Tom’s Franchise Information Blog

If you are a local small business person and you sell your goods and services to local business people like yourself, then there is no doubt that you have come across many franchised businesses in your community that you’d like to sell too. Often, you are not allowed to sell anything because of their strict franchising rules and agreements with their franchisor. You see, franchising companies have Confidential Operations Manuals, and they have a set of approved vendors.

This means that the franchisee is not allowed to buy something from someone that is not an approved vendor. Therefore, often you have to talk to the franchisor and convince them to allow you to become an approved vendor. Generally, there are forms the franchisee has to request a local vendor, but it is a little bit of trouble, so you have to be on very good terms with the local franchisee, otherwise it isn’t worth their time and energy to go to bat for you to fill out the form and wait for approval.

If you are dealing with a strong brand name in your area where there are quite a few franchise outlets of the same type with many different franchisees, perhaps, it makes sense to contact the franchisor and go through the rigorous screening process to become an approved vendor. You must understand that this is a very serious issue for franchising companies. They must maintain their standards of quality and consistency in the delivery of their products and services.

About the worst thing you can do is to get cocky with the franchisor because they are dealing with small business people and salesmen from all over the country and all different types of markets just like you. Believe me when I tell you they’ve heard every single sales line, and reason to buy from a vendor of your type already. Before retirement, I ran a franchising company which I had founded, and we set up franchises in 23 states serving some 450 different cities.

If I wanted to approve a vendor for a regional area, I was able to do this extremely quickly, but I got quite tired of the salesmanship hype and nonsense. I sure hope you will please consider this if you are going to sell to franchisees in your local area, when dealing with the franchisor. They got it.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes in franchising.