Hi Lewis,
I'm a SM Franchisee, their charges are very simple. There's a one-off purchase of franchise, a single one now I think costs £10k but if you buy two together the second costs £5k and then if you get a 3rd at the same time it will be even less. The previous franchisee loses a % of their sale fee to head office, who (so we're told) put the money into the training of the new franchisee. An already existing franchise would probably be sold with goodwill (customer list) which would most likely be a lot more than the actual cost of the licence as long as it's a thriving business.
Licences and fee rates (paid on monthly turnover) as follows:
Disaster Restoration (Fire, flood and accidental damage for insurance companies) 10% fees
Residential Carpet & Upholstery 10%
Commercial Carpet & Upholstery 7%
You're not forced into buying any equipment at all, but the stuff they do have in the warehouse is invariably a bit cheaper than off the shelf anywhere else (enabled by bulk buy discounts). I'm not up to date with prices really but you used to get a Ninja in a nice yellow colour with wand and hoses at a considerable saving over Ashby's price. There's a full time engineer in the warehouse too who knows the ninja inside out, plus is very good at fixing all sorts of machinery. Very useful chap is our Glyn!
I think the SM rotary is an awesome machine, nice and heavy, durable and goes on longer than the duracell bunny! Mine is pushing 20 years old - needs the brushes changing in the motor (must get round to that) but still strong as an Ox. Lord knows how many hours service it has been through
The SM products are pretty good although there is a stupidly MASSIVE range, far too complicated in my opinion. You aren't tied in to buying them at all though, absolutely no standing chemical fee per month or whatever. I actually don't use all SM products. All they say is that if you don't use SM products they can't give you any support in case of issues with carpets etc which is fair comment.
The same as Jason, I know little of the others you mention. I also see franchisees who thrive on the system and others who would probably be just as well going out on their own.
One thing's for sure though, no franchise network has 100% happy franchisees. For whatever reason there is always going to be an element of "us and them" which creates hostilities. Sometimes it gets a bit frustrating feeling like they don't really give a sh*t about you, but to be fair it must be difficult running such a big organisation.
The main bug bear is when you don't see much coming back from all the fees you pay.
After reigning supreme (and getting complacent!) in times gone by, SM have been in the doldrums insurance-wise for a number of years, but have been getting some big contracts back lately. It's a very circular thing, the big insurers do tend to re-negotiate and switch suppliers a lot more nowadays.
Sounds insignificant but say for example 30% of your work was from Aviva and they switch to another company, you might have employed a tech and/or purchased kit to deal with the work - what are you going to do now the work has gone!
In the old days it used to be just one licence, i.e. you did Res/Com/Ins all together. This meant that if the insurance dried up a bit you could push the other, but sometimes the residential customers used to suffer during floods etc as the staff levels weren't there to cope with extra demand. Plus obviously there's more money to be made selling 3 separate licences rather than one combined
Anyway I'm rambling as usual :