Currently being considered by a major international publisher, Phoenix Rising provides a process for ordinary people who retain dreams of building better lives to do just this. It encourages men and women to reflect on their lives, and on those aspects and events that have tripped them up, and to take pearls of learning from them. It suggests that they take enough time out to heal their wounds and it moves them to take and receive inspiration as they explore the world of possibilities that lies around them.

From Frank Sinatra to Michael J Fox, and from Benazir Bhutto to Mahandas K Gandhi, the characters who inhabit Phoenix Rising are presented as they really are, or were, rather than as the caricatures by which they are often known.

Business figures considered in the book include Steve Jobs, Lee Iacocca, Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, and Kerry Packer.

For the winner of a 10-day auction on eBay, the proceeds of which will be donated to World Vision, Dr Dave Poole will present an insightful and inspirational story to corporate audiences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. 

Be generous.  Bid on Dr Dave!

After a year of dramatic and radical change to almost every aspect of our organization, I found it difficult to transition to a somewhat slower pace of change and reform as my ideas began to meet resistance.  It wasn’t the sort of powerful symbolic resistance I’d faced early in my tenure, like the day I was asked to leave a meeting being conducted by the “shadow board”, a subset of board members who had created an illegitimate and unethical parallel structure to bypass my predecessor.  It was now a more insidious, creeping resistance.  It may not have been intentional on the part of those doing the resisting.  Their subsequent behavior, however, in all too easily permitting my resignation so that they could appoint their own “yes man” belies this view. 

Looking back, I think that I felt similar about six months into the job.  At that time, I thought our growth would be limited by several factors.  The first was the capacity of my people.  At that time, most of us were relatively new, completely overloaded and I couldn’t afford to hire any more staff, although new members were soon too join my team.  I was also unsure about the levels of political support.  I felt that our people, including key members of the board were with me, but they were cautious.  I was also challenged by the difficulty of altering the mental models of our stakeholders, as I sought to create the perception that things weren’t as great as they thought they were.  In addition, new strategies cost money – you have to spend it to make it – but you’ve got to find the resources to invest in the strategies first. 

So, it all seemed a lot tougher than the case studies had made me believe.  When I stood in the classroom and suggested that a CEO could simply spin-off a division here and seek a merger there, it appeared blindingly obvious and easily implementable.  It helped, of course, that almost all case studies in strategic management courses are of companies whose fortunes since the case was written are easily tracked.  Students often look back through the lense of subsequent events.  If the company made logical and sensible changes, it was these changes that brought the successes reported in the case study and could be reported as recommendations for action.  If the changes failed, then it was clear all along that failure was inevitable and that no recommendations were available to help make things different.  This is the beauty of the post-hoc rationalisation, the “after the fact” conclusion which ties all the loose ends together, bundles up the package, and mails it to the management gods.

So, in my role I met increasing resistance.  It should, perhaps, have been a hint about how things would turn out.  If I responded to this resistance by not going too far and ensuring that I did not continue to too much too soon, the old guard among the board may have never unveiled their guillotine! 

To the extent that a radically different pace of change represents a different style of management to your own, the growing gap between intentions and outcomes will cause a growing unease.  This discomfort may play itself out via unintended behaviors and actions driven by a restless and frustrated subconscious.  The seeds sown by your success as a change-driven leader may grow to become the high stalks ready to be slashed by your change-averse board members and stakeholders.

Ironically, I first sensed the stronger levels of resistance during my first day back in the office after our best ever event.  We held a fantastically well-attended, marvellously entertaining, gala awards dinner that received nothing but praise.  There were dark shadows growing, however, I had been using my love of writing to compose several press statements that turned out to a mixed bag.  While some garnered national publicity, others caused concern for some of my Board members who thought that the statements may impact negatively on their own businesses.  Since I hated doing work which did not pay dividends, I grew increasingly frustrated. 

I needed to take a few deep breaths and think strategically about the contribution I was making to the organization and may make in the future.  Maybe my role was becoming more symbolic and ceremonial than hands-on.  Maybe I needed to expand the role to account for these changes, looking for new areas in which I could make a difference.

On the other hand, the history of corporate leaders is one of leaders who favour a particular approach, philosophy, or style over others.  Very few are able to shift rapidly between one style and another.  In fact, to move flexibly between styles can, if not performed with excellence, cause others to see you as a chameleon with a wishy-washy approach.

