Beverage stores: headquarters performance assessment in Taiwan

The unpredictable financial crisis has caused businesses serious problem. The way for companies to tackle with this crisis is to implement no salary vacation and layoffs, which cause unemployment rate raises. There are more people looking for work, and it appears difficult to get a job. Therefore, there are increasing number of people want to start their own business. According to entrepreneurial population statistics, only 20% of people have their own career plans. The rest of people want to start their own business, but do not have any specific goal for their career. Therefore, joining chain stores business becames a better choice. However, media reports that franchisees often just happen to join, and their headquarters immediately announced that they have encountered vital problems. This situation causes franchisees lose all their invested money, so we suggest that franchisees have to be well-prepared of detailed information about franchisors before joining chain stores. The method people choose which franchisee to join is mostly by way of mouth, however, such inadvertent omission always lead to significant investment failure. We hope this study can assist people to avoid any rush investment and bankruptcy before joining chain stores. Our intention of this study comes from the studies of a beverage store as a five-year existence period; the way they improve profits in a competitive market; the way they change their traditional operational method while fresh competitors continuously coming into the market. This study starts with four dimensions of balanced scorecard as an index, and explores objectives of the guidelines through relevant literature. This study also comprehends and discusses franchisors, from stores planning to actual operation; utilize survey to explore the use of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to analyze the four dimensions of balanced scorecard to prioritize the critical elements to run a franchisee chain store.