Ray Borradale: Australia’s favourite and honoured franchisee

Advocates are made by predators.

I owe my franchisor, Nutri-Lawn, a lot.

Maybe Midas taught Ray something.

He continues to contribute by writing on Blue MauMau.org where his comments ring true.

The arrival of chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939 – 1987) was a Buddhist meditation master and holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, the eleventh Trungpa tülku, a tertön, supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries, scholar, teacher, poet, artist, and originator of a radical re-presentation of Shambhala vision.

Recognized both by Tibetan Buddhists and by other spiritual practitioners and scholars as a preeminent teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, he was a major, albeit controversial, figure in the dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism to the West, founding Vajradhatu and Naropa University and establishing the Shambhala Training method.

A Warrior: If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat  anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.

Clear explanation of Occupy Toronto

This retrieval of conservatism is significant.

Corporatism and organizations that are based on monopolies of information are quickly becoming unacceptable.

Franchising is not exempt from these transnational trends.

Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death.

The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul.

Campbell: Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There’s a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it. “All life is sorrowful” is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved which is sorrow. Loss, loss, loss.
Moyers: That’s a pessimistic note.
Campbell: Well, you have to say yes to it, you have to say it’s great this way. It’s the way God intended it.

– Joseph Campbell

Asmaa Mahfouz spoke to men of freedom, justice and dignity

Four Egyptians had set themselves on fire in front of their parliament.

All tyranny falls: Many times triggered by those people are the weakest.

She stirred Egyptians into revolution

Source: http://youtu.be/SgjIgMdsEuk

Ba-ba-bamp-ba ba-ba-ba-bamp-ba I wanna be sedated

And then all hell broke loose.

Number 144 on the Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

I Wanna be Sedated, Ramones, 1978

Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go I wanna be sedated
Nothin’ to do and no where to go-o-oh I wanna be sedated
Just get me to the airport put me on a plane
Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane
I can’t control my fingers I can’t control my brain
Oh no no no no no

Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go….
Just put me in a wheelchair, get me on a plane
Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane
I can’t control my fingers I can’t control my brain
Oh no no no no no

Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go I wanna be sedated
Nothin’ to do and no where to go-o-o I wanna be sedated
Just put me in a wheelchair get me to the show
Hurry hurry hurry before I go loco
I can’t control my fingers I can’t control my toes
Oh no no no no no

Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go…
Just put me in a wheelchair…

Ba-ba-bamp-ba ba-ba-ba-bamp-ba I wanna be sedated
Ba-ba-bamp-ba ba-ba-ba-bamp-ba I wanna be sedated
Ba-ba-bamp-ba ba-ba-ba-bamp-ba I wanna be sedated
Ba-ba-bamp-ba ba-ba-ba-bamp-ba I wanna be sedated

It’s a wonderful, wonderful opera, except that it hurts.

Life hurts like hell at times.

Campbell explains the high incidence of psychotic episodes in franchising.

Others say it’s because of a lack of sunlight in Canada.

This is the threat to our lives. We all face it. We all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? … If the person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you’re going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. And the world’s full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.

Joseph Campbell 1904-1987

The internet shocks and confounds water-based stakeholders

Modern franchising (franchisors, bar, franchisees, IndFAs) has evolved as if the industry were a plumbing/water system.

It was for many years:

1. tangible, physical/one-dimensional, hierarchical, overt
2. local/national largely, measurable, (hub:spoke structure, based on economics of scarcity/ignorance),
3. highly controlled ($: valves, fittings, pipes, containers; can be patched),
4. has inputs, use/abuse and disposal elements,
5. externalizes waste via gatekeeper attorneys,
6. launders and sanitizes industry reputations based on “new and improved” brand BS,
7. utilized shame-humiliation to muffle dissent,
8. burned off waste human life savings to reduce odor, and
9. dogmatism largely unseen/unknowable outside of the royal priesthood (subterranean, veil of secrecy, culturally taken-for-granted: figure-ground problem).

However, with the start of something called “The Internet‘ and a proper issue indexing system, the industry environment has become much more like electricity or a gaseous/liquid and solid states:

1. invisible, highly mobile, de-centralized, informal,
2. it can leap or arc, volatilizes: solid right to gas),
3. several dimension, pressures and forms (volts/amps),
4. primarily transnational/international, (web structure, based on economics of abundance/knowledge),
5. wild/unstable, cumulative, compressable, and
6. much, much faster (travels at the speed of light/life).

As an internet activist, I am bi-/multi-lingual, which is a very Canadian thing. I  understand water, solid and air nations of franchising. I surf among and between the dying and newly born on a daily basis.

Old school stakeholders cling to their old ways:

wondering why more of the same-old solutions doesn’t work anymore.

“If we only had some more legal referrals” or “a better franchise law”, they all cry.

Trust in franchising? What a concept

Two people I trust in franchising.

I need to check in with the second next month although everyone has their role to play.

• First expert witness, March 6, 2000, Toronto, Canada.

Resulted in the Arthur Wishart Act (Franchise Disclosure), 2000. Thanks to Bob Runciman who has gone onto his just reward.

BTW: This may be cryptic, but it is not unnecessarily so.

Some information requires care in transmitting and must be done in person. Words can hurt but iIf you don’t understand, that’s okay.

Trusting yourself enough to choose who to trust is 99% of the solution.

Budget $100,000s to renovate your deadbeat system

It takes million of $ to construct a system.

Contrary to popular franchisee perception, starting, growing and making a system profitable is a high risk and high investment proposition. It can take years and years, is fraught with many dangers and the returns (although they can be very substantial) are not guaranteed at all. Way too many me-too concepts and the quality of some industry players practitioners, well,…

Seven figures to start, six to change.

Hundreds of thousands $ within 2 years if alive (ie. equity established, sustainable, re-sale control, gain control of you gross margins).

Significantly less if just want it dead.