🎯 The business: a franchised home-service company: residential cleaning, non-medical senior care, restoration, painting, lawn treatment, handyman. No kitchen, often no storefront, a van and a small office. You buy a system, a brand and a lead pipeline instead of inventing them.

The same customers the independent version serves, but they often pay more for the brand and the guarantee. Senior care agencies bill $28 to $40 an hour; cleaning franchises $50 to $70 an hour per two-person team; restoration companies bill insurers by a national price list. Recurring work is the point in all of them.

Read the FDD for the brand you are considering and two of its competitors. Item 19 shows whether franchisees actually make money; Item 20 shows how many quit. Call franchisees who left. Compare the total you would pay in fees over ten years with what the independent version of the same business costs; sometimes the brand is worth it, sometimes it is not.

A senior care franchise with twenty clients averaging twenty hours a week at $32 an hour grosses about $55,000 a month. Caregiver pay and payroll costs take 60 to 65 percent, royalties 5 to 6, and the office and marketing the rest, leaving owner earnings around 12 to 18 percent of sales. The cleaning and painting brands run on similar shapes with different labor ratios.

The FDD and agreement with a franchise attorney. Senior care is state-licensed in most states as a home care agency, with background checks and training rules. Restoration needs certifications and insurer approvals. Payroll, workers’ comp and the misclassification trap (caregivers and cleaners are employees in nearly every state).

Hiring. Every one of these businesses is a staffing business wearing a service uniform, and the owners who fail could not keep caregivers or cleaners. A territory that was oversold. A brand whose leads dry up. The ones who succeed treat recruiting as the main job and the franchisor as a vendor.