In the end, we will only enjoy our work and make a real difference if we are working to our strengths and in proximity to our personal style.  If the gap between our style and the expectations of our organization becomes too great, it may well be time to move on.  For better or worse, that’s exactly what I did.

One of the few levers you may be able to pull is marketing, usually represented by the four Ps of price, product, promotion, and place.  For most franchisees, price will normally be set by your franchisor.  Similarly, your degree of control over product selection will also probably be highly constrained.  I have already spoken about the significance of place, or location, in Lesson 1.  It remains a hugely important variable in the success or failure of your business.

This leaves promotion.  While I am compelled to contribute a fixed percentage of revenue to a central advertising fund, local marketing efforts are pretty much up to me.  This may also be true for you.

I’ve tried several promotional strategies.  Around this time last year, I ran an Australia Day promotion coinciding with our national holiday.  I had signs made for the store and distributed almost 20,000 brochures in the local area.  It was a dud.  I gave away a 20 percent discount only for a short-term loss of profit.  Long-term benefits to the franchise through greater local recognition remain unclear.

Next, I attempted to win a competition run by one of my suppliers for the highest increase in sales for their travel books.  While my sales grew by almost 400 percent in the month of the competition, I was merely a runner-up.  One store increased their sales by more than 1,000 percent, although I remain intrigued by the reality that their equivalent sales of the same books in the previous years must have been close to zero.  In other words, I’ve learnt that while I may be highly motivated and strongly focused to win such competitions, there are others in the franchise system whose knowledge about the keys to victory is based on years of ensuring that they stay in front.

I have tried hard to encourage more of the book spend among employees in the local business district to remain in the area.  I created a local loyalty card that complimented the loyalty program of my franchisor.  In particular, I thought that this would appeal to local school teachers and similar educators who tend to buy more books than others from different professions.  Again, while incremental sales have undoubtedly been enhanced, this strategy has not provided the more significant improvements I had sought.

Arguably, the bargain-hunting book buyer is a different animal to the normal member of the book buying family.  For this reason, I have held several sales in the surrounding area.  While this strategy worked relatively well prior to Christmas, the most important retailing period of the year, it has been less successful since that time.  One attempt cost me thousands of dollars after I chose a rotten location.  Another was lucky to break even. 

The big wahu of all promotional strategies was the exclusive deal I made to sell books at the three Donald Trump events scheduled for various states in Australia last November.  I spent weeks to win this deal, subsequently signing an exclusive deal with the local promoter.  I paid him $7,500 for the privilege, and ordered more than 4,000 books to sell at the events.  I was sure I had a huge winner on my hands.  In addition, I was negotiating with Trump University to sell their range of Trump wealth-creation products at these events.

When Wall Street tanked, ticket sales stalled.  The promoter went bust, taking my money with him.  Donald Trump had been paid almost $2 million in fees to attend, however the promoter’s inability to come up with the final payment caused Trump to cancel his visit and pocket the money.   I am but one of the 650 creditors of this disaster. 

Given that I tend to have the perseverance of a bulldog, I actually attempted to resurrect the tour, offering to sell the tickets at more realistic prices, allow those who had already bought tickets to come for free, and to split any profits arising from the tour with Trump, suggesting that his share go to charity.  While I didn’t know if I would make any money myself, I truly wanted to do something for those folks who’d already paid an average of $350 for their tickets.  It would also have been nice to sell some of the thousands of books I’d ordered.

So, there you have it.  Promotional strategies from the realistic to the ridiculous.  It remains the nature of marketing that we must, to paraphrase Built to Last, try a lot of stuff and keep what works.  In the absence of the kinds of marketing research available to executives in large corporations, franchisees must feel their way cautiously along the dark promotional path. 

This is especially challenging during tough times, since marketing dollars are one of the few costs over which we have some semblance of control.  The overwhelming temptation is to back off and spend as little as possible.  While I wouldn’t recommend spending money that you cannot afford to lose, both new and existing franchisees must promote their businesses frequently and with gusto.  Set your budget at the outset, keep thinking creatively, and look around for new approaches that may provide a competitive advantage for your franchise.     

