A business that works is not the same as a business that replicates.

This page is for two people who look different and are asking the same thing.

You own a unit that works, and you are considering a second, a fifth, or a territory as an area developer or master franchisee. Or you run a business with your own outlets and people keep asking whether they can open one under your brand.

Both of you are about to multiply something you have only done once. The question underneath is identical: does this survive being copied by someone who isn't you?

Because the unit works, more units will work.

It is the most expensive assumption in Indian franchising and it is made identically on both sides of the table.

By 2012 we had built a 10,000 sq ft central kitchen — bakery, confectionery, cold kitchen, hot kitchen, two walk-in cold rooms, a refrigerated van. Built to flight-catering standard and designed to supply twenty outlets. We were at about ten stores.

That is when we sat down with a franchise consultancy about expanding. Their proposal came in two phases. The first was paid work: audit our readiness, tell us what had to change before we could franchise properly, then build the systems to run a network. The second was recruiting franchisees on a success fee.

I was ready to proceed. My partners were not, and I could not convince them. The sticking point was the first phase — a few lakh rupees, against a business we had put crores into. We did not engage them.

In hindsight that was a mistake, and mostly mine. I had the argument to make and I did not make it well enough to land.

I want to be careful about what I claim. The brand did not end because of that decision — we exited years later because the market filled with home bakers and turned price-sensitive. What skipping the systems work did was remove an option. I never found out what a properly built network would have done for us.

Two things came out of it, and both are why this service exists in the shape it does. The diagnosis was worth paying for, and I am the one who didn't buy it. And the second phase — a success fee on recruiting franchisees — is the part I will never sell. It makes the adviser a broker, and it means the person telling you whether you are ready gets paid when you sign people up.

Scale differently deserves naming, because no other adviser in this market offers it. Franchising is one instrument among several — company-owned expansion funded more slowly, a management or operating lease, licensing without the operating model, distribution instead of retail, a joint venture bringing capital you lack.

I took that route myself. Our family had run cinemas since 1958. When we built a new multiplex I argued for separating ownership from management and signed an eighteen-year operating lease rather than running it ourselves. It saved crores in capital and removed an operating burden we did not need to carry. Not scaling ourselves was the right answer, and it was not the obvious one.