however, you get a good franchise system, put forth the effort needed, have a good location, stay with the plan, are productive with your time, and do everything necessary for success, then how could you blame yourself if somehow you find yourself in the 10% of franchises that don’t succeed in 7 years?  Owning a business then becomes like going to school in that the people that never try cannot expect success with their studies, but the people that do try and do poorly are typically better than the ones that never attended any school at all.

Buying a franchise can be like buying a car or a house in that you really need to do your homework well.  As I recall, I remember hearing about a guy onetime that bought a new car and had it delivered to his house, but what he did not realize is that it was so new that the manufacturer did not fill the engine with oil.  When he started it up, it ruined the engine before it ever had been driven.  Another guy bought a new car, accidently dropped a rag in the fan, and totaled it.  In a similar way, if you open a pizza franchise for example and the cook undercooks all the pizzas a little bit shortly after it opens, your business may end before it even really has a chance to start even with a good franchise because of the memories that customers would have about the poor taste of the pizza.

Often the better the franchise system, the better the location, the more you prepare, and the more diligently that you follow the franchisor’s pattern of success with all your might, the better the results that you can expect.  Even with the best franchise system, you might not succeed if you are a quitter because quitters seldom succeed in anything.  Also, too if you are a person that is good at making excuses, then you are seldom good at doing anything else.  Overall, even with the best franchise it is no guarantee of success, but typically what you put into it is what you can expect out of it when you buy a good franchise.

Submitted by Franchise Consultant Mathew Mount