I began with the best of intentions.  My former accountant was a well-meaning guy with a number of small businesses in his portfolio.  His specialization, however, was the not-for-profit sector.  Their philosophy and that of this budding franchisee could not have been more different.

Believing that I should ground myself in all aspects of the business, he encouraged me to purchase bookkeeping software and complete all of the data entry associated with paying suppliers, receiving books at the store, processing credits, and so on.  Unfortunately, not only did I struggle with accounting at college, my desire to undertake such laborious processes was even more underwhelming now that I was distant from academia.  Thus, I let the bookkeeping drift while hoping that it would sort itself.  While the elf may have repaired all of the boots in the old fairytale, nothing of the sort would occur for me.

You see, I am a book keeper, not a bookkeeper!

Before telling you about the inevitable disaster that loomed over me, allow me to digress briefly to discuss the value of a franchise-familiar accountant prior to making the decision to buy a franchise.  In short, an experienced financial adviser is worth gold to you.  They can review the most important metrics underlying the success or failure of your proposed business and put their finger quickly on the flaws in your thinking.  If it is an existing business, they can spot whether the owners have been paying themselves a reasonable salary, whether they have or have not been squirreling funds between accounts to create the perception of inflated profits and revenues, and let you know if the value placed on the goodwill of the business is reasonable or overstated.

Oh, how I wish I had received that type of advice at the time!

Okay, back to my disaster.  While I was keeping up with paying my suppliers, my cash reserves were rapidly diminishing.  Cash is the lifeblood of any business and is the very heart and soul of every small business and franchise.  Despite sales revenues looking okay, I was losing the battle to stay afloat.  In addition, while not completing the critical accounting tasks, I was also neglecting to return overstocks to suppliers, a fatal sin for any bookseller.

I was just about ready to throw in the towel when I received a phone call from the franchisor.  A new employee in the accounting department had spotted a major error.  Every month since I had purchased the business I had been sending in a check to cover my royalty payments and advertising levies.  At the same time, my franchisor had been direct debiting my bank account for the exact same amount each and every month.  I had been paying the franchisor double and no one had spotted it.

When the head office employee stated that I was about to receive a refund of almost $30,000, I could hardly speak, such was the feeling of relief.  When I phoned my wife, who teaches part-time rather than working in the franchise, she cried.  While not nearly as naturally emotional as I tend to be, she had been sharing the same strain.  We shared tears of relief.

Now, I have an accountant who services the financial needs of three other stores in this franchise network in addition to mine.  He knows all of the ins and outs, can organize the leasing of new equipment, and can complete the critically important financial deliverables on which the franchisor relies.  Not only that, Doug drops by the store every few days to pick up my paperwork and discuss any financial matters that either he or I need to resolve.  He makes sure I pay my taxes on time, processes the salaries of my staff, and keeps a supportive eye on me, the financial luddite.

So, while it may be an overstatement to equate Doug with the holy father, it is nonetheless that he was an overdue answer to prayer.  For your own peace of mind, find a Doug at the outset!

For the pure entrepreneur, consider someone such as Richard Branson, now CEO and majority owner of one of the biggest and most admired companies in the United Kingdom.  From a very young age, Branson always sought to go his own way.  His first business venture was a student newspaper he started from scratch, a business he later sold to a multinational company for a tidy profit. 

Richard Branson considers himself to be a business and brand creator, someone who can reshape an industry through both innovation and an incredibly strong commitment to seeing things from the customers’ perspective.  By better responding to meet their needs than anyone else in the sector, his Virgin companies almost always carve out significant chunks of the market.  Clearly, Branson could never work for anyone else and, in fact, has never done so.

In the United States, Donald Trump is a superb example of an entrepreneur who always demanded total control of his business and his future.  While he worked with and for his father Fred, a Brooklyn-based real estate developer, during his college years, Trump created The Trump Organization during his early 20s.  His aim was to create the instant perception among potential clients and customers that his corporation was far more significant and expansive than it appeared, even though at first he was its only employee.  Like Branson, Trump has long been a lone ranger who has always needed to maintain primary control over any business venture with which he is associated.

If this approach is also your own favored approach for getting into business, buying a franchise may not actually be for you.

In summary, the franchising organization retains substantial control over what you can do, how you can do it, and when and where you can do it.  This information is contained in the franchise agreement that every new franchisee must sign.  While the restrictions on your behavior will differ from one franchisor to the next, the motivation for such constraints on your freedom is common to all.  That is, they are seeking to ensure that their offerings are standardized to the highest possible extent and that they maintain maximum control over their empires. 

