Top 10 Low Cost Business Franchises


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Starting a business often means making large capital investments, especially in the very beginning. In fact, many financial advisors recommend that you plan on losing some money as you get started. However, before you dismiss yourself as not having enough money to get going, keep in mind that not all ventures are so financially draining. What so many aspiring businessmen and women do not know is that franchising dramatically reduces the financial risks associated with building a new company. Furthermore, some of the most lucrative opportunities are low cost business franchises. They require very little start-up capital, few or no employees and most all of them are home businesses. This may sound too good to be true, but fortunately, there are real opportunities for people like you who are genuinely interested in starting a business. Best of all, there are several different businesses from which to choose. Here are ten of the most popular low cost franchises in the market today.

#1. Berkeley Brewer

One of the most important things to franchisees as they build their businesses is minimized risk. That’s why so many of them choose franchising over starting from scratch. Berkeley Brewer, a personal tailoring company, is a terrific example of how a franchise can significantly decrease the risk. This company is so dedicated to your success that it will refund your franchise fee if you do not see a return on investment within 12 months. Moreover, this business is easy to manage, which means you don’t have to quit your regular job until your new venture becomes so busy that you have no other choice. The reassurance with a franchise like this is that you do not have to risk everything – your money and your current means of making money – to change careers.

#2. CityLocal

Many entrepreneurs start their own businesses because they grow tired of simply doing a job. They want to be part of something groundbreaking. They have an intrinsic desire to make a difference. If this sounds like you, a franchise opportunity with CityLocal should be on your list of franchises to consider. This web-based home business focuses on the economic growth of cities throughout the UK and Ireland. Not only do you have a chance to be part of a profitable, high-traffic website, you also have the satisfaction of making a difference in your community. By offering both free and paid advertising, you keep members of the community abreast with local news and events. At the same time, local businesses have a means of promoting their products and services on your site.

#3. FirstWills

Transitioning from one career to another can be especially challenging when you’re not sure how much money will be coming in and how often. This is certainly true when it comes to starting a new business. As mentioned, many new entrepreneurs actually lose revenue faster than they can generate it. Nevertheless, one of the best aspects of FirstWills is your ability to earn money in a matter of days. All you have to do is meet with individuals who are ready to write their wills. Then, you write down their instructions and pass the information on to the franchise. You never actually write the will; instead, FirstWills does this for you. And, you make money with each sale you generate.

#4. Brazilian Soccer Schools

Countless businessmen and women had to take the hard route to building their companies. So many people enter the business world with the mindset that you have to dive in headfirst, quit your job, invest everything you have and hope that it all works out. Fortunately, this is not the only way. Brazilian Soccer Schools, for example, is a franchise business for sale that allows its newcomers to keep their existing jobs for the first year. This means that you can go through the coaching and business training with your mind focused where it should be – on what you’re learning rather than how much money you wish you were already making. Plus, it gives you time to launch and promote your business whilst you continue to meet current financial obligations.

#5. Little Angels Children’s Photography

Many new mums must weigh the cost of childcare when deciding whether to return to the workforce. For many of them, the costs of daycare take a large portion of their earnings, which leads them to wonder if going back to work is really worthwhile. After all, not only are they losing a significant amount of their earnings just to childcare costs, they also miss the opportunity to be with their children each day. If this sounds like your dilemma, you have to determine whether it’s truly worth the money you’re actually bringing home. Still, chances are that you can not afford not to contribute financially. This is where a work from home business opportunity like Little Angels can be very beneficial to mums like you. As a photographer for this company, you will work only four or five days a week for about four hours per day. This means you can take your children to school and be finished in time to pick them up. Most of all, no experience is required. All the training you will need is provided by the franchise. Of course, all franchisees are female because women are generally preferred by preschool aged children.

#6. Aura Roboclean

There are two ways to make money with this sophisticated cleaning franchise. First, you offer mattress, upholstery and carpet cleaning to hotels, nurseries, nursing homes, offices and other businesses. Nonetheless, this is not your average cleaning company. Aura Roboclean uses only environmentally friendly machines, protecting the earth and dramatically reducing allergens. People are paying more and more attention to the environment, on a global scope in addition to their immediate surroundings. As you can imagine, this market is expected to treble within the next five years. And, last but not least, you can even sell the equipment to those who are interested. This just increases your chances of profiting from this innovative business opportunity. Most importantly, you can become a franchisee with a very low investment.

