Dana Bell

You go into work on a monday and your boss is in a bad mood. You have a few cross words and he decides you need to be on your own. After a few weeks at home of trying to figure out a 7-letter meaning irritable, and solving the daily Sudoku, you decide to go get yourself a job. You got a good severance package, so you decide to purchase a franchise business. Let's say it's in printing, which is my vocation.

You don't have to know everything about printing; you don't have to know anything about printing. They will teach you and provide support. In fact, you don't even have to learn anything about printing, or business. You can just hire someone. You pay someone else to do the printing and then pay the franchise 5-10% of your sales for their support.

Six months later, business is slowly growing and you start to see some light. Then the franchise district representative comes in to adjust your pricing software, cutting back on your prices in order to boost sales even more. You'll lose money on every sale, but you'll make it up in volume.

He makes copies of several business guides with suggestions and tips for building business, making them on your copier, at your expense. After a year or two of wishful thinking, you begin to discover that you and your business are running out of money while the franchise is making a bundle. You were the big fish feeding off of someone else, but didn't realize there was a bigger fish feeding off of you.

People throw away their life savings in a business without knowing anything about the business or the trade, and live off of the work of others. Sometimes successfully; sometimes not.