Franchise Your Business

How To Sell Franchises When The Headlines Look Grim-January 2026

• Big Sky Franchise Team | Tom DuFore

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This is a recording of a live webinar recorded on January 30, 2026, starting at around 1:30 PM Eastern Time USA.   

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Links from the episode are here:   

  1. https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/reports/ism-pmi-reports/
  2. https://www.ismworld.org/globalassets/pub/research-and-surveys/rob/pmi/humpt202512pmi.pdf
  3. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/manufacturing-payrolls
  4. https://www.ismworld.org/globalassets/pub/research-and-surveys/rob/nmi/h4ckrob202512svcs.pdf
  5. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
  6. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
  7. https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/charts.html
  8. https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/current/index.html
  9. https://www.franchiseinsights.com/franchise-development/most-franchise-development-teams-stuck-to-expansion-plans-or-grew-them-in-2025/
  10. https://www.franchiseinsights.com/franchise-development/a-reliable-source-for-franchise-development-website-referrals/
  11. https://www.franchiseinsights.com/franchise-development/franchise-lead-generation/record-referral-percentages-from-portals-to-franchise-development-websites/
  12. https://www.franchiseinsights.com/top-ten-business-opportunity-categories/
  13. https://www.uschamber.com/sbindex/summary 

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Tom DuFore:

