SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM THE FRANCHISE CHAT TEAM - 1 April, 2015

Dear reader of Franchise Chat,

After 15 years of manual, daily news collection and updates, we have decided to hang up our boots.

The daily updates and weekly 'The Headliner' newsletter have now stopped.

We hope that you have found our services valuable, and appreciate those that have supported our endeavours over those long years. Two organisations standout, in particular, as key sponsors throughout that duration. Those were Franchise Direct and Franchise Solutions.

Many other organisations, mainly service professionals, also supported the site through many of those 15 years. Special mentions are due to Franchise New Zealand, my company Franchize Consultants (www.franchize.co.nz), iFranchiseGroup (US), Edwards Global Services (US) and the International Franchising Centre (UK).

Thank you for all of your long-standing support, as well as the many other organisations that maintained sponsorship or campaigns for extended periods throughout the 15 years.

You might be surprised to know just how much goes in to the updates. Every update every day involves physically scanning more than 50 worldwide publications for new and interesting articles. Some days bring many, across many countries. Other days, only two or three. And clearly sometimes a single story has totally dominated news for an extended period.

I have to make an extremely special mention to my good friend Chris Noble who has been responsible for assisting the many updates over the years. Between us, we have collected and linked to 10’s of thousands of franchising-specific news stories.

We thank you again for your interest. And we thank our supporters.

Very best regards,

Callum Floyd