Broken Wing

Entrepreneur, Feb, 1999 by Kurt Helin

"If you're not making money on the unit level, don't franchise out," Kaufmann warns.

The lesson for people buying a franchise is simple: Do your homework. Although Boston Market's stock made potential franchisees salivate, it was a poor indication of how the restaurant units themselves were doing. Had franchisees looked deeper into the actual results, they might have avoided a costly mistake.

"I'd want to check out the real economies of the [restaurant] I'm going to be running," Papiernik says. "I don't want to be told I'm going to wait three or four years to make a profit."

Kaufmann says there's a quick way to get an insider's view of the franchise - call some franchise owners. Their names and numbers have to be provided to potential franchisees. "If they're happy, they'll tell you. If they're not, they'll tell you even faster," Kaufmann says. (For more on researching a franchise, see "Now You're Cooking," January.)

There are never any guarantees when it comes to making a business sizzle, but learning from other people's mistakes can be a good way to keep from getting burned.

Kurt Helin is the editor of two weekly newspapers in Long Beach, California, and the former editor of Inland Empire Business Journal.