All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us here on another edition of our franchise your business and webinar series. My name's Tom Dufour, and I'm the founder of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as uh folks are loading in, and I apologize for the uh uh delay on the start today. I was actually traveling and had to get back to my desk. Uh so uh sometimes that's how it goes for these live events. So thank you, thank you, thank you so much uh for your patience and uh uh working with me here and and being patient on that. Um, but uh for our session, if you are new to us or you've never uh attended these before or or tuned in, I try to go through a wide cross-section of uh uh franchise data, business data, other information just to see what in the world is going on with with business, business sentiment, and other um other reports that we can take a look at to see what does this how can we maybe make sense of some of this information and see what uh what this looks like um for us uh just from a broad sense. How how can we be interpreting this for our franchise recruitment efforts, franchise marketing efforts, and to support our franchisees as they're going through their expansion? So I will um I will go ahead and uh share my screen here and start talking through some of these reports and data and information. And certainly if you have questions, if things uh come up and you're not quite uh uh sure, we typically have small groups here. So please feel free to uh give us a call or raise your hand uh or type into the chat and we will make sure to uh uh give you a chance to ask your question. So uh uh one other quick thing I will say before we get in. If I don't, uh please um I ask that you please uh uh go ahead and uh subscribe to our podcast uh uh at Franchise Your Business, our other podcast, which is Multiply Your Success. We're fast approaching 300 episodes there. And uh if you have not subscribed to our YouTube channel where you get access to all of this information that is readily available for you. So, with that, I am going to get in and share the screen, hopefully, so that we can start talking through this. Okay, so the first report up is from the Institute for Supply Management. Uh, this is a report I really like, and we go through two charts. They have two different charts. Uh, the first chart is their manufacturing PMI for purchasing managers index, and uh they they survey uh uh uh purchasing managers at manufacturing companies. And it says the U.S. manufacturing sector contracted in December for the 10th consecutive month after two months of expansion, preceded by 26 months of contraction. The manufacturing PMI registered 47.9% in December, a 0.3 percentage point decrease compared to the 48.2% recorded in November. So this is below that 50th percent with percentile, which is the breakeven line for manufacturing. So it's just under, and you can see it's kind of been hanging around there. It was a little bit lower, kind of slowly kind of doing the slow grind inch up. The overall break-even economy line is 42.3%. So we're still above that. Uh, but you can see this kind of long, slow uh kind of uh trend line. You can kind of see it's it's almost flat, but it looks like it might be going up. One thing that's new on this session that I found that I wanted to share is uh the trading economics has a report that they show for United States manufacturing payrolls. And it and so I thought this would be uh an interesting thing to add in to see how the purchasing managers index compare to manufacturing payroll. And as we can see here, we see that payroll has been declining for about seven months now, a few months in the uh at the beginning of 25. Uh, and so now and you can see that these kind of, if you look at these reports uh uh on these graphs, you can kind of see that, you know, eyeballing it, that there seems to be some a little bit of relationship there. Um, not saying there's causation, but just maybe there there's some correlation, which would make sense, right? If if uh the purchasing manager is purchasing less stuff to manufacture, well, you're gonna need less people to do that probably as well. Okay, uh let's take a look here at the uh purchasing managers index. Uh, this is for the services report. This report's by Steve Miller. The previous report by was was completed by Susan Spence for the manufacturing PMI. Now the services PMI, and the head paragraph reads in December, the services PMI registered 54.4%, a 1.8 percentage point increase compared to the November reading of 52.6%. A reading above 50% uh it uh indicates the services sector economy is generally expanding. Below 50% indicates it is generally contracting. So what I really like seeing here at this 54.4%, and we see this services starting to tick up. Most businesses in the United States are services or service related. And so we can see here for the last what what was this one, two, three, four months of the year, we're starting to see this upswing, the last four months of 25. And uh hopefully we see that continuing. So uh to me, that's a bit of a positive indicator to see that uh, and you can see from two years ago uh on this, by the way, that it was up around that mid-50s number, and then it kind of fell down, and then it popped up a little bit, and it fell down again. And so now it's popping up again in that fourth quarter. So let's hope, excuse me, that this services uh is not just bumping up because uh companies and people are are uh trying to spend budgets before the end of the year and budgets get renewed. Let's hope that that's a a trend that's going to continue into the new year for us. Okay, now let's take a look at the U.S. unemployment rate. And this is from TradingEconomics.com, U.S. employment rate, and it shows that in December of 2025, unemployment fell uh uh one tenth of a percent to uh uh 4.4 percent. And uh the article or the heading here reads Um the US unemployment rate, uh let's see, US unemployment rate edged down to 4.4% in December 2025 from a revised 4.5 percent in November, which had marked the highest level since October of 2021. The reading also came in slightly below market expectations of 4.5%. The number of unemployed fell by 278,000 to 7.5 million, while employed increased by 232,000 to 163.99 million. Meanwhile, the labor force declined by 46,000 to 171.5 million, pushing the labor force participation rate down 0.1 percentage point to 62.4%. Um so uh I think that's uh a uh a number that, you know, uh it's it's been around this number for a little while. It has edged up a little bit toward the last half of the year of 2025, but it's it's been kind of in this fours range for a little while now, the four to four and a half. Uh so uh while you know you see it on a chart like this and it and it looks pretty substantial. If we start zooming, you know, five years out, 10 years out, you start seeing that, you know, in the big picture, we're not um we're not all that um uh uh off. And and you can start to see some of these trends, you know, all the way back to 2016, it fell, fell, fell, fell, fell for about uh four or five years. Uh, then COVID hits and it falls down into 2022. And now it's kind of been on this slow, very, very, very incrementally slow increase over the last uh what looks like three, let's see, 22, three, four, four years or so. Okay. Uh so what does this mean, by the way? Well, this means that as a franchise or someone in in franchising, what you're doing, um, you should be considering or thinking about how this might be impacting your franchisees or maybe prospective franchisees. They might be looking at this because headlines always like to grab