About a year ago, myself, and many other business owners watched a scenario play out that seems to be increasingly common.

A business began a huge “pre-launch” media build-up. They began recruiting distributors before they even opened their doors. They announced a launch date, missed it, announced again, missed that, and finally hit the third one.

By the time they opened their doors, they had over 1000 distributors. Orders began coming in. Fulfillment problems surfaced right away. Orders were lost, some were fast to fill, others were slow. General inconsistency was apparent, as were bugs in their system which did not even seem to be a concern to the company.

Two months later they announced that they were upgrading their website system. This most likely involved custom programming – HORRENDOUSLY expensive (about 5-10 times the cost of packaged software website backend). There were glitches with it that took time to work out. They changed their business image and logo at the same time their website was upgraded, and they announced a new line of additional products.

Lost orders persisted. Most orders were filled, but a significant number simply disappeared. They stated that orders would not be billed to credit cards until shipped, but orders were billed within days of receipt, even though shipping did not occur until much later, and sometimes not at all. Customers began reluctantly filing chargebacks. Distributors complained, the company was making them look bad. Distributors began to drop out.

The order problem was not really acknowledged by the company other than through some top level distributors who tried to explain. Instead, they announced they were streamlining production by cutting out items that did not sell well, and announced an upcoming new line of products. They also announced the impending purchase of some higher volume production equipment, which they said would improve the turnaround time on order fulfillment. No mention made of creating a consistent order tracking system.

At this point it was pretty clear the company was in trouble. Complaints were rampant. The common explanation given was that they had expected 200 distributors and had ended up with 2000 – leading one to wonder why they had not capped enrollment at 200. They did finally cap enrollment, closing downline referrals for an indefinite period, just before they announced yet a third website revision to be launched sometime soon – I can't imagine the expense yet a further website upgrade would cost, since they implied they were rebuilding from the ground up. We are talking tens of thousands on the low side.

When the announcement that they were closing their doors came, it was almost a relief to the distributors. I have no idea of the financial status of the company, but I expect that the owners are still attempting to recover.

Many businesses make the mistake of deciding that they don't want to have to sell their product, so they'll just create an affiliate program, distrituborship, or sell rights to it prior to working out all the bugs. They got it backward.

• You cannot expect others to sell a product that you cannot successfully sell yourself.

• You cannot expect to fill a high volume of orders if you do not have the experience to smoothly fill lower numbers.

• You must create a successful business first. Then you can move on to replication and expansion. To do otherwise is foolish. And when problems develop, you must work out solutions BEFORE you expand to the next level.

This article is the introduction to a more complete coverage of what it takes to franchise. The full details may be found in the Introduction to Franchising article.

Written by Laura Wheeler, co-owner of Firelight Web Studio – http://www.firelightwebstudio.com - (a division of Firelight Business Enterprises, Inc). Laura is a busy mom of eight, and a skilled microbusiness web developer. She specializes in affordable, high value website services for small and very small businesses, and trains other web developers to do the same.