Last week in Part 1 of this two part series, we talked about how many small businesses and entrepreneurs create business expansion through franchising their product or service allowing others to bear the cost of their business expansion. In Part 1, we focused on key reasons that we would never franchise our Writing for the Soul Workshop™ programs. Those reasons were based on how franchising impacts the organizations operating the franchise -from the restrictiveness of the operating procedures, to cost. This week, we’ll focus on how all of the different groups that benefit from Writing for the Soul Workshop™ would be impacted if we offered the program as a franchise instead. Last week we mentioned there are thousands of reasons that we wouldn’t franchise, each with a face and a name. How our program impacts individuals and empowers communities are the focus points for the last 5 reasons we won’t franchise our program.
Reason 6 – Our Affiliates
One of the WOW factors of Writing for the Soul Workshop™ is our Affiliates Program, which is one of the few in the country that allows children as young as 7 years old to earn their own income by promoting Writing for the Soul Workshop™ books and services. Our affiliates have the unique opportunity to gain financial independence and learn how to be entrepreneurs as part of this program. The goal of a franchise is to create profit for the franchise. The goal of Writing for the Soul Workshop™ is to empower our affiliates to earn profits of their own. By adding a layer of additional profit structure, franchising would take money from our Affiliates.
Reason 7 – Our Program Providers
In addition to the fact that our Affiliates earn money, every young affiliate is tied to one of our Certified Program Providers that also earns a portion of the Affiliates Sales as “key source funding” for their programs. With a franchise, your profits are used to expand to more of the same – another location of the same franchise. With Writing for the Soul Workshop™ as a source funding mechanism, our Program Providers use that source funding as they need to support their organizational goals. Not only are they able to keep funding their workshops, they have an opportunity to fund new community programs and to expand the impact of their organization.
Reason 8 – Our Associates
Our Associates Reward Program gives small businesses access to a vibrant new market to expose their brand, products and services through our writing programs around the world. This creates a grass roots economic cycle in each community where Writing for the Soul Workshop™ is offered – Affiliates earn money that they spend in the community, small businesses earn more business through their support of our programs, and Program Providers have more source funding to help impact the community even more. What franchise can do that? Would you rather support a business whose sole mission is profits, or would you rather support a business that was helping to improve literacy rates in your community?
Reason 9 – Our Participants
Another WOW factor of Writing for the Soul Workshop™ is that our curriculum is flexible based on the needs of the participants in the program. As we discussed last week, one of the key tenets of Franchising is a specific formula applied over and over, with restrictive and specific operating plans. Our program is designed to meet our participants at their level while addressing their needs. For example, one of our Program Providers had a customer base of Youth with Adult Responsibilities (YARS) that needed specific help with passing their State required academic testing to graduate. This program provider was able to offer a tailored curriculum that helped our YARS better understand essay questions, which was the biggest challenge they faced based on their pre-test scores. Under a franchise model, each program would receive a curriculum where one size fits all. With Writing for the Soul Workshop™, we offer curricula that empowers and addresses the needs of our participants, not the needs of our business model.
Reason 10 – Our Mission and Operating Values
The mission of Writing for the Soul Workshop™ is empowering communities and impacting individuals on a global scale by developing and implementing programs that equip our next generation of leaders with tools to impact global problems. Learning is one of our key operating values… not just for our participants, but for everyone engaged with Writing for the Soul Workshop™. Our participants, mentors and program providers all have the opportunity to learn new skills that will continue to help them in life. We do this partially through ensuring that our learnings are collaborative. After all …diversity breeds innovation. As program providers find new ways that the program can impact their community, we share these ideas with other program providers, and have a collaborative environment where we all learn from innovative approaches and ideas that a strict franchise model would limit. We know that global problems require global solutions, but we also know that those solutions can never be one size fits all.
While franchising may be great for that cool new burger idea, or a catchy clothing line, franchising is a top down model. All the decisions are made at a corporate level, and the positive community impacts trickle down from the top. Our model focuses on building roots in the community that create empowerment that creates more opportunities for the community. Real opportunities that are financial, educational, and that address key community issues like juvenile crime, and teen unemployment.
Include Writing for the Soul Workshop™ as a viable component to your Youth Programs, State Agency, School or Mentoring Organization. Financing is available. Simply complete the Contact Form below and a Registration Packet will be emailed to you.
Writing for the Soul Workshop™ 