The problem with "most profitable"

Search "most profitable franchise" and you will find ranked lists everywhere. They are mostly fiction. Profitability is disclosed selectively, if at all, it varies enormously by owner and location, and it tells you nothing about the risks that actually end franchise ownerships: hidden costs, franchisee lawsuits, owners quitting, thin support, and contracts that strip away your control.

The cruelest part: the franchises that ruin people often looked the most profitable on paper. The brochure number was real. It just was not the whole story, and the whole story was never offered.

What we built instead

The Franchise Transparency Score grades how openly a franchise discloses the seven things that predict your risk. It is a single, reproducible grade, built from a published rubric, and it never touches profitability. Where a franchisor discloses an Item 19 earnings figure, we report it verbatim and attributed, exactly as they wrote it, and we leave it outside the score.

"We do not hand you a profitability score" is a feature, not a limitation. Any tool that claims to is either guessing or breaking the law. We would rather tell you the truth: here is how honest this franchise is being with you, and here is what to ask about the rest.

Who is behind it

The tool was built by Mike Millett, a buyer-side franchise analyst and former VP of Marketing, and is connected to Digilu, a trust-focused marketing agency. We represent the buyer, never the franchisor. The operator may receive referral compensation, which never affects a score; see our Compensation & Independence disclosure.

Part of a family of honest evaluation tools

This is one of several Digilu tools built on the same principle: real, deterministic evaluations, never fabricated numbers. Its sibling, AIOInsights, grades how well AI systems can find and trust a business. Same standard, different question.

Ask the better question

Not "is it profitable?" but "is it being honest with me?"

Get your Transparency Score