Barbara Levine has worked in big corporations as well as in small businesses. When the time came to start her own business, rather than going with a big franchise, she purposely latched onto a small franchisor ”“ a startup franchisor, in fact.
Levine runs Chyten Premier Tutoring and Test Preparation, running a student center in New Canaan. After a career in business development in the pharmaceutical industry and others, she elected to branch out on her own via a franchise.
If some enter franchising to learn the ropes of running a business with the goal of their own startup one day, Levine did so merely to achieve the goal of owning her own business immediately without the attendant headaches.
But there was an appeal to joining a franchise company that in itself was a startup.
“I liked the fact that Chyten was new at the time,” Levine said. “I wanted to get in on the ground floor. I like the process of helping a company grow and thrive.
“I”™m in the second stage of my career and it will be my last,” she said. “I didn”™t want to spend five years developing ”¦ systems for marketing and scheduling and building a business.”
She is not alone ”“ in mid-March, the International Franchise Association debuted a franchise business index designed by IHS Global Insight with data back to 2000. The index shows six consecutive months of improvement, but IHS and IFA now predict a slower pace of new franchises this year, at 1.6 percent growth, down from a December prediction of 1.9 percent.
Entrepreneur magazine lists Chyten among its top 20 “new” franchisors in the United States, a tag Chyten earned despite having been at it for five years, expanding to a franchise model on the eve of the recession. Through 2011, the Lexington, Mass.-based company has pieced together a franchise system totaling three dozen locations; Massachusetts is also home to Get in Shape for Women, ranked seventh on the Entrepreneur list of the top new franchisors. Get in Shape for Women has locations in Greenwich, Westport and Fairfield, and sites are on the way for Darien and Trumbull.
In a field that Entrepreneur touts among the most competitive in franchising, with established names such as Sylvan Learning Centers and plenty of non-franchise, locally owned competitors in wealthy Fairfield County, it was a daunting proposition.
And no small number of franchise opportunities were before her ”“ Entrepreneur magazine lists 60 in all in the education sector, with startup costs ranging from $27,000 (Club Z! In-Home Tutoring Services) to $264,000 (C2 Education Centers Inc., which has several locations in metropolitan New York City and New Jersey, but as of deadline none in Connecticut).
Entrepreneur lists Chyten”™s startup costs ranging between $116,000 and $220,000. Levine said she was able to foot Chyten”™s startup costs on her own dime.
The recession prompted the Small Business Administration to expand its loan guarantee program to cover new franchisees, which the CEO of the International Franchise Association termed “a lifeline to the franchise industry” as commercial lending became more difficult to obtain.
