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Most franchisees need to get working to earn some income from their business long before 8 weeks, and so grooming franchises are far better suited to franchisees with the time to learn grooming before they purchase a franchise. Sounds good, but it can be a major limitation. Keep in mind that the franchisor needs business income too, and significant royalty payments don't come for some time. Yes, franchisees pay a franchise fee, but for new franchisors, most of the franchise fee is invested back in franchisee training and results in little or no profit for the franchisor. Therefore, franchisors must have substantial savings to draw upon until they have quite a few mature franchises in operation. Unfortunately, most grooming franchisors simply are unprepared for these obstacles, and they could probably make much more business income by owning a chain of company-owned grooming businesses instead.

As a one time registered grooming franchisor we can also share something else we learned from experience. We worked diligently since the early 1960's to development truly professional grooming operations, and then worked another 3 years documenting it for franchisees. We came to learn that although we had done so much work, you really cannot enforce franchisees to follow your system to the letter. In fact, litigation between franchisors and franchisees clearly show that franchisees have a lot leeway in procedures. Therefore, we could enforce how they used our logo licensed to them, but could we make them follow our service marked "humane bath procedure?" No. Could we enforce their correct use of our clients relation program. No. It goes on and on.

When you consider that our franchisees would not be working on pizzas, yogurt, signs, or hamburgers, but on living pets beloved by pet owners, we became very concerned about the leeway we had to give franchisees to groom just about any way they wanted under our corporate logo, and well, we bowed out at great expense. In 40 years we never hurt or badly handled a client, and we didn't want that to happen by someone essentially licensing only our logo and possibly sullying it by their lack of regard for our proven system. The day we dropped out of grooming franchising was one we will never forget, but now years later much of what we prepared for franchisees is being used to train extraordinary students in select grooming schools, and some of it is right here at PetGroomer.com. In the long run it was worth it.

We believe that many other successful grooming business owners have also considered franchising and discovered many of the same problems we did. Perhaps many of them have also not chosen to franchise for these and other reasons too. Several of the 1990's grooming franchises are now gone. Though the idea is good, we don't project you will see many more grooming franchises. We do see chains of company-owned grooming centers in the future. Certainly a successful grooming business can make a far quicker financial return by opening up additional successful locations instead of franchising.

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