1.75% → 24.75%
See the fee behind the fee
Good Feet Store, The’s royalty is 1.75%. Add the brand fund and the local marketing the same filing requires, and what it obliges you to pay out each year is 24.75% of revenue.
What a franchise costs, and what happened to the people who paid it.
Franchisors must file a disclosure document before they can sell you anything. We read them, and set what they claim beside the repayment record of every franchisee who borrowed to buy in.
- Brands
- 1,439
- SBA loans read
- 93,493
- Filings read line by line
- 1,186
- Brands that disclose average revenue
- 449
What happened to the people who bought in
Every one of these was somebody who borrowed to open a franchise. The SBA publishes what became of the loan, brand by brand, and it is the only public record of how franchisees actually did.
- Franchisees who borrowed
- 93,493
- Loans that have run their course
- 45,407
- Ended in the debt being written off
- 4,432
- Outcomes the SBA withholds
- 35,640
That is 9.8% of the loans we can see — roughly one in ten — where the lender wrote the debt off. A charge-off is a business that closed owing money, so behind that figure are 4,432 people who did not get out whole.
And 44% of the outcomes are withheld from the public file. We do not estimate them, average around them, or quietly drop them from the denominator — a brand’s rate is shown only where enough loans have actually finished to mean something, always with the number they are out of.
At 71 of these brands every borrower repaid. At 49, more than one in four did not.
Same investment, same word on the door. Which brand you pick changes your odds more than anything else about franchising.
Every brand here shows how many franchisees borrowed and how many repaid. Looking one up is free. Find the brand you are considering →
What you can do with it
9.76%
See how owners actually fared
4,432 of 45,407 finished SBA loans to franchisees were charged off. No disclosure document tells you this.
449
Model it on your own numbers
449 brands state a revenue figure solid enough to build a model on. Put in your own rent, wages and financing — every assumption is labelled with whose it is, including the ones with no source at all.
9.00%
Put two brands side by side
is what the median brand obliges every year, across the filings we have read. Comparing two prices that difference in dollars and sets it beside their loan outcomes.
Why this is different
783 → 449
Directories ask if a brand discloses earnings. We ask what it disclosed.
783 of the filings we have read make an earnings claim. 449 state a figure you could actually divide into an investment. The rest are ranges, medians and top quartiles.
38%
of loan outcomes are withheld, and we say so
The SBA publishes no outcome for 35,640 of 93,493 loans. Every default rate in this market is computed over the remainder. Ours says which.
20
finished loans before we print a rate
Two failures in four is 50%, and also four people. McDonald’s has six finished loans and none charged off — a perfect record and no evidence, and its page says so instead.
0
invented numbers, and no composite score
A field the franchisor left out stays empty. A single rating would blend loan outcomes with filing terms, and only 972 of 1,439 brands have both.
The same 1,186 filings, asked three questions
- 783 of 1186make an Item 19 financial performance representation
The disclosure exists. Most listing sites stop here.
- 452 of 1186state a per-outlet revenue figure in dollars
The others report enrolment counts, or a seasonal service line — real numbers that are not revenue per outlet.
- 449 of 1186state one whose population is unambiguous
The rest average across territories rather than outlets, mix in affiliate-owned locations, or quote a mean over a distribution most outlets fall below.