How to Compare Franchise Opportunities

Why comparison is harder than it looks

Every Franchise Disclosure Document uses the same 23 numbered Items, so FDDs look superficially comparable. That similarity is a trap. Two documents can disclose figures with the same label, in the same Item, describing entirely different things — different populations, periods, cost bases and definitions of a unit. Comparison is therefore not a matter of putting numbers side by side, but of establishing what each means before allowing it into the same column as another.

Eight dimensions worth comparing

1. Investment

Item 7 gives an estimated investment range. Read the line items, not the total. Two Maids discloses $93,440 to $149,890, Merry Maids $126,875 to $169,325, Servpro $263,305 to $385,570, and Sport Clips $236,800 to $580,500 (2026 FDDs, Item 7) — but those totals cover different things. Sport Clips excludes real estate purchase and lease payments; Servpro’s total includes a mandatory $112,000 equipment package payable to an affiliate at signing.

Check the additional-funds assumption. All four budget three months, the Two Maids estimate assumes no owner salary and no manager in that period, and the Servpro estimate excludes employee wages and any owner’s draw. Three months is a disclosure convention, not a forecast of when you break even.

2. Fee load

The headline royalty is the beginning of the answer, never the whole of it. Total the recurring Item 6 charges as a percentage of sales, then price them in dollars at a realistic sales level.

Three things matter. Minimums convert a percentage into a fixed cost at low volume, precisely when you can least afford it. Caps and incentives can be withdrawn — several Sport Clips dollar caps are policy the franchisor may change — so model the contractual maximum. And required local spend belongs in the fee load even though the franchisor never receives it.

3. Disclosed performance — and its population

An Item 19 number is meaningless without its population. Record four things with any figure: how many units, which were excluded, what period, and whether it is revenue, gross margin or profit.

These four brands made four different choices. Servpro makes no financial performance representation at all. Sport Clips discloses 2025 average gross sales of $419,485 and a median of $416,189 across 1,645 stores open more than two years, with expense and operating-profit tables drawn separately from 73 company-owned stores in markets where it says it does not sell franchises. Merry Maids discloses gross sales only, $391,007 average against $299,059 median across 644 outlets. Two Maids discloses quintile averages and no system average or median, from $1,085,621 down to $229,897 across 94 territories. (All 2026 FDDs, Item 19.)

Exclusions do quiet work. Two Maids excludes 58 locations open less than a year, close to a third of the system. Merry Maids excludes the 103 outlets that ceased during 2025, so its tables describe survivors. Sport Clips excludes stores open two years or less.

Watch what is measured. Two Maids reports gross margins near 51% to 53% deducting only direct labour and materials; Sport Clips states its company-store operating profit excludes royalties and weekly training fees. Neither is owner earnings.

4. Growth, attrition and transfers

Item 20’s outlet tables are the most comparable data in the document, because the format is prescribed. Read three years, not one.

Net change hides the mechanism. Servpro’s growth came with only 26 terminations and 6 non-renewals over three years and no outlets ceasing for other reasons. Merry Maids’ decline is almost entirely booked as “ceased operations — other reasons”, at 35, 72 and 100 units, a category the tables do not explain. Sport Clips recorded no terminations in any year but 18 non-renewals in 2025, while company-owned units rose from 74 to 86.

Read transfers in context: rising transfers in a growing system suggest a working resale market, while falling ones in a shrinking system can mean owners cannot find buyers.

5. Evidence quality

This dimension is about the document, not the business, and most buyers skip it. Do the tables foot? Do the Items agree with each other and the cover page?

Sport Clips’ Item 19 sales bands sum to 1,745 stores and its above/below-average counts to 1,717, against a stated population of 1,645; its Item 7 total row shows a low of $236,800 where the cover page shows $226,800 and the rows themselves sum to $229,000. Merry Maids’ Item 20 Table 1 and Table 3 disagree for 2023. Servpro’s 2023 totals row shows 98 openings where the state rows sum to 99.

None of this is necessarily bad faith; FDDs are long and assembled under pressure. But a document that does not reconcile with itself deserves more scepticism throughout.

6. Risk terms

Item 3 discloses litigation and Item 4 bankruptcy. Read who is suing whom. Sport Clips discloses none in either Item; Servpro discloses one 2025 action it brought against former franchisees over unpaid royalties; Merry Maids discloses four concluded regulatory matters, all involving other franchisors under common ownership rather than the brand itself. A long Item 3 is not automatically worse than a short one.

