By Antoaneta Tsocheva

How do you choose the right company to purchase a domestic cleaning franchise?

There are so many companies offering start-up businesses to be affiliated with their franchise. Figuring out the right cleaning company for you involves some key factors.

• The franchising company should have a solid, well-regarded reputation.

• They should have a track record of doing the work for themselves before they began offering domestic cleaning franchise opportunities to smaller businesses.

• They should provide their franchise owners with significant up-front help and on-going support.

• They should be approachable to answer any questions based on their own experience as challenges arise during the start-up process.

What other factors should you consider before deciding to join a franchise?

• You will need a cleaning company with a wide variety of cleaning services to offer. If the domestic cleaning franchise doesn’t have a package ready to go, you will need to come up with your own. Getting a hold of these packages is one reason why many people want to join a franchise in the first place.

• The cleaning company should provide you with full financial information that should include a breakdown of start-up costs as well as how much operating capital you will need to get through the first weeks or months.

What guarantees should the manager of a franchising company offer?

The most significant guarantee is that the territory you sign up for is yours exclusively. Many domestic cleaning business franchises do not offer such a guarantee. This means that two cleaning companies that have purchased the same franchise could end up competing in the same areas. This is why the manager of the starting business needs to have an agreement for the exclusive territory in which its domestic cleaners will operate.

Another guarantee you need is that the cleaning company offering a franchise will be there to provide full business management training from the very beginning.

The cleaning company should view their franchise owners as partners of a larger business. While the start-up cleaning company owns an exclusive territory, they will contribute to the growing reputation of the cleaning franchise.

If the director of a franchising company doesn’t see their franchise owners as business partners, the start-up cleaning company will be without the necessary support needed to make their business succeed, therefore the manager of new business must weigh all their options before making that all important decision of which domestic cleaning franchise to affiliate themselves with.

By Christopher Benoit

One way of growing a brand name or a company’s products or services is to expand via franchising. While this is an excellent way to see some tremendous growth, the key to this process is not just following the letter of the law, but more importantly, it is about making sure that franchising is the right move. If it is, then so be it, but if it isn’t, for whatever reason, you might want to look into certain franchising alternatives. What is commonly understood is that while franchising is a good and proven way to grow, there are some other ways to go about it.

The first thing you will want to understand about franchising alternatives is to first understand what the textbook definition of a franchise is. How it is typically defined is in three steps, the use of a common trademark, the availability of training or support and the collecting of fees over a designated period of time. The reason why knowing this is so important is because the low cost franchising alternatives will tend to only vary slightly from what a standard franchising agreement would be.

One way would be to simply not collect fees until the initial 6 month period is over. You could do everything else like a franchise would, but without the collection of fees, this would constitute a “no fees” agreement and technically not a franchise.

However, you need to be very careful, while this can work, if the non franchisee buys anything from you and your company that could be viewed by some state laws as collecting fees. This sort of violation could end up costing you big.

Another option is by using a trademark license. This happens all the time with sports stars. They can lend their name to a car dealership, a clothing line or something else. However, you have to understand that unless you have a marketable name; it is extremely difficult to grow your business in this manner. Of course there is always company owned growth as well. While not as cheap as franchising it is one of the Franchising Alternatives.

One of the biggest disadvantages of franchising is that when you have other people representing your products or services, and if something goes bad, it reflects poorly on your brand. Even with many of these Franchising Alternatives, that problem will still exist. That is why so many companies find it more agreeable to go with company owned growth instead