Research Newsletter: November 15, 2006
From the Desk of the Research Director

Edith is away at the Restaurant Finance & Development Conference, so Research decided to take over the newsletter this week. Here are just a few things that we are currently working on that you may find interesting:

• Advertising Analysis - We've been approached by a few different supplier clients to help them find systems that have advertising programs and ad funds of a specific size ($ amount and franchisee contribution $). We covered advertising in the third section of the 2006 Profile of Franchising for the IFA Educational Foundation. That article is here. If you are interested in similar research, contact Edith at ewiseman@frandata.com.
• A private equity client has asked us to target a short list of prospects for them and to deliver research that benchmarks each franchise's performance against their peers over the last 5-10 years. Part of this is understanding the relative performance of franchising overall.This chart shows the breakdown of revenues for franchisors in all of franchising. If you would like to learn more about targeted marketing, contact Christine at charris@frandata.com.
• We are putting together the new Fast 55 Fastest Growing Franchises list for Franchise Times and this year's Franchising High Performers List for Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) StartupJournal.com. If you think your system should be considered for either of these lists, you should make sure that we have your most current data. Contact Randy Temple at rtemple@frandata.com or 703.740.4713.
  
  Have a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving!
• Speaking of the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday's article about Culligan's new terms in their franchisee agreement is causing a bit of a buzz. We read the agreement over again carefully and the article is accurate in the main. If you are curious and would like to get a copy of their UFOC to see for yourself, we've reduced the price for that one UFOC to $50 (regularly $220) until the end of the month. Download it here.

These are just some of the questions that the Research team routinely fields. If you have questions about franchising - be they best practices, benchmarking, due diligence, pure research, or identifying your target audience - give us a call at 800.485.9570 or email the Research Team at research@frandata.com.