HOW TO FIND YOUR PERSONAL FRANCHISE

Finding the unique small business that can grow into a franchise can be difficult. Read this article to see how to do it.

Find Businesses With Franchising Potential

To discover viable candidates, scour business publications, tap business groups, and get to know online resources like MarketResearch.com and Springwise.com

My company looks for small businesses that have the potential to become franchises. Where would I find an information source I could use to discover unique small businesses?
—B.D., Austin, Tex.

Like a talent scout or professional sports scout, you’re looking for small-time players who have the potential to hit it big. This is something of a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. There are millions of solid, profitable small businesses, but it takes some special attributes to turn them into franchises—and it isn’t always clear which ones will make the cut.

“It is a judgment call, based on the type of product or service a small company has and its ability to duplicate itself in other locations,” says Daniel Burrus, chief executive officer ofBurrus Research Associates in Hartland, Wis. Because many small, privately owned companies are leery of disclosing their financials, it may be tough to figure out which ones could sustain rapid expansion. And even the owner may not be sure whether his or her concept is a candidate for franchising, Burrus says.

It’s likely you have developed a formula that small businesses must meet in order to be potential franchisors. For instance, the product or service theoretically must be marketable around the country and even the world. The operations must be organized enough to be broken down into replicable processes that can be taught to new employers and employees. And, most important, profits must be sufficient to scale the concept up onto a larger playing field, with multiple locations supplied by a central headquarters.

Archaeologists Find Blade 'Production Lines' Existed as Much as 400,000 Years Ago

Large numbers of long, slender cutting tools were discovered at Qesem Cave, located outside of Tel Aviv, Israel. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Friends of Tel Aviv University)

Science Daily  — Archaeology has long associated advanced blade production with the Upper Palaeolithic period, about 30,000-40,000 years ago, linked with the emergence of Homo Sapiens and cultural features such as cave art. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University have uncovered evidence which shows that "modern" blade production was also an element of Amudian industry during the late Lower Paleolithic period, 200,000-400,000 years ago as part of the Acheulo-Yabrudian cultural complex, a geographically limited group of hominins who lived in modern-day Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

The blades, which were described recently in the Journal of Human Evolution, are the product of a well planned "production line," says Dr. Barkai. Every element of the blades, from the choice of raw material to the production method itself, points to a sophisticated tool production system to rival the blade technology used hundreds of thousands of years later.

Prof. Avi Gopher, Dr. Ran Barkai and Dr. Ron Shimelmitz of TAU's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations say that large numbers of long, slender cutting tools were discovered at Qesem Cave, located outside of Tel Aviv, Israel. This discovery challenges the notion that blade production is exclusively linked with recent modern humans.

An innovative product

Though blades have been found in earlier archaeological sites in Africa, Dr. Barkai and Prof. Gopher say that the blades found in Qesem Cave distinguish themselves through the sophistication of the technology used for manufacturing and mass production.

Evidence suggests that the process began with the careful selection of raw materials. The hominins collected raw material from the surface or quarried it from underground, seeking specific pieces of flint that would best fit their blade making technology, explains Dr. Barkai. With the right blocks of material, they were able to use a systematic and efficient method to produce the desired blades, which involved powerful and controlled blows that took into account the mechanics of stone fracture. Most of the blades of were made to have one sharp cutting edge and one naturally dull edge so it could be easily gripped in a human hand.

This is perhaps the first time that such technology was standardized, notes Prof. Gopher, who points out that the blades were produced with relatively small amounts of waste materials. This systematic industry enabled the inhabitants of the cave to produce tools, normally considered costly in raw material and time, with relative ease.

Thousands of these blades have been discovered at the site. "Because they could be produced so efficiently, they were almost used as expendable items," he says.

Prof. Cristina Lemorini from Sapienza University of Rome conducted a closer analysis of markings on the blades under a microscope and conducted a series of experiments determining that the tools were primarily used for butchering.

Modern tools a part of modern behaviors

According to the researchers, this innovative industry and technology is one of a score of new behaviors exhibited by the inhabitants of Qesem Cave. "There is clear evidence of daily and habitual use of fire, which is news to archaeologists," says Dr. Barkai. Previously, it was unknown if the Amudian culture made use of fire, and to what extent. There is also evidence of a division of space within the cave, he notes. The cave inhabitants used each space in a regular manner, conducting specific tasks in predetermined places. Hunted prey, for instance, was taken to an appointed area to be butchered, barbequed and later shared within the group, while the animal hide was processed elsewhere.

Children, Not Chimps, Prefer Collaboration: Humans Like to Work Together in Solving Tasks -- Chimps Don't

Cooperation is child´s play: children that are presented with a task that they could perform on their own or with a partner show a preference to cooperate. (Credit: © MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology)

Science Daily  — Recent studies have shown that chimpanzees possess many of the cognitive prerequisites necessary for humanlike collaboration. Cognitive abilities, however, might not be all that differs between chimpanzees and humans when it comes to cooperation. Researchers from the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen have now discovered that when all else is equal, human children prefer to work together in solving a problem, rather than solve it on their own. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, show no such preference according to a study of 3-year-old German kindergarteners and semi-free ranging chimpanzees, in which the children and chimps could choose between a collaborative and a non-collaboration problem-solving approach.

The research team presented 3-year-old German children and chimpanzees living in a Congo Republic sanctuary with a task that they could perform on their own or with a partner. Specifically, they could either pull two ends of a rope themselves in order to get a food reward or they could pull one end while a companion pulled the other. The task was carefully controlled to ensure there were no obvious incentives for the children or chimpanzees to choose one strategy over the other. "In such a highly controlled situation, children showed a preference to cooperate; chimpanzees did not," Haun points out.

Human societies are built on collaboration. From a young age, children will recognize the need for help, actively recruit collaborators, make agreements on how to proceed, and recognize the roles of their peers to ensure success. Chimpanzees are cooperative too, working together in border patrols and group hunting, for instance. Still, humans might have greater motivation to cooperate than chimpanzees do." A preference for doing things together instead of alone differentiates humans from one of our closely related primate cousins," says Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. "We expected to find differences between human and chimpanzee cooperation, because humans cooperate in a larger variety of contexts and in more complex forms than chimpanzees."

The children cooperated more than 78 percent of the time compared to about 58 percent for the chimpanzees. These statistics show that the children actively chose to work together, while chimps appeared to choose between their two options randomly. "Our findings suggest that behavioral differences between humans and other species might be rooted in apparently small motivational differences," says Haun.

Future work should compare cooperative motivation across primate species in an effort to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the trait, the researchers say. "Especially interesting would be other cooperative-breeding primates, or our other close relatives, the bonobos, who have both previously been argued to closely match some of the human pro-social motivations," says Yvonne Rekers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and first author of the study.