I have created something called the Information Sharing Project, ISP. I would like to demonstrate how I collect documents for it.
The ISP is a digital collection of newspaper and magazine articles having to do with franchising. There are also public documents such as public hearing testimonies, emails etc. that I think have educational value.
Example:
Let’s take a look at today’s Blue MauMau article from a real media pro, Janet Sparks. The article talks about the misfortunes of a New York city multi-unit franchisee of Dunkin’ Donuts.
Go there now and read it. (It’ll be worth your while…promise).
Once I see an article such as this one, I process it various ways. One of the major value-added services, [cringe] is that I assign a series of Keywords or Franchise industry-specific behavior descriptors. They’re sort of like tags or indexes.
For example, these are the Keywords I chose for this article:
- Raining litigation,
- Indentured servants,
- Private-equity financing buy-and-flip,
- Immigrants as prey,
- Franchisee-on-franchisee opportunism,
- Race,
- Termination of franchisee, single,
- Build up the business so they can take it,
- Re-sale value set by franchisor,
- Re-sale or transfer store through franchisor to new franchisee,
- Re-sales as a profit center,
- Offered much less than market value of franchise,
- Penalty applied without explanation,
- Stock market pressures make franchisor push system sales higher and higher,
- Initial public offering, IPO,
- Pump-and-dump scheme,
- Resale permission unreasonably withheld
This is how I chose to analyze franchising:
- I look for documented patterns in behaviors,
- add my industry expertise by showing what is the same (integration) and what is different (differentiation) in these micro-franchise case studies,
- index them for relevant decision making-based searches, and
- translate them in a common language (digital, indexed) to be used
- anywhere in the world.
Simple, eh?
- Ever been done before? No.