any anything negative. Uh uh, you know, news news sources love to grab those headlines. Um uh uh and uh because it it gets clicks and gets people's attention. So uh uh there's a good chance that your prospective candidates are seeing some of this information and seeing, for example, the unemployment rate tick up. They're seeing the uh this manufacturing piece uh uh stay where it's at. So those are things we just ought to be aware of, um, and and at least be able to talk to it and maybe even show them something like this or share some of the data to show, well, big picture perspective kind of here's where it really is. Because sometimes you get the blinders on and you see one piece of information from one month, and there's a gloom and doom about it, but it's really just one piece of information from a month. There's no real longer perspective. So sometimes zooming out and trying to see a broader thing. Maybe let's look at the last two years, the last five years, last 10 years. What if some of the things have been? Maybe it's not, maybe we should still pay attention to it, of course, but it might not be worth giving a significant amount of time and consideration to, or helping a buyer understand that, by the way, market conditions fluctuate every day, every week, every month, every year, every decade, and on and on and on and on. Okay. Um this is the uh University of Michigan Survey of Consumer Sentiment report. And it shows that uh the sentiment in for last month uh it curled up just a smidge here. Uh looks like it's just over 55 for their value, maybe 56. Uh, I'm just uh uh doing my best uh gauge here from looking at their uh chart on the left. Uh but what you can see, uh the blue line is the three-month average and the uh uh the dots. Uh well, I should say I was looking at the uh three-month moving average, which I like that as a little more indicative of what's going on. Monthly data are the dots, the the black dots. And you see there's a nice little bump up for those black dots uh in um uh for last month. So, you know, uh since 2024, we've just kind of seen this kind of zigzag on a decline. It kind of goes down, it shoots up a little bit, then it goes down, it shoots up a little bit, and then it goes down some more and shoots up, you know, and it's bottomed out, you know, kind of around the same numbers that we were seeing in in the middle of 2022, uh, where we've been the last few months. Uh, and so what this means is for selling franchises, uh talking with prospects, uh consumers are probably saying, Man, I don't know. They're not answering, they're not returning calls, or probably saying it's probably harder to get to a yes the last uh call it three to six months of the year than it was uh in uh uh the the the year prior. Uh and so um and you can see here even in 2024, if you look at 24, we had a nice little spike and went down and then it dropped and then it went up again in uh toward the end of 25, and then 25, it kind of went crashing down. Um it popped up again and then it went down again. So, you know, these are things just that if you're in marketing, if you're in sales, if you're a leader of a company, that there's a chance that there are these broader macroeconomic factors that are contributing to what's going on. You still need to try and do your best to control what you can, but also understand there's a general sentiment. So being able to communicate this information and talk about it is going to be helpful for those prospects that are coming through. Next up is one of my favorite reports. It's the uh it's from the U.S. Census Bureau. It's for business formation statistics, and this was released January 14th of 2024, and it shows that in December of 2025, there were 497,046 new business applications filed across the United States, almost 500,000. And it shows a 7.3% decrease over November, but we're still talking 500,000 new business applications. This is incredible to me because it was around 400,000 about five years ago. Um, and that was up 100,000 applications from just uh, you know, right before COVID. It was right around 300,000. COVID hits, uh, then 2021. Now we're consistently over 400,000. And now the last few months, this last year, we're seeing in 2025, it's been fast growing to 500,000. It's amazing the number of new business applications that are happening. So to me, it just is a further continued reinforcement that entrepreneurship, self-employment, and the American dream is alive and well. And you helping your franchisee, franchise candidates, understand how your franchise or your offering can help them. Or if you're a franchise broker too tuning in, uh I know we have franchise brokers that listen into this. Uh, this is something that you can be communicating or be thinking about with your franchise uh with the candidates you're talking to. Uh, there's a very good chance if they don't buy a franchise, they'll be starting their own uh of something, right? Some kind of business that that's on their mind. Um next up, we're going to move to uh uh franchiseinsights.com, which is put together by um uh uh uh franchise ventures. And this report shows it says, most the headline reads most franchise development teams stuck to expansion plans or grew them in 2025. And so this was released January 28th, 2026, so just two days ago by Mike Alston for Franchise Insights. And uh it said, uh uh, when asked about how conditions impacted their expansion plans in 2025, 79% of franchise development teams said they either stuck to their plans or expanded them beyond expectations. This is significantly higher than the 58% in 2024 and the 58.3% in 2023 who reported not pulling back. So, what does that mean? Well, that means that uh if you're in franchise sales and franchise recruitment, franchise uh lead generation and marketing, that means 80% of franchise ours stuck to the original plan or increased the original plan, which means that if you did as well, you might have found the number of leads became either more expensive to acquire the same number, or you spent the same and got fewer leads uh because there's more competition or the competition is sticking around versus the last two years where they said, you know, just under 60% stuck with it. Uh so if we look at that, that means it's about a 30%, roughly 30, 33%, uh more companies compared to the last two years stuck with their original budget or increased it. Um, so that just means more people are spending money on marketing and in looking for leads and trying to find franchise buyers. So if you're a franchise broker, if you're uh a franchiser, you probably might might have been feeling that that uh the the constriction or uh and maybe scratch your center, hey, why? What's going on? Well, this might be part of the reason right here. Um okay, another interesting data point that came out um by Franchise Insights um and on January 12th. The headline reads, a reliable source for franchise development website referrals. It says 89% of portal leads visit franchise or websites afterwards. One-third proceed to fill out a second inquiry there. Um, so it says uh uh December survey date, uh it says that this is by Mike Alston as well. And it says the first sentence reads When interested buyers submit inquiries at a franchise portal, only a fraction of them and their searches there. The vast majority of prospects who are exposed to and inquire about your brand on these franchise directory sites go to continue their research while awaiting your response. And I would say this is something I've generally seen uh with our clients and uh with some of the work that we've done, I've seen this uh tends to be uh spot on. That's what we typically see as some uh as well, and the data is supporting that. So I think it's really interesting. Um, and what does this mean? Well, is it a little self-serving for portals? Of course, but I still think it's interesting data worth noting because sometimes portals and and these um uh uh you know lead aggregators or franchise directory websites sometimes get a bad uh wrap. Um, but they are helping drive uh direct traffic to your website or to your franchise uh recruitment efforts. So just some things to uh to think about here. Um what are the uh referral? Let's see, uh why are the referral there are record referral percentages from portals to franchise development sites? So why is this happening? Right? They ran a second story and that published last week, January 21st to 26th. This was by Mike Alston. Um, and so it it they asked, why did you visit the franchise website after inquiring on a portal? 