Should You Start Your Own Business?

Few people become rich as employees. In any corporation, it’s only a few at the top who make six to seven figures a year. And while people do become wealthy in the financial markets, you need to get very good at it to do well. Fortunately, in a free market, there is a third alternative: start your own business.

However, your chances of creating a successful business are rather slim if you don’t have much business experience. Many small businesses fail within the first few years simply because the owners make expensive mistakes.

One simple solution to the dilemma of starting your own business without any business experience is to join a franchise. If, for instance, you’re interested in running a small retail store in a strip mall, then you should look for a retail franchise that sells something in high demand. A ups franchise would fit this bill. It’s not only in the retail sector, but there is a steady year-round demand for shipping packages and renting mailboxes.

Benefits of Joining a Franchise

The top five reasons for starting a franchise are using a tested formula, deploying a marketing and sales system, getting easier access to financing, benefiting from training and support, and enjoying the freedom to spend more time with your customers while a parent company takes care of things like product selection and human resources.

Although these five reasons to join a franchise are fairly compelling, they don’t guarantee your success. Not everyone who joins a franchise succeeds at it. This is because any system, no matter how well-thought out and thoroughly tested, is only as good as the person using it.

How to Be a Successful Franchisee

If a good system is not sufficient to make you a successful business owner, what’s missing?

Essentially, for a franchise to work, you have to be the right type of business owner. Simply having a good location, the right product line, and plenty of support from the franchisor is not enough, you also have to work hard at being an excellent entrepreneur.

While some people may be born entrepreneurs, you can still learn the attitudes and skills necessary to become a highly successful one. Even if you’ve only been an employee your entire working life, you can learn to think and act like an entrepreneur. In other words, it’s not an innate predisposition but a learnable skill.

Here are 4 skillsets you need to master to run a successful franchise business.

1. Salesmanship

If you hate selling, then you won’t get far. Fortunately, selling isn’t as difficult as you might think as there are only about 8 essential selling skills. The essence of selling is learning how to be a good listener, identify what someone needs, and then recommending a product or service that helps them fulfill that need.

You can become a good salesperson even if you’re an introvert because sales isn’t about winning people over with clever conversational gambits but about learning how to connect with people and solve their problems.

2. Money Management.

While salesmanship will help you bring in the money, you also have to be a good steward of money. In other words, you have to get good at money management, which is about learning how to create a budget and sticking with it.

3. Active Learning.

Learn everything you can about the franchise. While you can, of course, learn from books and other media, you should also learn from people who have been successful at franchising. The trainers at the franchisors headquarters and successful franchisee owners will be pleased to share their knowledge and experience with you.

4. Best Practices.

Hire the right people and train them well, provide great customer service, and make sure you follow the system outlined by the franchisor instead of taking shortcuts or doing things your own way.

Why You Should Start Your Own Business

While it’s easy to be an employee—just follow directions, it’s not easy to be an entrepreneur because you have to use your own initiative. However, it is far more rewarding. If you start your own business, your chances of becoming wealthy will increase exponentially — provided, of course, that you build a successful business. This is because there is no preset cap on your income and you are not waiting for anyone’s permission to move up a corporate hierarchy.