The entrepreneur’s roller coaster: three things we share with every new franchisee

Every new business owner is prepared for the highs. Almost nobody is prepared for the drops  –  or told that a good number of them are self-inflicted.

Darren Hardy spent years trying to work out why roughly two-thirds of small businesses fail. His conclusion, in The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster, was that most of the usual explanations  –  capital, location, credit, inventory, competition  –  were not the real story. The decisive factor was not economic. It was emotional. People do not generally get pushed off the ride. They get shaken until they climb off voluntarily.

We’ve been building the PropertyGuys.com franchise system since 1998, and I have watched a lot of people join it. Hardy is right. But I would add something specific to franchising, because our version of the ride has a particular cruelty built into it.

Why the franchise drop hurts differently

An independent founder expects chaos. They knew going in that they were improvising, and when month seven is grim, they read it as the nature of the thing.

A franchisee was “sold” something else. They bought a proven system, validated numbers, a playbook that works. So when the low arrives  –  and it always arrives  –  the conclusion is not “this is a hard business.” The conclusion is “everyone else can make this work, and I can’t.”

That is a much lonelier thought. The low turns up with shame attached to it, and shame makes people go quiet exactly when they most need not to. In my experience, that is the mechanism that ends more franchise careers than any market condition.

So here are the three things I say to every emerging franchisee, usually more than once.

1. Don’t ride it alone

The instinct at the bottom of the drop is to withdraw. Stop returning the calls. Skip the regional meeting. Go quiet on the group chat where everyone else seems to be posting wins. It feels like dignity. It is the single most expensive thing you can do.

Fellow franchisees are the most underused asset in any system. Somebody in your network was sitting exactly where you are eighteen months ago, and they remember it vividly. They will tell you things a head office cannot, because they lived it rather than measured it.

Then use the home office. We have seen this pattern dozens of times. We can often tell you which month it typically bites, what it usually means, and what tends to pull people out of it. That is not a favour we are doing you; it is what the support structure is for. Nobody at our end thinks less of a franchisee who calls. We forget about the ones who don’t, and then disappear.

Friends and family belong on that list too. They cannot fix the business. What they can do is restore your sense of proportion, which is the first casualty of a bad quarter.

One more thing, and I want to say it plainly because our industry tends not to. If the low does not lift  –  if it follows you home, if it is affecting your sleep, your health, your relationships  –  that is no longer a business problem to be solved by business people. Talk to your doctor. There is no version of quietly toughing that out that is good for you or for your business.

2. Don’t stop doing the things that got you busy

This is the least dramatic cause of the drop and by far the most common. I have watched it happen to good operators over and over.

You start out doing the work properly. The prospecting. The Habits. The follow-up calls you don’t feel like making. Showing up in the community, week after week, whether or not anything comes of it. And if done consistently and correctly,  it works  –  the business gets busy.

Then being busy takes over. Serving customers consumes every hour you have, and the habits quietly fall away. Not by decision. By displacement. You did not choose to stop prospecting; you simply ran out of Tuesday.

You are not riding a track somebody else built. You are laying it yourself, one quarter at a time.

Here is the trap. Business development is a lagging indicator. What you do this week does not show up for ninety days. So when the habits stop, nothing bad happens. The phone keeps ringing. The pipeline still looks healthy. You conclude, quite reasonably, that you have arrived and the hard part is behind you.

Ninety days later the pipeline is empty and it feels like the market turned on you. It didn’t. You turned, a quarter ago, and you are only now receiving the invoice.

What usually follows is worse: a panic sprint back into prospecting, another wave of business, another collapse of the habits, another quiet ninety days. That is the roller coaster. And the uncomfortable truth is that a lot of it is self-built.

The fix is not heroic. Protect a block of business-development time that is non-negotiable  –  the same hours every week, defended in your busiest month as fiercely as in your slowest. The discipline is not doing the work when you need customers. It is doing it when you don’t.

3. Keep in mind that this too shall pass

It is an old line and an unfashionable one, and it is still the truest thing I know about this ride.

The part people miss is that it cuts both ways. At the bottom, the low feels permanent  –  and it isn’t. At the top, the high feels permanent too, which is precisely why people stop doing the work in point two. A phrase that flattens both extremes is worth more to a business owner than any amount of motivation.

One practical version of this: keep a record. In the strong months, write down what you were actually doing  –  the activity, the routine, the hours. In the hard months, read it back. Memory is unreliable under stress, and it will tell you that you have always worked this way. Your notes will tell you the truth.

What franchisors owe the ride

I should be fair and put some of this on our side of the table.

We sell predictability, and we should be honest about its limits. The model is predictable. The emotional experience of owning it is not, and pretending otherwise sets people up to feel defective when the drop comes.

The best onboarding I have seen tells people about the trough before they reach it, that’s why it’s one of our last session during our PGU training session. Naming it in advance is the cheapest intervention available to a franchisor and one of the most effective. A franchisee who was warned experiences month nine as a stage. A franchisee who wasn’t experiences it as a verdict.

The same goes for how we make contact. If a franchisee only hears from our home office when their numbers are down, then the call itself becomes a signal of failure, and people start dodging it. Support has to be routine enough that it is never an event.

Stay in the seat

Nobody gets a version of this ride with only the climbs. The drops are not evidence that you chose wrong, or that you are not built for it. They are the job.

The franchisees who are still here in ten years are not the ones who found a smoother track. They are the ones who stayed in the seat, held on to the same unglamorous routine through the good months and the bad, and made sure there was somebody sitting beside them.

You joined a system so that you would not have to work this out alone. That is the whole point of it. Use it.