If you’ve ever considered starting a business by either buying an existing business or a franchise, you might have run across the statement, “no experience necessary.” While that may sound appealing, not having to have experience in an industry, it is very necessary to understand what you are investing in, and having some experience is not only necessary, but mandatory.

Let’s say, for example, you wanted to start a home-based, service business. You research your options and you find an advertisement for a janitorial company that says, “no experience necessary.” You say to yourself, “Great, I never owned a cleaning company before so I guess I can do this.” Now STOP. What did you just say? That logic doesn’t make sense. I feel that business experience is necessary, but let me explain.

While in the above example you may not have cleaning company experience, you’ll need to at LEAST be familiar with cleaning. You’ll need to be either a current end-user of cleaning services or possibly worked for a cleaning company back in college, but you need to know something about any industry before investing. To go blindly into a business, cold, with no experience, is fatal.

How do you get experience? Two simple ways to go about it are that you can work for business to gain the experience or you can become a consumer of the product or service to gain perspective.
If you decide to work for a business in which you are interested in starting, you’ll need to have the right attitude. Helping, serving and the true willingness to be a supportive employee is crucial. If you’re only doing it to spy on a potential competitor to get their secrets, then you’ll need to reconsider your motives. Make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.

If being a customer of a business you’re considering starting, then look at how the business currently operates and fulfills its service to you. How would you improve the service? Look for ways that you could do it better. There are many opportunities for creating new market ideas by surveying what’s currently in your market.

Whichever route you choose, make sure you get tangible, applicable experience before launching your franchise business search. Einstein once said, “The only source of knowledge is experience,” so get the knowledge that will help you make a wise business choice.