Stick or Twist series  ·  Part two of three

Door to Door Career Choices…

Starting a business doesn't mean you have to do it alone.

If you are currently imagining life after your current job (we aren't judging, plenty of Geeks have been EXACTLY where you are) but you're a way off retirement, you might think you only have two choices; two doors you can choose to walk through. Door one: get another job; a similar badge with a different lanyard, or door two: build something of your own, on your own, with no real sense right now of where your first client comes from. Few people realise there is a third door.

Door three, franchising, is designed specifically to take the edge off the parts of building something on your own that might be putting you off. It's worth looking at doors two and three, side by side, and weighing them up honestly, because it's not as cut and dried as you might think a franchise business like us would make it out to be.

Going it alone has real advantages. There are no franchise fees, so beyond the tax man, everything you make is yours. You answer to nobody about how you run your week, who you take on as a client, or what you charge them. For a certain kind of person, that complete independence matters more than anything else on offer, and no amount of support elsewhere would make up for losing it.

What you may be underestimating is what that total independence costs, not just at set-up but over the lifetime of your business. Building a brand nobody has heard of yet, entirely from your own name, takes real time. And at no point can you take a break from building that brand, as it's ALL on you. There's a subtler cost sitting underneath too. When a potential client considers hiring you, a meaningful part of their decision is having confidence they have made a ‘safe choice’, far more than believing you have the requisite skillset. No matter your experience it's hard graft building credibility from a standing start, no matter your marketing strategy.

However, Richard Few, Sales Geek's founder, is proof going it alone can work. He was likely in a similar position to you now, crushing a sales career and crushing his soul simultaneously; too much time away from his young family that no fringe benefit could replace. He made the difficult decision to ditch a senior corporate sales role and build his own business from scratch.

Franchising Sales Geek came four years later, partly because, by that time, he knew the model worked, and also because he decided nobody building this kind of business should have to spend four years alone, figuring everything out on their own without a network of people to share the experience and share the load.

What he built for the people who came after him allows our franchisees to still grow a business of their own, still work hard to make it a success, but do so with some distinct advantages over going it alone. Firstly, Sales Geek is a brand a prospective client has probably already heard of, or at least can look up in thirty seconds and find plenty of other people vouching for us. “Your Name Here Consultants” is many, many years away from generating that level of brand recognition. If a client asks something you haven't handled before, Sales Geek has a network of fellow Geeks you can lean on, across 15 time zones. More than 1,800 years of sales experience you can draw on, without relying on what an AI agent might make up. And just as importantly, with Sales Geek more than any other B2B franchise, your clients invest in a fractional sales leader who will work in their business, rather than hiring just one more independent consultant, hoping their fingers aren't burned again.

That doesn't mean going solo is the wrong choice. Some readers genuinely should go solo. If what appeals to you is total control over every decision, with no brand to answer to and an overriding ambition to be able to say, ‘I built this all by myself’, that instinct is worth trusting rather than talking yourself out of.

But if you think that still sounds a little scary, and it's forcing you to stay put when deep down you know you want to move, then this article is just a nudge that there is a third door you can walk through.