Labor Day in the life of a Zee

Ever ask a zee how they feel about holidays?  Just what goes through the mind of an average person versus the franchisee owner when “holiday” is discussed?  Ever wonder how a zor spends their holiday? In the Americas, the word is “vacation”.  Every paid worker spends their year planning and imagining the relief those two or three weeks truly bring to the family and one’s own inner balance of family vs work vs quality of life.  In Europe, it’s holiday and it’s twice as long as the Americas because most Euro holiday packages are four to six weeks.  The European has come to expect holiday and due to the lack of opportunity, in some respects holiday is one’s privilege.

In the thinking of the blue collar or the white collar or the Euro or anyone else who has never truly owned and run a business, let alone a franchised business, there is no reference or association as to what a holiday brings to a zee.  Their impression is that a small business owner who owns a high-profile franchise operation must already be rich.  They do not know that the life savings and the mountain of debt needed to serve them their 15 second servings of fast food heart attack will never allow me to enjoy another holiday.  The reference of outlay at the onset of such purchase of franchises is referred to “sunk costs”.  Oh how bloody true is that depiction!

Here are just a few interesting problems of the zee during holiday:

• Workers are off, zee gets to stay and keep the doors open (bills don’t do holidays)
• Workers are off, doors have to stay open, otherwise the revenue of the holiday revelers will be lost
• If it’s a day in which stores are closed due to law, I’ll stay and catch up on books and admin as the workers aren’t in
• If it’s a party day where retail is open, I get to stay and help the skeleton shift (who bitch and moan that they have to work)
• Leading up to the holiday, everyone leaves early, meaning I get to stick around to make sure everything is set because I own this mess
• And finally, the schedules are all mine to own and fix and work with due to the fact that no one owns anything but me (the R word means nothing to the hourly worker)

And last but not least, I can visualize and imagine the wonderful times the zor is having attending special events as grand marshall (the honor and respect he purchased with my life savings and ongoing royalty abuses).  After all, his ad fund, his marketing fund, his kickbacks from vendors and his admin, his legal support are all coming from the money I gave, will give him and am generating while working over this glorious holiday!

Bloody

Franchisee Recourse

Many of you have faith in the system.  This is why you bought into a franchise, are looking at buying into a franchise or sadly, have been burned and turned into ash by a franchisor.  Some have said that those of us who have been burned simply want to rant and throw the whole system out (the baby with the bathwater).  This is true if franchising stays in its current condition.  Franchising could be a great model, but not until there is recourse on behalf of the franchisee.  Today, recourse is non-existent.  As a franchisee, here are your options:

Scenario:  You’ve run into a snag.  No matter the snag (financial, operational, marketing, sales, functional or strategic), you are at a point where you don’t have the resources or the knowledge to go it without some assistance.  The normal course goes something like this:

