The term “Discovery Day” can be a bit misleading. While there is certainly an element of discovery in a prospective franchisee visiting your company and meeting stakeholders for the first time, Discovery Day is meant more to be the final step toward signing an agreement. You should go into it expecting to conclude with something along the lines of, “I’ll be sending out the final agreement tomorrow. We can then coordinate a signing time and begin the onboarding process.”

Did you ever play board games as a kid with a friend who made up the rules? It can be extremely frustrating to finally start making traction only to have the rules change half way through.

As a general rule of thumb, every franchisor will want to build a non-compete into their Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD). Once you give a franchisee the complete playbook to running and operating your successful business model, you don’t want them to turn around and start running their own offshoot. Which is where the non-compete comes in. It protects you.

I’ve stressed the importance of trademarks on many occasions. In short, owning (and controlling) the brand name is essential on the journey of franchising. It’s one of the many reasons that California cannabis companies can’t franchise.