California Feature Articles

California Feature Articles

Looking for a franchise opportunity in California? Whether you're a first-time business owner or a seasoned entrepreneur, California offers exciting potential for franchise success. With thriving markets in key cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach, there's a perfect environment to launch and grow a franchise. From food and beverage to retail and services, the diverse economic landscape in California is ripe for franchise opportunities. Explore the best franchise options today and take the next step toward business ownership in California.

Informative articles to support business buyers, franchisees, and franchisors in California.

Gaining access to and securing capital is more important for franchisees today than ever. Every week we talk with multi-unit franchisees about how they are growing and the kind of financing it takes for them to achieve their goals. It's an important topic and sometimes we get some very candid responses.
  • Multi-Unit Franchisee
  • 5,882 Reads
Life has not been easy--personally or professionally--for Chris Haque (pronounced Hawk), who was born in Dinajpur, Bangladesh. He was only 15 when his sister came to the U.S. for medical treatment for leukemia. Thanks to his gift of his bone marrow donation, she lived three more years before the disease took her.
  • Debbie Selinsky
  • 7,501 Reads 2 Shares
Gurvinder Singh is, in many ways, a "normal" 24-year-old guy. A former wrestler, he's into martial arts and spends an inordinate amount of time training in the gym. Despite his high energy level, he can go "couch potato" with the best of them, and he loves TV (his favorite show is "Lost"). He also loves cars, and jokes that the health of his business can be measured by the impressiveness of his ride.
  • Debbie Selinsky
  • 3,389 Reads 13 Shares
With 324 Subways in Oklahoma and Kansas, Don Rottinghaus knows his brand and his market. Must be time for something new. "I work those areas constantly," he says. He has to. Over the past 20 years, the multi-unit franchisee has built a huge chain of Subway locations in the region. And now he's taking on a new challenge, bringing a taste of Southern California sunshine to the Midwest. Over the next 5 years, Rottinghaus will develop 12 new LA Sunset Tan locations in Oklahoma and 25 in Kansas.
  • John Carroll
  • 8,543 Reads
Looking to expand your multi-unit operation and add some units fast? There's a way you can add locations--and immediate cash flow--quickly, without the long wait and usual headaches associated with building a unit from the ground up. It's called refranchising, and it's hot.
  • Kerry Pipes
  • 7,214 Reads 383 Shares
You'd think selling franchises in one of the worst economies since the Great Depression would daunt even the hardiest franchisor. But many franchisors, both well-established and new to the scene, keep on plugging when the economy goes south. Some even consider this a great time to grow.
  • Amy Zuckerman
  • 6,510 Reads 8 Shares
Technology tools have become a mainstay for every multi-unit franchisee, used for planning, budgeting, forecasting, and many other daily activities. Today franchisees are embracing technology for demographic research and site selection.
  • Kerry Pipes
  • 6,107 Reads 259 Shares
It was like a gut punch for Charlie Marshall. In less than a year's time, the Spring-Green Lawn Care multi-unit franchisee went from paying $12 per bag for lawn fertilizer to more than $25 per bag. "That will make you look for ways to streamline and cut costs," says Marshall. To add insult to injury, gasoline prices were skyrocketing, making it even more expensive to fire up his seven trucks and dispatch crews to care for his customers' lawns each day.
  • Kerry Pipes
  • 4,613 Reads 1 Shares
As a marketing expert for a string of fast food chains, Bill Welter learned his craft under "three wonderful kingmakers" of the franchising world: Ray Kroc, Colonel Harland Sanders, and Dave Thomas. But it wasn't until Welter got inside the four walls of his own restaurant that he understood the true nature of the business and the keys to its success.
  • John Carroll
  • 6,896 Reads 1 Shares
There was a time when franchise site selection was as simple (not to mention as rudimentary and often random) as pushing pins in a map on a wall. Maybe they turned out to be good sites, maybe they didn't. But as technology continues to evolve and the tools are recalibrated to further refine the site selection process, the art is becoming a science.
  • Kerry Pipes
  • 7,813 Reads
Anil Yadav knows what it's like to work his way to the top of the food chain. In 1984, he was a fry cook at a California Jack in the Box, a part-time job intended to help pay his expenses while attending college. Within 18 months he was manager, and after five years had bought his own restaurant. He never quite finished that engineering degree, but today he owns and operates 78 Jack in the Box locations, along with 16 Denny's restaurants.
  • John Carroll
  • 10,654 Reads 1 Shares
Sonny’s BBQ
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At 21 and 23, childhood friends Erica Miyabara and Kelly Hiraki own a frozen yogurt shop that already is set to expand with a second location after barely a month in business.
  • Pacific Business News
  • 2,984 Reads 1 Shares
As the Amended FTC Rule on Franchising became a reality over the past 12 months, many franchisors have tried to understand the consequences, particularly as they relate to the law on earnings claims, now called Financial Performance Representations ("FPRs").
  • Lane Fisher