If you have ever read Michael Gerber’s excellent book, The E-Myth, you will understand why this is so.  Developed appropriately, the policies and procedures to which you will be subject serve both franchisor and franchisee in positive ways.  They ensure that customers who visit any of the franchises receive similarly high levels of service.  They ensure that franchisees don’t drop their standards or personalize them in ways that compromise the franchisor’s reputation and brand.  Most importantly, they are designed to ensure that anyone with a reasonable degree of intelligence and a commitment to hard work can achieve them, thus limiting the reliance of the franchisor on the vagaries of individual brilliance and talent.

For the franchisee, the rules under which they operate limit the risks associated with starting a new business, since they are less likely to make dramatic mistakes.  Their potential customers may be already familiar with the brand and its characteristics, thus making it easier to develop customers and patronage.  Many decisions, particularly those associated with marketing, purchasing, and the creation of IT systems and databases, may be out of the hands of franchisees, therefore encouraging them to focus their efforts on building sales.  In all likelihood, franchisees will also benefit from the buying power and managerial support provided by their franchisor.

If this is more your ballgame, you are what I call a “frentrepreneur” rather than a pure entrepreneur.  Yes, you retain many of the characteristics of the traditional entrepreneur and likely associate yourself with their stories, but you act within a somewhat different operational context.  In essence, you deliberately choose to trim your wings in the knowledge that you will likely fly longer than other birds, recognizing too that you may also not get to fly as high as they do.

While accepting the downsides, this can still be a personally rewarding and totally appropriate business decision.  The world is full of franchisees who remain enthusiastic about self-selecting into a franchise system rather than starting from ground zero.  In fact, I walk past one every day, a bakery and pastry franchise, who proudly stated to me that he is the nation’s highest revenue franchise.  Not only is he delighted about this achievement, he is clearly making a great deal of dough with his dough!

In buying a franchise, it is therefore essential that you first examine yourself, your motivations and your relative need for control and autonomy before concluding whether you are an entrepreneur or a frentrepreneur.  In whichever industry you are exploring, ask existing independents about the benefits and costs of remaining outside a franchise group.  Also, ask current franchisees about the pluses and minuses that they consider to be part and parcel of being a franchisee.  It is only after you’ve reflected on this information that your true identity, as entrepreneur or frentrepreneur, will become clear.  Armed with this self-knowledge, a critical early decision will have been made.

The dog may as well have eaten it, for it wasn’t worth much. My preparation for buying a franchise wasn’t even close the quality of what yours must be if you are going to make a sound buying decisions.

Let’s consider some of my mistakes.

Most significantly, I was far too driven by emotion, passion and impatience. I had recently concluded a term full of part-time university teaching and when the phone stopped ringing my nervousness about the future took over. As I sat at my home computer in August 2007, I thought, “why not buy a bookstore?” and proceeded to go to the website of the chain from which I bought most of my books to view the opportunities. Since there were three existing franchises for sale, they were the three I examined. Since I couldn’t afford the start-up costs of a new store, I didn’t consider any other options for establishing a store. At the very least, I should have looked at what other franchisors were offering. I didn’t.

Of the three stores, only one was within my price range. While performing poorly, it looked like it would not be falling over any time soon, whoever was the owner. It was probably operating around its break-even revenues, thus offering a lower level of risk than one of the other stores, then struggling against huge local competition. It didn’t open Sundays, thus appealing to my sense of family, and contained a low level of inventory, therefore reducing my required levels of borrowing.

Having said that, it seemed to be providing the existing owner with a basic salary but little more. I knew that I could turn make it run as well as it had in years past, however I missed some critical information that I should have noticed. First, the owner’s partner had been employed full-time in the store yet was only being paid the equivalent of a couple of days a week. With my wife teaching part-time and looking after the kids otherwise, this was a salary expense I had not foreseen and would need to incur.

Second, the previous owner’s borrowings were much lower than mine, so his loan servicing expenses didn’t impact on the bottom line as much as mine did. While my accountant was competent, I should have sought advice from a financial adviser with more experience in small business generally and franchises in particular.

