Archive for Items Categorized 'Avanti Magazine', only excerpts shown, click title for full entry.
We all have to maintain a minimum net worth in our stores on a monthly basis. For some stores the minimum is $10,000 under the grandfather clause of the contract, while other stores have a minimum of $15,000 as per the Store Franchise Agreement. Many factors come into play when trying to keep our […]
Dave Niehaus, the iconic play-by-play announcer of the Seattle Mariners, would exclaim, “My, Oh My!” when he could hardly contain his excitement after a remarkable play. Potential franchisees have been attracted to the 7-Eleven system because of its many attributes: the iconic brand displayed on the corner sign and the resulting industry-leading average store […]
For any partnership or relationship to flourish, it’s important that all parties feel they are treated fairly and given every opportunity to live up to their potential. Reasonable expectations must exist. If not, bad feelings will fester, and in the case of a business relationship, sales will suffer. 7-Eleven franchisees understand that the convenience […]
Looking back at the cigarette category, one begins to realize how drastically it has changed over the last 10 years. Besides an eroding unit count and diminishing profit margins, we have lost all control over a category that system-wide represents 23 percent of our sales and a good percentage of our stores’ gross profit […]
We have recently been notified that 7-Eleven is undergoing a dramatic reorganization—dubbed Project E by the higher-ups at corporate—in order to streamline operations and make the system more efficient. As part of this project, everything will eventually be run out of one central location—the corporate headquarters in Dallas. In a way, it makes a […]
Rarely does a week go by that I do not hear from a franchisee, “Can they do that? I’m an independent contractor!” Typically the answer is a resounding yes, they can, despite the legal definition of an “independent contractor” and the language in paragraph 2 of your store agreement, which states, in part: “You […]
Gross profit dollars and total gross profit percent (GP%) of merchandise sales play a very significant role from the moment we first franchise a store. The franchise fee, for one, is based on total GP dollars, using different percentages for different brackets of gross profit dollars. The day-to-day operation of the store and product […]
Almost six months ago, SEI instituted a policy that drastically altered the payment method to vendors and affected every franchise store. This policy came about when the Accounting Department made the strategic decision to reduce its number of employees as a cost cutting measure. To accomplish this downsizing, franchisees and vendors were notified that […]
Facilities and maintenance are an important function of our business, because equipment is directly related to sales. We need to have all of our revenue-generating equipment properly running 24 hours a day. In the recent past we’ve had challenges with facilities and maintenance—like keeping the equipment up, lackluster repair response times, and problems with […]
After a decade of struggling to find a suitable daily delivery system for our stores, 7-Eleven has begun a transformation to what hopes to be a better solution for a daily distribution model. What started out as a network of warehouses and a fleet of small trucks that were designed to deliver fresh foods […]