#7. Charisnack

Just as people are striving to live in a better environment, they also want healthier bodies. As a Charisnack business franchise, you will offer healthy snacks and smoothies to people in the workplace. All you have to do is leave the products with your clients and pick up the cash at appropriate intervals. Furthermore, Charisnack is another franchise that gives you the opportunity to make a real difference. This is true because the company donates a portion of its sales to benefit the National Blind Children’s Society. You don’t have to make the donation. Just being part of this organization means your efforts will translate to help for others in need.

#8. UK Websaver

Once again, here is another great home-based business prospect. UK Websaver is a company that markets membership loyalty cards. This is a great product because consumers are always looking for ways to save money; meanwhile, businesses are constantly seeking new ways to promote their products and services. Additionally, this low cost opportunity demands only a limited amount of stock. Working out of your home means that you’re somewhat restricted when it comes to space, but the tiny plastic cards won’t crowd your home office or break your bank.

#9. Molly Maid

Not everyone will realize the benefits of running a business from home. In contrast, most people work at least eight hours each day. They don’t have the flexible schedule you’ll have as an entrepreneur, which means they will have to hire others to do work around their homes. After working all day, who wants to spend evenings and weekends on housework? This is a tremendous marketing opportunity for you as a Molly Maid franchisee. For a minimal capital investment, you will become part of the UK’s most recognizable cleaning companies. Rather than building from the ground up, starting a franchise with outstanding name recognition puts you one giant step ahead o
f your competition. In truth, a well-established brand name is one of the most valuable assets a franchise business has to offer.

#10. Baby Prints

If you’re a parent, you are already keenly aware of how quickly children grow. And, you also know that parents are always looking for creative ways to capture precious moments with their little ones. The Baby Prints franchise has found a way to make this desire very profitable for you. If you decide to invest in one of their franchises, you will make impressions of every cherished dimple in baby’s hands and feet. Parents adore this keepsake; at the same time, you get the chance to run a home business. All the independence and flexibility you can expect when running your own company is available to you. And, the most important part is that Baby Prints is one of the low cost business franchises that comes with exclusive sales territory. Not only will you sell a unique product, you won’t have to worry about competition from other franchises.


Find UK business franchises, home based businesses and information for entrepreneurs at Franchise Gator UK.

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Accounting Home Software Accounts Statement and Payroll Tables

ting home software is bookkeeping software which can be very valuable to self employed business owners running a small business, even medium businesses use off the peg business software. It can help you track critical areas of your business like payroll tables, sales, costs, any accounting asset, tax etc. If software is designed properly then the package can assist you and ensure that your business and accounts statement records help you to operate your business efficiently. Keeping any accounts report backed up using software can also perhaps in the long term reduce costs and cut down on the needs to hire staff with specific knowledge or experience.

Considering your business software carefully will help you to satisfy your own unique business requirements and accounting home software will mostly conduct accounting tasks such as your profits and loss, expense and revenue etc which of course spells out clearly just how much an accounting asset can be made of the systems you choose. The accounts ledger work can be simple and straight forward however if any software can help you keep accurate records and help you look after your payroll tables too then it is really value for money.

If we think about the kind of total investment required in buying and setting up any accounting home software then looking at only the initial purchase cost does not set a true figure ? when considering any kind of business software you must ensure that you take into consideration the training time and lost productivity in the initial stages. Even taking into consideration just how your accounts report will be handled in the training stage is just one of the things that need to be looked at before making such a major purchase and this mainly applies to small business that cannot always stretch the budget so much as business software for smaller business is usually priced to please.

On the contrary to the above, the benefits of accounting home software include cutting staffing costs or avoiding them if you are running a new business. Business standards and efficiency can be improved and the overall accounting asset of your company will also improve, something that cannot be ignored! In some cases, accounts ledger and other types of business software may come with the offer of free on site training which all helps you and whoever will be using the software to relax whilst learning how to use it in your own environment and to your own advantage. Checking out that the help desk is open during the hours that you run your business so that you can call when you are most likely to need them.

Any small business can only benefit from using accounting home software and the style of accountant planning that some packages offer mean that you have a chance also of saving where you might normally spend on your accountant or book-keeper. After you have done your research and decided on a particular accounting home software then good luck though you probably won?t need it as most accounting and business software has a great support team to rely on, helping your business grow naturally.