Third, given all of the above, I should have offered far less to buy the business than I did. While the existing owner dropped his price by about 30 percent, making me feel that I was a negotiating king, the reality was that the business was worth significantly less than I paid. The owner was pretty desperate to sell, there were no other serious buyers in the market, and I was too enthusiastic about showing my hand as a potential buyer to later have the negotiating power that I might have.

Finally, it turned out that the timing of my purchase was abysmal, at least in some respects. During September 2007, I left Australia for two months of teaching at a university in rural China. As I departed, I had decided against the idea of buying my favored franchise. The money was just not in it and something told me that it may never be. Nonetheless, on arriving in Shanghai en route to a central province, I received updated financials from the existing owner that gave me a little more hope. After another few days of reflection, no doubt encouraged by the fact that I was in the middle of nowhere and wondering about the state of my career, I took the plunge and bought the business.

All well and good, you might say, except that negotiating a price, completing the franchise documents, and filling in the never-ending pile of supplier credit forms was perhaps best undertaken from home rather than the middle of nowhere. Worse still was organizing a bank loan to buy the business. I had no previous record of business borrowings so had to start from scratch. Worse, my bank manager was out of the office far more often than she was in it. Tracking her down made for a ridiculous number of calls. What hurt the most, however, was that on my return, a Director of the franchisor asked me if I had used their preferred bank, since that bank had set up fast-track procedures for new franchisees and, better still, enabled the new franchisee to borrow against the value of the business rather than against their residence! If I’d known that at the time, much stress and heartache down the track could have been avoided.

While I still feel that the franchisor could have done a much better job of assisting me, the responsibility, when all is said and done, was mine, as it is yours if you are passionate about buying the right franchise at the right price in the right location. Carry out as much as the due diligence as you can yourself and, where you don’t have the skills, bring in others to better work through the critical processes that will undoubtedly have significant bottom-line impacts for your business over the long haul.

I was confident that I could restore its glory.  After all, I had doubled the membership, revenues, and staff numbers of a real estate industry association just before buying the bookstore.  I knew how to revitalize a business.  Surely I could do the same for the bookstore, right?

Well, yes, or at least a qualified yes.  Revenues are now approaching their former highs as a result of some very long hours and the implementation of some innovative marketing strategies.  Yet, for all this, I haven’t realized significant profits to show for this effort and these outcomes.

Why not?  Because, in the case of books, and probably for a heap of other products, the economics of the business model work against the creation of lucrative outcomes.  I was reminded of this by an insightful quote in the wonderful book, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer,

“I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers—booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up working in a bookstore for the wages, and no one in their right mind would want to own one—the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it—along with first goes at the new books.”

So, it’s a tough business.  But we each have to work at a place we find interesting, feel enthusiasm for, and is within our span of knowledge and expertise, don’t we?  For me, this had to be the world of books, particularly since I can’t fix or repair anything, am a dolt and a luddite when it comes to anything technical, and have had a love affair with books since my childhood.  Added to that, I self-selected into a lower-risk, lower-returns industry by buying a bookstore rather than something newer and more glamorous.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that the vast majority of franchise business models are designed with the primary expectation that it is the franchisor who will benefit most.  They pass most of the potential risks on to the franchisees, require the franchisees to undertake almost all of the “grunt” work of the business, and are not especially accountable to their franchisees except in an indirect, relatively weak manner.

Yes, they are required to monitor the health of their franchise networks, provide opportunities for franchisees to get together, and create marketing and logistics support for their franchisees, but these are arguably less onerous, less risky, and less committed tasks than those demanded of franchisees.

If it’s prosperity you seek, there are a few options you should consider.  Otherwise, you will find yourself in the very large pile of mom-and-pop franchise owners who have bought themselves jobs but do not achieve the returns deserved from their labors.

First, you can get in early and buy a franchise in an industry or niche in its early to late growth phase rather than one in its late maturity like the book business.  McDonald’s in the 1970s, Subway in the 1990, and fruit juices, salads, and sushi bars during this decade are all examples of this phenomena.  Cast your creative minds toward the growth curves of the new wave of franchises.  Perhaps there are businesses available that help people better manage the finances they have (or don’t have) that will be in real demand as the economy contracts.  The fitness and health sectors are likely to continue to grow at impressive rates, while services for our aging baby boomer generation will undoubtedly mushroom during the years ahead.  The earlier you are in, the more that you can take advantage of the above-average margins earned by those facing fewer direct competitors in the short to medium term, and the more that you can establish yourself and take advantage of further opportunities to purchase additional franchise stores or territories before the rest of the world learns about the money to be made there.  Of course, there is a higher level of risk here, but higher rewards usually follow if the risks pay off.