  • 6,347 Reads 1 Shares
With her high energy and positive attitude, it's no surprise that Linda Fong is a successful multi-brand, multiunit franchisee. However, like many franchisees, she's not one of those who made a plan and followed a straight line to that success. But it's the detours and her individualism that have taught her what she needed.
  • Eddy Goldberg
  • 3,539 Reads 15 Shares
When Bill McPherson was growing up in the San Fernando Valley, he dreamed of being a professional basketball player. He was good enough to get a scholarship to the University of California at Irvine.
  • Debbie Selinsky
  • 3,771 Reads 3 Shares
As vice president of concept development at HMSHost, Novack has his plate full, and seems to relish every bite.
  • Eddy Goldberg
  • 6,606 Reads 1,023 Shares
In June 2008, heavy rains caused flooding that filled the basement and rose two feet high on the first floor of Columbus Regional Hospital in Columbus, Indiana. The flooding closed the hospital, forcing the evacuation of 157 patients and causing an estimated $125 million in damages. Paul Davis National (PDN) was soon on the scene, part of the team brought in to mitigate the damage and allow the regional health care facility to reopen as quickly as possible.
  • Eddy Goldberg
  • 3,408 Reads 1,021 Shares
In franchising, no one has to be reminded of the importance of making deals and signing fabulous new franchisees. But unless you actually open new units, inking the deal is only part of the story. This important distinction--between units sold and units opened--led us to examine six franchises that grew by more than 100 units between 2005 and 2006 and ask them how they did it.
  • Debbie Selinsky
  • 4,203 Reads 25 Shares
What was once a humble grassroots movement to "Save the Planet" has now become big business, with consumers a major part of the push. Seems everywhere you look these days, more and more companies are touting their "green" initiatives as they scramble to implement various ways to recycle, reuse, and renew. Green is in.
  • Kerry Pipes
  • 5,060 Reads 7 Shares
Troy Medley has had two major life-changing experiences. The first came when he was just a 19-year-old college student in Missouri.
  • Kerry Pipes
  • 5,988 Reads 1 Shares
Sit-down restaurants, also known as casual restaurants, have re-established themselves in the world of franchising - a world more often associated with such fast-food standards as McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, KFC, Taco Bell, and Subway, for example.
  • Eddy Goldberg
  • 2,718 Reads 49 Shares
Potbelly Sandwich Works
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Potbelly Sandwich Works
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1987 was a good year for franchising. Up to then, franchising was young, brash, and not always professional. Franchises weren’t much concerned with history. They were built mostly by young entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity and grabbed it, looking forward, not backward. The first 30 years of modern business format franchising had the feeling of the Wild West (like the Internet of the last 10 years).
  • Eddy Goldberg & Ripley Hotch
  • 3,562 Reads 9 Shares
In the chronicles of franchising history, some names come immediately to mind - Ray Kroc, S. Truett Cathy, Dave Thomas. The names conjure up images of independent-minded entrepreneurs with the savvy, know-how, and vision to create successful business models replicable anywhere. As part of the celebration of Franchise UPDATE's 20th anniversary, we look back at some of these colorful, inspiring, and sometimes controversial characters.
  • Kerry Pipes
  • 5,055 Reads
When native San Franciscan Ellen Hui left a career in banking in 1989 to take on her first Popeyes Chicken and Biscuits restaurant, she experienced a big culture shock.
  • Debbie Selinsky
  • 4,569 Reads 2 Shares
Since 1653, when Izaak Walton published The Compleat Angler, "compleat" has come to mean many things beyond what Walton described as "a Discourse on Fish and Fishing." The dictionary tells us it means classic or quintessential. But compleat also implies mastery far beyond the basics, conjuring up words like visionary, leader, even master.
  • Debbie Selinsky
  • 3,974 Reads 7 Shares
The recent merger of Cold Stone Creamery and Kahala Corp. (which operates a dozen other franchise concepts including Blimpie, Taco Time, and Surf City Squeeze), see executives taking it all in stride.
  • Kerry Pipes
  • 3,614 Reads 1,014 Shares
When Liz Goodwin of Durham, N.C., was announced as the Curves Franchisee of the Year for the Southeastern Region last October, a cry went up from across the Las Vegas hotel ballroom.
  • Debbie Selinsky
  • 4,092 Reads 20 Shares
Check cashing has come a long way toward respectability in the past couple of decades. Its reputation, however--at least in the eyes of the media and much of the general public--has lagged behind.
  • Eddy Goldberg
  • 15,567 Reads 1,701 Shares
Mike Snyder, who grew up in Michigan and spent most of the last 20 years in and out of California, began work after college as a driver for FedEx in the early ‘80s. He ended up as vice president of the company's eastern region, responsible for $2 billion in revenue and more than a thousand employees.
  • Ripley Hotch and Debbie Selinsky
  • 3,005 Reads 5 Shares
Conventional wisdom has it that young franchises are jumping on the area developer bandwagon to grow quickly and establish their presence in the most efficient way.
  • Ripley Hotch and Debbie Selinsky
  • 3,468 Reads 137 Shares

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