DIY Accounting specialise in producing tax accounting software for company accounts and self employed business that incorporate tax software to automate tax returns. Simple tax software designed to produce accounting solutions and CT600 corporation tax returns to enable non accountant business clients to complete their tax affairs without recourse to the services of a specialist tax accountant

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Enterprise Content Management Software

pany needs to manage and create its information layer in an efficient way to do well in business. To meet this end they take help of various tools available in the market, but one tool that is proving to be their best aid in this endeavor is enterprise content management software. It helps in creating and managing professional-looking, dynamic websites and internal Intranet pages and menu systems that simultaneously comply with style guides and efficiently present information to the relevant users. Enterprise content management software supports content management and publishing of multiple Intranet, Extranet and Internet pages and also facilitates websites to be hosted on the same server or on multiple external servers. Its content editing, workflow and management approval features support collaboration, while ensuring users to remain in control of the content creation process across the enterprise. 

Enterprise content management software is fully integrated with document manager, which allows users to browse the document management software systems to create links to relevant application files and folders. It supports both permission based and public access web page publishing that enables companies to present a consistent brand and usewr experience throughout Intranet, extranet and Internet pages. It offers SEO friendly template, headers and XML site maps and help users to control metadata and generate W3C compliant pages, which are important from SEO point of view. Enterprise content management software provides quick and easy search capability of all page content, according to users permission and users can specify the content they are looking for or simply view the entire content in the information layer across the enterprise, including web pages as well as application files, forum posts and other information types.

Enterprise content management software has a sophisticated permission structure, which allows the administrators to specify which user can view and edit the individual web pages and once edits have been made, users with approval rights receive automatic notification. These features of enterprise content management software streamlines the editing process and eliminates chances of unauthorized publishing. Its check in and check out functionality ensures that only one user can update a page at a time, avoiding version duplication and providing complete version control and revision history. It also helps in maintaining a fully traceable record of all revisions that provide comprehensive audit of all changes made. Enterprise content management software has really proved a boon for the companies and is helping them in a big way in their success.

Claromentis is a leading Enterprise Content Management Software company operating across the domestic and commercial sectors providing wide range of Enterprise Content Management Software.

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Search Engine Marketing Strategy – How to Get the No. 1 Spot on Google!

Marketing your website to highly targeted customers can be accomplished most effectively by following this powerful search engine marketing strategy.

This search engine marketing strategy is working quite well for me…

First thing to do is find your keyword niche and base your search engine marketing strategy around this keyword phrase.

My search engine marketing strategy does NOT cost me a red cent!

First I went to wordtracker.com and used their free trial…

I then entered into the wordtracker tool my keyword “Internet Marketing” to get other related keywords along with each one’s KEI (keyword effectiveness index).

To maximize your search engine rankings look for keyword phrases with a KEI of 25 or higher. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. This means you have a great chance of getting to the top of page 1 on Google…

The Search Engine Marketing Strategy Holy Grail!

The keyword phrase I chose was the one at the top of wordtracker’s list with the highest KEI, in my case “online job search affiliate internet marketing program”.

Because Internet Marketing is highly competitive I like to use long tail keywords – or keyword phrases with 5 or more words.

I then wrote an article around the keyword phrase “online job search affiliate internet marketing program”. I put this keyword phrase in my article with just under 2% keyword density. This means my keyword phrase appears roughly 2 times for every 100 words in my article.

Anything higher than 2% keyword density might get flagged by Google as spam and kill your search engine rankings so try and keep it under 2%.

I then optimized my article by using the keyword phrase in the title, the first paragraph, the body, and at the end of the article. Don’t just stick the keyword phrase in your article to get it in, make sure your article makes grammatical sense otherwise it will appear “spammy”.

I posted my article on my blog and submitted it to the following 2 sites, for free:

=> squidoo.com

=> digg.com

My article titled “online job search affiliate internet marketing program” now occupies the top of page 1 on Google – and this all happened within a matter of minutes after posting it!

So in a nutshell all I did was write one article around the keyword phrase “online job search affiliate internet marketing program”, then posted it on Squidoo and Digg!

Then like magic in less than 30 minutes my article got listed on(and still is as of this writing)the first spot on page 1 of Google!

And this Killer Search Engine Marketing Strategy is totally FREE!