Second, you can snap up existing franchises with low-ball offers that may be accepted, with a little luck, by those desperate to sell.  In this way, you won’t find yourself taking years to pay back the goodwill that may or may not have been in the business you have just purchased.  I definitely paid too much goodwill for my store, adding years of additional work to pay it down.  In contrast, I know of one colleague who has recently added a second franchise to his existing store.  His timing was great for both stores, and he paid little more than the value of the inventory he was acquiring.  For him, there is a much greater potential upside than there is for me.  Live and learn, right?  

Third, you can scout around to see if there are any franchisors offering more of a win-win deal than those who cream off a flat rate of your revenues.  In my view, a truly abundance-focused franchisor would take less of your hard-earned cash as you scale up, and then a higher percentage as you move beyond your break-even to increase your overall margins.  I’m not sure if such franchisors exist, but if I was just starting out I would certainly check this out.  If you have already decided on your industry, I would also closely examine, from every angle, the slice of your money taken by all of the existing franchisors in the industry before settling on any one.  Don’t forget, 8 or 10 percent of your gross revenues may not seem like a lot, but when it is considered next to your bottom-line, you quickly realize that every dollar given to them is one that you won’t keep.  It is a dollar you can’t use for local promotions, a dollar you can’t use to pay yourself a higher salary, and a dollar unavailable to pay down your business loan.  You will never see that dollar again.  Consider this fact very, very carefully and understand its serious implications for your business and your lifestyle before buying your franchise.

Finally, you can always take on some extra work outside your franchise or establish another business to help bring in some extra cash.  This is not without its potential problems, however.  Any time spent elsewhere may take your eyes off your most important asset, your core business, and thus compromise your most critical business outcomes.  In addition, your franchisor may not look at your outside work in a benevolent way.  Check the franchise agreement carefully and, if in doubt, discuss it with someone you trust in the franchisor’s organization before moving outside the business.

If you are going to go the extra mile to make your new franchise a success, think very carefully about your expectations for the bottom-line.  If they are unrealistic and inconsistent with the likely profit flows from your business, you may quickly jeopardize your own morale and that of your people, sending the business into a downward spiral.  With some solid homework, however, you will enter and run the business with a healthier business philosophy and with more realistic expectations for its results.

Some franchisors have locations already available for the consideration of potential franchisees.   Some facilitate the purchase of existing outlets in established locations from franchisees looking to sell.  Others may leave the choice of location entirely up to you, although they will normally keep a watching eye on your choice.

When I returned from teaching an MBA class in New Venture Creation at Utah State University in 2001, I explored franchise ownership for the first time.  I had enjoyed teaching about franchising and had enjoyed excellent customer experiences at franchises such as Subway, Cold Stone Creamery, and Boston Market.  At the time, none of these brands were established in Australia in any meaningful way.

Thus, soon after our return, I attended a Subway meeting for potential franchisees held at south-western Sydney.  After Subway’s Regional Manager informed us that franchisees must first select their own location, I discussed with him two possibilities I then had in mind.  To the first, he said that the site, a shopping centre under construction, was already taken by a new franchisee.  My second suggestion was a regional shopping centre then several years away from development.  Unfortunately, it too was taken, this time by an existing franchisee in a nearby area.  Since I had no other good alternatives, I let the idea drop for a time.

I got back on the franchise horse via the purchase of an existing bookstore franchise in late 2007.  Fronting a pedestrian plaza in the middle of a regional business district, I confirmed the value of its location by sitting out front of the store and counting customers as they entered and left one afternoon.  I counted both buyers and browsers for about 20 minutes.  The numbers looked good.

Looking back, they were good, but perhaps not as good as I had first hoped.  Why?  Because I had observed the store during that time of day when it was, by far, at its busiest.  It was lunchtime, and I have learnt since then weekday lunchtimes, from noon until around 2:00pm, can account for 70 percent or more of the day’s takings.

