When signing up to a franchise deal, there are a few details you should get clear first:

1. Make sure your contract mentions the period of the agreement. This is often five years, but it can vary. It should also specify a renewal option. Check any small print in the renewal terms in case they involve much greater expense or other prohibitions.

2. Nail down the exact location you’re getting and your rights to exclusivity within it.

3. All fees and costs, plus calculation formulas, should be presented to you. You also need to know if you can sell the business on for a profit.

4. A clause specifying that you can leave the business to next of kin in the event of your decease is also important, if a little gruesome to the squeamish.

5. Costs of training of you and your staff should be met from the fees you pay to the franchisor. Hidden costs for training can be large and sometimes disabling.

6. If you think you know enough to set up on your own after a few years, talk to the franchisor. Enlightened businesses will provide opportunities for you to expand with greater input to the business as a whole.

Above all, make sure you are aware of all the subtleties of the business before signing away your cash.

If you are buying an existing business as a way to avoid the uncertainties of the startup phase, you’ll need to do “due diligence” on it before committing yourself and your investors to the deal. So, what is due diligence?

Essentially it’s the process of going through the books, examining current trading information, details of investment plans, commitments and liabilities. It should give an indication of any flaws in the setup, any skeletons in the cupboard.

For a listed company, it can ensure that shareholders receive the highest price and set off an auction process. It is disruptive to the target company which has no certainty that anything at all will come of the process.

Most companies like to keep closed books so that sensitive information doesn’t fall into the hands of rival firms who may just be fishing for confidential data.

The system isn’t foolproof either, in that investigating lawyers and accountants can run up huge bills without guarantee of accuracy.

Additionally, in the new world order, after Enron, we know that some companies have kept a second, secret set of accounts.

But for buying small-to-medium businesses, it would be unthinkable to go ahead without some form of due diligence, if only by the prospective buyers themselves.

The problem with sending email newsletters to your customers has always been that different states have different requirements.

In the US, Federal laws defining allowed practices for email marketers, which includes email newsletters, are detailed and precise. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulates what is know as the CAN-SPAM law. At present though, state laws are causing more concern, particularly in Michigan and Utah. I’ll begin with these :

New laws in Michigan and Utah for child protection carry custodial sentences for even inadvertent non-compliance.

In essence, the problem is : The states of Michigan and Utah have passed child protection laws with “Do Not Email” registries for individuals to enter minors’ email addresses. Marketers potentially face stiff fines as well as time in prison if they send email to a registered minor’s address and the email contains material, or links to material, which children may not legally see or respond to. If you send commercial email, of any type, and you don’t check the address against the registry before you send it you are potentially liable.

The laws are not clear on what products or services a minor is prohibited from purchasing, viewing, possessing, participating in, or otherwise receiving. However, the State of Utah’s Department of Commerce is attempting to add further definition to what types of advertisements are covered. There’s a pdf here.

The only way to avoid liability is to check every address in your email list against the Michigan and Utah registries before you send them an email.

The fees to start are expected to be 0.007 cents for Michigan and 0.005 cents for Utah per address on your list. The costs for a 100,000 name list will be $1200 per pass. So you’ll need to check each new subscriber as they come, plus the whole list every 30 days. For a 10,000 list which acquires say 100 new subscribers a month. The cost will be $121.20 monthly. A 50,000 list with 500 new subscribers would be $606 monthly. Not cheap.

Any business anywhere in the world with a presence in the US needs to follow these laws. This law does not just apply to businesses in Michigan and Utah, it effects all businesses with a presence in any of the 50 US states.

These are the main provisions of the Federal law :

It bans false or misleading header information. Your email’s “From,” “To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.

It prohibits deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message.

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor’s email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it’s illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.

It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender’s valid physical postal address. Your message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from you. It also must include your valid physical postal address.

Fines can be up to $11,000 for each violation, but may also impact other laws, so can be progressively higher, or even custodial.

While still a student at West of England University, Jamie Murray Wells used his student loan to start Glasses Direct from a disused stable block on his father’s estate. He negotiated deals with the spectacle-frame manufacturers which allowed him to undercut the high-street chains in the UK, like SpecSavers, by a substantial amount.

James Murray Wells, 23, now runs a multi-million pound internet company, which sells a pair of specs every eight minutes. He has netted sales of over £2.5 million ($4.6m) in less than two years

Jamie says: “It’s an exciting time. There’s an army of people wearing my glasses every day, and that’s an incredible feeling.”

Until this young entrepreneur turned his gaze on the industry, the £2.5 billion market was dominated by four giants: SpecSavers, Vision Express, Boots and Dollond & Aitchison. Needing a new pair of glasses while revising for his English finals, he was shocked at the price.

“I couldn’t believe there was nothing cheaper than £150 ($276) for what was essentially a piece of wire and two pieces of glass.”

He began contacting glazing labs to try to get a cheaper pair direct. He was told that the cost would be around £7 and that the process was done automatically in under 20 minutes.

“The mistake of high-street opticiancs,” he says, “is that they subsidize eye tests in the hope of clawing back margins on dispensing glasses.”

He used the last £1000 ($1,840) instalment of his student loan to develop his idea.

But time doesn’t stand still in the rarified air of this entrepreneurial eagle. Looking ahead a few years he sees himself as a billionaire buying himself an island.

“I didn’t grow up dreaming of being an optician, so it’s not going to be long before I move on and attack other industries — knock the bottom out of the property industry or pharmaceuticals, or whatever.”