Item 17 governs the relationship. Compare term length — Two Maids ten years, the other three five (2026 FDDs, Item 17) — with renewal conditions, transfer approval and fees, non-compete scope, and dispute venue, which for these four sits in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas respectively.

7. Operations model

Item 15 sets whether you must run the unit personally. Servpro requires it; Merry Maids, Sport Clips and Two Maids permit a trained manager, though Two Maids states it prefers active owners while Item 12 requires full-time attention to the territory. This determines whether the brand fits your life, and it changes the cost structure through manager wages.

8. Route to a second unit

Sport Clips normally sells multi-unit development addenda and awards single-store agreements only in specified circumstances. Two Maids sells additional territories under separate agreements with no right to acquire more. Servpro requires 12 months of operation and a minimum Gross Volume first. And Merry Maids discloses per-outlet averages falling as ownership groups grow (2026 FDD, Item 19): scale is not automatically accretive.

Normalising across brands

Three ratios make different-sized brands roughly commensurable, provided you know their limits.

Sales-to-investment ratio. Disclosed average unit volume divided by the midpoint of the Item 7 range: how much revenue does a dollar of capital produce? Its limit is severe — it says nothing about margin. A high ratio in a labour-heavy model can yield less owner cash than a lower ratio in a higher-margin one.

Fee load. Total ongoing charges as a percentage of sales at a level you expect, then again at the contractual maximum and at a low level where minimums bite.

Attrition rate. Closures of all kinds divided by units at the start of the year, averaged over three years, so systems of different sizes compare. Read it alongside net growth, since openings can mask a high closure rate.

Traps that ruin comparisons

Comparing a median to a mean. Different statistics, and the gap can be large: Merry Maids discloses an average of $391,007 against a median of $299,059 for the same 644 outlets, and states only about 36% of outlets reached the average.

Comparing across populations. A mature-unit average against an all-unit average is not a comparison. Neither is a survivors-only figure against one including closures.

“Top quartile” figures. A top-quartile number says what a quarter of units achieved, not your odds of joining them. Read it against the bottom: Merry Maids discloses a top quartile of $914,092 and a bottom quartile of $130,847 in the same table (2026 FDD, Item 19). The spread is the information.

Mixing periods. Sport Clips charges fees weekly; Merry Maids measures its minimum sales requirement as average weekly gross sales per four-week period; Two Maids tiers its royalty monthly. A four-week period is not a month, and there are thirteen in a year.

Unit definitions. Merry Maids defines an outlet as a licensed territory, not a physical location. Comparing that to a brand counting storefronts misstates system size.

Revenue treated as profit. Gross sales, gross margin after two cost lines, and company-store operating profit that excludes royalty are three different things, and none is what an owner keeps.

Stale documents. FDDs are annual; comparing a 2026 document to a 2024 one compares different years as well as different brands.

Using a screener without over-trusting it

A comparison tool narrows a field and organises questions; it does not produce an answer. Scores compress judgement into a number, and compression loses something.

On this site the formulas behind every score are published on the Methodology page, so you can see what is measured and disagree with the weighting. Five dimensions are computed — Financial Disclosure Quality, System Growth, Unit Stability, Investment Efficiency and Evidence Confidence — each on a 1-to-5 scale, alongside labelled indicators that are not scored. There is deliberately no composite “franchise score”: rolling incommensurable things into one number is where comparison tools do most damage.

Where data are missing we show “Not enough evidence to rate” rather than a low score. A brand with no Item 19 has not disclosed less because it is worse; it has disclosed less, which is a different fact. Every figure carries an evidence marker — Disclosed, Public data, Derived, Model estimate, or Not disclosed — so you can tell a franchisor’s statement from our arithmetic or our assumptions.

Use the tool to build a shortlist, then read the survivors’ full FDDs, call franchisees from the Item 20 lists, and put the documents in front of a franchise attorney and an accountant.

This guide is informational only. It is not legal, financial, tax or accounting advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy any franchise. FDDs change annually; review the current document and consult qualified professionals before investing.

Related

• How to Read a Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD)
• What Item 19 Actually Tells You
• How to Read Item 20 (Outlets and Franchisee Information)
• Owner-Operator vs. Semi-Absentee Franchises