Therefore, while the store continues to perform well, it would work a whole lot better if the lunchtime crowd was representative of customer flows and revenues across the entire day.  It’s not, and that’s life.

At another time in the recent past, I created two temporary retail stores at other locations, taking advantage of the busy pre-Christmas period to sell as much as I could in as short a time as possible.  The first was again at a place disproportionately favored by the lunchtime crowd, however the rent and overheads were sufficiently low to make the economics of the store work in my favor.  It did pretty well.

The second store was much larger, something all retailers would normally see as a huge positive, however the building itself was isolated from the main center of a regional shopping mall.  While it received plenty of passing automobile traffic as they entered and left the car park, the effort required for shoppers to actually come across to the building worked against its success.  While I didn’t lose money on the deal, I had paid a much higher rental for the site in the hope that the additional space would mean higher sales.  I was wrong.  It was not nearly the goldmine I had hoped it would be.  Ironically, the building had formerly been a Boston Market, a franchise that didn’t last long in Australia since it didn’t catch on.  Perhaps I should have learnt from their failure at the site some years before.

The other day, a friendly supplier gave me a great piece of advice.  He said that the target for any new retail store should be an average of 15 people walking past the location every minute.  While I suspect that many stores may still succeed with fewer pedestrians than this, it is a great “rule of thumb” against which we can evaluate any locations we are seriously considering.

This is the kind of research that only you can undertake.  Franchisors will cover themselves in legalese to ensure that they are not held accountable for any preliminary estimates of customer numbers and turnover.  The owners of shopping malls will do the same.  This is a job for you. 

Learn from my mistake.  If it is an existing site, survey the traffic flows at various times of the day and at different days of the week.  If you are thinking about an entirely new site, find comparison shopping centers and malls that have similar demographics to yours and a similar mix of tenants and make counts of the shoppers walking in and by stores like yours.  You will need to allow for the fact that the center may have grown its traffic over time, whereas a new mall will take time to pull a crowd, particularly in today’s challenging retail environment. 

If you get it right, however, a great location will ensure that your franchise business is a true boomer rather than a business which is here today and gone tomorrow.

It is thanks to global business leaders like Richard Branson that we can drill down into the roller coaster world of the global entrepreneur.  It is also thanks to Branson that we can see how business leadership can be infused with a sense of humour, a truck-load of passion, and a focus on working backwards from the real needs of the customer.

The Virgin empire extends from planes and trains to credit cards and mobile phones.  It has successfully diversified in an era in which diversification was viewed as a strategy of last resort.  Despite growing to become one of the globe’s biggest companies, Virgin’s corporate culture retains the energy and dynamism of its founder.

One of Branson’s most powerful insights is that even the most complex of businesses should be reducible to a simple understanding of its key elements.  If, like the failed dot coms of the last decade, it remains complex and impossible to understand, it is thus either shrouded in the mists of jargon and technocrap, and thus ripe for a new entrant or, at its core, is fundamentally flawed.

On this basis, none of us should be scared about learning the ins and outs of a new industry, winnowing our deepening understanding into a progressive search for new business opportunities.  Branson records, for instance, that he learnt the basics of running a new airline in just four months,

Four months to learn how to deliver an airline.  Not easy.  But definitely doable.  Those business leaders who seek, in interviews and in their writings, to turn their industries into complex puzzles…these people really, really annoy me…To listen to them, you’d think you must be born into an industry to make any headway in it.  And this is rarely true unless you are truffle hunting…The volume of information you’ll need to hack through will be high…but the underlying business model is always fairly simple.

For entrepreneurs, this is great news.  With hard work, you should be able to understand the mechanics of an industry and detect who is doing well and who isn’t.  Poorly or unmet customer needs will often arise as you undertake your homework.  Opportunities to establish a start-up, buy an existing player, or form an alliance may well appear.  Alternatively, you may conclude that the returns of pretty much everyone in the industry do not justify your further efforts and capital.  If so, nothing dramatic has been lost.

For business leaders and executives, however, I think that we need to take care in applying the Branson philosophy across the board.  Consider the Coles Supermarket brand in Australia, for example.  Coles has long sought to match its major competitor, Woolworths, in its offerings, customer service, and brand image, but has yet to succeed.  Recently, it was purchased by Australia’s Virgin-equivalent, the diversified Wesfarmers Group, however it has not shown any serious signs of improvement.  Prior to the Wesfarmers takeover, it had given a high-profile and highly-respected business leader, John Fletcher, the time and resources to bring it back to health.  Fletcher, however, could not sufficiently improve an extremely tired corporate culture and declining brand.

