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The guys welcome franchise owner Michael Davis to discuss his Cartridge World franchise and his experience as a franchise owner. They also answer the question, "How worried should I be about the arbitration clause in my employee agreement and does this force me to only arbitration?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: And thank you for joining us. This is our business legal podcast where we cover business in the news and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can submit to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. Here we go! Mid-week, I wonder is US won their game yesterday. I predict not, unfortunately. MATT: Wow. What a terrible way to start off the episode. NASIR: I know, it’s a downer. Well, hopefully, I’m just proven wrong. MATT: Yeah, I hope so. Our audience is going to stop listening too, unless we have a lot of audience listeners in Belgium. NASIR: Yeah, they’ll be depressed and won’t want to listen to our show. MATT: That’s fine. NASIR: I think our show is uplifting. Anyway, I think we have a good topic today because we have franchise owners as clients and we cover franchises all the time on our podcast. We get questions like this but today we actually brought in a franchise owner, Michael Davis. He’s the owner of a Cartridge World franchise in Atlanta, Georgia. Michael, welcome to the program. MICHAEL: Thank you, gentlemen. Glad to be here! NASIR: Yeah, absolutely. You know, we’ve talked about in the past how other franchise owners can have an effect on the franchise itself. It comes with the good and the bad, right? I mean, there was this one case we covered in New York where there was a Domino’s franchisee who stupidly fired all his employees for an illegal reason and, of course, had to bring them back and so forth. But those kind of things can have a negative effect but, at the same time, your successes also have a positive effect as well. Michael, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the franchise world in general and this little kind of secret family that I think a lot of people aren’t aware of? MICHAEL: Sure! Again, my name’s Michael Davis and I’m the owner of Cartridge World. We’re the world’s largest remanufacturer of ink cartridges – up to 30 percent less than the national big buck stores. There’s 1,400 of us globally. We’ve been around for six or seven years. Now, the beauty of franchises, much like you said, is you’ve got a known brand entity which you don’t have to build over time. It’s already there. You already have a support system from corporate in terms of marketing, operational, and other experience sets. The other parts you also have which you alluded to a few moments ago were business partners rather than franchisers who are going through the exact same experience you are that perhaps have different experience set that you. Really, you’re business partners. So, if you’ve got a situation like the pizza franchise you talked about, that’s a business partner of yours even if they’re across town because they’re damaging your brand. One wrong customer experience, they’ll tell ten people. One great customer experience, they might tell one person. You really can’t put a cost on that because, in the franchise business, the cost of new customer acquisition is huge but a damage control that you have to do from a bad experience from a franchise partner across town is priceless in a negative way. I’m a big advocate of franchisers because you have much of it already done. What you have to do as a franchise or within that structure, you have all that support and experience to figure out what is your unique brand going to be in your community. How are you going to differentiate yourselves in your ten miles of your graphic area? Are you going to partner with schools? Are you going to partner with non-profits and churches and do fundraising?