50% of the respondents said I was very interested and just wanted to learn more. 31.3% said I wanted to prepare before having a conversation with the franchise. And 18.8% said I did not find sufficient information on this website when I inquired. And other was 0%. So very interesting. Bottom line is they're looking to learn more and get prepared. Uh, so that's a good thing. So why are they going? Why is that increasing? Well, here's your answer. So just know that sometimes uh uh advertising on these sources are actually driving traffic to your website that's actually producing a better quality lead that ends up coming into your inbox or into your CRM. Okay, uh oh, I did business formation statistics. Okay, we have a quarterly report. I always like looking at these small business index. This is from the uschamber.com. Uh, this is presented by MetLife with the US Chamber. And they this is their quarter four small business index from 2025. They update these quarterly. Uh, and uh I think that this is uh always interesting data. So here's the small business index score from 2022 all the way through 2025 on a quarterly basis, and you can see in Q3 it was at 72.0. It was the highest reading uh uh since uh on sin over the last three years, and then uh in Q4, it dropped down 68.4 to 68.4 reading. So um uh it ended pretty similar to where Q4 of last year ended. Uh so I think that's kind of interesting to note, but um I I think that that this is uh uh an interesting uh uh number. It's a it here's a a paragraph to read out of it. It says notably, fewer small businesses report being comf very comfortable with their cash flow this quarter. Additionally, views of their local economy have declined slightly, with two in five, 43% small business saying that their local economy is in good health. At the same time, views of the national economy are stable. 38% say the same of the U.S. economy, similar to last quarter. Longer terms, longer term outlooks for both the national and local economies are more optimistic compared to this time last year. And uh on the side here, it says 43% of small businesses say their local economy is in good health. Uh, 58% of small businesses expect to raise prices this holiday season. So that was for Q4. Uh so anyway, just worth noting some information here uh and what the sentiment is of other small businesses. So if you find in your uh community or in your franchise network you're seeing that, well, they might not be alone. And it might be worth sometimes sharing some of this information with your franchisees. Um, you know, the old saying misery loves company, and I'm not saying they're miserable. But it will help them maybe get a sense to say, well, I'm not either alone. And they might be thinking, am I, is it just me? Am I the only one that's having this? Am I crazy? They might be thinking things like that. So it's worth noting and talking about. All things considered, right? You know, it's what I've said uh for the last goodness, I think it feels like several years. The the economy is just kind of feels like it's moving along, but it's just kind of feels like it's stuck. You know, it's it's just kind of, at least in these small businesses with these reports, it's just kind of flat. It's just flat, maybe growing just a smidge or declining just a smidge. Um, but but generally it's feeling like, man, it's really hard. We don't feel like we're making any progress. You know, kind of like the tires are spinning. And for uh those in and uh the the uh where it's been snowing a lot, uh uh hopefully your car hasn't gotten stuck and your your tires spinning, but you know what I mean. Uh I know I've been stuck in snow and ice before, and uh you you're just not going anywhere. Uh and it can be frustrating. So um uh let's see here. This is the uh vistage and uh report uh that they do, I believe, with the Wall Street Journal. And they ask this is the CEO confidence. Um, and it it says their headline says uh the CEO economic outlook for Q4. It says CEO confidence enters 2026 with measured optimism. So I think that's worth noting. And on this report, let me just look go back to the first one. It says revenue growth expectations among CEOs improved nine points from Q3. So 69% of CEOs said they're expecting the sales for the firm to increase next year, meaning for this year, 2026, compared to Q3 that was at 60%. Um, compared to the first quarter of the year, it was 58%. So that's a pretty big jump from Q1 to Q uh four of 11 points there. It says optimism increases as more than half of CEOs anticipate higher profitability in the year end, a five-point increase from last quarter. Um, so that's worth noting. And investment outlook improves slightly for the year ahead, with those planning a decrease down six points from Q1. So just some additional data worth noting and worth taking a look at. Um, I let's see here. I'm gonna stop sharing, open this up for some questions before we leave here. Uh, and I I'm gonna pull up my chart that I always like to close on, which is just where are um what are the top categories for of interest for um for franchising right now. So, okay, I just found the chart, and this is from Franchise Insights. Here we go. Okay, so these are the top 10 categories. So the following, it shows the top, the following business operating categories showed the greatest inquiries over the last 90 days. So number one is home services at 24.9 percent. Number two is business services at 22.1%, number three is senior and health care, number four is cleaning and maintenance cleaning and maintenance, number five is pet services, number six is food and restaurant, number seven is child related, eight is automotive, nine is retail, and ten is vending. So, what does this mean? Well, basically, this means if you're in one of these categories, it should be a little bit easier to find leads, especially the top five. Um, and really those tap three are are uh you know in double digits comparatively. So uh that's the session today, guys. Thanks so much for being with me. I hope you have had a great week, a great month as we're closing out January. Hopefully you're all keeping warm and safe with uh a lot of this weather that's impacting much of the country. And uh thank you so much for being here. Please make sure you subscribe to our podcast, Franchise Your Business. Please give us a like. We really appreciate likes and reviews. Um, and give us ratings. Uh, give us uh, you know, uh whatever you feel like. We love five star reviews, but give us whatever you're thinking on that. And um, we we so greatly appreciate you being here. Thank you, everyone. Have a great week. We'll see you next month.

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Tom DuFore

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