In the global context, consider too the business career of “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, who rode on the coat tails of a slash-and-burn philosophy that had appeared successful at Sunbeam in the United States and at Kerry Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press.  Appointed to save the languishing paper products giant Scott Paper, however, he failed miserably. 

The lesson for executives is that we must seek to match strength to context.  If a leader’s philosophy and style do not align with the array of variables together contributing to outstanding outcomes, all may be lost.  Some of these variables, such as the global and national economic environment, the support of one’s board, and the availability of key personalities to complement and support the leader’s approach, may be wholly or partially outside one’s control.  At times, an organisation’s decline may be terminal, impervious to whatever the leader tries.  Just this week, the giftware firm Wedgewood, as old as industrial life itself, sputtered to an end for this very reason.

So, while the critical ingredients for great leadership may be true everywhere – commitment, passion, ethics, and so on – these may be necessary but not sufficient ingredients for great leadership outcomes in specific situations.  What is missing?  Being in the right place at the right time and, perhaps, a dollop of luck.  Hardly the things that can be taught in MBA schools, but the reality of the messiness, and excitment, that is organisational life.

My teaching philosophy has changed in recent years as I have reflected on my experiences living in China last year while teaching at a university in rural Henan Province, as well as having taken teaching visits to Guangzhou during 2000 and 2002.  I am now certain that our most popular theories of management and leadership must be taught cautiously and with qualification in the PRC, and perhaps with similar caution in other parts of Asia.

To start with, the Chinese culture is, for the most part, radically different to that of North America, the UK, much of Europe’s, and Australia’s.  To recall Hofstede’s influential studies of cultural difference, the Chinese are high in their long-term orientation (a value Hofstede referrred to as the “Confucian orientation”) and power distance (expressing an ongoing preference for centralised power), medium in uncertainty avoidance (that is, they prefer more certainty over less, but not as strongly as elsewhere), and low in individuality.

In contrast, Australians are extremely high in their focus on the individual (rather than the collective and group) but much lower than the Chinese in power distance (Australians consider themselves egalitarian), uncertainty avoidance, and in the possession of a long-term orientation (for most of us, a month is the long-term!).

So, consider a few examples.  Maslow’s hierachy of needs, for instance, starts with the assumption that individual needs are important.  Try telling that to someone who subsumes their own needs to those of their families, living in far-off cities and living as modestly as possible in order to send as much money home as may be spared.  The Maslow pyramid also suggests that our ultimate need is to “self-actualise”, or to truly fulfil our potential and desires.  As far as I can tell, there is no direct translation into Chinese for the concept of self-actualisation.  It’s focus on individual fulfilment as the ultimate end has historically found no basis for comparison in the Chinese culture.  While there may be exceptions as some aspects of Hollywood culture seep into the behaviour of young Chinese, the reality remains that meeting one’s own needs is a flow-on benefit from first meeting the needs of one’s family, not an end in itself.

Let’s consider another example.  A great deal of western leadership theory relies on notions of shared power and empowerment, as well as a distinct preference for a good dollop of decentralisation of authority and responsibility.  In the vast majority of Chinese organisations, you may as well be recommending that they trade sandwiches for rice in the lunchroom.  Deep within the Chinese culture, taking root over many centuries, the philosophy of knowing one’s place, doing one’s duty, and seeking to rise up from one level to the next on the basis of one’s seniority and loyalty to boss, organisation, and party, continue to take great predence over pursuing any of the perceived benefits that may arise in a less rigid approach.

Thus, while some movement towards western practise has been detected by organisational researchers, particularly in the offices of some multinational corporations, across-the-board evolution is sometimes slow, often patchy and, in many locations, non-existent.  Yet, the vast majority of MBA and similar programs in China use western textbooks translated directly into the local idiom.  While there may be the odd example of a Chinese company, theoretically the books reflect the view that western theories may be transplanted without reflection or adaptation.

I do hope that this changes in time, since to do otherwise does a disservice to the Chinese students of our programs and the fields of leadership and management more generally.