Want proof?…

Type in the following phrase on Google: “online job search affiliate internet marketing program” (without the quotes), and you will see my article titled “online job search affiliate internet marketing program” in the no. 1 spot on Google…

A truly beautiful thing!

Now that you have a powerful Search Engine Marketing Strategy that won’t cost you a penny, all you gotta do is find some quality Affiliate Programs to promote…

Then start making some serious cash!

To your Success!

John Lynch

John Lynch is an accomplished writer and has published hundreds of quality internet marketing articles. To find the top Affiliate Programs on the net, John recommends you visit => How2MakeMoneyOnline

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What's the Best Customer Service During a Recession?

read the articles in the papers about the status of our economy? I am not sure that we are really in a recession or even in a depression, as some pessimists seem to indicate. May that be decided by the historians in a few years when all the data is available and analyzed.

Have you heard about the relatively low confidence readings by the public? You yourself might have asked yourself how to continue to pay for $4/gallon gas at the pump, ever increasing prices for food, and many other daily necessities.

Officially we have an inflation rate of about 1.5 – 2 % but when I look at most of what we consume, it has increased easily by 20% or 30%, and in some cases even 40%, not to speak of the 100% increase when filling up the tank of my car.

Do you feel the same pain? If so, you might ask yourself what you can do. You might also ask yourself what your organization can do, as your place of work is probably the one resource you can’t afford to loose in these challenging times.

With unemployment racing towards 6% nationwide, there is an increasing fear among the workforce about job security. The overall mood of the population is suppressed by the jump in prices, the war that doesn’t seem to end, the negative economic news, the unending stream of reports about foreclosures. It almost looks like everything is on a negative downslide right now.

Individually we can’t change the fundamentals of the economy and the associated political decisions. What we can do is get back to the very basics of doing business. One of these very basic things is customer service.

I strongly believe that the trend we currently see in many organization is going to be regretted when the dust of all the turmoil settles. When companies want to reduce cost, they typically look at those parts of the organization that don’t deliver obvious returns on investment. These include, almost on equal levels, expenses for training, and expenses and salaries for customer service.

One of the additional fallacies is the believe that a reduced number of customers coming into stores or visiting your website means you don’t need as many people providing services. The opposite is actually true.

When you want to maintain reasonable sales figures and thereby secure the jobs in your organization, you need to be better in customer service than most everybody else.

Many people who would have been customers a year ago are prospects right now. That means they might be interested in what you have to offer in products and services, but they have a generally negative state of mind. You know the reasons from reading all the bad things above.

To convert a prospect with a negative frame of mind into a buying customer, you will have to find out what they need, and show them all the benefits of what you have to offer. In these times, customer service becomes a needs satisfaction task, not a pure sale.

If you can satisfy the needs of a prospect by clearly showing how he or she will benefit from spending the little money they currently have with you, you have a much better chance to actually make a sale.

The second and almost more important task for your customer service providers is the transformation of a customer into a client. When the economy is restarting and the general mood will turn more optimistic, those organizations able to convert lots of prospects into customers and ultimately into clients, will be in a prime position to accelerate even more.

Never forget that a customer buys once (maybe because you just happened to have what they were desperately looking for). A client buys over and over again and builds a relationship with you that is often stronger than the lure of a lower price your competitor might offer.

To have a lot of clients, you want to determine what the needs of your prospects are, what the benefits of your solutions are, and then bring the two together in a smooth, caring, supportive way. If you can trigger the urge of a prospect to fill a need by buying what you offer, you will have a seamless sale.

If you keep serving your customer well after the sale, he or she will turn into a long term client and no recession in the world can change that.

Make sure that everybody in your organization understands that customer service is even more important in these challenging times than it is during a boom. You might even want to change the term from customer service to client service.

If that becomes the frame of mind of everyone working with and for you, your chances of flying through this demanding economy are way better than any of your competitors.

Make sure you don’t save at the wrong end of your business and invest in the skills of those among you who deliver the all important client services. That will secure the longevity and prosperity of your organization automatically.

Axel Meierhoefer is an experienced performance coach, author, and the founder of Axel Meierhoefer Consulting LLC (AMC LLC). His motto is” Helping others help themselves achieve success”. If you’d like to get on his VIP E-mail list to receive more articles, or like to find more insights like this article, goto http://www.myperformanceiq.com/secretstruthperformance.html or email AM@Meierhoefer.net

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