The Idea
June 1, 2008 (Updated April 2010)
So, how was the idea for OpenFran — the Franchise Openness Project hatched, you ask? Well, it came about much like most ideas come about — a problem in need of a solution. You see, we were searching for a better way to research a franchisor but found the process to be extremely arduous and expensive.
When CALEASI (the State of California's online database containing all publicly filed records and correspondence related to franchising in the state) was first introduced in 2002, it was lauded as a breakthrough in the area of researching and open information gathering. Although CALEASI represented a new level of openness for franchise disclosure related information, it still left us all with much to be desired. You had to know a great deal about what you were searching for in order to locate the information you were seeking. For instance, in order to find a franchisor's file in CALEASI, in many cases you would need to know things like the name of the franchisor's parent company. Even more difficult and time-consuming was locating certain bits of information hidden inside the many documents of a given franchisor. In most every case, a researcher needed to randomly open multiple PDF's and painstakingly read through multiple pages in a document just to find a given name or passage. It was also impossible to do Boolean searches or conduct cross reference or relational research queries — forget about finding how many instances of “Betty Sue Jones” and “Franchise Broker” were contained within CALEASI.
Additionally, for most members of the general public who were interested in investing in a franchise, it was both time-consuming and expensive to acquire a current UFOC or related due diligence information on a given franchise. In order for someone to conduct even the most preliminary research of a franchise concept, one either had to attend a franchisor's "Discovery Day" presentation or pay hundreds of dollars to obtain usually outdated versions of electronic documents. Many large franchisors also were exempt from filing their disclosure documents in California. We believed there had to be a better way.
Everything seemed to come together in February of 2008. Multiple technology announcements in the areas of optical character recognition (OCR), data indexing infrastructure/storage, and search engine capabilities made it possible to index, search, store, and retrieve mass amounts of information in a quick and cost-effective manner — allowing us to put our idea into action. All of it came together and opened the door for the creation of the Open Franchise Foundation and the Franchise Openness Project — OpenFran.
We decided to offer this service to the world as a nonprofit, community funded and supported entity. All searches and research can be done on the site at absolutely no charge. There is also no fee required to download any PDF on the site. There is a small fee to download searchable PDFs, but at a small fraction of the cost of what other sources charge for the same text searchable documents. We find it necessary to charge these extremely small fees due to the additional bandwidth and server power required to provide you with these types of files in real-time. There are also a lot of people-hours required to fix errors and maintain the archive.
The benefactors listed on our site represent leaders in the franchising community who seek to ensure that franchising related knowledge and current information is accessible and free to everyone. Their generous gifts and support helped to provide everyone with a powerful tool at no charge.
However, we cannot maintain and update this site without your help. You can help out by submitting your public UFOC/FDD and franchising related documents to the foundation for open archiving and indexing, especially those documents that are not posted within CALEASI. You can also help out by becoming a "Friend of Franchise Openness," an archive engine sponsor, donating individually, or by using the paid areas of the foundation's website. Learn more about the ways to help out by clicking HERE.
In 2011, The Open Franchise Foundation plans on expanding the project to support international franchising markets including those within the EU, South/Central America and Australia.
Welcome to a new era of franchise industry related research. Welcome to The Franchise Openness Project.
Susan A. Maizner
Executive Director
Daniel G. Maizner
Founder