Hey everybody,

Pickleball franchises are popping up everywhere. So are cold plunge studios, IV drip bars, and sauna lounges.

And every time a new concept gets hot, I get the same question: "Should I get in now before it's too late?"

Maybe. But first, let me give you three filters I use to separate a trend with real legs from one that's about to flame out.

The single biggest thing I look at: how often do customers actually use this thing? 

Not "would they try it once", but rather “how often do they come back?”

The best franchise concepts I've seen are the ones where customers are there multiple times a week. It's the core of their routine. Their social life is built around it. They rep the gear like it's a sports team.

I know people who play pickleball four times a week. I also know people who went to Topgolf twice a year. 

Both are entertainment. Only one of them creates the kind of loyalty that sustains a business long-term.

The way I think about it: you'd much rather have 100 customers who are 100% committed to you than 1,000 who are 10% committed even if the revenue is the same. The latter is far more vulnerable to the next shiny thing.

Topgolf is the cautionary tale here.

At its peak, each location cost $15–40 million to build. That's a massive bet on a single consumer concept. 

They did well through COVID, but when preferences shifted people went back to normal activities. And when inflation made the restaurant side too expensive, there was no way to pivot. The ship was too big to turn.

Meanwhile, the same ball-tracking technology started showing up in strip mall driving ranges for a fraction of the cost. You could get 85% of the experience for 10% of the spend.

Pickleball has a version of this problem too. 

These facilities need a lot of real estate, which means a big upfront commitment on something that's still relatively nascent. If you're the pickleball guy in your town and you can curate a loyal community around one location, that might work. 

But would I be comfortable signing up to open 10 units over the next decade? No.

The rule of thumb: the higher the buildout cost, the more certain you need to be that demand will hold. And with anything trend-driven, that certainty is hard to come by.

Here's something I've learned evaluating wellness franchises specifically: single-modality concepts are fragile.

Even when something is a fad, it rarely goes to zero overnight. What usually happens is demand gets cut in half.

If that one thing is 100% of your revenue, a 50% drop might kill you. But if it's only 20% of your revenue (because you offer multiple services) that same 50% drop is a survivable (albeit, inconvenient) 10% hit.

That's why I'm more interested in wellness brands that combine multiple modalities (sauna, cold plunge, IV, recovery) than one-trick concepts. Diversification buys you time.

→ I did a full deep dive on this: Aren't most wellness concepts just fads?

Trends aren't automatically bad franchise opportunities. Some of the best brands today started as "fads" that turned out to have real staying power.

But before you bet your capital on one, run it through these filters. 

Keep looking.

If you want help evaluating a specific concept, book a call. This is exactly the kind of thing I dig into every day.

Talk soon, 

Connor