Franchising Is All About Local

Better Life Maids started out just like most other American businesses, in a family home, around a kitchen table. It was not always easy, but we grew Better Life Maids to one of the largest and most successful house cleaning business in St. Louis. Being green and doing business in a sustainable manner was always important to us. We employ local people, we use local vendors when possible, and we are dedicated to making our local community a better place. When we started to develop our franchise development plan, some asked us why franchising? Aren’t franchises responsible for taking away local jobs, and money out the local community?

To me nothing could be further from the truth. Franchises are all about developing business at the local level. Franchises are started by local people, often husband and wife teams just like us, who are looking to build their own American dream. Franchising allows them to do so, without most of the traditional risks of starting a business. Franchising provides these budding entrepreneurs access to a strong brand, a successful sales and marketing strategy, developed human resources systems, technology, business coaching & support, and much more. Great brands are started every day, and adventurous local entrepreneurs help build these brands into something special, diverse, and help drive the economy.

For 2007, the last year that data is available, according to the IFA (International Franchise Association) franchising directly contributed almost 9.2 million jobs to the US economy. Those are all jobs that help local people, jobs that support local families, and jobs that indirectly help fuel the rest of a local economy where they live and spend their local dollars. But their contribution does not end there. Franchises spend money for products and services from other businesses, so in total franchising is responsible for over 17.4 million jobs, nearly 12% of all the jobs in the United States.

Starting a new business is risky. By starting a franchise, a local business owner is trying to mitigates some of those risks. Franchised businesses have a much better track record for success versus non franchised businesses. While all of us want to cheer for the scrappy start up, and hey I still think of Better Life Maids as one, their is no need to hate the franchise. Think of it this way, franchising is just a way for successful business owners to share what they learned, often with someone in your neighborhood.

And that is our goal with developing a franchise system for Better Life Maids. We want to share our experience with other like minded entrepreneurs. They will know their local markets better than us, and they can be engaged partners in building our company, and the Better Life line of household cleaning products into the first national name brand in green house cleaning.