1. Call the franchisor, who gets back to you a week later and simply says “You’re just not doing what we told you to do, keep trying”.  Or perhaps “You’ll need to buy another franchise to increase your revenue”.  (This isn’t an option because you’re already up to your eyeballs in debt.)
2. You call other franchisees to get support and find out they’re in the same boat and they have no answers. (Bitch and moan sessions break out.)
3. You seek out help from your friendly neighborhood lawyer, all to find out he has no expertise in this area and getting any advice from him is just plain stupid and doesn’t apply. (I pity those of you who trust main street lawyers with your livelihood.)
4. You read your contract and find out just how lopsided it  truly is and you now realize you’ve been effed (or “had” if you aren’t yet mad as hell by now).
5. Now you’re really in a pinch and you start thinking about any other recourse you might have.  Let’s just say you’re not an evil person so sabotage or ambush are not considerations of your recourse.
6. Considering you feel you’re very resourceful, you call your local franchisee association (assuming there is one – which means you’re in the minority).  After six months of feeling these people out, you realize its rife with lukewarm blowhards who have no clue as to how to get anything accomplished, while there are slight glimmers of hope from a few conversations, only to realize that corporate has infiltrated the association and everything submitted is “taken under advisement” never to see the light of day again!
7. Finally, you’ve done all of the nice guy things that can be accomplished, so you pull all the stops and you seek out franchisee-only law firms.  After several confusing discussions, you realize that the lawyers will cost you a fortune in hourly fees considering most will not take a contingency case.  Contingency cases must be a slam dunk and this rarely occurs when the UFOC/FDD is written 99% in favor of the franchisor.  The UFOC/FDD is loaded with intangible statements including “good faith” and “disparaging” types of words which do not and will not do the franchisee any favors with most judges.  The law firm will ask you enough questions to figure out whether the case is egregious enough to be considered a contingency or a class-action or you are stuck with arbitration. (Class action suits only benefit the firm and in almost 100% of all cases, the franchisee will only get a partial portion of their initial sunk costs back, about 5 years after engagement if one wins the suit.  The judge in these cases now holds all the keys to your future.)
8. Let’s just say you read the FDD and you ask your competent lawyer about the clauses of “arbitration”.  You find out that you cannot even go to court because you don’t have a case large enough, or it cannot be monetized and you are therefore subject to arbitration.
9. At this point, you either have to have the reserves to hire the firm on a retainer basis ((you now have to take a second or third or pull all of your life savings together (provided you have any left) to defend what you’ve already sunk into the venture)).  If not, you simply give up and either suck it up and swallow the franchisor’s bullshit or you close up shop and walk away a “loser”.  The franchisor can simply put you into the loser’s category and in court, you haven’t a chance in hell of ever convincing a judge or jury otherwise because he has statistics of successful franchisees and unless you can refute them, his word is way more viable than yours.  After all, he’s a successful franchisor and you’re just a low-life franchisee.
10. Maybe you do have a rather egregious case and the firm takes your case on a contingency basis.  First, they will need a retainer.  If you don’t have $50,000 to throw into a retainer, then you have to fund it with a loan or even worse, you ferret out other franchisees to see if you can rally the troops.   (You know from previous conversations that you’re not alone, but for fear of retribution, most are not as ballsy as you and you will have to do this with great fear and trepidation to avoid this getting back to the franchisor making you vulnerable to having your franchise terminated with/without cause).
11. Once you take action with a firm, regardless of contingency, retainer, class-action or some combination thereof, you now are going to be terminated and marked.  You will have to go out and find another way to make a living in the meantime.  Wasn’t buying into a franchise the alternative to having to go back into the corporate hell hole in the first place?

Conclusion:  There is no viable recourse for franchisees.  Even with a settlement (see the previous post about a Quiznos franchise awarded in favor of the franchisee over a 4 year period), you are subject to appeal.  And trust me, the franchisor has more time and money (your money I might add) and will pursue any and every possible remedy (with your money I remind you) to keep you from exposing them.  See the post below placed on Bluemaumau.com by the owner of a franchise when I called him on the carpet for being a dishonest franchisor:

hello all….bloody franchise is a nameless, shameless liar and malcontent. he/she seems to be hell-bent on trying to destroy the institution of franchising with malicious and false attacks on franchisors and their people at his blog and with persistent emails to people in organizations he wants to attack.

he/she attacks real people with real words but all the time refuses to expose hie/her real identity. my caution to you is to be very wary of any communications you have with him/her. his/her ONLY agenda is to destroy all who are part of the franchise family of franchisors and service providers.

hello bloody….we will find you. we will find out who you really are. and because of your malice, libesl and other counts we will seek all remedies the courts allow. you are a coward to hide behind an alias and attack real people. we will find you. and we will crush you. you are a coward. you are a liar. you are a loser. and if you have anything left to lose…you will lost it, too. that’s a promise.

So franchisees, there are no conventional recourse options.  Legal is in it for the money.  Franchisee-only lawyers are in it for the money – they have to be!  If they play both sides of the fence, they cannot be trusted!  The courts don’t have a clue and with the changes in franchising, the laws of the court have been replaced with franchisor-friendly arbitration firms who schmooze the franchisors to get the cases.  You have no options there either.

“So what are my options?” asks the franchisee.

“Aside from criminal, civil or libel actions against the franchisor, going to the press or organizing other victims of your franchise brand to bring grass-roots marches on the front steps of the franchisor, there are none!”  – Bloody